Sometimes I wonder, How?

Can people be so dumb:

From Fail Blog.

Sometimes I wonder, Why?

What goes on through someone’s mind when they leave the house to go to a public event made up like this:

This is Pocahontas’ lesbian sister Johnny Weir.

Tricking the eyes

Neat trick!

The implosion of a Star

Unfortunately I’m not talking about they type of star that spins around in the depths of space.  Rather I’m referring to that very rare human being that achieves widespread fame and success thanks to some innate ability, whether it be acting, painting, singing, or some other talent.

In Whitney Houston’s case, it was a voice so powerful, angelic, and pure, she could have sung the phone book and you would have listened.  It was captivating.

Alas, after years of heavy smoking and drug abuse, the magnificent instrument that millions of people around the world were amazed by has been ruined to the point of no return.

In her heyday, she was revered as one of the most talented singers to ever grace the stage.  Her voice was spellbinding, especially when she hit the high notes only she seemed to be able to hit.

Now, her voice is rough and jagged and she can’t hit a high note to save her life.  She sounds like a washed up hip-hop singer from a late night bar on a road to Las Vegas.  It’s saddening, pitiful, maddening, and frustrating to hear her sing.

The biggest problem is that she’s right in the middle of her worldwide comeback concert tour, and things are going very badly, with critics hammering her and fans walking out of her concerts.  She’s currently in England:

Whitney Houston's world tour lurches on, with the 46-year-old singer apologising to a London crowd for the poor quality of her voice. "She doesn't want to come, my soprano friend," Houston explained to the audience at O2 Arena. She wasn't referring to Renée Fleming.

This is ostensibly the singer's comeback tour, but she has been booed in Australia, laughed at in Birmingham, and several fans allegedly walked out of her London show. "Sometimes the old girl sings, but not tonight," Houston told the crowd. "I want to do it, but she doesn't want to ... She's getting a little temperamental."

Houston struggled through I Will Always Love You, her best-known song, and didn't bother finishing Greatest Love of All. She had a similarly rough time in Nottingham last Wednesday, "wheezing and grating" through ballads. In London, she blamed the air-conditioning. "Turn the air-con off," she asked organisers, from the stage. "I can feel it. It takes away my soprano."

It sure can’t be easy watching your own fame dim and your comeback inexorably derail, but one can’t forget that she brought this upon herself by not taking care of the gift she had.

Check out this recent video of her rendition of “I Will Always Love You.”  It’s painful to watch.  Sure, the recording is poor at best, but her voice is unmistakably broken.

This is just sad all around.

Would you like some plastic with your fries?

I blogged in the past about the Pacific Gyre, an immense island of plastic garbage that gets caught by the currents of the Pacific Ocean, swirling forever while endangering the sea life that comes into contact with it.
Now the stomach of a dead whale that washed ashore has revealed how deadly our carelessness can be for unassuming animals.
From Treehugger:

According to Cascadia Research Collective, 50 gallons of stomach contents were sorted through. Most of it was real food - algae and other bits common to a gray whale diet - but also included were more than 20 plastic bags, small towels, surgical gloves, sweat pants, plastic pieces, duct tape, and a golf ball.

And all sorts of animals are affected by this problem, like this bird, whose remains were photographed as evidence of what we’re doing to the environment:

See a slideshow of more birds here.

The Matrix Trilogy

One of the biggest cinematic blunders of all time firmly rests on the Wachowski brothers’ shoulders.  After creating one of the best and most innovative sci-fi pictures of all time, 1999’s mind bending The Matrix, they followed up with two overblown disappointments, The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, both released in 2003.

For all practical purposes, those two sequels soiled forever a beloved brand and missed the opportunity to build or improve upon the original.  And all likely because of hubris.

The Matrix’s performance was a big surprise.  Release the same year that another sci-fi movie was supposed to dominate, Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace, the first of the three prequels to another beloved sci-fi saga damaged by inferior sequels, all everyone talked about was how cool The Matrix was.

Largely because of that success, both in terms of how much money it made (and its sequels could potentially make) and of the fan base it had assembled, the Wachowskis got a pile of cash and the go ahead from the studio to complete the trilogy they had envisioned when they set out to make The Matrix.

Unfortunately, the two sequels turned out to be inferior chapters of the whole story that were longer and felt like overblown rehashes of all that we had been given the first time around.

Recently I decided to give the trilogy another try, since I positively worship the original.  I can now safely say that, apart from any issues there might be with holes in the screenplays, if the Wachowskis had been more editorial, the sequels wouldn’t have failed so miserably.

The worst parts of both are the endless fighting sequences.  Take the so called “burly brawl” of Reloaded.  Is it really necessary to have it go on and on and on like that?  What starts out as a “Shit Neo! Get out of there!!” moment, soon turns into “Enough already!!”  At the end, Neo simply flies away.  Why couldn’t he do that 3 minutes earlier?

Next to the endless fights, there are the useless ones, like when Neo needs to see the Oracle and meets Seraph, who, in order to ensure that he is indeed Neo, attacks him.  After that endless (but blissfully shorter) fight, Seraph tells Neo that “the only way to really know someone is to fight them.”  I can’t imagine a single person in the audience actually thinking that’s a good line in the script and it certainly doesn’t justify the fight.  Cut it off!!

Let’s then take a look at the useless sequence in chief: the Zion dance.  What exactly does that add to the story other than campiness?  It’s a totally laughable sequence of a bunch of half naked people dancing that was likely meant to sassy it up and ends up feeling completely out of place, ridiculous, and trivial.

Couple all the useless stuff with the lack of editing and you have a big problem.  For instance, in Revolutions, when the machines reach the outskirts of Zion, an interminable sequence begins without any intercuts of what is happening to Neo and Trinity.  Only when the battle is pretty much over and the machines are about to storm the city are we transported miles away to what our hero is up to.  Now his voyage to machine city begins and with it another battle, while the audience is left wondering about Zion’s fate.

I’m not a filmmaker or an editor, but I’ve seen countless action scenes and this is not how you build them.  If they had simply intercut the two sequences, the big battle in Zion and the struggle of Neo and Trinity to reach the source, the end result would have worked a lot better.  Just think of how masterful was the intercutting of three story lines in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Frodo and Sam meeting Gollum; Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli following the Uruk-hais; and Merry and Pippin meeting Treebeard.  Countless more characters and scenes are all advanced together to give the audience a well rounded sense of time and action.

And it’s not like the Wachowskis don’t know how to set up a chase scene.  Their highway chase in Reloaded is as thrilling as they come even though it’s long and overblown.  But they constructed it well, has a plausible purpose, and as a result it works.

It’s sad that directors often feel like they can’t go wrong and fail to recognize when and where things are taking a bad turn.  I’m assuming that someone did point out how over the top the movies were becoming, but the Wachowskis (or the studio) must have thought the more the better, and just kept going.

Too bad.  Sure, the sequels made more money than the original, but don’t even come close in terms of cinematic longevity.

The Matrix: 9

The Matrix Reloaded: 5

The Matrix Revolutions: 4

Our fragile world

Apparently, we don’t just have to worry about a sizeable chunk of rock and ice hurtling toward us in space.  We could be severely affected (or killed off outright) even just by its debris field:

An hour-long hailstorm from space bombarded the Earth 13,000 years ago - plunging the planet into a mini-ice age, scientists claimed today.

The catastrophe was caused by a disintegrating comet and saw the planet sprayed by thousands of frozen boulders made of ice and dust.

The collisions wiped out huge numbers of animal species all over the world, disrupted the lives of our stone age ancestors and triggered a freeze that lasted more than 1,000 years.

[…]

The change in climate caused retreating glaciers to advance once again, and coincided with the extinction of 35 families of North American mammals.

[…]

Professor Napier's theory suggests the devastation took place when the Earth strayed into a dense trail of fragments shed by a large comet.

Thousands of chunks of material from the comet would have rained down on Earth, each one releasing the energy of a one megaton nuclear bomb.

The impacts would have filled the atmosphere with smoke and soot and blotting out the Sun.

Prof Napier says a comet swooped into the inner solar system between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago and has been breaking apart ever since.

'A large comet has been disintegrating in the near-Earth environment for the past 20,000 to 30,000 years and running into thousands of fragments from this comet is a much more likely event than a single collision,' said Professor Napier.

Amazing and chilling.

More from Mail Online.

Big Love

Big Love, HBO’s series about polygamy, recently wrapped its fourth season, and it was its worst to date.

While at first I didn’t think I’d enjoy this show, I’ve come to love its intrigue, its fully-rounded characters, its rich story lines, and its high technical qualities.

The fourth season didn’t lack any of that, except for its basic seasonal arch, which this time around was fundamentally flawed.

In a nutshell, Bill Henrickson, the family patriarch, received something like an epiphany -- a sort of message from God -- that told him he had to run for political office and afterwards come out as a polygamist in order to show the world the “good side” of polygamy.

I didn’t buy it when they introduced it.  I didn’t buy it throughout the season.  And I didn’t buy it when the season ended with the family stepping into the light as a whole.

Why? Because the Henricksons had spent the previous three seasons trying their darnest to keep their secret from becoming widely known, all the while dealing with running a store chain, opening a casino, keeping their neighbors and in-laws at bay, and struggling to fend off the continuous influence, interference, and attacks of their religion’s Prophet and his compound’s followers.

And now, point blank, because of a vision (ok, Bill is very religious, but still he must realize what coming out could mean for him, his three wives, and his eight children), he bets all his chips on his state Senate run, throws his best friend under the bus, disregards his family’s fears and doubts, and keeps barreling down a path of destruction that can’t possibly bring him much good.

Nope.  Don’t buy it.

Anyway, I’m now curious to see what they’ll do next season, because, logically, Bill should get attacked by everyone, impeached, perhaps even removed from office.  His family business and ownings should be imperiled and suffer greatly.  His entire family should be ostracized.  And Margie should at least be investigated for trying to keep a foreign man in the country by marrying him when she was supposedly already married -- and therefore lied to the authorities.  If they don’t show us all that then they’ll totally ruin the brand.

My hope is that they will make the Henricksons fall hard till they hit bottom and then start picking up the pieces of their lives again, but I have my doubts.  I fear they’re going to try and make Bill’s stature as a politician not only work, but grow, which counters what would likely happen in reality.  After all, he broke the law, since polygamy is illegal, and flaunting it should have its consequences.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see, but the show is still great to watch and the acting is superb.  I’ll definitely be back for more.

Season 4 – Grade: 6

The Crazies

How could I possibly pass on the chance to gaze upon Timothy Olyphant on the big screen?

 

The Crazies is his latest project, a thriller in which he plays a sheriff whose town falls victim to a mysterious craziness that turns its heretofore law abiding citizens into rabid murderous maniacs.

The finished product is not a spectacular masterpiece, but it’s pretty good for the genre, which is a great accomplishment, considering that horror/thrillers often turn into comical or pitiful globs.

Acting, writing, direction, visual effects, and makeup are all quite good so I would recommend The Crazies to anyone who’s into this type of movie.

You certainly won’t be bored, and it might make you jump in your seat a couple times.

Grade: 7

Shutter Island

Shutter Island represents Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio’s fourth collaboration.  DiCaprio has clearly become Scorsese’s new muse, a role previously held by Robert De Niro, with whom Scorsese made eight movies, from 1973’s Mean Streets to 1995’s Casino.

I enjoy Scorsese’s work because even if sometimes it’s a little heavy, drawn out, or convoluted, you can always see the touch of the masterful filmmaker behind it.  Shutter Island is no different.

DiCaprio plays a federal agent in charge of an investigation into the disappearance of a patient from a mental institution for criminals.  The prison/hospital is headed by an intense Ben Kingsley, who seems to obstruct DiCaprio and his partner (Mark Ruffalo) at every turn.  He’s aided in this by a very sinister Max von Sydow.

The cast includes more great performers, like Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson, Jackie Earle Haley, and John Carroll Lynch, so right away you know you’re in for a great ride.

The screenplay is well developed and serves up a few good twists that keep you on edge from the first tense scenes to the final catharsis.

Technically, the art direction and costumes are impeccable and the cinematography top notch.

I’d strongly recommend this very good thriller to any cinephile.

Grade: 8