Unsought Input

I just saw Be Kind Rewind and if you haven’t seen it or heard of it or if you kinda wanted to see it but you weren’t sure, this movie is definitely worth seeing. In fact I think this is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time. It’s funny and has heart and it also has Mos Def and Jack Black. Anyway, this post is not a review of the movie, you can read that elsewhere. This post is all about home sweded movies. The top five that I could find in about fifteen minutes at least. So, as usual, only the creme de le creme from me.

The Shining

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Ultimate Tag Warrior is a great Wordpress plugin that lets you add tagging to your blog and build your own folksonomy. You can use it to show related posts or a nifty tag cloud.

As of version 2.3, though, Worpdress has tagging built right in. That means that development on UTW has stopped, leaving us with a very nasty bug in the final version. After someone comments on a post (and the comment is approved), all the non-category tags are deleted.

This is a known bug in UTW 3.1415926. I’m not quite ready to take the plunge into Wordpress 2.3, digging up new plugins to add the features I want and changing our theme. So in the mean time, I found an ugly hack to stop our tags from vanshing into thin air.

1. Go to your ultimate-tag-warrior-core.php file.
2. Find the SaveTags function.
3. Comment out the code that removes tags that are no longer associated with the post.

The end of the SaveTags function should look like this:

// Remove any tags that are no longer associated with the post.
/*
if ($taglist == “”) {
// since “not in ()” doesn’t play nice.
$q = “delete from $tablepost2tag where post_id = $postID”;
} else {
// lop off the trailing space+comma
$taglist = substr($taglist, 0 ,-2);

$q = “delete from $tablepost2tag where post_id = $postID and tag_id not in ($taglist)”;
}
$wpdb->query($q);
*/
$this->ClearTagPostMeta($postID);
}

Please note that this is an ugly hack.  It makes it much more difficult to remove tags from a post when you want to.  I find that we get comments on posts way more often than we ever want to remove tags, so it’s a god tradeoff for the time being.

Got a better solution?  Post it in the comment below.

A few months back we wrote about the comedic possibilities of super heroes confronting real life.  In the last few years there has been a flood of super hero comics, movies, and TV shows and many of them place people with extraordinary abilities in ordinary situations.  Witness the blockbuster Spider-Man movies, or heroes like Hiro from Heroes.

But beyond the world of fiction, what kind of super powers can we find in real life?  Sure, it’s fun to come up with speculative pseudoscience explanations for Superman’s heat vision, but that’s not likely to produce any results.  Even non-powered heroes like Batman rely too much on poor comic book physics and unrealistic survivability to produce real-life counterparts.

We’ll find our real-life super powers in less obvious places.  In the 1980s Marvel had a character named Cypher, or more properly Doug Ramsey.   Doug wasn’t known by his super hero name because his power wasn’t flashy or very useful in battle - Doug was genetically gifted with the ability to understand languages.

This amazing ability to learn languages (along with numbers, dates, etc.) is something you can find in real life, often linked with disabling autism.  Often, but not always.  Watch the video to see the life of Daniel Tammet, the boy with the incredible brain.

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Did you know that all over the country, nay the world, people are being persecuted for their belief and intelligence? Did you know that a small, powerful elite controls everything that children are exposed to in school for their own devious, Darwinistic ends? Did you know that only a complete outsider, a rebel with nothing but guts and a heart of steel, can expose the truth?

You might not know these things because none of them are true. But the makers of the movie “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” and star Ben Stein will try to shovel that particular pile of poop in theaters this February. Thanks to Pharyngula, an excellent blog by an actual scientist, for the tip.

From the movie’s home page:

Ben realizes that he has been “Expelled,” and that educators and scientists are being ridiculed, denied tenure and even fired – for the “crime” of merely believing that there might be evidence of “design” in nature, and that perhaps life is not just the result of accidental, random chance.

The movie Expelled, in a sense, is nothing new. It follows the established tactics of the creationist / intelligent design crowd, trying to fight the “materialistic” “darwinists” in the court of public opinion rather than in the labs or peer-reviewed journals. It’s yet another attack on science.

“And what’s so wrong with that,” you might ask, “this is a democracy after all.”

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We’ve seen a lot of really bad movies based on video games. From Wing Commander to Super Mario Brothers to, well, everything Uwe Boll has ever made. And they don’t seem to be getting any better, or really making much money at the box office, so I can only imagine that producers green light them to punish humanity for some horrible war crime.

Once again, a million random people on the Internet are churning out better video than companies with $100 million dollar budgets. Well, they’re turning out better movie trailers, anyway. Below are the five funniest video game movie trailers we’ve seen on the web.

1. From the geniuses at College Humor, Where the f#ck is Carmen Sandiego

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Just like for Harry Potter, here are some fun videos for the release of the Simpsons Movie on Friday.

Two guitars at once, playing the Simpsons theme. Very Nice.

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In celebration (lamentation?) of the newest and final Harry Potter Book coming out, I thought I would post some Harry Potter spoofs up for some fun.

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Takashi Miike is one of the most prolific directions today who you probably have never heard off. He is most know for using extreme graphic violence and taboo subject matter in his films. Audition and Ichi the Killer feature some of the most extreme imagery put to film. However, Miike is not all shock and he is an accomplished film maker and story teller. He has directed around 14 productions covering a wide variety of subjects and genres. In the movie One Missed Call, Miike tackles the genre of J-Horror and applies his own unique vision to it.

The plot of the movie is that college students begin to receive strange ringtones on their phones and they find messages left from a few days in the future that feature themselves saying something and then screaming. The students then at the time of the message die do to some bizarre circumstances. The first falls off a bridge onto a train, then next down an elevator shaft. All of the characters that die have a piece of candy in their mouths afterwards.

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As a lefty liberal, I like Michael Moore. As a journalist (I have more creds than just a blog, I swear), not so much. Lucky for me he’s making movies for the masses and not writing for The Washington Post. Otherwise, he’d have been shut down years ago. Instead, we can enjoy his films for what they are - films that while maybe not full of “truthiness” will make people talk and think.

As Moore state in the film, SiCKO is not actually about people who don’t have health care in America. It’s more about people who DO have health insurance and get screwed by it. People who pay the premiums and deductibles and still get denied care. In America, we like to get what we pay for, but when it comes to insurance it doesn’t seem to work that way.

He tells the stories of an older couple who have gone bankrupt paying for medical treatment for heart attacks and cancer, even though they have good jobs with good insurance. The middle-aged woman who’s brain tumor was considered not a medical emergency and died. The young woman who’s surgery was paid for by her insurance and then payment was revoked when it was revealed that she had not disclosed a previous yeast infection when applying for insurance.

Moore reports in the movie that he received over 2500 emails from people with stories about the horrors of health insurance - many of them from people who work in the insurance industry. The most stand-out story was that of Linda Peno, a former medical reviewer (the person in charge of deciding who gets what care) for the Humana HMO. Ms. Peno stated in a congressional review:

I wish to begin by making a public confession. In the spring of 1987, I caused the death of a man. Although this was known to many people, I have not been taken before any court of law or called to account for this in any professional or public forum. In fact, just the opposite occurred. I was rewarded for this. It brought me an improved reputation in my job and contributed to my advancement afterwards. Not only did I demonstrate that I could do what was asked, expected of me, I exemplified the good company employee. I saved a half a million dollars.

It may be no secret that insurance companies are for-profit businesses and saving money is their game. After all, we’re a capitalist society. But is this the right way to go? Moore points out our socialized fire and police protection. Our free schools. Free libraries. Why not free, government-controlled health care? (more…)

I could turn this into a simple review of Knocked Up. I could say that, while funny, well-cast and full of Katherine Heigl hottness, its needless and mostly uncritical obsession over celebrity culture (and the repeated celebrity cameos) dulls it faster than an evening watching C-SPAN. I could point out the major disconnect of the main character’s obsession with celebrity nudity with the fact that we never get to see any of Katherine Heigl’s naughty bits, despite two sex scenes and a tub scene. I could list all the ways that Judd Apatow, Seth Rogen and all the supporting characters are interconnected in such a way to make Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon devotees cream their jeans.

But no, the reason Knocked Up has me swearing off paying $8 for a theater ticket and another $8 for popcorns and sodas (yeah, things are cheap here in Vermont sometimes) is because I’ve already seen it. Sure, it’s a largely original movie, and I’m not going to claim Apatow stole the ideas for it from an previous work (barring, perhaps, the Miracle of Life, that sex-ed film we all had to watch in the eighth grade). But if you’ve seen just one trailer for the comedy, then you’ve seen the whole damn movie.

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In honor of the passing of Jerry Falwell, who made a mockery of Christ’s teachings, we present the best mockeries of Jesus himself. Actually, that’s a bit harsh - these aren’t really mockeries, more like satire.

1. First off, in Passion of the Christ 2, Judgment Day, we see Hollywood logic extended to Mel Gibson’s blockbuster. A box-office hit deserves a sequel, and any self-respecting sequel needs twice as many explosions.

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To start off the big summer movie season I saw two of the most hyped movies, Spiderman 3 and 28 Weeks Later. Both of these were supposed to be action-packed movies with a thrill a minute. Needless to say I was not impressed by either.

First Spiderman 3… when exactly did they decide that the needed to make Spiderman more Emo in this movie? Were they doing market research and said “hey lots of kids today are whiny bitches let’s make Spiderman more like that so people relate more to him.” The main problem with the movie is that there were too many villains and no plot line. We get the the New Goblin, Sandman and Venom and yet the stories for all of them are beyond lame, and none of them are really bad guys they’re just misunderstood. Heck Sandman even killed Spiderman’s Uncle and he still forgives him, lame. The special effects were cool but they weren’t enough to make of for all the cheesy lame scenes.

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Spider-Man 3 seems like a shoo-in to join Spider-Man 1 and 2 in the top ten highest-grossing films of all time, but reviews have been mixed. Right now it’s running about 60% positive at Metacritic and 61% positive at Rotten Tomatoes.

So is it any good? I thought so, but this isn’t a movie review. As an internationally-recognized expert in Spidey Studies, I thought it would be important to point out where Spider-Man 3 gets it right, and where it get things wrong. I’ll start with the bad news first, with the good news to follow in the next day or two.

Please note: this is not a series of gripes over deviations from the “cannon” of the original Amazing Spider-Man comic books or anything like that. Spider-Man, like many of his his comic book and other literary brethren, has been written by many different people over the years in many different media. Instead, I hope to point out where Sam Raimi deviated from the crux of the characters or missed opportunities that presented themselves.

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