WTF

Of the sixteen movies that have a rating, only one is “fresh,” Gran Torino at 79%. I think that rating is a bit high, but no one should be embarassed at being seen walking out of the video store with a copy. Next is The International. I have not seen it, but it stars Clive Owen, Naomi Watts and fricken Armin Mueller-Stahl, sounds acceptable. Defiance is at 56%, which I also haven’t seen, but you can definitely look the clerk in the eye while you rent any movie where Daniel Craig kills Nazis. In fact, the act of renting a movie about The Holocaust makes you morally superior to those of us who haven’t.

It’s a pretty steep dropoff from here, and those top few are mind boggling. Maybe I’ve lived in a cave, but I didn’t even know what Knowing was. I had to look it up, and I literally laughed out loud at the synopsis: “Nicolas Cage stars in Knowing, a gripping action-thriller of global proportions about a professor who stumbles on terrifying predictions about the future—and sets out to prevent them from coming…” Besides the interesting placement of the ellipses (not mine), that is one whale of a setup. Some screenwriter actually sat in a meeting somewhere and made that pitch, presumably with a straight face, and then someone gave the film a green light and spent $50 million dollars to make it. So far it’s grossed $155 million, worldwide.

I’ll give you all a pass for The Haunting in Connecticut. I’m sure it’s as bad as the rating, but it’s a horror movie. That’s expected.

If you’ve rented Push, on the other hand, you should apologize to your family and loved ones for the shame you’ve brought upon them. Burn your Blockbuster card, cancel your Netflix and Xbox Live memberships, and move to Montana to live in a shack where you will write manifestos decrying the sad state of the American entertainment industry (otherwise known as blogs).

When I first saw the trailer for Push, I was honestly shocked at how bad it looked. Even a bad movie generally contains two minutes of footage that, when spliced together correctly, make it look like it might be slightly interesting. This one struck me from the outset as the most banal crap I could imagine. “Is that what the kids are calling it these days?” Yes, crap.

Yes, Dakota Fanning is cute. Yes, Djimon Hounsou is a very good actor and plays a solid heavy. Yes, it was cool when Magneto made guns float in the air, and that kid who played Johnny Storm wasn’t so bad. All of these things in combination do not guarantee a good movie, though. What Push seems to be lacking, if the reviews I saw are to be believed, is some substance to back up the special effects. Not an uncommon problem in modern day Hollywood. Why do studios keep cranking out these crappy movies? Because people keep paying to see them. Dance, Spiderman, dance.

And speaking of lists of crappy movies, I don’t have the energy to go into all of the injustices in the list of popular movie rentals on Xbox Live, but there is one I am compelled to comment on. This is an injustice both immense and inexplicable, that you may not understand unless you’ve actually seen the film in question, which is called The Center of the World.

As I write, this movie is rated 16 of 1131 movies available on Xbox Live (if you browse all movies, and sort by popularity). It was released in 2001 and was directed by Wayne Wang. Wang had previously directed The Joy Luck Club, which was almost universally loved by critics. Molly Parker and Peter Sarsgaard star, and I remain a huge fan of them both, despite their involvement with this picture. Miranda July has a screenwriting credit.

It is horrible, just mind-numbingly boring and empty. I went to see it with a friend in the theatre, and we were in shock as to how such a talented group of people could produce such a soul-sucking film. I still have no explanation. This is not a big budget action film like some of the ones I’ve mentioned, either. It’s a small, character driven piece that was shot on a low budget on digital video.

Why is it popular on Xbox Live? Because it’s about a guy who’s a dot com millionaire who pays a stripper to go on vacation with him. And I think she gets naked.

#facepalm

Now, I don’t expect you all to be renting Citizen Kane every weekend, but there are better options than some of the crap you’re watching. Here’s a small sampling of movies below Center of the World on the Xbox Live list that are at least watchable, if not much better:

A Clockwork Orange
Quantum of Solace
V for Vendetta
The 40 Year Old Virgin
Braveheart
The Matrix
Blade Runner: The Final Cut
Training Day

And Defiance. You’d like to be morally superior, right?

The news broke yesterday that nine out of the ten top AIG bonus earners had returned their payments. Never one to avoid the obvious question, I couldn’t help but wondering who you were, the tenth person.

Is it sexist and racist for me to assume you’re a white male? Maybe. I’m picturing about five chins from eating too much, and additional appetites for hookers and luxury box seats. All things I could see myself engaging in more than I’ve been able if I was focused only on, “wealth building.”

We’re told that there’s an American Dream for everyone, that the playing field is increasingly leveled, but we both know that’s not true. You and your secret handshake buddies from Yale/Harvard/wherever have many advantages. Some of you were born into wealth, some have family connections to it, or Ivy League diplomas and the networks they bring. Your much bigger advantage over many of us, though, is your utter lack of scruples.

You raped our financial system. There’s no better word for it. You grabbed what you could, set the building on fire, and got the fuck out before the cops showed up. Or at least that was the plan.

Honestly, I couldn’t care less whether you pay back the bonus money. It’s a drop in the bucket compared to the damage you’ve caused. I’m actually pulling for you to keep it, because eventually everyone will know who you are. A secret that big won’t stay hidden forever. Either way, I hope to see soon some of your crew playing bridge with Madoff and others who put their greed above any concern for the whole.

[Update: At least fifteen of the top twenty have now returned their bonuses.]

I saw you on the street today rocking that canary yellow shirt with gigantic, seventies collar, a Pendleton, brown polyester pants and New Balance kicks. You looked exactly like me ten years ago, except I flew the Pumas and scruffy beards weren’t so much in fashion back then. About the only people who had them were the Pedro the Lion fans, and they tended to wear theirs sans moustache.

As I saw you ambling down the street, two questions came to mind: Was the Goodwill out of trucker hats and Harlem Globetrotters wristbands? And why aren’t you at SXSW?

Now I understand, you may feel you’re way too cool for an industry event like SXSW. It’s actually cooler to stay home and diss it than to go, unless you’re in one of the bands or sleeping with them. But you’re missing out on secret shows, pool parties, and secret shows at pool parties. You’re also missing out on the chance to see how your hipster moves stack up against rock stars from all over the country.

Next year, please try harder. If you’re short on cash, hitchhike. You must know someone who knows someone in Austin who will let you crash in their garage. Or just sleep in the park, that would be pretty punk rock. It’s not like you’ll be planning to wash your hair, anyway.

(Photo via Pierre Lascott)

Admittedly, we both know I don’t have money to hide overseas. I’m too occupied with racking up credit card debt to even think about saving, let alone jumping through all the hoops it takes to get a Swiss bank account. I’m a busy person. I have episodes of Secret Diary of a Call Girl stacked up on my Tivo.

But hey, it could happen. I could find a bag of drug money, or blackmail a politician, or just start selling drugs myself. I’ve seen Scarface like twenty-seven times. The world is mine.

The one thing I could always count on is that if I did manage to get my hands on a bunch of cash that I didn’t want redistributed to the unwashed masses, I could hide it in a numbered account. As long as I wasn’t messing around with Nazi gold I was good to go. Until now.

You’re trying to pretend there’s still secrecy, but we both know that’s spin. Once you’re willing to divulge information about an individual account to a government, it’s game over. There’s already a line of potential jailbirds. When I have my next money laundering fantasy, I’ll guess I’ll have to turn to e-gold.

I saw your performance Wednesday night on Hardball. At first I was going to say that segment made me want to throw up in my mouth, but that would be wong. It made me want to throw up in yours.

Mr. Fleischer, it truly boggled my mind that you could sit there smiling and utter the words “Bush recovery” together, until I remembered your previous employment as a paid liar. I’m not sure there can be a bigger straw man than an oxymoron, but for the sake of argument let’s assume you believe at least a tiny bit of what you said.

Let me offer the photograph above into evidence. I took it two days ago in downtown Portland, Oregon. You’re reading that correctly, it says eighty percent. That’s how sadly fucked this store owner is. Its a brutal time to be in retail, period, but this person happens to own a luggage store. It turns out that people don’t need a new suitcase for their staycation.

I’m not saying the Bush administration was bad for everyone. If you’re Erik Prince, for example, you probably spent much of the last eight years laying in bathtubs full of benjamins sipping dirty martinis. Prince was born into money, though, so he probably would have been doing that without Blackwater, just with smaller bills. Meanwhile the other ninety-five percent of us were staring at our blood running down the bathtub drain.

As disgusted as I was to hear your rationalizations, I’m very glad you’re out there talking up GW. Chris Matthews didn’t invite you on his show out of generosity. It’s a big help to President Obama to have a bunch of Bush cronies trotted out in front of the cameras right now. Try as you might, you can’t spin your way out of responsibility for this financial mess. The American people know better.

So, Ari Fleisher, please try harder.

Let me explain what jumping the shark means. You see, I’m old enough to actually have seen that travesty of television the first time it hit the airwaves. I watched Happy Days long before any shark jumping had occurred, and sadly, for several years after (fuck you too, Scott Baio).

In fact, what some of you throwing around that phrase may not understand is that pretty much everyone in America was watching Happy Days before that episode. It was the number one show on television already in its third season. The first four seasons were completely shark free.

What’s my point? Popularity and jumping the shark are not the same thing at all.

Twitter seems to have had a breakout moment during President Obama’s (Not) State of the Union speech, when people discovered that even members of Congress were tweeting. Let’s face it, when @senjohmccain started tweeting a grocery list of earmarks every day, Twitter suddenly seemed a lot less sexy.

However, for every Senator who thinks the Internet is a series of tubes, there’s someone who really gets it like @clairecmc. Senator McCaskill understands that she now has a direct line to express her opinion to people all over the world, unfiltered by the press. She writes her own tweets, and she sounded honestly surprised that people didn’t believe she reads every @ reply herself. Whether she’ll be able to do that when she has 100k followers instead of 15k remains to be seen, but she’s clearly someone who is curious about Twitter and inspired by its immediacy.

Now, back to Fonzie. Again, the problem with the shark jumping episode wasn’t that Happy Days was popular, the problem was that Fonzie was jumping a fucking shark. It made no sense. Someone at ABC decided that twenty-three million viewers wasn’t enough, and what followed was the screenwriter’s equivalent of the cheeseburger basehead from Menace II Society. They saw the lowest common denominator and aimed way below it.

Twitter’s situation is completely different. Twitter’s popularity has grown partly due to its embrace by celebrities, there’s no doubt, but the reasons people love the service (including those celebrities) come from several factors:

The 140 character limit pushes people to express themselves clearly. If you’ve tweeted long you’ve surely edited your ass off, trying to fit your ideas into that box while saving enough room for a tinyurl and a “RT @.” Users like @AinsleyofAttack take this idea to another level, composing tweets that are aphoristic and destructively funny in their impact.

Then there’s the social aspect of Twitter. It’s like Facebook without your mom, and without the bouncer at the door. It’s easy to locate new people to exchange ideas with, and to search for topics. Third party tools like Twitscoop, Twistori, and Twitterfall provide a pulse of the Internet, throbbing right on your screen.

What may be the biggest contributing factor to Twitter’s popularity, though, is its openness. The Twitter APIs give programmers around the world an easy way to plug their ideas into the Twitterverse, and there are hundreds of third party apps that extend Twitter in unique and amazing ways.

That, to me, is why the shark jumping analogy is such a massive fail. Twitter hasn’t jumped any sharks at all. It offers a very focused and open product. 140 characters of text, things don’t get much more straightforward than that. The day that the Twitter devs start building in tools to propose to your fiancee, or to tweet the URL to that book you just bought at Amazon, that’s the day I’ll consider the Fonzie comparison. I can’t see why they would possibly do that, though, when other people can already write any crazy apps they want (and any brilliant ones).

People Talking About Shark Jumping, please try harder.

If Jon Stewart eviscerates you on The Daily Show, just laugh it off. People will forget, once the emails and blog postings and tweets and retweets die down. Don’t go on multiple tv shows in a feeble attempt to call him out. That’s a little like cleaning a shotgun barrel with your tongue.

Jim Cramer, please try harder.

I hate to rain on your parade after your induction to the Hall of Fame, but when even Hitler sees the problem with your big offseason free agent signing, you’re in serious trouble. Do you think your staff can keep T.O. in line any better than every other team he’s already played for? Are you just starved for locker room drama, or have you sold the season to a reality tv show?

“I thought ‘wide right’ was a bad day, but this…”

Ralph Wilson, please try harder.

Yes, I’m speaking to you. Put down your Sidekick and your Hello Kitty messenger bag.

Life is passing you by. It’s time you buck up and apply yourself. I’m here to help.

There won’t be any motivational posters, or twelve step programs. We’ll boost your self image the old fashioned way: by demeaning and insulting others.

Underachievers, please try harder.

(P.S. I love you Camera Obscura)