Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

After trying to enjoy it for years, I've come to the opinion that modern American lit can sit and spin. Except David Foster Wallace, the one poor bastard who tried to say something real in the hyper-self-conscious language of the seminar creeps and wound up hanging himself. He's a good read, which is why I initially avoided the film adaptation of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

It's a shame this film didn't suck because then I could title the review "A Hideous Film" or something equally punny. Is not great - for the most part - but it's pretty alright, especially for a first time director. Jon Krasinski, the smirking everyman of The Office, put this together and it's obvious he's both a Wallace fan and deeply entwined with the mingy world Wallace struggled with, making for a film that's much too comfortable with it's own targets.

For those of you who never read it, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is actually a short story collection and gets the title from a number of interviews - or really monologues - from very ugly and very familiar men, mostly about women. This film does the ugly well, but only up to a point.

One particular interview is with a guy who has a hilariously complicated and neurotic sexual fantasy - always in a gym and always with stopping all time around him while he plows the chick of the moment. Originally, this fantasy goes out of control as he freaks out over all the madness he would cause by freezing people worldwide, just to get his rocks off. Think Alex Portnoy to the tenth power of cocaine.

In the film, it cuts off before it can get that weird and we're left with just the dolt smiling over the awesome powers he cribbed from Bewitched.

I couldn't find him so here's the guy who ejaculates democracy.

And Krasinski is a very middling actor. He has the good grace not to make himself the star of the show, instead focusing on some sallow hipster knock-off of Felicia Day as she goes about conducting the titular interviews. These are taken verbatim from Wallace, illustrated through the magic of film, and are for the most part well acted. The only one that falls flat is the penultimate scene with Krasinski himself, which stays faithful to Wallace's overwrought delivery but can't muster any of the humor or humanity.

But before that, we get to see Krasinski as a phenomenal director. Seriously, just watch this:

...I'll be honest, I didn't expect much from this movie. I just threw it on so my wife and I had some noise during dinner. I certainly wasn't expecting anything this good! Hell, the rest of the film feels stodgy and try-hardy in comparison.

Everything here - the delivery, the set, the subtleties - is perfect. This is what film can do that books can't! This one scene takes Wallace's prose and gets to the core of desperation while still reciting things verbatim. It's better than I ever would have expected from a dead writer cash-in flick and better than anything I've seen since A Serious Man.

One scene may not make a movie but this comes pretty damn close. It's enough reason to check out the rest if you have the time before Europa Report comes out.

The Boot Stamping on Your Face

I'm not sure who to hate more in the whole Snowden fiasco. Michael Hayden, for losing his shit in a ludicrously partisan op-ed? Glenn Greenwald, for raising up a suburban American dweeb as the second coming for just reiterating what everyone with a clue already knew about the NSA? Or said dweeb himself, Snowden, who for all the good he could've done for some real government transparency has flushed it away in a half-baked stance that's devoid of historical awareness or anything approaching the political will to affect some good change for once?

Mostly, I'm going to hate You the citizen. You got your panties in a twist at the thought of some federal office drone reading your embarrassing emails and ignored the one really important aspect of Snowden's leaks - the outsourced, for-profit security state.

The real Ministry of Love...

This has been going on for decades and nobody wants to pay attention. Defense spending was crooked as all hell even before Reagen but it was under that reptile's for-profit revolution that you started seeing things in the budget that had no fucking use whatsoever. The B1, Star Wars, pretty much anything that threw money down the business hole so that contractors could buy bigger and uglier houses in the DC suburbs.

Fast forward to now and you've got government surveillance filtered through IT companies, most of whom like to put on libertarian airs. Like Palantir, a typical technogeek outfit that loves to harp on individual liberty while taking fat CIA contracts. And let's not forget how the only reason the spooks can root through your data is because Facebook and Google gave it away. That the government doesn't need to be clever to invade your privacy but just ask the sites you inexplicably trust for your info, that's what should be worrying. Unless you hold to the belief that corporations can't be as oppressive as governments, like Cato flunkey Glenn Greenwald.

"And as you can see here, I supported the Iraq War until the Koch Brothers told me not to."

It's not just that the public and private institutions you've placed your trust in have betrayed you. It's that, should a real threat be brewing, this outsourced surveillance is worse than useless. Remember, this was all going on in the lead up to Boston with Tsarnaev the younger posting straight-up jihadi videos on YouTube! Even without their super secret spy gizmos, every three letter agency could've spotted that! Didn't help in the least. In the aftermath, we had the amateur detectives of Twitter getting ready to string up a Saudi for the crime of being scared. I called that bullshit out as it was happening and as far as I can tell I was the only one. When it turned out to be a nothing story, everyone just went back to the usual white noise that substitutes for thinking in this country.

And that's what I find really troubling about all this - that national defense is reliant on a system with little grounding and even less interest in reality. If such a half-assed system continues, the events of Boston will be easy to repeat as anyone serious will just be lost in the noise. And you're all cool with it because Business Good, Government Bad.

You cretins don't deserve any privacy. You'd just drown in the toilet.

What Florida Did Wrong

How is America going to move beyond the racism that lead to the murder of Trayvon Martin? Simple, it ain't. At least not until a whole lot of crackers die of old age, along with their children and their children's children... So yeah, racism is gonna keep killing young black men in hoodies for the forseable future.

But depending on where it happens, no one will be punished for it. Let me say up front I don't know and don't particularly care if George Zimmerman is racist. I'm more inclined to believe a gun owning buddy of mine who described the shlub thus - "I see him as that guy who just got his first  gun and couldn't wait to try it out." And then he threw in some Beavis laughs for emphasis. However, he would've just been another trigger happy moron if not for the State of Florida.

"Stand Your Ground" is the catch all for self-defense laws which could charitably be described as "pro-active" and more accurately described as "ludicrously paranoid." See, every state recognizes your right to defend yourself when attacked but that's not good enough for the dumbasses who think every brown person is planning to mug them. So they clamor for an expansion of existing law, saying they have no obligation to retreat first and may meet the threat as they deem appropriate. The idea is to put a stop to the imagined railroading of equally imaginary responsible gun owners who were just defending themselves. What it has actually lead to is encouraging escalation.

Let's have a quick legal aside - "escalation" is the fancy way of saying "he punched you so you stabbed him." Technically you were defending yourself but you did so in a disproportionate manner, which makes you the agressor. And guilty of assault.

Unless you're in a state with Stand Your Ground on the books! You can still be considered acting in self-defense if you shoot someone who's unarmed or retreating from you or even if you're a known drug dealer. Proponents of the law say they are shocked - shocked! - that such shenanigans could occur but that's what happens when you adopt broad legislation to appease a mouthy minority of screwheads. And you're statistically more likely to get off if you shoot a black person.

Now let's talk about Martin and Zimmerman. Like I said, Zimmerman's a clown but let's give him the benefit of the doubt for now: Supposing that Martin did indeed attack him first and battered him against the sidewalk so his shaved head looked all bloody, does that give Zimmerman cause to defend himself? Absolutely. Does being attacked by a bare-handed teenager give him the right to respond with lethal force? The proper legal answer used to be "Hell no, that's escalation!" but thanks to Stand Your Ground, it isn't possible to make that distinction anymore.

Trayvon Martin is dead because he crossed paths with a trigger happy idiot. No law would have prevented that - at least none this rotten country will consider. But his killer walked free because of a law dreamed up by paranoid hicks that encourages ordinary citizens to go beyond common self defense into outright murder. And this won't be the last case.

Apocalypse? Please...

Ever seen a movie that was both fantastic and terrible? It's a unique experience and one you can have right now a your local multiplex, courtesy of World War Z.

Based on the novel by the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft - no, really! - this flick is... Well, all of you know what it's about. Zombies, armageddon, headshots, if you've been in any way engaged with popular culture for the past seven years you know exactly what you're getting.

An inspiring story of can-do spirit!

But doing the familiar really well is just as important to film as innovation and on that fron World War Z is very... Hold on, this is a little complicated.

I'm going to state right out that I do not like zombie stories but I liked World War Z. The book, that is. I enjoyed how Max Brooks took dozens of little stories to tell one big story that was horrifying, inspiring, and balls-out funny in a number of places. He also injected it with a subtle but clear vein of satire - from an obvious Karl Rove stand-in reduced to literaly shoveling shit in Texas while trying to defend his bosses utter cock-up of the pre-apocalypse, to the description of "LAMOES" or "Last Man On Earth Syndrome" who indulge in the classic lone survivalist fantasy only to pick a fight with the new blue-uniformed US Army and promptly get vaporized. Stick that in your AR-15 and smoke it!

I was also of the opinion that it's one of those books which are simply unfilmable and said so to friends when the first rumblings of a movie adaptation came out some years ago. But two weeks ago I went to see it, ready to give it the benefit of the doubt. And World War Z - the film this time - sidesteps those unfilmable issues by not having much of anything to do with the book at all.

Oh sure, there are zombies and they start in China and there's a wall around Israel and the UN is organizing the survival of the species from a fleet at sea, but that's where the similarities end. Rather than a bunch of little stories forming a greater hole, this is just one big story that's so much hot air.

Brad Pitt plays Brad Pitt, a former UN investigator used to such scary places as Afghanistan and Chechnya, and he's sent by the Black King of the World to find Patient Zero from which a random biologist can hopefully extract an antivirus. Pitt continues in his Patient Z search even after said biologist is killed by a ricocheting bullet five minutes later.

So as an adaptation it's simply not but how does it stand on it's own?

Eh...

Pitt follows up getting the last hope for humanity killed with a globetrotting adventure - okay, just Israel and Cardiff - trying to complete the search himself and always one step ahead of a CGI zombie horde. It gets a little ridiculous, everywhere Pitt goes, zombies invariably follow to the point you wonder if he's somehow attracting them. Like, if he was launched into space would all the zombies helpfully expel themselves from the Earth like dolphins?

"So long and thanks for all the brains!"

Not that he really has to, since the six screenwriters cram in a deus ex machina conveniently located at a British lab. Turns out sufficiently sick people are invisible to zombie bran-dar and the undead hordes will part like the Red Sea for a single cancer patient or kid with meningitis. At last, a fighting chance for humanity! Roll credits!

...Wait, what? Not at the deus ex machina, but at the credits. I left the theater feeling like the movie ended three hours early. No reconquest of the world by the living, no Studs Terkel wannabe interviewing the survivors, just Pitt taking a paddle boat to see his family.

But what makes the abrupt ending so jarring is that World Tour Z is actually pretty good in spots. The opening of Pitt and his Pitts trying to escape the madness around them is nice and tense, keeping the monsters just enough out of sight to really work the nerves. The later lab sequence is similarly good and creepy - and I swear it's a Half-Life reference inserted by J. Michael Straczynski because he's a huge nerd. What else would you make of people running around a research facility where the doctors and technicians have all turned into shambling monsters and they get whacked with a crowbar?

That's not a dig at Straczynski, by the way. I love that guy's work, he really knows how to take a story on a grand scale and communicate it through relatable characters. And besides Brad Pitt as Token Hero Square-Jaw, the characters in this are really good. The dead biologist, Nelson Mandela Junior, an Israeli soldier girl who accompanies Pitt because he helpfully hacked off her arm. The only wasted talent was Peter "Malcolm Fuckmothering Tucker!" Capaldi and only because there's not much use for his glorious obscenity issuing from a World Health Organization dweeb.

"Zombies? Release the lubricated horse cock!"

Wrapped up in some excellent music and visuals - besides the CGI zeke rush - and it's a pretty good flick... It just feels anemic. And it's too bad this wasn't a vampire film, 'cause then I could end on a really bad pun.

Sympathy for the Devil

It's a special sort of film that can not only make you feel sorry for Adolph Hitler but root for him as well.

Not Chancellor Hitler of course. Only sketch comedy or idiot adolescents would go there. But Corporal Hitler, that nebbishy Austrian with pretensions of being a great artist, that's someone you can work with. Which Max does brilliantly.

Set in Munich not long after the Great War, Max is really about this guy named Max - oddly enough. A wealthy Jewish art promoter who left his arm in Ypres and his marbles somewhere else. Max is one of those types who craves "realness" in art, which gives him all sorts of artsy angst from having to deal with the hollowness of modern art in his gallery and the wealthy patrons with all the aesthetic sensibilities of a bowel of porridge.

"It fills me with ennui... And tobacco."

Enter young Adolph. He approaches Max at one of the latter's many swanky soirees to pester him about displaying his artwork. Max rebuffs the twitchy little man at first but, after catching a glimpse of the proto-fascist doodlings, comes to believe this Hitler boy has some real talent - despite his blatant anti-semitism.

So Max tries to bring Hitler into the art world. A Herculean effort, as the Austrian's every personal quality is antithetical to the vapid, Dadaist nonsense of the High Art scene in the interwar period - demonstrated best when Max puts on a full performance piece about soldiers being fed into a sausage grinder. Most of the audience is confused and put out, but Max's buddy Adolph is furious! He takes the dig at the nation and the military quite personally because, well, he's a frikin' fascist.

"I don't know how you keep forgetting that..."

And that's what Max finds so "authentic" about the angry twerp. He encourages Hitler's visions because he believes it to be the unvarnished inner world of the Common Man which, if we're honest, it kinda is. Parallel to all this, we follow Hitler's falling in with a reactionary movement of soldiers - very authentic and very common but more interested in murdering rich Jews like Max than getting into his artsy circle of friends. By the end, it all comes to quite a brutal head...

But what really makes Max work is Noah Taylor's performance. He does Adolph Hitler as a full human being - vulnerable, indecisive, craving a real human connection - but he never loses sight of how Hitler's entire sense of self was defined by his reactionary politics. When Max confronts him about the speeches he's been making at political rallies, Hitler defends it as another form of performance art. That may be arguable, but he really does come alive when whipping up a crowd - nothing like his awkward stutterings among the well-to-do artists.

Max is a fantastic film. Not just for humanizing history's greatest monster but for it's clear look at Inter-War Germany - how poor and dispossessed Common Men set the world on fire while the rich liberals were all busy contemplating their navels.

A Moral Vacuum

People are nodding very meaningfully to each other over the latest vet suicide. Not that Americans actually give a damn about vet suicides now, it's just that this vet left a note hinting at the raw and awful shit JSOC did in Iraq.

"You must not blame yourself. The simple truth is this: During my first deployment, I was made to participate in things, the enormity of which is hard to describe. War crimes, crimes against humanity. Though I did not participate willingly, and made what I thought was my best effort to stop these events, there are some things that a person simply can not come back from. I take some pride in that, actually, as to move on in life after being part of such a thing would be the mark of a sociopath in my mind. These things go far beyond what most are even aware of."

Not to denigrate Daniel Somers' memory, but there are thousands of vets who could tell the same story. Again, I knew a guy back in Charlottesville who saw some shit in plain ol' infantry, not the super-special wet ops. Somers is just in the news because he chose to kill himself after telling his story. Because it was the only way you craven freaks would listen.

Bradley Manning leaked documents saying - in detail - what Somers hinted at.  Friendly fire, walloping civilians, all the dirty shit you would expect from a military occupation. And Manning will likely go the way of Somers soon enough - by firing squad.

If people actually cared about any of this, they'd be out in the streets screaming for Manning's release right now. But that sort of effective protest only happens in this country over video games and besides, you'd all rather keep crushing on Edward Snowden. Rape and torture is a little too icky for you but you can still work up a good outrage over the possibility of the Big Bad Government reading your tepid sex fantasies on Gchat.

Assuming anyone at the NSA ever bothered, once they'd collected everything. Or that they ever got to your boring life, amidst the millions of other boring lives they had to sift through. That's the thing about total information awareness - just being aware doesn't mean you really know what's going on. Or can do anything about it, like Boston. But it's so much more comforting for you losers to imagine yourselves as somehow threatening enough to the most powerful empire in the world that spooks and other security state drones would concentrate on your mundane life.

Which they have every legal right to do now. Remember that Patriot Act thing you all cheered for ten years ago? You thought the feds wouldn't use the sweeping surveillance powers you granted them? At least they asked permission first - unlike your boss, who's been reading your email for years and is a very immediate threat to your personal liberty.

And getting back to Snowden - I really can't tell if he's naive or just doing it for the lulz at this point. His recent revelation of cyberwar between China and the US had as much to do with principle and civil liberties as telling John Dillinger that Al Capone cheated him at cards. They're both assholes, so what exactly is the point of helping either of 'em?

I guess that's why I don't feel all that outraged over the NSA stuff. All of you assholes support war crimes and the muddling technocrats carrying them out, then bitch when other technocrats start poking around. Like you have anymore vileness to hide...

From the Vault: All About The Benjamins

Originally posted July 24, 2008. Made relevant again last week.

Well would ya look at that? The illegal wiretapping we caught the Bush Junta doing isn't illegal anymore! Oh woe to Freedom and the Constitution and Yadda Yadda Yadda.

I'm starting to enjoy these abominations because it drags all the morons out into the light. "Duh, the Democrats are wieners who won't protect our Civil Liberties!" or "Duh, the Republicans are evil fascists who want to listen to our dirty talk to grandma!" on the Left aisle and mostly just "Duuuhhh!" on the Right. Neither are willing to point out the most disturbing fact of the new FISA: immunity for telecoms. Seems nobody in Congress was interested in that liberty or terrorism bullshit, just making sure Verizon doesn't get smacked with "frivolous" lawsuits.

Our legislature has been privatized for years now but everyone just pretends "politics" still exist, when it's all just corporate favor trading. FISA won't save us from terrorists or turn us into Oceania. Hell, I doubt it will really affect Americans in any way. If there's one thing the government does better than blowing up foreigners it's ignoring Americans. The last real disaster to hit us was Katrina and we saw what good all that Total Information Awareness did. Goddamn Wal-Mart was more on top of things.

And it proves - again - how obsolete the activism born of the 60s has become. No elected official listens to constituents that aren't passing them bags of cash and nobody in this goddamn country wants to talk about the only real, bloody option available to us as free citizens in an armed culture...

No, not even the teabaggers.