Living on the Neener-Net

Feminism alive and well... in a 12-year-old Egyptian boy

posted on Jul 16, 2013

Things like this give me hope for the future.

Ask a physicist, 5¢

posted on Jul 23, 2012
 
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Leon Lederman sometimes sets up a card table up on a street corner and allows all comers to bring him their physics questions.

10 worst best films of all time

posted on Apr 30, 2012
So Roger Ebert just added Tree of Life to his 10 best films of all time list. Which I don't get because it was poorly structured, unmemorable, and tedious, which is a pretty friggin' impressive achievement for a movie with dinosaurs and Brad Pitt in it. And that Hallmark greeting card version of the afterlife at the end--complete with sunsets, waves, and wheeling birds--was like a Sunday school orientation video it was so unspeakably clichéd and dorky.

And he chose this over Synecdoche, NY. I guess some things in life just defy analysis.

But this does raise the question: what are the absolute worst best films of all time? Here's my list, and I'm putting Tree of Life in the #1 position, just because it's annoying me right now.

  1. Tree of Life - I was ready to cut my own throat after the first hour, but I was pretty sure that the film would redeem itself in some way before the end. Perhaps a character would show up that we cared about. My money was on Sean Penn, since his purpose in the film was otherwise inexplicable. (I lost that bet. He talks about uninteresting things to someone on the phone, and he rides an elevator, and he looks annoyed about the stupid role that he has to play.) Perhaps something resembling a plot would become evident. Okay, forget plot--maybe something would just HAPPEN. Anything, please! Nope. The most exciting part of the movie for me was when the end credits started to roll. Yes!
  2. Forrest Gump - Here's a movie that celebrates how mental inadequacy and the American Dream go hand-in-hand. Seriously, wut?
  3. Citizen Kane - It's like the old joke about Shakespeare: it would be better if it wasn't so full of clichés. Except, it probably wouldn't. I think movies should at least be memorable, and the only thing I can remember about this film was the "Rosebud..." ending, which has been repeated in so many places, it's probably now a false memory that was implanted by a Simpsons episode.
  4. Vertigo - I just start laughing when the psychedelic effects start in. Okay, maybe there was a time when that shit actually worked, but it stopped being that time somewhere in the 1960s. And we are talking about the greatest films of all time, after all, not films that were great for 3 years until their special effects technology became comical.
  5. Raging Bull - I like De Niro. I like Scorsese. But I can't remember anything about this film. I think I didn't finish it for lack of interest. I figure that's got to count against you.
  6. On the Waterfront - To be honest, I can't think of any Marlon Brando lead roles that I've actually liked. We'll pick on this one, just because I was forced to sit through it in film class.
  7. Platoon - Hollywood loves Oliver Stone. But the dude's a bit of a hack, isn't he? He tackles issues that are sensitive to Americans, but that tricks Americans into thinking he's brave and nuanced. But he's actually a bit ham-fisted, which doesn't become clear until you see how he handles non-American subjects. Alexander, anyone?
  8. Empire Strikes Back - Okay, this was actually an eminently enjoyable film. I'm putting it here because most people say it was the best of the Star Wars movies, when in fact the first film stands head and shoulders above it as a piece of art. Empire is a boilerplate sequel--more action, better one-liners, upgraded special effects, and a cliff-hanger ending setting up a ridiculous third movie. It's actually nothing more than an extremely-well-executed piece of shite. But still a lot of fun.
  9. Star Trek II - Wrath of Khan - Same story as Empire, above. This one's a favourite of the nerds, who apparently just want their movies to be big-budget TV shows. The cinematic, Kubrickesque pretentions of the first Star Trek movie got swept into the garbage with this one, and the franchise rapidly went downhill after that.
  10. No Country for Old Men - This was actually a really good film, and I adore the Coen brothers and everything they do. Why pick on this film, in that case? Because they botched the ending. Just as the tension and storyline gets wound up to the snapping point, the filmmakers simply look away. They literally look away, and we don't see the end of the movie. We see Tommy Lee Jones looking a bit baffled by the ending, but he doesn't get it, so he goes and talks to his old dad about it, but he doesn't get it either. It's like the film broke, or the DVD was scratched and unplayable for the last 5 minutes, and we just have to hope that it was a good ending after all. But mostly I'm just annoyed that of all the Coen Brothers' films, this is the one that got an Oscar.

Leave out the parts that readers tend to skip

posted on Jan 25, 2012
elmore-leonard

38 miles of pure, unbridled insanity

posted on Dec 5, 2011

One hair-raising lap of the Isle of Man TT racecourse--38 miles of pure, unbridled insanity on public roads.

This has not been sped up.

Nobody should have to eat alone

posted on Dec 1, 2011


This ad was pulled in South Africa after Zimbabwean Nando's franchises started to get heat from the government.

What if they held a Turing test and nobody came?

posted on Aug 29, 2011

Guns... that sing

posted on Aug 3, 2011

If Earth had rings

posted on May 3, 2011


If Earth had rings like Saturn...

Dr. O

posted on May 2, 2011
Osama bin Laden's assassination was an interesting bit of political theatre. The news is enthusiastically trumpeting that the mastermind behind the 9/11 terror attacks has been killed in his fortified compound after a 10-year manhunt. It's a single-sentence story that makes use of all kinds of tropes to allow us to fill in the complex backstory with various villainous stereotypes, learned mostly from James Bond films.
 
Trope #1: The Impenetrable Lair of the Evil Genius. Doctor No is the archetype of the evil genius. By means of this trope, we are allowed to believe that Osama has spent his time holed up in ingenious, high-tech lairs, from which he directs a vast, many-tentacled network of minions to do his evil bidding.

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This appears to be a Hollywood version of reality that has no basis in fact. There is no evidence that anything like the "Binladenland" super-villain lair actually existed in the mountains of Tora Bora. The early media reports from his assassination described his more modest lair in northern Pakistan as a "mansion", but the early photos and maps show more of an ugly suburban compound, such as might be expected of a minor drug lord or third-world gangster. Not to downplay the actual mission difficulty—storming the compound of a third-world gangster unquestionably means a shitload of bullets flying in your general direction, so it would certainly require some serious military professionalism to get the job done right.
 
Trope #2: The Many-Tentacled International Terror Organization. Dr. No's SPECTRE is the media's model for Al-Qaeda. But organizations like SPECTRE have members and a structure, which Al-Qaeda does not. Al-Qaeda is an invention of the western media, which uses the SPECTRE trope to gloss over the complex nuances of Islamic political extremism, by suggesting that it is a villainous organized body with a command structure and dedicated minions—something that we are much more familiar with through our dalliances with James Bond. It allows the media to tell a simple but compelling story without having to pause every second sentence to explain the politics of Wahhabism or the complex interrelationships between revolutionary politics and religion in the Islamic world. Nine out of ten viewers would get confused and change the channel if the media tried to explain that Al-Qaeda is really just an umbrella term that they invented to associate a diversity of radical movements with overlapping interests, in the interest of compressing complex news stories down to a sound bite.
 
We would get even more confused if they actually took the time to explain that these revolutionary movements are directing their primary wrath at their own middle-eastern tyrants, and the United States is only suffering collateral damage as the primary supporter of these regimes. We might start to wonder who the good guys are. In fact, you may be wondering that right now, so I'll just remind you that there are none. A better trope to understand all of this, is not Doctor No, but Scarface. There are numerous different groups of vicious killers engaged in a furious turf battle over… well, it's money, it's always just about money. And in the end, the decadent and coked out kingpin goes down in a blaze of gunfire, screaming "You wanna play rough? Say hello to my little friend!" as his gangland hideaway gets stormed by rival gangsters.
 
Trope #3: The Evil Genius and his Diabolical Plan. Dr. No planned to take out a U.S. space mission with his atomic ray. Bin Laden, on the other hand, planned to take out the architectural symbols of American power with airliners hijacked by suicidal pilots. Right?
 
Well... maybe. The FBI publishes its most-wanted terrorist list, and Osama bin Laden has held the #1 spot for years now. There is no doubt that he was a bad dude of the first order—he is directly cited for his role in a number of Embassy bombings that killed hundreds. However, the FBI makes no mention of the most heinous crime in U.S. history that killed over 3000 people. When questioned on the matter, their frank response is that they do not have the evidence to accuse him of involvement in 9/11. Instead, his wanted poster only mentions "other terrorist attacks" in which his involvement is suspected. Bin Laden himself corroborated the FBI's version of events—he disavowed involvement shortly after the attacks, and subsequent taped admissions that have made the news have been shown to be bald-faced forgeries or ambiguous "endorsements" of the attacks.

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The whole evil-genius-and-his-diabolical-plan-to-blow-up-America trope was apparently started on September 11 itself, by Richard Clarke. He was speculating on who could have done such a thing, and since Osama Bin Laden had recently blown up some U.S. embassies in Africa, that was his best guess. It was a good trope, so the media ran with it, and it basically became accepted as fact by everyone except the people whose job it is to actually gather facts about international terrorists. When the media later questioned George W. Bush about why he wasn't trying harder to find the worst man of the 21st Century, Bush admitted that he just wasn't that interested, and it wasn't a priority. Which seems a pretty odd thing for the Texas Sheriff to say about the biggest mass-murderer ever to thumb his nose at the law, unless the Sheriff knew that Bin Laden's conviction in the court of public opinion had little to do with actual facts.
 
So if not Bin Laden, then who was the evil genius?!? Who the hell knows? If you want a half-baked wingnut theory, you can ask a conspiracy theorist, but their story is only going to be more trope-laden than ever. Maybe it really was Bin Laden—just because we don't have good evidence that he did it, doesn't mean he didn't. The point is not to fill in the blanks with crazy shit, the point is that you can't tell a good story about the worst terrorist attack in history and the various wars that broke out in reaction to it without a charismatic bad guy. The media needed to convict Osama in order to make their job of story telling much easier. And one way or another, this has served political interests enough that they really haven't gone our of their way to make corrections.
 
Which brings us to today. If it wasn't a priority for the most trigger-happy cowboy president to find and kill Osama bin Laden, then why did it suddenly become a priority for a bleeding heart Chicago lawyer? That's the most interesting question of this whole drama, but few are actually asking it. Most Obama fans are in fact gloating that their President is more bad-ass than the last one, secretly relieved that their guy can also enthusiastically kill brownies, despite his own suspicious pigmentation.
 
The icing on the whole TV-as-reality-cake is that the whole thing hit the airwaves during the middle of the season finale of The Apprentice, an impeccably-timed "Fuck You" to Donald Trump. Apparently finding and assassinating Osama bin Laden was judged to be easier than assassinating Trump, although politically it may have more or less the same effect.
 
We are being manipulated in ways that are obvious, and in ways that are not, and we are unconsciously doing it to ourselves as much as we wilfully do it to manipulate others. We interpret the news through a lens that has been shaped by comic-book plots, and action-movie villains. But the writers of the news are no different from us—they were raised on the same crappy television and formulaic movies that we were. They are writing the news to conform to these these same story models, because otherwise it would be hard to tell the stories at all. Our propagandists halfway understand this, and are concocting media spin that takes advantage of our subconscious indoctrination in these forms of story telling. But they are doing this in order to promote ideologies that are subconsciously built on exactly the same set of fictions.
 
There is an old adage that truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense. The unfortunate corollary seems to be that if politics and news is an attempt to make sense of the world, then we are only able to consume it in the form of fiction.

Manifest

Things that mobu likes, things that mobu does, things that mobu makes, things that mobu thinks.


©2019 Morgan Burke