Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Your little hopes and dreams."
¤ Usage: "Poor fellow, his little hopes and dreams have all be smashed."
¤ Origin: Quipped by a whore, or pre-op transgender man, or a sociopath, or some other lowlife who was engaged in a vicious verbal battle with another lowlife guest on the Jerry Springer show
¤ Notes: While the Jerry Springer show is generally pretty lacking in opportunities for intellectual improvement, you do tend to hear some funny jokes, of the personal insult type.  This was one of the best.  One loser was arguing with another loser, and when one said something about how she'd loved her husband, whom the other lowlife had stolen away, lowlife #1 replied, "Bitch, I don't care about your little hopes and dreams!"

You'll find it applicable to almost every situation in life.  It's the "little" that really makes it work, since that just so perfectly and cruelly diminishes whatever claim to importance the other person might previously have had. -- February 20, 2004

he weather here, for the past week or so, has been disturbingly warm.

If you've been reading this site/blog for any length of time, you'll recall that I formerly lived in San Diego, 500 or so miles to the south. You're not doubt glad that I moved for at least one reason; I no longer spend half the daily blogs bitching about the weather being too hot. 

As for right here, right now, it's been in the mid/high 70's all week; by far the hottest warmest it's been since about October. I'd be perfectly happy living somewhere that it rained 3 days a week, was mostly cloudy three other days, and sunny once a week so the plants would grow; preferably on a day of the week that I could sleep late on and thus miss most of the sun and all of the warm weather.  I've never lived in snow and don't think I'm cut out for it all the time, but I love it when the day time temps are in the 50s and 60s (16-19c), and the 30s or 40s (5-9c) at night. And that's what it's been here, pretty much every day, since about November.

There have been stretches where it rained more, and stretches where it was sunny for a week or two, but the temperate hasn't been over 60 in the day for months, and I've been loving it.  I hadn't even looked at my shorts since Halloween.

The temperatures lately, and the unrelenting sunshine, are atypical for this time of the year in this location, but they are still slightly depressing me.  It's not that the weather here has been so bad; hell, I haven't even gone out in the day since the Tahoe weekend so it's not like I've been sitting and sweating in traffic, it's just that it reminds me of the mid-winter heat waves that used to come along in San Diego and shatter my jeans-wearing hopes and dreams.

Where I used to live, about 10 miles east of San Diego, it's been in the 80s, which is hot enough to make me unhappy. And it was like that all the time, all winter there.  I'd get all happy with the clouds, or at least the 60s and 70s daytime highs with sun, and then suddenly the Santa Anas would pick up and we'd get the offshore flow, and it would be 85 and cloudless for 3 days.  And I'd have to dig out the shorts, dig out the window fans, and sit and sweat and dream of moving away, somewhere cooler.

The weather up here was too hot, like that, last year after I moved up here. But only for a week or two on and off during August and September, and at least it cooled down pretty nicely here at night.  I'd be sitting and blogging and sweating in 87º at midnight, back in La Mesa.  And knowing that my choice in the morning would be tossing and turning while I tried to sleep with a fan on me while lying in a puddle of sweat in my east facing morning sun bedroom, or running the central AC that I couldn't afford and spending about $12 on the electric bill for six hours of sub-85 temperatures in the morning.

It's not weather that bothers more people, and in fact thousands of them move to the San Diego area every year month, largely to get that sort of weather damn near year round.  But I was always too hot, always wanted it 10 degrees cooler, and never did anything about it until Malaya found me and took me away from all of that. And it's funny how immediately I got those old, depressed, "God I hate this weather.  Nine months of this hot sunny shit." feelings earlier this week, when it was bright and sunny and hot enough that I had to put on shorts to be comfortable in the house.

And it's funny how weather that 98% of San Diego greets with joy always sent me into a black depression.

Fortunately it's less hot up here, and I know that it probably won't be that hot again here for a month or two.  Hell, when I was visiting up here last year, before moving, I was comfortable wearing my leather jacket in the daytime in June.  So it's not like San Diego, and I don't have hot weather to look forward to dread every day for the next 6 or 8 or 10 months, and I don't need to get depressed and distressed about a little too much sun for a week.

Or so I keep trying to remind myself.

It's funny that I write about this, since for the past couple of days, I've felt really aimless and bored.  No energy to write, what I've been forcing myself to write has sucked and been uninspired.  I blogged in the day on Monday and posted it (Tuesday's blog) Monday evening around 9.  So with that out of the way, and no blog to post Wednesday, I basically didn't write anything at all, other than a couple of emails and some very mediocre editing on my novel, for more than two days, when I started doing blog stuff early Thursday morning.

I hadn't connected that lack of energy or dedication to the weather, and my light depression with hot hot San Diego memories coming over me, but looking back now, with cooler temperatures in the forecast and a fat black cat shedding all over my long-sleeved, white, cotton, pseudo-metrosexual Tommy Hilfiger shirt, after several hours of blog type writing, I think there was a connection.  Since now that I've thought and written about it, I'm feeling pretty good and mentally stable for the first time in a few days, and I know that right now I could do good work on my novel.  If it weren't almost 6am and I weren't so tired and I weren't still in the middle of writing blog stuff.

Since tonight I've done enough material for about 5 blogs, even the oversized ones I routinely post, hopefully I can just paste in a fair selection of goodies for Friday's blog, and concentrate on working on the novel tonight, after I sleep away most of the hot, sunny day.

And no, none of you have any reason to care about any of this.  But I've long since given up any thought of writing this stuff to cater to the interests of the average reader.  It's basically just to amuse myself at this point. Though I do hope that our areas of amusement overlap, at least once in a while.

One news item today.  I've got more blogged that you'll see tomorrow along with long-delayed photos and discussion of what we did during Dad's visit in Feb, and then Tahoe snowboarding trip two weekends ago, and various other things.

¤ You have to laugh at this one. The Bush Administration were all set to announce a new initiative with a new leader.  A drive to build US manufacturing jobs, while so many of them are being "outsourced" to India and other countries where they can do nearly as good a job for about 1/100th the cost.  Great for the corporate profits of the companies, terrible for the thousands of Americans who keep seeing good paying jobs vanish.  There's one problem with the guy Bush picked to head it, though:

Six months after promising to create an office to help the nation's struggling manufacturers, President Bush settled on someone to head it, but the nomination was being reconsidered last night after Democrats revealed that his candidate had opened a factory in China.

...the administration announced that the new assistant secretary of commerce for manufacturing and services would be named at a ceremony this morning. Industry officials were told that the job would go to Anthony F. Raimondo, chairman and chief executive of a Nebraska company that makes metal buildings and grain silos. But Kerry's campaign, tipped off about the impending nomination several hours earlier, hastened to distribute news reports that Raimondo's firm, Behlen Manufacturing Co. of Columbus, Neb., had laid off 75 U.S. workers in 2002, four months after announcing plans for a $3 million factory in northwest Beijing.

Seventy-five minutes after the administration announced a news conference with Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans to name the official, an advisory went out saying the event had been "postponed due to scheduling conflicts."

Since the Democrats are eating Bush alive on the jobs and economy struggles in the US, this wasn't quite how Bush wanted things to go.

Democrats contended, however, that Raimondo's record helps illustrate why the nation has lost 2.2 million jobs, most of them in factories, during the Bush presidency. The layoffs have been concentrated in such swing states as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio.

Bush announced the new office with fanfare on Labor Day, and Democrats had been saying for weeks that the long delay in naming the new assistant secretary reflected the low priority that Bush puts on preserving jobs.

Bush's White House prides itself on orderliness but has been on the defensive on economic issues. Last month, the White House had to disavow its own estimate that 2.6 million jobs would be created this year. The same economic report, issued under Bush's signature, touted the economic efficiencies of sending certain types of U.S. work overseas.

  
I'd seen the trailer at some point in the past, hadn't thought much of it, and hadn't heard a word about it or seen a single TV ad. In fact I'm only talking about it now since I checked Rotten Tomatoes to see how the crap released last weekend was reviewed, and saw Spartan as a title coming up this weekend, and saw that it had a "fresh" review total.  So I clicked it, and then vaguely remembered the trailer, and out of curiosity, checked out a few of the positive reviews.  And they make it sound pretty damn good. More on that in a bit.

I also looked up the the trailer again, and while it convinced me that I wanted to see the film, I wouldn't really recommend watching it, if you're already sold on giving this one a try.  It's a bit spoilery, since you know (if you read any of the reviews) that there are betrayals and plot twists galore.  And while the trailer keeps moving and doesn't have bad voice over narration or anything like that, it shows various people shooting at each other, apparently late in the movie, and that sort of gives things away.  I'm not going to say who, or say anything in this discussion that could be considered a spoiler, primarily since Malaya is now interested in seeing the movie, and she hates spoilers about some things.  I haven't quite figured out what things, since she obsessively reads the news about the upcoming books Feast of Crows and Song of Suzannah, and constantly has to slap herself to keep from spilling the spoilers she's read about them to me, since I know I'm going to read the books, and don't want to know anything about them.  I'm not even going to read any reviews, or the dust jackets, if I can help it.

Anyway, the Spartan trailer gives away some stuff, but if you're not sure you're going to see the movie, or don't want to, you might as well watch it; it might win you over.  It (the movie and the trailer) look very stark and hard and harsh.  As the reviews have said, it's like the TV show 24 with more guts and less absurd plot twists, or like one of those Tom Clancy spy thrillers without all of the Boy Scout rah rah for America stuff and glorification of spies and secret agents and authority figures. 

As for what got me interested enough to watch the trailer again, the reviews are positive, and interesting. Check them out, since even the negative ones seem to give some props for interesting and non-conventional film making.  Well, most of them.  Skip the one by Walter Chaw of Film Freak, since he 1) hates virtually everything, 2) fills every review with massive spoilers, 3) writes in intentionally confusing and thesaurus-happy style, and 4) never fails to find misogyny and/or racism to comment on.

I hadn't noticed point #4 until just now, but skimming over a few of his recent reviews, he finds racism and sexism in everything.  I haven't seen these movies (fortunately) so can't evaluate them myself, but I read multiple reviews of most of these movies, and don't recall a single other critic commenting on it about them. Here are a few examples from some recent movies. All of which he hated, needless to say.

Hidalgo: "aspiring for the epic adventure and achieving near-lethal doses of misogyny, racism of the paternalistic and other kind"

Spartan: "Because we hate Arabs (and women almost as much as we think that Arabs hate women, those hateful Arabs), there are films like David Mamet's patently ridiculous, relentlessly offensive, unintentionally hilarious Spartan."

Twisted: "...once again humiliated and physically abused for her sexuality, Judd has this perverse penchant for self-mortification legitimized by yet another contractually required African-American mentor."

The Big Bounce: "The picture is thus misogynistic enough to be a Michael Bay film, but it's not nearly as exciting."

Point #1 is self-evident from his furiously negative reviews, #2 is something you'll find out for yourself if you foolishly click on a link to one of his reviews (For example, he immediately gave away the fact that that Jesus guy dies in the end of The Passion.) for a movie you're curious to see and suddenly find the entire plot and twist surprise ending laid bare without even a "SPOILER WARNING!" notice, and #4 is sort of irrelevant, but it caught my eye. As for #3, here's a sample from the Spartan review, which I began talking about several pages ago.

A brilliant theatre man, the very definition of a keen cultural philosopher (his book of essays Some Freaks is must-reading), Mamet as film auteur has grown increasingly esoteric to the point now that his exclusive playpens of linguistic masturbation are so alien and self-conscious that they begin instantly to function as satires of themselves.

Now it does make sense, but what percentage of people looking at a quick internet movie review are going to feel their eyes and brain glazing over at this diatribe?  I also thought this line scored pretty highly on the "unintentional comedy" meter, when you consider how perfectly the description covers Walter Chaw's own movie reviews.  A point the next few tech-babble sentences in the review hammer home.

His action is action as imagined by an egghead, all awkward movement and frustrated invective. His is the school of anti-casual cool, the drama club suiting up for the Friday night football game, and his supporters are cut from the same cloth, believing that there's a point to be made in Beckett for the brute while ignoring that Beckett is best staged with Spartan minimalism and left in the theatre besides.

Okay, I have pretty good reading comprehension, and a large vocabulary.  But um... what the hell is he talking about?  Drama clubs and football games?  Ignoring brutes with minimalism best left in the theater?  It's a internet movie review, Wally, not a sociology journal.  Writing with such brilliant tech speak and metaphor that no one can figure out what the hell you're talking about isn't a good thing.

Returning to the subject of Spartan, and ignoring Walter Chaw's largely incomprehensible review, we see that most reviewers enjoyed it, and in a good way.  It's not that they wanted to like it and thought it was just okay, like they would a new movie by Spielberg.  They were challenged, they liked how hard and polished and fierce it was, they liked that the story was only revealed over time, that you knew less than the characters and had to think to keep up, etc.  All qualities that make me want to see it, as well as dooming it to almost certain commercial disaster. (As if Val Kilmer's increasingly-blotchy presence alone wasn't enough to ensure that fate.)

A few review quotes.

Internet Reviews:

As Mamet peels away more and more of his onion of a plot, you may be looking at your watch, but not for the reason that usually causes you to get acquainted with your timepiece in the dark of a theater. You may be thinking, as I did, that you don't want this to end. If Mamet ever wants to turn SPARTAN into a miniseries, I'm there. And, if the average screenwriter had just one tenth of Mamet's talent, movies would be a whole lot more fun.

Philadelphia Weekly:

The first rule of Hollywood thrillers is that characters are always extra careful to describe everything that's already occurred in the movie thus far to each other, just to reiterate the obvious for the audience's benefit.

The great thing about Spartan is that it's populated by folks who couldn't give a fuck what you make of the plot. They're all too busy doing their jobs to drop everything and recap for lazy viewers.

Everybody in this film already knows a hell of a lot more than we do going in, so the audience is stuck playing catch-up for the next couple hours. Whether you find this tactic annoying or invigorating is a matter of personal preference. But speaking as someone who has his intelligence insulted on a weekly basis by modern movies, there's something thrilling about a picture that boxes your ears and forces you to sit up and pay attention.

Spliced Wire:

It's a movie in which intellect trumps exposition to the point that most of the characters aren't clearly identified, making all of them seem more shadowy and dangerous. The story counts on your ability to think for yourself and draw your own conclusions about evidence trails, incidents, alibis, motives and intentions -- then pulls those conclusions out from under you more than once with substantial surprises that make you think even harder. And it has a palpable atmosphere of pressure-cooker urgency, kept doggedly in check by government agents for whom eye-on-the-prize callousness is compulsory.

Just this afternoon, Malaya was commenting about how long it's been since we went to see a movie, which is entirely a function of it being so long since there were any movies released that we wanted to go see. We'll probably catch this one at a matinee this weekend, and we also keep telling each other we should join up at the soulsucking Blockbuster, just so we could rent some of the recent titles that weren't intriguing enough to drop $8 on in the theaters, but would be worth $5 (or whatever Blockbuster rentals cost these days) to see at home.  Stuff like Mystic River and Lost in Translation and School of Rock. Well, maybe not that last one.

On the other hand, speaking of secret agent type movies opening this weekend, we've got the totally unnecessary Agent Cody Banks 2. It's only got five reviews so far, but all five are negative, and from the sounds of them, there's not much hope future critics will be kinder.  Here's Spliced Wire:

Director Kevin Allen ("The Big Tease") displays an apathetic contempt for his audience, assuming kids won't notice the endless parade of lazy and lame machinations as long as they get a gratuitous fart joke from time to time, and that parents will soldier through with their lowered expectations.

But "it's just a kids' movie" is no excuse for such an insipid and cursory effort.

Of course the tragedy is that ACB2 is getting tons of promotion and has a known TV star, so despite being stupid and awful, it'll make about $50m and then do better on DVD as a "kid's movie" while Spartan is 100x smarter and more interesting, but it's getting zero promotion, has no bankable stars, and will sink without a trace.

Meanwhile, Mel's holy snuff film is up to $232m, is still going strong, and hasn't even begun to take money from Christians in other countries, where it'll probably do nearly as well as it's done in the US thus far.

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