Monthly Archives: October 2008

Signs of Patriotism

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Sometimes I hear people describe criticism of Sarah Palin as “hate”.  “All you liberals are hating on Sarah Palin!”

It’s not hate, it’s patriotism. 

If you believe, as I do, that she is utterly unqualified, and that the country is in deep trouble, you have to believe that Palin is a threat to our country.  It’s not just politics.  I don’t agree with a lot of conservative positions, but usually from a moral, philosophical, or economic basis.  I don’t usually think they are trying to destroy our nation.  We can argue over minium wage, a woman’s right to choose, and proposition 8 (hate).  These are important arguments, and the Republicans are morally wrong.  But lots of people are wrong.  I’m sure I’m wrong about something too.

Patriotism is a different thing.  Patriotism starts from the premise that this is my country, and I care about what happens to it.  I don’t think it’s the greatest possible country, or that it’s always right.  But I live here, as do most of the people I love.  It has given me life, prosperity, space to become who I am.  I owe it something in return.

One thing I owe it is criticism of its leaders.  If we’re going into a war we can’t win, for reasons that are misguided, I owe it to myself, to the troops, to the future of our country, to object.  Also, while my politics are important, I owe the country at least the awareness that people who disagree with me are still Americans.  We’re in this together.

If I were to push a person or an agenda that satisfies my personal interests, the economic status of my class, or the specific requirements of my religion, that has to be balanced against the interests of the country as a whole.  I can do so, of course.  But if I push for my particular bracket to get great tax relief, while other brackets suffer, that’s not patriotic.  If I take it to the extreme, undercutting the financial health of the country as a whole, I’m being unpatriotic.

After the Katie Couric interview, it became obvious to me that Palin is not ready to lead.  Not even close.  If you don’t see that, and you are for Palin still, that’s fine.  We disagree.  But if you did see it and are ignoring it because she represents your party or your religion, then you are being unpatriotic.  The most patriotic thing I can do, right now, is to strive against her.  It’s not because I hate her, it’s because I love this country.

Max Payne, Minimal Fun

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There’s a movie in my head.  I built it out of trailers for Max Payne.  It has powerful, scary villains, a tortured hero, and the eternal, supernatural struggle between good and evil.  It is laden with Norse mythology, and punctuated with intense set pieces that include guns and explosions and Valkyrie.

It could be awesome.  But the actual movie has none of those features.  You might think you saw them in the trailer.  Maybe you heard a quote about “The Devil building his army” and “Max Payne is looking for things God wants hidden.”  You probably saw images of winged Valkryie and fiery skies.  Those things are said, and the images do occur, but they don’t have the meaning you’d hope.  The quotes are just one guy’s ramblings, a guy who is entirely tangental to any part of the story.  The images?  Well, apparently they aren’t meant to be taken literally.

There was still some promise.  The apparent bad guy seemed to have some kind of superhuman strength and resistence.  Maybe Max Payne shot him six times.  Maybe not.  My friend leans over and says: “promise me this is going to get better.”  Sure, I assure her.  But then the wheels started falling off.  Max Payne is only tortured in the most cliched sense.  There isn’t so much one evil bad guy as several sort of bad people doing apparently random bad things.  Some of them are highly improbable.  The rules fail to be applied consistently.  We thought someone was invulnerable, but he dies from a single shot.  The Valkyrie show up at odd times, but seem to signify nothing.

The central theme?  Nothing supernatural, or gripping, or high-tech.  It’s a concept that’s been used in a hundred lower-budget movies: somebody’s experimenting with something to make soldiers more soldiery.  Naturally, something goes wrong.  But this particular experiment is even dumber than most.  Instead of making soldiers stronger, smarter, or able to take punishment, it just makes them “feel” invulnerable.  And it only works on like 1%.  Don’t we have drugs like that?  Crack?  Cocaine?  Meth?  Even alcohol has been known to make idiots braver.  And more idiotic.  This version doesn’t seem much better, except for being blue.

I thought I had lowered my expectations.  But I guess I really had something I was looking for out of this movie.  Given the trailers, I think my hopes were somewhat justified.  But like Epic movie, where the jokes were actually funnier in the trailer than in the context of the movie, the scenes from Max Payne were better without the context of the movie.

Overlooked for Best Picture: Goodfellas

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The first time I really remember being outraged at The Academy was 1991.  That was the year that Dances with Wolves beat Goodfellas for Best Picture.  I was talking to a friend about The Departed the other day.  That movie seemed too convoluted, too soupy, for my taste.  They gave Scorcese his Best Picture award, but it wasn’t the right Scorcese movie.  Goodfellas was right Scorcese movie.

Of course everybody knows this.  I watched the movie again this week, and it is clear and focused in a way that The Departed utterly fails to achieve.  The only question I had during the movie was the post-Lufthansa robbery killing spree.  How did that make sense?  Wouldn’t somebody notice that everyone else was getting knocked off?  Why have a criminal organization if it’s going to eat itself like that?  I thought that the mafia served to bring stability to crime.  To give a sense of rules and responsibilities to the lawless.  That way you can plan much more complicated capers, and place some element of trust in your partners.  Though the movie seemed very true the character, I wondered if they had perhaps over-dramatized this portion.  So I looked it up on Wikipedia.   Turns out the truth was even crazier.  This is the list from Wikipedia:

The following were all murdered after the heist: [2] [3]

I also learned a lot about Italian cooking from this movie.

Appaloosa: Westerns Like They Should Be Made

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I have a friend who loves westerns.  I love westerns.  Unforgiven is one of my all time favorite movies from any genre.  And 3:10 to Yuma was great as well.  The one thing I really don’t like is romantic comedy.  I will, at some point, write an essay on why I don’t.  I also really don’t like when they shoe-horn romance into places it just doesn’t belong.  Top Gun, which is over-rated as an action flick, and very over-rated as some kind of guy cult movie, suffers badly from this.  If it does belong in the story, I’m okay with it.  Officer and a Gentleman?  Yes, the love story was very much part of the overall story.

Anyway, my friend had the same reaction I did when reading the reviews about Appaloosa.  “What the F(*&ck” is Renee Zellweger doing in this movie?”  She not only just seems wrong, she’s also almost as iconic of romantic comedy as Hugh Grant.  He decided not to see the movie.  I swallowed my fears and, partly due to peer pressure, went anyway.

I won.  Ed Harris, who co-wrote, directs, and turns in a starring role, must really understand the western.  He gets down into the roots of the genre, capturing the violence, the shifting sense of right and wrong, the slow pace at which everything happens in the wide open desert.  Having read over 50 Louis L’ Amour novels and a scattering of other westerns, as well as growing up in a small desert town where you can shoot guns in your back yard, I consider myself knowledgable enough.  This is another great entry in a genre that is marked with some masterpieces, and which somehow always captures more about America than other genres.

He gets that the West was a microcosm of civilization, going from lawless to quasi-civilized in just a few short years, and that the people who became the pillars of the community came from both sides of the law.  And honor.

Harris also understands just where love fits in all this.  Renee Zellweger showed up and my hackles rose.  But her character was exactly right for the time and for the story.  As the town whore explained, women have it hard out here.  Love is mostly for men.

I hope my friend gets over his little RZ wall and sees this movie.  He’ll love it.

Small Claim Filed Against Best Buy

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Last night I went to the DC small claims court.  It turns out they have evening hours on Wednesday.  It also turns out that there’s one woman working behind the counter, struggling with technology that intermittently fails her.  A few other people waited in the room with me.  Two guys, probably contractors, playing some game where they identify drawings back and forth, and one professional guy who sat quietly.  A woman ahead of us stood at the counter and chatted about rent.

I had most of my paperwork done, and the woman was very helpful, and now I have a court date.  My major goal is that, somehow, Best Buy will learn something.  Like, my hard drive is important to me.  It’s my property.  You can’t just take it.  My fear is that, even if they lose, they won’t learn.