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.
The past couple weeks at work have been pretty slow for the most part. I’ve had some books to deliver but I’ve had several days where I’ve either gotten all of my work done pretty early or I’ve come into work in the morning with nothing there for me to do. Scott, the guy I share an office with, has had a similarly tedious time with his job during that time. Predictably, this has lead to even more extended pop culture conversations than we usually have in a given week, and several visits to wikipedia whenever we’ve brought up an obscure movie one of us barely remembers, or a random actor who came up in a conversation. Yesterday I mentioned Ryan O’Neal after a story Scott told me – which involved him buying lunch from Quizno’s and then absent-mindedly walking out with chips and a drink when he’d only ordered a sandwich – reminded me of a scene in What’s Up Doc?, a 1972 movie that starred O’Neal and a very young Barbara Streisand. Scott couldn’t remember who O’Neal was, so he read a bit from his wikipedia page, which detailed the various domestic disputes he and his sons have gotten into. This was quite hilarious in a most unintentional way.
Later in the day, Scott ended up on the wikipedia page of British actor Roger Moore, or rather Sir Roger Moore, I should say (he was knighted 5 years ago). One of the pictures on that page seemed to tell us more about his altruism (or possible lack thereof) than he might want people to know. In the picture, which was taken on his 80th birthday just over a year ago, Moore is wearing a very nice grey suit and is holding something in each hand. If you zoom in on the photo (see below) you can see a $1 bill in his left hand, which was presumably drawn from the huge roll of money in his right hand, which he seems to be putting back in his pocket.
The photo is cropped a bit and even in the full picture you can’t see the entire context of the photo, but in looking at it Scott and I guessed that he had the bill out as a tip for someone. I mean, what else would he possibly be doing with a $1 bill? Getting a Cherry Coke or a Snickers from a machine perhaps? If he was intending to give that as a tip, then he’s either a lousy tipper or he’s fallen on hard times. It’s an amusing photo to see; a wealthy movie star who has been a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire for five years wearing an expensive three-piece suit and holding a large roll of cash in one hand and a solitary Washington in the other. Is our economy that bad? Is Sir Roger Moore reaching the point where he can only afford to give $1 tips to valets or bellhops?
If the U.S. government is going to designate tens of billions of dollars for bailouts of large corporations like A.I.G., Bear Stearns, and General Motors (that last one hasn’t happened yet, but the liberal union-friendly Democrats in Congress want it to) because those are institutions which are – we are told – vital and “too big to fail”, then surely a bailout for Sir Roger Moore should be in order. Sure he’s British and is most famous for playing two iconic British characters (James Bond and Simon Templar), but the James Bond series of movies have been vital to the long-term financial success of landmark American film studio United Artists (started in 1919) and its parent company MGM Studios (founded in 1924), and Roger Moore, having played Bond in seven movies, is a man inextricably linked to that character and that series. We can’t have him in such a state, as it’s not just him who could be hurt, but also the James Bond image and the studios who produce his celluloid exploits. Stated plainly: he is just too big to fail (and if you saw Moore’s last turn as James Bond in A View To A Kill, then you know that sentence could have multiple meanings). We need to get the Senate Appropriations Committee working on this right away.
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Speaking of Bond, the 22nd James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, will be released tomorrow and I’ve already bought my ticket. I’m going with a small group from church, and the ringleader who sent out the email asked that all the men going wear a suit and tie. I don’t have a proper suit coat at my apartment so I may have to settle for my dark jacket. The previous Bond film, 2006’s Casino Royale, was the first one of the series that I watched in the theater, and only the second one that I’d seen period (the first was Moore’s first Bond film, Live and Let Die). So needless to say, I’m not a huge aficionado of the series, but I really enjoyed Casino Royale, which was light years above anything Roger Moore did with the series.
I’m hoping the new movie will be just as good, though my expectations have been somewhat muted after I read a review in this week’s Dallas Observer in which the writer (Robert Wilonsky) praised Casino Royale before calling Quantum of Solace “easily one of the worst” films in the series. For much of his stated criticism of the movie and its supposed failures, he blames director Marc Forster, who he thinks was in over his head helming a James Bond movie when his “biggest action sequence to date involved Halle Berry and Billy Bob Thornton getting it on” in 2001’s Monster’s Ball (which is a terrible choice for a first movie to watch with a girl, I might add). It’s a clever line, though only if you forget the more visually rich sequences in such Forster-directed movies as Finding Neverland and Stranger Than Fiction, or last year’s adaptation of The Kite Runner for that matter. Mocking Forster’s filmography is a low blow when other directors who worked with the Bond franchise had similarly thin résumés in the area of action filmmaking. Before John Glen directed 1981’s For Your Eyes Only (the first of five Bond movies he would direct), his sole directorial credit was one episode of the TV series “Man in a Suitcase” (which aired 30 episodes in its only season, which ran from 1967 to 1968). 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (which is widely regarded as one of the best entries in the franchise) was Peter Hunt’s directorial debut, though in his case he had worked as a film editor for several years (and four previous Bond films) before his first turn in the director’s chair.
So that’s what’s on tap for tomorrow evening. Traffic can be bad around here so I’ll probably go to the theater straight from work. My brother called while I was writing this and told me he had tomorrow off from work and might drive up here to watch the movie with the rest of us. When I mentioned the suit and tie requirement, he seemed unfazed, which is odd because he’s rarely seen in something so formal as khaki pants, let alone a suit and tie. So we’ll see how that goes.
* Gas prices have really gone down lately! I drive a car that will only run on premium grade gasoline (for reasons known only to Cadillac), so I tend to pay more for mine than most people anyway, but prices have dropped for everybody. As recently as mid-September I filled up my car for $3.99/gallon. Since that time, I have filled up my car 4 times, most recently on Sunday night, and have paid the following prices per gallon: $3.85, $3.69, $3.29, and $2.89. That’s consecutive fill-ups where the price had dropped 40 cents from the previous one, and a decrease of over $1 in barely a month’s time. In fact, the last time I paid less for gas than I did on Sunday night was October 14, 2007, and I know this because dad got me into the habit of filling out a log book every time I got gas for my car, and I log the total mileage, trip mileage, and cost of the gas (among other things) whenever I fill up. Somehow, I doubt all the grandstanding liberals in the Senate will be calling for investigations and sending subpoenas to oil company execs obligating them to appear before a congressional committee and explain how they let the price of their product drop so much so fast. You can imagine the righteous fury those same politicians would be showing if the price had gone up over $1 per gallon in that short of time.
* I went to the State Fair of Texas on Sunday afternoon and had a good time. I didn’t ride any of the rides this time around, but I sampled some of the fried foods, such as fried banana split, chicken fried bacon, and chocolate-covered strawberry waffle balls. I also spent some time looking at the new cars displayed at the auto show. That was my favorite part of the Fair when I went as a 12 and 14 year old (I didn’t go to the fair again for 10 years after that), looking at the new cars and collecting the cool pictorial brochures from each of the major car makers.
I also ran across a stand that did handwriting analysis for people, where you wrote your signature on a small card, then the guy put it through some kind of scanner or computer and it would print out 10 things that your handwriting supposedly says about you. I had done that some 12 years earlier and found most of what it said to be right on, though how much of that is actually true of me and found in my handwriting and how much of it I suddenly “realize” when a computer says it’s true is up for debate. Here are the 10 things about me that resulted from my handwriting analysis, and I’d like to think they are at least 80% right:
- You are usually quick to get over disappointments.
- You have an inner shyness but cover it up well.
- You are affectionate to those close to you.
- You are able to adjust when things do not go according to plan.
- You are unusually observant and sum up situations quickly.
- You like to collect things.
- Your sincere friendliness is a great social asset.
- Missed opportunities upset you more than they should.
- You are dedicated to succeed and you pursue your objectives with zeal.
- You may have a closet that needs some organization.
The only real negative from the day was the parking fee. Now I knew going in that the parking fee in the official lots at the Fairgrounds was $10, and that there were always businesses and homeowners across the street who offered parking for slightly less. Traffic was really bad while driving over there, and when we (my brother was riding along in my car) finally exited on 2nd Avenue in downtown Dallas we immediately found guys with flags waving people into private parking lots. I wanted to keep going and follow the road until we got to the official lots, but for some reason, either by my brother’s urging or my own impatience, I changed lanes and pulled into one of the lots. There was no sign anywhere that advertised their parking rates, but I assumed the fee would be fairly minimal since it wasn’t in a fenced-in area and the lot was a good walk from the Fairgrounds entrance. But when I pulled up to the guy who was collecting money from people parking in the lot, he told me parking was $20! My jaw dropped and I came very close to uttering an obscenity and driving away, since it made absolutely no sense to me to pay twice the official rate to park in a less secure lot that was a longer walk to the gate than a spot in the official lot would have been. But before I could think to do anything else, my brother handed me a $20 bill and I parked in the spot I was directed into (on an unpaved part of the lot, no less). I was steamed about that for the next hour or so, and then even moreso when I found out that my parents (who came in a separate car) had parked just up the road in a lot that charged them a mere $5. To top it off, when they were waiting at a red light, a woman in a nearby car had rolled down her window and held out two tickets to the Fair and offered them for free to whoever wanted them, an offer mom literally jumped at, or so dad said. So the combined price for mom and dad to park and enter the State Fair was $5 (had they paid regular admission for seniors, that would have increased to $25), for myself and my brother it was $48 (we each paid the regular $14 admission price after having paid the obscene $20 fee to park).
When I returned to my car later that night, I had some words with the guy who had taken our $20 earlier in the day (I say “our” because we were going to split the parking fee but David paid for the whole thing because he owed me money for something else). I pointedly asked him where their sign was that told people how much they were going to pay to park there, and he was evasive in his answer, pointing first at a temporary sign that only said “public parking” and then at another permanent sign that had been covered up with paper, probably to hide the fact that the normal rates to park there didn’t apply during the State Fair. When I said that the official parking lots only charged $10 and I assumed theirs would be less than that, he tried to explain the $20 parking fee by saying theirs was a privately-owned lot, which still didn’t explain the ridiculousness of not only charging double what people would pay to just go to the Fair’s lots (let alone 4 times what my parents paid to park just down the street), but not advertising their fees to people and letting them know what they would pay before they went through the trouble of pulling into a lot and faced the prospect of battling traffic to leave the lot and get back onto the street if they chose to park elsewhere. The whole situation stunk and was unethical at best. They had put a slip of paper on my dashboard showing that I’d paid to park, and from that I learned that the company who owned the lot is called Parking Company of America. A google search shows there is one large company that goes by that name, as well as several smaller ones based in cities all around the country. Whether the smaller ones are franchises of the larger one, I don’t know. I did find this report from someone who said he was similarly ripped off by that company after parking in one of their lots in Dallas. When I told my story to a co-worker, he immediately guessed that the parking attendant had asked for more money than he was supposed to charge, then pocketed the extra money and given the rest to his boss. Wouldn’t surprise me one bit if that was true.
The moral of this story is NEVER park in a lot owned by Parking Company of America if you can avoid it. Take my word for it, and I’m sure there are other stories just like mine and that in the link in the above paragraph.
* I began watching season six of 24 last night, going through the first three episodes. This one had hardly began before it registered high on the implausibility scale. Jack Bauer, having spent two years in a Chinese prison, is released and sent back to Los Angeles, and when we first see him he is very hairy and weak. Then he’s brought into a room where he’s allowed to clean up and change clothes, and within 10-15 minutes of screen time he’s clean shaven, bathed, dressed in a suit, and looks like he’s back to normal. Oh, and he still seems to be in good shape physically, despite being tortured and probably not well fed during his imprisonment in China. Also, the first episode begins at 6 AM Los Angeles time and it is completely dark outside when we first see Jack Bauer, then it goes from being pitch dark to being bright as noon within maybe 10 minutes. Past seasons have had this same phenomenon. It’s an interesting season so far, with plenty of tension through the first three episodes, if a bit filled with politically correct statements that seem like an obvious outreach from the Fox Network to the Muslim community for its past depictions of Muslim villains on the show. Though this is not only unwarranted, it is somewhat deceptive, since one of the Arab characters in an early episode is defended by a white neighbor from a bigoted man down the street who is angry about the terrorist attacks that we are told have killed hundreds of people all over the country in the weeks leading up to that day, but then that goes out the window as we learn that this same Arab man is working for the terrorist leader who is organizing the attacks within America.
I’m hoping to finish this season faster than I did season 5, since there is a two-hour 24 movie airing on Fox next month, which is supposed to bridge the long gap between season 6 (which ended in May of last year) and season 7 (scheduled to begin in January).
So I watched the final McCain-Obama debate last night, and while McCain did noticeably better than he had in the two previous debates, there were still numerous times where he frustrated me either with his refusal to hit back at some of Obama’s obvious fibs, or with his inept responses to Obama’s rhetoric that squandered genuine opportunities to articulate basic conservative principles and contrast them with Obama’s big government liberalism. It’s not as if Obama didn’t leave him some openings and weak spots to attack, and with a more articulate and clear-thinking and debater, going after Obama could have been like shooting fish in a barrel. Instead, McCain did worse than bring a knife to a gunfight, he brought a gun without a full clip, or, to symbolize a tool both candidates made mention of, he could have been shooting fish in a barrel but was only armed with a hatchet.
I will never run for President and it’s quite unlikely that I’ll ever be a candidate for any other elective office, as running a campaign and trying to be all things to all people and being deathly afraid of saying something that might upset one constituency or another is just not something I have the personality for. But I could see myself as being someone who engages in policy debates, that is, discussions that are substantive and don’t rely on the sort of tit-for-tat embellishing or distorting of records that candidates will engage in during heated election years.
So, in that spirit, I’ll say what John McCain could have and should have said in response to some of Obama’s statements.
During the discussion on taxes and the economy, Obama, for the third straight debate, characterized McCain’s capital gains tax cut and business tax cut proposals as being ones that would help “some of the wealthiest corporations in America”, as if Exxon Mobil was a specifically-targeted beneficiary, when that proposal would affect all businesses, which would necessarily include the largest ones. Obama also repeated his claim that under his own tax plan, “95 percent of working families, 95 percent of you out there, will get a tax cut”, which is a patently false and misleading statistic since not every “working family” pays income taxes, and in fact only about 60% of workers actually make enough money to owe income taxes, the top 50% of income earners pay about 97% of the total income tax burden. So McCain has had multiple opportunities to point out the discrepancy between Obama’s fantastical claims of how many people will get a tax cut and the reality of how few people actually pay taxes.
And if I had been sitting across from Obama when he invoked the name of Exxon Mobil and said my plan would give them “an additional $4 billion in tax breaks”, this would have been my response when my turn came up:
“First of all, my plan covers all companies and not just the extreme example you have given. You know that, Senator, but rather than debate the merits of cutting taxes on businesses and corporations, you have chosen to engage in class warfare by trying to stir up the worst kind of resentment and wealth envy in people, and by essentially promising to punish businesses large and small that make a lot of money because they are well-run and successful. Now you mentioned Exxon Mobil and said under my plan that company would pay $4 billion less in taxes. I ask you here tonight, what’s wrong with that? Exxon is a company just as Joe’s plumbing company is, and I’m not going to discriminate against them or deny them a cut in their business taxes just because they are one of the very largest corporations in this country. Exxon employs over 106,000 people, which is roughly the population of Erie, Pennsylvania. There are a lot of people who pay their electric bills, gas bills, home mortgages, car loans, and their kids’ college tuition with money they earned working for Exxon. When you tax Exxon, you don’t tax a person named Exxon or even a group of suit-wearing executives sitting in a boardroom; you tax the customers of that company, who will probably have to pay more for that company’s product as they raise their rates to be able to pay for increased taxes, or you make it harder for that company to hire additional employees. Now, you’ll probably respond by telling the American people that Exxon can afford it because they posted a profit of over $11 billion in the 2nd quarter of this year, although what you either don’t know or don’t care to point out is that their profit margin was less than 10%, that is, they earned less than a dime’s worth of profit on every dollar they invested. That is hardly an excessive profit margin, and nowhere near as high as those regularly posted by companies such as Google and Microsoft, two companies whose profits you and your fellow Democrats have been considerably less vigorous in attacking. Google’s profit margin was over 25% last year, their profit on every dollar they invested was two and a half times what Exxon’s was, and I’ve never heard you or anyone in your party decry Google for having excessive profits, let alone threaten to “take those profits“, perhaps because its executives mainly support Democrats.
“Our business tax rate is the second largest in the industrialized world. Cutting business taxes will make American companies more competetive internationally and will give them less of an incentive to, as you put it, “ship jobs overseas”, to countries whose taxes are more business-friendly. Domestically, it will free up more money so that those companies can hire new workers, invest in new equipment and technology, or open new branches and expand into new markets, which would help create new jobs in more areas and lead to increased local sales tax revenues in more towns and cities across the country. That, Senator Obama, is how you spread the wealth around, by encouraging investment and growth, not by taking more and more tax money from companies that have been successful and profitable and have employed thousands of people whose jobs earn them income to provide for themselves and their families. Such a thing would only create a disincentive to hire additional employees, and basic economics suggests it will lead to increased prices for consumers and/or lower wages for employees of those companies.
“Joe’s plumbing business might employ only a handful of people, but his company would benefit from a cut in his taxes. There are many tens of thousands of people working for Exxon and other large and profitable companies who depend just as much on their jobs for their livelihood and whose jobs depend just as much on their company’s success as Joe’s employees and their jobs would depend on his business and its success. Are you saying that because Exxon is so large and employs so many people and earns billions in net income, that it should not have its business taxes cut along with all other businesses? And do you think that the federal government punishing their success by taking more of their money in taxes and arbitrarily redistributing it will do more to “spread the wealth around” than rewarding their success by cutting their taxes and giving them an incentive to hire more workers?”
I’m sure Obama would have loved having to answer that. McCain did mention that our business tax rate was one of the highest in the world but he didn’t press that point and he’s never disputed Obama’s false claim that he would cut taxes for 95% of workers when fewer than 2/3 of workers pay income taxes.
I also would have had some words to say in response to Bob Schieffer’s question about the negative tone taken by both campaigns, and the use of guilt by association. McCain was very defensive about comments made recently by Rep. John Lewis (D-Georgia), where he repeated a dubious claim that McCain rallies were filled with people expressing vitriolic hatred for Obama and shouting racial slurs and death threats directed toward him, and he had the audacity to compare that with the late Alabama Governor George Wallace, who fought against desegregation as long as he could and had fire hoses sprayed at civil rights protesters and other such cruel acts. (Such a comparison comes across as hyperbolic on its face, but then again John Lewis is the same man who earlier this year claimed that giving his support to Obama over Hillary Clinton was a more difficult decision than participating in the Selma march. McCain might have gone beyond simply saying he was hurt by the baseless comparison, and said something like this:
“I know Congressman John Lewis. He has served his district in the House of Representatives for over 20 years. He was on the front lines of the civil rights movement in the 1960s; he was beaten badly for participating in the Selma march, and has the scars to prove it. He is to be admired for his history with the civil rights movement. But that does not give him the right to take the idiotic speech of a few people at one of my rallies and claim that they represent all or even most of my supporters, let alone compare me and my running mate with a racist southern governor who met civil rights protesters with fire hoses, police dogs, and beatings.
“Now, to be fair, your campaign has rebutted those remarks by Congressman Lewis, who is a strong supporter of yours. While I am hurt by his statements, I will not use his support for your campaign to tie him and his comments to you, and I say this now because the story is still fresh in many people’s minds. I remember during your acceptance speech at your party’s convention when you mentioned comments made by my friend Phil Gramm and tied them to me, as if I had spoken his very words myself and approved of them. You said this a full month after I had disowned his comments and he had stepped down from his position within my campaign.
“When it comes to guilt by association, I don’t find it very useful or fair to ask a candidate to respond to or repudiate every objectionable thing said by anyone who happens to support him, let alone to tie those comments to the candidate. Campaigns can get heated, and they can get emotional. You can’t always choose your supporters and you can’t control what all of them say. But you can choose your friends and people who you associate with. I’ve been in the Senate for over two decades, you’ve been in the United States Senate for two-thirds of one term. I’ve been involved in several campaigns at the state level and the national level, and so people have a lot of statements, votes, and personal history with which to judge me by. A relative newcomer like yourself is not nearly as well known, and when there are few votes to judge your record by, I don’t think it is out of bounds to examine the kind of people you have had long associations with. You were a close associate of Tony Rezko, a convicted money launderer and corrupt businessman who gave you your first ever campaign donations and who was a member of your campaign finance committee. For 20 years you were a member of a church pastored by a man who preached racial hatred and presented a distorted gospel based on Afro-centrism and socialism. This man was your spiritual mentor and more for two decades, and while you distanced yourself from him this year, it took you twenty years to do so and you gave shifting explanations for how much of his teachings you were aware of and when you knew about them.
“If Rev. Wright were merely a pastor who had given you his public support, I wouldn’t think it the least bit consequential what his teachings were, let alone ask you if you agreed with them. Some of your supporters have tried to do that very thing with me over Pastor John Hagee’s endorsement of me, as if because of his endorsement I should be made to answer for his anti-Catholic views, as if I had expressed them myself, when I have never been a member of his church or counted him as a spiritual mentor. If Rev. Wright’s was a church you attended infrequently as you worked and lived in Chicago and served your constituents, then it might be plausible that you didn’t know what Rev. Wright stood for. But the fact is that you came to him, talked with him, became a member of his church, sat and listened to 20 years of sermons that he preached from the pulpit, you married your wife in his church, had your two daughters baptized there, and named your second book after the title of one of his sermons. You had a very close friendship with this man for 20 years and yet you told the American people that you were surprised and shocked by his much-discussed comments earlier this year, which I won’t repeat here.
“This election is as much about character and judgement as it is about our resumés and qualifications, and those who you have freely chosen to align yourself with, accept spiritual advice from, tie your political fortunes to, and used your position of power to enrich with taxpayer-funded programs says more about you, your character, and your judgement than 30 years of Senate roll call votes could have.”
Okay, that’s way longer than McCain would have been allowed to speak, and much farther than he would have gone on the attack. But I felt the need to get that out while it was on my mind. This is directed more at Obama because I feel he would do far more damage to this country than McCain would, but this is not to say I think McCain is without his faults, as he has many, some of which I’ve written about before.
Obama’s speech tonight followed the speech template that has been consistent throughout this week’s DNC Convention: portray a McCain electoral victory as the equivalent of a 3rd Bush term (despite the undisputable fact that he has differed with Bush far more often than Obama has strayed from his party’s line), talk in generalities without offering hard specifics of certain policy agendas, decry the “same old politics” as divisive and talk about how Obama (who has never in his career had a history of compromising or working with both sides of any issue) will unify us and “heal” the divides that have persisted the past 8 years, laud the values of perseverance and self-reliance while praising big government solutions to all of society’s problems and painting a picture of America that is unrelentingly negative, and telling America that government and only government can bring people out of poverty, “level the playing field”, help more kids go to college (I had no idea it was the government’s job to do this), keep businesses from “shipping jobs overseas”, and enable women to earn “equal pay for an equal day’s work”.
Just as on foreign policy, where in the past four years the bulk of the Democrats put themselves in a position to only benefit politically from negative news about the war on terror in general and the Iraq war in particular, they have used their convention speeches this week to paint an overly negative and cynical picture of the American economy, and have put themselves (and Barack Obama in particular) in a position where they can only achieve their highest electoral success by convincing voters that things really are going as badly as they say they are. This despite the fact that our unemployment numbers are still quite good, and any Europeean nation would be having parades if their unemployment percentage was as low as ours. They touched on the housing “crisis”, which to them is somehow Bush’s fault, as everything is, despite the fact that some 97% of borrowers are still making their regular mortgage payments on time. The overblown “crisis” mentality of all that reminds me of a satirical article I read in the early 90s after the failure of President Clinton’s universal healthcare proposal, where one Clinton staffer is made to say something along the lines of, “I guess the American people decided we didn’t need to completely overhaul a system that works for 85% of them just to fit in the other 15%”, a reference to the mythical 40 million or so Americans who supposedly were without health insurance at the time.
Obama touched all the bases of traditional liberal myths about the economy and the Democratic Party’s shopworn class warfare rhetoric. I got upset numerous times and wanted to throw things at my TV. Obama was disingenuous to be sure, though not quite as rich as Bill Clinton’s speech Wednesday night, and judging it just as a speech, I think Obama’s speech paled in comparison with Bill Clinton’s. After a while I got mad enough to take down some notes for this blog. So here are a few points of contention I had with Obama’s rhetoric.
* I first pulled out my notepad shortly after he got to the following paragraph.
Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves – protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.
He was doing okay until he stated that one of the things “we cannot do for ourselves” was to provide children with a decent education. The positive record of achievements by students educated at home shoots gaping holes in the idea that government is needed to give children “a decent education”. But Obama, like the rest of his party, has been in the pocket of the teachers unions for several decades (for some reason, he never refers to them as a “special interest” group), so he would be the last person to ever exalt the accomplishments of students who excel in school without the government’s help. It’s worth noting that you won’t find education mentioned once in the Constitution. And while we expect the government to build the roads, it’s a patently false and, at best, ill-informed to say that government should be expected to invest in “new science and technology” based on the reasoning that it’s something “we cannot do for ourselves”. Private enterprise, the entrepreneurial spirit of America, and economic incentives have always driven investments for and innovations in “new science and technology” far better than the government has.
* Obama, while hitting most of the targets he set out to hit, left himself wide open to return fire on a couple of points. Early on when talking about the economy, he made a reference to former Senator Phil Gramm, without naming him, calling him “one of his [McCain's] chief advisors” and “the man who wrote his economic plan” before going off on Gramm’s much-discussed remark that the U.S. had lately become “a nation of whiners”. Obama neglected to mention that Gramm had resigned his position with the McCain campaign staff and that his remarks had been disavowed by McCain himself. He also apparently doesn’t have a memory long enough to remember that Gramm, back when he was a Democratic congressman, had a big role in writing the bill for one of President Reagan’s tax cuts, which helped turn the economy around after the “misery index” days of the Carter administration. If anyone is qualified to be a major candidate’s economic adviser, it’s Phil Gramm.
But aside from that, what I think will come back to bite Obama the hardest is his tactic of linking McCain with the remarks of one of his associates, especially one who no longer works for him. Obama and his surrogates have decried “guilt by association” tactics during this campaign, especially after the controversy that arose after a spotlight was shined on remarks by Jeremiah Wright, not to mention the June conviction of Obama associate and fundraiser (and next door neighbor) Tony Rezko on charges of fraud and bribery. Now that he has cast that stone and criticized McCain (in a speech in front of 80,000+ spectators no less) for something one of his former advisors said, and which McCain publicly rejected, then surely he won’t be surprised if McCain returns fire and dares to link Obama with a whole litany of even more odious statements which have come from numerous associates of his.
* The single most jaw-dropping line of the night, for me, was when Obama was talking about the balance between government action and personal responsibility and he brought up his oft-used “brother’s keeper” reference.
That’s the promise of America – the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.
For a man who put “audacity” in the title of one of his books and who throws the word around as much as he does, it was the height of audacity for him to claim “the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper” barely a week after several world news services reported that his youngest half-brother George Hussein Onyango Obama was living in a shack in a shanty town near Nairobi, Kenya and surviving on less than a dollar a month. Obama has only met him twice, and he made a passing reference to him in one of his books. But the “brother’s keeper” line is ironic for two reasons, one because of how richly Barack lives while spouting rhetoric about “working” people as his impoverished brother lives in a shack and makes less money in a month than one would need to buy a small order of fries at McDonald’s, and two, because he mentions the “brother’s keeper” line as scripture but seems to forget where in the Bible that line originated. It was spoken by Adam and Eve’s son Cain, who murdered his brother Abel and responded to God’s asking him where Abel was by saying, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9) That line is not used anywhere else in the Bible, and when Obama says, “Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us.” he is apparently reading from the same Bible with such fictional verses as, “God helps those who help themselves” or “What God brings you to, He’ll bring you through.”
For further reading, Douglas O’Brien wrote a great column Tuesday for the American Thinker in which he touches on Obama’s “apparent disconnection from many fundamental elements of his own life”, his astounding lack of any real accomplishments, and what his brother and his treatment of him says about his own character. Here are a couple of paragraphs from that article.
In his stint on the faculty of the University of Chicago, among the most intellectually rigorous of schools, he published not one single piece of scholarly work. As a State Senator in Springfield, he hung out with the movers and shakers, but formed no real personal alliances or friendships. He played in the most exclusive poker game in town, but never seemed to win or lose, as he rarely took risks or invested himself in the game, just as he never threw himself emotionally into his work.
We are coming to know a man whose life has been calculated, focused and driven toward goals, always moving forward and without room for error or encumbrance. His history is replete with individuals who served various purposes and who could be jettisoned as circumstances warranted. Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, Alice Palmer, Tony Rezko, Michael Pfleger, all to varying degrees, served the advancement of Barack Obama, and all have been denounced or denied. Even the woman who raised him served as his foil when he used his grandmother as the prototype for everyday white racism.
* Later he said that unlike McCain, he would “stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas”, without considering the possibility that corporations ship jobs overseas because the U.S. has the 2nd highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world. Unless the tax code is changed to make it more friendly to businesses (which is almost anathema to modern liberals), there will likely be more jobs shipped overseas. Of course, he declined to complain about foreign companies that “ship jobs overseas” to the U.S.
* On energy policy he said he would, “set a clear goal as President: in ten years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.” This is a pipe dream of the highest order, especially since he went on to say “drilling is a stop-gap measure, not a long-term solution. Not even close.” Only a liberal would have the logic to conclude that ending dependence on foreign oil could be accomplished without increasing drilling for domestic oil. It’s almost like trying to end our reliance on air conditioners by keeping our windows open, rather than investing in fans or insulation, or developing something new that works better than air conditioners at keeping homes cool. If you want to end dependence on foreign supplies of oil, you either have to produce more of your own oil, or you have to develop something that will take oil’s place. He’ll have to at least do the former because the latter is not even remotely feasible within the 10 year time window he’s talking about.
* He brought up the theme of keeping “the promise of equal pay for an equal day’s work, because I want my daughters to have exactly the same opportunities as your sons.” This is a tiresome and discredited myth that has long been propagated by women’s groups, one which asserts that they make less than men for equal work, based on the statistic that women make 76 cents for every dollar a man makes (as far as average salaries for men and women are concerned). But this oft-cited statistic doesn’t take into account the number of hours worked, the amount of experience and education, or the type of work involved. Studies in recent years have concluded that when women and men work in the same field and have equal educational accomplishments and equal experience, they make pretty much the same amount of money, and in fact the women often make slightly more. The idea that women don’t make “equal pay for an equal day’s work” is false because the statistic that argument is based on didn’t derive its numbers from workers doing “an equal day’s work”, doing the same kind of work, or even doing the same amount of work.
* I could write a lot more but it’s late and I need sleep. I’ll conclude with a comment about this entertaining passage:
We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country. Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t keep us safe.
Just hilarious! To cite examples of Democrats who defended the U.S. and kept the country safe, he had to hearken back 45 years to JFK and 63 years to FDR! Was that the most recent example he could find? He didn’t mention Clinton or Carter, or even a name just as worthy as the first two: Truman. This would be like McCain defending the Republican party’s reputation by citing the actions of President Eisenhower, who left office in 1961. If he did such a thing he would be laughed off the stage.
NBC just broadcast the men’s 4 X 400 meter relay race that happened “last night” in Beijing. The U.S. team won pretty comfortably and set a new Olympic record in the event, which partly atones for the U.S. track team laying an egg in a number of other track events they were supposed to be competitive in. One of the commentators apparently has a short memory though. I think it was Ato Boldon (who was formerly an elite sprinter for Trinidad and Tobago) who made the erroneous comment but it could have been Lewis Johnson. As Jeremy Wariner was running the anchor leg for the Americans, one of them said that he had anchored every mile relay team for the U.S. since Michael Johnson retired in 2000. This means he must not have seen the gold medal-winning U.S. relay team at the 2004 Athens games, because Wariner actually ran the 3rd leg in that relay and Darold Williamson, who was Wariner’s teammate at Baylor that year, ran the anchor leg.
I would expect something like that from the Dallas Morning News, but I had higher expectations for NBC, especially from someone like Boldon, who usually knows what he’s talking about. Do I have to do everybody’s research for them?
Ok, this isn’t part 6 of any series, but I’ve written about this almost ad nauseum in previous blogs. I have this feeling that one day I will have a job title that includes the word “editor”, or perhaps more likely, “fact checker”. I think I should start keeping a notebook of all the errors, factual and otherwise, that regularly show up in publications I regularly read, publications which should be able to afford a decent fact checker or editor. I could make more than a few newspapers look a bit more respectable and less error-ridden if only they’d pay me enough to get me to leave my current job.
There’s the Daily Commercial Record, which is barely worthy of being called a newspaper it’s so shoddy. How it has managed to stay in existence for 120 years I can’t begin to guess. Among their many lowlights from the past year are the following two:
- During the campaign for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, they once referred to John Edwards as “the senator from South Carolina” (emphasis added), which I’m sure would have shocked Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint. Edwards is actually a (not “the”) former senator from North Carolina.
- A few weeks ago in an article that mentioned Mitt Romney as a possible running mate for John McCain, it said that he had run the 2002 Winter Olympics in Denver. The 2002 Olympics were in Salt Lake City.
The Dallas Morning News is a regular offender, but in today’s GuideLive (read: entertainment) section they had an article with an error so basic and egregious I was genuinely angry after reading it. The article was an obituary for LeRoi Moore, the saxophonist for the Dave Matthews Band. He had been seriously injured in an ATV accident on June 30th, and on Tuesday of this week he died of complications from those injuries. The band’s summer tour had already begun at the time he got hurt, so Jeff Coffin had been filling in for him and will probably continue to do so now that Moore has died.
The sentence that so upset me was near the end of the story when Coffin was mentioned: “Saxophonist Jeff Coffin, who played with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, had been sitting in for Mr. Moore during the band’s summer tour, which included a show Saturday at Frisco’s Pizza Hut Park.” That Saturday concert was actually held at the Superpages.com Center in Dallas.
Now I could perhaps understand the error if they had previously booked the former venue and changed to the latter, or if perhaps they had played at Pizza Hut Park in previous years (they never have; they have played at the Superpages.com Center on pretty much every tour for the past 7 years), or if the concert in question had been several months before and the writer’s memory was foggy. In any of those cases it still would have been sloppy writing and research, but it would be a far sight more understandable than screwing up a basic fact about a concert that happened five days ago.
Those two venues aren’t even remotely similar or close together, in fact they’re 32 miles apart. It couldn’t have been a case of confusing one for the other. They’re not exactly next door to each other or just down the street. That’s like mentioning a concert in Houston and saying it took place in Galveston, or like a baseball team having Los Angeles in its name when it plays in a stadium 30 miles away in Anaheim. (Oh wait! Bad example. And yes I realize my Dallas Cowboys are building their new stadium in Arlington, which isn’t even close enough to be a suburb of Dallas).
To avoid that error, all the writer had to do was check the band’s touring website, or last weekend’s entertainment section, or Ticketmaster, or HIS OWN NEWSPAPER’S SUNDAY EDITION. It really wasn’t that hard. But he probably either relied on his own faulty memory or used the questionable fact-checking technique of asking the co-worker in the next desk over. I’m serious, he could have called DMB “a boring has-been act” or Dave Matthews “a no-talent hack who employs musicians far superior to himself” or something similarly demeaning and I wouldn’t have been nearly as upset as I was about a newspaper with the circulation and budget of the Dallas Morning News printing an error so obvious, so easily avoided within a simple mouse click to Ticketmaster, so egregious that it painted a picture of a writer either too lazy to get something right or offensively indifferent to the memory of the man he was writing about.
It’s a silly thing to be upset about, I suppose, but it wasn’t a simple typo; it was an outright error and it angered me in ways that I can’t adequately explain. There are days when I think the Dallas Morning News isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, or even the plastic bags it’s recycled into. This was definitely one of those days.
- The opening ceremonies was one of the most amazing events I’ve seen in a long time. My jaw dropped several times just watching the sheer amount of imagination and technical precision that went into its staging. The organizers of the 2012 games in London will have a very tough act to follow.
- Best event so far: the men’s 4 X 100m freestyle relay (swimming). That had an amazing finish as the American team’s anchor leg swam a blistering (I’m sure a better word could be used to describe a feat done in the water) split to catch the French swimmer in the last 25 meters of the race and beat him to the wall by a split second after being behind by a whole body length for much of his turn. Had they finished 2nd, everyone’s most vivid memory of the race would have been the fact that the U.S. relay team included a black swimmer. First time I can remember seeing a non-white, non-Asian swimmer in the Olympics. I think I actually did a double take when he dove into the water on his leg of the relay. And they say black people don’t swim, or help set world swimming records. There goes that stereotype.
- Most random commentary so far: NBC swimming commentator (and 1984 Olympic gold medalist) Rowdy Gaines getting all botanical in describing the smooth backstroke of Zimbabwean swimmer Kirsty Coventry, saying, “She’s like a piece of balsa wood in the water.”
- I was in my car after lunch today and heard Rush Limbaugh suggest that NBC had hired “a bunch of female directors and camera people” to work on the Olympics broadcast, because “during the events featuring female competitors, we’re not getting the same camera angles that we used to always get.” I haven’t noticed much of a difference in placement of cameras or the angles of their shots, but he may be right. For obvious reasons, Michael Phelps has gotten a lot of coverage so far, but if anything might back up Limbaugh’s (possibly facetious) assertion, it’s the fact that at some point before or after all of Phelps’ races that I’ve seen, they’ve shown a gratuitous shot of his abs that lingered a little longer than it needed to. Yep, must be those female directors. Although whoever produced the feature on him that they showed tonight had good taste, as they played Coldplay’s “Life in Technicolor” in the background.
- Earlier tonight I watched a beach volleyball match pitting the American duo of Phil Dalhausser and Todd Rogers against an Argentinian duo. The Americans won the match convincingly, but more striking to me was Phil Dalhausser’s resemblance to Smashing Pumpkins/Zwan leader Billy Corgan. Take a look below and see if you agree.
Phil Dalhausser
Billy Corgan
- Commercial from the past week that rates highest on the WTF? Scale:
- As a special bonus, I give you a classic David Letterman Top Ten, from a show that originally aired on June 24, 1996, about a month before the Atlanta games.
Top Ten Signs You Won’t Be Qualifying for the U.S. Olympic Team
10. Keep accidentally burning your wrestling opponents with your cigarette.
9. You need an advanced pulley system to get over the high hurdles.
8. When you hear the starters pistol, you ball up like a frightened armadillo.
7. To get you to the trials, firemen had to remove the side of your house.
6. When you started running the 100-meter dash, Bob Dole was still in high school. [Shows how dated this list is, it goes back to the year of the Clinton-Dole Presidential race]
5. Boxing opponents get their gloves caught in your stomach.
4. You train by standing in front of mirror, trying to smile like Mary Lou Retton.
3. Being 35 and still living at home with your parents not yet an Olympic sport.
2. When your relay partner tries to take the baton, you shout, “Screw you — get your own damn stick!”
1. Can’t get your a** through the parallel bars.
I’ve had the idea for this list for a few months now, and over that time I’ve thought of new examples, added to the list, and rearranged the order. Hollywood and the entertainment industry in general has produced decades worth of far-fetched plot twists, action scenes, and character changes, but the past few years have seen some exceptional examples, and a few films and TV series have practically turned implausibility into an art form.
I’ll admit a certain amount of inspiration for the concept came from sportswriter Bill Simmons’ Unintentional Comedy Scale. This isn’t supposed to be a conclusive or exclusive list; it’s more of a guideline about where I would rate certain scenes or sequences. The scale rates as high as 100, with the list getting steadily more implausible as it goes, and the tip top most implausible example or examples rating a 100. Ideally, such a list would work so that you would read #65 and say, “now that’s implausible, but I’d believe it before I’d believe #66″ and so on, though a lot of it is just for fun and the list doesn’t strictly follow that formula. Hope you’re entertained, and feel free to add your own examples and where you think they should rate.
I should also note that I’m picking and choosing my implausibilities here, as I’m including, for the most part, only examples that I’ve actually seen, and examples of scenes or sequences that defied logic and/or reason. Because of this I don’t include scenes from sci-fi or fantasy type movies like The Matrix, which has some far-out action scenes, but which take place in a reality not governed by normal laws of physics, and thus they make sense within the movie’s own internal logic (until the whole plot jumped the shark in the 3rd film, but that’s another topic).
I’m beginning the list at #60 and moving on from there. Fair warning: a few of the examples cited here may be plot spoilers to those who haven’t seen those films or TV shows.
——–
60: TV personality Katherine Heigl sleeping with, getting pregnant by, and ultimately deciding to have the baby of immature and unemployed pothead slob Seth Rogen in Knocked Up. Two of those three might happen, all three happening would be very unlikely.
61: Rachael Leigh Cook as the average, un-pretty girl in She’s All That.
62: Kenan Thompson scoring a goal on a lengh-of-the-ice “knucklepuck” shot at the end of the Junior Goodwill Games championship hockey game to tie the score and force overtime in D2: The Mighty Ducks. No way the shot would have flown that straight or that far, or that they could have gotten away with having him secretly change into another player’s jersey. And the Icelandic coach’s reaction is priceless (“The goalie! Nooooo!”)
63: Joshua Jackson’s character arc in the Mighty Ducks movies. In D2, he’s team-oriented and unselfish to the point of giving up his spot on the team right before the championship game to make room on the roster for a teammate who has just recovered from an injury. In D3, he’s selfish and arrogant, only wants to play as a scorer and yells at his coach who wants him to play defense.
64: Anakin Skywalker’s character arc in Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I didn’t believe it for one second.
65: The dialogue in any radio ad for Just Brakes.
female caller – “Wow, you repair disc pads and brake shoes and inspect and rotate the balance on all four wheels?! That’s an even better deal than when I bought my car new!! Why do you do it, Just Brakes?”
Just Brakes repair guy – “Because at Just Brakes, we really do care.”
66: The dialogue in any radio ad for Ovaltine. (“MORE OVALTINE, PLEASE!!”)
67: 5’7” Tom Cruise as a star defensive back on his high school football team, and getting recruited by several major colleges in All The Right Moves.
68: 5’9” Jamie Foxx as an NFL quarterback in Any Given Sunday. That’s a good 3-5 inches shorter than any pro team would want their quarterback to be.
69: Sarah Jessica Parker falling for Dennis Quaid in Smart People; Amidala falling for Anakin in the Star Wars prequels; and Maggie Gyllenhaal falling for Will Ferrell in Stranger Than Fiction.
70: Luke Wilson actually being a bestselling author in Alex & Emma. In real life, the story he and Kate Hudson come up with in the movie wouldn’t have gotten a passing grade in a junior college writing course, let alone a six-figure advance.
71: “Tool Time” actually being a popular show on Home Improvement. In real life it probably would have been cancelled in under a month.
72: The impossible aerial maneuver James Franco pulls with his World War I-era fighter plane to slip behind and shoot down the plane of his ace German archenemy in Flyboys, a maneuver right out of Top Gun, I might add.
73: The Middle Eastern villains in season four of 24 conveniently speaking English when counter-terrorist agents manage to listen in on their cell phone conversations. That series could fill a list like this on its own, but I’ll be nice and only include this one example.
74: The end of the $500,000 poker tournament in the movie Maverick, where on the final hand, with the three remaining players betting all their chips, they show hands with four 8’s, a straight flush, and a royal flush, respectively. There’s no way all three of those happen at the same time, the odds are too astronomical. But I’d believe that before I’d believe…
75: Estella Warren’s improbably nice skin, hair, and makeup in the 2001 Planet of the Apes remake. Humans have been enslaved for hundreds of years and the women still have a hidden supply of lipstick? Sure…
I might also add the three-day stubble Martin Henderson sports for all of his scenes throughout the length of Flyboys. He has one of those razors that only exist in the movies, one that allows characters to always look like they haven’t shaved in a few days.
76: President Andrew Shepard’s (Michael Douglas) speech during a press conference at the end of The American President, which is full of combative and hokey dialogue no President would ever say, and even has Shepard utter the line: “You cannot address crime prevention without getting rid of assault weapons and handguns. I consider them a threat to national security, and I will go door to door if I have to, but I’m gonna convince Americans that I’m right, and I’m gonna get the guns.”
No President in his right mind would make such a statement publicly, and any who did would have next to no chance of being re-elected (at least one would hope). Also, I think the movie’s screenwriter (Aaron Sorkin) missed the irony in the President promising to “go door to door if I have to” in order to “get the guns” just minutes after praising the ACLU and calling it “an organization whose sole purpose is to defend the Bill of Rights”, because apparently his copy of the Bill of Rights doesn’t include the 2nd Amendment. (Note: The scene is hokey, self-congratulatory, and emotionally exploitative enough on its own, but when you add the music in the background and the serious, uncritical looks on the faces of the reporters as he’s talking, it’s almost comedic).
77: Orlando Bloom’s “Who has claim? No one has claim” speech before the siege of Jerusalem in Kingdom of Heaven, which is only slightly more historically improbable than Leonidas’ “an age of freedom” speech in 300, or Joely Richardson’s “It’s a free country. Or at least it will be” line in The Patriot.
78: The boxing arena spectators in Cold War-era Moscow chanting American Rocky Balboa’s name as he fights against the Russian giant Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. A rough equivalent might be a baseball movie set in Boston where Red Sox fans chant Derek Jeter’s name.
79: Pretty much any episode of CSI (including both spin-off series).
80: Any movie where a character gets a few simple lessons or pointers on fencing or swordplay, and then becomes a near master swordsman in about 5 minutes of screen time (see: The Mask of Zorro, Kingdom of Heaven, The Last Samurai, The Count of Monte Cristo, and the hobbits in The Fellowship of the Ring.)
81: The end of Alien vs. Predator where the Predator saves Sanaa Lathan’s life and essentially joins forces with her for a short while, which goes against everything previously known about the Predators.
82: The endings of The Fast and the Furious and the 2007 version of 3:10 To Yuma.
83: Angelina Jolie as Colin Farrell’s mother in Alexander (she’s just under a year older than him).
84: Any McDonald’s TV ad that portrays the employees as young, clean cut, good-looking, always smiling, and nearly always white or black. Have the producers of those commercials ever been inside a McDonald’s?
85: Nicholas Cage and John Travolta being able to shoot and hit people or airborne objects from long distances, but frequently being unable to shoot each other even when they’re 5 feet apart in Face/Off.
86: The plot of National Treasure.
87: The plot of National Treasure: Book of Secrets.
88: Jack Sparrow and the crew of the Black Pearl turning the ship completely upside down by running back and forth across the deck in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. (There’s also the para-sailing bit near the end of the movie, which might rate slightly lower).
89: The action sequence in Live Free or Die Hard that immediately precedes this line: “You just killed a helicopter with a car!“
90: The long jungle sequence in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull that includes: A. Mutt (Shia Lebouf) swinging on vines through the trees following a pack of monkeys, B. Marion Ravenwood driving a Jeep off the edge of a cliff and onto the branches of a tree, which gently lowers the vehicle onto the river below before swinging back and swatting some Russians who are climbing down the cliff, C. the Jeep (and its 5 passengers) going over 3 large waterfalls in succession without anyone falling out of the car or getting any scrapes, bruises, or concussions, and D. Indiana Jones never once losing his hat the whole time. The quantity of implausibilities in those 10 minutes piles up high enough to make it among the most implausible things ever put on film, but to save room I’ll mention them all together and take the rough average of their implausibility scale rating.
91: The Tom Cruise-Dougray Scott motorcycle joust/beach fight sequence in Mission: Impossible II. Neither character should have been able to walk (if they were even still alive) after a collision like that, which you can see at the end of this video clip.
92: In Transporter 2, Jason Statham driving up the levels of a parking garage, crashing his car through a short concrete wall at the edge of the roof, then still having the inertia to fly well over 100 feet forward through the air and land on an upper floor of a nearby building under construction. You can see it at the 4:40 mark of this video clip.
93: The scene in the 2005 King Kong remake just before Kong goes unconscious after having bottles of chloroform thrown at him. Just before this, there’s a shot of lots of men throwing ropes and a net over Kong and actually holding him down, which would seem more than a little unlikely since earlier in the film Kong had picked up and thrown a Tyrannosaurus, a dinosaur that weighed between 7 and 8 tons.
94: The bus in Speed hopping and flying over a long gap on an unfinished highway overpass and landing safely on the other side, with the speedometer somehow staying above 50 mph the whole time. The jump occurs just before the 4:00 mark in this video (warning: contains some R-rated language).
95: The entire plot of Flightplan. The villains would have needed psychic powers or a crystal ball for their plan to have worked the way it did. I’ve never seen any other movie be so interesting and then completely fall apart in the third act the way that movie did when the plot was revealed.
96: Jeff Goldblum hacking and sending a computer virus to an alien computer system from an earth-based computer system in Independence Day. Apparently, those aliens can manufacture fighter ships armed with laser guns and deflector shields and can communicate telepathically, but they can’t be bothered to update their anti-virus software.
97: Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt surviving an F5 tornado without a scratch by tying themselves to the pipes of a water well just before it passes right over them at the end of Twister.
98: In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the title character surviving a nuclear bomb blast by shutting himself inside a 1950s-era refrigerator, feeling no ill effects from the fridge being blown hundreds of feet away by the force of the blast, and not getting radiation poisoning when he climbs out of it and stands directly under a mushroom cloud and breathes the air. Who does he think he is, Chuck Norris?
99: In Wanted, the scene where James McAvoy is supposed to kill a guy in a limousine as he drives along the side of it, but finds the limo has bulletproof windows. So Angelina Jolie, working with him, drives her sports car toward McAvoy’s, then hits the brakes just as they’re about to meet, and an invisible ramp allows McAvoy’s car to shoot up off her car’s hood, fly up into the air, and flip over the limousine where an open sunroof gives McAvoy a clear shot at the guy (which he takes) before his car harmlessly lands back onto the street and he drives away. In real life, this would result in a fiery crash and the guy in the limo would speed away from the scene laughing. You can see an edited part of this scene at about the 2:00 mark of the movie’s third trailer.
100: The sequence in Transporter 2 described here by Roger Ebert:
“Seeing the reflection of a bomb in a pool of liquid under his car, and knowing that the bad guys will not explode it while they’re standing right next to it, the hero races the car out of a garage and up an incline, spinning the car neatly through the air, so that it makes one complete rotation and the bomb is pulled off by a hook on a crane, exploding harmlessly as the car lands safely. Uh, huh.
I could observe that this is preposterous, but the fact is, I laughed aloud.”
So did I, as I’d never seen anything so outlandish before. The scene is so ridiculous (and also fun in its own way) that not even comic books or video games would try something like it. On the Implausibility Scale, I don’t think it will ever be topped by any movie that takes itself the least bit seriously.
*101: I’m adding one extra example to the list, a clip from the 1985 Indian movie Adavi Donga, starring Indian movie icon Chiranjeevi. I’m putting an asterisk on it and not putting it with the others because it was probably designed as a parody, though without seeing it in its full context it’s hard to know. I saw this clip over the weekend (and posted it in a previous blog) and decided that parody or not, it completely shattered the Implausibility Scale. The brief clip involves a horse skidding underneath a large trailer (with its rider still on it) and a pursuing Jeep leaping over that same trailer at its driver’s command (apparently, vehicles in India can jump when their driver stands up slightly in the driver’s seat). It truly has to be seen to be (dis)believed.
The weather services are forecasting a high temperature of somewhere between 104 and 106 today for my area. Last week some guys at church had talked about getting together and playing softball on some Sunday afternoon. It will not be happening this afternoon, needless to say. Record high temps are projected for today and tomorrow. A lot of people’s electricity bills are going to go up a tick after this week, not to mention last week.
My most recent Facebook status: “Jonathan is a hunk of burning love… minus the hunk and the love.”
I think my next one will be “Jonathan does NOT like it hot, unlike some.”
I keep putting off writing my Implausibility Scale. I have all the entries I want listed out, it’s just a matter of sitting down and writing the thing. I was pretty well set on which movie scene rated a 100 on the scale, but yesterday I saw the following video posted on a message board, and it completely shattered the Implausibility Scale. I laughed out loud for several minutes watching it multiple times.
