Sporadic Ramblings

A recent NY Times poll shows that 42% of respondents think humans and other animals have existed in their present form since the beginning of time. Sigh. Of course, people believe all kinds of weird stuff, but in this case, they want to teach it at school.

It is weird to see this issue actually progress backwards through time. I think we're back to about 1870 at this point. If it continues, we might get back to 1781 or so, when Thomas Jefferson and other Deists were arguing that extinctions were impossible and never happened, because God wouldn't let things die out:

The bones of the Mammoth which have been found in America, are as large as those found in the old world. It may be asked, why I insert the Mammoth, as if it still existed? I ask in return, why I should omit it, as if it did not exist? Such is the economy of nature, that no instance can be produced of her having permitted any one race of her animals to become extinct; of her having formed any link in her great work so weak as to be broken. -- From Notes on the State of Virgina, 1781-1782.

What's doubly weird is that no other countries are suffering from this plague of boobs - it's mostly a dead issue in Europe and South America.

Loved it. Kind of a Harry Potter/Breakfast Club feel with the goofy superhero stuff I love from The Tick and games of Champions back in college. Not all of the jokes worked, but I laughed out loud on many occasions, and the story, while not innovative, is fun, sweet, and nicely done. I went with my kids, and I was very happy to see that for once I was watching a kid-oriented movie where no one farted. There was one reference to a full diaper, but it was relatively low key. See Racing Stripes for wildly inappropriate kid-movie scatology. I'm not a fuddy-duddy, and I know from being six once that such stuff is very funny then, but I'm not there anymore.

Also, though the high school kids did fall in love, or at least in like, there was nothing more than kissing. Likewise, there wasn't any reference to drugs or alcohol. And gee, look, the movie was still really funny without David Spade making jokes about poo.

This is one of those movies where I wonder how anybody gives it a bad review. Sure, it's not great art, and sure it's derivative, but the themes it's re-using are solid and make you feel good. Those who want a comedy about young superheroes to be full of angst and meaning should go skulk back to the beret-filled coffeeshop from whence they came.

Didn't like it. Everybody else I know thinks it rocks, and I usually love John Cusack in anything. I was talking about it with a friend who pointed out that I don't really like movies about low-life people, which is generally true (e.g. Goodfellas, Scarface), though not always (Godfathers 1 through 3 - yes, I liked 3, and yes, it's not nearly as good as 1 & 2). Maybe that's part of it. When there's a movie about seedy folks, I usually want at least one of them to be trying for redemption, or at least be good at heart, so I have somebody to cheer for.

I think there were other problems for me here too, though. The characters didn't seem real, at all. None of the three main characters rang true for me - they all seemed to do things (big and little) later in the movie that seemed inconsistent with who I'd thought they were from earlier in the movie. They also never really felt like real people. I know they were in a weird situation and lifestyle, but still.

It also felt like the movie was shooting for quirky but missed and hit weird. This is just my own gut-feeling issue, to be sure - I like quirky (High Fidelity, also a Frears-Cusack movie) and I tend to really dislike weird (Mulholland Drive).

Finally, the ending just killed it for me. I'll say no more, but it was a big cop out for me, as this kind of thing almost always is.

From the previews, I thought Sin City would be way too stylish and stupid for me to enjoy, so I didn't run out and see it in the theater. I figured it might be worth a shot at home, though, and it turns out my initial take was only partly right. The movie is one of those that's interesting to watch from a movie-design perspective - it was really cool how much like a comic book they'd managed to make it, and it oozed with visual style, with flashes and glimpses of color occasionally sweeping through the black and white. I am not familiar with the source comic books, and I haven't really read comics at all since Groo, but even so, I could recognize and admire what they'd done with color and scene composition.

That it drips with style doesn't necessarily make it a good movie, though. The stories (three of them plus some connecting stuff) were fairly simplistic and disjointed, and it was hard to care much about any of the characters. In most movies, saying the characters were like those in comic books is an insult; in this case, it was the whole point, but even so, that doesn't make them complex enough to carry a movie. The violence was largely pointless, of the "look how violent yet artsy we're being!" variety, rather than having any meaning or emotion connected to it.

I had the same problem with this as I did with the Kill Bills. They were going primarily for style, and the characters, plot, and dialogue were sacrificed to this end. In the case of Kill Bill, I didn't really care for the style Tarantino ended up with at all; in this case, I found the style fascinating, but it still left me wanting more of a movie. I don't know that it would have been possible to do both (comic book style with a great movie underneath), so I guess I can't fault them too much.

So, an interesting experience, but as I thought, I wasn't all five-star-ga-ga-my-life-has-changed-completely over it.

Here's an example of creationist-style pseudo-science applied to another popular religious story:

• Every year, presents arrive in homes on December 25th in roughly 80% of the households in the U.S.
• For these houses, this is normally the most presents they get in a year.
• If there are about 116,000,000 households, the odds that 80% of them would just happen to get most of their presents on exactly the same day is about 1 in 10 to the 100,000th power. It is impossible that Christmas could happen by random chance alone.
• The story of Santa Claus offers a possible explanation for this phenomenon.
• Public opinion polls show that a significant portion of the public (albeit mostly under age 7) believe in Santa Claus

Given the popular support for Santa Claus, and that stories about him explain a widely observed yet improbable phenomenon, we should teach the story of Santa Claus in science classes.

Is this thing on?