Monthly Archives: January 2009

Slumdog Millionaire

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As I just mentioned, once the Oscar nominations are announced a lot of people go to see the best picture nominees who might normally not be interested in that genre.  I don’t really like “heartwarming”.  But Slumdog Millionaire is getting a lot of buzz.  Since I just had to sit through a brunch where some of my friends tried to convince me that The Dark Knight isn’t really best picture material, I thought I’d go see what’s out there.

For the first hour or so, things weren’t looking so good.  There’s nothing more overdone than the nice-smart-shy guy versus the good-looking-bully over the beautiful-but-confused girl.  This movie was definitely falling into that triangle.  Also, true love conquers all?  Seriously?  But as the story went on, I started to really like the kids.  The framing is a bit contrived, bordering on deliberately arty.  But the character was compelling enough that I didn’t feel the flaws during the movie itself.  By the end, I admit I’d had a good time.

I’ve seen far better movies this year, including The Dark Knight.  But also indepenents like Hamlet 2.  So I don’t know how this rose quite as high as it did, but it’s still an enjoyable evening.

Can I Rate a Movie I Haven’t Seen?

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Apparently, according to Cinematical, people are going to IMDB and giving Milk a rating of “1″,  just because it’s gay-themed and was nominated for best picture.  The evidence is that the IMDB rating dropped sharply after the nominations were announced.  Brokeback Mountain saw a similar decline.  I suspect that Cinematical is correct in assuming that a lot of hateful people are just going to IMDB and giving Milk the lowest score without ever having seen it.  The drop is large.

But if I wanted to be sure, I would want to see the drop in ratings compared to all the other nominated movies.  Also, if possible, I’d like to see  the number of new ratings compared to changes in ticket sales.  What I think we’d see is that all of the nominees show some decline.  When a movie is first released, the people who see it are the ones for whom it was made.  (unless bad marketing brings in an audience who think they are seeing something different).  Milk played to people who like Sean Penn or are interested in the story of Harvey Milk.  Slumdog Millionaire played to the independent theater crowd, or people who like international films, and possible fans of the director.  But once these films are nominated, a lot of people go see them who were not part of the original crowd.  People who usually watch action movies, or romantic comedies, or whatever.  This crowd will probably be less impressed.  So ratings should fall to some extent in any case.

Business Week Approves of my World of Warcraft Addiction

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Turns out that all the time I spend in World of Warcraft is honing my management skills. Business Week did an article on how all the skills used in WoW also apply to making the workplace better and more efficient. I think this is probably true, but have admit that my WoW performance, as well as my performance in other video games, reflects the meandering way my career has gone so far.

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Serious World of Warcraft players create a character, optimize the heck out of it, and march their way to level 80. They join a guild and do complex 25-person raids on high-end dungeons. Some have more than one level 80, and alt characters who have specific roles, such as farming or banking.

I’ve been playing for a year now. My highest character is level 40, but I have a bunch of them. I have wandered all over the place, and have a host of unrelated achievements. I have yet to find a guild I really like, and don’t really want to be in one where they dictate my schedule or tell me how to “spec” my character.

I have this problem with a lot of games. I like to explore. I’ll spend way too much time on non-essential quests that let me go all over the map. I usually load up on quests, but don’t efficiently drive to the conclusion. Maybe if I focus more when I’m playing World of Warcraft, this will carry over into real life.

Note: I found the article on Business Week while perusing Chainsaw Buddha.

Was I There? (Barack Obama’s Inauguration)

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I live in Washington DC.  Once in awhile, things happen here that don’t happen anywhere else, like terrorist attacks on the pentagon and the inauguration of Barack Obama.  For both events, I was here, in DC.  If I ever had grandchildren, or even children, I’d probably have to tell them I wasn’t actually down on the mall.  It was damn cold, and you had to get there really early.  Instead, I watched everything on my HDTV, in my warm apartment, while tweeting and facebooking about the event to friends all over the country.  I saw a lot more than I would have seen down on the mall.

I did go down to Chinatown, made it as far as the security gates keeping people out of the parade route.  I took pictures, which are posted here.  I talked to vendors, and bought two Obama hats and a bottle of Obama hot sauce.  The hats will go to my sister, who wanted something that was there, at the inauguration.  The hats count.  Even though you could buy the same things from other places, on other days, she’s getting hats that have that ineffable been-there-ness.  Had I bought the same hats a day later, though, even though they might have been sitting there for the inauguration, they would not have that magic quality.

On 9/11, I was walking around Dupont Circle, talking to my sister on a cell-phone.  I assured her that nobody would attack Starbucks.  One plane hit the Pentagon, the other may have been coming for the Whitehouse or Congress.  I had friends who were closer, but that day was in the air everywhere.  We didn’t know what would happen next, there were rumors of car-bombs, and I didn’t dare get on the Metro.  So I was “there.”

Make Lovecraft, not Warcraft?

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My favorite virtual world, right now, is the World of Warcraft.  Because it’s so popular, naturally some people will hate it.  I don’t mind that, I sometimes hate people, movies, television shows, whatever, mostly because they seem way more popular than they deserve.  I understand.  But the reasons people give for hating are sometimes instructive.

One of the silliest World of Warcraft haters has to be the Timothy Plan family of funds.  Ostensibly an investment fund for people who want to invest only in “moral” companies, the plan caters to the over-protective yet inattentive parent who can’t read the description on a video-game but gets all their information from the ever-inaccurate Fox News.  The Timothy Plan released a document that supposedly rates “offensive video games”.  The document doesn’t seem very useful as investment guidance, but seems intended more as a warning to parents.  However, since most of the games are already rated “M”, you might wonder why an additional warning is required.

Then there’s the research.  If you’re investing in and kind of “family of funds,” you probably want solid research.  In fact, the descriptions they give of games seem to be frequently inaccurate.  They have identified WoW as a game where “many attacks cause enemies to bleed.”  Believe me, there are no gaping, bleeding wounds in WoW.  Characters don’t particularly change when you’re beating on them until they make some sighing noise and die.

Then, they claimed there was a lot of sexuality.  Maybe a little, but not as much as in, say, a soft drink commercial.  But this is a claim a number of reporters seem to be making lately.  That there are places in WoW where you can find naked characters having sex.  Which would be awesome.

One of the podcasts I listen to took up the challenge.  None of the podcasters had seen it, but they thought, maybe if they went to a certain Roleplaying server, it would be there.  They proposed that listeners go to a particular town, on a particular server, at a particular time.  Naked.

Naturally, I not only rolled up a character and went along, a let a friend of mine in on the deal.  She not only showed up, she made the biggest splash.  You can read her take on it here.  My take was that 25 people showed up, had a lot of fun, and basically streaked through two capital cities.  A lot of the server residents thought it looked fun and joined in.

Double Feature: Hamlet 2 vs. Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter

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Hamlet 2 is this brilliant movie, in which a loser high school drama teacher decides to stage his own creation, a complex sequel to Hamlet that involves a time-traveling Jesus.  A Jesus who “kicks ass”.  Elizabeth Shue shows up to play herself, as a someone who is kind of done with acting.  You get the feeling she’s playing it quite close to life.  Hamlet 2 is a must see, but the reason I bring it up is that the teacher’s dream, a mixed up play with randomly drawn characters who shouldn’t really be there, and a religious icon doing things he shouldn’t really be doing, is exactly the theme of another movie: Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter.

The message of Hamlet 2 is that even if your vision is fucked up, lots of people will jump in at the last moment and help you transform it into art.  Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is what happens if someone takes that message too seriously.  Now, I hate romantic comedies mostly because the central message is destructive.  They teach us to be victims or stalkers in the name of love.  And, unlike action/horror movies, people take those messages seriously.  Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is not as bad as believing that some girl will really love you if just keep following her around.  But it is bad.  All through the movie, you can almost hear the voices of the creator/director and his friends saying things like: “wouldn’t it be funny if Jesus had to fight a bunch of guys getting out of a car?”  “wouldn’t it be funny if Jesus had to go shopping in modern times?”  “wouldn’t it be funny if Jesus rode a skateboard?”  No, no, and not really.

If something seemed really funny when your stoned, you should probably try running the idea around in your head sober before making it into a movie.  On the other hand, everybody making this thing was having a good time.  They decided to thrown in a Mexican wrestler and lots of lesbians, just in case the profane Jesus couldn’t carry the movie.  There are a few characters who are desperately trying to be over the top, and one or two of them make it.

Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter is probably about as good as you might expect.  Bad acting is topped by senseless direction and inane action scenes.  There is no actual nudity.  Jesus is ridiculous, but doesn’t engage in any kind of political or social satire.  The vampires are inconsistent, and some of the other characters get a lot of screen time which they don’t have the talent to make anything of.  It looks like a college student movie that somehow got enough budget to go full-length, and hire one stunt man.  But it doesn’t make the kind of magic out of these elements that Hamlet 2 seems to promise.

TSA Comfort

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I was reading a Peter King (Sportswriter and Bret Favre spokesperson) column where he complained that the TSA didn’t do the same thing every time at every airport.  He wanted the comfort of either being told to always take off his shoes, or never take off his shoes.  I think he speaks for most people.  If there are security precautions, they should be the same, everywhere.

In fact, if the security was the issue, the rules would change constantly.  Any static set of precautions can be planned around or bypassed.  But planning around rules that don’t stay the same is far more difficult.  But I suspect that even if we explained this to people over and over, most would still rather have predictable rules.  They would feel comforted.  Obviously, the true goal of the TSA is comforting our fears.

Theater and the TSA

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Long lines at airports, to get through security, tell us something.  They tell us that our government is doing something about terrorism.  In fact, the government is mostly crowding travelers into large packs, in the midst of which large carts full of luggage are dragged along.  It makes a pretty good target, but nobody says anything.  Any joke or comment about safety wins you a quick trip to a private room and rubber gloves.

There are other rules, practices, rituals that make us feel safe.   Once we go through those security gates.  The assumption is that terrorist will only target us on the other side.  With hummus.  We take off our shoes, take out our laptops.  No pen-knives, no liquids.  And, it turns out, no hummus, no cottage cheese, no yogurt.  The TSA doesn’t seriously think you could design a bomb that looks like an unopened thing of hummus, does it?  Anybody who could do that could make a meatball sub into something even more dangerous.  And how did they decide what amount was too much?

It’s a safety ritual.  It has to do with making us feel safe and protected.  It’s a bit of theater, really.  When they took my hummus, the TSA guy looked deep into my eyes, with the trained softness of a hostage negotiator or grief counselor.  “I understand,” he said, “I’m a hummus eater too.”  I offered him mine.

Before 9/11, we had a false sense of security.  After 9/11 we had a false sense of danger.  It happened, so we believe it could happen again, anytime, anywhere.  In fact 9/11 took years of planning and organization.   But we need something to tell us that it’s okay to fly.  Ritual security measures are probably more effective than real security, which necessarily takes place out of our view.