The strange psychology of 40 year old virgin

40 Year Old Virgin.

I take back almost everything I wrote about this movie, other than to say it strains believability.

More misc.

Another thing I've realized is that although I've always known I came from a backward place, I didn't realize before my brother made a homophobic comment on someone's Facebook stream, that coming from a backward place IS THE NORM, not the unusual.

Okay, it's pointless to keep writing about how horrible Hollywood movies are because they keep making them


I hope I never have to experience a time when I'm considered to be "in lockdown." America has adopted and applied to its population all the tactics of the prison. I suppose this is to be expected, since we are the most likely country to put people in prison to begin with. But just as I have hoped never to have to work in a corporate environment again, I also hope to never be treated as if I am a criminal simply for existing in a certain place at a certain time. When I see children leaving an elementary school with their hands up, it makes me want to cry.

(and now, apparently, it no longer matters if your hands are up... they will shoot you anyway.)

The ten year nightmare with B****ski (a judge in Ohio who hates my family) is bad enough. This past week he sentenced someone to five years in prison for accidentally causing a fire at the college. AN ACCIDENT. The kid's life is ruined. In the online version of the local paper, all the idiots that live in that town applaud the decision, saying things like the kid needs to "cool down." Oh yes. Let's have him get raped a little bit. That'll help him with his anger. Nothing like a little involuntary ass fucking to turn you around. But this 'judge' is so horrible, he bases his decisions not on evidence but on his own fat gut. The crime of the justice system in this country is that it cannot correct itself or its acknowledged mistakes. There is no law that governs judges. There is no law that undoes the damage of corruption.

Law is governed by theory, not benefit. So we get kids in Elyria for whom simple mistake of smoking ends in a five year sentence, while bankers, who actually rob people of their money using illegal tactics that they know are illegal, are allowed to keep their jobs and are allowed to keep robbing us.

Spike

Old Boy
Gravity
Hunger Games (2)

I used to live in the same dormitory as Spike Lee. My roommate, in fact, became part of his crew at the very beginning of his career. I've never liked any of his movies, except as he got older. I even like the flaws. Even though Old Boy is a pretty awful movie in every way --- based on a foreign movie apparently, which I haven't seen --- I still enjoyed it and felt it was worth seeing. Apparently distributors don't because it's hardly showing anywhere, but compared to the absolute drek of Hollywood in general, a pretty awful movie by Spike Lee is better than anything put out by the studios, with the exception, of course, of Gravity.

Also The Hunger Games (2) pretty much makes up for the horrible first one, which made you nauseous but not because of the story.

STOP SHAKING THE CAMERA!  It doesn't make anything feel immediate or intense. What makes for intensity is real emotion.

The Oranges

As a failed screenwriter, it irks me to no end go to the theater and some piece of shit movie like The Oranges.  The cast is fine, even though they were all miscast. This time we have to single out Jeanne McCarthy, the casting director, for being an idiot.

Many of the people involved in this wreck worked together on previous projects like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But the screenwriters were two nobodies. In normal circumstances, a script with so many holes in it wouldn't make it through a cheap screenwriting workshop.

It's narrated, for one thing. Voice overs are always a sign of bad writing unless there is something particularly interesting about the voice. Good examples are Sunset Boulevard and American Beauty, where the narrator, a character in the movie, also happens to be dead. A medium good example out now is Looper. Other examples where the character's voice is unique are Blade Runner and Days of Heaven.

In this case, the voice over is Alia Shakwat and there's no real reason for it. She doesn't figure in the plot, describes herself as a fifth wheel which begs the question... why is she there?

I can't go on. It was just stupid and boring and the screenwriters didn't deserve to have it made.

Retard

Going The Distance, by Geoff LaTulippe.

Another pussified movie, where the men are all basically girls and the girls are young women, but not women. What I can't understand about modern, presumably young writers (this is Miss Tulip's only credit), is their fear of germs. There is much too much made over the fact that the dork to the left and Drew Barrymore, (who needs to start being more selective, or switch to theatre), begin to have sex on the dining room table of her sister's home. The sister, Christina Applegate, behaves in the script as if some sort of nuclear device scattered radiation on the table. She gets into full combat cleaning gear and starts scrubbing the table, and with her heavy latex gloved hands, removes a possible pubic hair and almost pukes. 

These sorts of gimmicks are supposed to be funny, but they're only funny to people who laugh at anything that's put in front of them. This got a 6.5 on IMDB which is pretty good for how actually bad it is.

Well I haven't written a movie review in a long time, so what shall I tear apart for my first day back in the Blogosphere (a.k.a. useless writing storage place).

I think what I'm going to tear apart is all the people who hate the director Roman Polanski.

Almost no one understands that the entire Polanski story (the murder of his wife by the people in the picture, the sex with the young teen girl, his flee from the country, then his recent arrest in Switzerland and subsequent release) was about fame and the truly sick obsession America and her people have with it. Maybe it's because so many years ago Emerson wrote that biography was going to be the only American form of literature, and somehow that has turned into "Fame is the only form of American literature."

Polanski actually made the story better and more famous by doing what he did. He actually extended the story, so that it still has relevance thirty or forty years later.

Oh. Yes. Everyone calls him a coward because he didn't want to face his sentencing. What they don't know is that he had already been sentenced by the corrupt judge who was in charge of his case and had already served out his sentence in jail. The judge and his bailiff used a subtle illegal tactic to put Polanski in jail "for observation," for up to forty days. Polanski's lawyer, the prosecutor and the judge, and the family of the victim had all agreed that this would be enough and, especially important to the victim, it would end all the coverage. Well the judge decided, after the fact, that he wasn't satisfied and wanted to punish him some more, so he pulled the prosecutor and Polanski's lawyer into his chambers and told them what he was going to say and what they were to say in response. The judge planned to jail him, and then start deportation proceedings, which seems oxymoronic.

The judge held press conferences with the Hollywood press and loved seeing his picture in the papers. He was an ass-sucking viper, just as bad as the papparazzi, and he didn't want to let the Polanski fade, because the case was his ticket to the front pages. A more recent example of a judge that loved the media attention was Ito, in the OJ case. That case would never have taken a year if it had not been televised.

The victim, who is now a middle aged woman, said in the documentary that the judge ruined her life. Polanski said at the start of the documentary, that he fled the country because of the corruption of the judge, and for no other reason. And I believe him. The fact that he voluntarily went to jail for "psychiatric observation" shows that he didn't want to leave the country, or stop making movies. For fuck's sake, his wife is buried in L.A.

Everything points to the corruption of the judge. But here in America we don't believe that judges are corrupt, or have the freedom to do almost anything they want, or that corruption exists outside Washington D.C. Law & Order has persuaded us that judges are sensible, reasonable, arbitrators of good law. Even when they're making terrible decisions or decisions that are based on personal feelings, they hide those decisions behind the obfuscation of law.

But they aren't saints, and we need to find a way to remove them from their positions of power. We cannot have simpletons and vanity cases in the position of sentencing people to death, or, in the case of Roman Polanski, jailing them and then start deportation proceedings at the same time.

So Polanski jumped bail. Hopefully whoever put it up got their money back somehow. And the victim, whoever she was, has moved on, from an encounter that her mother forced her to do and changed the course of her life, because Polanski thought she was "just" a young pretty girl and could give her the same drugs that everyone else was using.

The only thing I question are two things: In Bugliosi's book about the Manson killings which is called Helter Skelter, I think, he said that Polanski went into the crime scene and retrieved some "sex movies" he had made with Sharon Tate. Why was he allowed to do that? And after having your wife and baby killed by a demented bitch with a knife, why would you give drugs to a young girl, whether she looked 18 or 25?

But this could be the same question asked of those parents who sent their kids to "play" and "sleep over" with Michael Jackson.

Hollywood SUCKS!