The Stew

There have been a couple of times, watching some TV show or movie, when a piece of music suddenly appeared and the combination of images, emotions, lyrics and notes elevated whatever was going on. The use of “This Woman’s Work” in the film She’s Having a Baby is an example of how it can work brilliantly for dramatic effect.

I was thinking about that recently because I ran into an example this week that fires on all cylinders… in a video game, of all places.

I’ve heard the song “No Rest for the Wicked” by Cage the Elephant, and it’s okay. It’s fun, even. But pair it up with the pseudo-cell-shaded, dark-humored goodness of the sci-fi RPG shooter Borderlands and you’ve got a toe-tapping intro that revels in its own bad-assery.

If you’re the type of person who would enjoy a sci-fi RPG shooter, I defy you to watch that and not want to play this. It’s damn near perfect in setting up the visual and emotional tone of the game.

Exactly a week ago, from Rush Limbaugh: “This is the greatest teaching moment for Obama and he won’t get it.  The people of the world hate this country more than they like him, and they don’t like him all that much.”

Today: Obama Wins Nobel Peace Prize.

I’m sure this is somehow a bad thing for America.

“Stargate Universe.” Mostly harmless.

Pilots are funny things. They’ve got either .75 or 1.5 hours to make a good enough impression on you to keep tuning in. They’ve got to introduce a bunch of characters and a situation that is compelling on its own, but ripe enough with possibilities so that the remaining shows in the season don’t suck.

“Lost” had an amazing pilot.  “Star Trek: The Next Generation” had a pretty lousy one. SGU, as it’s known in the biz, just had a mediocre one.

It cribs visually from “Battlestar Galactica” and thematically from “Star Trek: Voyager” (or “Lost in Space,” for you old-timers.) There are too many characters. The setup is oddly contrived. The one thing it has going for it is that there are possibilities for the rest of the season.

So far, two thumbs enthusiastically sideways.

“District 9″ is not, despite some hyperbole to the contrary, the second coming of sci-fi cinema. But it has engendered some strong feelings — both positive and negative.

Yeah, there are clever allegories… and yeah, there are plot holes. Depending on who you talk to, the shaky-cam documentary-style cinematography is either a brilliant way to add to the sense of realism or a nausea-inducing brain fart of a first-time filmmaker. The third act is either a non-stop thrill ride or an unfortunate pandering to Hollywood sensibilities. The CGI effects are either gritty and utterly believable or a digital mess that comes off more as a demo reel than an element of an actual movie.

I’ve argued with people about various aspects of this movie, I’ve discussed its themes, and I’ve taken note of the way people are really arguing about his film. What I didn’t note during all that arguing and discussing is, I believe, one of the most important aspects of this movie: Fun.

I haven’t had this much fun at a movie in a long time. “Star Trek” was fun-ish,  but “District 9″ is made of fun. It’s brutal, sad, uplifting, funny — sometimes simultaneously. It’s filled with gore in exactly the way the “Saw” films aren’t, and I uncharacteristically found myself cheering as bodies exploded like water balloons.

And the digital characters? I want to rub George Lucas’ face in this film, because director Neil Blomkamp understands how to get a dramatic performance both from real actors and things that only exist in a computer and our imaginations. I was constantly impressed with what I was seeing, and I couldn’t wait to see what was coming next.

I understand some of the criticisms that have been leveled at the film, and I even agree with some of them. But doesn’t anyone go to the movies just to have fun any more? I’m not talking about Adam- Sandler-esqe in-one-eye-and-out-the-other comedic fun. I’m talking about genuine glee.

That’s got to be worth something.

Okay, so their cheap envelopes force the USPS to crack Blu-ray discs. Other than that, what’s not to love about Netflix?

This isn’t a post about “Leverage” per se, despite the photo. (The show is amusing enough, and definitely worth checking out.) I just noticed last week that Netflix offers instant streaming for episodes of the show from season 2. As in, the season that is currently airing Wednesday nights. Each episode apparently becomes available for streaming the day after appearing on TV.

Oh, and the episodes are in HD.

That makes Netflix, in my mind, the best thing out there since sandwich bread started coming in packages already cut up. It also brings to mind two questions, and I’ll rely on you for answers:

1. Are there any other series that Netflix is offering this way?
2. Are the cable companies crapping their pants? Seriously, if I hadn’t already scaled back my cable to the lowest of the low packages, this sort of thing would have pushed me over the edge.

I want to make two points about Dick Cheney’s views on waterboarding. Here’s what he said in his speech to the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., yesterday.

In top secret meetings about enhanced interrogations, I made my own beliefs clear. I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program. The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do. The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.

That’s a bold claim, and one that — conveniently — may never be provable. He can continue to point to real or fictitious classified documents that may or may not back up what he’s saying, and those documents cannot be unclassified for security reasons. He can even go through the motions of asking for such documents to be released, knowing full well that they won’t be.

Of course, he could have released such documents when he was in power, but didn’t. Applying Occam’s razor,  he’s lying.

It amazes me that we’re even having this discussion about the efficacy of torture. It’s beyond the point. The point is, you don’t get to do things that are unconstitutional. Police might have a much easier time with the war on drugs if they could just randomly enter people’s houses and search for contraband, but that pesky constitution says they can’t. Even if I could prove that such a policy would be efficacious, it’s not going to happen.

But let’s take Cheney’s logic to the next few steps:

• If our enhanced interrogation techniques, which included waterboarding, are legal, essential, justified and successful, does that mean all methods of torture are thus? If you’ve waterboarded a guy 180 times in one month and he hasn’t talked, would it be okay to waterboard his young child in front of him? Why or why not? Would it be okay to switch to flaying?
• If this works so well, why limit it to a few dozen suspects in Cuba? How about letting police departments all over the U.S. start using these techniques on anyone suspected of any crime? They’re legal and they work, after all.

I can’t believe this stuff even needs to be discussed in this country. Grabbing people and secreting them away to hidden dungeons where they’re tortured into confessing their crimes — that’s what we were told happened in the police state of the former Soviet Union. The United States was supposed to be fighting that sort of thing.

“Forgetting Sarah Marshall” is a funny film. At least I think it is. I only managed to get about 45 minutes into it before my Blu-ray player sounded like it was grinding corn for the day’s tortillas.

Lo and  behold, upon inspecting the disc, a crack near the edge. So I used the handy “Report a Problem” link on the Netflix site, and they’re sending me out a new one tomorrow. End of story, right?

Well, it would be, except that this happened to me two weeks ago with a copy of “Hancock.” The replacement Netflix sent out worked fine, so I managed to finish watching that one. (It was about half of really good movie, but that’s a story for a different blog post.) I didn’t think anything of it at the time — but now that it’s happened to me twice, I had to use the Google to find out if something is amiss.

Sure enough, there are plenty of annecdotes about cracked Blu-rays from Netflix. When pressed, Netflix apparently blames the Post Office for mishandling the discs. The Post Office apparently blames Netflix for using crappy paper envelopes for shipping the discs. They’re probably both right. All I know is that it’s enough of an inconvenience that the missus thinks I should drop Blu-rays and only order regular DVDs from Netflix. Cooler heads prevailed, but Netflix should take note: Since you’re charging extra for these things, you should probably find a way to have them delivered properly.

Edit (04/21/09): Replacement copy of “Forgetting Sarah Marshal,” also cracked.

Edit (04/24/09): Replacement of replacement copy of “Forgetting Sarah Marshal,” also cracked. Netflix customer service gave me a Post Office number and basically told me to bitch to them.

Edit (04/28/09): Replacement of replacement copy of replacement copy of “Forgetting Sarah Marshal,” also cracked. I’ve switched to DVD-only. If anyone knows how to contact Netflix executives to express displeasure, please let me know.

Edit (04/29/09): I thought I was going to get a DVD, but my Blu-ray subscription runs through the end of the month. So they sent me another cracked Blu-ray.

Edit (05/02/09): Another day, another cracked copy of “Forgetting Sarah Marshal.” This time, I didn’t ask for a replacement.

Quick — can you spot my left anterior descending artery in the first image? No? That’s because it was nearly completely blocked at the time. After doctors inserted a couple of tiny plastic/metal mesh thingys, it popped open as shown in the second image.

I had a heart attack. At 39. Unexpected, to say the least. I figured it out early enough and went to a hospital close enough that doctors say I shouldn’t suffer any permanent damage.

I’m pretty much back the way I was before, minus about 12 pounds and with a notable lack of bacon in my life. Most days go by and I don’t even think about it. Other days, I think about it as the life-changing experience that it actually was.

So anyway, if I haven’t been updating here very often lately, it’s because of this.

“Guilt is a Useless Emotion” is a track off the most recent New Order album. That title came to mind when I read a recent story on CNN.com about “TiVo Guilt.”

Apparently, people are having to deal with the fact that they’ve used their DVRs to record more TV than they can reasonably get to. I understand this concept for a couple of reasons. First, I grew up Catholic, so I know something about guilt. Second, I recently upgraded the hard drive in my home-built DVR from 200 GB to 500 GB — and I’m constantly in danger of running out of space.

However, even this recovering Catholic finds it hard to feel guilty about either not watching something contemporaneously with its broadcast (what is the point of a DVR, after all, if not for time-shifting) or deleting something without watching it at all. Here’s some unwatched stuff that I purged recently, without shedding a tear:

• The last half of season 2 of “Heroes.”
• The entire second season of “Notes from the Underbelly.”
• Five episodes of “The Graham Norton Show.”
• The movie “Flightplan.”

Some of these were probably worth watching. None of them were worth losing sleep over. And guilt? Please. Now I’ve got room for a few more episodes of “Fringe,” which I’m almost caught up on. But if I don’t get to them for a while, I think I’ll live.

…but that’s not really the point of this. I don’t want to gloat, after all. Although, I’ve got to say, I’ve been walking around with a spring in my step this week. And you can get these neat hats at CafePress.

No, I’d rather talk about Palin — because you just can’t get enough Palin. Turns out that in one post-election poll, 69% of Republicans think Palin helped the McCain-Palin ticket. This flies in the face of the results from “the only poll that matters,” wherein 60% of voters thought Palin was not qualified to be president.

After the election, Fox reported that McCain staffers said of Palin:

• She didn’t know Africa was a continent, and not a country
• She couldn’t name the three countries in the North American Free Trade Agreement (hint — it’s the three countries in North America)
• She spent way more on clothes and other stuff than was previously reported.

I understand that Republicans like things in black and white, and these revelations set up a clear black-and-white scenario. One of the following is true:

1) The McCain people who sat on this information and portrayed Palin as ready for prime time tried to foist a huge fraud on the American people; or

2) The McCain people have absolutely no scruples and are willing to make negative stuff up about others in order to hide their own shortcomings.

I really don’t care which one is true, although I’m willing to be that there’s more truth in #1 than #2. In either event, I’m even more sure that America did the right thing this week.