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Up to the minute notes on the current state of free thinking and free living: Kentucky moonshine - original analysis and reporting from MoreThings, and all round pop culture museum of sight and sound - photo galleries, mp3 and video downloads.
Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
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January 16, 2004
On Deadly Ground is the stupidest movie ever
Steven Seagal's On Deadly Ground may be the stupidest goddam movie ever made, and by that I do not mean stupid fresh. After having been subject to a few minutes of this movie, I was mesmerized by the continuing torrent of offenses against reason and geometry. By the end, I was in full sputtering Ignatius J Reilly mode, throwing Milk Dud boxes and popcorn at the offending television images.
How insulting to common sense is it? Let's start with this "Plot Outline" from IMDB: "Mystical martial artist/environmental agent takes on a ruthless oil corporation."
Oh My God.
So apparently, the big problem is that this Evil Oil Company (run by greedy Rich White Men, specifically Michael Caine) have drilled a well in Alaska so they can import as much of as many kinds of poisons as they can get from the whole world over so they can pump ALL them down this oil well to kill all the cute little Eskimos and baby seals. Mwa-ha-ha! Naturally, they make a point to senselessly murder the wise old visionary elder Eskimo for no discernable reason.
Now, this doesn't sound like it could be right, and my people ARE admittedly from Kentucky, so I may have missed some nuance in that story line. But I'm not making it up. I swear to Rand that appeared to be the plot they were going with.
Among the atrocious and asinine pre-fab plot lines, he's Dances With Wolves- the ONE good white man who is down with the plight of the poor, innocent perfect indigenous victims. Seagal even gets to have a dream journey and hear about the fate that has been written for him.
But no- the movie's only getting ready to START getting ignorant. Naturally, the only way to stop Whitey's evil scheme is to murder dozens of people, and utterly destroy a big honkin' oil refinery or some such. I'd call Seagal's character an "ecoterrorist" but I'm afraid that would make this sound more interesting than it is.
I don't know quite how to express how specifically STUPID this ranks as an environmental consideration. I see- the only to protect the environment is to burn down and blow up a HUGE oil refinery. Riiiight. That'll help out the baby seals and such. Crikey, this looked like it was purposely bringing on about a dozen simultaneous Exxon Valdez incidents.
He's like the oh-so-reluctant Billy Jack- only Billy Jack was several rungs up the scale from this, intellectually. Anyway, Seagal plays out the Billy Jack schtick of being forced by Evil White Men into combat to defend the vulnerable women and children.
In short, this Steven Seagal action movie appears to be the retarded butt baby of Dances with Wolves and Billy Jack.
Then he caps this nonsense off with a big formal lecture on how Whitey is destroying the Earth by the conspiracy to repress post-oil energy technology, and by not talking a lot of fake spiritual Eskimo/Indian new age pinko nonsense like he should, and how we've got to have this compulsory New World Order to save the environment from the Evil White Men. It's like, on top of being Kevin Costner and Billy Jack, he wants to be Noam Chomsky as well.
Holy flippin' retard, Batman- this Seagal guy seems to think he's actually making some kind of intellectual/spiritual STATEMENT.
Come quickly: he must be put to the lash immediately before my valve closes down in protest!
DISCUSS THIS CONSPIRACY
posted by Al at 1/16/2004 01:38:00 AM
Michael Jackson as Norma Desmond
Michael Jackson fascinates me at this point. What in the world could he possibly be thinking with his continuing shenanigans, such as ridiculous extravagant self-serving transparent lies that he was telling Ed Bradley Christmas Day? Then on top of that, STILL insisting there's nothing wrong with sleeping with young boys?
Watching the little carnival he whipped up for his first court appearance (1-16-04), the feelings of wonderment deepen. He made a point of busing in hundreds of fans to cheer him in court before going to Neverland for a big party. What conceivable legal strategy could he even THINK he was serving by making the judge wait while Jackson is outside basking in the artificially generated love from his crowd of extras?
Watching him slowly and methodically self-destructing, I started thinking about Sunset Blvd. Holy Jebus, Michael Jackson has turned into Norma Desmond! He's conjured up this big scenario of either commiting very bad crimes or going to some great lengths to make us all think that he has. Diddling a sick boy has to rate several rungs lower in patheticness below Norma Desmond's relatively clean crime of passion, though.
He seems to be just that desperate for the spotlight. Like Norma, his bright star has faded. They're both a generation past their fame. Hell, Britney Spears hadn't been born yet when Thriller came out.
Like Norma, Michael seems to be grasping for those last sparks of public adulation as he self-destructs. He's hired multiple video crews to come film him at the courthouse while he dances on top of cars. If he had any rational thought for his situation, he'd not be making such a huge public mockery of the judge and the whole legal system.
But that doesn't appear to matter to him here. Even as he burns off the last remnants of his career and personal reputation- possibly his very freedom- he's just glad to have the warm glow of everyone looking at HIM in all his wonder. Dancing atop the car, I could almost hear him thinking, "You see, this is my life! It always will be! Nothing else! Just us, the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!"
I'm just saying that when Michael Jackson calls Mr. DeMille in for that close-up, it's going to be a LOT scarier than a 52 year old Gloria Swanson.
posted by Al at 1/16/2004 12:44:00 AM
January 15, 2004
Beverly Hills Cop Eddie Murphy's dangerous seduction
I have a new essay up amongst my fan pages on Eddie Murphy's classic Beverly Hills Cop, which now strikes me in a somewhat troubling way. You'll see.
posted by Al at 1/15/2004 09:32:00 PM
January 14, 2004
NEWSFLASH: Iraq was American enemy even before 9-11!
These supposed Bush scandals are really getting to be pretty thin gruel. THEY are trying to conjure one up out of this book sort of by his former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill. This comes even though O'Neill himself is disavowing what Bush critics want to say he was supposedly implying.
For example, a Mr. Richard Feder of Fort Lee, NJ writes me:
Watch the Republicans panic!
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". . .Bush made a strong defense of his Iraq policy on Monday, while some of the Democratic presidential candidates weighed in, saying Bush had misled the American public.
"The decision I made is the right one for America and for the world," Bush said when asked about the book during a press conference at the Summit of the Americas in Monterrey, Mexico.
Asked specifically whether O'Neill was correct in saying that planning for the war had begun far ahead of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Bush said that when he had become president he had inherited a policy of "regime change" from former President Clinton and had decided to adopt it as his own.
"So we were fashioning policy along those lines and then all of a sudden Sept. 11 hit," he said.
[Warning: Ad hominem attack ]Republican supporters of Bush aimed their fire at O'Neill, contending that his comments showed the grudge he held against Bush for the president's decision to fire him for fighting against a new round of tax cuts.
"Mr. O'Neill is now as bitter as he was ineffective when he served as treasury secretary," said Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio.. . ."
*************************************************
The poopy-lickin' Rep. Ney can only resort to ad hominems, in defense of Bush. And notice Bush's Sir Humphrey Appleby-style non-responsiveness/changing the subject: Clinton MIGHT have had a "regime-change" policy, but "regime-change policy" does not necessarily imply a military invasion! The "inherited" Clinton policy was NOT "unilateral non-U.N. supported military invasion". The policy inherited from Clinton was one stressing inspections.
Bush wants to imply that his policy was really no different in essence, from Clinton's. That Clinton discussed regime-change as a contingency, is certainly true: But "discussions of contingencies" is not the same as official "policy", now is it?
We certainly have many, many contingency plans on the books, which don't constitute official "policy". Sir Humphrey could certainly produce minutes of Security counsel meetings where Clinton and his staff discussed the CONTINGENCY plan: "What if we just have to flat-out go all out and just take this bastard Saddam out?"
Since O 'Neil was on the NSC, as Treasury secretary, he would know, when he says he saw no evidence of WMD's.
I wonder how Rush and others are going to "spin" their way out of this?
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Al rolls his eyes and sighs like his more famous fellow Al, and says:
Yes, yes. Naturally you go on endlessly about ad hominem attacks, though your own crap here is obviously based on bitter personal hatred. You're clearly far more interested in spiting this man than in considering the defense needs of the country.
I am less than impressed with O'Neill's revelations. I haven't read the book, nor do I particularly care enough to do so. It doesn't sound like anything interesting.
However, before you even START to treat his comments on Iraq as some scandal you'd need to get into just exactly what kind of plans W had for Iraq before 9-11. Were they just putting together contingency plans for how you might go about invading if Hussein came pushing his shit again?
Did they supposedly have some date, some specific plans to actually DO it? You would only MAYBE start to have something scandalous if he were hatching some covert plot to major military action without congressional approval. I have seen nothing suggesting that O'Neill is even hinting at claiming any such a thing.
And how much of that stuff would the treasury secretary even know about? They might be mentioning some general idea of contingency plans in full cabinet meetings, but if they were seriously contemplating actually DOING it- putting it on the schedule- I imagine that this would be considerably more secretive.
The idea that such a thing was being seriously contemplated does not strike me as being out of line. Regime change was the officially voted on policy of the US Congress, voted on publicly and broadcast across C-Span years before W came to office. Is it somehow scandalous or bad - as you seem to imply - that he was considering just how we would have to go about it?
I find it a small POSITIVE mark for the president to hear that he was seriously considering outing Saddam before 9-11. This suggests to me that he was not in fact just asleep at the switch when we got hit. He was apparently already seriously thinking about the seriousness of the bad guys in the rat's nest that is that part of the world, rather than just sitting there with his penis in hand.
As a responsible adult, W was assessing the troubling but possibly necessary parameters of dealing with a dangerous enemy. He was considering how to seriously deal with problems rather than just reactively throwing a minor, largely cosmetic military action at immediate PR problems while kicking the actual serious problems down the road.
This incident tends to suggest that the president was not just careening blindly when disaster hit, but had been making at least the beginning of thinking through how to go about getting a handle on the Middle East.
He was thinking through what would specifically be involved in actually doing something to deal with a big, huge problem and its many component problems. Good.
What does he even NEED to "spin" his way out of?
posted by Al at 1/14/2004 12:31:00 AM
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