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The original post, with original comments, can be found here: Dissent Poetry Corner: Whitey on the Moon

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still.
(while Whitey's on the moon)
The man jus' upped my rent las' night.
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's uppi' me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I wuz already payin' 'im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that shit wuzn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an' arm began to swell.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made las' year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)

—Gil Scott Heron

The Road was hella depressing (book and film), and I'll only fault the film for being maybe overly faithful to the book. I don't know about the comparison to Children of Men (entertaining, book and film, though I wasn't entirely sold on either), but a film version of Never Let Me Go is in the works, and if its at least as decent as The Road adaptation, it'll be something to look forward to.

Trailer linky.

If you need to wash the taste of crap films out of your mouth, I suggest the Royal Shakespeare Company/BBC production of Hamlet.

It's a tad uneven in places, but David Tennant and Patrick Stewart play well off of each other. Stewart in particular does a great Claudius-as-gigantic-asshole. Tennant (of recent Dr Who fame) plays the Hamlet insanity in terribly unsubtle ways, but that's obviously a directoral decision to go for the standard. The art direction is typical medieval/modern fusion, though good, suffers a bit from copying moments of the Ethan Hawke variation (what's up with Hamlet, security cameras, and giving the whiny prince a video recorder?).

Worryingly, Tennant sometimes seems to veer into Hipster Whiner Hamlet (the costume director's interpretation of what the With-It Young People These Days wear casually doesn't help), but it's hard not to with that character, I suppose. I do like that they seem to go for the Horatio-as-Hamlet's-imaginary-friend angle, though one of these days it would be interesting to see a production of the play that emphasized the notion that Hamlet isn't crazy from the start, and carried it through to the end.

IMDB link

dissent rating: 0/10

Oho, you say? What's that? A Worst Film Ever Made whose rating doesn't even dip into the negatives? Step right up, it's time for another movie review. It's time for a look at Daybreakers. Spoilers abound, like you were gonna watch it anyway.

Let me get my praise out of the way first: with production design the original Batman cartoon would be proud of, this is definitely a film that hits all of the stylistic marks. If only the script weren't something out of one of Quentin Tarantino's erotic fantasies, we'd have been in business. But fear not, gentle readers! This film isn't all unnecessary violence and unexplanable plot points — this one has politics. Ham fisted metaphors for everyone!

The year is 2019. Everyone is a vampire. Humans are on the run, what few aren't hooked up to blood farms like something ripped straight out of the Matrix. Ethan Hawke plays a broody scientist-vampire tasked with synthesizing oil blood we can run our cars with vampires can live on since there's an energy crisis blood shortage. With the looming scarcity of resources, governments and citizens alike have thrown their old human morals to the wind in the quest to fight over the last supplies of fresh water..er, crude oil, I mean blood. I think. But Ethan still has his morals! He only drinks pig's blood. Damn hippy vegan vampires. Go play with the Cullens. At least we don't have to watch Ethan Hawke sparkle. But his brother, good military boy, is having none of it. Real men drink human blood!

The last supplies of oil human blood are in the hands of the private mega-corporations, natch, and Ethan's big scary boss, played by Sam Neill (it was all downhill after Event Horizon, buddy) whose own daughter is a fugitive human, is the boss of that company. And really, he's just a paper-thin stand-in villain. After driving home from his job at Evil, Inc. one night Ethan almost gets into a wreck with another car. Full of humans! Who he decides to help. Hey, why is everyone driving big Cadillacs, SUV's, and vintage sports cars, don't they know there's a oil blood shortage on?

So Ol' Ethan gets mixed up with the humans, and meets once-vamp now-human Willem Defoe (that's when I knew things had gotten bad — one day you'll get your own WFEM post all to yourself, Willem). Turns out, there's a cure to being dependent on foreign oil a vampire. Also turns out, Evil Inc. wants none of this renewable energy vampire cure! They're just greedy money grubbers, same as when they were human (maybe their didn't lose their sense of morality). All of this proceeds forward in the inevitable action-adventure pacing, leaving behind the only good part, namely the sexy vintage suits and eerily lit conurbations of Nameless American City Number Eight-Twenty-Two. The dialogue is bad, the plot twists predictable, (though the vampires exploding when staked is neat, but for the low-budget FX) and generally it lives up to its b-movie hype (did I mention that the gubbamint institutes death panels executing the oil blood-starved mutant vampires? Like a prescient forecast of Obamacare! Or a crude Afganistan/Iraq jab, somehow, with soldiers standing around cheering as all the poor people die, dragged out into sunlight — silly grunts, don't they know that they most likely come from underprivleged backgrounds, too?).

Oh, and they trot out the gore at every moment in this thing. Vamps feeding is a bloody affair, and they spare no expense. When Evil Inc. boss Sam Neill sends Good Military Boy to torture interrogate rape? 'turn' his human daughter, things start to get really messy (it's okay, Good Military Boy is redeemed at the end; after all, he was just following orders what's a vampire to do?). The cure to the energy crisis vampirism, it turns out, is the blood of a once-vampire cured human (don't think about that too hard, or your head will explode, like the vampires do, quite bloodily, in the film — think gerbil in a microwave). This is all set up as some big twist, even though you've already figured it out. So when our boy Ethan tricks evil boss Sam Neill into biting him, Ethan sends the now-human bad guy down an elevator to a bunch of waiting american vampire soldiers. In a frenzy worthy of DADT supporters' worst nightmares of hungry feeding on his human blood, evil Sam Neill is violently and viscerally torn to pieces (this being the part where Tarantino goes to full mast). Oh! but it gets better. In the final climactic scene, Good Military Boy sacrifices himself to the horny gay american hungry vampire soldiers to save his brother's life. And as soon as the first few have had their fill of Good Military Boy (the double entendre in that clause makes me queasy), the rest of the massed deeply closeted american hungry vampire soldiers pounce on the fresh converted? cured humans. Until it spirals out into a big chair reaction. Cue slow mo soldiers grabbing each other and wrestling to the ground as bodily fliud ejecta and bits of internal organs bounce off the camera lens. I am not making this up. Honestly, I thought I was being clever reading in some homosexual subtext into the bloodthirsty soldiers until this moment. Nope. Can't just be me. Definitely this supremely fucked up film.

All in all, it gets a zero, because the first fifteen minutes looked promising, and because when I wasn't supressing my vomit reflex there were some moments almost cheesy enough to earn a giggle. And because, you know what? It wasn't Banjamin Button.

A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still.
(while Whitey's on the moon)
The man jus' upped my rent las' night.
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's uppi' me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I wuz already payin' 'im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that shit wuzn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an' arm began to swell.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made las' year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)

—Gil Scott-Heron

Can we rant and rave about how good the new Joanna Newsom album is?

Point the first: it's got all of her signature epic-ness paired with writing (both musical and lyrical) that is more accessible (a neutral point) and still incredibly compelling and listenable.

Point the second: there's a bunch of songs — long ones and shorter pieces — arranged very well.

Point the third: I'm still obessing over the first 'disc', after a few full-album listens. Plans to move on to the second and third are slowly coming to fruition.

Point the fourth: 'No Provenance' was a bit boring, but I think I can forgive it.

dissent rating: -2.99/10

Spoilers abound, be warned!

I have posted here previously about what I thought of the film that, to date, I consider the worst ever (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). And as much as I like Brad Pitt as an actor, another one of his films clocks in at a very, very close second. I speak, of course, of Quentin Tarantio's latest piece of sensless violence pornography, Inglorious Basterds.

Recently a recipient of a quite presitgious award, there's no denying that Tarantino is an influential filmmaker. And as someone who saw and sort of enjoyed the Kill Bill diptych, I will readily admit he has talent. In the proper context, I think he deploys that talent well. His half of Grindhouse satisfyingly subverts the helpless-girl-in-a-horror-movie trope, and Kill Bill, though at turns overly violent, is its own kind of subversion of the exploitation tastes of the Charlie's Angels franchise. Certainly Pulp Fiction is a solid film, and probably the one that best displays his talents (and doesn't, as so much of his work does, rely so heavily on violence in lie of story or characters). But two of his most influential films — Resevoir Dogs and now Inglorious Basterds are of a different sort. Sure, Resevoir Dogs sucks. And it isn't just because its most iconic scene is one of torture, glorified, heroic, hell even meant to be ironically funny in a pre-indie way (what with the retro soundtrack and all); it's also because the movie is plotless, meaningless, and while heavily stylized, ultimately ends up being more of an empty design template than an actual movie. Don't get me wrong, not all movies have to have substance, and everyone loves a good action flick. But the Bond films don't obsess and fetishize violence the way Tarantino does, and Basterds is the ultimate case in point.

When I first saw Saving Private Ryan, a good number of years ago now, the level of gore present shocked me. Not only was it the first somewhat-realistic war film I'd ever seen, but all the previous violent films I'd been exposed to, most of it up the James Bond alley, sanitized violence pretty heavily. A bad-guy red-shirt is shot, falls away, and there's no blood. Sure, I don't agree with American TV and cinema's heavy reliance on the troped of violence and guns and whatnot, but as depictions go, the Bond franchise is pretty blasé. It isn't as much about the violence (one could argue) and doesn't fawn over it. It's about one-deminsional hero/villain archetypes, patriarchal depictions of the masculine savior, and a lot of other stuff, and there is violence, but few people being violated. Private Ryan was a different story. It's depictions of war aren't exactly ground-breakingly radical (quite the opposite), but a dead man in Spielberg's film, a person who has had violence inflicted upon them, is obviously violated. It's really quite a shocking thing to watch if you aren't used to that level of gore (as most are these days — in America and elsewhere). And yet, unshockable as I think myself, Inglorious Basterds had my stomach churning at a few points, and ultimately, I don't think it was the violence.

Tarantino doesn't sanitize his violence in this movie (not that he often does) and perhaps his refusal to depict violent action as somehow humane and easy to witness should be taken as a virtue. But in this alternate-history vengance story in which a troupe of Jewish-American soldiers set out for no other purpose than to kill and scalp enemy soldiers, the terms are not of a drama or even a political statement. For that, the film would have to be current, it would have to address modern issues, which is does not. I find myself often tiring of World War II films, and this one only reinforces that: it adds no new story to the canon, no interesting insight that often comes from examining horrible tragedy. In fact, written from a modern perspective (in which American society has somehow been scrubbed clean of its own anti-semetism that was rife in the first half of the 20th century) it is nothing more than a high-budget rehashing of Tom Cruise's ridiculous sentiment about how he 'always wanted to kill Hitler' as a kid. And man, does Tarantino kill Hitler. Sets him up for the kill in triplicate, in fact, finally doing the deed with a big spray of machine gun fire, and another, as the camera lingers over the body (a fleeting linger, like Sharon Stone's naughty bits in Basic Instinct, but still a linger), that chews up the man's face for us to take in. Did I call Hitler a man? Yes, because this is the important point that Trantino misses in this feature-length masturbation that is Basterds: each of his dead villains, each 'Nazi,' though ficticious, is a stand-in for a real human being. All of the fetishizing of murder (since soldiers killing soldiers is still murder) is the murder of people, not Bond villains. Maybe that's the ultimate problem with historical fiction — your adolescent fantasies still exist in a continuum that's based in reality, and lingering, fawning, even relishing in the death of real people (and relish this film does, with every close-up of a German scalp being detached) is ultimately a sick enterprise. Don't get me wrong, the endeavours of the Nazis in the second World War were so far beyond the pale of crimes against humanity that they belie understanding; yet Tarantino, in the protective casing that is a work of art, aims to reproduce a similar kind of inhuman violence and expects us not only to enjoy it with him but to cheer (just as his Nazis do watching a propaganda war film in the movie's climax), even to laugh (just as his Hitler does watching the same film).

It's a sentiment that fuels America: us versus them; we're right, they're wrong; righteous violence in protection of home, family, and retribution against those who would do us harm. It's probably one reason why history classes in America so guiltlessly discuss the dropping of the atomic bomb, why Israel's rutheless, disproportionately violent foreign policy is to roundly lauded (and why Spielberg's Munich was so successful), why every home-invasion turned-on-its-head film is so satisfying—even why, in many ways, I enjoyed rather than scorn Death Proof. It's pretty much built in to the American pathology (though not unique to it) that the greater wrong someone does you or your people, the more license you have to dress somone up as their effigy and pump bullets into them (after you've done the real thing, of course, or even more so if you've been denied it). But I don't have the stomach for that in cinema any more, or on TV (jesus, is 24 still on the air?) or anywhere else for that matter. Hanging on to our grievances, taking eyes for eyes and never forgetting or forgiving or stopping hating is one reason why shit never gets done, and frankly the likes of Tarantino aren't helping the matter. Artists, along with their art, have a responsibility, and Quentin has to take responsibility for every person that went to see his newest film and walked out cheering, a bounce in their step, because some Nazis got slaughtered, nevermind how easy it is to use them as a two-dimensional villan you don't have to humanize, or as a historically distant placeholder for this fanciful notion of 'evil.' Where number one on the list of Worst Films Ever gets its position for being utterly worthless, devoid of interest or value and at the same time winning the praise it did, number two gets it for being a twisted, immature, onanistic, and morally bankrupt piece of anti-intellectual pornography. And that is all I have to say about that.

This photo credit made me do a double take. I want that name!

From the name on.

Lose/Lose. Playing this game will put actual files on your actual hard-disk at risk.

Like this one, from the New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/06/13/050613fi_fiction1?currentPage=all