inherently different

Archive for November, 2008

Or at least a new wordpress theme. I’m thinking something with a typewriter… you know, for inspiration. I am 1500 words into my novel and need to keep motivated. I figure the average novel has roughly 120,000 words so I have a way to go.

I have pretty much given up all my vices. I don’t smoke cigarettes, drink alcohol, or frequent brothels, so I am unsure whether or not I can still claim to be a writer. I think you need at least one vice to be a professional writer, but since my writer’s guild membership was revoked, I have no way of knowing for sure.

I have watched a lot of movies. Even if you only counted the movies I have rented through netflix (I have been a member since june of 2000), you would arrive at a number that boggles the mind (834). Of course, the real number, including films I have watched in theaters and on TV would probably hit upwards of 4000.

When I say I love movies, I am NOT kidding. I like a great many movies that most people dislike (Hudson Hawke) as well as movies that are universally loved (Old Yeller), but when it comes to my list of films I believe are the “best evah,” I simply picked films that are entertaining and examples of what the medium could be if all filmmakers took the time to care.

What film is my favorite? Which film do I consider the best film ever? Without a doubt, it is…

01. Blade Runner – It would be too easy to say I love this film because it is the most modern version of Film Noir there is. It is a detective story, dark, dirty, and features a femme fatale who may or may not want to pull one over on our hero. But the fact that it is a modern film noir is only part of it. The acting is first rate, the story fully realized, the characters motivated, but above all, it is visually stunning. I was a fan of Phillip K. Dick long before Ridley Scott chose Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep as the basis for Blade Runner, but you can add that to the list of reasons why this is my favorite film of all-time. I still pull this movie out (the director’s cut, not the theatrical version although even that version is good) when I am alone and looking for something to watch (I am pretty sure my gf thinks the movie is boring). It satisfies me on levels I can’t even begin to express.

The previous post must seem hollow with out some way to measure my taste in film. Anyone can say an entire industry is a shitpile of epic proportions, but it takes a true film fanatic to support that claim with a list of celluloid masterpieces everyone should watch at least once (even if it is just to totally disagree with me). This list includes some of the greatest films no one has ever heard of as well as some films everyone has heard of. I have a lot of different favorites, each for a different reason, but if I had to bring just ten films with me to a desert island, these are the films I would choose.

10. The Wild Bunch – Sam Peckinpah was a master storyteller and he may or may not have used the color red a little too liberally. While some of his other films may be considered equally entertaining, The Wild Bunch features an all-star cast of hollywood misfits including Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, and Strother Martin. William Holden, as the bunch’s leader, wasn’t Peckinpah’s first choice (or second, third, fourth, or fifth), but i doubt any one could imagine someone else in that role. Make sure you get the unedited version for maximum impact.

09. The Killing – Kubrick is considered to be among the most influential filmmakers of his generation and this film rivals Dr. Strangelove as his most cherished effort. The Killing is a really short film by today’s standards clocking in at a little more than 1hr 37min. What makes this remarkable is that this film has very little in the way of the filler scenes that make up a good third of today’s productions. It is a text book example of a heist film.

08. Reservoir Dogs – Quentin Tarantino is a huge film geek. Lots of people, especially other film geeks, hate him because they feel his movies are unoriginal. I disagree strongly. Quentin takes things from his favorite genres and makes them accessible. His films are always entertaining and this can be considered his masterpiece. Traditional heist films always focus on the events leading up to the caper or the caper itself. Quentin turned the genre around and focused instead on the aftermath and the drama that results from a failed robbery. He never shows what actually happens during the heist, instead showing us everything that happened once everything fell apart.

07. The Night of the Hunter – This film is notable for a number of reasons, the least of which is Robert Mitchum portraying a bad guy. Few stars these days are willing to play characters with NO socially redeeming traits for fear of hurting their box office pull, but Mitchum, directed here by the underrated Charles Laughton, is mesmerizing as a conman/preacher hellbent on getting his hands on a cache of stolen money. This film is also notable for putting children in peril (one of the first films to actually make a child the target of a homicidal maniac). In addition, you will be amazed at how HOT Shelly Winters looks in this early effort. The plot was based on the true story of Harry Powers, who was hanged in 1932 for the murders of two widows and three children in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

06. Pulp Fiction – Yes. Two. Two Quentin Tarantino films on my list. You may ask yourself why. The simple answer is that he is by far the most interesting filmmaker in Hollywood. Along with Robert Rodriguez, Tarantino represents the filmmaking cabal looking to entertain without falling into the trap set by the Hollywood studio system. Pulp Fiction represents a type of filmmaking that had been absent for YEARS before Quentin and Roger Avary decided to kick Hollywood in the nuts and make a film that jumped around in the timeline of standard storytelling. Without Tarantino and Avary, a film like Memento would NEVER have been made in the Hollywood system.

05. Double Indemnity – Fred McMurray, of My Three Son’s fame, as a gullible murderer? Who knew he had it in ‘im? I love film noir and this is just a masterpiece of the genre. Barbara Stanwyck as the femme fatale steals just about every scen she is in.

04. Yojimbo – If I had to pick one director’s movies to save as the missles were falling, I wouldn’t hesitate… Akira Kurosawa’s films came first and then everyone else simply copied him. I find it ironic that most of the legendary westerns were actually either inspired by or outright copied from the most influential director to ever come out of the Far East. Yojimbo is a tale of a lone samurai who plays two sides of gang war to his profit. Toshiro Mifune, a staple of Kurosawa’s films, plays the samurai and is still the inspiration for every single hero I ever put down on the page.

03. The Bridge on the River Kwai – When I was a kid, I watched a shit load of movies. I was a latchkey kid and instead of going out robbing liquor stores with the rest of the hoodlums in my neighborhood, I watched movies on KCOP Channel 13 and KTLA Channel 5. These two LA stations played the BEST FUCKING MOVIES 24-hours a day, seven days a week. Bridge on the River Kwai introduced me to Alec Guiness long before he rocked my socks off as Obi Wan Kenobi. An epic adventure movie about loyalty, teamwork and survival. How can you not love this movie?

02. Chinatown – I’ve been writing for such a long time that I can’t honestly remember a time when I wasn’t. When I was a kid though, I wanted to be novelist, but this film changed my mind and convinced me that screenwriting was the ultimate writing profession around. To this day, Robert Towne’s screenplay for Chinatown ranks among the best screenplays EVER FUCKING WRITTEN. If you can ever get your hands on this script, read it. It is an amazing demonstration of story-telling, but more importantly, it is a text-book example of why screenplays should be considered yet another written medium worthy of mass production. The film is a classic, and showcases exactly why Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway are legends in Hollywood.

I’ll have to devote an entire post to the number one film on my list… Later.

I am sitting here in a food induced semi-coma and reading about upcoming movies. I was enjoying the information until the editors snuck in some information about a bollywood movie… or an indian movie… east indian? Fuck who cares. That stuff is shit. Even the worst of American cinema beats the hell out of anything that emanates from that shit pile of a movie industry.

I am going on record with this… unless you live in a dirt hut, with straw for floor covering, and worship beef, you shouldn’t be thinking that bollywood movies are even remotely entertaining. If you do, you’re the saddest motherfucker on the face of the planet. Seriously. Two mentally challenged monkeys with a video camera and a flashlight could make a more entertaining film than anything that comes out of bollywood.

So I am researching my next post (animal cruelty and animal rights activism) and I start chatting with a person who is the typical PETA zealot. It was hilarious in a sad way. The complete and saturated type of ignorance these people are crippled by boggles the mind. I will write it up tonight, but just wanted to tell my two or three regular readers to expect my new post soon.

“Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave.”

- Prophet Muhammad

My life is essentially a collection of experiences and activities guided by a need for information. I like knowing things and more importantly, I like knowing when someone is talking out of their ass.

Religion, politics, science… these are all disciplines that people are passionate about, but rarely does that passion translate into a quest for true understanding. Most people simply spout of psuedo-facts gleened from watching TV sound bites or friends who “know.” Or worse, they repeat items that are psuedo-science or bastardizations of real ideas.

There are words for these types of people, but I prefer to call them ignorant zealots. It is an unfortunate side-effect of living in the so-called “information age” that anyone with a computer and an internet connection can get customized rhetoric against or for anything.

Three arguments I tend to get involved in quite often are about recycling (conservation), animal cruelty, and religion as politics.

Recycling is one of the hottest topics you can come across in your day-to-day conversations. Ask anyone why they recycle and you’ll be hard pressed to find an answer that is even remotely based on fact or science. For the most part, their answers will be passionate pleas to save the environment, the Earth, the whales, etc. Few if any will discuss recycling simply as an aesthetic value proposition – reducing the amount of litter in communities. Most people don’t really investigate recycling, instead regurgitating factoids and random trivia to support their position.

It can be argued that recycling has been around since the dawn of man. Reusing the bones of animals they killed for food is possibly the first and most productive use of previously used materials. But recycling, and the fanaticism that it creates in otherwise sane human beings, began in earnest in 1987.

That was the year that a barge named the Mobro 4000 began a meandering journey along the eastern coast of the United States in search of a safe harbor in which to transfer its cargo into an appropriate landfill. That incident had a rather interesting, yet whole-heartedly misguided, effect on the population of not just the East Coast, but the whole nation. Believing there was no more room in landfills, Americans concluded that recycling was the only option lest we be buried under billions of tons of garbage.

Before I begin to systematically destroy people’s misconceptions about the environment and recycling, I should say that I do honestly believe that the idea behind recycling is sound. Afterall, if we are able to make use of some of our detrious we create through consuming goods and services, we’d have less actual garbage to bury in landfills. The problem is that the act of recycling is in itself, wasteful. And two wrongs, do not make a right no matter how you play with the math.

There is no question that for some cities, recycling offers a cost-competitive option to waste management. The problem is that in many more cities, recycling simply takes away time, focus, and money from programs that better serve the communities within the geographic area. For those cities, it is much cheaper to bury the garbage in an environmentally safe landfill and use funds that would otherwise be earmarked for recycling programs toward community services like housing, food supplements, and medical care. The cities that implement mandatory recycling programs are even worse. These mandatory recycling programs offer short-term benefits to a few (mostly politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations), while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems.

Of course, saving money isn’t the only issue recycling zealots use to defend their position. Many of them believe that Americans have a moral obligation to recycle. Some facts about the United States:

• The United States has five percent of the world’s population, yet generates 19 percent of its wastes.
• The U.S. uses 20 percent of the world’s metals, 24 percent of its energy and 25 percent of its fossil fuels.
• The U.S. ranks 15th in paper recycling efforts and 19th in glass recycling.
• Some 96 percent of U.S. plastic, and 50 percent of its paper, goes into landfills. By comparison, Mexico, arguably the poster child for toxic pollution, recycles more glass than the U.S.

These numbers position the U.S. as a voracious and unsympathetic monster, hell-bent on destroying the planet, yet those numbers should be tempered with the idea that the United States also contributes more to the well-being of the ENTIRE POPULATION OF THE PLANET than any other country, and in some cases, more than all countries combined.

The U.S. contributed $930 million to the World Food Program in 2002, four times greater than the next largest donor, and 51 percent of total contributions to rid the world of famine. In response to the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake, the U.S. gave over a BILLION dollars in aid. More than any other country by more than half. Of course, zealots will point out that the U.S. is giving less than 1% of its GNP and can afford to do much more. Truth be told, the U.S. doesn’t HAVE to do anything at all, yet it does anyway.

Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources, but for the zealots, it is all or nothing. The conservationists have long been of the “end-is-near” variety. They have turned a relatively noble idea into a virulent need for panic for panic’s sake. It is a system driven by fear, largely at the expense of American lifestyle and happiness. Unfortunately, we have become mired in an economy of fear that extends to just about every facet of our lives from what we drive to where we live to what we eat.

NEXT: Passion without Understanding, Part II – Animal Attraction

I’ve been thinking a lot about the mainland. I have discussed this many times with the Red Queen. I think it is time to move back and perhaps (choke, cough, gasp) get back to working for the man.

I will give myself 365 days in which to find a way to avoid the mainland. Through crook or by hook, if anyone can find a way to avoid something, it is I (or is it me?).

So perhaps I will detail my struggle to avoid the mainland over the course of the next 365 days.

What do I know about relationships? I know what works for me… will what I do work for you? Probably, but chances are you’re going to do whatever it is you have learned to do and ignore anyone or anything that goes against what you believe to be true. If I am asked, here is what I have to offer anyone looking for relationship advice.

1. Be confident. Confidence is infinitely more valuable than looks or intelligence. Looks fade, intelligence is relative, but confidence will open more doors than a valet at a steak house.

2. Be honest to a fault. Honesty is possibly the only real value you can bring to any relationship. Never lie, even to spare someone’s feelings. And remember that there is a difference between being honest and being mean. One is done with malice, the other is free from malice.

3. Never be vague. Ask for what you want from your sig other and you’ll usually get it. Of course, that said, a little mystery goes a long way toward attracting people. Be enigmatic but don’t take it too far by being evasive. Remember the three T’s… Tempt. Titillate. Tantalize.

4. Don’t change anything about yourself to attract or keep the opposite sex. If you are a woman, this is especially true of your hair color. Just remember that god made blondes so that beer commercials wouldn’t be boring. True story. Anyway, the attraction of blondes isn’t really the hair… it’s a perception that they are usually fun and open minded. Any woman, regardless of hair color, can pull off that attitude.

5. Don’t argue with your heart. Ever. If you must, don’t cry or get emotional because that will just give them the impression that you’re hysterical if you are a woman, and effeminate if you are a man. Be logical, concise and run mental circles around them. Considering that the human body’s largest sexual organ is the brain, it is easy to see why people like people with big brains!

6. Always follow your instincts. If someone seems too good to be true, they usually are. Run. Run fast and far away.

7. Women should have curves not angles. Men should be men and act accordingly.

8. Sometimes people don’t know what they want until the don’t have it anymore. Be patient and don’t expect your sig other to realize anything if it isn’t spelled out in terms than can understand.

9. Always be yourself. If you pretend to be something your not, you’ll get whatever was meant for the person you pretended to be.

10. Say whatever is on your mind the moment you feel it. If you say I love you before your sig other does, it just means that you’re living in the moment. Don’t play games… people get enough of that from their ex’s… how do you think they got to be ex’s?

If one was to really dig through all the data, and poll all voters, I would imagine an interesting theme might rise up. The major differences between Obama’s campain and McCain’s was simply how negative McCain was and how negative McCain’s supporters were.

For the most part, both campaigns based there platforms on change. Obama wanted to change the world, starting with the US. McCain wanted to remind people that change would be the order of the day if Obama was elected, most notably negative change (higher taxes especially).

I think this vote was a vote on how Americans want to move forward. They want positive change, not negative campaigns. Hopefully, even the most devout Republicans can rally around the flag and support the new president for at least half a year before they start looking for ways to impeach him.