A Fine Look at Fascism

Disgusted is the only word I can use to describe what I saw on CNN.com yesterday. Anyone who is reading this blog, which probably is no one, I just want you to look at the picture to the right. The young man being accosted is Andrew Meyer, a 21-year-old journalism student from the University of Florida. Campus police are arresting him. And yes, that's a book in his hand. Not a gun or a knife or a bomb. A goddamn book. After they arrested him, they tasered him. In any other case, that would have made me laugh but again, I'm filled with nothing but contempt and disgust having seen what happened.

It all started in Florida a few days ago when Senator John Kerry was having one of his "town hall meetings". At the end, Andrew stepped up to the mic for the Q&A session. After a quick precursor to his question, Andrew asked Kerry about reports of disenfranchised black voters and fraudulent voting machines during the 2004 election. He was then told his time was up after about 30 seconds. Then his mic was cut. Then he wanted to know why his mic was cut. Then he was arrested. Why the fuck was he arrested? Seriously there was no reason. He wasn't a threat to anyone. He had a legitamate question, albeit on the abrasive side, but he a had a solid question none the less. And he resisted arrest, which I can't quite condone, but I do believe in fighting against fascism which is what I think he was doing. They were arresting him for asking a question. That's fucked up beyond words. So after he resisted arrest, he was pinned to the ground and tasered. And he screamed in agonizing pain and it was one of the most shocking things I've ever witnessed. A young man, voicing his opinion, and being arrested and tasered for it. And everyone in the room is yelling, "Why are you doing that! Stop!" It was horrifying.

And the Fox News reports stressed Andrew as being a "prankster" like that matters. Like a young man brandishing a book instead of a firearm can be tasered and that is justified because he "likes to pulls pranks". Are you fucking kidding me, Fox News?

And Meyer's lawyers are worried that the video of this kid being taser will inevitabley hurt his case because, in a juror's eyes, "the kid had it coming". Are you fucking serious? So next time I ask a question about the integrity of a political leader, I should watch my ass from getting tasered. And the police are trying to charge the kid with disrupting the public. Now that is interesting because I guarantee you if the cops hadn't arrested him, there wouldn't have been a disturbance. The kid would have asked the question and Kerry would have answered. OH MY FUCKING CHRIST IT WOULD HAVE BEEN CHAOS!!!!

The lack of civil liberties being displayed here staggers me.

The Controversial Abortion Entry

Don't worry, I'm still going to talk about idiots on the internet. I just watched like ten videos on youtube about abortion, both pro-life and pro-choice. I'm not even going to tell you what I think of the issue because, well, to be honest I don't even have one. I'm a guy so I could never make the decision. So two of the videos that really stood out, see the issue from both sides. The first you'll get that right away but it is ineffective, which I'll explain later, and the other appears to be something else until the very end.

The first video is from Rosary Films and is frankly titled, "Medical Science Abortion is Killing of Human Beings". Grammar aside, the video really is inept in proving anything. The video poses the question, "Is this a human being?" as it shows various stages of pregnacy. After each stage, the question is posed and the answer, "Yes, this is a human being". Thanks for that well-researched, articulated, and elaborate analysis and explaination. Praise Allah. This is another sad attempt to guilt trip people into not getting abortions. Though they forget that guilt is the last thing on the mind of a rape victim. The truth of the matter is, that question is of theological nature and can never be answered using empirical evidence because there is no evidence. No one really "knows" when life starts because for life to "start", that means it has to not exist and life is constantly in existance. The cells involved in the fertilization process are alive, so does that mean every time I jack off, am I killing thousands of possible babies?

Here's the link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PPamlX4HQ0

The second video is pro-choice and has a "cool, ironic, witty, way to prove to conservatives that liberals are smarter then them". But in reality, the guy who shot this was an idiot and made the pro-life protestors look like saints. Basically, this guy walks around a protest and interviews people, asking them what the punishment should be if abortions were made illegal. To this, they all said that they didn't know. They didn't know what the punishment should be. They know that abortion should be illegal and why but they didn't know what the punishment should be. Many said that there shouldn't really be a punishment because either a) they didn't know the judicial system adequately, or b) it was between them and God. So the guy at the very end asks, "Well why should it be illegal if there should be no punishment?" and "What crime is illegal that doesn't have a punishment?"

So what does this guy accomplish: two things. First, that pro-life individuals are not crazy Bible totting hypocrits who think that any woman who gets an abortion be hanged. Instead, he reveals these people to be genuinely compassionate towards these women who recieve abortions. The second thing he accomplishes is that these people are dedicated to the protest. They really only care about these babies that are being killed, as they say. It really enlightened me to the whole situation. These people just care about life. Who gives a shit if they don't know what should happen to the women if abortions were illegal. The guy wanted to make them out to be idiots, like they didn't really know what they were doing out there, but really he made them out to be saints.

Here's the link to this callous nit-wit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk6t_tdOkwo

Why I hate Carlos Mencia

First of all, I don't think he's funny. So tonight, I put away my personal feelings toward him and tried to watch the show.

I couldn't do it.

A lot of people think that he's a racist and just pulls the race card (which he does) but I don't think he's a full-fledged hate monger. I mean, he tells jokes that are controverisal but I don't think he thinks that hispanics are superior to other races. But he does pull the race card, in fact, 99% of his jokes are about race. The other 1% of his jokes are divided between midgets and old people. Mind of Mencia is the most uncreative and banal TV program on the air.

This is how the show works, which looks like it's being made up as they go along. First they start out with a sketch, which is not funny, about something stupid. The episode I tortured myself through was about two penguins that he takes care of, one of which has sex with a duck. The sketch inspired no response from me. I just sat there.

And as the show continues, they eventually run out of "good" ideas and hit the streets where Carlos performs numberous stereotypes. After that, they head back to the studio for more stereotypes. And that's it. END OF SHOW.

Now if some aspect of race was enlightened or he said something insightful, you know, point out an irony or something, I would accept that and appreciate the show even if it was still just as unfunny as it is now. But it doesn't. He just presents the stereotypes. This is my impression:

BLACK PEOPLE LIKE FRIED CHICKEN! OMG YOU"RE FUCKING HILARIOUS!

WHITE PEOPLE CAN NOT DANCE!! OMG LET"S GIVE YOU YOUR OWN SHOW!

CHINESE PEOPLE CAN NOT DRIVE AUTOMOBILES!! OMG LETS MAKE A 50 FT STATUE OF YOU OUT OF PLATINUM AND FORCE PEOPLE TO PRAY TO IT!

ARAB PEOPLE ARE NOT ALL TERRORISTS BUT WE PEG THEM AS SUCH!! OMG I WANT TO SUCK YOUR DICK!

There is no redeeming quality to Carlos Mencia or his goddamn show. I've seen sketches from YouTube comedy troupes that are wildly funnier than him and they don't get his bloated paychecks. It just boggles my mind how one could find anything he does funny.

In short, I hate Carlos Mencia because he reduces comedy to just stating over-generalizations of entire peoples.

Zombies: A History of Allegory and Kick-assery

Zombies are never bigger than the movie. They are too humble and modest for that. At least the filmmakers and authors who know what they are doing know this. Because let's face it: zombies themselves are not scary. It's what they do to us that's scary. And no, I'm not talking about turning us into undead, for the most part at least. No, I'm talking about something much more complex. For this entry I'm going to dig deeper into this cultural icon known as the modern zombie and perhaps enlighten those who simply see this creature as a reanimated corpse fuel by instinct.

I'm going to begin with my second favorite zombie franchise, Resident Evil. Like I said, good zombie flicks never place the undead as the forefront of the movie. Resident Evil is about a huge pharmaceutical corporation, called Umbrella, whose main profit comes from viral weaponry and defense research. Umbrella is so focused on military implications of their products that they even have an elite security force whose job requires them to "clean up the mess". So Umbrella synthesizes an agent called the T-Virus which under certain conditions reanimates dead tissue ie makes zombies! And the fictional mid-western metropolis of Raccoon City soon becomes choked with an army of undead. I think this is a great idea. Whenever I think about Resident Evil, I think of like Microsoft or like GlaxoSmithKline doing the same shit Umbrella does. Like there are paramilitary soldiers with a "GSK" patch on their flack jackets running down some street to cover up a mess that they made. Or the Microsoft Special Forces gunning down a witness in cold blood and burning the body in a dumpster in Hell's Kitchen. Resident Evil affects me so much because it could actually, if it hasn't already, come to that. The dominant ideology must be kept safe and that is that these corporations actually care about us. They can't let us know that while we are buying anti-depressants and birth control and band-aids from them that they are also making nuclear warheads and viral weaponry and pills that will make your head explode. And the video games and movies and books have always been about people against the corporate machine, not against the zombies. Sure the zombies are in their way and they have to fight them off but the plot is never, "We have to kill every zombie here before they infect us all".

Now I'm going to get into my favorite zombie franchise, the one that started it all: Romero's Dead series. The great thing about Romero's movies are that they are each about something different. Some aspect of culture or society is dismantled, examined, and eventually reproached. In NIGHT, violence was examined and shown to be destructive even to those dealing it out. In DAWN, consumerism fetishes reflected the rotting corpses that filled the world in the zombie apocalypse. DAY showed us that when in a crisis, logic becomes skewed. And finally LAND said that money can only give illusions of class and power. But the common bond in all of his films, the thing that really sets it apart from other horror films, is the nature of the zombies. The zombies in the Dead series are not the antagonist. They aren't the monsters. And it's strange to think, two of the greatest horror films to ever be release came out in the same year, 1978. Those films are Halloween and Dawn of the Dead. Both films were remarkable in their portrayal of the antagonist. Halloween's antagonist is Michael Myers, of course, but he was different because he was completely vapid and emotionless. There was nothing there. He was simply put - an autonomous killing machine. He nearly isn't even human. And it's all in the mask too - plain, white, unremarkable. Nothingness is the only way I can describe it and that's why I think he's so terrifying. He represents a void. So if this is true, then Romero's Dead series does the opposite. If Michael Meyers represented a hollow nothingness devoid of humanity, Romero's zombies represented a strangely human entity yet so very unhuman. Like Peter from Dawn of the Dead says, "They're us, that's all." Night and Dawn and the rest of the Dead series changed the face of antagonists by making the human characters the villains whilst surrounded by creatures that could have easily been handed that role. It's so easy to make a zombie a villain because it wants to eat people. Romero completely subverted the horror genre because now instead of being afraid of the monster, we are afraid of the people around us.

The strange thing is, this subversion of the genre almost nulls it. Dawn of the Dead isn't really a horror film. It's more of a dark comedy/human drama. The psychological subplot takes precedence over the main plot. The crux of the film is about a group of people losing their humanity to a stale life of luxury, not zombies.

This analysis only applies to traditional Romero zombies who walk. The running zombies is a whole new can of worms. Running zombies present a bigger threat than walking zombies and therefore are usually given the role of antagonist. And let's face it, running zombies are pretty fucking scary. And those movies are good but I think they serve to slake the appetite of MTV-addicted, onanist, Ritalin- fueled thirteen year old males across the country.

Why Godzilla is a Bad Movie

I am a student of film but I'm no god. I don't know everything. I don't know what good acting is or good special effects or any of that stuff. All thats important but I usually don't consider those things when determining if I did in fact like the movie. So having said that, when I continue this little diatribe about Godzilla (1998), know that I'm not going to discuss any of those things. I am going to talk about the plot and what the movie says about people as a culture or species or however you'd like to classify us.

The plot is weak. A group of scientists and soldiers must kill the monster before it destroys the city, multiply, and take over the world. This may seem all well and good but my problem with it is, "Who is the antagonist/protagonist"? If you think that Godzilla is the antagonist, you have to ask yourself, "Is Godzilla trying to stop the protagonist"? That's what an antagonist does, they try to stop the protagonist from accomplishing thier goal.

So what's the protagonists' goal? First, who's the protagonist? Let's just say it's Nik Tatopolous played by Matthew Broderick. So what's his goal? He wants to stop Godzilla, or better, he wants to kill it because if he doesn't, it will multiply and take over the world. Okay. But that means that the way Godzilla is trying to stop Nik from accomplishing his goal is by...uh...not being killed.

Well that's not very compelling! Of course it doesn't want to die. It's stupid. But if you think about it even more, you ask yourself, "What side should I be rooting for"? And this leads to what I really wanted to talk about - what does this movie say about us? What's it say about our values and culture?

Well, it's not good. In the beginning of the film, we are shown nukes going off in French Polynesia and various reptiles being exposed to the radioactive fallout which turns Godzilla from mild-mannered komodo dragon to gigantic lizard. And as the movie progresses, people get scared and decide that this thing poses a threat to mankind and it must be destroyed. And we destroy it. We destory it and it's kids. Nice. Now this thing did considerable damage to NYC but that's the only thing it did that prompted the military to be involved. It wasn't malicious, that's the point.

So this is what I got out of it: competition must always be destroyed, even if it doesn't pose an immediate threat. And what's worse is the fact that we created the thing from the nuclear bombs. I think Godzilla should have won. We created the monster, its only fitting that it destroy the creator. That idea is a classic literary and cinematic technique. But the ending they had just summed up humans this way - we destroy. And the only thing that comes from our destruction are horrific monstrosities that, should punish us for our destructive ways, but instead, they too are destroyed.

My ending would have been hundreds of Godzillas roaming some grassland in Africa in harmony with the other animals. In the foreground, a band of humans hide behind some bushes wielding spears. The world would have been returned to a simplier place thanks to the Godzillas. That ending would have been poetic justice served to people for creating nuclear weapons.

But no, nothing is learned from this film. No insights gained, nothing can be taken from this film other than reinforcement for our collective appetite for destruction.

To Kill a Celebrity

A scary thought is that any person that I know could, potentially, become a celebrity. They walk among us, everyday, donning civilian clothes and attemping to fit in. You could be in line at the bank or a grocery store and a celebrity could be just behind you buying milk, eggs, and maybe even cereal. It's a scary thought. But there is hope. We need not live in fear. No longer must we constantly be looking over our collective shoulder, thanks to Us Weekly.

Yes that supermarket tabloid we've all come to know and love has saved humanity. There is a section of the magazine entitled, "Celebrities: They're just like us!", where paparazzi take photos of celebs doing everyday things like walking, yawning, putting in eye drops, and other banal activities to prove their humanity.

Everytime I see those articles, I think of the movie Reign of Fire with Matthew McConnehey and Christian Bale. When Van Zant and his team of ruffians come to London, he tells Quinn about the true nature of the dragons. "They're made of flesh and blood! They got a heart, liver, and mind. You take out one of them, you bring down the beast!" I love that speech just because McConnehey is bald, bearded, and ripped to shreds and is almost always crying tears of absolute passion in every scene. But when ever I watch that movie, I always think of Us Weekly and the reminders they give us about how "normal" celebrities are. I guess some people think you have to decapitate celebrites Highlander style or shoot them with silver bullets to bring down.

This is why I would never want to be famous and/or a celebrity: you lose your humanity and you spend the rest of your life trying to get it back. This is probably why so many celebrities form charities and foundations, so they look like they care. I'm sure they do, too. I don't think all celebrities are shallow and callous and full of hate. I don't think they think of themselves as gods on Olympus. But we do. That's how we see them. I know this because there is a section in Us Weekly called "Celebrities: They're Just Like Us!". If we thought celebrities were just normal Joe Schmos then that article would never exist. But I guess in the long run, that section is good. People shouldn't think of celebrities as superpowerful uber-people and the article definate brings them down from that stature. I just think it's silly that we NEED that article to do so.

Internshit and Actors Welcome

If there is one thing that I can pull from my internship it's that work can never always be fun. And by work, I mean work at a career, not at some stupid summer job or an hourly gig. I mean like what you want to do when you "grow up" or whatever. Luckily, it's worse when you just start out but sadly, that's where I am right now. Mind-numbing is the only word to describe the work I did today. Absolutely mind-fucking-numbing. I had to log footage from interviews for a Towson University promotional video. That was a complete fuck.

But it was actually kind of funny. The people they interviewed didn't know what to say. They couldn't make the school look good. They talked a lot without saying anything. Oddly enough, one of them was a political science major and I think that skill will definately come in handy for him at some point.

Anyway, so they are just going on and on with countless "um's" and "uh's" that I actually have to type. But the best part came at the end where the interviewers asked them to do a little plug in about the school's tour. They basically asked them to act which I think was asking too much of them. They asked the interviewees to be energetic and spontaeous and to "just have fun". Well the only fun to be had was at thier expense with all of the nonsense that spew out of thier mouths.

The first guy just started screaming. But he was a political science major so he didn't want to pull a Howard Dean and so he threw in some big words with the screaming to off-set the ridiculousness. He said, "OH MY GOD IT'S AWESOME! IT'S....STUPENDOUS!!!!"

What?

He continued by saying if we don't go on the tour, a part of him will die.

BUT WHAT PART WILL IT BE!?!?!?!

The next guy was pretty calm but he just went off on one of the wilder tangents I've heard. He starts talking about Stephan's Hall:
"Oh man, Stephan's hall is like...so old! Oh my God, it's crazy how old it is. And then you go over to the other side of campus on the other side and it's like the 70s and you're like, "Wow, did I just step into a time warp or something?" you know. It's awesome".

I don't think I need to comment.

They were just saying the stupidest shit. I almost thought it was better than the internet but I didn't want to get ahead of myself. I wanted them to completely go off the deep end and say like, "If you don't go on the tour then your mom will get AIDS and your dog will be raped by a homeless man!" That's the sort of incentive our youth needs to get them motivated! I just hope that they say in the beginning "Not an actor" when they're picture pops up in the video. Although, I don't think that will be necessary.