Loyal DD reader Joćo suggests head’s up on two movies. He’s right on the money judging by these trailers.
First up, hilarious teaser for Four Lions, a British comedy on wannabe jihadis. The phenom — described by me in various essays, articles and brief posts over the past few years — was always ripe for this kind of treatment.
And now someone has done it. Shame no American studio would have had the stones.
And this one, a US sci-fi apocalypse thriller, which would seem to be already in release overseas:
Good news, lads! Good news! There’s no satire here!
If you view this on YouTube, you’ll notice the video is the property of the PasadenaTeaParty. Of which I am not a member.
Everyday, DD takes a walk to pick up lunch supplies, crossing the el Molino Street bridge on the way to Lake. On the right hand side just back of a church is a rambling mansion, fenced in by iron and guarded by a Doberman which has been de-barked.
Big sign in front yard: “Putting liberals in Congress is like putting PIRANHAS in your child’s playpool!”
” ‘I’m a beginner political activist,’ said former ‘Saturday Night Live’ star Victoria Jackson, who took to the stage with a ukulele and sang ‘There’s a Communist Living in the White House,'” wrote LA Times columnist Steve Lopez on a Tea Party rally in Beverly Hills last week. (Unbelievably, there was one.)
“I thought either Jackson was satirizing the movement or that she was doing a Porky Pig impression,” continued Lopez. “But I later saw video of her insisting on various occasions that President Obama is indeed a communist.”
“The [marmorated stinkbug] is a native of China and was first reported and identified in Allentown, Pa in 2001, although there had been reported sightings of the bug going back to as early as 1996,” reads one article.
“The bugs are keeping Tom Kendrick, owner of Pro-Kil Professional Exterminators [near Pittsburgh, PA], busy this year. Kendrick has been in business since 1995, and said this is the worst year for stink bugs, although he’s not sure why,” reads another, with a photo entitled “Stink bug attack.”
“He sees about eight to 10 cases daily. Kendrick said they’re noticing stink bugs for nearly every customer — as long as there are trees around.”
Scruffy-looking young character plans to propose to his pretty girlfriend on pleasure cruise. Girlfriend mysteriously disappears while he’s off watching fish with another girl.
It takes thirty seconds for the viewer to figure out that a shadow group has kidnapped her, along with her kid sister, shot her mother, all to persuade the dad, who is a pilot, to fly a jet-liner into the party where the prez is appearing.
And there’s a secret facility in Alaska, called Mount Inosotranka, housing 97 prisoners.
The president wants them released.
Tony Todd is in it, too. But he doesn’t have a hook or Klingon make-up. Maybe the next best thing, though, a general’s uniform!
The jet is diving toward the party. Lots of noise in between commercials! The scruffy character is at the cockput door, trying to persuade his girlfriend’s dad not to do it. Pull up!
A ball of energy appears in front of the jetliner, swallowing it before it smashes into the party villa, killing everyone.
Abandon ship! Another series where every episode is one big stall, nothing ever explained until it’s cancelled. The sooner the better.
At 10:00, your host switches to the remake of Hawaii Five O.
Look, it’s Grace Park — Number 8/Boomer/Athena from Battlestar Galactica — as a Maxim-ready girl cop! She appears in a bikini on a surfboard and punches a dude. She’s tough!
Then she’s in a dress, standing before a slimy crook. He tells her to take it off. The producers of the show have her in her underwear again, that’s twice in the space of about ten minutes.
Why the heck didn’t they just have her take everything off, too, so the audience of presumed kuckledraggers could see if she’s trimmed her bush in pornstar landing strip fashion?
Sadly, you can tell the writers and producer will have Park being divested of her overclothes or in a bathing suit, at least a couple times an episode.
Then there were those other guys. Now Steve McGarrett is an ex-Navy SEAL, very white bread and about twenty years too young. And without a hint of the steely and imposing character of the original. The comic heavies from Magnum P.I. could grease this guy.
There was a plot but no one watching cared.
This ain’t your Hawaii Five O, presuming you’re my age.
Grace Park, along with Katee Sackhoff, now in the race to see which alumna from Battlestar Galactica can rack up the most humiliating roles on network TV.
Which reminds me, when are they going to give Jackie Earle Haley his own series? Wasted on the horrible Human Target, I bet lots of people would wish to see him playing some smart-talking five-foot-five tough guy who gets to beat up people twice his size once a week.
Good news, lads! Good news! They’ve made The Making of The Claw into a supermovie.
Today’s Culture of Lickspittle vignette comes from the outpour of huzzah for Danny Boyle’s latest pic, 127 Hours, a movie on Aron Claw Ralston and his amputation.
You may have forgotten the name but movie critics at all the big metropolis papers, and their features editors, will guarantee you get the full story. You’ll recall, the hiker who forgot to tell people where he was going, got trapped under a boulder, and cut off his arm with a knife to get out of it.
It was the best career move he ever made. Which we’ll get to in a minute.
First, the Cult of Lickspittle quote, from today’s LA Times Calender section:
[Danny Boyle] says that while it’s easy to look at Ralston’s story as the unimaginable demonstration of superhumanism, he believes that we are all capable of doing the same thing if the situation demanded it.
Unimaginable superhumanism.
I’m sure it seems that way to movie critics at Telluride. After all, it’s where the fancy and fine people go to gasp at the nausea provoking repackaged as inspirational.
Ralston’s story is many things. Something I’d not want to read at length or see a movie about are two of them.
It also seems to be a lesson, albeit an unfortunately cynical one.
If you happenstance yourself into a deadly misadventure and survive in a grotesque fashion, and can get it onto 60 Minutes, because of the pure titillating nature and freakishness of it, your ship just came in.
Today’s entertainment news amusement concerns the idolatry for Aron “The Claw” Ralston. Dick Destiny blog didn’t know his name, and it wagers others do not either, but it does remember him as the hiker who went into a canyon, had his hand trapped under a boulder, and a few days later cut off his forarm with a Swiss Army knife or Gerber multi-tool or something.
Of this it can be certain, he was stupid but gutsy. He didn’t tell anyone where we was going and when he would be back, a simple enough way to have avoid cutting his arm off when he got into trouble.
Anyway, the Los Angeles Times Calendar section informs Ralston is a semi-celebrity, a pitchman for beer as well as a corporate motivational speaker. One can imagine the hilarity of a Ralston-led inspirational seminar for corporate crooks.
Ralston: “Remember, if you’re really in trouble because of shitty decisions, you have the steel within you to cut off your arm and completely distract everyone from your lack of management skill or ethical lapses! I did it! You can too!”
[Crowd of dumb white men in suits, who look all alike, erupts!]
However, maybe it’s not that motivating. Ralston could say something like this: “I’m convinced that being able to cut off my arm with a pen knife was a miracle and that it was given to me to share with other people!”
From the crowd: “What, your amputated forarm? You brought it along?”
Come to think of it, Ralston did almost say that. It was in the newspaper but I juiced it a little.
Ralston is also known to friends as Captain Fun Hog for his risk-taking and after making the rounds of the newsmedia with his nub healed over, he wrote a book proposal. The title was not “Buy This Book Or I’ll Cut Off My Other Arm” but the less insouciant, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place.” The Times informed The Claw received a six-figure advance and it is now a bestseller.
The Claw also is a pitchman for Miller beer. “The guy cut off his own arm to save his life,” said a fugelman from Miller. “He knows how men need to act.” Now, Dick Destiny has always enjoyed Miller but no matter how much consumed has never been inspired to cut off a forarm with a pen knife. On the other hand, “Enough Miller and you won’t mind amputation” has an unusual zip to it. (Or, “Miller — your select choice before lifesaving self-surgery.”)
The Los Angeles Times reported that Ralston would never again repeat his hiking mistake. One reckons this is a sincere claim, as it would be tough to cut off the other forarm with only the old stump available to hold a cutting tool. It can be conceded that there is always the wild animal caught in a steel trap procedure: Gnaw it off. That would be good for another book.
It is said, Ralston has spoken to disabled veterans: “If your arm is trapped under the twisted wreckage of the Hummer. . . Oh wait, that’s not quite the same. Forget I said it.”
This festival has the best logo ever: a big shrimp wrapped around an oil rig like a wedding ring.
YOU MUST SEE! NO JOKE! IT’S AWESOME ! (Click on that link.)
Further:
But don’t get the locals (Morgan City population: 20,000) started on the federal moratorium President Obama has imposed on oil drilling through Nov. 30. “He’s trying to starve us,” one long time local told me at breakfast. Morgan City would dry up with an extended moratorium. Oil companies would flee to the waters of Brazil and Cuba.
It’s Ray Bradbury’s 90th birthday and so the Los Angeles Times and friends are sponsoring a well-earned extended celebration for the famous sci-fi author. Who doesn’t like being called a sci-fi author, apparently.
Used to have most of his books and was even a fan of the frankly not-so-hot Ray Bradbury Theater.
But I’d be lyin’ if I told you I’ve had any use for the guy since 1985, the year I graduated from Lehigh.
Here are all the quotes from Ray you need, published at the end of today’s piece in the LATimes:
I think our country is in need of a revolution. There is too much government today. We got to remember the government should be by the people for the people …
[We] have too many cellphones. We got too many Internets. We have too many machines now …
[Obama] should be announcing we should go back to the moon. We should never have left there. We should go to the moon and prepare to fire a rocket off to Mars and then go to Mars and colonize Mars.
Pick your favorite ending from these and let me know in the comments:
B: Cue “I’m a good ol’ ‘Merican” — sung to tune of you know what.
C: It has just been lernt that Ted Nugent will arrive as a special guest at Bradbury’s birthday bash, presenting the author with the last carton of Gonzo Meat Biltong ever made.
If you weren’t some damn Godless commie liberal you wouldn’t think this is so funny!
On a tip from Rick in Pennsyltucky, this laugh out loud essay in the York Daily Record:
Last week, an alert reader called to point out an article in the Arizona Republic about Mexicans flocking to Pennsylvania, apparently hoping to alert the state that hordes of illegal immigrants will soon be overrunning the state and taking jobs from the thousands of Pennsylvanians who dream of, one day, trying to earn a living by picking fruit or mowing lawns.
I almost fell out of my chair. The columnist, Mike Argento, is already making a wry joke in the first graf, one satirically likening Pennsylvania to soCal. Which is actually where illegals fleeing Arizona come.
Argento goes on, at one point revealing:
A bill similar to the Arizona law is pending, introduced recently by some representative from Butler County. Rep. Daryl Metcalfe said, “The purpose of this legislation is to offer every illegal alien residing in Pennsylvania two options, leave immediately or go to jail.”
We’ve always been kinder and gentler here in Penn’s Woods.
The law has no chance of passing and has no chance of becoming law and has no chance of doing anything except elevate Metcalfe in the eyes of his constituents, which, being Butler County, are mostly deer and raccoons.
I guess word hasn’t gotten out about our attempt to join Arizona in hating on the Mexicans yet because nobody is boycotting Pennsylvania over the proposed law …
Tremendous column, you really should read all of it.
Understand that it will generate a certain amount of hate mail in the conservative ‘burg of York, PA.
Southern California has about 10 million people living in it. The entire state of Arizona, much less.
And Butler County, Pennsy, is a flyspeck. But one of those places from the interior which makes outsiders consider the state “like Alabama” between Pittsburgh and Philly (except for Dauphin County, also where African Americans live).
But first you have to know the history of the journalist.
Carpenter was infamous for being a Times swell. Her old gig was writing for a discontinued automotive section, reviewing high end superbikes, riding with Peter Fonda, writing about breaking the speed limit and getting her picture into the newspaper.
And I used to bag on her regularly.
Here she’s lampooned for touting a $3,000 electric bicycle, the iZip, made for miscellaneous upper class nuisances, gadget freaks and conspicuous consumers.
[The] Silk Route highway is empty for Carpenter and her tourmates because most of the locals are too busy scrabbling out a subsistence living to afford driving on it.
And gas is cheaper in China than southern California! Imagine that!
The main hazards on the Silk Route highway, we are informed, are “packs of animals and stacks of rocks. In rural areas, you never knew when you would round a corner and need to slow for yaks or goats.”
“[There’s] never a line at the pump because so few people drive in the remote and impoverished outskirts of Xinjiang province.”
So she’s just right to tell readers — “Welcome to the future” — and that a hydrogen generating station the size of a refrigerator is just around the corner, for her wealthy and highly regarded pals, maybe.
Was she perhaps thrilled by Brad Paisley’s latest record, too?
Carpenter’s article centers around the Honda Clarity and it never deals with the details of cracking water for automotive use. All on house current without causing fainting from billing shock.
The latter is dealt with by simply saying it can all be had with solar-power panels and an accompanying electrolysis system.
One of the only figures delivered (there are two pertaining to power generation, neither particularly enlightening or convincing) is that the new “hydrogen fueling system” is “25 percent more efficient than the electrolysis system Honda devised in 2001 and it no longer requires a mechanical compressor or storage tanks.”
While it sounds too good to be true, Carpenter swallows it without comment.
If you were interested in chemistry as a kid you may have cracked water with wall current and a transformer. If you did, it was an unexciting experiment, slow and not much of a hydrogen generator, although you could collect some gas in a test tube, enough to make a pop when lit.
The energy required to decompose the covalent bonds holding water together is not trivial. This is well-explained, in chemical and physical terms, here.
In life, that it’s not trivial is good. If water fell apart easily, life just wouldn’t be possible. It just wouldn’t do to have to worry about unexpectedly and explosively popping from hydrogen build-up.
Carpenter’s article for the Times does not explain any of this. And it is
one of the central problems facing any attempt to bring on a hydrogen-based energy rich economy, one in which the hydrogen is generated from water — with the power not furnished by fossil fuel.
Use wall power generated by fossil fuels to generate hydrogen from water doesn’t automagically do away with the problem of greenhouse gases. It just lengthens the vehicle’s tail pipe away from the house and roads where it operates.
Generating it from solar — well, let’s say no one has even come remotely close to adequately explaining how the entire country, not just sunny soCal, could get enough power from the sun to satisfy current American driving habits on a daily basis.
Like in the middle of winter in eastern Pennsylvania.
And no editor at the LA Times required Carpenter to even take a stab at it.
Instead, most of her article’s testimony is turned over, of all people, to Jon Landau. A member of the mansion set who presumably called in some favor to get his Honda Clarity lease and fueling station permissions.
Landau was the film producer of Titanic and Avatar, so he’d be the guy to go to for an explanation of how the hydrogen economy and automobiles might work.
“There’s no trip I can’t make and get back here [to the fueling station], Landau tells Carpenter.
“Now he drives it more often than his Mercedes S550,” writes Carpenter brightly.
The Mercedes S550 is a $91,000 car, about twenty thousand cheaper than Elon Musk’s electric car for the rich. The cost of the Honda Clarity is ridiculous — $1 million. And this explains the expensive cocked-up leasing program for test vehicles and attached fueling station described by Carpenter, a program which furnished Landau with his auto.
If only we could all have such gigs and opportunities. Welcome to the future. Where the class war’s been waged and you’ve all lost.
