Transformers 2 gave me a headache

I was actually entertained by the first Transformers movie a couple of years ago. But the new sequel was not only the most boring movie Michael Bay has ever done, it had an incoherent storyline that felt as if the writers had pulled it from a hat, and there was a lot of unnecessarily crude humor, mainly from the robots. I watched the movie this afternoon in a packed theater, and my head started hurting before I even made it back to my car. I took a Tylenol when I got back to the apartment because I’d gotten a headache.

Ever since King Kong — and to a lesser extent, the last 2 cinematic installments in the Lord of the Rings trilogy — I’ve had a less than enthusiastic reaction to movies where the CGI tends to overwhelm whatever story is present. I had a hard time being emotionally involved in the title character in King Kong, especially during his fight with the 2 dinosaurs, because I was at all moments keenly aware that I was watching a computer-generated giant gorilla fighting against a computer-generated dinosaur. I was skeptical going into the first Transformers movie that I would care about one computer-generated giant robot fighting against another, but I was entertained overall by it. In the sequel, it wasn’t so much that I didn’t care, it’s just that the fights were shown from such extreme close-up angles that I could scarcely tell which robot was which. And most of the human characters were so annoying I wished a decepticon would land on them.

It followed a pattern similar to that of the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels: keep the same characters that people liked before, but remove all the interesting elements, write the action sequences before you’ve written the story, and make the plot up as you go along without concern for it being the least bit comprehensible. After Dead Man’s Chest, however, I was still ready to go back for the third Pirates movie to see how it would all end up. If a third Transformers movie ever hits the screen, my money and my person will be staying far away from it.

For a funnier look at the film and its legion of problems, read Roger Ebert’s print review.

on the passing of Michael Joseph Jackson

I was driving home from work Thursday when I first heard rumors of Michael Jackson’s death. The afternoon sports talk guys on ESPN radio had brought it up, almost as a joke really, because at the time only TMZ was actually reporting that he had died, while more reputable news outlets were merely saying he’d been rushed to the hospital. In any case, it was the first I’d heard of it, though I had already read about Farrah Fawcet’s death, which otherwise would have produced the day’s most notable obituary.

By the time I got to my apartment and got online, Jackson’s death had been confirmed and I already had seven — count ‘em, seven — Facebook friends who had mentioned his death in their status in some way. I was never a fan of his and didn’t listen to his music, and despite his having produced the top-selling album of all time (1982’s Thriller, released when I was barely 2 months old, and believed to have sold over 100 million copies worldwide to date), I probably couldn’t name more than 4 or 5 of his songs if I heard them.

In my post-adolescence, he was in the news far more for his often bizarre and mostly disturbing personal scandals than he was for his actual music, and the fact that he only released 3 albums of new material in the past 2 decades could be seen as either the partial cause or the effect of that. I didn’t follow his career and had only a cursory knowledge of his biography, let alone his discography.

However, when Michael Jackson’s name comes up in conversation years from now, I’ll still have 2 distinct memories related to his music. The first was his electric performance for the halftime show of Super Bowl XXVII (won by the Cowboys, thank you very much). He performed some of his most recent (at the time) popular material for about 6 minutes, danced all over the stage, and shattered the record for most crotch-grabs at a Super Bowl (which I’ll assume was previously held by Charles Haley). He was a decade removed from Thriller, 14 months removed from the release of Dangerous (his 2nd highest selling album), and still 2 years away from HIStory (a double album that had some of his biggest hits on one CD and brand new music on the other). He was a spritely (better adjectives could probably be chosen) 35 years old, still in the late prime of his career, and 3/4 of the way through a run of 4 albums — released between 1982 and 1995 — that today have combined to sell nearly 200 million copies! Read that last part again. In the span of 13 years, he released 4 albums that sold just shy of 200,000,000 copies worldwide! That, combined with his radio hits, brought him more music royalties than you could shake a white glove at.

But back to Super Bowl XXVII. It’s interesting to contrast Michael Jackson’s set with halftime performances at more recent Super Bowls. The most striking thing about it is he performed in broad daylight, not under a night sky on a field lit with all the snazzy lights, video screens, fireworks, and bells & whistles the National Football League can buy. The game was played at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California and the game began at around 5:30 Central time, as pretty much all Super Bowls do. So he was outdoors and it was most likely not even 6 p.m. Pacific time when he appeared on stage. It was fairly obvious he was lip synching but he still had all his patented dance moves and the crowd (an estimated 98,000+) went wild.

I’ll always remember watching that, though it was unfortunately followed by children gathering around the stage as he lead them in singing the almost unlistenable “Heal the World”. I was a 4th grader at the time, and within a few weeks somebody brought a tape of that song to class and it ended up getting played incessantly (thank you, Mr. Bolton!) And yet somehow, it wasn’t even the most ridiculously overplayed song of that year (on our classroom’s tape player anyway, if not radio itself); that honor went to “Boot Scootin’ Boogie” by Brooks and Dunn, but that’s neither here nor there.

My other distinct Michael Jackson memory recalls my first month of college. My roommate and I were watching the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards (apparently I had nothing better to do) when *NSYNC came on near the end to perform “Pop” (the video for which won them 4 awards that night) from their final album Celebrity, which had been released a few months earlier and had already been certified 6x platinum. *NSYNC sang, danced and basically mailed in a 4 minute performance, backed by lights, extra dancers, props, gaudy costumes, and other aesthetic features that will make all future generations wonder how *NSYNC became so popular in the first place. As their performance ended, Michael Jackson (by then 43 years old) made a surprise appearance (it’s at about the 4 minute mark in the video), and immediately the crowd at the show became about 40 times more excited than they were at any point during *NSYNC’s routine. Jackson danced for all of about 30 seconds, strung together a few of his most familiar moves, then finished and waved to the crowd and exchanged hugs with all the members of *NSYNC. I distinctly remember my roommate having a very excited “No way!” reaction upon Jackson’s appearance.

The MTV Video Music Awards have had a history of surprise appearances by music icons, and this one fit right in line with that, though Jackson’s minute-long cameo certainly had to have been at least partially related to the fact that his final album, Invincible, was to be released in less than 2 months. It was the last distinct memory I have of Jackson performing, and the last impression I ever got of just how hugely popular he was even 19 years after Thriller when he was into his early 40s. Perhaps just as notable was the fact that the 2001 MTV Video Music Awards show took place at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City just 5 days before 9/11.

Invincible was released at the end of October that year and received mediocre reviews and sold poorly (by Jackson’s standards anyway). And for the rest of the decade he served as little more than the butt of jokes from late night comics and as the central character of “The Jeffersons”, a memorable South Park episode that aired in April of 2004. He was mired in scandal and financial troubles for the last few years, but always had his ardent (and frankly delusional) defenders among his worldwide fanbase (myself, not being among them).

He was scheduled to play 50 concerts at the O2 Arena in London beginning in less than 3 weeks, which was to mark his musical comeback after all his recent personal and musical troubles. Obviously, that won’t be happening now. If nothing else, it certainly would have been interesting to see if his 50 year old legs could still pull off the moves he did as a 25 or 35 year old. Presumably he could have sold out arenas while performing in a wheelchair just based on his back catalogue alone. After Thursday, that’s what his fans will have to remember him by.

Top 5 Tuesday: soft drinks

Wow, I haven’t written anything in over a month! And I know I haven’t done a Top 5 Tuesday entry in several weeks. Today I return with my top 5 favorite sodas/soft drinks/pops/whatever you like to call them.

1. Dr Pepper

 

2. A&W Cream Soda

 

3. Mountain Dew Code Red

 

4. Cherry Coke

 

5. Coca Cola

 

Honorable Mention (discontinued flavors):

 Coke with Lime

 
Surge

2008 in review: books I read

Since a number of friends have done this lately, I figured I’d add my own humble list to the bunch. The following are all the books I finished in the year 2008. I won’t bother ranking favorites this time, because there are so few of them and they’re so different from one another that it’s very difficult to judge one against another. I’m listing them in the order in which I read them, and I hope the number I read in 2009 is at least twice as large.

1. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon [began in fall 2007, finished in winter 2008]
2. The Mysterious Affair At Styles by Agatha Christie [the very first Hercule Poirot mystery]
3. The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth
4. A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle
5. A Wind In The Door by Madeleine L’Engle
6. No Country For Old Men by Cormac McCarthy
7. Boys Will Be Boys: The Glory Days And Party Nights Of The Dallas Cowboys Dynasty by Jeff Pearlman

The tax code shrinketh?

One of the book sets I have to update from time to time is the United States Code Service (USCS), which only the Civil District Attorney’s office keeps. Today I got to work and found on my desk a box of new USCS volumes. These particular volumes were six books on Title 26, the Internal Revenue Code, so I’m guessing it was the whole of our federal tax code. I was encouraged when I removed the 2008 volumes and replaced them with the new ones because the new volumes were noticeably thinner, and in fact, when I shelved the new ones there was still a gap large enough that an additional book could have fit there.

We’re less than two weeks from the inauguration of a President who has all but promised tax increases for some (i.e. people less likely to vote for Democrats), proposed a myriad of tax “credits” for others (i.e. transfers of wealth to favored groups of people, most of whom don’t pay income taxes to begin with, and who are statistically more likely to vote for Democrats), and whose economic policies seem influenced more by class warfare and some vacuous (and unconstitutional) idea of “fairness” than by an actual knowledge of basic economics. So if I can take some encouragement in anything I’ve seen at work this week, it’s that I removed six volumes of Internal Revenue Code and replaced them with six new volumes of significantly smaller breadth. Does that mean our tax code has shrunk significantly in the past year? I don’t know, but I can’t think of any other reason those six books would be so much smaller than they were the last time I shelved them, and any time our tax code shrinks rather than grows in a given year, that is a good thing, in my opinion.

Music check

Haven’t posted anything in a while, and since I just opened iTunes, it feels like a good time for one of these “put your music player on random and see what plays” lists.

1. The Everly Brothers – Bye Bye Love
2. America – Sister Golden Hair
3. Death Cab For Cutie – No Sunlight
4. Cat Stevens – Tuesday’s Dead
5. Smalltown Poets – Inside the Bubble
6. Oasis – Morning Glory
7. Chris Rice – Smellin’ Coffee
8. Glisten – Untainted
9. Mae – The Sun And The Moon
10. Dave Matthews – Some Devil
11. Peel – Trenchula
12. Howard Shore – The Breaking of the Fellowship
13. The Who – I Can’t Explain
14. Hamilton, Joe Frank, and Reynolds – Don’t Pull Your Love Out
15. Sufjan Stevens – All Good Naysayers, Speak Up! Or Forever Hold Your Peace!
16. Editors – An End Has A Start
17. Sanctus Real – Beautiful Day
18. Dave Matthews – Dodo
19. Department of Eagles – No One Does It Like You
20. Neil Diamond – Thank The Lord For The Night Time

funniest movie edits for network TV

I was going to make this a Top 5 Tuesday entry but had trouble coming up with 5 examples I could find video for. While I was at work today I started thinking about my favorite content edits made to movies so they can air on network TV stations. I found a few of the best ones I could think of on youtube, but not enough for a real Top 5 Tuesday, so I’ll have to delay that category’s resurrection another week.

I’ll begin with arguably the two most legendarily awful edits, the ones most frequently brought up in discussions on this topic.

The Big Lebowski: John Goodman takes a crowbar and breaks all of the windows on a nice sports car, yelling at its supposed owner, “You see what happens when you f*** a stranger in the a**?” But in TV edits, the line is heard as “You see what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps?”

Die Hard 2: Bruce Willis has just had a fight with a terrorist on the wing of a passenger jet about to take off, and the fight ended with Willis getting kicked off the wing and falling to the ground, but in the process he manages to open the fuel door/hatch thing (do planes really have those right there?) and as the plane escapes it leaves a trail of fuel behind it. Willis takes out his lighter, says his trademark “Yippie ki yay, motherf*****!” line and throws the lighter onto the line of fuel, which eventually gets to the plane just as its taking off and blows it up. But in the TV version, Bruce Willis says, “Yippie ki yay, Mr. Falcon”, and in a voice that is obviously not that of Willis.” High comedy.

The Usual Suspects: Career criminals (played by Kevin Pollack, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio Del Toro, Gabriel Byrne, and Kevin Spacey) are put together for a police lineup of suspects. They are told to read the line on the card they are passed. They all take their turns reading the line, “Hand me the keys, you f****** c*********!” In the TV version, however, they all say “Hand me the keys, you fairy godmother.” That’s one of the more inspired ones I’ve ever seen.

Pulp Fiction, as you can imagine, is nearly unrecognizable when it appears on edited TV stations. There’s not really one good clip, but there is a pretty good video compiling some of the more obvious edits.

One of my other favorites was a number of Samuel L. Jackson’s lines in Jackie Brown, such as “motherf*****” becoming “my friend”, or “motherfu**ing” becoming “mutual-funded”, but I haven’t found any videos of that. And it’s late and I need sleep. If anyone can think of other good ones, feel free to mention them, or post video links.

vacuous church signs of the week

The award goes to two churches I drove by this past weekend.

1) The Clifton (Texas) Church of Christ, whose sign displayed the following quote when I drove past it on Friday: “If you pause to think, you’ll have cause to thank.”

It’s hardly original (a Google search for that term brings 203 results) and has been featured on any number of church signs before, I’m sure. In fact, on this page there’s a picture of a church sign bearing that quote, and at the bottom of the page the writer has added these words: “This sign reminds us to be thankful. But it also implores us to be contemplative about our position and blessings. It’s a reminder to be thankful, but it’s also a reminder of why we should be thankful.”

I don’t know what sign the writer was reading when he or she wrote that, but it surely doesn’t describe the quote “If you pause to think, you’ll have cause to thank”, at least not as it is written. To get any meaning of that kind out of it you’d have to read into it some deeper intended meaning, because the phrase itself says very little. Not only is it not a reminder of why we should be thankful, it says nothing about what we should be thankful for or (more importantly) who we should be thankful towards. Perhaps the fact that it was on a church’s sign will be enough for some to read a deeper intended meaning into it, but what would one think of such a statement if they saw it written on, say, a bathroom wall, or scribbled on a piece of scratch paper? Removed from a church’s sign and written anywhere else, the sentence would appear as empty as it really is, because it sounds quasi-profound but says nothing. A good quote from, say, Corinthians or Romans about the sovereignty and grace of God should have a quite different effect anywhere it is written.

I’m constantly amazed by how many churches there are which, when choosing quotes or statements to put up on their signs for public view, just can’t bring themselves to use actual scripture verses, and instead opt for vacuous “feel-good” statements that essentially any semi-spiritual person could agree with. A good choice for this time of year might have been Matthew 1:21, “And she will bring forth a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus, for He will save His people from their sins.” (NKJV) Now that’s a verse that reminds us of who we should be thankful towards and why. Churches (and the unsaved public who might happen to read their signs as they drive by) will be much better served if their signs are used to actually proclaim the Gospel, by posting actual scripture and losing the puns, oh-so-clever rhyming schemes, and feel-good psychobabble.

2. Victorious Life Church in Robinson, Texas (just southeast of Waco off of I-35), which displays an ostentatious banner that advertises “30 minute worship!” In fact, you can even reach the church’s website by visiting 30minuteworship.com.

Lest you be lead to think that the 30 minutes refers to their praise and worship time and not the entire service, the site provides a breakdown of the 30 minutes: Worship (10 minutes), Word (12-15 minutes), and Response (5 minutes). They use terms like “innovative” and “cutting edge” to describe their worship, as if a congregation simply singing praise to God is old hat and must be infused with innovation and the newest, hottest, and rockin’-est worship tunes out there today in order to be relevant.

I also worry about any church that provides child care for children from ages “birth-12″. These days especially, those early years are too precious to be wasted by sending your kids to “trained personnel in our children’s areas who provide a safe Christian learning environment”, when an actual church service should be the very definition of a “Christian learning environment”. What kind of kids will be turned out of a church like this, one which allows kids up to age 12 (the age most kids will be when they begin junior high) to spend their Sunday mornings not hearing God’s word preached but around other kids in a “safe Christian learning environment”? 12 years is far too long for someone to attend a church without the benefit of hearing sound preaching, much less kids spending their first 12 years of life without sitting with their parents in a corporate worship setting.

Just my two cents.

TWSS of the week

From a conversation overheard at work today. The two parties will go unnamed, but they were talking about sandwiches and one had just brought up Subway’s roasted chicken breast subs and the sub-par texture of the chicken.

Person A: I’ll get it about once a month, and I’m never satisfied.
Person B: That’s what she said.

Context makes all the difference

Back in my high school and early college years, if there was a movie I was thinking of seeing but wasn’t sure about the appropriateness of its content, I would pay a visit to either Kids-In-Mind.com or Screenit.com, two sites that provided objective analysis of content in movies, particularly the kind that parents or morally discerning types might be concerned about. Kids-In-Mind rates the amount of sex/nudity, violence/gore, and profanity each on a 0-10 scale, and gives somewhat detailed explanations of how much of each is shown on screen, usually without giving away key plot points that be involved in those scenes.

Today they break up their analysis in bullet points, one for each individual scene being described. For instance, here’s how the Kids-In-Mind page for the new movie Twilight described two scenes that earned mention in the sex/nudity category:
► A vampire teen boy and a teen girl kiss tenderly, then passionately, she leans back on her bed (she is wearing a T-shirt and panties) pulling him on top of her, they continue to kiss, and he jumps off and tells her to stop.
► A teen girl and a boy vampire dance close together at a dance, they kiss, she asks him to bite her neck, and he dips her and kisses her neck instead.

It describes exactly what you hear and/or see on the screen, giving little-to-no context for it, but making it clear that the instances described there are in different scenes. Unfortunately, in years past that site didn’t split up their descriptions into their respective scenes and instead just mentioned all the content in the movie that fell into their respective categories, which sometimes lead to some hilarious confusion.

The 2001 movie Enemy at the Gates, which takes place during the drawn-out World War II battle of Stalingrad in Russia, doesn’t have much sexual content to speak of, but it does have one (quite unnecessary) scene where two characters have sex in the middle of a large room full of people who are sleeping. I saw the movie with my dad when it was first released because he’s a history teacher and he wanted to watch it for its historical aspects. I read over the movie’s Kids-In-Mind page before watching the movie, and it left me a little bewildered. Here’s the entire paragraph the site dedicated to describing the movie’s sex/nudity content:

“A few kisses and a couple of kissing scenes (with a few kisses in each scene, but not any “making out” scenes). An extended sex scene takes place in barracks while people are sleeping around the couple; the couple kiss and put their hands down each other’s pants, then the man thrusts on top of the woman (the woman’s bare buttocks are shown briefly). We see the side of a man’s bare buttocks (he passes gas to blow out a candle).”

The described sex scene and the incident at the end of the paragraph take place in completely different scenes probably an hour apart, but when I first read that paragraph I got the impression that they took place in the same scene, since the writer made no effort to put them in different scenes or explain the context of the latter one. The mental image that the paragraph gave me was one where Jude Law and Rachel Weisz (the two actors in the movie’s sex scene) are in bed kissing and either having sex or about to begin, and in the middle of it, Jude Law rolls over and passes gas toward a candle to blow it out and make the room go dark. Of course that’s not how the scene played out but it was the idea I got from Kids-In-Mind. This week I randomly remembered the confusion I had about that, and laughed hysterically for a long time. I asked a co-worker if he’d seen the movie, and then described the false impression Kids-In-Mind had given me about its sex scene. We had a lot of fun discussing what the dialogue would have sounded like had the scene actually taken place the way I’d first imagined it. (Example: “There’s too much light in the room, honey. Here, watch this trick!”)

Truly, had they staged the scene like that, it would have been the funniest (and probably least romantic) moment in any movie I’ve ever seen, by far. If only they’d explained the content by scene and not lumped it all together back then, misunderstandings like that wouldn’t have happened. Context truly makes all the difference.

That’s the funniest memory that has randomly come back to me in a long time.