Books Lying Open
¤ The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
¤ The Bachman Books, Stephen King

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ New software.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Just because. 

Curse of the Day:
¤ May you realize that being happily married, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, precludes you from any longer extorting facetious promises of sex in return for minor favors delivered over the internet.

• Brian C. -- Band Names
• Mel R. -- Hidden in the Magistrate Suit

The problem with the email, Mozilla now, is that I have all sorts of junk controls set, to send shit mails right to the junk folder. For some reason, that doesn't interface well with my Norton AntiVirus, which scans the attachments and deletes the viruses. In some way, Norton trying to delete the mails while the junk detector is trying to move them to the junk folder causes the inbox index to become corrupted, and then I can see all of the mails by title and time and sender, but if I click them I just get a blank page.  I can't see them even if I send them to another folder, or forward them to myself. There's no way to fix it other than to delete the whole inbox, and restart, which wipes out not only the new messages, but every message in the inbox.

I've tried every different setting for Norton, but the problem keeps happening, about every other day at this point. Even if I turn off the inbox checking, it sees them in the junk folder, and deletes them there, which often causes the inbox to lock up. I don't even need the Norton to scan the emails, since I've got all of the auto-opening options turned off, and I never click any attachments without being sure of them, but there doesn't seem to be any way to make it not scan the emails. I've got all email scanning disabled, but it's still crashing.

So now I'm running Eudora, after downloading it today. I hate it so far; don't like the display, don't like the ads, don't like the way mails are shown, and I can't see any way to set up multiple accounts and keep them separate, the way Mozilla 7.x allows. I need that since I check 5 different emails and don't want them all mixed into the same folder.  I also can't see how to have the incoming mail go to the correct subfolder, rather than just the default inbox. The worst thing yet is that there's no bottom of the window display of what it's doing. When I tell it to download new messages, nothing happens. If there are messages and it connects it will download them, but there's no display on the bottom of the window to tell me what it's doing. Mozilla gives you the "connection to _________" and then "downloading message 1/7." I feel like my every command is timing out on Eudora, since there's no way to tell if it's working and there aren't any messages, or if the whole program is locked up.

The Eudora site says that you can't get junk blocking either, unless you pay their absurdly high $50 a year user fee. And if I can't get junk blocking I'm certainly not going to use an email program I dislike. However once I went through the options and enabled the junk options, they seem to be working fine. Unfortunately I have to label everything junk again, so the whole month-long educational process has to start over again, just when I had the junk working 99.5% of the time on Mozilla.

If I can't figure out better ways to get Eudora working, I'll probably have to go back to Mozilla and just turn off the junk blocking and see if that makes the crashes stop. That would make me very, very unhappy though. If anyone's using an email program they really like, other than Outlook Express, Netscape/Mozilla, or Eudora, feel free to recommend it, since none of my current options are working well.

¤ I've ranted blogged about the horrifying amount of salt in every sort of prepared food in the past, and on that theme, here's a new health report article of the "everything you little dumplin's eat is going to kill you" type. You know, the ones you don't read because they depress you.

At least restaurants are aware of the problem, and taking steps to help save lives by cutting the obscene amounts of salt that they slather on top of everything.

Or not.

I guess people love salt, but I often find food so salty that I can't eat it. Malaya got a giant CCC to go from Claim Jumper the other day, and it was so salty we could hardly eat it. The salt was sort of useful though, since it enabled us to eat it in very small bites, spread out over several days. French Fries though, are the "too much salt" poster children.

Some places still serve them relatively plain, since fried potatoes are damn tasty by themselves. We get these huge 8 pound bags of frozen FFS at CostCo and fry the up in the wok, and they're awesome. We never even consider adding salt, and when I used to fry fresh potatoes myself all the time, I added red pepper flakes, ground black pepper, and sometimes garlic. But never considered adding salt. Restaurant fries though, are painful. The ones at Chili's are simply buried in salt and pepper, to the point that I often pick up each fry and brush it off a bit before eating it. And they still make my lips pucker.  Many types of corn and potato chips are painfully salty as well, to the point that I don't buy certain varieties since I know they're about as coated in salt as Frosted Flakes are with sugar.

Why do restaurants and food manufacturers put so much off it on everything? I guess that most everyone likes it, and it's cheap, and it doesn't really taste like anything, so it goes with everything. Pepper is great on lots of food, but for some things it's simply not used. Fruit, for instance. Most people like garlic, and basil, and oregano, and lots of other spices. But only on certain foods. Salt can be poured over most everything. Despite that, I think it's all an acquired taste, and that if people simply don't eat a lot of salty stuff and don't add it to their food, they'll be fine without it. I didn't even have a salt shaker at any time during the decade I lived on my own, before I came to live with Malaya. We have a salt shaker now, but I couldn't tell you the last thing we made that we added salt to.

I suppose the human need for salt is nutritional as well, to some extent. After all, our bodies need it to function properly. You could go your whole life without ever tasting pepper or garlic or pesto or other delicious spices (And in fact lots of people in the Midwest do, judging by the dinners I attended with my grandparents in Missouri.), and you'd be fine, nutritionally. But you need salt, or you get sick. Lots of types of grazing animals do too; they just have to get their salt directly from a lick, rather than obtaining more than the required dosage from a single serving of basically any prepared food in the entire supermarket.

It's pretty obvious that most people aren't real good at listening to their bodies and eating what they need, rather than what they want. That's obviously true of sugar and calories, but apparently it's true of salt as well. You just can't see your developing hypertension in the bathroom mirror or on the bathroom scale. Fortunately, there are depressing news articles like the one above, and depressing blogs like this one, to remind you of the fact.

MANILA (AFP) - From stressed-out executives toiling away in concrete jungles to the inhabitants of palm-fringed Pacific atolls, millions across Asia are being stalked by a silent killer -- obesity. A steady rise in living standards over the past two decades has lifted millions out of poverty in Asia but also brought with it a new problem. Throughout the region, people are getting fatter.

At a meeting in Geneva last weekend, World Health Organisation (WHO) experts adopted new policies aimed at tackling what was once seen as primarily an American problem. Today, it has gone global and many Asian governments are only now starting to grasp the full impact it is having on their health services and societies.

I remember numerous news stories from years ago, when doctors began to grow aware of how fat and unhealthy Americans were getting. Most of the stories discussed other cultures one earth, and quite often they'd show a bunch of footage of skinny Japanese or Chinese people eating rice and fish and living to 107.

ast blog, I reviewed The Day After Tomorrow, and included a quote from a review on BoxOfficeMojo. The review gave the movie a D, and wasn't really a review of the film. Rather, it was a long diatribe against the science that the movie was based on, which had obviously so affected the reviewer than he couldn't get past that to comment on the film itself. I quoted from it since it was one of the five worst movie reviews I've ever seen, and the ultimate example of the "This movie isn't any good since the environmental message/science in it is not 100% factually accurate." school of thought. It felt much more like a policy piece from some right wingnut site like Townhall.com or Newsmax.com than a review, and that's where the real fault lay.

In fact, his review motivated me to email him. Only my second email ever to the writer of a review. More on the first one later. Here's what I said:

Hmm.

I found your review of TDAT a bit histrionic, and far more about your feelings towards global warming and environmentalism than about the movie you were theoretically reviewing. The concluding 2 paragraphs of your review, especially.

True, the VP's concluding speech was a bit preachy, but in the universe of the film, what did he say that wasn't 100% true? Pre-disaster he was wrong, colossally, and everything the scientist said was right. I thought it spoke well of his character, actually, even as I rolled my eyes at the preachy-ness of it. Honestly, imagine if we had a real elected leader who was willing to own up to his mistakes, make changes, and work to improve things from there? The last 2 occupants of the White House certainly haven't had that ability, despite depressingly-frequent opportunities to demonstrate it.

Overall though, why do you have to agree with the premise of a movie to watch it and review it on its own merits? TDAT wasn't a documentary, or a policy piece. It was a popcorn disaster movie. Looking at Emmerich's past work, I didn't think much of either film, but does a person have to fear imminent alien attack or 500 foot mutated iguanas to watch ID4 or Godzilla? If you start counting the number of summer movies with entirely plausible scenarios, you certainly won't need to take off your shoes. Probably not even your BBQ gloves.

No offense, but stick to discussing the movies in your reviews. Start a blog if you're burning to write political editorials and critiques.

Flux
http://www.blackchampagne.com

I didn't add it, but looking back now I wish I'd tacked on:

PS: 9/11 was 3 years ago. How long does Hollywood have to wait before a movie can include plane crashes, and something bad happening to New York City skyscrapers (you'll note that NYC is almost entirely filled with skyscrapers, so a movie about a disaster there will, inevitably, feature a lot of skyscrapers) before it's no longer shameless exploitation?

This was in reference to the following completely non sequitur-esque line from his review:

But there is something sinister about a movie that shamelessly exploits the memory of September 11, 2001, with people stranded on rooftops, plunging airplanes and New York as the epicenter of destruction for its own sake.

Maybe I'm over 9/11 more than I should be, but I didn't associate offscreen plane crashes (nowhere near NY) due to turbulence, a storm surge flooding Manhattan, and people climbing up to the frozen rooftops of NYC skyscrapers to be rescued by helicopters, with the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Also, since he brought it up, when was anyone stranded on a rooftop on 9/11? The roof ladders on the WTC were locked; no one got up there at all, as best I recall.

Overall, I thought my letter was okay. Picky, but not vicious, and I certainly didn't include lines like, "One of the worst movie reviews I've ever read, and I read at least a dozen a week." I certainly didn't expect to hear back from him, and was surprised when I checked my mail the next day (which wasn't deleted by my fucked up Mozilla, for a change) and saw his reply.

This does nothing to change my opinion of his review, but it certainly takes the piss out of my sails when it comes to slagging him for it. How can I write mean things about someone so professional and polite? True, he'd probably be far better suited for working in PR than writing movie reviews, but who knows, that might be his day job. I suspect he's making about as much money writing his reviews for BoxOfficeMojo as I am for this site.

Anyway, in the email he basically restates his argument from the review, with a lot less hyperbole. Strange to think that the person who wrote this email said this (among other bizarre things) in his review:

There's simply nothing in the movie anything like this.  We bring the disaster on ourselves with our global warming causing desalinization of the seas, which triggers the whole thing, but it's made clear that basically the exact same thing happened 10,000 years before (in the movie's version of reality), with no help from man. So basically the humans in the movie do nothing other than accelerate the inevitable climate change.

It's also very self-serving to say that Emmerich has some sort of glee at destroying America. I thought that was one of the drawbacks of the film; how narrowly-focused it was on the US. The entire northern hemisphere is iced over, and as a quick check of a globe will show you, most of Europe is further north than the US. The movie shows nothing of Europe other than a few early storm scenes, another scientist trapped in the cold, and views of the frozen globe from outer space. Emmerich's Deutschland is certainly a big icicle, and one would assume there is a massive panicked evacuation from Germany into Africa, just as there is from America into Mexico. It's just not shown at all, in the entirely US-centric film. I wondered why they did it this way, since it'll have to hurt the movie's world wide box office prospects. Imagine if the entire movie had been set in oh... Italy. Or China. Or India.

The reviewer's argument is consistent, but I don't think it's defensible. What is there about TDAT that requires the viewer to buy into the whole premise so completely? I could list a thousand film examples, but imagine if someone said they hated Jurassic Park because there's no way to sequence Dinosaur DNA perfectly from the blood in amber-entombed mosquitoes? Or if someone couldn't enjoy LotR or Harry Potter because there isn't really magic, or Dawn of the Dead because Zombies can't really exist. You'd scoff and think them a fool, for applying the same logic of real life to a fictional movie, right?

How is TDAT so different? It's slightly more based in reality, but it's not as if those other movies had disclaimers at the start saying they were entirely works of fiction, and no one should believe that a T Rex is going to be cloned, shipped to San Diego on a freighter, and escape from it to rampage through the suburbs. It's called "suspension of disbelief" or "stick to documentaries." Your choice.

Or spend a paragraph decrying the inaccuracy of the science in the movie, link to a detailed discussion of it written by someone who knows more than you do (as I did from my TDAT review), and then get on with the movie review.  It was a disaster movie, and it required a disaster. I didn't think it was any more unbelievable than a movie about an asteroid striking the earth, or a plague wiping out 99% of humanity, or nuclear war, or whatever you prefer.

As I said previously, this was the second time I've been motivated to email a movie reviewer. The only other time was in response to another D review on Box Office Mojo, and it was for the review of The Ladykillers. Not by the same author as the TDAT review, fortunately.

My objection to The Ladykillers review was that the review author just completely didn't get the movie. Not that that's a crime; it was just that he scolded the movie relentlessly for being something other than he thought it was. The movie was a comedy with very broad, satirical characters. The movie was populated entirely by ridiculous exaggerations of characters who were, at all cost, not meant to be taken seriously. Which is why comments such as this in the review were so unintentionally hilarious that I had to mail the guy.

Here's a quote from the review.

To make matters worse, the acting is just god-awful. The actors involved in this train wreck have given much better performances and in much better movies. Marlon Wayans as the homeboy Gawain MacSam plays into the stereotype of the bling-bling gangsta type who can barely utter a coherent sentence. J.K. Simmons (TV's Law and Order) is Garth Pancake, the explosives expert with IBS. Tzi Ma, who was outstanding in The Quiet American, is the General, a martial arts expert whose primary role is to endlessly repeat a running gag with his cigarette. Ryan Hurst (Remember the Titans) is Lump -- his name says it all.

But the worst performances and roles are reserved for the two leads Hanks and Hall. Hanks plays Dorr as if he were channeling Truman Capote and Joseph Cotten giving a fractured interpretation of Colonel Sanders. In a word, it's an acting travesty. Hall's performance is less an outright disaster but is so clichéd and stereotypical that it borders on the offensive. That it is rendered in such a manically dull way just blunts and negates it. We're sort of hoping that she gets bumped off just to end the agony of the entire enterprise.

My email to him, from April 9, 2004:

Regarding your review of Ladykillers, which I saw posted on the box office mojo site. I certainly wouldn't argue that it's a great film, but a D? Your comments on it seemed very misguided, as you spent most of the review criticizing the comedic elements of the film for not being dramatically convincing. Of course all of the criminals, not to mention the not-so-little old lady, are ridiculous stereotypes. That's the whole point. It's a comedy, and in this comedy the joke is that they are so broad and absurd and cartoonish.

Now it's certainly open to debate whether or not this is funny, since humor is entirely subjective. But your review seems to criticize the movie for accidentally doing what it clearly does on purpose. Ebert didn't think it was funny or compelling either, and he spent most of his review (pointlessly) comparing it to the original film (that I suspect about .05% of the US population has actually seen), but he at least acknowledged that he got the joke; he just didn't appreciate it.

If your review had pointed out that they were all exaggerated caricatures, and said that you didn't care for it, I think readers would be more likely to take your comments seriously, rather than just wondering if you somehow didn't grasp that it was sarcasm and comedy, rather than drama.

I didn't mention it in my own brief review, but on the way out of the theater my girlfriend and I passed a couple of women who were talking about the movie, and one of them said, "I didn't care for it. Jocks aren't really that stupid."

We (my girlfriend and I) traded a look and started laughing like hyenas, astonished that an educated adult could sit through the entire movie and come away so clueless. And I hate to say it, but I had the same reaction after reading your review, which seemed so earnest in its incomprehension.

Cheers.

Flux
blackchampagne.com 

My, I was a snarky little shit, wasn't I? Perhaps it's no surprise that I never got a reply from the guy. I am more surprised that he never went back and changed the review along the lines I suggested, to remove his embarrassing incomprehension from it. But perhaps he stands by his original analysis. Or perhaps he doesn't have full FTP access to the site, but can only submit reviews that a script uploads and then doesn't allow to be edited.

The other thing I found myself wondering about was why both of my movie review emails went to the same site, when I hardly ever read their reviews anyway. I don't know why, exactly, since I didn't do it on purpose. I'm not angling for a job there, or observing their every review, or anything like that. So why that site?

Well, both reviews were dramatically awful, which motivated me to disagree with what I saw as major errors in them. But I think the fact that they both appeared on a site I read frequently (not for the reviews) and feel some affection towards, and the fact that it's a relatively small site, where I felt like my email might actually be read and make a difference, are contributing factors.

If either review had been written by a major critic I would have laughed about it and probably excerpted it on the blog, but I can't imagine that I would have mailed them about it.