Sapere Aude!

State of Play Mini-Review

I watched State of Play last night.  It was a pretty good political thriller based on the privatization of domestic security and intelligence gathering, but it also raises other topics like the impact of sales on newspaper coverage and journalism as well as the rise of new media.  It's really about a cobweb of relationships across private and public distinction as Russell must cover a story related to his college roommate while trying to maintain his journalistic integrity.  Interestingly this obvious conflict of interest and threat to journalistic impartiality seem to be the least problematic aspect of the Russell character.  Check out the movie and see if you think he pulls it off.

Brad Pitt on Religion, Pot, and Gay Marriage on Real Time

G.I. Joe Movie Deemed Insufficiently "American" by Ideologues

Apparently, some people think that the G.I. Joe movie is just not "American" enough.  I guess Team America wasn't enough for them.

Man Commits Suicide After Learning Harry Potter Spoiler

This is very sad.

HUDSON, OHIO (The Borowitz Report) -- A rabid Harry Potter fan took his life yesterday after inadvertently learning a plot spoiler from the soon-to-be-released J.K. Rowling movie, "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince." 



Jude Ralston, 32, of Hudson, Ohio left a suicide note indicating that since overhearing the plot spoiler at a shopping mall earlier in the day, "I no longer have a reason to live." 



But, this is stupid.

Ms. Clovis said that she hoped Mr. Ralston's death would cause federal authorities to tighten the flow of Harry Potter plot information to prevent similar tragedies from taking place. 



Yeah, that's what the government needs to spend its time on - securing Harry Potter spoilers.  The government cannot protect people from suicidal nihilism or being batshit crazy.

Brüno Review

We saw Brüno this weekend.  It was alright, but not as funny as Borat.  In Borat, Sacha Baron Cohen's character exposes a wide range of cultural stereotypes found in contemporary American life, but in Brüno it's just the gay thing over and over again.  You can only make straight guys uncomfortable so many times before the joke gets old.  Plus, some of the gags may even reinforce some negative stereotypes.  So, it's not as subversively funny in the way that I think Borat was.  Having said that, there are still some great scenes.  Like when Bruno tries to bring peace to the Middle East.  Or, for example, when he meets with a terrorist to arrange his own kidnapping.

I'm surprised he got out of there alive.

GLAAD Slams 'Bruno'

GLAAD Slams 'Bruno'. 

LOS ANGELES — The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation said Friday that "Bruno," the new film starring Sacha Baron Cohen, reinforces negative stereotypes and "decreases the public's comfort with gay people."

GLAAD president Jarrett Barrios, who saw the film Friday, said that "the movie was a well-intentioned series of sketches _ some hit the mark and some hit the gay community pretty hard and reinforce some damaging, hurtful stereotypes."

In a style similar to his popular Borat character, Baron Cohen brings Bruno, a flamboyantly gay Austrian fashionista, into ridiculous situations with unsuspecting everyday people.

I'm checking it out tomorrow afternoon.  I liked Borat and the Ali G Show. 

Is the Internet Ruining Porn?

Some porn-stars are worried about the decline of their craft.

The actress known as Savanna Samson once relished preparing for a role. “I couldn’t wait to get my next script,” she said.

There’s no reason to look at them anymore, she said, because her movies now call almost exclusively for action. Specifically, sex.

The pornographic movie industry has long had only a casual interest in plot and dialogue. But moviemakers are focusing even less on narrative arcs these days. Instead, they are filming more short scenes that can be easily uploaded to Web sites and sold in several-minute chunks.

“On the Internet, the average attention span is three to five minutes,” said Steven Hirsch, co-chairman of Vivid Entertainment. “We have to cater to that.”

Vivid, one of the most prominent pornography studios, makes 60 films a year. Three years ago, almost all of them were feature-length films with story lines. Today, more than half are a series of sex scenes, loosely connected by some thread — “vignettes” in the industry vernacular — that can be presented separately online. Other major studios are making similar shifts.

So, wait, the internet is ruining porn?  That's a new one.

Maher's "Religulous"

"BRUNO" TRAILER! Calamity, African Babies, Chase Scenes And More (NSFW VIDEO)

"BRUNO" TRAILER (NSFW VIDEO).  I'd guess that Cohen was really good at the gender reversal exercises in his acting classes.

Alexandra Pelosi's Documentary on Republicans

This interview with Alexandra Pelosi about her documentary on Republicans during the 2008 is interesting, and I hope to watch it sometime.  But, I'm confused by some of her remarks in the interview.  She remarks:

Thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of people showed up to see the McCain-Palin ticket. Maybe a dozen people humiliated me -- you know, embarrassed me and made me feel really unwanted. I don't want to paint the whole lot of the Republican base as mean-spirited and cruel and unfriendly. To me it's more interesting to focus on the real Christian conservatives who didn't agree with anything I had to say but invited me over for dinner so that we could talk about it.

And, later says:

There are some things that they see that make them uncomfortable. And I think we have to respect that and understand that. Not say, "Oh, they're just extremists. Oh, they're just freaks. Oh, they're just racists." They're not. They just don't agree with us on, like, moral and cultural and political issues. They don't agree with us on anything, really.

But, then she admits that it was common for her to hear Republicans make extremist remarks about Obama.

Every day. It was much more common than you'd think. In the heat of an election, people say some crazy things. And in the case of the gentleman you're talking about, I have talked to him since then and this is just the way he sees it. I heard that every single day. It was much more common than you'd think. And I think that a lot of them were mimicking things they heard on right-wing radio.

So, what does she do?  Edit the film to make GOPers look less extreme.

Right. I'm not naive. I know that I'm going to be criticized for picking people who say some extreme things. If you take the guy that says Obama is the antichrist and use him as a sample of the movie, you have to take one of the 20 other people who say very reasonable things. You have to take the woman who says we're angry because -- "The economy. I went home and cried last night because I just lost my 401K." There are lots of normal people in this movie. I sat in the edit room for a very long time. I was very fair in terms of the ratio of how many people I interviewed that said Obama is the antichrist -- put that in once. "He reminds me of Hitler" -- put that in once. I heard that every day at every rally. That doesn't mean that everybody who showed up at that rally felt that way, but just people on the camera. Remember, who's going to talk to a camera? These are going to be certain kinds of people.

I mean, my brother-in-law, my next-door neighbor, my mom's college roommate: These are Republicans who voted for McCain, who didn't think that Obama is the antichrist, but of course they don't want to be on camera, because they don't want to be speaking for the Republican Party. I think it's really irresponsible to focus on the few crazies that appear in the movie as opposed to the tons of really sane, normal people that appear in the movie.

Um, if it's not uncommon to here extremist remarks at GOP political conventions, then isn't it irresponsible to make them look less extreme than they really are?