» Archive for March, 2006
In my previous post I claimed I’m not a criminal. That’s not entirely true, according to Officer R.D. Helms (any relation to Jesse?) of the Charlotte P.D. According to him, “on or about Saturday, the 11 of March, 2006 at 12:00AM in Mecklenburg you did unlawfully and willfully operate a motor vehicle on a street or highway at a speed of 53 MPH in a 40 MPH zone (G.S. 20-141(B)(G)).”
This is far worse than your typical bullshit speeding ticket, for a number of reasons:
1) When I got pulled, I only had two minutes left of a three-hour trip.
2) In two months I’ll turn 25, at which point my insurance will drop dramatically–if I don’t have any points on my license, that is.
3) With my highly effective visual radar, I managed to spot the cop a hundred yards away–but the font that Charlotte uses to write “POLICE” on their cars is fairly low-contrast (light blue on white), and so I thought it was just an innocuous late-model American sedan.
4) I was going 53 on a mostly empty 4-lane highway. That’s perfectly reasonable–it should be unlawful for that to be illegal. Pull me over if I’m driving unsafely or endangering someone, don’t pull me over because the numbers allow your county to turn a profit. Speed limits are more suggestions than laws. Go do some real police work.
This ticket (my third, although my record is clean thanks to a few lawyers and some other, cheaper tactics) made me draw the following conclusion: all highway speed limits in this country should be raised by 10 miles per hour. It won’t happen anytime soon, but it should, and here’s why: cars. They’ve gotten much better. Modern engineering justifies raising the limit. Model Ts needed 30 MPH limits; cars built in the last 15 years need 75 MPH limits. I drive a 4-cylinder car made in ‘99 and it is comfortable going… 99. Even at that speed, which I rarely ever reach, passengers feel like they’re going 70.
From my perspective, raising the limits is a no-brainer. But I’m a healthy twentysomething with close-to 20/20 vision, I’m an outstanding driver, I’ve been driving for a decade, I’ve driven six-digit miles, and I’m driving a newish car. Not all of America can say the same.
So along with raising highway speed limits, we should also raise the age on driving, increase public transportation options, more frequently test the elderly, and revamp the state inspection system.
All of this would be a moot point if the act of raising speed limits made the roads more dangerous. There are way too many accidents as it is, and as long as I’m young, a car accident is what I fear the most in terms of uncontrollable threats to my life. But I did a little research and found that raising highway speed limits does not result in more accidents, in fact in some situations it results in less. And anytime you find an issue that I agree with the National Review on, I think we have a consensus.
Of course, when it comes to tickets, there are always ways to keep the points off your license. Unfortunately I can’t do it in person this time–I’m outside New York right now, in Connecticut. The court date in Carolina is a month away and by then I’ll hopefully be settled into my refrigerator box in the city. Thus I’ve gotta hire an overpriced, southern-fried lawyer with a 4th-tier law degree to represent me. As I said to a girl at the Georgetown Law Barrister’s Ball this past weekend, after she curtly introduced me to her fiancé: “sweet.”
I’m packing up and moving to New York this weekend, so over the next week or so I’ll be posting some quick thoughts on North Carolina (where I was born, and where I’ve spent most of my life).
Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead was a Pulp Fiction-era crime yarn (released in 1995) starring Andy Garcia. In it, he plays a marked man who spends most of the film tying up the loose ends in his life, in preparation for an impending, inescapable mob hit. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen it, and frankly I don’t trust my opinion of any film I saw more than a couple of years ago, but I remember there being a palatable emotional resonance underneath its typical-of-the-times “gangster cool” exterior. Unlike most latter-day crime films, TTDIDWYD wasn’t merely about the logistics of law-breaking, or about the circumstances of Garcia’s death–it was about him putting things in order and making amends before his time was up. Trying to set things straight before leaving any place is a natural priority for most people, and if you’re deprived of this opportunity, things are left in a messy state of incompleteness.
I’m getting out of dodge. And while I’m merely leaving Durham–whereas Garcia’s character was not only leaving Denver, but also this earth–there’s a similar putting-things-in-order and tying-up-of-loose-ends that I’ve been trying to accomplish before I go. I’m not a criminal, though, and I haven’t been tearing through girlfriends like so many ligaments in my shoulder, so I really don’t have the number of damaged personal relationships to repair that a womanizing criminal would.
I kind of wish I did, though. Is that wrong?
Even though I’m still physically here in Durham, my mind has been elsewhere for months. Like Andy Garcia in Denver, I’m as good as gone.
At long last, the not-at-all-anticipated part three of my Kongparison, wherein I jot down notes from watching each of the three Kongs (here are parts one and two).
King Kong (2005), dir. Peter Jackson:
Kongtech divides up nicely: stop-motion for the 30s, guy in an ape suit for the 70s, CGI for the 2000s. What’s it gonna be in 2040?
The three Kongs are a good example of music in movies becoming more understated over the years. These days the original score suggests emotions; fifty years ago the music told you how to feel.
Great quote from Jack Black’s character: “Defeat is always momentary.”
Making Carl Denham more of an antagonist, and Ann Darrow more immediately empathetic with Kong (not to mention, expanding greatly on the Kong/Darrow relationship), is one of the great successes of Jackson’s version.
Not sure how much the juggling and trickster persona adds to Naomi Watt’s character, although it does give her something to do to interact with Kong–after all, the two of them weren’t going to get a running-on-the-beach, eating-cotton-candy, buying-each-other-sweaters montage set to Foreigner.
Too many violent skirmishes were added, the most glaring example being the giant-insect encounters. This has been pointed out ad naseum, I think.
In the 2005 version, the boat captains happen to be trappers, which is too much of a coincidence (Kongicidence? This could get old quickly). In the ‘33 original, the crew brought along explosives for the express purpose of capturing Kong, which is more believable.
Jackson adds too many unresolved subplots and characters–the young character on the boat, played by Jamie Bell, seemed like he had a dark secret. The kind of secret that stays hidden for the whole film, only to come to the fore during the denouement, changing everything (“he’s been dead the whole time!”). But his character went nowhere (maybe the twist will make the 5-hour special edition DVD release).
The racist overtones of the film are obvious and have been widely discussed–although they try to make up for it at the end by having the gleaming, ultra-white, Aryan girl not capture Kong’s attention–but did they have to kill off the black and Asian guys so early and easily? Certainly changing the natives to be white pigmies would lessen the contrast between Naomi Watt’s ultra-pale skin and the tribe’s superethnicity (it would seem every tribal practice known to man was put to use at the WETA workshop)–but still. You’d expect them to take a more revisionist approach to the film, this being the new millenium and all.
An applicable quote I remember from a local radio morning show, years ago: “if there’s monsters and black people in a movie, the brothers are going down.”
All of that said, King Kong’s dealings with race bothered me for a total of about 30 seconds during its three-hour runtime. Academy Award Winner Crash, on the other hand, bothered me for the full two hours.
In these Hollywood tales involving primitive cultures, it’s the historical superstitions and myths of the tribes that cause our modern-day heroes problems–for example, let’s say the primitive people believe that the devil and his minions have white skin. When our clean white protagonists waltz in, ala King Kong (Indiana Jones is another good example), they’re in a world of hurt by default, because of these myths. As the audience, we see the primitive tribe as the bad guys, and root against them acting on their firmly held beliefs. But isn’t our own culture doing the same thing today? Our myths today are the Bible, Qu’ran, Torah, etc., and we perpetrate violence through these closely-held, revered, and too-little questioned “stories” in the same way. It’s no coincidence that the wars being raged against, and by, Americans today are being led by religious extremists: Bush and Bin Laden. Sure, each twists his respective scriptures to suit his own purposes, but each also believes in his heart that his war is a just one… In the same way that the tribal leader stringing up Naomi Watts believes that he’s doing what his God wants.
This point is highly debatable, which is why I’m not going to get into it any further. Apologies to anyone who’s offended that I just referred to their sacred text as a myth. I can only refer you to some information about the etymology of the word “myth” here.
Some terrific moments in the film–I understand why this is the text that got Peter Jackson interested in making movies.
More so than most films, Kong warrants a couple of different ratings. If I had to rate this movie at its best I’d give it five stars, but at its worst it is probably one-and-a-half. Most movies don’t have that kind of range, I think–a three-star movie, for example, would probably be between two and three-and-half, typically. Kong is really hit or miss. Thankfully, I don’t have to rate movies using stars, numbers, thumbs, or anything of the like (and I even seem to have abandoned my Actual Movie ratings system, which was a mockery of ratings system in the first place).
Kong is a brilliant vessel for telling this story, but some of what makes him great also makes the story come across as overly simplistic. At times he appears to be a 50-foot incarnation of some of the frat guys I knew in college, in terms of his destructive belligerence, his superficial view of relationships, and his visceral appeal. To prove this last point, I can imagine Kong at a pool party (wearing a pair of flowery board shorts), pushing a girl into the swimming pool and thus igniting her attraction to danger and raw strength (and effectively scooping me). Would there be a way to tell a story of a mythic beast who represents the opposite? An intellectual creature without physical prowess that wins hearts through emotion or intelligence? Something beyond skin deep?
There’s a blockbuster idea. Here’s another one, which would also have very little chance at financial success, but appeals to me a bit more:
In all three movies, the natives are complete throwaways. Ala Grendel, Wicked, etc., it’d be interesting to make a movie from the native’s perspective–about how these white people randomly show up and steal their island’s most-feared beast, only to throw their society into chaos. It’d be a post-Cold War scenario: the single enemy the natives always feared actually provided some stability in their lives, unbeknownst to them. So once Kong (the former Soviet Union, in this case) is removed from the equation, the natives are attacked by the dinosaurs and gigantic insects all around the island (Al Qaeda and the Taliban). They no longer know where the threat is coming from, and suddenly the removal of their archenemy is seen as not merely a blessing but also a curse.
Unfortunately I’m not sure that this film would pull in enough of an audience to justify what it would cost to make. Story of my life.
Last night after watching the Academy Awards I told a friend that I explicitly did not want to take the time or effort to explain why Crash understands race-relations in America at a pre-Rodney King level, or why Paul Haggis is more of a hack than Keanu Reeves in The Matrix. But then the fucking thing won Best Picture. Suddenly I felt compelled to undertake such an explanation.
Thankfully, LA Weekly critic Scott Foundas has already illustrated, in no uncertain terms, why Crash is a veritable P.O.S. In a response to critic Roger Ebert’s contrarily-titled “In Defense of the Worst Movie of the Year,” where Ebert defends Crash as his pick as 2005’s best movie, Foundas rips both the film and the fake progressives who champion it. I had a hard time limiting myself to only a few quotes from this response to Ebert, and an earlier piece he contributed to a movie roundtable at Slate also includes some perfectly-elucidated points (search for “abomination” on the page and you’ll find the discussion about Crash). I recommend you skip the following excerpts and just click on the above links, if you aren’t absolutely clear as to why Crash sucks. Hats off to Scott Foundas.
Here is some of what he had to say:
The characters in Crash don’t feel like three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood human beings so much as calculated “types” plugged by Haggis into a schematic thesis about how we are all, in the course of any given day, the perpetrators and the victims of some racial prejudice. (Nobody in Haggis’ universe is allowed to be merely one or the other.) They have no inner lives. They fail to exist independently of whatever stereotype they’re on hand to embody and/or debunk. Erudite carjackers? A man who can’t remember his own girlfriend’s ethnicity? You may see such things as “parables,” but I call it sloppy, sanctimonious screenwriting of the kind that, as one colleague recently suggested, should be studied in film classes as a prime example of what not to do.
…
Crash is an Important Film About the Times in Which We Live, which is another way of saying that it’s one of those self-congratulatory liberal jerk-off movies that rolls around every once in a while to remind us of how white people suffer too, how nobody is without his prejudices, and how, when the going gets tough, even the white supremacist cop who gets his kicks from sexually harassing innocent black motorists is capable of rising to the occasion. How touching.
…
Not since Spanglish–which, alas, wasn’t that long ago–has a movie been so chock-a-block with risible minority caricatures or done such a handy job of sanctioning the very stereotypes it ostensibly debunks. Welcome to the best movie of the year for people who like to say, “A lot of my best friends are black.”
He’s a little tough on Spanglish there, but he has a point: Ebert’s argument about it being “useful to be aware of the ways in which real people see real films” is the modern-day equivalent of Marie Antoinette writing an 18th-century blog post about the flavors of cake preferred by proletariat Parisians.
Several weeks ago I wrote, “it’s not worth either of our time for me to try to elucidate the reasons” why Crash is a bad film. But five minutes ago it won Best Picture, which may make it an issue worth delving into. Of course I’m also on record as saying that Paul Haggis “can’t write worth shit,” which is probably not a great career move if you’re an aspiring writer/director with no credits to your name–you’re calling out a guy who just walked off with two Oscars in his hands.
So it goes. I’m sticking to my guns.
When the mainstream press calls Crash’s win “unexpected,” “shocking,” and an “upset” tommorrow morning, ask yourself if it had anything to do with Lionsgate sending out an unprecedented 130,000 copies of the film as screeners (I can confirm this, as one of my friends in DC had it sitting on her coffee table, courtesy SAG). Or maybe Hollywood just loves Paul Haggis because Paul Haggis loves Hollywood, and he has no shame about trying every trick in the book to try to wrench a tear from your eye?
If I don’t find an already-existing, lucidly-argued piece on the internet to the same effect, I’m going to have to write the “Why Crash is a Bad Movie” post. I don’t want to, so I hope someone else has already done it. And despite the fact that I could care less about self-congratulatory, all-politics-anyway awards shows, every year I still manage to have a “throw my hands up in minor disgust” moment while watching the Oscars. In light of the rest of the nominations, which included some absolutely terrific films this year–and the fact that Jon Stewart is the best thing on TV today–I’m actually surprised that they still managed to leave me shaking my head.
I came up with these in a flurry while listening to The Strokes’ “Ize of the World,” a song off their newest album, First Impressions of Earth. It’s a sort-of clever play on words on the “eyes of the world,” obviously. I didn’t need to say that. Anyway, the choruses are comprised of culturally-relevant current statements that end in “-ize” (I cheated and used “-ise” too). And the song has a trick ending, which I duplicated here. You won’t get any of this if you haven’t heard the song. Not that there’s anything to get; this is pointless.
Chihuahuas to accessorize
Classic films to bastardize
Moviegoers to galvanize
MP3 libraries to organize
0% APR to advertise
Curling to televise
Muslims to proselytize
Royal Sauds to fraternize
Closeted gays to catholicize
501(c)(3)s to monetize
Selves to aggrandize
Rubber to vulcanize
Penises to desensiti–
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