CleverDonkey.com …Musings, Commentary, Opinions, and Drivel

So I had an experience yesterday that caused me to need to come here and vent. Mynagirl and I work for the same company in a downtown Houston office building, and our building has a cafeteria. It is a garden variety corporate cafeteria, with food that is neither really good nor really bad, and fairly reasonable prices. They typically have four or five general areas for food…a mexican line (tacos, burritos, taco salads, quesadillas, etc), traditional food line (chicken breast, meat loaf, fish, turkey, vegetables, etc), sandwich line (sandwiches), grill line (hamburgers, grilled chicken sandwiches, chicken fingers, fries, etc), and twice a week a pasta line where they make pasta to order.

There is also a salad bar, dessert area, frozen yogurt machine, Starbucks cofffee, fountain drinks, bottled drinks, and fresh fruit.

So, not bad for a corporate cafeteria.

But yesterday when Mynagirl and I sat down, there was a man and woman at a table not really that close, but close enough for us to have to endure the guy pontificating for 20 minutes. The subject of his sermon? He ranted and raved and railed about the fact that the cafeteria was “ripping me off” because they charged him for the extra cup of gravy that he asked for and for the cup of ice and water that he got.

Now, some of you are saying, “Yeah, brother, right on…fight the power!”, while the majority of you are saying, “Man, what a cheap bastard.” I fall squarely into the latter category, and find that as I get older I am beginning to have less and less patience for people who have an entitlement mentality. These are people who somehow expect the world to be “fair” and somehow perceive that large organizations like businesses and governments should somehow have bottomless pits of money that they should be used to make life easier for cheap bastards with a sense of entitlement.

In the specific example of the guy yesterday, here’s what happened from my perspective:

• Cheap Bastard (CB) orders chicken fingers which come with a little plastic cup of gravy. CB asks for a second little plastic cup of gravy, thereby taking more gravy than is built into the food costs. CB then is surprised and offended that the cafeteria wants to charge him $0.25 for this cup of gravy.
• CB comes into the cafeteria empty-handed, and has not bothered to purchase and schlep his own bottled water with him (which the cafeteria allows), nor has he filled his own cup with water from one of the many water fountains available all over the building. Instead he grabs a cup that the cafeteria provides, goes to the ice machine that the cafeteria bought and maintains and fills the cup with crushed ice from the crushed ice machine provided by the cafeteria, then moves to the push-button water-dispenser that was purchased and is maintained by the cafeteria and fills the cup (with water that the cafeteria pays for), then grabs a lid provided by the cafeteria, then grabs a straw provided by the cafeteria, then goes and sits at a table in an area provided by the cafeteria, finishes his water, throws the remaining water and ice, along with the cup, lid, and straw into a waste receptacle that the cafeteria maintains and pays to have emptied. And then CB complains that all of this convenience costs him another $0.25. He truly is a CB.

And I think that’s where the major disconnect is between the CB’s with a sense of entitlement and the rest of us. I truly don’t think that CB understands that his cup of gravy or that cup of ice with water are a very real, hard cost for that cafeteria business. And although he may not think it’s worth $0.25 to have the luxury of extra gravy or he doesn’t think that it’s worth another $0.25 for the convenience of having cups, lids, straws, crushed ice, and water available, he should realize that it is not the job of the cafeteria to give things away. The cafeteria is a business, not a charity, and so has every right to charge for these things, and it appears to me that they are charging very fairly. CB is free not to eat there and/or not to get extra gravy or a cup of ice water if he doesn’t want to pay for them. However, paying for them and then complaining that they are not worth it are just plain stupid. The fact that CB paid for them proves that they were worth it to him, unless he was forced through the line with a gun to his head, or something.

In yet another example which also happened in the last few days, I was traveling home from a business trip and was in the Seattle airport, and was going through a fast food line to get some nachos to nosh while waiting for departure. The couple in front of me got a taco plate, a salad plate, and two medium drinks (trust me, I remember exactly). After they ordered the wife went off in search of a table, while the husband kept tabs on the progress of their lunch order. The girl who was checking them out was obviously new, and rang up his total. She told him “$12.97, please!”, to which he responded, “No, that can’t be right” and directed his gaze to the menu. The girl double-checked her figures and claimed it was correct, but the guy insisted it was too high. He then ran through the pricing from his perspective. “First we have the taco plate meal, then we have the salad plate meal, and those include drinks so the total should be eleven fifty-something” he says.

At this point the new checkout girl was completely paralyzed by what to do, as you could tell she didn’t agree with him or his math, but wasn’t sure enough to say so. So she summoned a more senior lady from the back, who reviewed the tab and pronounced it correct. Mr. Man continued to dispute the charges, and pointed out to both of the ladies that there was a handwritten sign that said that the two dishes they had ordered were available as a meal for price X as opposed to the a la carte pricing where the drinks were added separately. The senior lady finally acknowledged that he was correct and rung him up for the displayed price.

Now, there are those of you out there who are again saying, “Yeah, brother…right on….fight the power!” while the rest of you are again saying, “What a cheap bastard!”. Again I am in the latter camp. I can hear all you CBs out there reading this and finding it incomprehensible that I can fault Mr. Man for fighting to get the correct price, but I do, with extreme prejudice. Because while Mr. Man argued with these oblivious cashiers, he made the rest of us poor, tired, huddled business travelers wait for 5 extra minutes (while our already-prepared food was cooling on their counter), all to save about $1.50. I was literally at the point of handing this schmuck $5 and asking him to get the hell out of everybody’s way, because enough was enough. The restaurant was obviously not purposely ripping him off, and the amount in question was trivial, but Mr. Man stood there making everybody wait to make his point. Now, I know that he had every *right* to do that, but it was still rude to everyone else in line, and Mr. Man should have said to himself “Close enough” and moved on.

Now, if Mr. Man had been buying a car and the price was off by $5,000? Go ahead and make a stink. If he paid for his groceries at the store with $100 bill, but only got change for a $50, stand your ground, and more power to you. But making a stink in a busy airport line making everybody else wait in order to make your point about $1.50? That’s just beyond the pale and begins to border on a disorder. Let it go, pal, you’ll get it back many times over in good karma (or the avoidance of bad karma), trust me.

I’ve known many CB’s personally, and one thing I’ve found is that most of them have never actually run a business themselves, or worked in a job where they were responsible for profit and loss. Either that, or they see money simply as a game that they must always win, not matter what the stakes. These are the same dorks that will drive across town to save $0.05/gallon on gas, burning up any cost savings with their meanderings but not caring, because they get to “win” with the lowest price.

When your imperitive is to maximize the bottom line, such as with your own business or running a product line within a larger business, you realize that you can’t afford to give things away, or to waste time making sure the accounts balance to the penny. The for-profit enterprises that do seem to give things away actually don’t, because they either charge you for them elsewhere and hide that cost, or know that they’ll get future sales/profits from you by investing in providing you with an incentive.

For example, that home security system that they install for free? It’s the minimum system and they know you’ll almost certainly add on additional sensors and things, plus they charge you a monthly recurring fee for monitoring the system, and that’s where they make the money. The restaurants that *do* give away extra gravy and cups of water? They’ve built those expenses into their food costs already, so you and me and everybody else there is paying for that “free” stuff.

Remeber, as it says in the abstract up there, TANSTAAFL, which means, There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, and that is a truism that is very true indeed…steeped in truthiness, in fact.

Based on the little I know about CB from his rantings, I’ll bet he’s also a bad tipper (BT). And I find that BTs and CBs both have an entitlement mentality. The world owes them something. It owes them what they think they deserve, regardless of they they’ve actually earned it or lucked into it. Dammit, I just *know* I’m supposed to have a big, flat-screen TV to watch the Super Bowl on, and the fact that I don’t means either that my company isn’t paying me enough or that the companies making the TVs are charging too much for them. It couldn’t possibly be that I can’t afford one, because that’s just not right.

Don’t you know people like that?

Are *you* a person like that?

• Leave a comment... (0)

This is one of those rare instances where I read the book before seeing the movie, and the cliche holds true, the book was better. Much better. That’s not to say that the film was bad, but the pecking order is great book followed by slightly above average film. One of the best parts of the film is the performance of Aaron Eckhart as Nick Naylor. Nick is a lobbyist for Big Tobacco, and he hasn’t so much as sold his soul as he has failed to control his awesome power for convincing. He’s managed to convince himself that Big Tobacco is being unfairly treated and mis-characterized by the government and the press, and with his pure belief he is able to charm and sway just about anybody to open their minds, even if just a smidge, to consider the fact that Big Tobacco just may not be the incarnation of the Devil.

Now, if you’ve read much of this site you’ll know that I’m not pro-smoking (he understated), but intellectually I’ve also felt that the government is acting quite hypocritically with regards to tobacco. Since tobacco is legal, the constitutionalist in me says that it should be treated as such and not harassed and over-taxed. If we as a people say that tobacco is legal, let it be legal. Now, that’s not to say that I believe it should be ubiquitous, and in fact I would happily agree to having tobacco legal to smoke, but have it be illegal to inflict others with one’s effluvia. In other words, I won’t tell you you can’t smoke if you don’t tell me I have to inhale your blow-by gasses.

Parking high horse.

One of the things I like best about the film is that it doesn’t demonize Nick Naylor, and instead shows him to be a superstar, while also beginning to question if he’s playing for the right team. He has a young son, and the film plays up the fact that Nick is ambivalent about how to reconcile his desire to be a good dad with his desire to do a good job. This aspect of the film is what I think weakens the impact, as it attempts to humanize Nick without making him pick sides.

For example, there’s a scene where Nick’s bosses send him to visit an old, cancer-stricken former Marlboro man and take him a briefcase full of cash, no strings attached. No confidentiality agreement, nothing. Just, here, here’s some money from us to you. An implied guilt trip. And Nick not only delivers the money and the message, but he spins the interaction in such a way as to leave Mr. Dying Marlboro Man (played wonderfully by Sam Elliott, who in retrospect seems born to play a dying former Marlboro Man) with only one option – take the money (for his family after he’s gone) and keep his mouth shut (so that he won’t be a hypocrite by taking their money and then saying derogatory things about tobacco).

The kicker is that Nick has taken his son along with him on this visit. You see, his son accompanied him on this business trip to California so that he and his father could bond, and the son innocently backs his father into a corner about going along to make the payoff, because Nick admitting that he didn’t want his son along would be Nick admitting that what we was doing was “wrong”. And Nick doesn’t see himself as a wrongdoer. So Nick’s son gets to see what his dad does for a living. And, like all sons, absorbs it and learns from it.

There are other facets to the film, as well. Nick belongs to the M.O.D Squad, which stands for Merchants of Death. This group of three represent Tobacco, Alcohol, and Firearms, and meet once a week for lunch and spend time comparing yearly mortality rates for each of their respective masters and using that to gauge the toughness of their jobs.

There’s also a vacuous reporter, played by Katie Holmes, who does a little convincing of her own (if you know what I mean and I think you do) and gets Nick to open up to her about his job, and then writes a scorching expose of him and his cohorts. It was only afterwards that Mynagirl told me that the reporter was Katie Holmes, and I have to say she did a singularly unimpressive job, and sort of faded into the background, in my opinion. And got a little bit freaky before doing so, I might add.

The rest of the cast does a good job, with Robert Duvall as the personfication of Big Tobacco, William H. Macy as the prototypical anti-smoking (and Birkenstock wearing) liberal Congressperson, and Rob Lowe (whose porn name should be Raw Blow, if you ask me) as the stereotypically sociopathic and pseudo-spiritual Hollywood movie exec.

Put it all together and you have a fairly good film that could have been great with just a bit of tweaking and enough backbone to stay away from the Hollywood-esque ending. Still it was much more entertaining and different than the usual Hollywood drivel, and that makes it worth seeing.

• Leave a comment... (0)

Your money is "safe" with him

After seeing this movie it became clear to me what low expectations I have from Hollywood films these days. This film was a solid, well written, well acted, intricately plotted action flick, and I realized I hadn’t seen anything like it since…well…since a very long time. It’s not quite as good as Die Hard, but it’s better than Collateral, to give you an idea of where I’d put it in this genre. It’s a bit unfair to compare anything to Die Hard, since that’s the film that both defined this genre and has ruled as the best intelligent action picture ever made ever since, IMHO.

However, Inside Man is right up there. First of all, it was astonishingly refreshing to see Denzel Washington not play Denzel Washington for the first time in a long time. Here he plays an NYPD hostage negotiator who gets pulled into a Dog-Day-Afternoon-like standoff at a bank robbery that isn’t what it appears to be. Denzel’s character is extremely competent, but he’s not a super-sleuth or a John McClane-like bad-ass. However, he uses a combination of his instincts, street-smarts, and determination as he attempts to unravel the mysteries with which he is presented.

Also refreshing to see is Jodie Foster, looking exactly her age, playing a character her age, showing wrinkles and laugh lines and looking spectacular doing it. Not only that, but she plays an amazingly amoral “consultant” who helps people’s problems go away. Her character can be summed up by noting that after she has blackmailed the Mayor of New York City into doing what she wants, he responds by saying “You, my dear, are a magnificent cunt.” And she is.

Clive Owen and Christopher Plummer also both shine in their roles, and the supporting cast is nearly perfect. All of this is directed with flair by Spike Lee, and also with a bit of Spike Lee-iness. There are some trademark shots and scenes that mark this as a Spike Lee Joint, but he has proven here that he can deliver the big-studio, big-budget, big-grossing ($66 million and counting) hit, while still making a great film. That skill seems to have escaped most directors today.

I’m curious if Spike was able to leverage his status as a premier director to keep control of his film and maintain the intricate and sometimes nearly opaque plotting. My take is that today’s studio execs fear films that challenge audiences to pay attention and think, and instead seem to reflexively add in slow-motion kung fu, slow-motion gunplay (with pistols held sideways in that “cool” way), techno-music-driven flash-cut montages in nightclubs run by the bad guys, any time they think a film is getting too cerebral.

In any case, I really liked this film, and if you’re a fan of action movies that challenge you to keep up and don’t mind that there’s not any kung fu or sex, then this might be a film you’ll enjoy.

• Leave a comment... (0)

So, I really like Seinfeld. On average I probably watch 5-7 episodes each week. The more I watch it the more I appreciate it…you have to watch it for several years to *get* the intricate weave of characters and storylines over the years. It was self-referential without being self-conscious, and it was funny. FUNNY. Sure, there are some episodes or plotlines that I don’t particularly care for, but overall the show is classic.

And I’ve watched with some interest as the former cast members have moved on and tried to go solo, with limited success. Until now.

In The New Adventures of Old Christine, I think Julia Louis-Dreyfus has hit paydirt. I TiVo’ed it out of respect for Elaine Benes, and figured I had to give Julia the benefit of the doubt and at least give her show a chance. I’m glad that I did. Mynagirl and I have watched all of the episodes so far (four, I think), and they have been pretty damn funny. Sure, there are rough spots and some hackneyed sitcom staples (precocious kid, slacker brother, sassy black friend, etc), but it seems to be working.

When I first heard the title I mentally rolled my eyes and figured the show would have to suck, given such a trite title. But after the first episode I got the story behind the title, which is that Christine (Louis-Dreyfus) is divorced, and her ex has started dating a younger girl. Her name is also Christine, and she gets referred to as “the new Christine”, hence the show’s title. In a wonderful rejection of low-hanging sitcom fruit, the new Christine seems really nice and is not scheming, evil, superior, or rude.

And Louis-Dreyfus really seems comfortable in the role and embodies the old Christine quite fully. I watched a bit of her other show (where she was a singer…I forget the title…it really sucked) and she just didn’t seem like she felt at home with the character. This character is older, wiser, and a bit more jaded than Elaine Benes, and with an ex-husband and kid to boot, but still allows flashes of Elaine to show through, which makes me think that they are flashes of Louis-Dreyfus and they just happened to flash through both for Elaine and Christine.

The rest of the cast also seem to fit comfortably into their roles, although I’m not sure yet if the character of her son is cute or annoying, although the kid playing the role does a great job.

And now I’ve actually started looking forward to new episodes, and that’s rare for me. I hope they keep up the good work on the show, because I want it to be good. It would be nice to see a former Seinfeldian do good.

Note to the producers of TNAOOC: if you ever have an episode where Louis-Dreyfus plays both Christine and Christine’s sister Elaine Benes, then your show will have jumped the shark. Just wanted to let you know in case it started to sound like a good idea.

• Leave a comment... (0)

‘Hole Foods Market

We should be right in the target demographic for Whole Foods Market. Mynagirl is vegetarian, I try to eat relatively healthily, we like natural and organic foods, and we don’t penny-pinch when it comes to grocery shopping.

However, we go there as little as possible, even though there are some things that we can only get there. For example, I stopped eating ground beef from grocery stores and restaurants (click here to find out why) but I eat organic and/or grass-fed ground beef, both of which Whole Foods carries. Yes, Kroger and Randall’s carry some form of organic ground beef, but it’s frozen and the volumes they sell means that it’s usually not the freshest. But the meat counter at Whole Foods has trays filled with fresh organic and grass-fed ground beef.

Whole Foods also has a produce section filled with organic fruits and vegetables, rather than the few organic things carried by mainstream grocery stores. We also prefer natural sugar as opposed to refined white sugar, whole grains as opposed to bleached white flour, preservative-free as opposed to shelf-stable-for-our-convenience, and additive-free as opposed to chemically-treated-and-or-irradiated-to-kill-any-possible-bad-things-while-introducing-who-knows-what-long-term-health-effects.

So, Whole Foods Market should be the place for us, right, right?

Wrong! Wrong!

The reason that Whole Foods is wrong for us is because every trip there is an exercise in frustration and annoyance, and a test of my patience with people. You see, I have almost zero tolerance for the following:

• Narcissists
• Rudely oblivious people who think the entire world not only revolves around them but also needs to cater to their every need and whim, including freeing said oblivious person from having to demonstrate the common courtesy that all humans must demonstrate to get along in this world, such as sharing space in the aisles of grocery stores with other carts, moving out of peoples way if one is blocking the entire pathway (particularly if there is plenty of room to get out of the way and said oblivious person is blocking the entire pathway simply because they are oblivious and self-centered)
• BMW drivers (or is that the same group as above?)
• Health freaks (those who take “healthiness” to OCD levels)
• Poseurs
• People with obvious affectations
• People who park in the fire lane of grocery stores to load/unload, making all other traffic go around them and reducing traffic flow to one lane, simply for their own convenience, and oblivious to the fact that if all shoppers did the same there would be anarchy and chaos, but they count on the fact that nobody else is rude enough to do what they do so they know they can get away with it
• In other words, every single other person in WFM other than Mynagirl and me

Not only that, but the layout of WFM (at least the one on Kirby in Houston) is a tightly-packed rat maze with all of these oblivious, rude, narcissists packed in together like sardines jostling for position with as little human compassion or interaction as possible, and with zero friendliness or politeness that I have experienced. And that last part is the literal truth. I have never interacted with a WFM patron who was even slightly polite, and most are outright rude, brusque, and dismissive. I don’t know if it’s the lack of protein in their diets or the fact that many of them eat healthily only as an affectation while not really beleiving it, and so are cranky at constantly doing something they don’t want to do, but feel they must do in order to keep up the imaginary image they have of themselves.

You may be thinking that perhaps there’s something that I’m doing to trigger these reactions, but trust me, I’m not. I was raised in a small Texas town by a mother who taught me to be polite and friendly and to treat others as I would like to be treated. I’ve tried that at ‘Hole Foods Market – for example, at a particularly tight intersection I’ve stopped to allow cross-aisle traffic to go, waiting for someone in the other lane to stop and let me through, as I was stopping to let them through, and instead have experienced person after person breezing past as if I were the Royal Guard keeping the hoi polloi at bay while their procession passed. And it was very clear that I wanted to cross the intersection, and if I hadn’t finally decided to just rudely cut somebody off and force my way into the flow, I’d still be there.

Now, you may say that that’s life in the big city, and I should just get used to it. Well, I lived in the Northeast (NY/NJ) for several years, so I understand how to live in a brusque and rude society. And up there, it’s actually not rudeness, because it is the expected behavior. That’s the way everybody is, and one is expected to simply assert one’s self similarly – no harm, no foul.

But this is Texas, where people are friendlier. And in virtually every other retail situation that I experience, I get normal Texas hospitality. But not at ‘Hole Foods Market, for some reason. And I go to all kinds of other snooty places here in Houston, and still don’t find myself feeling like I’m in some rat-infested little market on some street corner in New York, dealing with brusque, uncaring idiots. Only at ‘Hole Foods Market.

And I think that may be part of it – WFM has laid their stores out to be like a cramped NYC deli/grocery, and the people who shop there I’m sure include a high percentage of people who subscribe to the Sunday edition of the New York Times, and think the only real place to see a play is Broadway, and make sure to make one or two shopping trips to NYC each year, because that’s the only place to really get good fashions, don’t you know? And so they watch Annie Hall and Sex and the City and The Sopranos and decide to put on those New York airs and blend.

Yeah, I’ve got your blend right here, pal. How about this? How about you remember that you’re in Texas and that here people’s default behavior is to be friendly to each other? How about you put aside your affectations and airs and treat other people like human beings when you’re at ‘Hole Foods Market? And how about you park in a parking space, just like the other 95% of the people there, who somehow manage to struggle and strive to roll their carts an additional 50 feet to their cars, which you seem to be unable to do so must pull up and inconvenience everybody else?

And how about the next time we cross paths in the aisles and I have the right of way and you try to cut me off, I just push my way in front of you, slap your cart and say, “Hey, I’m shopping here!!”

• Leave a comment... (0)

Mynagirl and I have a relationship where, when we are sure that we are alone and have absolute privacy, we share with each other the uncharitable, judgmental, mean, nasty, rude, cruel, and just plain malicious thoughts, jokes, and feelings that pop into our heads. These are the things that one would never ordinarily share with others, lest one be thought to be evil or crude. In most cases these thoughts don’t actually represent our beliefs, but instead represent things that we think are funny even if they are just plain inappropriate.

For example:

What’s the difference between Christopher Reeve and OJ Simpson?

OJ walked and Reeve got the electric chair.

or

What is the opposite of Christopher Reeve?

Christopher Walken

Now, intellectually I find both of those jokes offensive. I liked Christopher Reeve and don’t really approve of making fun of the dead. However, in my heart of hearts, both of those jokes make me laugh. They shouldn’t, but they do. They’re creative and funny, and Christopher Reeve was enough of a cultural icon for me to be able to disassociate the jokes from the actual tragic circumstances of his accident and his ultimate death.

And I would share with Mynagirl the fact that I found those jokes funny – she may or may not agree, but we revel in the trust and closeness that results from such open honesty with each other.

What, you may ask, do my autobiographical musings have to do with CSA: Confederate States of America?? Well, the parallel is that Kevin Willmott, the writer/director, has put into his script and onto the screen a lot of the same gasp-inducing-yet-funny things that many people might think, but never say.

The premise of the movie is that you, the viewer, are watching a television station, and that station is airing a Ken Burns-like documentary about the CSA. In the reality of this film, the South won the Civil War (or the War of Northern Aggression, depending on one’s roots) and hence we have the Confederate States of America, or the CSA. The documentary (in the film) was produced by British television, complete with typically erudite and accented voice-over. The documentary is interrupted at regular intervals for commercials from the present-day CSA for products that would only have niches in this imagined reality, and also by news breaks reporting news that one would never see today.

I’m trying not to get too specific, as the parade of yelp-inducing moments in this film are endless and diabolically funny, while also forcing us to hold up a mirror to today’s less-than-perfect race relations. Mr. Willmott has taken a great risk in producing a film like this, because even though it is funny, it is also incendiary and I’m sure will be controversial.

I’ll give you a real-world example of how this film is completely relevant today. We went to this movie with our friend Bruce, and it was showing at the Angelika theater here in downtown Houston. The Angelika is an upscale venue for arty, snobby, and foreign films that have some revenue-generating potential (it’s not a gritty, run-down, art-house type venue, is what I mean). We go there frequently and really relish the experience of seeing a film in a calm and serene setting, with comfortable seats, good concessions, and interesting films, without having to subject ourselves to the multiplex masses.

So, today when we showed up for the film, we purchased our tickets and went inside. To picture the scene, please note that the lobby of the Angelika is very beautiful, with artistic touches and over-sized posters of foreign films on the walls of the soaring atrium overhead. Also, the three of us are about as white as you can get – I’m of Czechoslovakian-British descent, Mynagirl is German-British, and Bruce is Polish. That’s about as white as you can get, and we were in a place that, let’s be honest, is traditionally populated with upper-middle-class whites, pseudo-intellectuals, and film-geeks.

However, when we walked in today, the lobby was the fullest that I have *ever* seen it, I’d say between 100-125 people (and if you’ve even been to the Angelika you’ll realize how full the lobby was), and 95% of the patrons were young African Americans, 90% of those male. My immediate thought was that they were here to see CSA (which is billed as being “Presented by Spike Lee”), and based on the interactions of people I could tell this was an organized event, and that they weren’t all here by accident. So, I wondered what organization had gathered here en masse for this film, and I wrestled with the fact that this film might not raise up warm feelings of brotherhood in my fellow moviegoers. I didn’t have any specific worries, but let’s just say I was tracking the potential of ending up on CNN in the worst-case scenario.

After we got our concessions and headed into the theater, we realized that 99% of the African American folks were there to see a sneak preview of the film ATL, which is a coming-of-age story focusing on four black friends. I have to admit to a certain amount of relief-followed-by-white-guilt at my own feelings. Realisticaly, I knew that it was possible that watching a film like CSA could very easily, and understandably, generate feelings of ill-will from a theater full of young black people. And I also calculated that there was a very small, but nonetheless real, chance that those feelings might manifest themselves in some confrontational way.

I was also a bit disappointed that they weren’t going to see CSA, because I think that dragging these kinds of unspoken differences and suspicions out into the light can only be good in the long run, and I was looking forward to playing my part. However, interestingly enough, the black-white viewership ratio swung wildly into the other direction, and I only saw one African American patron watching CSA. On the way out I wondered how he felt, being the only black person in a theater full of whites watching a film depicting modern life pretty much the same as it is today, only with slavery still being legal.

And that was an interesting result of this film, to me. I stopped and examined my own thoughts and feelings about race, and I pondered the thoughts and feelings of someone from a different race and wondered if they mirrored my own.

So that means this film was effective. I laughed, I was horrified, I empathized, I examined my own feelings, and I contemplated the feelings of others.

What more can one ask from a film?

• Leave a comment... (0)

While I’ve never liked the idea of eminent domain, I’ve been able to make an uncomfortable peace with it. Until recently, eminent domain defined a right held by governments and municipalities to forcibly take ownership of property for a fair price regardless of the owner’s wishes to sell, as long as there was compelling case that “public use” would serve the greater good.

For example, suppose a city decided to build a park in a certain area, and all but on of the landowners agreed to sell to the city for a negotiated price. The last landowner, however, holds onto his empty parcel of land that he bought as an investment and demands a price that greatly exceeds recent market prices. It’s clear, in this case, that the landowner is trying to stick it to the government, knowing that he has them by the short ones as the last holdout for a major project. So, the government claims the land under eminent domain and pays the landowner the going rate.

In a less clear-cut example, suppose the evil landowner above was replaced with an 80 year old widow living on the land in a house she’d lived in for the last 50 years. Now it’s not so clear-cut, and it was this type of situation that caused me to have intellectual problems with eminent domain. Who is qualified to weigh the need for a community park against a lifetime of ownership and memories? It always felt un-American to me that cases like this often ended up in the forcible condemnation and claiming of the land, followed by the widely televised bulldozing of the poor old widow’s lifelong home.

However, while there were cases in the past that I would consider abuse of eminent domain, they were nothing compared to the new definition of eminent domain provided by the Supreme Court.

Now, based on the recent Supreme Court ruling (Kelo v. the city of New London, Conn.), the definition of eminent domain has been expanded so that “public use” now includes the ability to forcibly take land and give it to private developers who assert that they can create a material improvement for the community, such as more jobs, bigger tax base, etc. So in the past, eminent domain could claim land for public use such as parks, roadways, etc. Now public use includes taking privately owned land and giving it to private companies to develop more profitable enterprises with the land.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the principal dissenting opinion, where she stated, “Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.” She also stated that this decision eliminates “any distinction between private and public use of property — and thereby effectively [deletes] the words ‘for public use’ from the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment”.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a separate dissenting opinion where he says that the court is changing the interpretation from being for “public use” to being for “public purpose”, and sums up that change by saying “This deferential shift in phraseology enables the Court to hold, against all common sense, that a costly urban-renewal project whose stated purpose is a vague promise of new jobs and increased tax revenue, but which is also suspiciously agreeable to the Pfizer Corporation, is for a ‘public use’.” He then further stated that “Losses will fall disproportionately on poor communities. Those communities are not only systematically less likely to put their lands to the highest and best social use, but are also the least politically powerful.”

I couldn’t have said it better than Justices O’Connor and Thomas. This decision will *clearly* benefit large, wealthy companies…who are the only companies with both the capital to stage an “urban renewal” project and also the political clout to cloud the judgment of local officials into stealing land from rightful owners in the name of “improvement”.

Isn’t this America? I got to the land first, I own it, I’m putting it to good use, you don’t need it for “public use”, so keep your goddam hands off of it! I don’t care that Pfizer wants to expand their plant, I was here first. Don’t you remember kindergarten? No cutting in line! Also, I’m not trying to hold out for more money like some carpetbagger…I don’t want anything from you, other than for you to leave me alone. I believe myself to be a reasonable man, but this issue gets me so riled up that I’m not sure what I’d do if somebody tried to take my home and give it to Wal-Mart. I might end up on CNN in some kind of stand-off. And I consider myself not only reasonable, but VERY reasonable. I fear for the repurcussions when a case like this involves less reasonable people.

The one and only positive aspect of this case is that the majority opinion contains language stating that this ruling does not preclude governmental entities from enacting laws to restrict this type of eminent domain. Many state legislatures are already considering legislation to restrict eminent domain, however my hopes are very low. We are asking governments to restrain themselves from increasing their tax bases. Not only that, but whispering in their other ear are huge developers filling their heads with tails of marina$, resort$, spa$, shopping center$, and office building$.

I wonder who will win that argument?

• Leave a comment... (0)

I’ve heard and read nothing but good things about Peter Jackson’s King Kong. This weekend I got a chance to go see it with my friend Bruce. Long story short, there is no way that Mynagirl would ever go see a movie filled with so much animal cruelty, but she and her mom are deep into a home renovation project (from which I am excluded by everyone’s mutual consent), which left me at loose ends on Saturday, which is rare.

So on Saturday we saw the film, in a fairly full movie theater, and I must say that I do not get the hype. I will say this, the film managed not to be boring over its three hour length, but “not boring” does not an epic make.

On the positive side, the effects are pretty eye-popping and realistic for the most part. Kong’s face is very realistic, as is his fur, gait, musculature, and hands. I’d quibble with the fact that during his titanic clash with three T-Rex’s, Kong throws boxing jabs like Joe Frazier, drop-kicks like Jackie Chan, and does rolling, over-the-shoulder throws like Rowdy Roddy Piper. Not very…ape-like, I must say. But very well-rendered from digital effects perspective.

With regards to the story-telling, I think I can sum it up with one anecdote. An hour into the film Bruce leaned over and asked, “Isn’t there supposed to be a giant monkey in this movie?” The first hour sets up the tale by showing an idealized but still Depression-era New York, with fanatical movie producers, struggling engenues, salty tramp steamer captains, and earnest playwrites. The second hour begins with the tramp steamer voyage, complete with gruff but trustworthy crew members, secret maps to undiscovered islands, and a semi-kidnapped earnest screenwriter.

During the second hour we finally make it to Skull Island, replete with fog-shrouded rocky coastlines and the ship temporarily beached on the rocks, forcing them to stay just long enough for the plot to continue developing.

The first journey ashore is quite frightening, and the lady beside me with her two kids should be ashamed of herself. Her daughter appears to be 6 or 7, and her son appeared to be about 5. During a very scary encounter with the local natives, and I mean *very* scary, her son leaned over and said “Mommy, I’m scared…” and tried to crawl into her lap. She fended him off back into his seat, saying, “Look, your sister isn’t scared…stay in your seat…”. I almost couldn’t pay attention the rest of the film knowing that this poor kid was sitting there having to huddle alone with his fear next to his seemingly uncaring mother. And, ma’am, if you read this, next time believe it when the film is rated PG-13.

About halfway through the film we finally get a brief glimpse of Kong as he takes Ann Darrow off into the jungle. The next 45 minutes consist of the men chasing Kong and Ann, Kong chasing the men and Ann, everyone fighting with dinosaurs and insects, and the crew of the tramp steamer being miraculously transformed into the Colonial Marines from Aliens, blasting natives, dinosaurs, and giant bugs like a well-trained special forces military squad. They finally knock Kong out with a sh*tload of chloroform that just happened to be aboard.

They bring Kong back to New York, put him on stage, he gets loose, climbs the building, yada, yada, yada, we all know how the story goes. The creative part of this film is that this whole thing is stretched to three hours. It felt like about 30 minutes of screen time were taken up with Ann and Kong staring soulfully into each other’s eyes and inventing a new one-word sign language (setting up the faux-tearful finale).

Jack Black, as big a personality as he is, isn’t really able to inhabit Carl Denham, the larger-than-life character that he plays…his performance just doesn’t do it…like a long fly ball that hits a foot below the top of the fence…still a well hit ball, but just a double, not a home-run. I didn’t even recognize that Ann Darrow was being played by Naomi Watts, as the performance was very un-stellar and unremarkable, and it was only later that I found out it was Watts. Adrien Brody is…just one of those things that I don’t understand about women. He looks like a whippet and has about as much personality as a sedated whippet, but the accolades seem always to flow for him, so I’ll just have to resign myself to his celebrity-hood, I guess.

Overall this movie is just average, which means that it’s actually pretty bad given the budget, expectations, reviews, and hype surrounding it. If I’m being completely honest, I have to say that this movie was just about exactly what I expected, so I’m glad that I’ve seen it so that I can now disparage it from direct experience. And if that’s the most positive thing one takes away from a film, that is faint praise indeed.

• Leave a comment... (0)

So one of my favorite web sites, The Smoking Gun, has dug into the story behind the supposed memoir by James Frey called “A Million Little Pieces”. According to their findings, many (if not most) of the key events depicted in his book either never happened or are wildly modified and exaggerated. Now, most memoirs contain certain dramatic license, usually of this type:

• Retorting to cads in a pithier manner than real life
• Embellishing the details of what went on behind closed doors
• Endlessly deep wells of altruism
• Rose-colored memories of one’s bucolic childhood and/or gut-wrenching remembrances of childhood abuse
• Crazy exes
• Rehab as a virtue and not the pathetic bottom rung of an egocentric, self-inflicted downward spiral
• Invention of the ThighMaster
• Etc

We, the reading public, expect a little fudging of the facts for better reading, because the truth is that we are all mostly mundane and the absolute, literal truth of the events of just about anyone’s life would make for dull reading.

However, Mr. Frey has gone beyond the expected bounds of dramatic license for non-fiction works. It appears that the truth of the matter is that he spent his life as a spoiled, coked-out frat boy, nothing more, nothing less, and then finally stopped snorting blow long enough to write a fiction book that contains some small aspects of his actual life surrounded by very huge imaginings and tall tales.

For example, he derides rehab as useless and encourages people to kick drugs by using the slogan “just hang on”. Perfect. That’s like telling a depressed person to “just cheer up”. If he was in fact addicted to drugs, and he managed to quit them on his own without treatment, that might be noteworthy. However, the fact that it worked for him does NOT make going cold-turkey with no support the most effective way for true addicts. I would not be surprised to find out that although Mr. Frey may have been an abuser of drugs, that he was not a true addict and so his blatherings about coping with drugs should be discarded, if for no other reason than they are based on a sample size of one (very impeachable source) and have not been proven to be repeatable.

In another case of melodramatic license, Mr. Frey twists the details of a tragedy from his high school days into a “Rebel Without a Cause” moment in his life. The facts are that two 17 year old girls were riding with some other guy in a car, and the guy raced a train to the crossing and lost. He was broadsided on the passenger side and both girls died. The driver survived, was prosecuted for his crimes and served time for the accident, due to his blood alcohol level. The main players in the story, interviewed by The Smoking Gun, have a vague recollection of who James Frey is, but also have a clear recollection that he was in no way involved in the incident. These witnesses include the dead girls parents and friends. However, Mr. Frey moves the whole incident back 5 years so that it happened when he was 12, and weaves himself into the plot by claiming he helped a girl sneak out of her house to the movies so she could go on a secret date with a boy her parents disapproved of, and on the way back from her date she was killed. Mr. Frey was, of course, wracked with guilt, and also became the focal point for the wrath of the entire town, who blamed him and felt sorry for the poor football star driver of the car. Mr. Frey makes no mention of the other dead girl, or of the fact that it happened 5 years later, or of the fact that the three people involved had left a party with many witnesses and headed to another party, nor of the fact that neither girl left home using him as a cover story. Basically, he makes no mention of anything that matches the reality of the situation.

In another example, Mr. Frey tells about being in a drug-fueled rage, striking a police officer with his car, assaulting said police officer and his backup, inciting nearby watchers to riot against the cops, being beaten down by the police, and finally serving 3 months in jail as a result. The actual story, as uncovered by The Smoking Gun, is that he was drunk, made an illegal u-turn, didn’t hit a cop, didn’t start a fight, didn’t incite a riot, was released after 5 hours, and the cops noted on the arrest report that “He was polite and cooperative at all times”. Yeah, what a rebel, huh?

And the list goes on and on and on and on, click the link in the first sentence up there to read the full expose on The Smoking Gun. All of this would simply be humorous and a bit sad to me, except for one thing. Oprah Winfrey was enthralled with this guy’s fable, and has treated him as if he were a near-messianic example of what she and all her quivering desperate housewife audience want…the “Bad Boy” who cleaned himself up, not with outside help, but with the sheer force of his own superhuman will, beating up cops, inciting riots, vomiting and bleeding on airlines, and reading great works of literature to illiterate cell-mates in prison along the way. A suburban housewives’ wet dream come true.

And the fact that he is being held up as an example by someone with the undeniable cultural power of Oprah Winfrey means that people are taking his story to heart. This means that there are addicts who are tattooing “Just Hold On” over their trackmarks instead of going into rehab. There are people who are looking at the devil-may-care actions of the fictionalized James Frey as something to emulate. This would not be a good idea even if his stories were true. But the fact that his stories appear to be based on his imagination makes it even more wrong.

And the most wrong, most vile aspect of this whole thing to me is the fact that Oprah is standing behind this chump with her full support, in the face overwhelming facts and the admission of the author that he took great license with the facts. I can almost forgive Mr. Frey for his book, because at the time he wrote it he had no idea it would ever even be published, much less become the second best selling book of 2005 behind Harry Potter. So, he told a wild tale, characterized it as a “memoir”, managed to sell it, and then had to stand behind it as it caught fire. I find that aspect to be sad but understandable…the spoiled frat boy caught in a white lie to aggrandize himself and make a few bucks.

But Ms. Winfrey is already rich beyond belief and has nothing at stake here other than the fact that she adopted this guy as her pet bad-boy, and now seems not to be able to let go and face the facts. For example, Mr. Frey appeared on Larry King Live, admitted to his fabrications while defending them as within the bounds of dramatic license, and Oprah called in and said that regardless of the truth, it’s his “story” that is important. Here are Ms. Winfrey’s incisive arguments in support of Mr. Frey and his book:

“If you’re an addict whose life has been moved by this story and you feel that what James went through was able … to help you hold on a little bit longer, and you connected to that, that is real. That is real,” she said. “And it’s … irrelevant discussing, you know, what happened or did not happen to the police.”

Wow. Oprah thinks that it is irrelevant to discuss the actual facts of this asshole’s life and instead encourages real addicts with real problems to embrace the fictionalized actions of a mythical being that James Frey created in his head and put into his book? That is the height of irresponsibility, and although I have never been a fan of Oprah’s I used to have respect for her and the good that she seemed to try to do in the world. But in this case she has abandoned any claim to righteousness or the moral high ground, because she is using her awesome stature as a media powerhouse to try and do what all women who fall for bad boys end up doing…trying to justify it in the face of utter tragedy. She might as well have said:

“You just don’t understand him, he’s not really like that. If you knew how he was in private, how much he cares, and how much he’s had to go through you’d know why I love him, even when he hits me and sleeps around and steals the rent money and hits the kids and gets fired and drives drunk and…and…and…and…”

The litany of a woman and her bad-boy-gone-wrong. Oprah needs to “Just Hang On”, forget about her ego, and come clean that she backed a loser here, if for no other reason than to stop the harm that his book coupled with her publicity is doing to people who are being sent the wrong message…real people with real problems. One of my great fears in this story is that we will find out that Oprah has some sort of financial stake in the success of this book, or his next book, or his movie, or his TV show, or something else, and so is taking these irresponsible actions not out of a misplaced mothering instinct but as a coldly calculated business decision to stem her losses. I actually don’t think even Oprah is capable of stooping that low, but given the spectacle she has made of herself thus far, I would not be surprised to learn that was the reason behind her actions.

• Leave a comment... (1)

First of all, be prepared to pay attention. If you’re not in the mood to stay focused and track details and make logical jumps and not be spoon-fed the typical, ham-handed, Hollywood hoopla, then skip this movie and go see King Kong. However, if you’re in a thoughtful mood and want to be challenged, educated, and entertained, then go see Syriana.

It also helps if you have an interest in geopolitics and a healthy skepticism that causes you to wonder what the differences are between what the government says, what the news reports, and what reality is. Syriana tells a complicated story by following several key characters and showing their points of view as they interact, intersect, or pass in the night.

The backdrop of the story is the oil bidness and how the trillions of dollars involved end up causing oil companies to act as nation-states, and also causes the disenfranchised of the world to direct their hatred at the oil companies in the same way they hate fat, comfortable western nations.

The movie is a fictionalized story based on a non-fiction book by a former CIA agent who worked the Middle East beat back in the 80’s. The book is called “See No Evil”, by Robert Baer. I have not yet read the book, but plan to do so very soon.

The story borders on being opaque, and I had to lean over to Mynagirl more than once and whisper stuff like “Which brother is he?” and “Is that somebody we’re already supposed to know?”. But it gives you just enough of the story so that even though the blanks aren’t all filled in, you’re able to get the gist of it. I like that in a movie…challenge me to keep up and don’t feel you have to have some character exposit everything for the audience.

Along with its intricate plotting the film also has great acting and directing. George Clooney disappears into his role as a the CIA agent, sporting a full beard and a few more pounds that make him seem much more Everyman-y and much less Clooney-y. Then there’s Christopher Plummer – yes, that Christopher Plummer, from The Sound of Music – turning in a chillingly effective performance as a behind-the-scense string-puller. Matt Damon is also effective as the eager and idealistic consultant.

If you’re comfortable having a black-and-white view of the world, and you don’t want that worldview challenged, you should skip this film. Everything and everybody in this film is some shade of grey and while some of the characters are truly bad, none are truly good in the typical Hollywood sense. But if you have an open mind and are energized by challenges then this might be the movie for you.

• Leave a comment... (0)