Money Well Spent, New Jersey Republican State Committee

I left New Jersey roughly three and half years ago, after having maintained my primary residence there for seven or eight years. While I lived there, I was generally politically apathetic. I voted in presidential elections, and probably in some of the gubernatorial and senatorial races. I had no idea who my local reps were. I never donated money, never signed a petition and was registered independent, meaning I could skip the primaries with a clear conscience.

In the past three or so weeks, I'd wager that about 75% of all calls to my landline phone have been from the New Jersey Republican State Committee, imploring my to vote for whomever they've got running this year. At least I assume that's what they're saying, since I generally hang up as soon as the call comes through. I listened to a few extra seconds the time Mitt Romney called, but that was more from the amusement factor. We've also been hit with about 20 pieces of junk mail reminding me to vote. One or two of these mentioned an absentee ballot, but most just wanted me to drive down to the polling place and vote. One actually called out the polling place, which Google Maps tells me is roughly 930.3 miles from my house.

Does no one in the NJ Republican Party know how to use a merge purge? I don't live or vote in NJ. My phone number (a WI area code) was obtained more than a year AFTER leaving NJ. I have never voted for a Republican candidate. I have no idea who the Republicans are running in NJ, though a quick Google search brings back an individual for whom my first two adjectives would be "husky" and "confused". I am a complete waste of the NJ Republican Party's money.

Corzine (the Democratic incumbent) seems to have done an excellent job of not targeting me. I cannot vote for him, and none of him sizable campaign dollars appear to have been spent trying to sway me to do so. The Republican war chest in NJ is much smaller, and they've been wasting time and money on me. Not much, but multiply me by however many other ex-New Jerseyians there are out there and it's probably a good chunk.

In the event the Republicans win, let's hope that this doesn't speak to their level of operational efficiency.

Where the Wild Things Are : A Quick Review

WtWTA The Book is a nearly perfect piece of children's literature. It works because it gives readers (adults and children) just enough to create a world of their own, and ties it just enough to emotions we know to put us in that world. It doesn't do any more than it needs to, knowing that the stories we create in our heads are more powerful that those we see or read. It's a book everyone reads and remembers differently, an incredibly personal book for only a few dozen pages.

WtWTA The Movie is Spike Jonze's reading of the book. It's a valid and incisive reading that I found alternately touching and disturbing. And it's a movie that I wish had never been made.

At a 50,000 ft. level, the movie follows the outline of the book, though at 90+ minutes, there had to be some expansion. Jonze and Dave Eggers (who wrote the screenplay together), spend the movie fleshing out the rest of the world that WtWTA The Book put into their heads. The world of WtWTA according to Jonze and Eggers is a world of skin-deep metaphor, nebbish monsters, and a reflected vision of the internal violence of being a nine-year old boy. It's a beauteous world, though a mundane one; very little actually happens wherever it is the Wild Things Are.

There's a lot of things done right in the movie. The opening sequences (all pre-trip to the Wild Things) are a wonderfully brutal look into the loneliness of childhood, and may be hard for parents to watch. It's a stark look at the ways we hurt the one we love without thinking. Once we're with the Wild Things, the visuals knock your socks off. The Wild Things look great, their world is dense with beauty, and everything feels tangible in a way I didn't think they'd be able to pull off.

But just as many things are done wrong. I had trouble imagining that a vibrant 9-year old kid would surround himself with monsters who stole their personalities from extras in 1970s Woody Allen movies. Too many of the sequences felt like they were checked off from a list: first, we have a wild rumpus, then we build a fort, then we have a war. So much of the time with the Wild Things felt slooooow. Maybe at 80 minutes the movie would have felt taut, but at 94 minutes, it felt excruciating at points.

On the whole, I think there were more positives than negatives, but I can't help but wish I hadn't seen it. Or seen the previews. Or known about the movie.

This is Spike Jonze's WtWTA. Not mine. Mine was written in my head reading the book as a child, and re-written again reading it to my own children. My WtWTA was not as lush as Jonze's. It wasn't as existentialist. It may not have been as good. But it was mine. By giving shape and voice to Maurice Sendak's images and words, Jonze has taken something away that it may be difficult to get back.

With some books, this doesn't matter. Some authors are fond of saying that movies don't affect their books... the books are unchanged on the shelf, regardless of what people do with them off the shelf. With some books, that's true. Others, less so. Harry Potter readers may have trouble picturing Hermione as anyone other than Emma Watson, but that's not a completely bad thing. Dune readers may have trouble divorcing Dave Lynch's vision from Frank Herbert's. But in those cases, there are thousands of pages of words to shape a vision. Sendak gave us a few dozen.

So, I will go about re-claiming the book for my own. I'll give the movie a thumbs up, but I won't recommend it. (I especially won't recommend it for anyone younger than 10, and more realistically for anyone under 18. The images will disturb children, and the meaning won't resonate with teenagers. This is a movie made for people in their 30s and 40s.) Spike Jonze made a very interesting movie. I just wish he had kept it to himself.

Laziest Spam Ever

Received this morning.

You have been choosen for a cash of {$850.000.00 USD}contact chevrontexaco80@hotmail.com with your Full Informations i.e Full Name,Address,Phone Number and any form of identification.

That was the entire mail. Sent from a separate email address. And somehow, GMail did not flag this as spam.

I am tempted to respond, just for the entertainment value.

Newspapers and Ralph Stanley

We're part of the dying breed of folks who still subscribe to a physical newspaper, delivered daily to our doorstep and generally read cover to cover. We're motivated primarily by local news on that front; the national / AP feeds that pop up in the paper are days old by the time we get them. But for coverage of whatever local info is going around right now, we like having dead trees on our kitchen table.

On Thursday morning, I was flipping through our local entertainment insert (77 Square) and reading an article on the recently refurbished hundred-year old Stoughton Opera House, in which they casually mentioned that Ralph Stanley was playing there on Saturday.

I spit out my cereal and ran over to the computer to book tickets. (Which would have to wait... The Opera House doesn't have online ticketing. But they also don't have 33% service fees like Ticketmaster, so I'm cool with that.)

Ralph Stanley is the 82-year old leader of the Clinch Mountain Boys, and a mainstay on the bluegrass scene since the 1940's. Like most people under 40 not raised on bluegrass, I had no knowledge of Dr. Ralph until 2000, when the Coen Brothers released "O Brother, Where Art Thou?", which featured a soundtrack comprised almost entirely of old timey bluegrass. (For my dollar, it's the best soundtrack album ever made.) Stanley was featured on two tracks, including the haunting a capella track "O Death", and the gospel band "Angel Band", and the film's main track "Man of Constant Sorrow" was popularized by Ralph and his brother Carter. His voice stands out as something unique. The blurb from the playbill describes it perfectly:

Ralph Stanley’s voice is not of this century, or of the last one for that matter. Its stark emotional urgency is rooted in a darker time, when pain was the common coin of life and the world offered sinful humanity no hope of refuge.

So, I signed up for a ticket, managed to score a fourth row seat since I was going solo, and wandered down to the Opera House last night, and had a great old time. The show itself was just good. It was only about 90 minutes, and much of it was focused on Ralph's band rather than Ralph himself... at 82, he doesn't have a lot of dexterity left on the banjo and focused mostly on vocals. A number of songs featured other vocalists, who were all talented, but a bit of a distraction from the main event. But when he shined, he shined, and the best moments were up there some of the best concert going experiences I've ever had. Their gospel choir call-and-response of Amazing Grace was one of the best things I've ever heard live, and his voice is harmony with more conventional vocals creates a sound unlike anything else I've heard.

The evening felt like poking my head into another time for a few hours. Stanley ran the show like an old fashioned MC, with an almost vaudevillian aesthetic, only enhanced by the feel of the venue, which was going strong in Stanley's prime. This was a dying breed of entertainment, put on by one the original practitioners of the artform. And it was a blast.

A Premature Top 20 Movies of the Aughts

There are still three months left in the first decade of the new millennium, but I was in a list mood and decided to throw together my draft Top 20 movies of the last decade.

It's a capriciously thrown together list, and one that will look different in three months and would probably look different if I did it next week, or last week. It's presented in chronological order, and with the caveat that while I see a lot of movies, I also miss a lot of movies. And I'm counting the Lord of the Rings as one movie.

Anyway, here you go:

• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
• O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
• The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)
• The Lord of the Rings (2001 - 2003)
• Lost in Translation (2003)
• Spellbound (2003)
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
• The Incredibles (2004)
• A History of Violence (2005)
• Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
• Brick (2006)
• Children of Men (2006)
• No Country for Old Men (2007)
• Ratatouille (2007)
• Once (2007)
• Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
• Synecdoche, New York (2008)
• In Bruges (2008)
• Panyo (2009)
• District 9 (2009)

If the list shows anything, it's that the auteur theory of film-making is still alive and well in my head. All but a handful of those are made by "filmmakers" rather than "directors", for whatever that distinction is worth.

If pressed for the Top 3 among those, I'd likely choose (in no order) The Royal Tenenbaums, Synecdoche, New York & either Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or Children of Men. (I promise, I like comedies too.)

Anyway, these are fun, meaningless exercises that tell more about the person making the list than the movies themselves. But they are fun, hope you enjoy and decide to pick up any of these you haven't seen.

Oh, and for the extra curious, when I had to trim my original list down to an arbitrary 20, I cut out Shadow of the Vampire (2000), Amelie (2001) and Spirited Away (2001). Fun fun.

Wax (or, The Discovery of Television Among the Bees)

Sometime in 1996 or so, a group of friends and I wandered down to the local Blockbuster chain on campus. It was a Friday night, and we had nothing going on, so we decided to rent some random sci-fi. At this point, Blockbuster wasn't homogenized to the level they are now. Each store had its own relatively idiosyncratic selection, though ours wasn't overly out there. The sci-fi section was only a few shelves high, and there are only so many times you can watch Dune or The Last Starfighter.

If you've ever tried to rent movies with guy friends, the experience is always a little odd. Depending on your crowd, it's either a race to the lowest common denominator to pick out either something everyone has already seen 15 times, or a pissing content to find the weirdest film on the shelf. (Or the one with the most breasts.)

We'd made it through most of the alphabet without a bite, until we saw something none of us had ever heard of. On the last shelf sat "Wax (or, The Discovery of Television Among the Bees)". It appeared to have some Tron-style computer graphics and some strange Gulf War imagery. There was no real plot description I could discern, just strange superlatives about the film. We figured "what the hell", picked it up and wandered back to the dorms.

And then our brains exploded.

I have no frame of reference to describe this movie.

Film.com offers the following capsule review, which is of little help:

The bizarre story of Jacob Maker, weapons-guidance designer and beekeeper extraordinaire. When the bees drill a hole in Jacob's head and insert a television with supernatural images that control his will, Jacob enters into a hallucinatory, alternative reality.

The more descriptive entry at Grey Lodge offers more, but still leaves me wanting.

"WAX or the discovery of television among the bees" is set in Alamogordo, New Mexico (1983), where the main character, Jacob Maker, designs gunsight displays at a flight simulation factory. Jacob also keeps bees. His hives are filled with "Mesopotamian" bees that he has inherited from his grandfather. Through these bees, the dead of the future begin to appear, introducing Jacob to a type of destiny that pushes him away from the normal world, enveloping him in a grotesque miasma of past and synthetic realities. The bees show Jacob the story of his grandfather's acquisition and fatal association with the "Mesopotamian" bees, in the years following the First World War.

The bees also lead Jacob away from his home, out to the Alamogordo desert, slowly revealing to him their synthetic/mechanical world, which exists in a darkness beyond the haze of his own thoughts. Passing through Trinity Site, birthplace of the Plutonium bomb, Jacob arrives at a gigantic cave beneath the desert. There, he enters the odd world of the bees, and fulfills his destiny. Traveling both to the past and the future, Jacob ends at Basra, Iraq, in the year 1991, where he meets a victim that he must kill.

Thumbs up for the phrase "grotesque miasma of past and synthetic realities." That kind of describes my job.

Anyway, that write-up comes closer, but again does no justice to the wonder and horror of Wax. Three or four of us watched the movie, splayed out on a dorm couch fueled by caffeine and pizza. The viewing experience was frequently punctuated by incredulous exclamations at our willingness to watch the film and confused real-time analysis of the plot and imagery. But no one left the room. It was, and remains, completely unlike anything I've ever seen. The somewhat retro-graphics interspersed with what appeared to be hand held video had no real frame of context for us, and the storytelling stretched the definition of abstract, even for a group of guys keenly addicted to David Lynch.

In a word, it was awesome.

I've never gotten up the interest / courage / gall to watch Wax again. It's not on Netflix. I believe you can watch some or all of it online. In a sense, some cinematic experiences are best left untouched. Watching a mindfuck of a movie on a couch with college friends is a lot different from streaming the same movie from your house as a thirty-something.

If you haven't heard of or experienced the movie, check it out. The NY Times has an interesting review worth checking out.

A few weeks ago, someone asked me what the strangest movie I've ever seen was. Now you know.

Summer Movie Recap

When I started this little here blog-type thing, one of my main drivers was to have a spot to dump my brief thoughts on movies. I watch them a lot. Some good, most bad.

This summer, I went and saw a bunch. But real life has intervened such that I haven't had the time (or more to the point, the energy) to write up any of my thoughts.

Well, now it's August, and the summer movie season is over. So, here are my thoughts on a baker's dozen movies that I caught in theaters in the last few months.

I made a conscious decision not to either Transformers or GI Joe. Just assume they would have gotten Ds or Fs and move on. I'm still hoping to see The Hangover, Moon, (500) Days of Summer and Terminator Salvation, but otherwise, this is my full summer movie slate.

Wolverine - Oh my god, did this suck. Sure, it was fun to watch attractive people hit each other for a few hours, but the movie was god-awful boring and made no sense I liked a lot of the raw elements here, but it just meandered into huge plot holes, made nonsensical decisions, and worst of all, the events in the finale meant that the entire movie really didn't matter at all. D

Star Trek - By weird coincidence, I ended up seeing this three times and it held up surprisingly well. Strong cast, witty writing, taut action and a load of fun. Great re-boot. There were a few things that seemed a bit forced in to try and hit plot points, but on the whole I though it was the best Trek film since First Contact. B+

Night At The Museum 2: Battle Of The Smithsonian - I had forgotten I'd seen this one until I went back and looked at a list of summer movies. That really says about all you need to know. This was inoffensive, bordering on boring. It wastes the comic talents of a number of great comedians, like Hank Azaria, and just missed the mark across the board. I enjoyed the first one, but this wasn't even enough to call a re-hash. The kids liked it thought. C

Pixar’s Up - Someone stuck an existentialist mediation on death into my 3-D kids movie! This was excellent. Cried like a baby. Kids liked it too. If you want to get picky, it had some off pacing, but this is an example of a movie shooting real high and missing, but still outdoing all of its peers. It's stunning how far ahead of the American animation pack Pixar is in writing, animation, etc. A-

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs - I just felt like taking the kids to the movies and this was the only family-friendly thing playing. Yawn. Some nice sequences, but nothing to write home about. Pretty graphics, and the squirrel sequences are wonderful little interludes. But again, yawn. C+

Public Enemies - A beautiful mess. One of the prettiest movies of the summer, great cinematography. But I just didn't connect with any of the characters, so it felt like a really well shot Biography channel special rather than a movie. I don't know if it just needed a script doctor or what, but it just couldn't make me care. A for looks, C for story, averages to a solid B

Funny People - I like Adam Sandler when he's maudlin (see Punch Drunk Love). I like Judd Apatow. I like Seth Rogan. I like dark comedies. I like dick jokes. This movie had all of those. And it sucked. The movie felt like two completely unconnected movies strung together with dick jokes. I barely laughed and found the movie a tiresome attempt to seem "grown up". I'm willing to watch a movie with unappealing characters, if those characters are interesting. In this movie, Sandler is a self-absorbed loser, learns nothing (until maybe the final 2 minutes, offscreen), and isn't psychopathic enough to be interesting. D+

I Love You, Man - This barely counts as a summer movie, but I saw it and never got around to writing about it. This is a fun little buddy comedy that features Judd Apatow (producing), dick jokes and actual humor. Nice random riffs, reasonably endearing characters, and a good heart to it. Not a great flick, but I enjoyed it. B-

Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince - Is there a point in reviewing Harry Potter movies at the stage? All this one had to do was fill space before the final movie(s) coming next year. And it did that fine. I'm not a stickler for the book vs. movie debate. I think this was a nice flick, enjoyed the overall mood, and thought it looked very lush. David Yates has been an interesting choice to finish out the series, and I thought this was a good step forward. B

G-Force - See Ice Age. Nothing else was playing. It's a talking hamster movie. That's about all you need to know. Zach Galafinakis was in for some reason, as was Will Arnett. Both interacting with talking hamsters. Yup. As a kids movie though, it was a lot of fun. I never need to think about seeing it ever again. C+

District 9 - Wow. Thumbs up all around, great low budget sci-fi flick with a non-too-subtle message in there. Some big plot holes, but the overall aesthetic made up for it. This was a nice breath of fresh air in a slow sci-fi season. Adding the director on to my list of "I'll be looking for whatever you make next." I want to see this again. A

Inglourious Basterds - A two-and-a-half hour movie with about five GREAT scenes and a lot of middlin' ones. The movie worked for me, but I can see where it might not for other people. This is Tarantino's most fetishistic movie, and probably his prettiest. I've never really though of him as a very visual director (i.e. more verbal), but there are some great images here. Another one I want to see again a few times, and some stellar acting. A-

Ponyo - Pure movie magic. A movie that understands what it wants to do, executes against that vision perfectly, and does it with flair. Miyazaki may be the best working filmmaker today, in terms of having a complete vision he fulfills. He may be working on some other plane of existence, but I love that we get to peek in there now and then. A

And, that's it. It's been a fun cinematic summer. I also caught a few other fun things on video over the summer, including Synecdoche, New York which I want to watch a few more times but I think may be one of the best 2 or 3 movies of the decade. More on those later, but rush out to see the "A"s above if you haven't already.

How we magically fix all of your problems

This is possibly the most useful comic ever published.
(Click link or picture if the writing is too small.)

http://xkcd.com/627/

In Which I Touch Briefly On Health Care

I've been pondering a post on health care for a little while now. It's a topic on which I have reasonably strong feelings, and one on which I consider myself reasonably well informed.

But Emily over at The Lost Albatross nicely captured the essence of any argument I'd put up in a good set of opening sentences.

Every person in this country should have the right of access to quality, affordable health care.

No caveats, no conditions, no strings. Everyone. Health care is and should be treated as a fundamental right.

As I see it, agreement or disagreement on those set of statements really frames the entire debate. The rest is just details, albeit a very expensive set of details. Whether it's single payer, a public option, health care co-ops or something else, I don't mind. (For various reasons, I prefer a public option, but that's neither here nor there. I doubt more than a small percentage of people involved in the debate could tell you what a public option means, or why it's good or bad.)

I work for a private health insurance plan. As best as I can tell, we aren't one of the evil ones, though I work in information technology, so my exposure to any alleged "death panels" and the like is relatively limited. We're provider (i.e. physician) owned, so our incentives are different from other companies. I like the model, and it's one I believe in.

And I hope that the model can fit into any health care reform out there. UPS and FedEx exist alongside the USPS. Harvard and Yale co-exist nicely with the University of Wisconsin and UPenn. And more to the immediate point, my company plays very nicely with Medicare and Medicaid.

There is room for public and private options in almost any industry sector you can imagine.

Health Insurance is confusing. To some degree, that's impossible to avoid... Health Care as a whole is confusing. Attempts to simply it are great, but reductionism is dangerous in a different way. But look at the sentences called out above. That's a hell of a mission statement. Quibble all you want about details, but I'd love if we could re-frame the debate in those terms.

If you disagree with that mission statement as being Socialist, I'll kindly ask you to pull your kids out of public schools, bury your trash in your backyard, stop expecting the fire department to save your house, give the police permission to patrol elsewhere, allow TV stations to charge for over-the-air TV signals and starting paving your own streets.

Still here.

I'm still alive, I promise.

Just cleared a major hurdle to my mental free time. Hoping to get back on the horse again shortly.