What a Piss Off

This is going to be very, very interesting.

The other night I was over at Ryebone's house and after watching some movie trailers and discussing the politcal landscape in Libya over some finely aged scotch we ended up doing some classic gaming.  I suppose "classic" is a matter of perspective, but for our purposes here it means booting up some old Gamecube games.  And by games I mean SSX 3, a favourite of ours from back in the day that we'd spent countless hours playing after playing even more countless hours playing its predecessor SSX Tricky in university.  If memory serves, SSX Tricky is the first game that we ran for more than 24 consecutive hours on the Gamecube in our residence apartment, though Rogue Squadron II almost snagged that (potentially dubious) honour first.  The point is revisiting that shit was a fucking blast.

My gaming life of late has been dominated by an obsession with Xbox achievement points. (The metagame; the game within (or without) a game.)  I'm not knocking the achivement system on the 360, and in fact it offered motivation to keep going on those long, lonely nights of soul searching when in times of desperation I almost turned to actual human interaction.  Thankfully, though, I was able to pull back to the brink.  The achievement points system on the 360 is far superior to the trophy reward system on the PS3 and the entire lack of any reward system on the Wii.  But somewhere along the way the line got blurred between playing games for the (seemingly) intrinsic satisfaction I recieved from progressing through each one and progressing for the sake of progressing, which I suppose in and of itself offered a certain level of satisfaction.  This may seem like a fine line to comprehend let alone to tread (or simply rhetorical bullshit to some) but it is an important philosophical distinction I have recently found myself in the position to make.

When most people talk about video games they generally talk about the game play and the graphics; they generally don't talk about the philisophical ramifcations of gaming.  While some might have chalked it up to boredom, or even a slight bout of depression, to me it was the closest I might ever get to a crisis of faith.  I was playing video games almost exclusively on the XBox 360 (whenever I could sneak away from the wife and kids for five goddamn minutes, that is) with the sole intention of getting more achievement points and increasing my gamer score (which currently weighs in around a healthy 10,000 or so).  I was obsessed to the point that I almost completely neglected gaming on my Wii and PS3.  And I hadn't realized it until that night at Ryebone's pimping bachelor pad, but my gaming had become tedious and monotonous.  The games I was playing had simply become a means to an end instead of an end unto themselves.  Video games had become a conduit; a chore to perform in order to increase a virtual number by completing tasks in the games that I normally would never have considered and really weren't that fun or meaningful to me.  This was undoubtedly one of my lowest points as a gamer, a weekend philosopher and a functioning alcoholic.

Booting up SSX 3 on Ryebone's 52 inch plasma TV I felt something stir deep inside me.  At first I thought it was some strange mutant creature like Quatto from TOTAL RECALL coming to the surface.  Then I realized that it was the shackles of societal pressure being lifted from my back, shriveled soul.  Or at least percieved societal pressure, which amounts to the same thing.  I was fucking enjoying my virtual snowboarding adventure down (the aptly named) Peaks 1, 2, and 3 maxing out my uber tricks whilst grooving to some phat, juicy beats.  I had rediscovered my love of gaming (and also my obsessively competitive nature when I spent an hour trying to beat one of Ryebone's scores after he jokingly challenged me.  There is no such thing as a casual challenge, bitch).

Now the way we always played the SSX games was to completely ignore the racing in favour of the trick challenges because that's where the fun shit was at.  Getting ridiculously high scores, gloating to friends and family, then beating you friend's scores and gloating to him and dipping your balls in his coffee to celebrate your victory.  Some of you more astute readers may be saying to themselves "Wait a minute: you just said youd didn't feel spiritually fulfilled trying to achieve some virtual score for some sense of self-validation."  Well not exactly.  The difference between getting a score for performing tricks in SSX 3 and collecting a bunch of bobble heads in Fallout 3 to get the 30 or so acheivement points are philosocally very different things.  One corresponds directly to my gaming abilities and subsequent achievments and the other exists outside of the game itself and is related to a virtual profile with little to no relevence to the game itself or my relative gaming abilities.  The 360 achievement points -while still slightly meaningful- are another step removed from the game itself and from the player.

Anyway, after experiencing this Reawakening I went home and the next day I booted up my Wii and popped in SSX 3 ad SSX Tricky and dugout my old Gamecube controllers and memory cards and soon discovered... that nothing lasts forever and one of my memory cards had lost all its data.  Of course, it was the memory card with the bulk of my Gamecube save files including all my high scores from my virtual snowboarding exploits.  My first reaction was dumbfounded disbelief, followed by anger, then finally acceptance.  There was nothing I could do.  The card was working fine and took new saves.  Apparently over time without a steady power supply most electronic memory devices have a tendency to lose data. 

Despite this electronic inevitabiliy it was still a huge fucking piss off, though. 

What I had lost wasn't just gold medals for blowing up the Death Star or points from performing impossible tricks on virtual snowboards: it was validation.  The time I had spent perfecting my skills was not in and of itself enough.  Not totally anyway.  With a codified system of writing it is possible to pass on those records for posterity.  There is a way not only to objectively qualify your skills in relation to other people who may or may not give two shits, but simply as a way of leaving any kind of mark at all and saying "I was there.  I did that shit, and here is my score to prove how well I did it."  It lent a certain credibility to all the time I had spent playing those games, performing those glorious deeds.  Just like Achilles' desire to have stories told about him for thousands of years it was my own small slice of immortality that had been lost.  And now I have to start climbing that ladder back to immortality.  What a fucking pain in the ass.    

Flame On, Captain America

Way back in the year 2000 a movie based on popular comic book characters from either the two titans Marvel or DC seemed like the fevered dream of a madman.  Or at least, an occurence few and far between.  This was fortunate for viewing audiences the world over and the safety of the space time continuum itself after our World endured a terrible, unrighteous onslaught that ranged from the palpable (the 1989 BATMAN, BLADE) to the terrible (take your pick of any SUPERMAN film starring Christopher Reeves) to the insultingly awful (the 1990 CAPTAIN AMERICA, the 1989 PUNISHER starring Dolph Lundgren) to the Crime Against Humanity (BATMAN & ROBIN).  The extent of what most of these films accomplished was a lot of neck injuries brought on by excessive head shaking, the emmergence of the Psychiatric Revolution as thousands of adults who had been severely traumatized as children by this shit sought out professional help, and a general lack of faith in the essential goodness of humanity.

Part of the problem -at least- was the fact that movies based on comic books were not treated seriously, or at least not handled with the care given to "legitimate cinema."  Over the years comic books came to be seen as somehow less valid (often thought of as juvenile, and hence somehow less substantial) than other forms of literature and art.  This bias overflowed into the movie industry who seemed not to take their source material seriously when it came to comic book properties.  This was not only grossly and blatantly disrespectful to the men and women who took the time to creat these detailed worlds and characters but also to the legions of fans who appreciated these works on both a visceral and intellectual level.  Even superhero flicks that garnered a fair amount of commmercial success like SUPERMAN or BATMAN took gross liberties with the characters that made little to no sense in hindsight other than giving a big, old fashioned Fuck You to audiences, fans (of the comics), and free-thinking people the world over.

Finally in 2000 Marvel struck a blow in cinema that would change the course of the sub-genre forver (or at least the next ten to twenty years).  X-MEN was unleashed upon an unsuspecting world and immediately caused an entire generation to collectively jizz in its pants.  Here, finally, was an intelligently-written, finely-crafted film based on comic book characters that took itself seriously, paid homage to the source material and the fans thereof, and treated its audience with some modicom of respect and didn't make me want to put a hole in my head with my Black and Decker drill in an attempt to erase the terrible memory of the thing from my brain immediately after watching it.  With Marvel at a stage in the game to retain a lot more control over her characters as they ventured into other forms of media (ie. they had a shit-ton of money) things went exceedingly well, despite a partnership with Fox.  X-MEN starred an A-List cast and was directed by Bryan Singer the maverick who brought us THE USUAL SUSPECTS.

I know there's probably a lot of hardcore geeks out there who insist on liking shit just for the sake o starting arguments, but X-MEN really marked a turning point in the development of comic book movies.  All of the sudden they became a force to be reconned with and grabbed the attention of studio execs who started drooling all over whatever transvestite hookers they were doing cocaine off the scrotums of at the thought of all the money they could make from this shit.  The success of X-MEN really paved the way for the best super hero films ever made including SPIDER-MAN, X2, IRON MAN, THE INCREDIBLE HULK, WATCHMEN, and of course climaxing with BATMAN BEGINS and THE DARK KNIGHT (although any movie starring Christian Bale and written and directed by Christopher Nolan are completely doomed to extreme, dirty success and are really an entire genre of films in their own right).  Of course the flip side of that coin is that in their rush to make as much fucking money as possible studios began pumping out comic book movies at a blistering pace and in their haste to make a fast buck we've been subjected to a wide array of post-X-MEN goat shit from GHOST RIDER, to two more horrible PUNISHER MOVIES, to CATWOMAN, and two FANTATIC FOUR movies that made the unreleased 1994 version look like fucking SCHINDLER'S LIST by comparison.

Lately Marvel has really stepped up its game.  Not necessarily in terms of quality, but in terms of concept.  Their pantheon of characters is reminiscent -in terms of functionality and theory- of ancient Greek and Roman mythology.  The Ancients had thousands of stories about their gods and goddesses and even while a story about Demeter would have herown stories they would inexorably be linked to the rest of the pantheon.  That is to say a story about Ares would invariably involve Zeus or Aphrodite or one of the others.  They would have crossover characters.  It's like a story about Wolverine starting off at the mansion with Professor X and Cylcops and Rogue (fuck, Rogue is hot in the comics) and then he goes off and fights The Juggernaught for a while.  The folks over at Marvel and DC have invested a lot of time and money into developing their respective universes of characters with all their threads of interconnectivity so it makes a lot of sense that they finally started doing this with their movie franchises (with the exception of Nolan's Bat-universe, which is a universe uno itself and so not bound by our mortal concepts of right and wrong).

I'm talking about THE AVENGERS is what I'm talking about.  While I'm still not completely sold on the idea despite millions of fanboys getting a boner after hearing its being helmed by Joss Whedon, who I'm still not sure why is the the darling of thousands of geeks the world over.  I just don't get the Whedon.  I have no idea why people love his shit.  So far he's done nothing that really stands out or has motivated me emotionally.  Seven years of BUFFY and four more of ANGEL were so excrutiatingly mundane and unextraordinary that... oh, I don't know where I intended to go with this when I started.  The point is Joss Whedon seems to be another entity who seems comprised entirely of hype, unfulfilled expectations, and pure delusion and the only emotion I can associate with Whedon is disappointment at not getting to see Sarah Michelle Gellar nude in a single goddamn episode.

Where was I?... Oh yes, THE AVENGERS, narrative continuity, and cinematic wet dreams.  While the AVENGERS movie might turn out to suck hardcore (right now I'd feel comfortable betting with about 50:50 odds) the concept -I feel, anyway- has actually strengthened the rest of the Marvel properties by forcing them to be more coherent.  They're all building up towards something, the same place, and so they have to maintain an ideological consistency.  The other side of the coin is that it may tend to take focus away from the individul characters in their standalone movies: a delicate line to be walked to be sure, and arguably crossed over many times in IRON MAN 2.  It's a fine line that can only be mastered by the best in the business, and unfortunately Marvel has not been dealing with that particular breed through the whole process.

What this concept has done has given movies like THE INCREDIBLE HULK, IRON MAN, THOR, and now CAPTAIN AMERICA a spine around which filmmakers might construct their creatures.  Similar threads tying them all together.  On a visceral level this resulted in pure fanboy fodder: shout-outs to other characters and such from other Marvel properties.  On a conceptual level it both shackled and focused the filmmakers of each property.  The individual writers and directors couldn't take the characters in too different a direction (thank the gods) as they all had to eventually tie together, which is somewhat limiting creatively.  However, it also forced the filmmakers to diferentiate their characters so that when they were all forced on screen together in 2012 it wasn't a bunch of Super Heroes on screen but different characters with different motivations.

While Marvel's movies have been passable, they're still just good and not great.  I hate to keep bringing up THE DARK KNIGHT (Actually I don't.  I fucking love that movie)  but it really set the bar not only for what a good superhero movie should be, but what a good movie in general should be.  Why other movies have settled for mediocrity instead of trying to reach as close as they can to that bar (but not pass it; that's impossible for anybody but Nolan himself) is beyond me.  I really dug IRON MAN and THE INCREDIBLE HULK, but I was kind of left wanting by IRON MAN 2 and THOR.  The last two were OK movies, but they could have been better, and really should have been better considering the talent involved.

CAPTAIN AMERICA lies somewhere in between on the spectrum: better than IRON MAN 2, not quite as good as IRON MAN.  While CAPTAIN AMERICA had its darker moments to be sure (it was set mostly during WWII after all) it didn't quite have the emotional core to make me care about its characters enough to stop me from laughing when Bucky died abruptly two thirds of the way into the film.

In fact I found myself laughing a lot during CAPTAIN AMERICA. I'm not sure why.  It wasn't terrible and it wasn't a intended (I don't think) to be a comedy.  But there were just so many times when I found myself laughing out loud in the movie theatre.  Like the aforemetioned death of Bucky.  Pretty much any time the Hydra soldiers did their salute.  I don't know why, but it just seemed ridiculous in some way I can't explain.  The introduction of the vibranium shield.  Other random times throughout the movie.  I remember liking the movie overall, though perhaps only a second viewing will tell the tale.  I suppose laughter is a good thing.  At least I was enjoying myself.  Right?

It was a miracle that this film wasn't just a complete pile of doshit, what with it being helmed by Joe Johnston whose career highpoints seem to be HONEY, I SHRUK THE KIDS and JUMANJI and who brought us both JURASSIC PARK III and the absolutely terrible WOLFMAN.  I don' know if it was luck or an intervetion by Odin himself but CAPTAIN AMERICA turned out all right.  It had a good mix of action and character development.  Or about as much character devlopment as you'd expect.

Actually it wasn't that bad (although, I'm not sure who I'm trying to convince).  Captain America (portrayed here by Chris Evans) turned out to be suprisingly badass.  It's set during wartime, so Captain America ends up killing more people than the Punisher did in his last two times out on film: but they're all Nazi's so it's cool.  Between Indianna Jones and Captain America it's surprising that the Nazi's got as far as they did.  There was actually a surprising amount of death in a summer blockbuster super hero PG-13 movie, although the depiction of most of the deaths (through means of a death ray that most of the Hydra troops carried) was obviously designed so as not to show the battleground littered with dead, bloody corpses.  (Also surprisingly absent were the whores...)  This was a rather unique and effective way to balance the need to depict a WWII battle (ie. lots o' death) and the (apparent) need to maintain a PG-13 rating in order to rack in the maximum amount o' cash.  Although I must say that total disintegration has always troubled me on some deep, emotional level.  There's something somehow unsettling about the idea of somebody shooting you with a laser beam that completely disintegrates your body on the subatomic level.  I don't know if it's the fact that your margain of survial narrows a great deal should you be facing an opponent with such a weapon (get shot in the arm with a bullet,you might survive: get shot anywhere with a death ray, it's automatic game over) or whether it's the fact I wouldn't be able to leave a good looking corpse or something else entirely.  It just creeps me out.

Another kind of creepy thing was seeing Chris Evans' face superimposed or digitally grafted to another smaller, punier body.  Special effects have come so far and this effect was seemless.  Even creepier was seeing Hugo Weaving as Red Skull pulling off his own face in one scene.  As far as I know this was not special effects and Weaving pulled his own face off.  He's just that dedicated an actor.  Like when he learned how to asexually reproduce for the MATRIX movies.  The whole cast actually did a decent job.  This is Chris Evans' second forray into the superheroing job market having portrayed The Human Torch (AKA Johnny Storm) in the two shitty FANTASTIC FOUR movies, and thankfully his agent was actually right about this one.  I don't follow Evans' career a lot, but he did a good job here.  He bought a lot of street cred in my eyes for his appearance in SCOTT PILGRIM where he basically satirized the exact kind of action hero role that he earns his keep with and portrays here.  Tommy Lee Jones shows up as a gruff army commander for some reason.  I like Tommy Lee Jones.  Not like that.  That's all I have to say on that matter.  Another notable performance was Dominic Cooper as Howard Stark, Tony Stark/Iron Man's father who has a fairly sizable role in the film.  Dude did a great job, and I don't know if it was the power of suggestion but Cooper seemed eerily perfect as the Elder Stark, and he seemed to look a lot like Robert Downey Jr. 

There were really two big things that really held this movie back (Well, technically three, but I can't blame the movie theatre for not providing me with a giant bag of weed and a bong shaped like Princess Leia's metal bra-clad tits.  Or can I...?): really choppy editing, and a pretty anti-climatic final battle.  There were some really strange, really abrupt cuts with really no seguey or build-up.  And they were always to these crazy action montages that had little to do with the main plot other than to show the general badassery of Captain America and his band of rag-tags.  And the final battle with Red Skull kind of just ended, again rather abruptly.  I felt kind of cheated.  It wasn't that the climax wasn't action-packed or enjoyable, but the climax has to stand out from the rest of the film and in an action film you really have to kick it up a notch (another blast from the spice weasel - BHAM!).

I can't believe it... your tits are bigger than mine!

The makes of this film tried to emulate the SPIDER-MAN franchise by attempting to incorporate some kind of central theme.  This is not a bad thing.  It really worked out well for Spidey, and for some reason "With great power comes great responsibility" stuck in the public consciousness so well that to this day people will still quote that shit.  Usually for comedic effect now, but still that's a pretty resilient little meme.  It also helped give substance to the movie.  CAPTAIN AMERICA kind of does the same thing with its "Why someone weak?  Because a weak man knows the value of strength, the value of power..." concept that crazy German defecter scientist guy (Stanley Tucci) gives Steve Rogers as to why he was picked for the project.  This is all well and good I suppose if the rest of the movie hadn't been trying to show how he was strong in other ways like with courage and intellect and stuff.  But I suppose you're not really manly until you can bench press a Buick.  Or crush walnuts with your pectorals.  I guess it kind of worked, though.

As you might have gathered I was not entirely blown away by this film nor was I completely disappointed by it.  If you're a fan of the Captain America comics you're probably still cleaning the jizz from your favourite pair of slacks if you've seen the movie and if you're not an avid reader of the source material then you'll probably get a kick out of a solid action flick.  I suppose I should comment on the costume which, for some unknown reason, sparked of som very hot debates on the interwebs.  The costume was a good translation into the "real world" with it basically being a modified military uniform with some spiffy colours added.  The movie also gives you a logical reason he chooses to wear that particular costume and why he uses the shield, because we needed that for some reason.  I guess I shouldn't complain.  This "grounding" of ridiculous ideas from comics in the "real world" or at least the "realm of relative plausability" is where I see Chrisopher Nolan's influence on the comic book movie genre for which we should all be thankful.

For some reason when I was watching this movie I kept thinking about Don Draper and what he'd think about this Captain America fellow, even though according to the timeline he would have only been a little kid at this point in history (though maybe Sterling Cooper handled the Captain's PR when he went on tour with his dancing Cap-ettes).  That had nothing to do with anything, really.  Just thought I'd throw that in there.  Alrght, enough of this crap.  Bottom line: go see this flick.  I give CAPTAIN AMERICA a 7/10 = One Horribly Scarred Red Head That Is Really Just Crying Out For Someone To Love It


                

How Manly Is That?

This past week I installed some laminate floors in my basement.  I ripped out the old fireplace, pulled up the carpet, scraped the floor, laid out the foam, assembled my floor and put up the baseboards.  My wife helped when she could, but she was running interferance with the kids.  Ryebone came over one night to offer an extra set of hands, but it turns out that he's even less handy than I am.  So basically I ran the show and did the bulk of the work myself.

And after I was all done I felt really fucking manly.

After I finished I looked out over the realm that is my Basement and took in a deep, manly breath, nodded an approving, manly nod, then fantasized about fucking Olivia Wilde.  I was on top, of course: the manliest of positions.  Then I started thinking.  This is usually a bad thing.  I thought back over the tenure of of my time here on this planet and tried to develop a scale of Relative Masculinity for the course of my life.  I tried to figure out why I felt so manly at this particular point in time.  I thought about my usual preocupations.  I didn't feel less masculine when watching movies.  I didn't feel somehow emotionally or spiritually impotent when playing video games.  I didn't have dreams about my penis falling off after working out.  I didn't feel somehow inferior when reading a book or jotting down my thoughts in a blog that nobody (including myself) will probably ever read.  In fact, most days I don't even consider my Relative Masculinity, or even what masculinity even means or why it suddenly became important to me.

Like everything else masculinity and femininity are cultural constructions.  And while I like to remain aloof and detached when it comes to association to culture in any of its forms I am also aware that I am not immune or seperate from its effects even as I am aware of them.  It seems to me that our modern concept of masculinity really consists of three basic tennets.  1) Some sense of Integrity or Code of Honour regarded as strength in the mental sense (Man Up, Take it Like a Man, Be a Man, Be a Man of Your Word, etc.) 2) Fucking.  3) Physical competance.   

Masculinity in our culture is related a great deal to the third tennet: physical prowess.  My indulgence in this aspect of male life was lifting weights, and more recently muay thai.  These two things seemed (and still seem) pretty manly.  But in our concept of masculinity something was still missing.  I remember one time being in the parking lot of a bowling ally and a woman was having problems with her car.  The hood was open and she was staring at the engine block as if trying to will it to fix itself.  I happened to be close by and she asked me if I could help.  And I couldn't.  What the fuck do I know about cars?  Beyond checking the oil and gas I had no clue about how to diagnose and then repair any sort of minor problems in small engines.  Which is what I told her before I continued on my way.
So our modern concept of masculinity is not just physical strength; it's the application of that physical strength in an activity that is percieved to be constructive.  This could manifest itself in a variety of ways from being able to change the tire on a car to building a deck in your back yard.  It seems that in the eyes of our society a key component of masculinity was manual labour directed towards organizing certain types of matter into socially acceptable forms, like a skyscraper or a sidewalk.

What's really curious about this particular aspect of masculinity is that it is simultaneously exalted and derided.  There seems to be this romantic notion of the honourable suffering of the blue collar working class at the same time we look down our noses at manual labourers as uncouth, culturally unrefined, "rough around the edges" and even intellectually inferior to their white collar-sporting counterparts.  Perhaps its the Underdog Syndrome where people like to root for the honourable loser.  I guess this is specifically the ROCKY Underdog Syndrome because Rocky didn't actually win in the first movie, but fought on in the face of almost certain defeat winning not an actual victory but a moral (in the traditional sense) victory.  In this way we tend to view the blue collar crowd as admirable in doing their manly jobs, but ultimately as somehow always a couple rungs down the social ladder no matter how hard they work or whatever successes they might have (and despite the fact that somebody working in the trades can make a shit-ton of money - our society's ultimate benchmark of success).

And as I stood there surveying my floors I felt that sense of the underdog.  In my case it was even more poignant because I am not the most handy guy.  I haven't used power tools on a regular basis since Grade 9.  Now the sound of a mitre saw is actually frightening.  I haven't changed a  lot of tires or built a lot of decks.  In fact, I tend to avoid manual labour whenever possible.  So for me to take charge on this project and step up and have to use not one but three different saws (mitre, table, and jig) as well as a nail gun.  I felt like the fucking Rambo of laminate flooring.

But again, looking back I didn't feel like any less of a man before I installed the floors.  And thinking about it there were other men who couldn't have done as good a job as me (or completed it at all) ad there were women out there who probably could have done a better job much more quickly than I did.  So in the end I'm not sure if my elation came from fulfilling the societal expectations for masculinity or simply as a sense of accomplishment for doing something I had never done before or didn't actually believe I could do.  Sometimes a cigar is jus a cigar.  And sometimes a cigar is a cock.  I suppose it's all about perspective.               

Hot, Sticky Avian Love

A couple of weeks ago I took my family to a small zoo in central Ontario.  Actually it was my wife's idea.  We had gone to a family reunion for her paternal grandmother's family: my wife for some kind of strange loyalty to a line of DNA and the same morbid curiosity that drives people to go to their high school reunions: me because I had not had enough time to come up with a viable excuse (apparently staying at home masturbating and eating corn chips all day wasn't an urgent enough reason for exclusion from this particular mission): and my kids because they were too young to leave alone and everybody we usually pawned them of on was going to the reunion.  The reunion turned out to be a bust due in large part to a bunch of old people who smelled like death warmed over who sat in the basement of the church where the reunion was being held which smelled like stale, dank, moth-balled, shit-tinged basement and kept an eagle eye on the food making sure nobody got anything until the unknown time that had been predetermined by this Council of the Damned to be optimal for consuming typical shitty pot luck dishes.  Thanks in particular to one old cunt obviously on the verge of death and with that sense of entitlement that some old people get simply for having existed for a long time who kept a sharp watch on the food to make sure people weren't having too good a time.  Which is good, because some people there were coming dangerously close to associating positive emotions with family.  Luckily, she nipped that in the bud.

Before we had gone down to the relatively boring/relatively pain free reunion, my wife and I had kind of semi-decided that we would turn this trip into a mini summer vacation.  The plan was to stay overnight in a hotel -far away from anybody's family- and then take the kids to the zoo and the beach the next day.  I don't know why we assumed that on a Saturday night in the middle of summer that we'd be able to find a hotel with vacancies left "no problem," but we ended up finding a place after only three tries.  The next day we got up had a semi-shitty continental breakfast during which time the only working toaster stopped working and I had to have my second helping of waffles cold which did little for my libido.  Finally after only one major "freak out" on the part of my daughter we were on our way to the zoo. 

As we got closer it became increasingly clearer that this seemed like an odd place for a zoo.  In was in some backwoods town.  Elmsville or Elksdale.  It's not really important.  The point is the whole operation (I say "operation" as opposed to "business" is I'm still not sure if this place was 100% legal) seemed kind of low-rent.  The main "office" was cramped and unkempt and the staff seemed apathetic and detached.  Of course, that could have been me.

As we made our way into the park the anti-grandeur settled in completely.  The cages for the animals were considerably smaller than I'd seen in other zoos and seemed to have been constructed in haste, mostly out of old two by fours and what seemed like heavy-grade chicken wire.  After seeing the inside of this zoo I was really surprised there weren't  bunch of protesters out front trying to get them to release the animals or stop selling dead giraffes to the local Vietnamese restaurant, or renting out the capybaras (look it up, dickhead) for children's birthday parties or some shit.  I have very little patience or respect for protesters of any type.  That has no bearing on this particular story.  I just think that conventional protesting is ineffective and just plain annoying.

I don't know if the animals were suffering or not (they looked fine to me) but the advantage of having such a small zoo was that the animals were really fucking close which made the experience slightly less boring than the usual zoo experience.  I got to pet some giraffes despite the objections of the posted warnings not to and a drunken security guard with an overbite and a build like the president of your high school chess club.  I also got up close and personal with several breeds of monkeys who totally freaked me out staring at me with their people eyes.  I got the feeling they were up to more than just swinging around, eating bananas and rubbing their genitals on random objects all day.  I could tell they were just biding their time until James Franco could come and free them so they could start the New Revolution.

Eventually we found ourselves standing outside the ostrich pen.  At first there was nothing out of the ordinary.  Then one of those avian giants came over to the section of the fence my family and I were standing at and started pecking at the fence.  From our point of view it seemed playful, but I imagine just like the velociraptors in JURASSIC PARK they were looking for weaknesses in order to plot their escape and eventual rampage, feasting on human flesh.  At first it was fascinating because of the proximity of the great bird.  He was literally like three or four feet away and I got a close look at everything.  Then we got double the pleasure double the fun when a second ostrich came over in front of us and started pecking at the fence.

Then things got really funky really quickly.

I didn't realize it at the time, but what we were actually looking at was a male and a female.  It didn't click in right away even as our second ostrich friend turned her back to the first and spread her flightless wings.  It didn't register even as our first ostrich friend started to climb on top of the the second.  Then it hit me. 

She wasn't turning her back to him.  She was presenting.

He wasn't climbing on top of her.  He was mounting her.  Hard and fast.

Without even a hint of foreplay these two behemoth birds began fucking right there in front of us.  Not making love.  Just plain fucking.  But more than that.  It wasn't just fucking.  It was hard fucking.  As the male mounted the female from behind he also wrapped his neck around hers and started choking her.  And no, it wasn't like some lover's warm embrace.  It was hardcore, all out, autoerotic asphyxiation.  It was feather-ruffling, down in the dirt, ostrich pussy pounding action.

And then there was a loud splash and I saw a puddle of water underneath these two extroverted avian lovers.  Only it wasn't water.  It was a virtual pond's worth of hot, sticky ostrich cum.  And there was a lot of it.  When it overflowed out of the other ostrich's pussy it hit the ground like somebody had dumped out a bucket of water.  When it hit, there was actually a wave there was so much of it.  And as they finished and the male pulled out I finally got a full on view of ostrich cock.

And it was huge.

And red.

And huge.

And retractable.

And huge.

It was almost like a veliciraptor's claw.  It retracted right back up into the ostrich's body.  And it was equally as terrifying as the dinosaur's weapon.  And just when I thought it was over, the dude whips out his dick again (huge!) and goes back for seconds before she can even stand back up again.  Right against the fence.  Three feet away from me and my family.

Now, I don't consider myself a prude.  I don't like to get naked in front of other dudes at the YMCA locker room after I work out, but I don't think that's such an unnatural urge.  I'm more of an intellectual exhibitionist than a physical one, and I've never been one for public nudity.  I'm not sure exactly why, but I urged my wife to move on (of course, this was while I was still fixated on the whole weird scene myself).  I think it was out of some strange sense of empathy; I just wanted to give these two wild lovers their privacy the same I would want if I was trapped in a zoo with my wife and I mounted her ostrich-style and started fucking her from behind while choking her.  I just figured it was a private moment.  I don't know if I could fuck with a bunch of strangers watching me (unless I was getting paid obscene amounts of money).  I wasn't too concerned about my children seeing anything.  It was just sex.  My three year old daughter didn't even bat an eye at the whole thing.  My nine month old son was sleeping soundly in his mother's arms.

My wife, however, seemed transfixed my the whole thing.  She was absolutely fascinated.  I couldn't drag her away (though, admittedly, I didn't try too hard).  And that was kind of cool.  After three years of having kids we've both kind of been reclassified as "mom" and "dad".  I'm sure most parent's -especially newer ones- will tell you that your sex life takes a bit of a hit.  I'm not complaining or anything.  "Moms" and Dads" are social constructs just like everybody else and part of that construction is asexuality.  You don't think of parents in terms of sexuality.  Their job is to Raise the Children.  So to see my wife so into ostrich sex was kind of a turn on.  Somewhere deep inside my wife might have some kind of fetish for ostriches.  Or maybe ostrich porn.  All of the sudden my wife was My Wife, and apparently my wife had a kink for hardcore animal sex.  And it was her really honest, human reaction to something as simple as two ostriches fucking that reminded me why we got married in the first place.  On that strange scale between Madonna and Whore that our society tends to balance the idea of monogamous femininity it was refreshing and a bit of a turn on to see my wife slide towards Whore.  She was a human being just like me who liked fucking just like me with her own kinks just like me.  And while I may not share (as strong) a fascination with ostrich sex with my wife, now whenever I think about ostrich sex (which is quite often now) I'll think about my relationship with my wife.  (And if my wife wants to spice things up in the bedroom with some ostrich porn, hey, I'm game...)

And the ostrich shall lead them...

Look to the ostrich.  Always to the ostrich.   

On Moon Rocks, The Ethics of Ethics: What is the Emoticon for Love?

Have a nice day... On the motherfucking moon!

Since the beginning of time when our ancestors first looked up from the primordial ooze from whence they had emerged and stared out into the night sky at the the distant expanse of space in awe and wonder, one question has driven humankind forward and fueled the development of civilization: Is it possible to clone a human being? And of course the corollary: If you could be cloned and the clone was amiable and open to suggestion, would you take this opportunity to fuck yourself "just to see"?  And the corollaries to that: If you fuck your clone would it, in fact, be considered fucking yourself? And would it technically be considered homosexual? Or would it be an entire new subset of sexuality and sexual orientation?

Although the idea of cloning is not new, it was really brought to the forefront of our collective consciousness around February 22, 1997. This was the date that Scottish scientists Ian Wilmut and Keith Campbell and their posse announced to the world that they had successfully cloned a sheep using somatic cell nuclear transfer.  This, or course, led to an outpouring of (mostly unwanted and illogical) public opinion about the prospect of human cloning and to the movie THE 6TH DAY, which is still officially regarded by the UN as a crime against humanity.

In doing a lot of reading I have come to discover that for some reason there are a lot of people out there who are morally opposed to human cloning.  To which I would respond: What the fuck is your problem? I haven't yet come across a single, coherent, objective argument to ban human cloning.

Problem #1: Leggo my Fucking Bone Marrow, Mom

The first problem people have was addressed (sort of) in the movie THE ISLAND where clones were grown (bred?) in secret for people with enough money for the express purpose of being harvested for body parts and/or major organs should the need arise.  Well, I would like to say this scenario is bullshit, but unfortunately humanity's depravity knows no bounds, and I'm sure some people would consider this scenario.  Apparently, some people already do.  After doing some preliminary research on Wikipedia (the most reliable information network in the history of the universe) I discovered that some parents with critically ill children will actually conceive other children for the sole purpose of harvesting their bone marrow and other body parts/bodily fluids (I mean, before those hardcore Commies can get their hands on our precious bodily fluids) to try to save the first kid because they will (most likely) be a genetic match.

That's just really fucking sick.  I can't even fathom the idea.  You've already produced one faulty child who has to live the rest of his/her no doubt short life in terrible agony, and then you produce yet another kid and then force him/her to suffer through medical procedures against his/her will.  Great.  Now you've produced two offspring who you will continue to torture for as long as you see fit.  The first kid will have to deal with the pain of ongoing medical procedures and probably the guilt of having his/her sibling suffer because of him/her.  The second kid likewise will have to undergo painful, potentially health and/or life-threatening medical procedures and learn to resent his/her parents and/or older sibling for putting them through this shit. So is it conceivable that we would mistreat clones when we already mistreat our children who are essentially clones already?  Some of them will probably be exploited.  But will they be systematically and routinely abused?

I highly doubt it. Or at least, not any more so than any other subset of society. The reason this argument is bullshit isn't because it's entirely false, it's simply predicated upon false assumptions and absurd generalizations. The argument that we shouldn't clone people because these clones might not be treated well is spurious at best.  The same argument could reasonably be made about having children, but nobody's calling for that to be illegal (although it should be strictly monitored and legislated by the government).  What the fear mongers would have us believe is that if human cloning were to be allowed on a wide - potentially international - scale that our culture would isolate, imprison, experiment on, torture, and potentially kill these clones on a level not seen since the Holocaust.  However, if we are willing to concede that any currents in Modern Western Culture run parallel to Hitler and his regime, then we may already be fucked and questions about human cloning are the least of our worries.

#2 Shoot Him, I'm the Real Me!

Another argument against human cloning is that if a human being was cloned it would somehow detract from the "original's" individuality.  This would be THE 6TH DAY argument.  Apparently if there was another person running around with your DNA somehow you would be less you.  I guess all those identical twins out there are already fucked.  Because god knows that all identical twins suffer from identity crises and all manner of psychotic episodes because they share the same DNA with somebody. 

But, just for fun, let's break this scenario down.  In order for one's identity to be in crisis due to being cloned the following presuppositions would have to be true:

A) Your clone would have to have accelerated aging so that it ended up at exactly your age (or, if you're Johnny Depp, anywhere between the age of 25 and 45)

B) Your clone would somehow have to be given all of your memories about every second of your life somehow transferred from your brain to his.

C) Your clone would then have to undergo any surgery/trauma/roller-coaster ride gone wrong to duplicate any scars and/or missing limbs (Lieutenant Dan!).  Then your clone would have to have various amounts of chemicals injected into it to approximate a lifetime of eating fast food, energy drinks, and Spam.  If you're obese, the clone would have to be force fed a lifetime supply of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, Doritos, and pizza to account for your girth.

D) You clone would then have to follow you around for the rest of your life doing exactly the same things as you: eating the same meals, working at the same job, watching the same movies, using the same urinals, fucking your wife. (Which brings us to another philosophical question: if your spouse fucked your clone -or your fucked your spouse's - would that technically and legally be defined as cheating?)  At parties the clone would have to sit in your lap in order to maintain the same perspective.

I really don't like bees.

Your genetic structure is a very small part of your identity, if indeed it is a part at all.  Your identity is more based on the decisions you make and actions you take and their relation to the society in which you exist.  It's a sum total of your experiences; or rather, your perception and interpretation of those experiences.  And over time your perception and interpretation of those experiences will probably change based on other experiences and changes in your relationship with society.  Even if you were genetically predisposed towards certain actions - for example if your father was an alcoholic - you're not genetically predisposed to make a certain set of decisions for the rest of your life.  My family personally has a lot of anger management issues (and no, not problems with the movie ANGER MANAGEMENT, although I do have a lot of issues with that movie as well), but that doesn't mean that every time I get angry I fly off the fucking handle like Nicholas Cage overacting in any movie he's ever been in.  I take a deep breath, fantasize about strangling the object of my anger until his fucking body goes limp and then I laugh in his stupid, dead face, and then I try to approach the situation as rationally and calmly as I can.  It's called self-control, motherfucker.

Not only are your decisions not genetically preordained, neither are they metaphysically preordained.  There is no fate but what we make.  (He, he, TERMINATOR 2.)  The decisions we make are not set in stone.  I can totally recall dozens of decisions that I was completely on the fence about and, being in the same situation again, could easily have gone another way.  And that's not even counting the decisions I would consciously change given the chance.

And of course there is the fact that your decisions and memories are not genetic imprints.  They are stored in the genetic computer that is your brain and not inherited from your parents.  As of yet, scientists are no closer to understanding how the electrical pulses firing through your synapses are somehow translated into human consciousness than they were when our ancestors were still hanging out in trees, eating bananas, and trying to figure out how to wipe their asses without getting their hands full of shit.  Even if our most handsome scientists could find a way to somehow encode and transfer those electrical impulses there's no guarantee that just dumping them into another organic being would transfer actual memories or not.  I suppose the point is actually moot at the moment seeing as nobody can actually transfer your memories, so there's absolutely no threat to your individuality if you did get cloned.  Unless, of course, your entire identity somehow pivoted on your physical appearance.

#3 Religion, Religion, Why Fore Art Thou Devoid of Reason?

Another reason people argue against human cloning is because of some kind of religious or spiritual objection.  Apparently some crackpots out there believe that cloning is a slight against god.  I can only really speak for the Judeo-Christian ethical standpoint here as I have absolutely no background in any other religion.  The main reason I can determine why Christians are against human cloning is because they seem to think their god has some kind of inferiority complex.  The concern is that science is encroaching on "god's territory," uncovering secrets that were "not meant to be discovered."  So, basically, the argument is you shouldn't do it "because we say so" or "because we say the bible says so" (some hardcore Christians might quote you some shit like Psalm 139 or Isaiah 44 as "proof" that cloning is "bad"), which is the default argument for the fundamentalist Christian.  Somehow, they believe that a text written thousands of years ago has anything insightful or relevant to add to a discussion about something like cloning, which is completely beyond me. 

What's really at stake - and some of the brighter religious nuts must, at least in some small way, realize this - is far more fundamental.  If they are willing to concede that cloning humans is, in fact, a power previously reserved for the gods - or their god in particular - then if humanity harnessed that power we would, in essence, have harnessed the power of g(G)od.  If we take all of our triumphs as well as our tragedies and attribute them to that monolith known as Humanity, then if scientists unlock the secret to human cloning, that triumph belongs to Humanity, which would mean we all share the power of god, which by definition means we are all gods, and if everyone is a god that is the same as saying no one is a god.  Sometimes it's a slippery slope on the road to reason.

Another concern is that if we did make human clones, that they would be soulless automatons.  Again, this argument is predicated on whether or not you can prove the existence of a "soul."  This, in turn, is reliant on the objective definition of a soul and the ability to quantitatively document its existence.  The religious community would be the first to point out that while we can't currently conclusively prove the existence of a soul neither can we disprove it, therefore the metaphysical book is still open and the debate is not over.  On the Scale of Logic that argument ranks up there right behind "I know you are, but what am I," "He who smelled it, dealt it" and Dan White's "Twinkie defence."

The ultimate argument against cloning...

I don't know if we'll ever be able to define let alone prove the existence of a soul, little more than one can prove his own self-consciousness.  I'm pretty sure that unless George Lucas has his way, there will not be an army of evil clones trying to destroy our republic.  We're simply taking genetic material from one human being and making a new human being.  There's nothing more sinister about cloning than sex, which as we all know from the Internet is pure and wholesome and doesn't involve double fisting some BBW grandma while a transvestite hooker pierces her nipples and a one-eyed midget named "Gadget" surgically amputates her left foot and dry humps the bloody stump.  Nothing wrong with that.



 #4 This Is Progress?!?!

The fourth objection to human cloning is that inevitably we get shitty movies based on their lives.  A few notable ones are, of course, THE ISLAND, THE 6TH DAY, and STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES.  Of course, Lucas' moral ambivalence towards the philosophical ramifications of human cloning was perhaps the best part of the ATTACK OF THE CLONES.  In that film, it was simply a matter of social scientific integration just like swords made of light or faster than light travel.

However, this argument has finally been answered, and answered hard with Duncan Jones's MOON.  This movie is the first movie I have ever seen that took a rational, balanced approach to dealing with the concept of human cloning and actually treated the clone character(s?) as human beings and not soulless zombies.  The real genius of MOON was that it didn't really talk about cloning a lot, but rather what it meant to be human through the eyes of a clone caught on the moon (I kinda feel like there are some song lyrics in there somewhere).  In dealing more with the main character's reactions rather than the specifics of cloning, Duncan really put together a cohesive thesis about the nature of identity in a universe where cloning is a scientific reality.

MOON follows Sam Bell (played by the amazing Sam Rockwell) who is an industrial worker on the moon on a three year contract to oversee a lunar mining facility for a big, faceless corporation.  During his downtime he spends a lot of time working on anger management techniques, talking to his robot friend GERTY, whittling a massive miniature village, waiting to go home and bang his wife, and (presumably) masturbating gratuitously all over the space station.  Sam is nearing the end of a three year contract when he has a bad accident in a lunar rover, wakes up in the sickbay back inside the mining facility, then goes out to survey the accident only to find (mindfuck!) himself still trapped in the rover.

I guess in the universe of MOON cloning is a well-known fact, because the two Sams immediately jump to the conclusion that one of them is a clone.  See the first thing I would think is that maybe I was going crazy because of my total isolation on the fucking moon for three years.  Or, if I was on The Young and the Restless, this guy was a long lost twin.  Or maybe the other me could be an android or even an alien replicant from beyond the moon.

Immediately, the two Sams try to figure out exactly what the fuck is going on, and, in the course of their arguing, they begin to reveal a sociological construction of identity; they try to figure out which one of them is the "real" Sam Bell.  This is interesting for two reasons.  The first is that it seems like the natural thing to do and many of us in the same position would probably try to sort out that very same question.  The second is that it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever.  There seems to be this notion in the popular consciousness that something that comes first has to be inherently "better."  I've noticed this same reoccurring sentiment in discussions with other people about things like literature and movies.  Like saying the original OCEAN'S 13 was better then the remake simply because the one with Frank Sinatra "came first"  (though, obviously, the George Clooney vehicle was much, much better).  As a culture we seem to lend more legitimacy to things that occurred further back in the past.  To me, this seems to run contrary to logic and to the modern concept of progress.

In focusing on who was the "original" Sam Bell what both of them failed to realize was how individual they both were despite (potentially) sharing identical DNA.  One of the examples was how it was established that one of Sam Bell's demons was his rage ("I'm a rage-aholic! I just can't live without rage-ohol!").  The "older" Sam was nearing the end of his contract and had had time to contemplate and channel his rage into something semi-constructive like building a miniature village.  The "younger" Sam was still dealing with his anger management and easily flew off the handle.  To an outsider watching it was easy to see that each Sam was different: not because of their DNA, but because of their individual reactions to and perceptions of external stimuli.  In this universe, it is presupposed that the cloning process also transfers all of the memories of the "donor."  These two men - who both turned out to be clones and so had identical DNA - despite sharing about 90% of the same life experiences were already extremely different. 

The first rule about the moon is you do not talk about the moon...

I suppose the whole point of this movie was to examine the concept of human dignity and respect when faced with the most inhuman of situations.  A clone, which in the eyes of the people creating them at least were nothing more than biological assets, bred for a single purpose and, either by design or insufficient knowledge, were doomed to an incredibly short life span of three years after which time they would break down on the cellular level and die in what seemed to be an incredibly painful and horrible way.  Once the two Sam Bells discovered their terrible fate (with the help of the robot GERTY) they planned to escape the moon via a shuttle designed to send back shipments of valuable minerals.  They try to escape their fate.  They try to outrun death, or at least prolong the inevitable.  They hold out the (vain) hope that somebody back on Earth can help them.  This is the most human of sentiments.  The fear of death.  The drive to act in the face of certain defeat.

But what really got me wasn't the Sam Bell clones.  What really interested me was GERTY.  To me he (it?) represented perhaps the most fascinating aspect of cloning: creating an entirely new race.  Essentially, GERTY started to "feel" bad for the Sam Bell clones and actually helped them out.  This was a relatively minor plot point, but I was fucking blown away.  What was cloned wasn't human DNA, but human emotion.  GERTY displayed both empathy and sympathy and then self-sacrifice when he volunteered to have his memory wiped after helping the Sams thereby possibly destroying the "person" he had become.  GERTY's actions were obviously in complete conflict with his programming demonstrating an evolution in self-consciousness and self-awareness.  (Of course here is where some computer geek would make some joke about "cloning GERTY's hard drive")

And the idea of self-consciousness is really at the centre of the mindfuckery in MOON.  I mean, if you found out tomorrow that you were a clone, that you had not been born but cloned in a laboratory somewhere, it would change virtually nothing about your existence or your identity.  Your life would still be the same.  However, if you woke up tomorrow in a laboratory with thirty years worth of memories and then told that you were a clone and there was already somebody else living the life you had memories of, you would be totally traumatized.  But there, again, your identity would immediately start to diverge into something unique.  Or at the very least slightly divergent.

The other thing this movie did was finally give some validity for the existence of the moon.  At least in the movie MOON the moon contained some kind of valuable mineral.  In real life the moon is fucking useless.  It's boring to look at.  It's all grey and pockmarked.  Whoopee.  It doesn't even produce its own light.  It has to rely on the sun's light, which it reflects.  But even then the moon does a half-assed job.  Most of the time it only partly reflects light so all we see is a little sliver.  And then it has the audacity to fuck up our tides and shit.  Leave our water alone you boring, grey rock!  I bet in hell all you get to look at all day is the fucking moon.     

All right, I'm done.  So in summary say "Yes" to human cloning, "No" to the moon, and "Yes" to MOON.  MOON is a great flick that showcases the amazing talents of Sam Rockwell, who is on screen for almost 100% of the film and there are very few actors working today that would actually be worth paying for that much screen time in a movie.  I give MOON an 8/10 = One Cloned Head Slowly Disintegrating And Bleeding Through Its Eye Sockets          

What in the Name of Yoda's Ears? The Force Help Us All... Hate Leads to Ass-Kicking

Suck this article does not.

Celebrity is a strange beast.  While it is a reciprocal relationship it is not a personal one.  Or, I suppose more accurately, it is an impersonal relationship with strangely personal emotional consequences for only half of the parties involved.  It's reciprocal in the sense that celebrities need fans and ordinary people (or at least less extraordinary people) in order to be considered celebrities and the fans get some sort of emotional and/or intellectual stimulation/satisfaction from celebrities.  On the other hand a weird kind of one-sided relationship -or virtual relationship- develops.  Through a celebrity's "art" (or at least their product) and experiencing their public persona via various interviews and Celebrity Gossip Media (be it magazine or insufferable TV program like ETalk or Entertainment Tonight or TMZ or some other such bullshit) the fans -and really the general public due to the pervasive nature of media now- "get to know" said celebrity and develop an emotional bond with him or her. 

Even though we have never met these movie stars or musicians we begin to feel like we know them, even though we couldn't possibly because we have never met them or interacted with them in any way.  What we are actually doing is constructing a character based on the information we are given and compiling a compilation of traits that we associate with a series of images we see on the screen.  We're creating characters.  We construct narratives for these personas that are based on (key concept here) real people then we work these narratives into our our own personal narratives through our emotional responses to what these characters produce and what they "do" and say in their "real lives."

But here's the real kicker.  While these relationships with celebrities we've never met are objectively Virtual they are subjectively Real insofar as that they provoke actual emotional responses in the minds of fans who have invested emotionally in these relationships.  And that makes them Real.  The only Reality that matters is perspective -both personal and collective- so while the fact that Justin Bieber is currently dating Selena Gomez is of no concern to most free-thinking citizens, to a teenage girl with fantasies of dating Bieber this is potentially crushing news, even though the fantasy may and probably will still manifest in some way.  But the emotional response was real and that's all that's important.  It matters if it matters to you. 

It's like a metamorphosis.  The Virtual is cocooned in emotion until it becomes Real.  It's one of the reasons that celebrity deaths affect (some of) us so much.  Even though we mean (literally) nothing to them through the lens of the media we have (vitually) come to know them so when they die the personas we have constructed based on the also die and we feel a (real) peronal loss.

And even though I am aware of the nature of this bond I not only continue to engage in it, I relish in it.  It brings me great (potentially perverse?) pleasure to love and hate these unstrangers who probably have nothng more in common with me than the fact I have seen them on my TV and read about them on the Internet.  I suppose it could be considered a double-edged sword, but that implies some kind of negative consequence for me, which I don't really think is the case because even when I hate a celebrity, deep down I still derive some kind of twisted pleasure from the hating. Just the sheer visceralness of the whole thing.  Misery loves company and we love misery.

Like most people I tend to take the decisions of celebrities far more personally than I probably should.  This is especially true of celebrities whose work I actually enjoy.   I don't know Christopher Nolan personally, but for making THE DARK KNIGHT I am eternally grateful and if we ever met I would happily partake in any Heracles-style Labour that he sent me to do short of sucking his no-doubt gargantuan dick.  (Oh, who am I kidding...)  More than that, I actually felt joy at his success as the media kept posting the record-breaking numbers. I was totally stoked when THE DARK KNIGHT broke the1 billion gross mark even though I would never see a cent of that money.  I got satisfaction from all of the critical acclaim the movie garnered him and his accomplishment not only of making one of the greatest films of all time, but also lending legitimacy to an entire genre of movies.

Conversely it always hurts when a celebrity that you like makes some piece of shit.  It feels like some kind of personal betrayal.  How could he do this to me?  But more importantly: why?  Perhaps one of the greatest betrayals came from none other than the Big Guy himself.  That's right, I'm talking about George Lucas.

George Lucas is a strange enough idiom in and of himself.  He's become a living contradiction: paradox incarnate.  As the creator of STAR WARS he has created one of the most pervasive and important cultural texts in the last century.  The intertext between the STAR WARS universe and modern pop-culture is so cemented that they have now become inexorably linked.  Referenes to STAR WARS now pervade our culture to the point where fictional characters and technology have become incorporated into household vocabulary.  Even people who have never seen a STAR WARS movie (I know, I know) or -even worse- have seen them but aren't fans understand these references.  Han Solo.  Yoda.  Light Saber.  My the Force be with you.  Why the hell do I know who IG-88 was?  It boggles my mind sometimes.  George Lucas is one of the few people who not only influenced our culture but actually shifted it's tragectory.  I don't even know if there is currently a cultural presence more pervasive than STAR WARS, or if there ever will be in the near future.  Even if you're not a fan of the movies or -perhaps more importantly- the merchandise, if you take a look at cultural texts around you, you will see these intertextual references popping off of te page or screen.

Now here's where everything gets screwy.  Even as George Lucas is the creator of this vast cultural empire (pardon the pun) he is also his own antithesis.  This is kind of poetic, and also kind of sad.  And at times, kind of frustrating.  As much as George Lucas contributed to our culture, and as much as he became this icon, he also seemed intent on destroying his credebility as an "artist" and a rational human being.  In seemingly complete defiance of all conventional logic George took one of the most beloved movie franchises in movie history and seemed to do everything in his power to undermine them and himself with his trilogy of prequels starting all the way back in 1999 with THE PHANTOM MENACE.

I'm not going to get into all the nitpicky details about why the Prequel Trilogy was far, far worse than the Original Trilogy, but even as an uninterested party watching all six of these movies it would be easy to see the decline in quality in the prequels.  In general there was a heavy reliance on special effects to make up for a lack of quality storytelling (a perfect illustration of the difference between "pioneering" and "beating to death"), convoluted plotlines, wooden acting, and an all-around sense of lack of direction.  And Jar-Jar Binks.  To this very day I still can't tell if George Lucas is some kind of Malevolent Entity bent on torturing mankind, or a Supreme Being testing our faith.  Neither one would surprise me.

I think what the STAR WARS prequels indicated was something fans had suspected for some time, but out of respect to their Messiah had not dared utter: George Lucas is not that great a director.  This may seem like blasphemy, and I know there are some out there who will throw AMERICAN GRAFITTI and THX: 1138 back at me as examples of his directorial prowess, however I will still be willing to concede absolutely nothing (except that their dick-sucking abilities are probably superb).  I'm a fan of those two movies as well, but they only further emphasize he point that Lucas is no maverick director.  As a director he is adequate at best.  If you look at the Original STAR WARS Trilogy and I mean really watch with a critical eye, I think the weakest one cinematically was the original STAR WARS.  Most fanboys will maintain that THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK is far and away the best STAR WARS movie (for me a very close second to RETURN OF THE JEDI) and despite so much inexplicable hatred for Ewoks that RETURN OF THE JEDI is also a better movie than STAR WARS.  I'm not saying this to malign the original, because it was ground-breaking both narratively (well, not original, but innovative) and technically and captured the hearts and imaginations of several generations and without it we never would have had the subsequent movies.  I only draw the comparison to make a point.

And the poin is this: while George Lucas is undoubtedly a visionary with a vivid imagination and a creative mind he is not a director.  I think what George Lucas is good at is big ideas, but he has trouble working out the small details and navigating the nuances of translating his ideas onto the screen.  I think it can generally be agreed upon by fans and nonfans alike that the two best STAR WARS movies were the ones that weren't directed by Lucas.

And this really sucks balls.

As a fan of STAR WARS you can't help but be a fan of the entity who created it, despite any later attempts to alienate you.  (STAR WARS CHRISTMAS SPECIAL anyone...?)  And as a fan of George Lucas I couldn't help but try to forgive what I thought was shitty about the STAR WARS prequels (especially ATTACK OF THE CLONES) and found myself in the (oftentimes) unenviable position of defending what I thought were mediocre movies just on principle alone.  Celebrity is a strange beast.  Even while defending his work both to others and myself, I still felt the need to exonerate George Lucas in my own mind for his heinous crimes against humanity (midichlorians?  WTF?).  You've probably found yourself wishing at some point in your fan-life that the object of your fandom wasn't responsible.  There must have been some other explanation, no matter how bizarre.  At times I found myself wishing that it was all just a terrible nightmare and that George Lucas couldn't have been responsible for the Prequels.  And now, thanks to YouTube I have an alternate, completely viable explanation as to what happened to bring about the STAR WARS Prequels in the form of a faux-trailer for GEORGE LUCAS STRIKES BACK which is loosely based onthe plot of OLDBOY.

There's tons of great little jokes like George Lucas getting upset at being labled "totally lame" by the media, his outrage over midichlorians, "I'm a businessman on my cell phone!," Darth Maul doing blow, assembling his team including Princess Leia, an older, rounder Short Round, and Chewbacca, Short Round's outrage over some clone trooper's admitted admiration of the new INDIANA JONES MOVIE, Greedo (not) shooting first, George Lucas fighting ninjas, clone troopers and Jar Jar, and several great lines like:

Princess Leia: "How do you take down an empire like that?"
George Lucas: "You shoot first."    

Princess Leia: "It's OK, George, even good directors make bombs once in a while"
George Lucas: "But mine go boom."

Anyway, after basically describing the whole fucking video for you just check it out below.  I found it quite hilarious and I hope you derive some pleasure out of the truth about what really happened in a galaxy far, far away...

  

Got Class? Thanks, Charles

"Shut the fuck up!" I shouted into their soft, pasty-white teenage/twenty-something faces.

The whole theatre turned to look at the commotion.  There I stood in the middle of about a hundred and fifty people, face red with rage, yelling at these two pricks.  I gave them my best approximation of The Look that was supposed to show that I meant business.  That I was ready -and more importantly, willing- to start some shit.  I thought that through sheer will alone I could overpower this pair of idiots.

I was wrong.

They laughed.  Told me to shut the fuck up and sit back down.  Gave me the finger.  Threw their popcorn in my face.  Before those golden clusters had time to bounce off my face and reach the ground I had already hopped over my the back of my theatre seat and right on top of these assholes.  Tactically I may have had the upper ground, though I wasn't sure if Ryebone and my brother-in-law had followed me into the fray or not.  It was too late now anyway.

It was satisfying the see the smug little smiles wiped from their soft, pink faces replaced by terror.  One of them tried to escape, but I grabbed him by his shirt collar and reeled him back in.  Fight or flight.  Flight had failed, so he took a big, clumsy swing at me.  Who the fuck do you think you are?  Wolverine?  I easily brushed aside his pathetic attack and responded in kind.  Jab.  Liver.  Cross.  Right over the edge and into the next row of seats.  Patrons scattering like ants.

The other geek -seeing his friend in serious trouble- grabs me around the neck in some kind of vain attempt to put me into a choke hold like the kind he'd undoubtedly seen on TV.  Pathetic.  As I turn around I bring my elbow up, striking him in the face.  Hard.  He reels backwards, and I notice how his glasses somehow stay on.  He lands hard half on the seats, half on the floor and immediately I'm on top of him with my hands around his throat.  And it feels so fucking good when I squeeze.  The fall took the wind out of him and I think his shoulder is out of joint so he doesn't put up much of a fight.  He flops around like dying fish trying to get back to water.  His eyes are bloodshot now and seem to be popping out of his head.  He stares up at me with some vain hope in his eyes, like if he concentrates really hard he can shoot a blast of optic energy at me like Cyclops.  No such luck, hombre.

I squeeze even harder and I can feel my thumbs digging deeper into his trachea and his lips are a strange shade of blue now and all I can think is His fucking glasses are still on? How is that possible?  His eyes are rolling back in his head  and I hear myself saying something like:

"Maybe next time you won't talk through the whole movie, you fucking douche bag!"

And it feels so satisfying.

Unfortunately (for me) it didn't go down like that at all.  Instead I sat through X-MEN: FIRST CLASS seething, choking back my rage while the two morons behind us delivered their running commentary through the whole fucking movie.  And not even whispering either.  It was regular conversation volume.

What a piss-off.

Then there was the group of kids sitting at five o'clock about halfway back in the theatre with their own special kind of annoyance.  Overall it was one of the worst movie-going experiences I've ever had despite the latest X-MEN flick being a decent movie.  After reading the beginning of this article you might be asking yourself several things:

1) Why do I seem like such and angry, violent person?
2) Why didn't I turn around an say something to these assholes who talked through an entire movie?
3) Am I some kind of pussy? (a corollary to 2)
4) Would anybody else in the theatre have actually testified against me had I followed through with my violent fantasy?

Well first off, no I'm not really that angry of a person.  But sometimes The Rage builds up inside me and one way of dealing with my rage is through violent fantasies usually involving my perceived wrongdoer.  I assume this a natural way of dealing with my anger without actually walking around punching people in the face which would be counterproductive and also really hard on my knuckles.

Secondly I didn't turn around to confront these knob gobblers for two (what I assume are) very good reasons.  Or at least valid reasons.  The first reason is because no matter how the scenario played out in my head, no matter what I would have said or done to the commentators, I could only foresee the situation escalating to a point I wasn't willing to go to.  And the second reason was because if I had turned around my Rage was at the point where I almost certainly would have precipitated an escalation (see: the first line of this article).  And anyway we're socially programmed to avoid confrontation, which was probably a good instinct in this case.  I've never actually witnessed a movie theatre "incident" so I have no idea if it is ever possible to diffuse a situation with assholes of this calibre.  If you have then kudos to you and I'd like to hear your insight on the situation.

Thirdly, I might be some kind of pussy.  I don't know.  (If you lick me, do I taste like fish?  (I've never actually thought pussy tasted like fish, but that's the cultural reference people tend to understand.))  Sometimes I get this clear vision of what needs to be done and the corresponding burst of will to do it, and sometimes I feel constrained by the power of my social programming to just shut the fuck up and ignore shit.  Just blend in.  Another space monkey.  It tends to be easier not to enter into a confrontation, because if you do you might have to follow through.  Honestly, I didn't think asking a couple of guys to shut the fuck up while I watched the movie was worth A) Potentially having the tables turned on me and getting caught up in their shit and maybe getting kicked out of the theatre along with them or B) Potentially entering an escalating conflict which culminated with me having to lay the beatdown on a couple of ubernerds.

Fourthly I can only speak to my own personal feelings about the matter, but if a couple of assholes who were making my night shittier by the minute were subsequently confronted and beaten to bloody pulps, not only would I not testify in a court of law against said Hero, but I would also build a shrine to him and pray to it semi-annually from now until the time I forgot.  I can't think of anyone who would side with the douche bags except other douche bags who, sadly, have multiplied like rats over the past couple of years and have now become one of North America's leading house pests.

It was unfortunate that my viewing of X-MEN: FIRST CLASS was sullied by such douche baggery as Matthew Vaughn did a really good job with this film.  I'm torn about Vaughn because the same guy who gave us the underrated (?) yet totally awesome LAYER CAKE also delivered the stinking heap that was KICK-ASS (and before I get any responses outlining all the reasons KICK-ASS did indeed kick ass, let me break it to you: the movie sucked).  Plus with poor showings like the even stinkier and best-forgotten heap of shit X3 and the only slightly better X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE I did not have high hopes despite Ryebone's willingness to bet his collection of celebrity urine that I would indeed "love the bitch."

In my mind Vaughn has more than made up for KICK-ASS.  FIRST CLASS is an excellent addition to the X-Men movie mythology (a point of order for hardcore comic book geeks) and a solid stand alone movie in and of itself.  Now for me this movie wasn't quite as good as Bryan Singer's first two X-Films, but still a movie I would actually consider purchasing.

I won't bore you with the plot, but if you've seen the trailers and/or been on the Internet in the past year you'll pretty much know the basic plot.  The focus is on Charles Xavier (AKA Professor X) and Eric Lehnsherr (AKA Magneto) and how they became frenemies, and how the original X-Men came to be formed and then mixed up in some key events in the Cold War way back in 1960-something.  All that's not really important, because you can go and watch the fucking thing yourself so you don't need me to regurgitate the thing for you.  Needless to say the plot is smart and cohesive and "makes sense" in the colloquial sense.

One of the main threads that ran through the movie that I thought was interesting was Eric Lehnsherr's back story which picks up with the first scene of 2000's X-MEN in which he's a young man in a Nazi concentration camp separated from his parents and doing funky shit with metal.  Almost immediately after this he meets none other than... Kevin Bacon, who for some reason still feels weird to see in a movie like this.  Don't get me wrong, he did a great job, it just doesn't seem like his kind of vibe.  Of course this played right into Ryebone's (sometimes frightening) obsession with that game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon which was popular back when I was still in high school and which to this day Ryebone takes so seriously he still refers to it as a "contact sport."  After the movie was over he looked at me and in all seriousness told me that a blockbuster movie like this with so many new connections to Kevin Bacon would change the game forever, and to make it more challenging might have to be changed to Four Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and I could tell by the fervour in his eyes that he would brook no dissent on the matter.  His intensity kind of scared me and I wisely deferred to him on all things Bacon-related.

While X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is an X-Men movie that follows a team of mutants trying to save humanity (again for the first time!) the core of the film is really the relationship of pre-Professor X and Magneto, which was surprisingly complex.  The movie really could have been called CHARLES AND ERIC.  A large part was the tighter writing in this installment, and a lot of props also go to the actors -James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender- who brought a lot of pathos to the roles (Charles and Eric respectively).  I don't recall seeing McAvoy in anything before, but he was a pretty solid choice to portray a younger version of the character made famous by Patrick Stewart (do I smell a Star Trek: The Next Generation reboot in the works?).  I guess the balance you have to maintain in the case of a prequel like this is not having the younger version of the character totally the same as his older self, while not being completely different either.  The young Charles Xavier in this movie is just finishing up his doctoral thesis (on mutation, what else?) and although seems a lot more mature for his age (30-ish?) he's also a bit of a womanizer, which is pretty cool.  Mutants need to get laid too, right?  Fassbender did a kick-ass job as young Magneto as well and his character focus in this movie was rage.  It was kind of cool to see the character arc starting to form from Fassbender's pure rage and revenge to Ian McKellan's cold, calculating mission to further the rights of mutants the world over.  I didn't realize until later that I was already a fan of Fassbender's having witnessed his exploits in both 300 and INGLORIOUS BASTERDS.

One of the coolest things that FIRST CLASS added to the mythology for me was regarding Professor X's powers.  I mean, we already knew he had telepathy, and mind control, and he can make people see what he wants them to see, and in general cloud the minds of men, and maybe even kill someone if he thinks about them too hard. What we never really saw were the personal consequences of using his powers.  In FIRST CLASS there are a couple of really cool scenes were Charles delves into Eric's mind and while he's in there the connection is -at least in part- mutual. When Charles goes through all the shit Eric had to go through what with the Nazi's and the brutal murder of his mother and whatnot, there's actually an emotional connection and he literally feels Eric's pain.  Which kind of makes sense.  I mean, you're melding with somebody else's mind, there must be a line where the distinction between the two minds becomes blurred and... sounds really fucking nerdy, like I'm actually debating the logistics of telepathy like it's actually a real thing.  Oh god, what have I become.

Other major plot points involve a young Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) in a sort of love triangle with Charles and Eric, Beast (Nicholas Hoult) becoming the big blue Beast we all know and love, Emma Frost (January Jones) psychically humping some Russian general and Michael Ironside trying to stop the Cold War from going hot.  We also get to see this mutant called Azazel who -like Nightcrawler- has the ability to teleport, which on the surface doesn't seem that great, but in the context of the X-Men films seems to be one of the coolest powers you could ever want to have.  One of the best action scenes of X-MEN 2 was the first scene where Nightcrawler fucks shit up in the Whitehouse and shows how uber-powerful he really is.  In FIRST CLASS Azazel has not one but two totally awesome action scenes one of which again shows ho a teleporter is just like a one man army.  Fans of either comic books or comic book movies also get rewarded with a lot of cool shit like a prototype 60's-style Cerebro, a bevy of mutants like Havoc and Banshee, and pretty kick-ass X-Men uniforms with a colour-scheme that channels the classic look in the comics.  You get your standard training montage where Charles Xavier (with a little help from Hank McCoy) helps everyone reach his or her full potential.  There's also a cameo by a certain clawed mutant (OK, it's Wolverine) making sure that there will be no X-Men movie ever made that doesn't feature Hugh Jackman.  At the end of the movie you also get to see Fassbender in full Magneto getup which is pretty awesome.

Before I wrap this shit up, I have to make mention of one one of the best and worst parts of the movie.  If you've ever watched Mad Men then you will immediately recognize January Jones in the role of Emma Frost.  Now, in that show I always found Jones kind of... I think "stiff" is the right word.  Unable to emote.  Is there a single word for that?  I think for Mad Men this style works because her character is supposed to be emotionally and sexually repressed and suppressed.  Then I saw Jones in UNKNOWN, and she seemed to be acting (and I use the term "acting" very loosely in her case) exactly the same as she did in Mad Men.  Then I saw her "performance" in X-MEN: FIRST CLASS and I finally realized what the problem was: January Jones can't act.  She simply recites her lines mechanically with the exact same inflection every single time, like some kind of script-regurgitating robot with a really nice rack.  Unfortunately for her having nice tits will not help her acting, and unfortunately for audiences having nice tits will undoubtedly help her acting (regurgitating) career so I'm sure we will be forced to endure more of her shit for years to come.  I think Ryebone's take was that she seemed like she was just reading cue cards or something that somebody was holding for her behind the camera, which is really what it seemed like she was doing.

The other (slightly) annoying thing here was trying to populate the movie X-Universe with a back-catalogue of characters.  I mean, I'm not a hardcore comic book reader and most of knowledge about the X-Men comes from that awesome 90's cartoon, so I know the main characters like Cyclops, Beast, Wolverine, Jean Grey, Storm, Rogue, and Gambit.  It just seems like in FIRST CLASS they're scraping the bottom of the barrel.  I mean I kind of knew about Havoc and Banshee, but then there's characters like Darwin, and the weird alternate-Angel.  Then there's the one bad guy -I don't even know what the fuck his name was- but he was basically Tornado Man, and he was pretty much a tool.  Even the main villain Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon.  I wonder if Wendy's has to pay him royalties for using the name Baconator for one of its sandwiches...)  I had to look up.  The problem is they really blew their load in the first two films, went completely fucking insane in the third film, and then they set this movie forty years in the past before most of the other characters from the first movies were even born really painting themselves into a corner.

But anyway.  Although I had to endure an entire feature-length commentary from a couple of douche bags in the third row I was still able to enjoy X-MEN: FIRST CLASS.  And if you liked the other X-Men movies (except X3) then you'll enjoy this one too.  I give X-MEN: FIRST CLASS a 7.5/10 = One Head Slowly Being Lobotomized By A Magnetically Controlled Quarter.