Matt’s Week in Dork! (6/16/13-6/22/13)

    On Sunday, in preperation for the next meeting of the graphic novel club, I thought I’d get myself into a Thor mood by digging up a few single issues of Thor comics I somehow acquired.  I read issue 600, which wasn’t very good.  The main story has to do with Odin’s father coming back into the world, but it doesn’t seem to go anywhere, at least nowhere interesting.  The issue is then padded by a mildly enjoyable goofy comic and some bloody awful Stan Lee ‘classic’ stuff.  Meh.  Issue 601 wasn’t much better, but it was less cluttered.  J. Michael Straczynski is a frustrating figure.  He wrote one of the great sci-fi TV series, Babylon 5, but seemed (seems) unable to do much of anything else worthwhile again.  The pile was missing issue 602, but I got the gist.  603 was pretty much more of the same, though there was a really funny bit about a guy wanting an omelet.

Man of Steel:  “You can save them all.”  So, if you’ve been keeping score, with a few recent exceptions, I generally don’t like Superman.  Most of the time he’s straight up boring.  The rest, he’s bloody awful.  He’s been written by a lot of people for film, TV, comics, etc. and I haven’t ever been a fan.  Director Zack Snyder has made a bunch of movies I’ve really enjoyed, but his last film was Sucker Punch, one of the worst films in the last decade.  The trailers for this film felt like they were trying to go for that mythological, melodramatic, epic feel I dig.  And having just read All Star Superman, which also goes for that, and does such an amazing job, I was ready.  Sadly, this movie only gets part way there, stumbling almost as often as it succeeds.  It’s good, but not great.  And it felt like it should have been great.  One problem surfaced right away.  Hand-held.  No, Hollywood.  Stop.  Do I have to roll up a paper and thwack your nose?  Bad!  No hand-held!  I don’t want to get motion sickness while I’m watching a movie.  They have tripods and other rigging.  Use ‘em.  The second problem was the action.  I know this is a weird thing to say about what is basically an action movie, but there was too much of it.  The action scenes went on entirely too long.  The battle in Smallville, which seemed to accomplish next to nothing in terms of moving the story along, must have taken five minutes.  And the final fist-fight was interminable and unnecessary.  It felt like the movie had climaxed and was ready for final resolution…then another battle!  Ugh.  I was ready for the wrap-up and instead we have a second attempted climactic battle.  That’s one climax too many.  Cutting out that final battle, and trimming the other action bits by say a third, I think the movie as a whole would have been better.  And while Superman has always had religious overtones, Krypton being lost Israel, Superman being kind of a parallel of the Jewish experience in the States, then later shifted toward a Christ figure, the religious iconography and allegory got to be a bit much in this.  The scene in the church where he’s talking with the picture of Jesus right by his head…not subtle, guys.  Now that all sounds pretty negative, I know.  But I did actually like the movie, and it has a lot of good parts.  I liked Amy Adams and the Lois Lane character in general.  She’s less abrasive and harpy-like than I’m used to with Lane.  The rest of the cast all did a fine job, and it was fun picking out That Guy actors, including some Battlestar Galactica regulars (filmed in Vancouver?).  I liked the emotion and the Shakespearian grandiosity.  I liked that they did a lot with building Superman as a hero in the Nietzschian mold, something to be striven for, but not a god or a king; an ideal to build oneself into.  There is even a paraphrasing of that great line from All Star Superman, ‘They will race, and stumble, and fall and crawl and curse, and finally, they will join you in the sun.’  I also like that the film gave lots of moments to everyday human heroism.  It wasn’t just a matter of Superman saving people, it was people saving each other.  Though there was plenty of staring and screaming and running, this wasn’t the typical crowd, unable or unwilling to do anything without a superhero’s help.  So again, a good, but not great Superman film.  Certainly the best film adaptation of the character to date…but that’s not really saying much.  Next time, put the camera on a danged rig and hold it steady, and maybe have a more interesting foe.

Pirates of the Caribbean On Stranger Tides:  “Oh!  He’s even more annoying in miniature.”  Though Johnny Depp’s turn as Jack Sparrow in the first Pirates movie seems to have redefined his recent career, turning the once versatile actor into a DeNero style self-parody, I enjoy the crap out of this series, and would be back every couple of years for a new adventure without any reservation.  They’re fun, light entertainment that do something rarely done before…make pirate movies fun to watch.  I know there was a time when these types of films were a dime a dozen, but I don’t know why.  Even some of the more famous, ‘classic’ pirate films are extremely boring.  While this series manages to play on all the genera tropes, it has lots and lots of fantasy fun with them, giving us not only adventures on the high seas, but all the myths and monsters of the era as well.  I’d have liked more Ian McShane and less Penelope Cruz, but it’s still a great deal of fun.  It would be difficult for me to care less about the young missionary and the mermaid love story.  I like working mermaids into the mythos, but their story is dull and the actors lack charisma.  The screen time wasted on them could have been used better focusing on McShane, Depp, and Geoffrey Rush.

    Monday night, I started watching The Mod Squad.  It’s a fairly fun cop show, and I enjoy the out of touch vision of then modern youth culture.  The ‘long hair’ rich boy who just looks like a garden variety actor and clearly is not ‘hip.’  Awesome.  Peggy Lipton is pretty in that way that would become more common in the 70s.  And I’ve always liked Clarence Williams III, so it’s cool seeing him in an early role.

    Tuesday night, I went through another disk of Space: Above & Beyond.  Had my first straight-up good episode, and the first episode where I didn’t hate Hawkes.  It’s a show that does seem to get better as it goes, though the three leads are still pretty weak.  I do wish this series had come along a decade later.  It probably would have been more consistent.  Maybe some day someone could do a Colonial Marines (from Aliens) TV series.  I imagine it would have a similar vibe/structure…though hopefully more interesting characters and better special effects.

Two Moon Junction:  “I’m not a princess.”  My Twin Peaks journey drove me to check out this bit of late 80s trash.  Bad ADR and harsh lighting make it look made for TV.  But at least the story is stupid.  No bleach-blonde young socialite can resist the rugged charm of a be-mulleted carnie (I know.  Richard Tyson just has long hair, not a mullet…but I’m in it for the laughs).  Sherilyn Fenn is darned cute, though she looks super-weird as a blonde.  I guess it’s a sign of what actors do, but I don’t really find her especially compelling or attractive (we’re talking charismatically, not aesthetically) in this film, like I do in Twin Peaks.  Richard Tyson is a very 90s actor (his diagnosed shirt allergy is tragic).  I don’t know how else to describe him.  He’s bland and slightly abrasive…like that decade.  But I’ve always been kind of surprised he didn’t do better in the 90s.  And holy crap!  Little kid Milla.  Weird.  It feels like this movie was the basis for Cinemax.  Like everything that came after it, Animal Instinct, Wild Orchid, and all of that, spawned from this dumbass film.  No surprise from the guy behind The Red Shoe Diaries.  She’s naked.  He’s holding a puppy.  It’s so romantic.  Oh, wait.  I mean stupid.  For an ‘erotic’ film, this movie lacks pretty much anything I would call eroticism.  It’s like a boring episode of Thirtysomething…with boobs.

The Pit and the Pendulum:  “How can they confess if they don’t have tongues?!”  One of the first Full Moon movies, and along with Aliens, the beginning of my Lance Henriksen fandom, this is a pretty good low budget take on the classic story.  It’s all about the Spanish Inquisition, and the insanity of religious bureaucracy gone too far, and power put into the hands of a zealot.  It’s pretty darned over the top, but a lot of perverse fun.

Hellraiser:  “We have such sights to show you.”  If the stars shifted, the Old Ones returned, and I found myself in charge of a major film studio, there are a few remakes I’d like to do.  One would be, like Peter Jackson before me, to do my own version of King Kong.  Since he beat me to it, I may just have to pass on it now.  Second would be to do my own version of The Creature from the Black Lagoon.  Oh, man, would I do an upsetting version of that film.  Eat your heart out remake of Cat People!  But third on my list would be either the Phantasm series or this, Hellraiser.  Clive Barker’s adaptation of his own novel, The Hellbound Heart, is interesting but not actually all that good.  It hints at more, at better things.  The sequel picks up on some of those, but still misses the boat.  I would love to get my hands on it.  The idea that the Cenobites are more than just demons or angels, that they are some kind of extradimensional beings, explorers in the realms of sensation and experience, is full of potential.  And the box is a powerfully iconic artifact that could be explored in lots of different ways (I actually do like a bunch of what was done in Hellraiser: Bloodline).  Kirsty Cotton (ignoring where the series takes her) is not an especially interesting protagonist, nor are her uncle and stepmother especially powerful villains.  Her dad seems like a nice guy, and her boyfriend is a snore.  The movie is really best looked at as a treasure trove of ideas.  Sadly, most of those ideas don’t bloom here.

Heat:  “That lady who wears dark glasses at night asked me to give you this.”  Burt Reynolds, man.  Burt Reynolds.  It’s weird to see him picking on someone because of a bad hairpiece.  It’s a strange film.  He’s a hired goon who needs money to move to Italy.  His hooker friend gets all stove up and wants revenge.  That nerdy guy from Ghostbusters II is nerding it up.  The plot wanders around a bit, with people coming in and out.  It feels a bit ‘slice of life’ in the way the story progresses.  Honestly, Reynolds is pretty good in this.  It’s not a great movie, but it’s watchable.  And Reynolds does harpoon a dude with some rebar.

Man of Steel:  OK, so friend Ben didn’t get to see this the first time ‘round, so I accompanied him to what was my second viewing.  My first and biggest complaint is still the shoddy hand-held camerawork.  It’s atrocious, and makes me feel seriously ill on more than one occasion.  My other complaints remain, as do my positive assessments.  The second viewing does make me realize that I actually really like the movie up until one specific point, marked by the death of someone close to Clark and the re-introduction of Zod and cronies.  From that point on, the movie goes from a solid B (marks off for shaky cam) to a C.  The wanton and callous destruction does seem a bit much.  In another movie, like a disaster, war, or alien invasion film, it might have felt a bit more on target, but the fact that Superman doesn’t seem to take much note of what must be millions of people being blown up, squished, gravity gunned, burned, and otherwise ended, seems a bit odd.  That he takes the time to make out with his girlfriend in a wide open field that seems to be made of the ash of millions of dead people also seems…ill advised.  This could have been better with a few tweaks to the plot, a few re-workings of the dialog, and a frickin’ tripod for the camera.  It’s OK, but it could have been good.  This second viewing is probably enough for me.  While almost certainly the best Superman movie, it’s still not that great, and I still don’t give two shakes about the character.  If there’s a sequel (ha, ha…if), I’m sure I’ll be there to see it.  But it won’t be making my most anticipated list…Unless things get really dark in the land of movies.

    I read the science fiction short story The Little Black Bag by C.M. Kornbluth.  It’s an odd one, and has a great nasty ending.  It would probably make a really good short film.  And on Friday morning, I finished the fourth and final volume of B.P.R.D.’s Plague of Frogs epic.  Man, that series is waist deep in the apocalypse and still charging forward.  Can’t wait to see what the rosy sounding ‘Hell on Earth’ storyline will bring.

    And finally, on Saturday, I rejoined the modern world with the internet.  I imediately plunged into an orgy of time wasting, blankly looking at all the various sites I haven’t had time to regularly check up on, poring over old blogs, and watching episodes of Q.I. into the deep hours of the evening.  I’m back.

-Matt

Book Review: God is Not Great

“Credulity may be a form of innocence, and even innocuous in itself, but it provides a standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sisters, and is thus one of humanity’s great vulnerabilities.  No honest account of the growth and persistence of religion, or the reception of miracles and revelations, is possible without reference to this stubborn fact.” -page 161

    It was the success of this book that first made me aware of Christopher Hitchens, though it was various footage of him in debates and readings that made me really take note, made me a fan if you will.  So, it is a bit odd that I’ve only just gotten around to reading God is Not Great, after his autobiography Hitch 22, his massive collection of essays Arguably, his book about the process of death by cancer Mortality, and others.  The book stands as a kind of clarion call for people of reason to shake off their placating politeness and collectively call BS on the aggressive, pervasive, divisive, and morally bankrupt purveyors of the ultimate bait-and-switch scheme, religion (you give me money and power now, and when you’re dead you’ll get some vague reward).  And as you might expect from Hitch, it is full of wit and rage.

    As usual, he spares no fool.  Be it the media monster and champion of suffering (not for those who suffer, but for their suffering) Mother Teresa, or blowhard fools like Pat Robertson, or imams, priests, and charlatans of all stripes, he is on the attack.  And he uses the greatest tools of the trade.  He uses evidence, history, logic, and the most damaging weapon of all, the words of the holy texts and of their followers.  Is there a book more obviously cobbled together, disjoined, and nonsensical than the Bible?  Well, perhaps the Koran.  Both draw heavily on the Torah, which is itself a patchwork mess.  Claims of historic merit are at best dubious, and more frequently patently fraudulent.  Connections to historic places and people are often wildly inaccurate or incongruous, but that doesn’t stop the faithful from dubbing them proof of authenticity.  And when considering how many generations (frequently centuries) after the supposed events anything at all was written down, can even those less than air tight connections be seriously considered.

“Who--except for an ancient priest seeking to exert power by the tried and tested means of fear-- could possibly wish that this hopelessly knotted skein of fable had any veracity?” -on the horrors of the Old Testament, page 103

    Reading the Bible, the Torah, The Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, or any text with spiritual lessons or claims of the divine, it should be obvious to all but the most painfully unaware that these books are as much the product of humans (men, specifically), as the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Homer, or the music (elevating as it may be) of Beethoven.  The rampant bloodletting, petty local squabbling, complete lack of understanding of the world outside of the knowledge of the original readers, and total lack of knowledge of the workings of the world and greater universe should make perfectly clear that there was no mystical revelation, no angelic dictation, just the fevered imaginings of savage men bent on power and scared of death.  No amount of rape, theft, child murder, genocide, or general awfulness is too much, it seems for the righteous.

“If one must have faith in order to believe something, or believe in something, then the likelihood of that something having any truth or value is considerably diminished.  The harder work of inquiry, proof, and demonstration is infinitely more rewarding, and has confronted us with findings far more ‘miraculous’ and ‘transcendent’ than any theology.”  -page 71

    And one can easily compare this century’s UFO mythology with any of the major religions.  It relies on vague stories, shoddy evidence, faulty logic, esoteric writings, and an understanding of the universe that relies on faith instead of reason.  And, like the major profits of old, heavenly forces reveal themselves to illiterate yokels on the fringes of society or beyond.  In a world full of well read, literate people, beings wishing to bring their ‘truth’ to the world find people of limited resources and capability.  That’s just poor planning.  Like with the concept of Intelligent Design, it requires that these cosmic forces are either cruel and deviant devils, or blind idiots (I guess a creature evil enough to make people in a specific way, only to condemn them for being that way might be F-dup enough to put the eye together backwards, put too many teeth in our heads, and have waste come out of our mating organ).

“Many religions now come before us with ingratiating smirks and outspread hands, like an unctuous merchant in a bazaar.  They offer consolation and solidarity and uplift, competing as they do in a marketplace.  But we have a right to remember how barbarically they behaved when they were strong and were making an offer that people could not refuse.” -page 67

    I’ve always liked talking with, or listening to people much smarter and well read than myself.  Gleaning wisdom and knowledge, and finding new books to read or what have you.  Reading Hitchens feels like sitting down to great dinner conversation, and it’s led me to check out many things, and will continue to do so (one of these days I’m going to try Wodehouse).  But it was pretty sweet when he referenced a book I’d actually read already.  I think it’s the first time outside of one of his book reviews (for a Harry Potter novel) that it’s happened.  I read Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus: the Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why several years ago.  A fascinating book.  It was like listening to Dennis Miller back when he was funny (remember the 80s?) or the boys on MST3K, when you manage to catch an especially clever or obscure reference, you feel just that bit more cool, even if it is only for a moment.  Whenever I read Hitchens I feel like I’m learning something, but I also feel inspired to go out and learn more when I’m done.  That is the mark of a great teacher, and I’ve been lucky enough to have many of those (only a very few of them involved in my formal schooling).

    Lest one assume Hitchens only chastises and takes to task those religions more familiar in the West, he does go after several Eastern religions, like Hinduism, Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism, etc. with both barrels.  Whether exposing the awful hypocrisy of the hereditary horror-show that produced the Dali Lama, or the cult of the god-king that produced the famous kamikaze and was supported by the Buddhist mainstream in Japan, or the sectarian violence between Hindu and Buddhists that still grips Sri Lanka to this day.  And he addresses a couple of the most common attacks on atheism, the Nazis and the Stalinists.  Getting past the problems with the Nazi argument (like that most Nazis were practicing Christians), both Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia were more like theocracies than any kind of ‘secular’ state.  They did not attempt to suppress religion so much as replace it with a worship and obedience of the state.  He goes into some depth about the complicity of various churches and religious organizations in the creation and maintenance of these monolithic states, including the support of the Catholic Church for several fascist regimes, including Hitler’s Germany (though he does mention some of those few who stood up, including Catholics, to those same evils).

“But an extraordinary number of people appear to believe that the mind, and the reasoning faculty - the only thing that divides us from our animal relatives - is something to be distrusted and even, as far as possible, dulled.” -page 198

    Perhaps his most bold, but in a way most important question (and chapter title) “Is Religion Child Abuse?” looks into the effects of religion, both physical and psychological on children and on the adults they become.  Not just the obvious stuff like institutionalized sexual abuse or genital mutilation, but the more subtle things like telling a kid his grandfather is in hell, suffering for an eternity, because he was a different religion.  Or of course, racism, the ancient partner in crime of religion.  I remember hearing constantly throughout my Catholic upbringing that those evil (fill in the blank with Protestants, Satanists, Homosexuals, etc.) tried to ‘get you while you’re young.’  And I remember even then thinking, ‘wait, isn’t that what you’re doing, too?’  And of course, it was.  The best way to produce adults who believe in this mumbo-jumbo is to force them to believe it when they’re too young and malleable and credulous to turn away.  Otherwise, if you let children get to the point where they’re more rational, there’s almost no way they’d believe much of the crazy stuff written in the various holy texts.  They’ve lived long enough to spot a con, to know a lie, to see a fantasy.  And they’ve certainly lived to the point where getting the tip of one’s penis cut off or vagina sewn up doesn’t seem like a good idea.

“This is not the result of a few delinquents among the shepherds, but an outcome of an ideology which sought to establish clerical control by means of control of the sexual instinct and even the of the sexual organs.  It belongs, like the rest of religion, to the fearful childhood of our species.” -discussing the horrors of circumcision, mandated celibacy, and sexual repression, page 228

    Though not my favorite book by Christopher Hitchens, nor his most readable, it is a worthy effort and hopefully a conversation starter.  It identifies what he believed to be the great enemy facing humankind, calls it out, and gives it a sock on the jaw.  The book works as something of a call to action for all those who feel that religions of all stripes have a lot to answer for, if not a lot of answers.  And that the denial of reality one must embrace in order to believe in the supernatural is inherently damaging to us as individuals and to society as a whole.  That morality and ethics exist in spite of (and some times as opposed to), not because of religion.  The greatest gift that Hitchens, Sam Harris, Penn Jillette, and Stephen Fry, among others have given people like myself is a sense of community and hope.  We are not alone in our desire to leave behind the damaging and stultifying beliefs of our ancestors in order to create a more just and viable future.  That the way to live need not be dictated by squabbling illiterates who lurked in the deserts of our distant past, but in rational exploration of the world that is.  There are others out there like me, who found no answers to the questions that really matter in myth anthologies written by greedy savages, or in the expectation of rewards and punishments in the hereafter.  I constantly hear people talk about how silly, strange, or unfounded the religious beliefs of other peoples are.  But these same people can’t see the silliness in their own.  My hat is off to the late Hitchens for pulling back those curtains just a bit, and shedding light on a great many shadowed things.

“Yet again it is demonstrated that monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents.” -Page 280

God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
Author: Christopher Hitchens
Publisher: Twelve
ISBN: 978-0-446-57980-3

-Matt