Anyway, while I talk about the economy and not-so-subtly suggest that my own layoff was a direct result of the highest levels of republican mismanagement, I want to embed a wide-ranging lecture on the economic crash and the subsequent “reboot” of America, by USC professor Jon Taplin, himself a former film producer (hat tip to the Filmmaker Magazine blog).

It covers a lot of ground and points fingers at all the usual targets, but it’s a nice compendium of the problems we currently face as a declining empire, and is a perfect representation of the distributed education of which I speak. Plus, for those of us who’ve recently found ourselves with more time on our hands (via job loss), it can’t hurt to have more stimuli with which to work the brain muscle, right?

–At the Film & Video Webbys, we were the assholes. Maybe gracious and humble was the way to go, but everyone was saying those things and our speech was at the end of the show, so we went for something more memorable. Sorry, girl.

–The Webby Awards are at an interesting crossroads; they’ve been around for 12 years but are only now on the cusp of becoming well-known. Considering most of us spend more time surfing the web than we do watching TV, viewing movies, reading books, or going to plays, you’d think the web would have an awards show as prestigious as the Oscars, Emmys, etc. The Webbys are certainly the foremost Internet award, but they still have a ways to go.

–To further distinguish the award, the show-runners could axe many of their hundred or so categories, such as “Best Rich Media Advertising: Business-to-Business.” Maybe there really were hundreds of entries in that category. Or maybe there were more like nine entries, five of which were in turn nominated, two of which were then winners (the Webbys add a popular-vote “People’s Voice” award in addition to the judge-determined Webby Award). Add on the Official Honorees distinction and the show starts to feel like “everyone gets a star.” As a nominee (for Best Drama–certainly not a category that would be dropped, I should note), I tried to watch as many as possible of the other nominees, but I couldn’t make it through the 25+ Film and Video categories, not to mention the hundred other Website, Mobile, and Interactive Advertising awards.

–On the other hand, there should be awards for websites in a broad array of categories, given the Internet is such a broad and varied community. I’m not trying to bite the hand that feeds us; we couldn’t be happier about the award itself, or the accompanying shows and events. The boost in interest we’ve gotten because of winning the award will hopefully be career-launching. But it’s also in our best interest to hope the award continues to gain prestige; at the very least, the Webbys need to start prodding their sponsors for a higher percentage of their operating expenses to reduce their reliance on fees from participants (which is the most immediately obvious explanation for why there are so many categories).

–The first act of WALL-E is entrancing. It’s one of the greatest first acts ever committed to digital screens or celluloid film, for children or adults. But (minor spoiler alert) I was jarred by the appearance of actual live human beings in a Pixar film, in the form of Fred Willard no less; I’m still grappling with Stanton, et al’s decision to portray the Earthbound human civilization as a live-action digital video relic, but then 3D-animate the masses of human beings who appear on the spaceship. I get why they did it, but I’m not sure I like it. (That specific decision, I mean; while I think the second half of the film is a bit disjointed, as a whole it nevertheless ranks up there with Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and The Incredibles as Pixar’s best… and that’s saying a lot).

–At-home high definition is anathema to the movie theater industry; since I bought a cheap HD projector for my apartment, I’ve seldom set foot in a theater. This isn’t a new observation, but I’ll add to the chorus of voices: for $12 a ticket–$35 if you go with a friend and buy popcorn–the theater had better be a vastly superior experience than home, and it’s not. At the very least, the sound and visuals should be unbeatable, but when I eventually get a Blu-ray player, WALL-E will be brighter, sharper, and more colorful on my own wall than it was at the theater. And WALL-E will cost the same to own on disc (digital, re-watchable, with behind-the scenes interviews, commentaries, deleted scenes) as it did to see the analog film reproduction of it projected once in the company of strangers. I hope theaters find a way to right the ship, but at this point it’s simple economics as to why attendance is down (and yes, box office records are still being broken, but that’s due to increased ticket prices and more screens, not increased attendance).

–In other world news, “Mission Accomplished.” We got that oil–oho! And not only mission accomplished for Mr. Bush, in light of gaining control over Iraqi oil through no-bid contracts for American companies worth up to 75% of the country’s profits; also for Mr. Bin Laden, who stated in 2001 after 9/11 that his goal was to get oil to $144/barrel. Last week, it hit $145.85. Congratulations, oil barons/religious zealots! Somehow, you both won.

–On the other hand, neither of them can be blamed for the direction our auto industry took–or, more accurately, didn’t take–in the ’90s. Between 1974 and 1989, fuel efficiency doubled; since then, how much more efficient do you think our cars have gotten? Actually, the question is, how much less efficient have our cars gotten? The average car in 1989 got 27.5 MPG and today the average car gets right around 25. One could point to the fact that a higher percentage of hulking SUVs on the road today lowers the MPG average across the board, but the 1989 Toyota Camry got 27 MPG, while the 2008 Toyota Camry gets… 22. Surely that doesn’t represent 20 years of scientific progress? Granted, there is a hybrid Camry, which gets 34 MPG, but even that only represents a 25% improvement on a 20 year-old relic. As the New York Times points out, this mileage crunch was entirely preventable, and it’s our politicians who are largely to blame–on both sides of the aisle–although it was Republicans who passed a six-year bill in 1995 that expressly forbade the highway administration from spending any money to elevate fuel efficiency. Justify your existence!

–Speaking of which, I’m still waiting for an Obama-Edwards ticket. Pretty crazy: when I wrote that here two years ago, not only was I convinced Clinton was certain to get the nomination and anyone else even having a chance was wishful thinking, but I also had Obama penciled in as a Vice nominee because I didn’t think anyone’s star could rise that fast. Yes We Can!

–I’m excited to announce I’ll be doing television commercials for the McCain campaign.

–Kidding…

–Sorry, this temporarily became the so-not-film-school-that-it’s-politics-school; back to movies.

–The Dark Knight is going to make a metric ton of money, but how much of its opening weekend gross will be inflated by Heath Ledger’s baffling, sobering, premature death? Over the course of its theatrical run, domestically, internationally, including cable TV airings, adding in DVD and Blu-ray sales and all the other ancillaries, how much will the increased interest in the film because of his death end up being “worth?” No one wants to profit from an event like that, and no one wanted it to happen… but it did happen, and people are going to end up being richer because of it. Unsettling.

–As parts of The Dark Knight were actually shot on IMAX film stock–and scanned in at 8k for the DI–this is the film to see in an IMAX theater. So much so, in fact, that I had to buy tickets two weeks ahead of time; even the 2AM, 4AM and 6AM showings that I thought were listing errors on Fandango.com (“they must mean PM, right?”) for opening weekend were sold out. If you’ve been wanting to see a grown man run around in a glorified Halloween costume on an 80-foot screen at 6AM Monday morning on your way to work, now’s your chance.

–This late-night ticket phenomenon was also reported in the pesky New York Times; they somehow manage to beat nofilmschool.com to every story!

–Because I apparently write a lot about Christopher Nolan projects, I’ll keep going on The Dark Knight: my West Side co-director Zack is predicting a $114 million opening weekend, which I initially filed under “just another example of Zack’s boundless and unreasonable optimism,” but I’ve slowly come around to believing he’s on the money. Despite the movie’s dark subject matter, it’s both a sequel and a comic book movie, which collectively dominate the top of the all-time box office charts. At Media Predict, where “trading” ends 30 days before the film opens, the over/under finished at $101.5. We’ll see.

–The Brothers Nolan (Christopher and Jonathan), who have worked together in some form on Memento, The Prestige (one of my favorite films in recent memory, which I attempted to explain as a polemic on the price of religion), and now The Dark Knight, are at the top of their game. (Batman Begins was directed by Christopher, but penned by Blade scribe David S. Goyer, and Christopher’s other studio picture, Insomnia, was adapted from the Norwegian original by Hillary Seitz, an apparently prolific script doctor). So, yes, I’m really looking forward to this massive Hollywood blockbuster; I’ll get off the Nolans’ collective jock now.

–Wait a second, Bush is “pushing” for an average of 31 MPG by 2015?! We were getting 27 MPG in 19-fucking-89 and a mandated 12% improvement over 26 years is being called “aggressive”!?

–Sorry. I don’t own a car and I live in a city where mass transportation is readily available, so I’m allowed to be incredulous. If you’re in the market for a car and care about these things, however, you may be wondering which is better for the planet: a new Prius or a used compact sedan.

–Our screening and panel at IFC Center was a great experience and is covered a bit here and here. It was great to meet and chat with the other participants, and I was surprised at how well The West Side’s visuals held up on the big screen. As for the panel, I learned for the hundredth time that I’m much more coherent in writing, with or without editing, than I am when talking. Good thing this isn’t a podcast.

–If the most common approach for an aspiring filmmaker to break into the industry in the ’50s and ’60s was to get a studio apprenticeship, if the path in the ’70s and ’80s was to go to film school, if the path in the ’90s and ’00s was to direct music videos and commercials, the ’10s and ’20s will see the internet become the most prolific source of new talent. And not just for people who can film a video of their cat mowing their lawn; legitimate directors at the highest echelons of the industry will be most commonly discovered via their hitting the “Upload” button.

–That’s about as self-interested a statement as you’ll find. But you are, after all, at nofilmschool.com.

–On the other hand, reading about The Wire’s Ed Burns and how much of the greatest television show in history was informed by his personal life, one gets to thinking about how much more important real-world experiences are than anything they can teach you in a school, much less a film school. I’ve successfully avoided paying a lot of money to incubate in a film classroom, but on the other hand I’ve been stuck in a cubicle day in and out and haven’t traveled outside the country in two years. Day jobs are a bitch.

–Thus the name of our nascent production company: Exit Strategy.

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These words were written by Malachi Ritscher (pictured) shortly before he set himself on fire. On an early November morning in Chicago, he brought a can of gasoline and a book of matches before an audience of rush-hour commuters, and performed his own coup de grace. When his protest of the United States’ occupation of Iraq was over, his body was charred beyond recognition and the population of Chicago had shrunk by one.

Viewed in historical context, I suppose it’s not surprising that a citizen of an attacking country responsible for tens of thousands of innocent civilian deaths would take his own life to protest the war. It follows that self-immolation would be the way to ensure the protest was heard ’round the world, despite–or because of–the unimaginable anguish of burning alive. Ritscher felt, similarly to Norman Morrison or Roger Allen LaPorte, that by igniting himself on fire, he would draw the international community’s attention to the fact that Americans felt strongly enough about the actions of their own country to kill themselves. But while Morrison got his own postage stamp and a street named after him in Hanoi for his protest of the Vietnam War, Ritscher, forty years later, instead received a media blackout and accusations of being mentally unstable.

The mainstream press responded to his excruciating death by accusing him of insanity and describing his obituary as “rambling.” But in actuality, his self-penned obituary is entirely lucid and leaves no doubt as to why he did what he felt he had to do. By no means was he “insane”–insanity, as Albert Einstein said, is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

Insanity, thusly, is embroiling ourselves in another Vietnam when Vietnam happened during all of our current leaders’ lifetimes. Insanity is turning Saddam Hussein over to a lynch mob and watching him hang via online video, when we think of the town-square hangings carried out in the middle ages as barbaric. Insanity is constructing a 700-mile long fence between the United States and Mexico when we tore down the Berlin Wall less than 20 years ago. Insanity is letting an administration steal one election, and then four years later letting them repeat the same feat of electioneering.

Not learning from history is a cardinal sin. But I’m 25, so what do I know of history? And I’m not religious, so what do I know of sin? Better, then, to let the most powerful man in the world explain this “don’t repeat your mistakes” mantra: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice… You don’t get fooled again.”

By Einstein’s definition, Bush and Cheney are insane, but the mainstream media in this country refrains from launching sustained character attacks on them. Somehow, with everything that is wrong with the leadership in our country, Malachi Ritscher–citizen, dead–is the one who is attacked. Our political office consists of war criminals and our press is full of neutered houseboys.

In his last known writing, Ritscher asked:

What has happened to my country? We have become worse than the imagined enemy – killing civilians and calling it ‘collateral damage’, torturing and trampling human rights inside and outside our own borders, violating our own Constitution whenever it seems convenient, lying and stealing right and left, more concerned with sports on television and ring-tones on cell-phones than the future of the world.

Are these the words of an insane man?

A), no.

B), it’s not even a question worth asking in a public forum. To debate his mental condition at the time of his death is offensive–not only is it belittling to his sacrifice, but to do so is to participate in the same charade of misdirection that our current administration uses too often. To ask whether he was sane or not is to imply that he had a point if were sane and he did not if he were insane. The fact is, Ritscher was reacting to the problems created by those currently in power in this country, and it is them we should be questioning, not him. To call in to question his character is morally repugnant. If the canary in the cage dies from toxic fumes, do you question the canary’s medical history or do you try to do something to improve the air quality?

There’s a Mooninite across the street from my apartment here in NYC–and it’s been there for weeks–but somehow none of us in this fair city thought to call 911, worried that it was going to attempt to kill us.

To the city of Boston, I would just like to point out that no one would design a bomb that calls attention to itself before it explodes.

(Illustration from a t-shirt at The Cotton Factory)

—

One of the wonderful things about the interweb is the ability it gives you to find and contact almost anyone. Ever since I was made (more excruciatingly) aware of my own naivety many years ago by a friend after giving a homeless man in Durham a buck (“he’s just going to spend it on booze”), I’ve been more conscious of the “but what if they’re telling the truth?” mentality that typically garners a beggar wages.

After a week of riding the subway from Connecticut to NYC every morning and night (about an hour and a half each way, not counting mass-transportation snafus, such as my train on Thursday catching fire and requiring an evacuation), I began wondering if there was an “answer” to the question I’ve been forced to consider on a daily basis now. Despite issuing a few minor complaints about their first book, Freakonomics, the only people I know of who’d be willing to consider my question from an academic and journalistic standpoint are Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt. A quick stop at their website (and excellent blog) garnered a contact email address, to which I sent the following:

Last week I moved to New York City from North Carolina. Homelessness is certainly prevalent in my own hometown of Durham, but it’s not constantly in your face like it is in NYC. While sitting on a subway listening to a man regale the car with a tale of being a Vietnam vet with three hungry children, I began to wonder:

What percentage of bums are telling the truth?

And, consequently, what are the actual odds that any money you give them would end up going to food or other necessities, instead of alcohol/drugs?

I wouldn’t think that too many people would want to take a stab at “answering” these questions, because of the borderline-offensive generalizations that would result — except perhaps the two of you. That said, I have no idea how you’d go about researching this; nevertheless, it’s certainly a worthwhile (and obvious) topic.

Stephen J. Dubner actually replied the same day–on a Saturday, no less (one drawback of today’s connectivity it that it turns all of us into 7-day-a-week part-timers). He responded,

The most visible hustlers are, while probably in need of quite a lot of things, pretty inevitably lying. I’m sure there’s been research done on this but I’m guessing it’s of the sociological variety, without great data. Would be a good project, for sure. Maybe you’re the man for the job?

—

Maybe not. However, because I was still writing for DVguru at the time, and was kicking around the idea of delving deeper into “real” journalism, I briefly considered doing some cursory research and submitting an unsolicited article exploring the topic to Slate (despite my lack of statistics/economics/numbers-in-general background). But then I went on hiatus from DVguru soon thereafter, started pursuing actual doings instead of merely writing-about-doings, and the question died there.

Or did it?

One of the books I’m currently reading–and yes, I’d be better off finishing a book and only then starting another, instead of A.D.D.-ingly reading whichever one on my bookshelf strikes my fancy at the moment–is James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds. Here’s an applicable example from it: if you have lots of people guess how many jelly beans there are in a jar, the mean of all their guesses will actually be fairly accurate. However, each person’s guess, individually, is more than likely off by a lot.

So let’s open up the question at hand to the wisdom of the (albeit very small) crowd that reads this blog. Here:

Where “bum” offensively refers to a homeless person or panhandler in general; where “the truth” refers to their story being mostly true; and where “telling” refers to a bum asking for money with a sympathetic story, rather than playing an instrument or performing otherwise…

What percentage of bums are telling the truth?
	Less than 5%
	5-15%
	15-30%
	30-50%
	More than 50%

UPDATE: After receiving a whopping 54 votes, the leading category is 5-15%, although <5% and 15-30% each received an almost equal (to each other, and only a few less than 5-15%) share. If you were to weigh the categories based on their size (with <5% being smaller than the others), then the <5% category would in fact come out on top, I suppose. But, long story short: who knows? The only conclusion we can draw from this is that the vast majority of a tiny sample size of respondents on a random blog think that less than 30% of beggars are telling the truth. Maybe one day (if I stick with this whole navel-gazing thing… correction: if I stick with this whole blogging-about-navel-gazing thing) I’ll actually have a readership that I can pose interesting questions to. That’ll be the day.

Oh wait… apparently some Democrats (still) don’t understand the way the two-party system works. See, if you split from your own party, you take votes away from… nevermind.

A few minutes after the film ended, I opened up my laptop and found myself watching Steven Colbert’s utterly scathing speech at the White House Correspondent’s dinner, which he had given mere hours earlier. Although I’m posting this the very night of Colbert’s speech, by the time you read this, you’ll probably already have seen his coruscating routine. If not, here is a transcription, and here is the video.

There’s so much more to say about Colbert’s speech, which is not only career-defining for him, but is also a watershed moment in New Media vs. Old Media. Well, maybe “watershed” is overstating things. How about a “water closet” moment? Regardless, the mainstream press has already downplayed his speech, which demonstrates the very timidity of the press that Colbert lambasted. Yet the living web will not let it die–and Colbert knew this. He was aware that his routine–delivered at a specialized members-only event and televised by the ratings-weakling C-SPAN–would be picked up and “syndicated” by the internet’s social bookmarking sites, blogosphere (ahem), and e-mailers. No big deal, right? Well, had Dubya’s father been openly mocked at a press event by a Colbert predecessor (say, Al Franken), the buck would have stopped there (a phrase which is in fact itself a presidential term). A newspaper or two might have mentioned it, but that’s a far cry from being able to actually watch the speech, and more importantly, share it.

Colbert knew this would happen. He knew that the power of one performance could accomplish more than anything he could do on his own show (the viewership of which will now skyrocket), and more than anything he could say in an editorial in any newspaper, magazine, or other form of Old Media. And someone was foolish (or brilliant) enough to give him that very stage. If Americans see the straining and helpless look of discomfort on Bush’s face upon getting so openly mocked, Colbert may manage to call to fore the elephant in the room and the utter ridiculousness of the times we live in, through a mere act of comedy.

Normally I’m opposed to writing “pun intended,” because it seems like a stupid practice–if the reader gets it, they get it, and if not, it’s a throwaway anyway. Few plays on words warrant their own neon sign advertising their oh-so-clever existence. But damnit, when I said “elephant in the room,” it could have either meant, “we’re living with one of the worst presidents in history yet much of the mainstream press and a third of our country sits back and passively approves of him,” or it could have meant, “Bush, whose political party symbol is an elephant, was physically in the room while Colbert was lampooning him.” And this was the best part of Colbert’s performance–he ripped the most powerful man in the world, to his face! And while I may despise our current administration, I’m not an impractical America hater–if someone tried this routine in most of the rest of the world, they wouldn’t be able to comfortably return to their regularly-scheduled TV show the following week. They probably wouldn’t be allowed to return to their regularly-scheduled life.

There’s a bumper sticker out there that reads, “No one died when Clinton lied.” In this case I’d like to add, “No one died when Nixon lied.” And both of those presidents were almost impeached (Nixon, or course, had to resign to avoid it). There’s a big difference between Watergate and the not-even-elected-presidency-of-Bushgate, but in terms of calling out a corrupt administration (and in light of having just watched All the President’s Men), it certainly says something about the state of the mainstream media when our modern-day Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward are Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

And yes, it’s possible that people did indeed die when Nixon lied. But not thirty-five thousand.

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.”

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.

I really thought I was going to like Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s Freakonomics. Any book which is primarily concerned with looking at things in new ways, and is also focused on race in America, I figured I’d love unconditionally. But I didn’t. I did thoroughly enjoy it, and it’s a very quick and easy read (funny that with a book, that’s a positive attribute; no one ever says, yeah you should see this movie, it’s only 64 minutes long). And yes, I do highly recommend the book, etc. That said, I’ll now spend a few paragraphs issuing some complaints.

First off, I had no problems at all with the first half of the book. But somehow as I got deeper into it, alarms started going off in my head–to the point where I actually jotted down some thoughts as I read. Here’s what I wrote:

No matter how many factors you control for in a regression analysis, there are plenty more out there. Factors have factors, and those factors have factors. Much of the conventional wisdom that the book proves wrong was in fact drawn from some of the same methods used in Freakonomics itself. The book has the benefit of hindsight to say that ten years ago we were wrong about this–but in ten years, what will the next experts have to say about the conclusions drawn in Freakonomics? I’m not sold that Freakonomics has the end-all-be-all answers to all of the questions it raises. Yet, possibly because it’s designed to be a bestseller, it presents its findings as if they were ultimate truths.

Of course this is sort of par for the course when it comes to experts in any field drawing conclusions about anything–knowledge expands as time passes. After all, the concept of Evolution is only a hundred and fifty years old. And Intelligent Design is brand-spanking new! Well. That’s kind of the opposite of knowledge growing. But regardless, here were some specific complaints I had:

pp. 120: The Stev(ph)ens point out that kids who went to Head Start don’t do any better when they start regular school than kids (presumably of equal income and social standing) who didn’t. They rightly point out that Head Start has been “repeatedly proved ineffectual.”

Instead of spending the day with his own undereducated, overworked mother, the typical Head Start child spends the day with someone else’s undereducated, overworked mother.

Okay. But doesn’t the child’s own mother (who has a statistically high chance of being a single mom) benefit from Head Start by being able to go to work during the day, thus putting food on the table? And isn’t that (food) kind of important? Maybe that’s not one of the goals of Head Start, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the numbers show that mothers with kids in Head Start have no more income than mothers who don’t. Not being an economist or researcher of any kind, I can only speculate. But this is the part where I draw on my own experience as a once-upon-a-time Head Start volunteer (full disclosure: the Head Start program was my choice, but my school at the time required volunteer work). First off, I’m not sure that you would really retain anything you learn at that age–much less ten years later–and so the benefits of the actual education the children received in Head Start are questionable. But I think, or at least I hope (and this could be me just being a liberal idealist, which is at least infinitely better than a conservative idealist), that the program has other benefits, social or otherwise, which aren’t easily measurable by available numbers. Regarding the program I spent time with, one of these benefits was that the kids were safe and productive for the whole day, and that’s worth something.

pp. 172: TV-watching. If you’re gonna say it’s not bad for children, please, at least say something about other potential drawbacks of the pacifying device, whether it be potentially shortened attention-spans, the promotion of consumer lust in youngsters, or just the general proliferation of fatass chip-eating kids in our country.

I’d also like to note–and I have no real knowledge of this, other than the fact that my father is an economist by training and he told me so–that the University of Chicago Economics program (where Levitt is tenured) is historically conservative, infamously so (see the wikipedia entry here). I’m not suggesting that Levitt is conservative–anyone who points out the positive consequences of the legalization of abortion is not likely to be–but I thought it was an interesting connection to point out, to pretend that I have knowledge of such things. I bring this up because one of the things about the book that got on my nerves is the way that various metrics of so-called success–classroom performance, amount of money made later in life–are assumed to be indicative of things like natural intelligence and genuine ability. Certainly there is somewhat of a correlation, but potential squandered by unfortunate life circumstances or events is not measurable by any set of numbers. It would have been nice to look into the phenomenon of rich dumbasses and poor geniuses.

Freakonomics is certainly funny, and I do think it’s a “good” thing that it’s popular–like I said before, I do recommend it, and that’s a pretty huge deal, since my recommendation alone is known to move precisely zero-thousand-and-none units. In the end, it’s a great read, it’ll make you think (do we need to be “made” to think?), and it’s certainly worthy of the praise it’s received. I just had a few reservations.

I had absolutely no reservations, however, about laughing uncontrollably upon finding out in the name-analysis portion of the book that a family had legally named their kid “shithead.”