Uberfluff

As you may have guessed from today's Daily Fluff, I saw the latest Harry Potter movie this weekend.  Overall, I'd have to say that I was pleasantly surprised.  Having read the books, it becomes kind of hard to judge the movies fairly--not because I think the books are so wonderfully written (ahem . . . on the contrary), but because Rowling stuffs them with so much detail and so many subplots that adapting them must be the stuff of screenwriter nightmares.  And if I recall correctly, Half-Blood Prince was especially tough, as it was mainly about people's memories and teenage love, with very little action or real drama and an annoying amount of Harry mooning around about Ginny Weasley and moping about Dumbledore or Voldemort.   Full credit to the screenwriter, who took a lot of this dreck and made it sweet, human, and even elegant at times.  I suspect that someone who hasn't read the books may be a little lost at times, but that may be the best possible compromise between appeasing the fans and revealing details that are not only anticlimactic, but a bit confusing as well.  (E.g. When I told Gator why the actual Half-Blood Prince had that name, it was enough of a letdown from the dramatic promise of the title that he wished he hadn't bothered to ask.)

[Note of clarification: Despite what it may sound like, I did enjoy the books, despite my problems with the quality of the prose.  The writing itself may be mediocre, but the story and characters are--for the most part--first-rate.]

Last night, I managed to catch a few minutes of "The Superstars"--one of those pointless summer airtime fillers.  This one goes all '70's style and pairs up sort-of famous entertainment types with professional athletes in a sort-of athletic contest.  The fact that I only watched about 12 minutes of the 90 minute show should tell you all that you need to know.  It wasn't terrible.  It just wasn't as entertaining as the alternatives.

The problem, I think, is two-fold.  Part of it is the official celebrity boot-licking stance that seems de rigeur in a big chunk of our culture.  So the competition has the be staged in all sorts of ways that makes everyone feel good about themselves.  Instead of a Pros vs Joes showdown, the teams are one celebrity and one athlete, so what we're really doing is watching retired athletes compete with various levels of handicap.  And so that we can get a mix of stars, they try way hard to balance the teams, giving the athletic Julio Iglesias a partner in Brandi Chastain, while saddling Terrell Owens with some stick figure "supermodel."   Half the time, I couldn't identify the celebrity if my life depended on it--after all, once cute actress/model/singer is very much like another.  Who can keep up?  Of course, giant chunks of time are taken up with dull "post game" interviews, where we get the standard, "Oh isn't this fun, we're going to do our best to win," blather.  In the end, the only thing to hold our interest is watching the trash talking between Owens and Robert Horry.

Of course, there's very little excitement in trying to guess whether Lisa Leslie is a better long-jumper than Bodhi Miller.  I wish they'd accepted the fact that it's not too hard to rank the relative abilities of the star athletes, and turned it into more of a competition between the "star entertainers," with the athletes serving as a kind of general opponent.  (Yes, like Pros vs Joes.)  That way, it wouldn't seem so contrived, and I'm sure that the producers could have still figured out a way to make everyone spend most of the time in a bathing suit.

So, I finally got to see The Hangover.  Not only does it get a solid "thumbs up," but it restored my faith in movies a little.  I know that summer is the season for brain-dead blockbusters, but sometimes it feels as though the intelligence level of our big flicks (never high to begin with) has been slowly draining to the point where I begin to imagine the script being written by a slightly slow second-grade child.  That's definitely where they seem to peg their audience's ability to follow plot and dialogue at least.

But I suppose I shouldn't review the new Transformers movie before I've seen it.

Anyway, the Hangover is one of those movies that's going to movie line heaven, where guys repeat the best bits at each other forever and ever, amen.  What I find most interesting about it is how it handles the "crazy stuff happened when we got drunk last night" cliche.  My biggest problem with movies like this is that I usually don't believe that the characters involved really took part in all of this mayhem--it always seems so staged.  But somehow, I completely accept the bachelor party in the Hangover.  I'm not sure why--though I think it may be because the actors seem so ordinary and grounded that they seem to be sharing the audience's bewilderment at what went down the night before.

Oh, and Zack Galifianakis practically steals the movie with his clueless, socially awkward man-boy brother-in-law role.

(P.S. There's also a new Daily Fluff today that has nothing whatsoever to do with anything.)

Understandably, not everyone is a huge fan of Team America: World Police, but I confess that I really, really enjoy it for three primary reasons:

1. The way that they make fun of actors, especially Matt Damon.

2. The "We Need a Montage" song.

3. The "Pearl Harbor Sucks and I Miss You" song, wherein they ponder why Michael Bay gets to keep making movies.

It's number three that I'm focused on right now--and for the record, I think it a legitimate question.  No, the first Transformers movie wasn't terrible, but it also wasn't nearly as good as it could have been.  Bay doesn't make movies.  He makes wasted opportunities.  And his plots are so rigidly formulaic that you could swear they're actually written by a monkey with a laptop and a Screenwriting for Dummies book.  Which is why I bring you this parody of a Michael Bay My Little Pony movie:

Having watched most of Transporter 3 last night, I'm really in a mood about retarded evil masterminds.  (Though I didn't give up on it because of the dumb bad guy.  I gave up on it because of the obnoxious hot exotic chick, who spent the entire first half of the movie being a sullen, annoying twat.  Then, suddenly, she turns all seductive and vulnerable and our hero, instead of telling her to get bent, sleeps with her, then gets all protective of her.  This doesn't necessarily match up to my vision of hot, tough guys, who can generally get enough hot girls on their own, and are less likely to put up with crap from a random one who happens to be endangering his life.)

It has always annoyed me a little when movie villains shoot one of their henchmen on a whim.  I know that there's no better way to establish one's evilness than by killing one of your own, but it seems like a poor management decision.  It's hard enough to find good help without complicating matters by killing your employees based on your mood swings.  You know that can't help your retention rate.  And in Transporter, we have a guy who spends (what has to be) millions of dollars on an elaborate kidnapping scheme, including a highly sophisticated bomb system  meant to entrap the "best driver in the world" to take part in the plan--and all to coerce a government official into some toxic dumping contract.  Why not spend that money bribing some official in another country to do the same thing?  It would probably be cheaper, and have far fewer unpredictable variables.  Hell, for the cost of this scheme, you could probably have hired a scientist and figured out how to recycle the stuff into plastic lawn chairs.  And then you wouldn't have made the mistake of giving a James Bond clone hero a lasting grudge against you.

Last night, I watched Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist.  It raised many interesting questions like: "Would anyone in real life actually be attracted to Michael Cera?"; and "I mean to the point where hot girls were actually fighting over him?"; and "Is this supposed to take place in an alternate universe where it's considered sexually attractive to be awkward and mumble a lot?"; and "Why the hell would a band want to make their concerts a big secret? Doesn't that inhibit their ticket sales a bit? Not to mention pissing off any industry folks that might have some interest in seeing them?"  Not to mention, "How is it that, in a night of driving all over creation, these people never once have a problem finding a place to park a full size van in New York City?"

To say that I didn't like the movie is an understatement.  This was like a 2 hour conversation with one of those guys who thinks that the bands someone listens to are somehow deeply revealing about one's personality.  Oh, and with a sprinkle of the "deep" life observations of twentysomethings playing high school students.  Yes, there is a moment where someone quotes obscure music lyrics and we're supposed to appreciate the sincerity and sensitivity of the moment.  And yes, there is a scene where two teenagers fool around in the Electric Ladyland studios and we get to see the girl's orgasm via the meters on the soundboard.  Does the mean, shallow girl get her comeuppance?  Do the token gay friends make lots of outrageous statements in a desperate attempt to add cutting edge humor to this bland cover of a coming-of-age comedy?  Don't make me laugh. 

And here's the truly depressing part: Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist had a US box office of $31,287,493.  The average movie ticket price in 2008 was about $7.18.  That means that about 4,357,590 tickets were sold for this movie.  The movie running time is about 90 minutes.  That means that those 4 million-ish tickets represent about 6,536,385 wasted man hours in watching this movie.  That's the equivalent of 272,349 wasted days--or 746 wasted years--in cumulative time that we (as a country) spent watching this thoroughly pointless movie.  Don't tell me that's not a downer.  So there really isn't such a thing as a victimless crime. 

The anti-smoking people want me to start smoking.  That's the only explanation I can come up with for their relentlessly irritating ad campaigns.  They're secretly trying to drive me to tobacco use by being preachy, inaccurate, and over-the-top.  And I don't even like to smoke.  But I would if it would stop smug 20-something "Truth" people from entering my living room and preening about the evils of big tobacco.  I'll take evil corporate guys in suits over smug pseudo-hipsters any day.

It was bad enough when they were just being hysterical in documentary format with their little pieces of man-on-the-street performance art.  The damned things were ironic about everything except the fact that they were being as manipulative with facts and statistics as the big, evil tobacco companies they attacked.  But all of that paled before the new Syke 9 campaign.

Where to begin?  Well, there's the fact that most people stopped saying "syke" in the mid '80s sometime.  Well, except for my sister.  And then they did weeks of ads where they didn't even hint that this is about cigarettes, instead giving us an energy drink that advertises like Axe body spray.  If it weren't for the obvious allusions to cigarette smokng in later ads, I'd be convinced that they were trying to warn young men about the dangers of overusing cheap cologne.  And a worthy cause that would be. 

And all of this in a pathetic effort to make it seem like smoking isn't cool and opposing smoking is.  Nice try guys, but you should have had a nice long chat with the anti-drug folks before sinking millions into an ad campaign the primary purpose of which is apparently to get me so annoyed that I throw something at my flat screen TV, permanently damage it, and become so depressed that I skip right past tobacco and start on heroin.  It is impossible to make cigarette smoking or drug use appear uncool via commercials, cartoons, dramatic school presentations, or short films.  The Force is too strong in them to be affected by the lameness that is the PSA.  The only way to really pierce their cool aura is to grab a 43 year-old meth head, complete with missing teeth and oozy complexion, and have her introduce herself to children individually.  (While chain smoking Marlboro Reds, of course.)  Don't let her talk though--other than mentioning how much she loves getting high and smoking cigarettes.  You don't want her sharing about the time she did lines with Keith Richards and undermining the whole project.

We did it.  We bought a Playstation 3.  We didn't want to, since there aren't many games for the P3 that aren't also available for XBox.  In fact, none of this would have happened if we hadn't first bought the crappy Blu Ray player.

There's something about having a high-def TV that gradually convinces you that you don't just want a Blu Ray player, you need one.  And once you talk yourself through the doubt and conservatism that always accompanies media switches,  there you are, in the Blu Ray aisle at Best Buy, overwhelmed by the meaningless points that they use to bulk up the "features" descriptions.  (The worst is when they allude to the design or basic controls as a feature.  I don't look at it as a bonus that my DVD player has a "play" button.  I tend to expect that.)

Anyway, we ended up with a seemingly capable Insignia Blu Ray, but when it got home, it was the worst-behaved Blu Ray player ever.  It stuttered and stalled, loaded in geological time, and clawed up the furniture.  Not to mention that it couldn't even play the new James Bond movie--not, as some might claim out of an innate sense of taste, but because its firmware was out of date, and there was no practical way to update it.

I know that some people would claim that you should try to work through these things, but watching a Blu Ray disc shouldn't be a painful experience that makes you long for VHS.  The problem we discovered, on taking it back to the store, is that unless you're willing to sell your first born, Blu Ray machines that solve the loading and easy updating problems are prohibitively expensive.  But the PS3, which of course, can play Blu Ray and has better memory and wi-fi capability than almost anything else in that price range was the obvious solution.  This is kind of a bummer, since it's a big, ungainly piece of electronics that hunkers on the entertainment center like a sad, lonely hunchback.  But at least we have something that plays Blu Ray discs that isn't in danger of being hurled out the window in frustration.