30 Days of Night - Review

Director: David Slade
Writers: Niles/Beattie/Nelson
Based on the Comic by: Ben Templesmith
Starring: Josh Hartnett/Melissa George

Vampire fans won't be disappointed in 30 Days of Night, but they won't find anything new, either.

That isn't a damning statement. With horror and its myriad sub-genres, you go in expecting certain things to happen. When they do, you feel strangely satisfied, as long as they are handled well.

30 Days of Night is about the downfall of smalltown Barrow, Alaska. As the film's title suggests, the town suffers from 30 straight days of night during the winter. When you throw vampires into the mix, you know that the film is going to be a bloodbath for the Barrow locals.

The film asks for some suspension of disbelief beyond the usual "vampire-bit-me" stuff. In the film, Barrow, Alaska is cut off from the outside world for the entire month, because planes can't land there. Planes can't land at night? This seems dubious, and it is: if you go on Alaskan Airlines' website, you'll see that they have flights to Barrow every day throughout the winter.

But that's nitpicking. As I said in a review of Vacancy, horror films are getting harder and harder to make. It's simply impossible to cut anyone off from the outside world. Cell phones, airplanes, the internet, you name it. So when the filmmakers use the old "last plane out of town," or, "Damn, the cell phone doesn't have reception," you have to forgive them for it.

I enjoyed 30 Days. It harkened back to John Carpenter's The Thing. I like movies where the locals think they are king of castle, only to have their safe little habitat become a nightmare prison.

Josh Harnett does an okay turn as the hero of the movie, once he stops snivelling and whining. Male leads have recently decided to get in touch with their sensitive side. It's all right in a Dr. Phil kind of way, but when it comes to killing vampires, I want my heroes to have some backbone.

The rest of the cast is pretty good. Danny Huston, as the head vampire, is suitably menacing and mean spirited. Gone are the days of classy vampires seducing young women. Now they swoop from street corner to street corner, expose terribly sharp teeth, and utter a grunt once in a while.

In this film, the vampires "speak," which is a shame. Made-up gibberish doesn't sound convincing no matter how many times you run it through the special effects lab, so it comes off as hokey. I wish they'd just let actors speak, or not speak. Not speaking is creepy. Speaking gibberish pulls you out of the movie and makes you ask yourself questions like, "I wonder if that's Hungarian, or if they just made all that up?"

If you can avoid thoughts like that, and keep your mind on the fact that this is meant to be moderately mindless, somewhat gory fun, then 30 Days will entertain you this Halloween.

Saw IV Buzzing at Box Office

Every October they release a Saw movie, and every opening weekend it does well.

I wasn't really a big fan of the Saw horror franchise when it came on the scene. The premise was sound, but Danny Glover's acting in the first one turned my stomach more than the gory special effects.

See the full weekend box office here.

Black Day in October

Well, I saw this coming all season long but, of course, I put off wanting to believe it.

Read the story here.

Merci...and Good-Night

I've pointed out before that Sarkozy walks to the beat of a different drummer. Being French, he gets away with it. Still, I can't fault him for this one. If a reporter showed up from the "most respected news magazine show in TV history" and started asking about my wife, I'd say au revoir, too.

Tonight on 60 Minutes, they aired an interview between Lesley Stahl and the French President. In the interview, Stahl asked Sarkozy about his marital relationship (not long after the interview was taped, Sarkozy and his wife separated). Sarkozy got up, said, "Merci," took off his microphone, and walked out.

The press would have a field day with any British or American leader that did that. Instead, 60 Minutes promoted the piece by calling Sarkozy "smart, energetic, and tempestuous."

Here's what I had to say about Sarkozy and his views on Iran a few weeks ago.

More on what Sarkozy called a "stupid" interview here.

Condom Testing Sounds Great - But How Much For Overtime?

Here's a job posting you don't see that often. Durex is accepting applications for condom-testers until November 4th. Their website asks if you're a "sexual intercourse enthusiast" and if you'd like to win $1000.

Hmm. Sounds like a no-brainer. Could also be a hoax, but it would be interesting to see their comeback.

You can find the application here.

Amsterdam Burning

No, not the bongs, but the city itself.

These two stories from Amsterdam deserve consideration. France is not the only country with riots on its hands.

Check out the story here, and the choice of words here. Meanwhile, an Amsterdam blogger gives his perspective and the breaking news here.

"Lost" Stars Get Drunk - Lose Jobs

According to the AP, another star of the ABC program Lost has been busted under the suspicion of drinking and driving. Daniel Dae Kim, one of the stars of the show, was taken into custody in Hawaii on Friday morning. He posted bail and was released.

It doesn't bode well for Kim. Two other stars of the show, Michelle Rodriguez and Cynthia Watros, were busted for the same offense in 2005. Shortly after pleading guilty to the charges, their characters were killed off and the show went on without them. In 2006, Adewale Akinnuoye Agbaje had a run-in with the cops for driving without a license and disobeying a police officer. His character, too, was quickly given the axe, though criminal charges were later dropped because the prosecutor determined they could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

I have to hand it to ABC. I'm not sure if the criminal charges alone led to the show dumping the actors, but I can see why they would. It's bad business dealing with people that get into trouble with the cops or threaten people's lives by driving drunk. Hawaii is a small place, and the locals wouldn't be too enamored with the show if it is was loaded with actors that got away with breaking the law.

Kim is just another in a list of actors that makes me shake my head and ask, "You can't afford a driver?"

Another Final Wake Up Call - This Time We Mean It!

The UN has come out with another of its weird reports on the state of the environment and, no shock here, it is "the final wake-up call to the international community."

Tick...Tick...Tick...
As if we can take this seriously. The UN and their enviro-boob friends have been giving "final wake-up calls" for so long that I long ago hit the snooze button and called reception to tell them not to bother.

Who exactly is in this "international community?" Nobody agrees on anything, and nothing ever gets done. It might take a village to raise a Clinton kid, but the UN hasn't even managed to construct a mud hut without screwing it up, swindling cash, and letting people get massacred before their very eyes.

In their latest report, the UN tells us that there are too many people on the planet, and that the Earth can't sustain humanity's growing population. They then go on to report that children are dying at an alarming rate, and that people in Africa will starve to death in short order.

So which is it? Too many people, or too many people dying? They're opposites of the same pole, so if one is bad, the other must be good.

Starvation, by the way, is never caused by a food shortage. There's tons of food lying around. Famine has always been caused by political regimes keeping food from people, not by people wandering into a desert and realizing that there's nothing to grow so they might as well sit down and die. The UN could try to do something about thug regimes not feeding people, but they're too busy writing bogus reports on climate change. Not as messy that way.

I especially love the line in the UN's report that claims humans aren't leaving enough areas alone to nature. And here I was thinking that homo sapiens are a part of nature.

The UN jokesters never get tired of issuing "final wake-up calls." Us, the patient idiots, never seem to get tired of hearing them.

Wake me when it's over.

Borat Lawsuit

If you saw the film Borat, you might remember the five Alabama dinner hosts that invited Borat (actor Sacha Baron Cohen) into their home for an American cultural lesson with Kazakhstan Television. Borat, of course, was not working for Kazakhstan Television. His dinner hosts were ignorant of the fact that Borat was an actor, and the scene was being taped for the Borat feature film.

Now they're suing for the humiliation that they claim he put them through. I was wondering how many lawsuits might be filed against the filmmakers not only for insulting unwitting participants, but for not getting releases to have them in the film in the first place. 20th Century Fox claims that releases were signed, but I wonder what the language in them looks like. It should be an interesting case.

Catch the story on the lawsuit here.

Here is what I wrote about Borat back in August:

I watched Borat last night. It disturbed me.

I’d been putting it off for quite a while, because the commercials told me everything I needed to know. He was going to make Americans look dumb, and he was going to do it in a faux-reality TV format.

One thing the film did show me is that it’s becoming more and more hip to pick on Jews. Antisemitism is returning to the days of being acceptable as long as its done to a laugh track. One scene that particularly bothered me involved the title character throwing money at two cockroaches. The roaches represented the elderly Jewish couple that had given him a place to stay for the night.

Yes, yes, I know. It was only a comedy. I can laugh at most anything, and I can dish it out as much as I can take it. Still, I had an unsettling feeling creep over me with every new Jew-bash in the picture.

I pointed out some time ago that Hollywood has no problem bashing Asians. Jews get the same treatment. Try that with blacks, Hispanics, or gays, and your career would be over. It's interesting how the degree of your prejudice is measured by what group you happen to be picking on.

The film did manage to show me that while Americans can appear stupid at the hands of a comedian and his editor, they always appear extremely polite and welcoming. I doubt that’s the effect Borat was going for.

Photo: Yahoo Movies

Elizabeth: The Golden Age - Review

Director: Shekhar Kapur
Writers: Hirst/Nicholson
Starring: Cate Blanchett/Clive Owen
Runtime: 1 hour 54 minutes

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is described as historical fiction, which is a good thing. I promised myself that I wouldn't harp too much on the film if it took liberties with the documented facts of Elizabeth's reign. History is covered in dust and cobwebs, and the further back you go, the thicker the dust gets. If you were to use only the primary evidence of written documents to make a movie about Elizabeth, you'd probably end up with a 30 minute film. Liberties must be taken, and forgiven, in order to fill out facts and turn it into some kind of emotional story.

This film, however, leaves you with one eyebrow raised throughout the showing. Not in surprise, but in incredulity. Would a Queen really break down and lose control like that in front of her courtiers? Not once, but four or five times? Would she really let commoners talk to her like that? And, if she would, how long would it be before a wily courtier used her instability to his advantage?

These are some of the questions that drift through your mind during a rather confusing story that is covered with a bombastic musical score and lavish costumes.

The film takes place towards the end of Elizabeth I's reign as ruler of England. Her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, is locked up in England and scheming to steal the throne with Spanish aid. King Philip II of Spain, a Catholic like Mary, despises the Protestant Elizabeth. He hopes to conquer England and knock Elizabeth from the throne. In the film version, he hopes to install his daughter Isabella as eventual Queen of England, which might have been news to Mary.

Henry VIII
Want backstory? Okay, follow this: Mary (Bloody Mary, not Mary, Queen of Scots), was Philip's wife. After she dropped dead, the throne went to Elizabeth, to the chagrin of English Catholics. Since Henry VIII, Elizabeth's father, had divorced Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Elizabeth's mother (Anne Boleyn), Elizabeth was regarded as a bastard, and not eligible to take the throne. Long breath. Therefore, Mary, Queen of Scots, who was a Catholic great-granddaughter of Henry VII, was considered by Catholics (and Phillip II in Spain) to be the rightful owner of the throne. That is why Philip was in cahoots (fine: secret communication) with Mary, Queen of Scots, in her prison cell. If he could get her on the throne, that would put paid to Elizabeth's Protestant reign, and Mary (not to mention the Pope) would owe Philip bigtime.

Got it? I don't blame the screenwriters for leaving this out of the movie.

Sir Walter Raleigh, however, does make it on the screen. Though he doesn't get much press in the history books vis a vis Elizabeth, the film gives him the full blown movie star treatment. Elizabeth is attracted to him, and enjoys hearing his stories of adventure on the high seas. He informs her that he has named a colony in New World after her: Virginia, for the Virgin Queen.

The rest of the story is convoluted, as the filmmakers seem unsure of where it should go. It could have been a story of political intrigue between Phillip II of Spain and Elizabeth I of England. Or it could have been a love story between Raleigh and Elizabeth (a love story with no foundation in fact). Or it could have been a story of the Protestant Elizabeth's troubles with the Catholic Church (the Pope in abstentia, Philip II as bad guy on the horizon).

In the end, the film tries to do all three, and you end up caring about none of them.

As far as the Catholic/Protestant angle, it was fairly obvious that the good old Christian/Western-bash has made it into historical films. The movie's modern day language and politics is a joke. Elizabeth I comes off as an agnostic, leaning towards atheist. The filmmakers were either unaware that the Protestant faith still considers Jesus Christ a top dog, or they ignored it.

The Spanish, on the other hand, are the film's Christian Neo-Cons. Philip II is a gibbering manic-depressive, constantly quoting scripture and declaring that a Catholic God will help him win the day. The main sails on the Spanish fleet are decorating with portraits of Jesus Christ and crosses. When he kneels to pray, his face is a sweating mask of religious zealotry. Back in England, when Elizabeth I prays, she says no words aloud and appears to be contemplating her next dinner party.

I was amused at the ignorance of the writers and the director. No matter which side you come down on with today's religious beliefs, they do not match the flavor and fervour of five centuries past. I was curious to see how they would handle the religious disputes of Elizabeth I's reign, and they completely fumbled, yet fumbled on purpose.

In Elizabeth's day, there was no such thing as a separation between church and state. Elizabeth's faith was not called the Church of England for fun. Her father established the Church of England so he could get a divorce and not kneel at the feet of the Pope. Mary I, Elizabeth's predecessor, brought the Catholic Church back to England. Then Elizabeth took over, and made it Protestant again. Religious conflict was common for the times, and Elizabeth was hardly as "above the fray" as a liberal Senator from California might be.

There is no question that the costumes and production value are top notch. Unfortunately, you might feel like you're watching a music video. There are a few short scenes where Elizabeth is filmed wearing beautiful clothes under beautiful lighting, while the camera twists and turns for the best angle. It's pretty, but it's bogus. The director of photography was obviously told to shut up when he said, "Um, boss...this doesn't look like it's lit with torches."

They did try for some subtlety. There is one scene where a dwarf is standing by Elizabeth's throne. No mention is made of her, and she can't be a jester, because she's too cozy with the Queen and she's dressed too finely. This is probably Lady Mary Grey, sister to Catherine Grey. Catherine Grey was one woman who had a legitimate claim to the throne, but died leaving only two bastard (and therefore, out of luck) sons. In another scene, a ship's Captain calls out the name, "Drake!" to let you know that Francis Drake was there during the Spanish Armada invasion. Beyond that, however, the film is lavish, in your face soap opera.

As for the Spanish Armada sequence, when Philip II rolls the dice to invade England, I will not go into it too much and blow it for you. It takes place towards the end of the film, and is meant to leave you with the cozy feeling that after this, England's future is bright and cheery. As any armchair historian knows, England's future was never bright and cheery: political intrigue abounded at home, and England had to fight and swindle for everything that it got abroad.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age left me wondering what the filmmakers were trying to accomplish. I don't believe they accomplished very much, either as entertaining narrative or history lesson.

Photos: Yahoo Movies

CNN: We Didn't Start the Fire - But it Can Help Our Ratings

Here's a memo that Drudge leaked about a CNN news meeting, where network President Joe Klein discusses how CNN should handle the California fires and the network's upcoming TV special on global warming.

Anderson Cooper heard his marching orders and acted accordingly. On October 23, during his show Anderson Cooper 360, he said:

“At the top of the next hour, as I said, the big picture. These fires are really a piece of it. Fire, drought, global warming, climate change, deforestation, it is all connected, tonight, 9:00 p.m. Eastern…‘Planet in Peril’ starts in just 30 minutes.”

CNN: the Cynical News Network.

Halloween Movie Treats

I bid you...Vellcome...

Halloween's on the way, so it's time to take a look at some favorite horror flicks you should be ordering at the corner video store. First, let's look at the horror genre in general.

Horror has several sub-genres. By genre, I do not mean broad terms like horror or suspense. Both of these have sub-genres that are tried, tested, and sometimes true. Here's a look at some of them and their rules:

Vampire: The Lost Boys, Blade, Interview with the Vampire, Salem's Lot, Queen of the Damned, and the numerous Dracula movies. These stories always involve an innocent population being infiltrated by a vampire. This vampire is usually hidden until one, two, three, and sometimes four people are bitten. When the population realizes what is happening, it is almost too late to stop it, but only almost.

Generally, the human side of the bad guy is more apparent in the vampire genre than in any other monster movie, as the vampire can reason and be quite charming. The vampire is also well-to-do in the cultural context of the film: Bela Lugosi in a tuxedo, the cool kids in The Lost Boys, the rich party animals in Blade. In this genre, the monster is never less than middle class and often wears a suit. Sexuality also plays a large part in vampire films.

All vampire films owe their birth to Bram Stoker's original story, but they do not always keep his rules in play. In Salem's Lot, the religious angle still works, as crosses can be used to ward off vampires. Salem's Lot also follows the rule that vampires must be verbally invited into a house before they can enter it. In other films, this rule is cast aside.

The one steady rule in this genre is that vampires can't stand direct sunlight. This rule made the leap into the technical age when characters began using UV lamps (transportable sunlight) against vampires, as in Blade and 30 Days of Night. Another familiar rule that is still followed is the Renfield rule. Renfield was the name of the character that assisted Count Dracula (until he betrayed the Count, and paid with his life). Most vampire movies have a Renfield of one kind or another, acting as a human aid to the vampires.

Undead: any of Romero's zombie films, as well as the mummy pictures. In this genre, the dead rise up and try to kill people. They are often cannibals. The reason for their animation is seldom given, and doesn't much matter. In Undead films, the only way to kill an undead creature is to chop it apart or blow its head off. Brains matter more than the heart. Vampires are a technical cousin to the Undead, but they are never as stupid, enraged, lumbering, or outwardly disgusting.

Slasher: Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer. The rules behind this genre were well laid out in Scream, when Kevin Williamson had one of his characters state them. It was a funny scene, but also true. In the Slasher genre, the bad guy has something against the community he lives in (or returns to, after disappearing for a number of years) and exacts his revenge by killing people, mainly teenagers. Girls that have a sex scene in the film are almost certain to die before the closing credits. If you see a woman's breasts, she's a goner. The hero is usually a virginal teenage girl, and she becomes the focus of the bad guy's rage. By the end of the film, everyone else will be dead, and she will have to face him on her own.

Possession: The Exorcist, The Evil Dead, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, 28 Days Later and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later. In the possession genre, evil forces cause a person to turn into the bad guy. The cause could be spiritual (Exorcist), or medical (28 Days Later), or supernatural (Event Horizon). In the possession genre, the bad guy does not always have to be killed. Instead, the supernatural element must be forced to leave the bad guy's body. In a way, all of the vampire and zombie movies are possession movies, with this key difference: you must kill a vampire. There is no cure.

Brilliant Psycho: Saw, Silence of the Lambs, The Vanishing, SE7EN. In this genre, the bad guy is omnipotent to the point of being a god. He seems to be everywhere at once, including inside his victims' heads. He (and it's almost always a he) knows their next move before they do, and he makes the cops look like fools. He never kills his victims immediately, but rather strings them along, playing games with them (literally and figuratively), until he decides to do them in. Even then, the bad guy doesn't always kill a victim directly. Instead, he forces them into clever situations where they will do his bidding and end up killing themselves or someone else. The Brilliant Psycho genre is the easiest one to draw a sequel from, because he often escapes.

Alien From Outer Space: Alien, War of the Worlds, Predator, The Thing, Slither. This genre is as straightforward as it can get. An alien lifeform comes down to Earth or invades a space ship. It murders people, destroys things, and generally wrecks havoc, until the hero can kill it. The alien is very hard to kill, and quite often gives birth or turns into a possession film by taking over the bodies of its victims. By the end of the story, the hero must not only save his own life, but that of all mankind, because the alien usually intends to colonize Earth and kill everybody on it.

My genre picks for this Halloween:

Vampire: Dracula (1958). Starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Campy and fun.

Undead: Dawn of the Dead (2004). A great re-make. Ving Rhames is perfect.

Slasher: Halloween (1978). What else would you watch around Halloween? Shun the re-make directed by Rob Zombie.

Possession: Normally I would say The Exorcist right off the bat, but you've probably seen it too many times on cable. If you haven't seen The Exorcism of Emily Rose, rent it.

Brilliant Psycho: Re-run The Silence of the Lambs and remember how good it is.

Alien from Outer Space: Go with Alien, just for the chest-popping scene.

Happy Halloween.

Gore's Advice: Save the Earth - Cut Back on Your Jet Fuel

I was bumbling around cyberspace today and saw an old interview between Al Gore and CBS Early Show co-host Harry Smith. It's on the MRC website. The interview was taped on April 1 (rightly so), a few months before the Swedes crowned Gore as King of the enviro-boobs.

Check this out:

Co-host Harry Smith: "Last week, former Vice President and Oscar winner Al Gore took Capitol Hill by storm, dazzling senators with his expertise, and today he joins us. Mr. Vice President, what do you say to those who still doubt that climate change is the Earth-destroying crisis that you and every environmentalist group says it is?"

Al Gore: "Harry, if your baby has a fever, you go to the doctor. If the crib’s on fire, you don’t speculate that the baby is flame retardant. You take action."

Smith, chuckling: "I know a lot of moms out there are nodding their heads. Speaking of action, any tips for viewers who want to reduce their own carbon footprint?"

Gore: "Well, I try to use my personal jet only for important trips. We gas up our fleet of SUVs only after sunset, and the thermostat in my 10,000 foot mansion is set at 68 degrees when Tipper and I aren’t there."

Smith: "Boy, I wish I could cut back like that."

You can't make this stuff up.

I love this interview. Every time I look at it, I find new fascinating things to laugh at. The conceit is so palpable that you have to read it twice and say aloud, "Did they really say that on television?"

"If your baby has a fever...If the crib's on fire..." Well, thank you for clearing up all the scientific mumbo-jumbo with examples I can understand. Gore's right. The last time I saw a crib on fire, I didn't speculate on how fire resistant the baby was. I phoned the Sierra Club and asked them to lend me a jug of water, but they hung up after calling me a heathen for wasting our most precious resource.

"I know a lot of moms out there are nodding their heads..." Say what? What a lame brained segue. How many moms out there are nodding their heads and saying, "Yup. When I saw junior on fire, I knew it was as bad as climate change."

"My personal jet...fleet of SUVs...10 000 foot mansion..."

The bald arrogance of that statement is obscene. It would be amazing that he said it with a straight face, until you remember that this fat cat has known no other life except one of inherited privilege. Still, I know what Gore was up to. He was trying to head off the counter-arguments at the pass. People had ripped on him before for flying around all over the place and living the high life, while at the same time hearing him tell people not to use air conditioning. So this statement was meant as a sop to his own people as well as a defence against his opponents.

News to Gore: good job. It worked. Six months later, they handed this bozo a Nobel Peace Prize.

Photo: Reuters/Kimberly White

Sox In - Tribe Out

It's to be the Red Sox and Rockies in the World Series this year.

You have to feel for Indians fans. Watching your team score only five runs in the last 3 games of a series is bad enough, but watching the Red Sox score 30 runs in the same span must make you want to war whoop your way off the nearest cliff.

In other baseball news, Cleveland pitcher Paul Byrd has been outed by the San Francisco Chronicle as the latest player caught using human growth hormone.

According to the report, Byrd purchased $25 000 worth of HGH from 2002 to 2005. If you guessed that his supplier was from Florida, as seems to be the case with everybody else getting caught with HGH, you would be correct. According to Tim Brown at Yahoo Sports, it's the same clinic that the Feds are investigating for the illegal distribution of performance enhancing drugs.

Byrd's excuse? Surprise! He was taking them under a doctor's supervision, and he never took anything "that wasn't prescribed to [him]." This is the standard defence taken by most of the juiceheads that have been outed in the past couple of years. It's the "doctor did it" defence.

Let's get this straight: a professional athlete that knows drug testing may destroy his career is willing to purchase $25 000 of HGH, and not once does he ask his team, agent, lawyer, or the league if it's all right? Not only that, he wasn't visiting the "doctor" to get his injections. His shipments of HGH came with a do-it-yourself supply of syringes.

The timing of Byrd's HGH shipments is akin to the Troy Glaus case which I wrote about last month. Byrd says the HGH was prescribed because of a pituitary gland problem, yet strangely won't confirm if this problem cropped up before or after he started taking HGH. Tim Brown reports that, "In spring training 2002, Byrd was so alarmed by his lack of velocity that, fearing the end of his career, he radically altered his windup."

Funny that his 2002 fear of a declining career coincided with the 2002 receipts of HGH, and continued after he had Tommy John surgery in 2003, then the receipts dried up in 2005 when the league banned HGH. Funny.

Byrd's excuse of a doctor's prescription grows even more shady, as the Chronicle reports that one of the prescriptions was filled out by a dentist whose license was suspended in 2003 for fraud. That does not sound like the kind of high-end doctor that teams provide to their players. I'm not an anatomist, but I do know that the last time my dentist asked me how my pituitary gland was doing was never.

Photo: AP/Elise Amendola

Coppola's Comeback

Nobody's heard much from Coppola in the past 10 years, as he took a hiatus to write, grow grapes, drink wine, and enjoy life. His latest effort, Youth Without Youth is heading to theaters after a stint at RomeFilmFest.

I wasn't impressed or turned off by Coppola's last effort, The Rainmaker. Based on the John Grisham novel, it was a good legal thriller that starred a decent cast.

One thing that I've always liked about Coppola is that he gives credit where credit is due: The Godfather was called Mario Puzo's The Godfather at Coppola's insistence, and same with John Grisham's The Rainmaker. We'll see if this latest Coppola flick has Mircea Eliade's name in the title. Eliade was the Romanian writer and philosopher that wrote the novel.

More on the story here.

Writers Authorize Strike

It looks like the Writer's Guild of America has voted to authorize a strike. Writers are looking to get better residuals for such things as DVD sales and internet content. Producers are against it.

The last writers strike in Hollywood happened in 1988. It lasted 22 weeks and the industry lost $500 million. The impact of a strike on the public is that some of their favorite TV shows could be knocked off the air and replaced with re-runs until the dispute is settled.

Check out the story here.

Fade to Black - Deborah Kerr

Somebody forgot to tell me.

Deborah Kerr died on October 16th. She'd been suffering from Parkinson's Disease, and according to one family member, she "just slipped away" shortly after her 86th birthday.

A Shot for the Ages: Kerr and
Lancaster in From Here to Eternity

How the stars fade. I surf the net regularly, and had no clue that one of Hollywood's greatest First Ladies had passed on.

Kerr will be remembered best for her charm and manner, but I especially liked her role in From Here to Eternity. That is one of my must-see Fade to Black films this week. The Sundowners and An Affair to Remember are two others.

RIP, Deborah Kerr.

Where There Be Zombies

I've been on a zombie kick of late, having watched 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Dawn of the Dead (1979), and Dawn of the Dead (2004) all in the past few weeks.

The zombie genre was invented by George A. Romero. His status as Master Zombie has been intact since his first zombie classic, Night of the Living Dead (1968). Shot in black and white, Night of the Living Dead was like nothing anyone had seen before. It was gritty, low budget, scary, gory, and funny. It was an entertaining horror picture that became a cult classic, and as with all cult classics, it found a rabid fan base that will protect it and its creator at all costs.

I have bad news for the cult fans. I'm not one of them. Having re-run George Romero's films in the past few months, and most recently compared Dawn of the Dead to its 2004 re-make, I must confess: Romero's movies are not very good.

I will be met by a hail of dismembered body parts for saying that, but I can no longer live in the Romero closet. For a long time I talked up Romero's work as much as the next horror fan. His work was "groundbreaking." His films were "classics." He "changed" modern cinema.

I recently went on IMDB and read some fan reviews of Romero's work. Time and time again, I found the words "social commentary." Romero fans have often said that Night of the Living Dead is a 60's social commentary, and they go on to paint every Romero zombie picture with the same brush. Romero, they say, is a director with a message.

Early on in his career, Romero denied the social commentary angle. Night of the Living Dead was a decent horror movie made on the cheap, which he threw in the back of his truck and took to NYC in hopes that someone, anyone, would want to screen it. He couldn't have cared less if anyone saw a message in it. He simply wanted to freak people out while they ate popcorn and, hopefully, they'd make Romero a buck in the process.

The Romero cult will have us believe that everything in Romero's films somehow illuminates our societal ills. Many see the zombies as a metaphor for people walking through their crummy lives. In Night of the Living Dead, when Duane Jones (who is black) takes refuge in a house with a white woman, the Romero cult tells us that this is a commentary on the '60s: the black guy hiding out with the white woman while the angry zombie hoards (a metaphor for the lynch mob) try to kill him for it.

It's simply not true. Romero has said himself that Duane Jones was right for the part, and that any "commentary" seen in the film is purely coincidental.

You can't tell that to the cult crowd. Saying that zombie movies don't have social commentary reduces zombie movies to what they are: zombie movies (it should be noted that the word 'zombie' never appears in Night of the Living Dead, and only once in Dawn of the Dead; the tag was applied by the fans). Using the ruse of "social commentary" gives the cult crowd something to feel good about. It raises the genre to new heights. If someone knocks a cheap zombie movie for being what it is, the cult crowd have a natural defence: they see the secret, while others do not. They're "in the know," while others are the zombies.

I would be fine with leaving the cult crowd alone for believing whatever they want, but I take issue with them when they demand that others believe their "social commentary" theory, too. Film critic Danel Griffin's statement concerning Romero's zombie series is typical: "[Romero] uses them to represent the rich class’s pathetic attempts to exploit the feeble and then turn on each other as they fight for the bones."

If you say so, but not according to Romero. While drafting Night of the Living Dead, the filmmakers weren't sure what the zombies were even going to do. They came up with cannibalism because they felt it was the most shocking thing to film. They were right, but they did not do it to depict the exploitation of the poor.

It wasn't until later in his career that Romero read his fan mail and got on board the commentary train. When he did, it was a disgrace. Land of the Dead's "commentary" is so transparent that it is literally laughable.

Here's another typical review from a revisionist-critic, in this case Wesley Morris of the Boston Globe:

In his " Dead" trilogy ("Night of," "Dawn of," and "Day of "), Romero used the zombie to satirize America. "Dawn" was released in 1978, and it was both a pioneering work of suspense-schlock and scathing social commentary: The dead come back to life in order to keep consuming - and in a mall no less...[In the 2004 re-make] few of the original movie's political and philosophical preoccupations (abortion, capitalism, patriotism, individualism) remain.

Morris' theory goes like this: the film takes place in a mall, so it shows materialism. The dead come back to "consume" the "consumers." Abortion is also mentioned. Ken Foree asks if a woman wants a baby aborted. She says no. This shows that people were talking about abortion 6 years after Roe v. Wade. Scathing! As for the patriotism, I wish Wes would show me where that is in the original. And the individualism? I guess that is a reference to not wanting to be become a zombie, but if that is the case, how is the 2004 re-make any different?

Time makes people nostalgic. Morris was turned the way many people are that remember things from their youth: sentimental, even about zombies. They remember things that weren't there. They have been told so many times that Romero's zombie movies are poignant, gritty, low budget social commentaries, that they believe it. Trust me, if Romero had the cash in 1979, Dawn of the Dead would not have been shot in one mall location, and he wouldn't have had a minuscule cast. Years later, for Land of the Dead (2005), he did have the cash and it was a flop.

Predator - Misunderstood
There is no way to change the tune of the cult crowd. You can't refute their reasoning because you can make "social commentary" statements about any film ever made. Take Predator, the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle. You might think that it is about an alien lifeform coming down to Earth and killing people. But you're wrong. I think it is a movie about illegal immigration. Note how the Predator migrates to earth and only kills what he finds. He doesn't go into towns or cities to mutilate people. He stays in the forest, acts in an environmentally responsible way, and tries to live in peace. Then Arnie and his militaristic regime move in and murder him merely because he's different. Shame on them.

Right now you think I'm crazy, and you're right: the Predator theory is a laugh. The reason it is a laugh while the Living Dead theory is not (at least to the cult crowd), is this: Predator cost a lot of money to make and it was a commercial success.

Dawn (2004)
That's what a cult film is: a movie that that does better in home theater sales than it does at the box office. If Romero's series had been highly successful in theaters, there wouldn't be a cult crowd to draw up all kinds of interesting theories about it. Yes, I know that Romero's Dawn of the Dead grossed well worldwide during its release. But it will disappoint (or perhaps not, come to think of it) the cult crowd to know that the Dawn of the Dead re-make was the most successful zombie move in history, beating Romero's by a long shot.

Does Romero deserve respect for kicking off the zombie genre? Of course. Do I enjoy Romero's movies? Absolutely. But that is about as far as it goes. I enjoy them for what they are.

Unfortunately, they have become very, very dated. The effects simply do not hold up. The zombie make-up is poor (most of the green/grey paint ends at each background actor's neckline). The foam body parts are obviously foam. The intestines are kind of gross, but only kind of. The character development that the cult crowd talks about is simply not there. The character are fun and at times humorous, but in a campy way. Which is fine, because that is how I view Dawn of the Dead: campy fun. As a horror movie, it does not instill much horror.

Reiniger - Dawn (1979)
Before anyone writes in to tell me that I shouldn't go after a film for its effects when it was made in the 70s, too bad. A film must be judged on all of its merits. People born fifteen years ago will not be scared by this movie, but they will be scared by The Exorcist (1973), The Omen (1976), Halloween (1978), Alien (1979), and The Amityville Horror (1979). My advice to filmmakers everywhere is if you do not have the funds to produce believable effects, don't use them. Find another way to frighten people. Having said that, I will admit that the make-up people on Dawn of the Dead (1979) made Scott Reiniger's the most frightening 'zombie face' in film history. It's the ultra-phony blood and guts that turns me off.

I will surely get creamed by the cult crowd, because I think that the 2004 Dawn of the Dead re-make, directed by Zack Snyder, is heads and tails better than the original as a horror movie. It is more frightening, the characters are well developed, it is fun, and it is humorous where it intends to be. I am stunned that the cult crowd tries to pass off the original as social commentary, but seemingly find none in the re-make. How is this possible? All of the same elements are there, so the social commentary is theirs for the taking.

Why don't they? Again, we go back to the same reason why any film becomes a 'cult classic,' while another does not. The re-make is not a cult classic because it was a commercial success. It's not welcome in the club. It made a lot of money by reaching not just a keen, knowledgeable cult crowd, but a wide spectrum audience.

You know, the zombies.

Photos: Yahoo Movies

Mailer in Hospital

Mailer has gotten under my skin more than a few times for his political views, not to mention his arroagance. I don't like most of his work, but he deserves respect for The Fight, his account of the Rumble in the Jungle. It was the 1974 heavyweight title fight between Foreman and Ali in Zaire. Mailer's book captures it perfectly.

Mailer, now 84, is in hospital and recovering from surgery. Get the story here.

Photo: Adam Nadel/Polaris

Super Bowl in Limey Land?

It looks like the NFL might hold the Super Bowl overseas some time in the future.

The NFL has been pushing the NFL to foreign market for a while now, but this is the first time the Super Bowl's been mentioned. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said Wembley Stadium would be a good venue.

On October 28th, Wembley Stadium will host the first-ever regular season NFL game on foreign soil, between the Dolphins and Giants. Tickets are selling well, and it might be a sellout.


I can't see football ever beating out soccer for attendance records overseas, but it would be nice to take a run at them. The rugby guys would be especially ticked. Rugby plays second fiddle in foreign lands, and they never get any credit (not that they deserve any).

A Super Bowl in England would be fine, except for the Limeys running around all over the place telling you, "It's no' bloodeh fooooball, ya wankah!"

Whether Goodell will be able to sell Americans on the idea that the number one game of the American sporting year will be held overseas in a country whose people are notorious for calling Yanks idiots does, of course, remain to be seen.

More on the story here.

Photo: HOK Sports

Divorce Fair

In keeping with the modern culture of Disposable You, Vienna is set to host the world's first-ever Divorce Fair. Instead of searching for dress makers, photographers, and wedding cake bakers, people can find an attorney, real estate agents, and labs offering DNA testing.

See the whole story here.

Michael Clayton - Review

Director: Tony Gilroy
Writer: Tony Gilroy
Starring: George Clooney/Tom Wilkinson
Runtime: 2 hours

Michael Clayton is well titled. It is not so much a legal thriller, as it is a study of the lead character. Screenwriting guru Robert McKee would bawl me out for that last statement, because according to McKee, all films should be character studies.

McKee has a point, but Michael Clayton is a film that shuns convention. I was waiting for it to become a thriller of the John Grisham variety, and it never did. You know the type: lawyer stumbles upon wrongdoing in his own firm, realizes he's a moral person, sets out to find justice, and almost gets killed for his trouble.

Michael Clayton has those bits, but it's missing the tempo of a regular legal thriller. That doesn't mean it's a poor film. On the contrary, it was nice not to have a chase scene wrap the whole thing up. The editor (director Gilroy's younger brother) wasn't allowed to cut the scenes down to thirty seconds, then twenty, then ten, then two, all in the slight-of-hand of modern filmmaking.

The title is apt because we stay with Michael Clayton throughout the film, and he seems like a real man doing real things. He's only missing from perhaps three minutes of screentime. The rest of the film is the study of a man that may or may not like himself, or his job, or his life. In the end, we never really know the answers to these questions, because neither does Michael Clayton. And I love that.

George Clooney is utterly perfect in the lead role. He doesn't overdo it, and neither do the filmmakers. His haircut is just a haircut, his suits are just suits. He drives a fancy car, but he doesn't own it. He makes a lot of money as a Mr. Fix It of a law firm, but he's in dire straits because of a bar business that's gone belly up. Though he seems powerful, his office is down the hall and he is not in "the club." He is not a partner. He's the permanent outsider, the loyal dog that earns his room and board by keeping the masters clean.

Clayton is the attorney that the firm sends to mop up a mess. Rich guy needs help in a drunk driving wreck, but wants to dodge the publicity? Call Clayton. Senator with his hand in the cookie jar? Call Clayton. At one point in the film, a character calls Michael Clayton a "janitor." Rather than laughing it off or taking offence, Clayton internalizes it. He knows it is the truth. Later, when a man says that he's heard Clayton is a miracle worker, Clayton replies, "I'm a janitor," without a hint of irony. Does he like being a janitor? Perhaps not, but that's life.

The plot of the film feels incidental to the man. In the film, Clayton has to bail out one of the firm's partners, Arthur Edens (Tom Wilkinson). Edens has gone off the deep end and is acting like a lunatic. Seeing as he's the lead attorney in charge of a massive lawsuit, the firm needs him under control. They send Clayton to straighten the man out. Behind the scenes, however, another of the firm's partners (Tilda Swinton) decides to take matters into her own hands, with deadly results.

That's a fair plot. It's been used before and it will be used again, but I didn't mind. Watching Clayton believably pick through his spiralling life was good enough for me.

It was fairly obvious that this was directed by a writer, in this case Tony Gilroy. Clayton is his directorial debut. This might surprise you, since Gilroy's list of writing projects in the past includes Armageddon, Proof of Life, and all three of the Bourne movies.

Gilroy with Clooney
What a change of pace. Gilroy is a fantastic action writer, so perhaps he didn't trust anyone to do one of his dramas, lest they think, "Ah, a Gilroy script. The Bourne guy, right?" Handing Michael Clayton to someone else probably would have resulted in a net total of five car chases, ten shootings, and a bad guy that tells Clayton, "You're such a boyscout." This is important to remember if you're a fan of Tony Gilroy the writer and think you're going to get the Bourne treatment. You're not, so don't complain if you see this movie and wonder where all the action went.

Instead, Clayton has very believable characters doing the most believable thing: being selfish. No one in the film is outright evil for evil's sake. Swinton's character is worried about making it big in the legal world. She does what she feels she must. She's not proud of it. In fact, she's terrified of the consequences. But she does it anyway. Watch her scenes where she examines her wardrobe in the mirror, rehearsing her lines for the next day's presentations. In front of the mirror, she's a nervous wreck, desperately fighting to achieve flawless diction. The next day, she's on the ball. Or is she? They're excellent scenes.

Sidney Pollack takes another turn as actor in this film. I wonder how Gilroy felt, having the Oscar winning director on the set during his own directorial debut? There's probably some good stories there. In any case, Pollack does a fine job, and as always I found myself wondering why he doesn't do more acting.

Tom Wilkinson is good as Arthur Edens, the lawyer that goes off the rails. He's a little bit over the top, but then again his character is a manic-depressive, so it's hard to argue the point.

Michael Clayton is a very satisfying film made a by a good writer-turned-director, and it stars an excellent cast. See it.

Photos: Yahoo Movies

Steinbrenner Hangs Them Up

Steinbrenner (Newsday)
This is the beginning of the end for a baseball era.

George Steinbrenner is reportedly turning over control of the New York Yankees to his two sons, Hal and Hank Steinbrenner.

Well before Bruce Springsteen was the Boss, there was Steinbrenner. Springsteen never wore the moniker very well. Even when Bruce was The Boss, he didn't act like one. Sure, he made a lot of money and sold out stadiums wherever he went, but he wasn't a Boss. Springsteen was quiet, introspective, and avoided the off-stage limelight.

Steinbrenner was just the opposite. He never shied away from the cameras. He always had something to say about something and somebody. He was a boss that cubicle minions can understand: a man that is feared, respected, loved, and loathed, often in equal amounts, sometimes all at once. He was a loudmouth Boss with a capital B. Steinbrenner knew it, and he lived the role without shame.

Fans, sportscasters, players, executives, the nation at large, everybody has something good or bad to say about The Boss. To some, he's the embodiment of sport as business, and deserves grudging respect. To others, he represents everything that is wrong with sports in general and baseball in particular.

He got his start in shipping, but no one can accuse him of not being interested in sports. He coached football at Purdue and Northwestern for a spell. His first team purchase was the Cleveland Pipers in the American Basketball Association. The Pipers foreshadowed The Boss's actions with the Yankees. By mid-season of 1961, Pipers coach John McClendon had resigned, citing Steinbrenner's interference as the reason.

The Pipers went on to win the first ABA championship later that year. That was smallfry. Steinbrenner signed basketball star Jerry Lucas, hoping that this and the championship season would leverage the Pipers into the NBA. When the NBA spurned the idea, Steinbrenner spurned them back by disbanding the team. Steinbrenner wouldn't have been interested in anything that wasn't big time. Later, he had an opportunity to purchase the Cleveland Indians but was again spurned and couldn't close the deal.

In 1972, CBS owned the Yankees and were looking to sell. They approached Yankee President Michael Burke and told him he could buy the team if he had the cash. Through a middleman, Burke was brought in touch with Steinbrenner. The two hammered out a deal. Steinbrenner gathered investors together, and Burke was slated to be a minority partner. In 1973, they bought the team from CBS for $8.7 million, about $2 million shy of what the Yankees would pay Mariano Rivera in 2007.

Looking back on Steinbrenner's statement regarding the deal, it's easy to see the man that would come to torment fans in later years.

"We plan absentee ownership as far as running the Yankees is concerned. We're not going to pretend we're something we aren't. I'll stick to building ships." - New York Times

It's an understatement to say that those were hollow words. Steinbrenner had no intention of being an "absentee owner," as Michael Burke found out within months of buying the team. Burke was still team president in January of '73, but had quit by April. He was the first to ride the Steinbrenner merry-go-round. Over the years, 20 managers would work under Steinbrenner. 11 general managers have done the Boss's bidding. The Boss fired manager Billy Martin five times alone.

Billy Martin - (AP Photo)
His history with Billy Martin is the stuff of legend. Steinbrenner once had to fire Martin for slugging a marshmallow salesman in a Minnesota elevator (Martin wasn't adverse to fighting; among others, he once duked it out with a Chicago cabbie that said soccer was better than baseball). Another time, he forced Martin out after Martin said of Reggie Jackson and The Boss, "One's a liar and the other one's convicted." He was referring to The Boss's shady donations to the Nixon campaign in '72. The Boss and Nixon eventually forgave Martin's slight. They both attended Martin's funeral.

His relationship to players and their wallets made the biggest headlines. It is his true legacy. The Boss never had a problem forking out the dough. It is this that makes him most infamous in baseball circles. He drove the price of players up so high, so fast, that the numbers seem ludicrous in their scale. In 1981, he made Dave Winfield the highest paid player in baseball history by offering him a 10-year, $23 million deal. 26 years later, Winfield's salary is chicken feed. Winfield at $23 million for 10 seasons? Try A-Rod, whose contract earns him $252 million in the same span. Though hard to compute because of signing bonuses, the Yankees' average salary now hovers around $7 million per season. The 2006 league average was less than half that, at $2,699,292.

Steinbrenner was the owner that started fans saying, "He bought the team." Or, "He bought the pennant." Or, "He bought the World Series." He bought everything. There was, after all, nothing Steinbrenner couldn't afford to buy. He's always been an incredibly rich man, and he spends like one. When the league brought in the luxury tax in 2002, Steinbrenner couldn't have cared less.

In 2003, the Yankees were the only team above the payroll threshold, and shelled out a tax bill of $10.8 million (a third of the Devil Rays 2003 payroll). In 2004, they were taxed $25 million. In 2005, they paid yet again, to a tune of $34 million. If the luxury tax was meant to be a deterrent, it didn't deter Steinbrenner (or the Red Sox, who began to play catch up but still didn't come close to being taxed the way the Yankees were).

Steinbrenner was never one to mince his words. He's called out players and managers in the press several times. He once accused Derek Jeter of partying too much and not "giving 110%." He then ended up in a credit card commercial with Jeter, partying.

His feud with Dave Winfield in the '80s was long and mean. At one point, he hired an investigator with a gambling background to dig up dirt on Winfield's life. Commissioner Faye Vincent responsed by banning Steinbrenner from day-to-day operation of the Yankees indefinitely. When Yankee fans heard the news over a PA at Yankee Stadium, they gave a standing ovation. Steinbrenner was reinstated 3 years later, and Winfield opted to go into the Hall of Fame as a Padre.

In 1985, he told the press that a bad start to the season would not affect his opinion of manager Yogi Berra. 16 games later, Berra got canned.

On April Fool's Day, 1999, pitcher Hideki Irabu dogged it on a play to first. Steinbrenner called Irabu a "fat pussy toad" in the press, then refused to let him join the team in Los Angeles. Later, he apologized for calling Irabu fat, and said that the team needed Irabu "big time." At the end of the season, Irabu was traded.

Torre (Sports Network)
Most recently, he told the press that if Joe Torre lost game 3 of the 2007 ALDS, Torre would be out of a job. When Torre arrived at Yankeee Stadium for the game, he was told the news. Said Joe, "It’s what goes with the territory. It’s really not a lot of difference than in the past. If I get caught up in that, I’m really going to have a tough time doing my job, and I don’t think that’s right.” Torre never was Billy Martin. As a testament to his skills as a manager, not to mention politician, Torre has lasted the longest as a manager in the Steinbrenner system.

So now Steinbrenner is turning the team over to his sons. The Boss dividing the office, Caesar dividing the Empire. During his tenure, the Yankees have won 6 World Series titles and 10 AL pennants. They are without doubt the most successful franchise in North American sports, with Steinbrenner the most recognizable owner of a team. According to Forbes, The Boss is worth over a billion dollars. His $8 million investment in the Yankees was an extremely good one, as they are now worth over a billion dollars on their own.

The Evil Empire may be losing its day-to-day Emperor, but make no mistake: like the Wizard of Oz, Steinbrenner will still be there behind the curtain.

Sources: Wikipedia, NY Post, MLBPA, Ohio History Central, MLB.com, SI.com, ESPN

Winter's Coming - Pass the Sunscreen

I woke up this morning ready to watch some football. As is my wont, I stepped outside with a cup of coffee, and lo and behold, my feet got cold inside of five minutes. I checked the temperature. 10 degrees C. Hmmm. Where's all this global warming I've been hearing so much about?

Nietzsche
I remember reading Nietzsche some time ago, where he talked about crime and punishment. He had a theory that said as a people become more prosperous, so they become more complacent about crime. It is in third world and less prosperous countries that you find hands being hacked off for theft, stoning for adultery, beheading for murder, so forth. In prosperous countries you find words like parole, suspended sentence, no contest, rehabilitation, and community service.

Nietzsche likened it to a large beast regarding fleas. What are these fleas to me? I am large, successful, powerful.

The analogy can be used on a nation: what are these pesky criminals to me? They can't bring me down, they can't upset my balance of power. Nietzsche saw this complacency as our root for the ideals of what we call mercy.

I think he was on to something, and that it can be extrapolated. When countries become prosperous, so they become complacent about all things. It should be no surprise that Al Gore received a "Peace" award for talking about climate change. He is a Western fat cat, patted on the back by other Western fat cats. It does not matter how much pain and suffering is going on in the far flung reaches of the world. The West is fat and complacent. We have time to discuss the weather patterns of the Earth circa 2176 AD. The people in less prosperous countries do not have that kind of time. They're thinking about tomorrow's meal, or next week's bullet.

Roasting in June - Norway
Imagine Al Gore visiting Burma today and giving a speech on climate change and its impact on global conflict. If they weren't so polite, the monks would laugh him off the stage. Climate change? They're busy dodging bullets and knitting the bones that got broken in yesterday's crackdown.

Here's a news story about Dr. William Grey, a scientist that knows what's going on, both about the climate and the politics of the enviro boobs. His most telling line is,

"It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong. But they also know that they'd never get any grants if they spoke out. I don't care about grants."

He's worth a read. By the way, don't forget to check out my daily Worrisome Warming Watch in the links bar. I've chosen a place in the continental US that will tell us how warm it is again this winter. I think the name of the town is apt.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I can't decide which is better: global warming, so the babes are in bikinis more often, or global cooling, so they want to spend more time in the hot tub. Whatever happens, we'll find a way to manage.

You Tube Publicity Leads to Mayhem in London

This has happened more than once. The last time I saw a report like this it involved Facebook, when an English girl posted her party on the web, and her mother's home ended up getting demolished.

The internet has been going through twists and turns in the last couple of years, as more and more websites battle for the supremacy of turning you into a "somebody." This noteriety comes with a price: anybody can say anything they want about themselves, or you. The consequences of this information can be extreme.

In this story, an 16-year-old London kid was going to have a party with about 30 invited guests. However, details of the bash were put on You Tube, and several dozen uninvited teens crashed the gates. They trashed the place, stole booze, beat up the birthday boy's brother, and broke his father's nose. 6 teens were arrested.

Bummer night. You can tell it's a You Tube world when a 16-year-old has thirty friends to invite over for a birthday party.

I went on Facebook the other day and took a look at a few of the people that have labelled me as 'friend.' If you're not hip to Facebook, a friend is someone that knew you a hundred years ago, writes you an email, and then never writes you again. You're put into a "friend list," and there you remain.

You're like a collector's item from their distant past. Maybe they pull you out once in a while, blow some dust off, look at you in the light of the window, and put you back. Maybe they print out your picture and draw mustaches on it. Either way, you're theirs to keep, unless you 'unfriend' them, and who would want to be so rude as to do that?

Facebook is the Ebay of society. Instead of trading old lamps and hockey cards, you get the chick that sat next to you in first grade and the guy that made everyone laugh with the hand-under-the-armpit fart trick.

Of the 150 Facebook friends that I have, I'll bet that I've heard from 10 of them more than once. The rest just kind of hang out in cyberspace. I suppose they check in once in a while, but I'll never know it. If I update my "profile" by saying that I'm reading a newspaper on the john, three friends will probably write to tell me that I'm being too graphic, while the other 147 remain in the shadows, eavesdropping on me like spooky CIA agents. Were I, say, to write that I'm throwing a party on Friday, 150 people might descend on my house unannounced. And if I were a 16-year-old boy writing about having a party, well, let's just say dad wouldn't be too impressed.

You Tube, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Blogger (which you're reading now), My Space, the list goes on. I've logged into a few of them, and it amazes me the amount of personal information that ends up there. People that use them need to ask themselves some hard questions: do I really know who's looking at me right now? And if so, do I really want them looking at me right now?

One thing that this English kid's hard luck story does prove is the answer to the most important party question. Where is the best place to have a party? Someone else's place.

More on the party that got out of hand here.

Early Buzz on Elizabeth: The Golden Age - Just Okay

I won't have a chance to catch Elizabeth: The Golden Age this weekend. It stars the ever-watchable Cate Blanchett, in a reprise role of Elizabeth (1998).

I rarely read reviews before checking out a film, but I stumbled upon this report card on Yahoo. If you're a review junkie, you'll find the early buzz on Elizabeth: The Golden Age here.

Look for my review next week.

Photo: Yahoo Movies

Radiohead Download - Publicity Stunt?

My friends have been buzzing about the recent Radiohead offering, In Rainbows. The band has been saying that they will offer the album over the internet, and fans can pay as much (or as little) as they like. Sounds great, right?

Not so fast. It's now come out that the album's download audio quality is subpar, and that the offer may have been a publicity stunt for the release of a physical CD.

More on the story here.

Photo: Axetopia

Al Gore - Nobel Sham

Al Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize, sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. There's going to be a hue and cry from the old school types, who will insist that talking about polar bears is not on the same level as Theodore Roosevelt ending the Russo-Japanese war.

These critics miss the point. For the past half century, the Nobel Peace prize has not been about peace, but about politics. In the same way that a Nobel Prize for Literature means that the author's books are boring crap, so the Peace Prize means that the winner was some guy that, well, what exactly?

Child Soldiers - Sudan
Saying that environmentalists deserve a Peace Prize is a pretty big stretch. It's quite obvious that this was handed to Gore and his looney-tune buddies as a slap to George W. Bush, in the same way that it was handed to Jimmy Carter in 2002. I have no idea what Jimmy Carter has done to "advance peace," just as I have no clue what the UN and Kofi Annan ever did. He won the prize in 2001, after supervising the Oil for Fraud scandal and doing absolutely nothing to stop tyrants around the globe from murdering people, especially in Africa.

This is Ole Danbolt Mjoes, Nobel committee chairman, awarding the prize to Gore: "We would encourage all countries, including the big countries, to challenge, all of them, to think again and to say what can they do to conquer global warming. The bigger the powers, the better that they come in front of this."

Ah! Now I get it. If you use the word conquer, you can give the Peace Prize to anybody. Old Ole asserted that this was not a slap at Bush or the US for not adopting Kyoto (Clinton, darling of the Left, didn't adopt it, either). Still, one can't deny the Nobel crowd's bald politics. When handing the Peace Prize to Carter in 2002, then-committee chairman Gunnar Berge called it a "kick in the leg" to the Bush Administration. You can't get more direct than that.

Alfred Nobel, master of dynamite and TNT, started the whole Prize game back in 1895. Back then, the prize was to go to a person that fought for peace and disarmament. It now includes poverty, economic growth, and the environment. In other words, it's being watered down to include virtually anybody for anything.

Burma
The Buddhists that get shot in Thailand on a daily basis by Islamic thugs, the people struggling for democracy in Burma and getting tortured for their trouble, the peasants in Darfur that are hacked to death each and every day. No peace for them. Al Gore is being hailed as a prophet. How about doing something for peace now?

Here's another laugher from the Nobel Committee, upon presenting the award: "[Climate change] will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."

News for you, genius: the vulnerable countries are already in danger. There's no "may" about it. Violent conflict and war are taking place right this minute. Take off your rose colored political blinders for the first time in your life, and you might be able to see the blood in the streets.

It makes one ill to think that there are fat cats like Al Gore patting themselves on the back in Norway over a dubious scientific theory, while a few thousand miles away, men, women, and children are receiving the hard facts of a bullet to the brain.

Hugh Grant's Still Got It

I'm not much for the scandal rags, but I figure Hugh Grant needs some congratulations on this one. Every time we hear about a celebrity getting drunk and having fun, it is usually at the expense of the rest of us.

For instance, what do Lindsay Lohan, Mel Gibson, Paris Hilton, Keifer Sutherland, Nicole Richie, Haley Joel Osment, Gus Van Sant, Chris Klein, Nick Nolte, Kim Delaney, Aidan Quinn, Tim Allen, and Michelle Rodriguez all have in common? If you guessed drunk driving arrests, you'd be correct.

Celebrities that tell us how to vote and what to believe are kidding themselves. As the above list shows, they are no better than the rest of us, especially when it comes to "making mistakes," and "just being human."

However, Hugh Grant did it right. Apparently he was at a pub called Ma Bell's in the UK last weekend. He ended up partying with some college girls and went back to their place for a few more drinks. No drunk driving, no arrests, no scandal. Good job, Hugh. An example to the rest of the celebrities out there that make the papers by jumping behind the wheel and risking somebody's life.

Anyone that rips on Hugh for this night of revelry is merely jealous. Yes, Hugh is 47. Yes, the girls were half his age. But he isn't married and he didn't hurt anybody, so where's the problem? Show me an unmarried 47-year-old that doesn't want to go to an all-girl house party and I'll show you a liar.

More on the story here.

Photos: Daily Mirror

Grave Concern

To the question, "Is nothing sacred?" the answer in England is, "No."

Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park has been closed as a burial ground since 1966 because it was deemed full. Over 300 000 of England's ancestors are buried in the East London graveyard. Their memory doesn't seem to concern the Tower Hamlets council, which is considering digging up the graves in order to make room for a Muslim cemetery. What they will do with the 300 000 dead is also undecided.

You can read the whole story here.

Meanwhile, another report says that 1 in 7 UK adults are putting off having a family because of fears of terrorism. 70% say that terrorism is their biggest worry, with 58% saying they are regularly concerned about immigration.

The British politicians may not have paid much attention to the implications of the 7/7/05 tube bombings, the 7/21/05 bombing attempt, 6/29/07 nightclub bombing attempt, or the airport attack in Glasgow in June, 2007. But it sounds like the public has.

Photo: Daily Mail

Tell Me About It

By Daryl Cagle - Click to Enlarge

Faith Based Flop: Tory Blows It

The Liberals took Ontario for another term tonight, while the NDP made some gains. It's the first time in over sixty years that the Libs have won back-to-back majorities in Ontario.

John Tory, PC leader, blew it badly by bringing faith based schools into the equation.

If I were one of Tory's ousted MPPs, I'd be ready to take him into a dark alley and settle some scores. The PCs had a good thing going, and then their leader shot them all in the feet. Instead of making the Ontario election about the Liberals' record of broken promises, the Conservative leader brought a decidedly unconservative topic to the table and fumbled. For his ineptitude, he got the same message as his bushwhacked followers: the voters in his own riding threw him out on his butt.

Tory - Done
In a blatant show of how pathetic political cronies can be, those still clinging to his coat tails cheered his name when he announced that he would remain as the party's leader. Election? Lost. His own seat in government? Lost. His reaction: "I'm your leader." Yes, that is certainly something to celebrate.

The NDPs and Greens will make much out of their modest gains, but their success was probably made possible by Conservative protest votes: they didn't want to vote for Tory, but they couldn't bring themselves to vote Liberal, either.

That said, I do have to hand it to a representative from the Greenies. During an election night interview, he was asked if he was hopeful that the new referendum would pass so that the Greens could grab some seats even if they lost in their ridings, but won a percentage of the popular vote. He replied in the negative. He said that the Greens want to show they can win seats the old school way: by convincing people to elect them.

Class act.

More election coverage.

Photo: CBC