OLD SCHOOL
Today I saw
Old School, the new comedy starring Will Ferrell, Vince Vaughn and, one of my favourite actors, Luke Wilson, from
Bottle Rocket,
Rushmore and
The Royal Tenenbaums (all co-written by his brother Owen). Mitch (Wilson) is a young real-estate lawyer (or soemthing like that) who returns home and finds his girlfriend is into gang-bangs... Mitch has to find new digs, and picks a house right near a college campus, vacated by the death of a professor. Frank (Ferrell) is just married but has doubts even at the altar and has difficulty leaving his party animal days behind. Beanie (Vaughn) owns a successful chain of electronics stores and is married with kids, yet he still seems to want to hold on to something from his college days with Mitch and Frank. Without telling Mitch, Frank and Beanie arrange for a huge house-warming party to be held at Mitch's place, complete with a performance by Snoop Dogg. Frank makes a promise to his wife not to revert back to the hard-drinking "Frank the Tank" of his college days, but, of course, he breaks his promise about a minute after entering the house. The party's wild, and Mitch wakes up in bed with a strange girl... who turns out to be the daughter of his boss... and still in high school. (I like how it's rather ambiguous as to whether or not body fluids actually were exchanged). Meanwhile, Frank strips naked and streaks through the streets of the town, where his wife, on a "girl's night out", notices him and this incident forces her to bring him to a marriage counsellor. Although the party gives Mitch "street credibility" at the college, it also attracts the ire of the dean (Jeremy Piven) who has the land re-zoned, making it college property (or something)... Mitch has to vacate it in a week... unless...
Mitch finds a loophole and establishes a fraternity, which includes both students at the college as well as some guys off the street. Mitch, Frank and Beanie must juggle the responsibilities of their jobs (well, Frank doesn't seem to have one) with re-living the glories of their frat days (and Beanie, although he's eager to relive his youth, must also try and protect his sons' ears fromt he language Frank and company use). But the Dean has some nasty tricks up his sleeve, including bribing the pretty young head of the student council (Sara Tanaka, also from
Rushmore) with a foot in the door into Princeton through his "contacts" in orer to vote his way against the frat... Hilarious 1980s-style frat house hijinks ensue. Ahh... I didn't think they made movies like this anymore... well, okay, there was
Van Wilder, last year, but that one was supposed to be so bad that I never remotely considered seeing it. Also, lots of cameos, including from Andy Dick as a gay fellatio instructor and
American Pie's Seann William Scott (Stifler) as a white trash animal handler with a penchant for tranquilizer guns, and, of all people, Clinton speechwriter/Democratic political pundit/
Crossfire co-host/one of Rush Limbaugh's "Dueling Bozos" James Carville. Just lots and lots of raunchy, risqu� fun bits, like K-Y Jelly wrestling, an initiation rite that involves a cinder block, a rope and the male organ, and several glimpses at Will Ferrell's "package". Not too much I can say, you'll either enjoy this or you won't.
***1/2/*****
(I'm getting the idea I'm leaving somehting I liked out... well, if it comes to me, I'll edit this thing.)
ISN'T TECHNOLOGY WONDERFUL?
Woo-hoo! According to Matt Drudge,
CBS is considering shutting off the microphones to presenters, award recipients and performers at Sunday's Grammy Awards should they begin to mouth off against the war! As someone who is honestly not remotely interested in nearly any popular music in any genre made since the early 90s, I wasn't planning on watching a minute, but, with the prospect of seeing Hollywood liberals being shut-up should they try to turn the podium into their soapbox, now the Grammy Awards are a must see for me! An anti-Hollywood-liberal button... about time someone invented that!
Yes this link has been given elsewhere, including during the
Rush Limbaugh Radio Programme, but it's a real goodie!
Evan Coyne Maloney of Brain-Terminal.com amongst the protestors. Wow, this guy's good... almost like a right-wing Michael Moore.
Coming Friday... review of
Old School, starring Luke Wilson and Will Ferrel.
Ooh... finally found a
'Blog that puts Michael Moore under the microscope... been looking for one of these.
Found on
Right Thinking from the Left Coast... a bizarre, bizarre
animated political cartoon from the Al-Jazeera website... a smiling Space Shuttle Columbia flies towards the moon, which has Osama Bin Laden on a flying carpet on it and a sign reading "Al Queda"... Osama blows on it � la "Big Bad Wolf" and it goes down in flames, crashing in Texas, which has Israel... er, I mean, "Palestine" superimposed on it for some reason. Note the position of Alaska and Hawaii on this map, by the way... they're where you'd find them on the inset sections of maps of the United States, not where they are in reality. Plus Canada and Mexico and Cuba are gone.
Here's a link to the cartoon as it appeared on the Al Jazeera site.
GREAT STUFF FROM THE TELEGRAPH ON THE PROTESTS
David Pryce-Jones on how the protestors are endorsing, consciously or not, a racist and condescending view of Arabs.
Their protests suggest that it is not worth risking anything at all to free Arabs. To risk spilling a single drop of blood to liberate Iraq would be futile - not merely because it would be "destabilising" or "kill children", but because the Arabs have no capacity for "Western" freedom anyway. Behind the demonstrators' slogans lies the assumption that Arabs should be left alone: they don't mind being brutalised, tortured and murdered by a fascist thug like Saddam. Where they come from, it is the natural order of things.
That line of thought is nonsense. More than that - it is racist nonsense. No one knows better than the Arabs the horror of being oppressed. No one knows better than they that tyrannical oppression is all that they will get so long as Saddam and his family are in power. Saddam's despotism is not a denial of "Western" freedom: it's a denial of the freedom that every person needs to be able to live a worthwhile life. To imagine that the Iraqis don't want to be freed, or are not entitled to it, is simply to suppose that they are less human than us.
It is shocking to discover how deep lies the prejudice against Arabs being able to enjoy freedom. It is to be found in some surprising places other than the demonstration in Hyde Park: the CIA, for example, and the US State Department have long taken the view that Iraq is so tribal and retrograde a country that only a brutal dictator like Saddam could control it.
An editorial on who would win and who would lose should the protestors have their way.
The biggest winner would obviously be Saddam Hussein. His position, both in Iraq and across the Arab world, would become virtually unassailable. Having seen off both the United Nations and the United States, he would understandably feel that no force could stand in his way.
For which reason, the biggest losers would be Iraqi dissidents, a category that now effectively includes the entire Kurdish and Shi'ite populations - in other words, a majority of Saddam's subjects. On them would fall the vindictive wrath of a tyrant who regards them as agents of a foreign power, and who would no longer have cause to fear that power.
The UN weapons inspectors would also be immediate losers. After repeatedly being denied access to sensitive areas, they eventually left Iraq in despair four years ago. The only thing that persuaded Saddam to readmit them was the obvious readiness of the Americans and British to invade him again.
And, one link I didn't steal from "The Corner" on
National Review Online,
Barbara Amiel wondering why there was so much criticism of the United States and Israel, but none of Saddam.
A colleague I met at the march said he had counted only two or three anti-Israeli signs. "Torture, Murder, Ethnic Cleansing!!! Welcome to Israel" was the wording of a large banner from the Muslim Association of Great Britain, but that was to be expected. The MAB, co-organiser of the London march, has a number of ideological and personal links with the Muslim Brotherhood, the oldest Islamist organisation, four of whose members assassinated Anwar Sadat and whose offshoot is Hamas.
In fact, there were hundreds of anti-Israeli signs. What disguised this was the activities of the Jewish establishment. The Board of Deputies of British Jews, well-meaning but dreadfully inept, had worried about all the hate signs against Israel in the last "peace" march. Not understanding that it is best not to help your enemy disguise itself, they had written to the Committee for Nuclear Disarmament asking it about its relationship with anti-Israel groups.
The Deputies were reassured to receive a letter promising them that CND was "working hard to ensure that this march would be free from inappropriate slogans and chants". The result was that apart from a few "Boycott Israel/Boycott Murder" banners, the MAB restrained itself to hundreds of posters with the coded anti-Israel message: "Freedom for Palestine".
Ah, an article about the
decline of The Simpsons by Chris Suellentrop in Slate where I agree with pretty much everything said, other than I peg the decline as occurring in seasons 8 or 9, not seasons 11 or 12. I wish it could go on hiatus with the knowledge that it would return, with renewed energy at some point in a few years.
BEST ANIMATED FEATURES OF THE IMAGINARY PAST I found this
article by Martin Goodman from Animation World magazine in September 2001, written soon after the creation of the "Best Animated Feature" category was first announced, where he imagines what would have happened in many key years since the release of
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1937, if there had been a "Best Animated Feature" category at the Oscars since the beginning.
He says that in 2000 (for films released in North America in 1999),
Tarzan would have scored an upset victory over
Princess Mononoke. I disagree... I think it's fairly obvious
Toy Story 2 would have gone all the way. Also, I have my doubts that
Mononoke would have been eligible, having been released in Japan over two years before its American release (
Spirited Away was released in Japan in July 2001, within the allowed window of the year before the North American release, so it's eligible). He also has
My Neighbour Totoro beat out
The Nightmare Before Christmas... no,
My Neighbour Totoro was released in 1988 in Japan; much too long for it to be allowed to run.
CLIMBING THE CHARTS
Currently, if you do a
Google search for "Lilo & Stitch" and "Best Animated Feature", this 'Blog is #57 and Google hasn't yet cached all the times I wrote "
Lilo & Stitch" and "Best Animated Feature" yesterday!
What a fucking embarassment for Montreal...
150 000 Saddam-appeasers on the streets yesterday... well, just goes to show that the local cousins of the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys", the "poutine-eating separation monkeys", are just as wussy, but, then again, they've always been like that. This was the province that opposed conscription in World War II, of course.
FIFTH COLUMN UPDATE Oh, when perusing
Instapundit earlier for his take on the protests, I somehow missed
this great link to pics of the protest in New York from "Asparagirl". My favourite is the one of a member of the "Queer Resistance For Palestine", below which "Asparagirl" links to a page which
tells us what exactly they do to "queers" (their term, not mine) in "Palestine" (their term, not mine).
FUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCKKKKKK! FUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCK! FUCK FUCKITY FUCK FUCK FUCK!
I composed a long e-mail to the (Montreal)
Gazette's TV columnist Basem Boshra about how
The Simpsons isn't the longest-running prime-time animated series in TV history, nor will it be the longest-running comedy series in TV history in two years after it surpasses
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet in two seasons... unless you limit "TV history" to just North America. I believe both honours should go to
Sazae-san, which has been running nearly every week since 1969 and surpassed the 1700 episode mark in December. Though it's a comic strip-based domestic comedy series with extrememly primitive doodle-style animation (yes, "primitive" even when compared to
Sailor Moon, which I adore) that is far too Japan-specific, and not in an interesting way like
Urusei Yatsura, to appeal to pretty much anyone outside of Japan, even those of us North Americans within the anime fandom niche, so you'll hardly find any domestic fans, though, in Japan, it is one of the few anime series considered acceptable to adults outside the Japanese anime fandom niche (yes, for the most part, anime fandom among adults is a niche, even in Japan) to watch.
Also, I wrote about the myth that
The Simpsons declined significantly after Conan O'Brien left (Conan only had the lead writing credit on three episodes), and I gave him my top 10
Simpsons episodes, all from between the 2nd (1990-91) and 7th (1995-96) seasons.
1) "Marge Be Not Proud"
2) "Summer of 4 ft. 2"
3) "One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Blue Fish"
4) "Homer the Heretic"
5) "Homer vs. Lisa and the 8th Commandment"
6) "Colonel Homer"
7) "Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk"
8) "The Last Temptation of Homer"
9) "The Front"
10) "Bart vs. Australia"
But the web e-mail I used timed out while I was writing it, so, when I pressed "Send", I went back to the log-in screen and lost everything I wrote. Hence, the colourful title for this posting!
�Ö�
YET ANOTHER REASON WHY LILO & STITCH SHOULD WIN BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Okay, Academy Voters, I established the other day that
if you don't vote for Lilo & Stitch for Best Animated Feature, you're homophobic. I found out something else very interesting about
Lilo & Stitch the other day in
this interview with Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois.
AO: The original climax to Lilo & Stitch involved an aeroplane flying near skyscrapers. Can you talk about how that was altered after September 11th?
CS: The sequence exists almost entirely intact. It was just a matter of changing a few elements. It was something we all wanted to do... There was really no discussion. We met the very next day and thought, "How can we change this?" It only took a few weeks and it really works in much the same way. It's almost shot-for-shot the same sequence, it's just instead of skyscrapers, there's now a mountain ravine, instead of a 747, there's Jumbo and Pleakley's spaceship. The plane was digitally pounded into a different shape.
CG is always misleading. The things that seem difficult actually aren't. You ask, "Can we change the shape of this whole object?" � "Oh yeah." So you're like, "Oh really? That's not hard? So can we change the color?" � "Oooh (laughs), that's going to take a while..." It all seems so backwards. We had a fantastic artist named Brian Jefcoat and within a few days he had reshaped everything.
So, now, you see, if you don't vote for
Lilo & Stitch, you're insensitive.
Oh boy! I wasn't even particularly looking for anything written by him, but, lookit what I found on A.N.S.W.E.R.'s site: a
column on "Anti-Imperialism" from
the Left's favourite cop-killer!
Okay, since an idiotarian was just on CNN spouting off on how "It's all about oil!", I'll link to a good piece by
Thomas W. Lippman in the Washington Post about how it's not just about oil. And I thought the
Washington post was supposed to be liberal? Well, I don't know that that's the
Washington Post's editorial stance. (Yes, I stole the link from Sari.)
Also, here's a post on the
protest in New York from my favourite
New York-based 'Blogger.
FIFTH COLUMN UPDATE
Yes, once again, hundreds of thousands of the
politically irrelevant are on the streets of North America to protest against the liberation of Iraq. Like the protests last month, it's the exact same people (mostly
A.N.S.W.E.R.-types), and also, like last month,
289 million Americans stayed home, or watched
Daredevil, which I would have watched today except I've had this fricking cold for the past couple of days.
Last night, I saw a self-flagellating report on one of the American network newscasts, or it may have been a prime-time newsmagazine, asking whether the mainstream media had been too ignoring of the voices of "dissent". Oh please... these protests get too
much coverage. I watched about half-an-hour (about as much as I could stomache) of coverage on CNN this evening and it seemed like an uncritical, cheerleading, infomercial for A.N.S.W.E.R. with reporters asking really softball questions to
M.A.S.H. star Mike Farrell, and this one puff-piece about 3 "unlikely" protestors... a family in France. Anti-American protestors in "cheese eating surrender monkey"-land? Shocked, I am, shocked.
Hmm...
An anti-idoitarian French blogger with a bilingual 'Blog. Brave, brave man. I love his frequent shots at Jose Bov�, the idiot farmer and criminal thug who wrecked a McDonald's under construction in France and became a hero to Fifth-Columnists, Idiotarians, Anti-Globalists, Communists and Fidel/Ch�/
Mumia-lovers worldwide.
