V for Vendetta: Great Movie or Greatest Movie?

I saw V for Vendetta on Saturday. If you haven't seen it, don't read beyond this paragraph because I'm going to deal in spoilers here. But I will say this and you can read it without fear: V for Vendetta is a great film. Pay no neverminds to the mainstream film reviewers who're being very cautious in their praise because of the "controversial" subject matter. I think their reaction to The Matrix was similarly tepid. For me, I thought not only was V for Vendetta better than the trailers let on, but the film is better in many respects than the graphic novel it's based on. Call me a blasphemer.

Spoilers below:

V for Vendetta is to left-leaning film audiences living under the reign of Bush the Younger what the graphic novel was for left-leaning comic readers under the reign of Thatcher and Reagan: a message of hope and solidarity in a time of political darkness. It's a great big happy billboard posted up for all to see that, even though it may seem differently, you are not alone. That even though the media tells you that the so-called silent majority is in support of those things you oppose, they are, in fact, with you. Not only are they with you, but if it gets bad enough, that silent majority will rise up with you and topple those who seek to tyrannize a free people.

The movie's a fantasy, sure, but even if it's just a palliative, it made me feel better for a couple hours, so it works. V for Vendetta is not, as some in the mainstream media have tried to suggest, a call to arms or a celebration of terrorists who blow up buildings (even though the hero of the film does say, "Blowing up a building can change the world." Roeper has a good opinion on this line here.) To me, this film was an opportunity to sit in a dark theater and have a mini political catharsis. Not that a film like this could make up for how depressed I felt in November of 2004 when I discovered I would be living under W's administration for a further 4 years, but it helped. It's that good. The ending of the film was, for me, one of the best moments I've seen in a film since the Kaiser Soze reveal in The Usual Suspects. And what's amazing, what's so impressive, is that you see it coming the whole time and it's shocking and exciting. Because of how awful and repressive the government in the film is, the explosions that end all of that are beautiful. Matrix was no fluke. These guys know how to tell a story.

V for Vendetta is a cautionary tale. Despite what some on the right are saying, the Wachowskis aren't asserting that the fascist England of the future where V for Vendetta is a mirror of our current reality, only that fascism, though the term sounds old and musty, is still possible in a so-called Western democracy, and that if we let it, our governments can and will sink to it. (For a little backstory, the story of V for Vendetta, as Moore conceived it, was to tell a story set in an alternate England where the Nazis won WWII). The film tells the story of Evey Hammond (Natalie Portman), an average citizen of this poisoned country, who, with the help of the Morpheus-like, masked "terrorist" V (played by Hugo Weaving) "frees her mind" from the years of government propaganda she's been indoctrinated with. He takes extraordinary measures to allow her to live without fear; the fear the government has used as a tool to control the populace her entire life.

In addition to being a cautionary tale, V for Vendetta is a celebration of the amateur conspiracy theorist in all of us. Once the facts of a government conspiracy have been exposed to the public, the conspiracy theorist believes, the citizenry will rise up and make things right again. This film allows one to think, even if just for a few minutes, that given enough information, the people WILL rise up and make things right again, and it's a great feeling. McTeague and the Wachowskis have fashioned a film that builds to the climax so well, so forcefully, so brilliantly, that I came out of this movie beaming, and excited that others would see this film and be similarly affected. I came out of this film feeling the same way I did after seeing Fahrenheit 911, and JFK in the theater. I know both of those films were essentially propaganda films that played fast and loose with the facts, but that didn't make them any less effective or well-made. V for Vendetta, on the other hand, is fiction. There are no facts that require massaging. If critics believe this film is purposely critical of current governments, than it's because they see similarities.

It seems that every now and again we need to be reminded why we shouldn't trust our governments implicitly. Huxley reminded us with Brave New World, Orwell with 1984, Bradbury with Fahrenheit 451, and I think V for Vendetta is our first reminder of the 21st century, and I think it's about time. Late in the film, one of the characters, a lesbian who was rounded up by the government, experimented on, and finally murdered, tells the story of England's descent into fascism through her own experience. She talks about how they used God to give them moral superiority. How they took bloodless, unfamiliar words, and gave them terrible meanings. She mentions "rendition" as an example, which is, I believe, a direct and pointed criticism of the Bush administration. Rendition means only "to give", or "to relinquish". Pretty harmless. But in Bushworld, rendition now means to hand over prisoners to other countries for the express purpose of being tortured. The cunning use of euphemism to do awful things the citizenry might object to is one of the hallmarks of a fascist government. So while the totalitarian England of V for Vendetta has much more in common with Nazi Germany than with modern day America, there are chilling reminders that there are similarities, and they seem to get more numerous every day. Last week US News and World Report reported that the Bush administration could give no assurances they were not doing warrantless searches of people and property under the same "authority" they believe allows them to do warrantless domestic wiretaps. Scary stuff. As Keith Olberman said on his show, "If there were a prequel to 1984, might this be the first chapter?"

And though there are moments in V for Vendetta that seem naive or fanciful -- the entire populace coming out wearing V's Guy Fawkes masks to demand a change in their government, for example -- the fact is something very much like that really happened a couple of years ago, albeit without the awesome masks. In the Ukraine, a fairly Westernized country, a handsome reformer ran against the Russian stooge incumbent. When the reformer got too popular, the intelligence service poisoned him. When that didn't work, they rigged the election. That would have done it, except the people rose up as one, gathered in the square, and demanded the Russian stooge go out, and the reformer go in. They stayed and they stayed, and finally, the Ukrainian president stepped down. When faced with an attempted coup d'etat, the people staged their own, successful one. So while some may say it's naive to think the people could ever rise up and speak truth to power with one voice as it happens in the movie, and most days I'd be one of those saying this, what may be more naive, more dangerous, is to think abuses of power and shifts away from representative government and towards fascism couldn't happen here. Anyway, I know that I've probably set expectations impossibly high for this movie, and you may come out of this movie totally disagreeing with me, but I really loved this movie and wanted to let you all know about it. It may be that after Ultraviolet, I could have gone to see Maid in Manhattan and been equally blown away, but I don't think so.

For an interesting, alternative view, go to Mike Moran's blog, Moranadu. He has a totally different take on the movie.

Before I end this way-long post, I wanted to link ya'll to this awesome clip. It's a video for a musician named Vitalic. It's called Birds and it has a lot of dogs in it, a la House of Dogs, flying around in slow-motion. Equal parts hilarious and mesmerizing, the thing that makes me watch it again and again (or rather hear it again and again) is the music. Just frickin' good. Makes me want to write. All right. More tomorrow.

Right Up There With Mortal Kombat: Annhilation, Ultraviolet Isn't Just The Worst Movie of 2006. It's The Worst Movie of the 21st Century

I forgot to tell you. Last week, Speck, my brother Patrick and I went to see the new Kurt Wimmer movie, Ultraviolet. I'd seen Wimmer's freshman effort, Librium, which Wimmer wrote and directed. While it did have problems, it wasn't a bad movie. Christian Bale, Emily Watson, the dude who played Robert the Bruce in Braveheart: all good actors doing good work. Years back I'd read, courtesy of Heath, an original draft of the screenplay and liked it. Though, in the final product, more interesting elements from that first draft were either watered down or eliminated completely, I thought the ambition behind Wimmer's film was worthy, and if he ever had more say in his film product, the result might be surprising ... if not good, exactly, than at least watchable, mindless entertainment. Even if it turned out to be a bad movie, we thought it would be bad in an inoffensive, Blade 3 sort of way.

Not so.

Ultraviolet is the most badly-written, badly-acted, non-sensical, sci-fi film to have a theatrical release in, I don't know ... my lifetime? The CGI was stunningly bad. They looked like cut scenes from a PS1 video game. Mind-boggling. In one neverending sequence, Milla Jovovich, who plays Violet, touches what looks like a compass on her belt which then allows her to drive her motorcycle up the sides of buildings while dodging bullets shot from a squadron of government helicopters. Like The Matrix as written by an 11-year old, and then directed by the guy who couldn't get into film school (which you KNOW means a non-talent). Not since Pootie Tang have I walked out of a movie, but we walked out of this one a half hour in and got some movie passes. I would say stay away from this one, but I know nary a one of you was even contemplating checking this one out, so I won't insult your intelligence. This one stung pretty bad. It'll be a long time before I see another movie I wasn't dead-sold on before going. Thank God V for Vendetta's coming out tomorrow.

Also, please, check out Heath's story on Literary Smackdown. And also Hinesy's. And Abe's. And now, freshly posted today, Shawn's. It's all good stuff, and you should give it a read. All three of you who still check this thing. All right. Tomorrow I'm busy with family stuff, so no blog action. I'll return on Monday with more crap. I mean Inanities. Have a good weekend.

Thanks for Visiting! Now Go To This Other Blog.

Today, I'm merely going to direct your attention to Hinesy's blog, The Literary Smackdown. For the month of March I've been the MC over there, introducing the authors and posting up their entries. The writing challenge that got the Smackdown party started this month was an exercise from John Gardner's how-to book, The Art of Fiction. The assignment: "describe a lake as seen by a young man who's just killed someone. Do not mention the murder." So to read my entry, go here. I encourage you to read the other three entries also -- it's worth your time. Good times.

In an Attempt to Free Louis XIV From the Guillotine, Blinky Charges Through a Crowd of 18th Century Parisians

This is a big "painting" I did my senior year in high-school. It's much too large for my little scanner, so I took a digital photo of it which is what you're looking at now. As you may notice, the image is a little out of focus on the left side of the frame. Anyway, I use quotation marks around "painting" because drawing with watercolor pencils and then using a water-laden brush to spread that color around (which is what I did here), seems to be painting only in the most technical sense. This is really a drawing I colored in. Probably no one would ever say I painted this. Anyway, whatever it is, it was partly inspired by Eugene Delacroix's Liberty Guiding the People. It's a cool painting, and not just because Liberty's dress has fallen down. I tried to grab a little of that painting's energy and that sense of capturing a big, crowd moment in a still frame with this dopey thing. What you see here is an attempt at a mob scene featuring yours, mine, and everyone's favorite anti-hero, Mr. Blinky. But more than all of that serious-sounding So-and-So-Painting-Influenced-My-Art stuff, I was just drawing a scene from my still-percolating Mr. Blinky screenplay. I was still writing it at the time. The script features only the most original, thought-provoking stuff; the kind of material Hollywood literary agents step over one another to represent: time travel, Nazis, elaborate special effects, vast arenas filled with costumed extras, and glorious "catchy" lines like, "I've got to save time."

Anyway, I also wanted to link you guys to something I saw on Aintitcoolnews. This is Peter Jackson accepting the award for best movie of the year for King Kong at the Empire Magazine awards. During his acceptance speech, which was taped, he included a King Kong blooper reel showing all the film's stars flubbing their lines and then immediately saying "F*ck!" afterwards. Hilarious. The best thing about it is Andy Serkis doing a little impromptu dance number while in the Kong motion-capture costume. The result had me rolling. Literally. Floating in mid-air like Sigourney Weaver in Ghostbusters just doing barrel rolls above my desk. See if you don't.

All right. More tomorrow.

The Two Hours I Spent With a One Half of Filliam H. Muffman

Went to see Transamerica today. We saw it at the giant 24-screen Regal Cinemas megaplex down in Chamblee. It's sort of new. Driving north on Interstate 85, we've passed by it a few times, on each occasion marvelling at how repugnant pink and purple neon is (which this theater has in spades), and how much I prefer AMC to Regal. Regal, after all, was the first theater corporation (as far as I know) to show a 20-30 minute reel of commercials masquerading as "behind the scenes" info-tainment before the previews even begin. Regal calls it "The Twenty" which is the theater version of televisions hanging in every corner of a restaurant: something to relieve us poor humans of the burden of conversation. So those casual discussions you used to have before the movie started with the people that brung you, are increasingly becoming a thing of the past. I know. I don't appreciate anything until it's gone, either. AMC used to be superior in this respect, kow-towing in a smaller way to their bottomline by showing a relatively unobtrusive slide show of ads and "trivia". Slightly annoying, but quiet at least. But now AMC has their own thing. I don't know what it's called, but it's as abhorrent as Regal's "The Twenty".

And another thing: though both AMC and Regal have cupholders built into their armrests, AMC's armrest-cupholders seem to jut further out, allowing at least part of the seated moviegoer's arm to actually rest on the armrest. At Regal, the cupholders are much closer to the seated moviegoer's arms, making it impossible to rest any part of the arm on the armrest. If you force the issue and use the armest as it was intended, then you start to lose feeling in your hand because your wrist is pressed uncomfortably by the force of its own weight into the thin plastic rim of the cupholder. I think that sucks. I had to tuck my elbows between the armrests and fold them awkwardly across my lap for most of the movie. I do concede that some part of my trouble with the armrests stems from my having giant monkey arms, but surely I'm not the only one.

But anyway, enough of that. Transamerica. While watching this movie I thought about how structurally boring and lazy road movies can be. I know it's possible to make good road movies (Dumb and Dumber, Grapes of Wrath, Easy Rider supposedly), but writing a road movie in the first place seems like a lazy undertaking from a screenwriting point of view. It's so easy to just inject a new character or a new place into the story to give it a little narrative juice, that by the time the credits roll, they almost always feel kind of cheap and weightless. In a lot of ways, Transamerica felt like one of these good-effort road movies, but even with the interesting characters and the issues of "transgendered" people interacting with the rest of the world, the movie seems by-the-numbers and without dramatic weight. I walked out of the theater feeling a little like I hadn't actually seen anything. The performances are mostly believable. Felicity Huffman manages to pull off playing a male character trying to pass as a woman. She wears a prosthetic penis for a couple of scenes, and though this seems admirable and "brave" for an actress who's not classically pretty to do, it kind of adds to the stunt-like quality of the performance. It's hard to forget while watching Transamerica (which was released by the original Oscar-whores, the Weinsteins) that Huffman, like Theron before her playing a rough-looking lesbian serial killer, or Hillary Swank before them both, playing a lesbian trying to pass as a boy, that these actresses are all hunting for Oscar. I wonder: if there was no such thing as the Academy Awards, which is itself a strange and arbitrary singling out of films and performances as "Best" every year, would we still see this peculiar sub-niche of indie movies that revolve around a bravura, appearance-altering performance from some comely actress? I kind of doubt it. But I also don't mean to suggest Transamerica is a bad movie. It's not boring, and it never shifts off-tone, but because not much was risked narratively, I don't think much was gained either.

Before I go, I wanted to direct your attentions to a blog freshly inaugurated by my good friend from Massachusettes, Mike Moran, (SOF class of '01). It's only got one post so far, but Mike's got a unique and interesting (some might say slightly cynical) viewpoint, so I'm looking forward to his posts. Here's the link to MORANADU! More tomorrow.

An Experiment in Sequential Art

It is Friday and I am tired. I ran up and down the street flying a kite today at my in-laws, and being as out of shape as I am, that much exercise can lay me out for a few weeks. It's a strain for me to even type, much less think of something to type. Here goes.

A while back, I asked Shawn Harwell to write a couple pages of a graphic novel idea (any idea) he had, so I could work on something that wasn't Blinky or that "Untitled Sarah Hill project" (a page of which I posted up here). Shawn obliged with a compelling opening to a graphic novel involving hitmen, ultra-violence, regret, and, I'm guessing, redemption. I don't know the end. Anyway, as a capper for the week, I'm posting up this bit of comic art I did for Shawn's graphic novel idea. This was mostly an experiment. I wanted to see how this story in particular might look drawn in white pencil on black paper. This section of the page worked out all right, but the rest of the page (not pictured) did not. Thus the omission. I think when I do get around to drawing up a finished page (I've got all 4 or 5 pages thumbnailed out), I'll just do it in standard black ink on white, though I think I'll be liberal with the ink. This style of white on black paper doesn't really allow for sketching first, and then laying the finished drawing down over the sketch, and I usually make lots o' mistakes.

Anyway, I'm through boring you people this week. I am up out of here. Er'rybody have a good weekend.

Thursday's Inanity: A Risque Cover for a Nuts and Bolts How To Draw Manual, and the Birth of a Speck

If anyone's been looking for the 21st century version of How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, I've got the book you've been looking for. Here it is: How to Draw: The Best of Wizard Basic Training. Back when I was a major comics geek (I've since been demoted to minor comics geek), I used to love the "How to Draw" sections in each month's Wizard magazine where they'd offer cool drawing tips to would-be comic artists. As with most how-to books, the results of the amateur are often shockingly unlike the work of the pro, but while you're reading and before you've set pencil to paper to produce the predictably depressing result, you're thinking, "Yeah, I can do this!" If people knew they couldn't do beforehand, how-to books would never be profitable. Anyway, they cover everything in this one. From the precise pencils, inks, and paper the pros use, to a quick clinic on perspective, great tips for inking, coloring, composition, everything. So if you're a'hankering for some draw'rin books, I'd suggest you take a gander at this one. If you click on the link, you can, as the image says, search inside of the book to see sample pages.

In Crane news, today was laid back but kinda fun. Went to Best Buy today so David Speck could return Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. He bought it the other night and we tried to watch it but the transfer was so bad, it was almost hard in places to concentrate on the movie. It's been a long time since I've seen anything on DVD look that bad. Anyone else had an issue with the movie? Ran around to a couple of other places, than headed home and played Punisher and Halo multiplayer for hours. It's good times. And because it is Speck's 27th birthday today, we had some chicken enchilada ring and some ice cream cake. He heads out to do his shoot tomorrow. Anyway, back to Halo. More tomorrow.

The Story of the Dog Who Was Cooler Than Me

My good friend (and loyal Inanities reader) David Speck is out in Atlanta visiting me and Peggy for a few days before he begins a Yamaha corporate video shooting south of the city. We were headed out to my local AMC to see 16 Blocks when we stopped at a red light. In my peripheral vision I spotted a dog in an SUV to our left, a mutt by the looks of it, with its head sticking out the window, enjoying the temperate sunny weather. I looked back to the light: still red. Then I realized the dog was wrong somehow. I looked back at it and saw something I've never seen before.

The dog was wearing sunglasses.

It wasn't wearing sunglasses in the same way we're all used to: a regular pair of our own, made for humans, placed on the dog's face for a joke or a photo op, usually staying in place for 5 seconds tops before the dog manages to shake them off. This dog was wearing full-on Made For Dogs sunglasses. Much, if not exactly like the sunglasses pictured. They were strapped on tight, but not too tight, and the dog seemed content and unencumbered by them. If a dog could be said to wear sunglasses naturally, this dog was doing so. I watched with eyes a-goggled, mouth agape, not sure what to think. "What could the purpose of those possibly be?" I asked. Beside me, David was busily trying to cycle through menu options on his elaborate PDA-Phone thing to get to the camera option, but by then the car carrying the too-cool-for-school pooch was too far away for a decent camera phone picture. The trend-setting dog got away, his coolness escaping with him undocumented.

Does anyone know what the hell these things could be for? Are these doggy sunglasses what I think they are, being just another needless pet accessory inflicted on animals who'd be better than fine without them? Or is this the result of some obscure study that says dog's eyes need protection from the sun as much as human eyes? I don't know, but this was a first for me, and I thought I'd share that with you folks. Has anyone seen this strange phenomenon before?

Anyway, 16 Blocks was very good. Speck liked it too. Well-acted, well-directed (surprisingly), and it did a bunch of very creative, admirable things within the constraints of the genre that worked very well. Bruce Willis does a great turn as an old used-up dirty cop trying to do the right thing for once, David Morse is fantastic as usual playing the heavy, and Mos Def is, well, kind of annoying with the voice he affects for the role, but he's clearly not another rapper trying to be an actor. He can act. One of the best things the screenwriter accomplished was making what appears at first to be a fairly run-of-the-mill cop thriller into something unpredictable and surprising. 16 Blocks was a great couple of hours and well worth a weekend matinee. If box office receipts signified quality, 16 Blocks would have the number one film this past weekend.

The Geto Boys WISH They Were as Hard as Natalie Portman

Natalie Portman hosted SNL this past Saturday. I missed it. As soon as I saw they were opening the show with yet another bit of criminally weak Bush-related "political satire" featuring more of Will Forte's tone deaf impression, and because I knew that Natalie Portman (not an actress previously known for her comedic ability) was hosting, I thought for sure this would be yet another forgettable (if not awful) episode of the show. But over the past couple days, this clip's been making the rounds on the internet. It's the pixie-looking Natalie Portman, still growing her hair out from V for Vendetta, doing the hardest kind of hardcore "gangsta" rap. In the same vein as the uber-hilarious gangsta raps Chris Parnell does sometimes on Weekend Update, this short features Portman cursing a blue streak, slapping cast members, pushing away an autograph-seeking child dressed as Amidala, smashing bottles over her own head, and looking "hard" and a little insane in general. Pretty funny. Take a gander.

Academy Awards 2006: BOOOOORRRRRING!

Hello all! Now that the quasi-hiatus is behind us, we can get back to current events. So, today, I'm going to get to the thing everyone's talking about (or at least talking about not talking about), the Oscars. The 2006 awards were all handed out last night, and there was some great choices (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and some not-so-great choices (Memoirs of a Geisha over The New World, or over Batman Begins for cinematography?). The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences can be a hard group to take seriously. They passed up chances to anoint modern classics like Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, Shawshank Redemption, or LA Confidential, in order to give the Best Picture nod to, respectively, Dances with Wolves, Forrest Gump, and Titanic. All of the films in these cases were actually good movies, I thought, but they were also not the best film of their respective years. So in 2006, we were lucky that Munich, the best film released this past year, was nominated at all. It looked to be a close thing there at the end of the nominating process. A lot of folks in Hollywood would have been happy to see Munich drop off the face of the earth, but it gutted it out and managed to make the top five list after all. But because Munich was the best film of last year, of COURSE it wouldn't win. But Crash? Not even Brokeback, but Crash? Inexplicable.

I'm not sure what to make of Crash winning the big award. I'm still not even sure what I think of this movie. I guess the reason I don't know what to think about Crash is because I never thought much about it after I saw it in the theater. It isn't the kind of movie that stays with you, at least it didn't stay with me. Crash seems to be more about a message than about a particular story, (and is that ever good?) and the message in Crash seems to be "racism is bad, but not all racists are bad people." Or maybe it's "racists are bad people, but sometimes bad people do good things"? I don't know. Is it the best movie of last year? Not by a long shot.

As for the award show itself, it presented once more the eternal Academy Award show conundrum -- how do you make this crap interesting? From the looks of things, making the proceedings watchable seems to be really damn hard. How do you perform almost universally awful "Best" Song nominees without boring everyone? The producer of the show, Gill Cates, seems to think interpretive dance is sometimes the answer, which he did with the performance of the first ever rap song nominee. But isn't it never the answer?

Another difficulty: how to get the largely humorless audience of actors and producers and film execs that comprise the Oscars audience to laugh? Doesn't seem to matter which comedic genius you throw at them, they're going to greet the guy with dull grins and muted, polite laughter.

And maybe the biggest challenge: how to make the often mind-numbing acceptance speeches acceptable. This year, Cates decided to play soft orchestral music over the winners' entire speech, instead of just at the end to get them the hell off the stage. I guess he did this to make everyone feel like they had just 5 seconds to finish during the whole of their alloted 30 seconds, resulting in super-rushed sounding speeches. I don't particularly enjoy hearing the soulless, award-acceptor-bot Hillary Swank, for example, thanking her cadre of lawyers, (as she did last year), but I don't know if limiting everyone to 30 or 60 seconds is quite the answer either. I know it's not a major deal for Reese Witherspoon to have only a minute to thank everyone who needs thanking, but for a lot of the winners, especially some of the technical guys or the animated short guys, this is the culmination of their professional lives. It sucks that some of them don't even get the oppotunity to say a single thing.

I guess a good Oscar show is like a good World Series: it depends on who's up that year. If great movies people care about are nominated (and have the added value of actually being good), and the Academy hires a good host who can nimbly riff on whatever happens on-stage, then you got the makings of a good show, but not even that guarantees it. The law of averages dictates that most Oscar shows are going to be, in the words of Mel Gibson, "as boring as a dog's ass."

In the Appliance Mosh Pit, the Atari 2600 Strangles the S**t Out of One of Them New-Fangled PS2's. Like Vanessa Williams, I Saved the Best For Last

Is it Friday already? Wow. I can't believe the quasi-hiatus is over so soon. Seems like the hiatus began just, geez, 4 or 5 days ago. Well, it's been an amazing journey. We've made incredible dicoveries together, you and I, revelations about "art", pop culture, and deleted comments we'll always remember. Who could forget those Michelangelo-esque drawings of the Alien Ant Farmers, rocking out like it was 2003? And with household appliances no less! Lol. And what about the picture of everyone's favorite magician-in-training, 15-year old Emma Watson, throwing back a Corona like she was 17-and-a-half and enrolled at FSU? What times we've had! These are indelible images that will last all of us a lifetime, and I'm so grateful we've been together this week to share in the magic that was the Crane's Inanities Quasi-Hiatus of March 2006. Hope your weekends don't feel like pale, lifeless facsimiles of your former lives, now that all of you are, in a way, doomed to live forever in the shadow of these quasi-hiatus posts. Life may have peaked for us this week.

What? I don't know either.

Anyway. Oscars Sunday. More blog on Monday.

Thursday's Quasi-Hiatus Storyboards

The fridge gets jostled by a jammin' AAF band member and beer pours inexplicably from the freezer. Luckily, loyal dependable vacuum cleaner is on hand to clean up. The tiny insert shows an inebriated vacuum cleaner only moments after the spill clean-up. There you go. The quasi-hiatus continues!

Hermione Granger's No Lush!

Because it's truly criminal that loyal Inanity-reader and A-#1 harrasshole Heath Michaels ever be bored at work, even on this blogger's quasi-hiatus, I'm posting up this picture of Emma Watson, AKA Hermione Granger, "tipping one back" at the tender age of 15. This picture comes straight off of Gawker, where they have a snippet of prose about the photo beneath the photo. In the comments on Gawker, someone suggests Emma's only faking taking a swig, and the more I look at it (and I've looked at it more than I care to admit), the more it does look like she's just kidding. Hermione would never engage in underage drinking.

Wednesday's Quasi-Hiatus Storyboard

This is Dryden singing to an electric mixer. Again, these are music videos. The bar is not, and never has been set very high. Enjoy your hump day er'rybody, and check out the Smackdown for the new March writing topic I posted. It's a short one, so everyone can try it! (he said, waaay more optimistic than he had any right to be).

Tuesday's Quasi-Hiatus Storyboards

What is there to say about this one? Or any of these really? It's all about the animate and inanimate, coming together to share in the joy of amazing music. Music videos, dudes. Also, someone mentioned the Pixar lamp from yesterday's post. Well yeah, that's the Pixar lamp in the middle. It's one of the lamps I know how to draw because I used to have one.

Here's another instance of a guy in the band rocking with an appliance. Vem and Tony, (the Klasfeld proteges who directed this thing), were throwing out ideas for human/appliance interaction. I wrote down the ideas they agreed were board-worthy, sketched them out for their approval, then I went home and drew it up purty like this into the wee hours. I don't know how this toaster thing came out in the video, but it reads pretty well in the form of a drawing. All right. More tomorrow.

A Week-Long Quasi-Hiatus

Hope everyone had an excellent weekend. Sure enough, it rained all day Saturday. Again. Thanks Atlanta weather. Also, for anyone who's wondering, Friday night's Goizueta Business School prom went fine. I just followed my wife around the room as she said hi to people I'd either never met or had met before only briefly, making sure to smile pleasantly when necessary, even to laugh when it looked like someone had just finished saying something funny, even if I couldn't really hear them. And since the DJ never once played a slow song (can you really call a dance without slow songs a "prom"?), I was relieved of my duty to dance a few. So it went off much better than I had any reason to expect.

At any rate, I'm doing a week-long hiatus this week. Not because I'm so swamped or anything, but just to try and recharge the blog-part of my brain a little. Now, I know that often (if not all the time) I've posted up blog entries that required almost nothing at all in the way of thought or effort, in essence a day's hiatus, I've decided that instead of a full-on dead-blog hiatus, I'll just post up a storyboard each day (I've got tons of them), maybe accompanied by a brief comment, or maybe not. So, like a mini-blog break for me, but still something to look at for you folks when you check back here.

So this week I'm posting up a storyboards from an Alien Ant Farm video I did way back in 2003 called "Glow". I never saw this video, so post up a comment if this looks familiar to you -- I'd like to know how the video came out. The concept behind this one (BTW, not a Marc Klasfeld-directed video) is that Alien Ant Farm is rocking out with a bunch of household appliances. The appliances get into the music and the performance begins to feature some familiar elements from wild, teenager-filled concerts. So, here's Monday's storyboard: one of the Ant Farmers head-banging alongside a lamp. Brilliance.

A Dog Who Strangles Itself Against Its Chain Without a Sound. Just one of Many Strange Goings On in a Gated Community Called Canaan Cove

This is a thumbnail for an illustration I'm planning to do one day for my novel, or, as I call it these days, just "Book". Even if my planned illustrations, most of which exist only in my head, amount to nothing more than "value-adders" for my own vanity press edition, that's fine. Illustrations in books are cool. Something very nineteenth-century about them that I like. Anyway, this is an image from a new element I added into the first half. The protagonist's odious next-door neighbor is, among other things, the caretaker of an unusual dog who appears only in the hours between nightfall and sunrise, during which time it works tirelessly (not to mention silently) to free itself from its chain. I added a couple of scenes involving the dog because I needed to foreshadow certain elements of the second half, and this new section helped me do that. Though this image was intended as a sketch for some other more finished-looking version, I kind of like the rough version.

Anyway, it's Friday and I'm going to a prom tonight with Peggy. Yes, Emory's business school has a prom. I thought I was done with this sort of stuff after the wedding. Oh well. Peggy got a new dress and everything. So I guess I'm going to get totally wasted at this bacchanal and cut a lil' rug 'till the wee hours. Or was I just going to sit at a table cramming hors d'oeuvres while watching business-dorks dance? I forget. One of the two.

Hope everyone has a good weekend.

A Couple Pages From the Last Thing I Read

With some of my Christmas book-cash, I went to Barnes and Noble and bought the Acme Novelty Library Vol. 16, written and drawn by the oft-discussed graphic novelist, Chris Ware. I've been reading Ware's stuff each week in the New York Times Magazine -- late last year they started publishing a page each week of a series called Building Stories. The story in the Acme Novelty Library is like the Building Stories: depressing, hyper-realistic, usually told in real-time about crushingly regular people having bad times that may likely strike the reader as eerily familiar. Anyway, in ANLVol.16 (what a goofy title), Chris Ware puts himself into the story. In interviews he talks about the perception that he draws depressing comics, and insists that depressing people is not his aim. He addresses this perception very neatly in (deep breath) Acme Novelty Library Vol. 16 in these two pages. The punchline is, for me, hilarious. See what you think.

(Also: any opinions or notes on whether or not my posting this copyrighted material on my blog is illegal or not? It feels kind of illegal. I mean, what's stopping me from scanning in the whole thing and posting it, right? Is an attributed, 2-page sample constitute copyright violation? Does anyone have any info on this subject?)

All right. Tomorrow be Friday. More then.

The Other Genius Show on HBO: David Simon's "The Wire"

When I was laid up with my broken leg, I did a lot of video game playing, a lot of writing, and a lot of TV watching. One of the shows I discovered laying in bed those many weeks, was HBO's The Wire. It's a fantastic show and, in my opinion, as brilliant and well-done in its way as The Sopranos. It was into its third season when I found it, and I got really sucked into it. It's hard not to. Does anyone remember the short-lived ABC series written by Stephen King called Kingdom Hospital? In doing the press for that show, Stephen King talked about wanting to do a "novel made for television". Well, Kingdom Hospital wasn't that, it turned out to be just more bad TV, but The Wire is the real deal -- TV with the breadth and depth of great, sweeping novels. Not creaky, "classic" literature, but the good stuff you don't mind reading. A while back, Peggy got the first season of The Wire from a colleague and for all that time, it's been sitting on my bookshelf in the cellophane, just sitting there. I unwrapped it a couple weeks ago and have been watching episode after episode ever since. Addictive stuff. I'm on episode 9 now, and I'm starting to think that as good as that third season was, and it was fantastic, the first season is even better.

The first season of The Wire follows a unit of detectives assigned to bring down Baltimore's newest drug lord, a kingpin from the projects named Avon Barksdale. Det. McNulty is the homicide detective who's most driven to bust Barksdale and put a crimp in the drug trade in the projects of Baltimore. At least for a while. The show is from the same guys who did the NBC show, Homicide, which was also brilliant and groundbreaking for its time. But when your show's on HBO, you can go all the way with the realism. On HBO, the writers (like David Simon, the exec. producer of the show) can put real (read: profanity-laced) street dialogue in the mouths of their street characters, and real (read: same) cop dialogue in the mouths of their cop characters, and if there's a show that needs that level of authenticity, it's this one. Far from the glamourized, cartoonish world of CSI where titillating violence is perpetrated and investigated by beautiful people, where clues appear magically, and suspects confess about 50% of the time, the writers' aim with The Wire is much bigger -- this show's intent is to depict the inner workings of law enforcement in a big, drug-corrupted city with a realism and a seriousness of purpose never before attempted on TV. With airtime divided equally between the cops and the criminals, this show is about the on-the-ground reality of the so-called "War on Drugs", and it's pretty clear we're not winning.

The Wire shows how law enforcement works in the real world. We watch cops building, methodically, step-by-tedious-step, a case the DA's can prosecute and win. We go through the procedure to tap pay phones, clone pagers, the hours of sitting around and watching nothing much going on, the lies they tell to cover each other's ass. Though it's the nitty gritty of police work we're seeing, not a second of it is boring. The Baltimore of The Wire is a place where homicide detectives call each other "murder police", where their superiors are happy with them if they solve just eight murders in a year, and where, if a suspect gets too mouthy in an interrogation room, he will be beaten by cops.

And in great news, HBO's bringing The Wire back for a fourth season. Should start filming soon, and airing later this year. Oh, HBO. How I wish you were free.

Anyway, it's great, great stuff, and I reccomend ya'll check it out if you have the time.

Remember Math?

Does anyone remember math? Not the practical kind you use in real life, like figuring 15% for a tip at Longhorn Steakhouse, but the useless high-school kind? I've been doing a few practice GRE math questions today and I'm a little shocked at how very little of that stuff I do actually remember. Did you know that all of the exterior angles of a figure always add up to 360 degrees? I sure didn't. I'm not sure I ever knew that. I don't even remember how to multiply fractions anymore. So doing these practice GRE math questions has been an exercise in humility. I know so very very little. When I go in tomorrow for a "practice" test at a Kaplan testing center, I'm fully expecting to embarrass myself on the quantitative section. Here's an example of a question that I took a good look at, and then straight up gave up on. (I'm choosing the hardest one I've seen so far just to keep everyone on their toes):

17.) Jane must select three different items for each dinner she will serve. The items are to be chosen from among 5 different vegetarian and 4 different meat selections. If at least one of the selections must be vegetarian, how many different dinners could Jane create?
a) 30
b) 40
c) 60
d) 70
e) 80

The explanation in the back of the book made my mind hurt. I encourage you to give it a shot. 1 in 5 of you will get it right. Or will you? Or are those odds? I don't know odds, and 1 in 5 of you probably won't get it. 1 in 10? Less than that? Peggy?

Anyway, if anyone is interested, I'll post up the answer and the explanation tomorrow.

Schnauzers and Addictive Flash Games

The weekend is over, though you wouldn't know it by the weather. It's been raining for the past 3 weekends here in Georgia, and Glenn Burns, our ABC-affiliate weather-dude, says we're looking good to make it four. It's raining again today.

Though not all was dismal over the past couple of days. Over the rainy weekend, Peggy's folks took home not one, but TWO Schnauzer puppies. They are named Frodo (the gray one, because he looks slightly more strung-out), and Sam (the black one). Pat and Mike brought the wee ones by the apartment on their way back home so we got to say hola, and Sam got to piddle on the carpet. It was adorable. We didn't let Venkman meet them. He gets fed enough. We'll wait 'till they're bigger and can defend themselves against a feline berzerker barrage.

Also, I found a games website that kept me from doing a number of things I'd planned on doing today. Not that it takes much, but check out Teagames.com. A lot of you have probably already seen this site, but I thought I'd mention it for the uninitiated. Most of them get old pretty quick, but they're all simple and there are lots to choose from. I spent too much time on the one called Blueprint. Eagle Eye's fun, too.

Because It's Friday, Here's More Gratuitous Senior-Citizen Nudity. You Know You Like It.

I thought I'd finish out the week with yet another bit o' artwork.

In October of last year I posted up a drawing I did in white pencil on black paper of an old naked dude. In that post, I mentioned this woman and talked about how I'd wondered about her motivations for doing this sort of work, i.e. posing naked for community college drawing classes. Turns out I did maybe two good drawings from that class: the one I posted in October, and this one. Though I'd share it with all of you.

In other news, Harry Whittington, the dude Cheney shot in the face last Saturday, apologized to Cheney for getting in the way of all of that birdshot. Kind of hard to believe. Maybe that's just what old-fashioned hunting accident-victims say to the shooter when they recuperate. Outstanding questions that have, to date, never been answered about the incident are: Who were Cheney and Whittington with? How far from Cheny was Whittington when Cheney fired, really? (90 feet is generally accepted as laughable). And, most importantly, was Dick drunk? We may never find out. The county where the shooting took place has about 400 people living in it (it's actually one of the least populous counties in the entire country), and Armstrong, the owner of the ranch, "draws a lot of water" in town, to quote Big Lebowski, and the local police aren't going to risk pissing her off by getting to the bottom of things. We'll likely never find out what happened.

Anyway, have a good Friday evening, and a great weekend.

Your Thursday Inanity: A Drawing of the Missus

Peggy read in the comments that a particular Inanity reader wanted to see some family-friendly drawings of this blogger's wife. She thought this sounded like a good idea, (and one that wouldn't require hours to compose), and so, this Thursday evening, I present this heavily cropped drawing of my lovely wife, Peggy.

I drew this from a photograph taken at Sushi on Brand. I cropped myself way the hell out of it because, well, I look freakish in it. The closer you look, the more apparent it becomes that I drew myself... incorrectly. Because Peggy likes the drawing (even the vaguely humanoid version of myself in it), I don't want to post it up because it would (rightly) be mocked and maligned in the comments, and, because Peggy is attached to the drawing, she wouldn't like my friends to make fun of it. So I'm posting up the successful part of the drawing: Peggy. Though the likeness isn't dead-on, it's close enough that I definitely recognize my wife in it, and am not embarrassed to show this SECTION of the drawing off. Most of my attempts at drawing her end up on page after page of botched attempts, not terribly unlike the page of caricatures I posted yesterday, though the source material is obviously much better-looking and actually worthy of rendering. Anyway, so here's a drawing of Peggy which we both like.

(And for reference, I'm including here the source photograph. Ain't she purty?)

All right. Now is the time when we catch up on Lost episodes. (Shout out to Mom-in-law Pat Ethier for taping all of them for us! Totally awesome!)

I've Already Shown You Most of The Good Stuff I Can Fit On My Scanner. This Is What's Left. Enjoy the Inanity.

I haven't really posted up any artwork for awhile, so I thought I'd flip through the old sketchbook and see what I could find. This stuff is about the freshest "art" I got. I make no promises about the quality of this stuff, just that I drew it, and it's not a rant about Cheney. I get tired of thinking about that stuff, too, so I thought I'd give you folks a break from having to read it.

On with the show! The first image is of my brother, Patrick. I drew this with a Sharpie from a photo from one of the photo romans we had to do our first year. In my opinion, this is probably the funniest photo I've ever seen, and certainly the funniest I've ever taken. He must have been about 11 or 12 at the time. (The other actor in this brilliant roman, incidentally, was my sister). This shot is of the pushy trick o' treater demanding more candy than my sister gave him. He's pointing into his bag of candy as though to helpfully show where additional treats might be placed. The photo roman concludes with Shannon slipping a razor blade into a full-size 3 Musketeers and then giving it to him. It's one of the best things I did in film school. I thought my sibs did good work for me.

Later, Patrick proceeded from a punk-kid actor (as shown) into a brooding adolescent actor, starring in high-school plays and a 7-(or so) hour PSA about drunk driving. He was really good in it, actually. I actually believed he'd driven drunk and plowed into a car filled with teenagers. That it happened on a football field didn't affect my suspension of disbelief in the slightest. Man, did he kill a lot of teenagers.

Anyway. This next image is of a model from the JCrew catalog. I just drew the face because that was the hard part, and I would have just wasted a lot of pencil lead drawing out her boring suit thing. For some reason I imagine the JCrew models, after the photo shoots at rustic (but never "dirty") upstate farms, retiring to tastefully-decorated Brooklyn apartments where just the right amount of sunlight shines through clean windows in which they lay across overstuffed armchairs reading books people think they're too pretty to understand. You know, like The Devil Wears Prada. They also come off as kind of cold. This may be one of those things that says more about the interpreter than about the interpreted. Let's move on before I reveal too much.

This final image is yet another testament to my narcissism. A whole page of self-caricatures. I did these in Sharpie also. Before you start thinking I'm hopelessly self-involved ("start?") I should say that I was going through photographs trying to draw something up that I could use as my little avatar picture for this blog. I settled on the thing I posted up a little while back of me in the funny hat, but these were the rejects. The one in the center cracks me up. I made myself look so fiercely Down's.

In other news, my grandmother Jean got married for the 2nd time in her life today to a Georgia Tech grad, former NASA employee, and generally cool old-timer, Ted Taylor. They got married at my aunt's house in Cypress in a small ceremony. Congratulations to them.

At any rate, more blog action tomorrow.

A Far-Out Theory About The Cheney Shooting

Michael Moore hinted at something interesting on his website. Could the guy Cheney shot, Harry Whittington, be dead already?

What if Cheney killed him outright, or injured him badly enough that he died within hours of the shooting? That might explain why there was an 18-hour delay in telling ANYONE.

In this theory, it takes Armstrong 18 hours to alert the Corpus-Christi paper because Karl Rove needs all the time he can get to firm up everyone's story and present a united front to a press corps already skeptical of almost everything this White House tells them. Armstrong, the owner of the ranch on which the shooting occured, said Whittington "got peppered pretty good" by Cheney's gun. Which caused Jon Stewart to quip that Whittington had been "seasoned to within an inch of his life."

At any rate, it's now very clear Whittington's injuries are worse than the White House make them sound. Cheney hasn't made a public appearance or said anything to anyone about it. If this was just a mishap resulting in no serious injury, then it seems natural that Cheney would have popped up to quell rising suspicion. Or what about a bedside interview with the injured Whittington, alert and smiling in his hospital bed, a little bloodied up, but altogether all right? Nothing.

The shot supposedly came from 30 yards away and entered into Whittington's right side. Pellets punctured his heart which caused him to have a heart-attack this morning. According to hospital officials, he's been moved back into the ICU today after his heart-attack. The human heart's on the left side of the body. For birdshot pellets to go all the way through a hunter's protective gear, his clothes, break the skin, burrow halfway through the meat of his torso, and then embed themselves deep into one's heart, 90 feet would seem a little far for these injuries to be plausible. I dunno. Not a doctor or a hunter, but it doesn't sound like we know the whole story.

I'm not saying it's likely that Whittington's dead and this is some massive cover-up, but if Whitting does die sometime this week while in his Secret Service-guarded hospital room, this whacko conspiracy theory would suddenly become a little more respectable. I mean, c'mon. It's Dick Cheney we're talking about. Can we really put anything past this guy? Even this?

At any rate, conspiracy theories are fun.

Batman, Having Officially Run Out of Fictional Super-Villains To Beat Up And Turn In To The Police, Turns to the Real Thing.

Hope everyone's having a good Valentine's Day.

The Cheney thing continues to unravel -- some folks are wondering if maybe Cheney was slightly inebriated when he did the deed -- but I'm thinking Cheney shotgunning other old people is not so hot a topic with the Inanity faithful, so I'll switch to something that may skew closer to our hearts, namely Batman.

Who doesn't love Batman? I know I do. (Here he is kicking Superman's ass -- because sometimes Supes needs Batman to set him straight.) So whenever Batman makes it into the mainstream media, I'm interested. So here's the story: Frank Miller's next Batman story is called Holy Terror, Batman! and in it, "Batman kicks al Quaeda's ass". I actually read this story originally over at Aintitcool the other day, thought it was kinda cool, but not THAT cool given how bad the sequel to the Dark Knight Returns looked, but now all of the major news organizations have picked it up. I think this story appeals to them because it a) features two names recognized worldwide whom one wouldn't necessarily expect to hear uttered in the same breath, and b) the idea of an American icon meeting the great villain of the day to exact some righteous justice feels homespun, timely, and kind of edgy all at the same time. Provided Miller's style doesn't slide too much further into the abstract, strictly representational style he's evolved into, this sounds like it could be pretty fun.

Dick Cheney Hunts With Big-Time Donor. Cheney Wants Cash. Donor Says He'll Have to Think About It. Donor Gets Shot in the Face.

Well, I was going to write up a blog about seeing Jay McInerney give a reading at the Margaret Mitchell House tonight, but when we got there we discovered the event was cancelled due to his being snowed in by that nor'easter that dumped all the snow on New York. Would have been nice to get an email or something. Oh well.

I did want to mention a couple news items. First, as you've all heard about by now, Cheney shot a guy in the face over the weekend. The official White House version of events has the old-timer Texas attorney and big-time GOP donor Harry Whittington getting a face full of birdshot because he stepped into the wrong place at the wrong time. What's weird (and these days, what isn't weird about most things the Vice-President does?), is that there was an 18-hour gap between when the accident happened, and when the press was informed. Why the delay? And why was the owner of the ranch, another big-time Bush donor named Katherine Armstrong who is, so far, the only eyewitness who's been cleared to speak to the press, the one to actually inform the press (the press in this case being that august paper of record, the Corpus-Christi Caller-Times), and not the Office of the Vice-President? Maybe there's nothing to this, maybe this is what it appears to be and nothing more. But then again, these people lie a lot.

Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo, one of the very few legitimate news blogs, has a link to this tidbit, that has none other than "the architect" himself, Karl Rove, on the phone with Ms. Armstrong within 90 MINUTES OF THE SHOOTING. For the next 16 and a half hours, he sure didn't tell anybody about it. Did they think they might just be able to keep it quiet?

Then, also from Talking Points Memo, former-Crossfire-combatant, America-hurter, Democratic hack, and generally affable Clintonista Paul Begala offers his take on what may have happened. Begala hunts quail in Texas frequently, and finds the macho, back-slapping euphemisms being bandied about by the White House a little misleading. Begala says that when a person is fired on at that range with that sort of gun, they have not been "sprayed" or "peppered" as has oft been reported in the largely administration-friendly press, they have actually been "shot". And though the official line is that even older-man Whittington was at fault and not Cheney, Begala hint that, under the circumstances, Cheney was himself negligent.

Finally, if you click on only one link in this post, click on this one. It's a fun one. The Press Secretary and NBC's David Gregory get into a shouting match during a press conference. Man, I want C-SPAN, and I want it now. Ok. More tomorrow.

Is Netflix Evil? If They Aren't Yet, They're Working On It

This is an article anyone who either has or is considering subscribing to Netflix needs to read. In January 2005, 4 months after a subscriber filed suit against them, Netflix admitted to systematically delaying shipment of movies to subscribers who rented more than 9 movies in a given month, even though all Netflix subscriptions are supposed to be (and advertised as) "unlimited" rentals, the only variable being the number of movies a user is paying to rent at one time. This practice is called "throttling", and I think this sucks. I always thought Blockbuster were the bad guys in the video rental market, using deceptive statements in their advertising to lure unsuspecting customers, like "no late fees" for example. Now, it's Netflix. Netflix says they do "throttling" to protect their profit margins, and that's fine, $0.78 an envelope can add up, but don't resort to deceptive advertising and say your rental plans provide "unlimited" DVD rentals.

Why does it seem like absolutely everyone on the planet is either lying outright or just shaving the inconvenient bits off of the truth? Anyway. Today is Friday and that is good news indeed. Have an awesome, truth-telling weekend.

Michael Crichton Wants You To Calm Down And Enjoy These Warm January Temps

This is Michael Crichton. You may remember -- a couple weeks ago I blabbed about bits of homophobia I found sprinkled throughout his early, possibly first novel, entitled The Terminal Man. Even then he seemed to have something in common with the right-wing of this country. Now, as I see in the New York Times, he's receiving a journalism award from the American Association of Petroleum Geologists for his NOVEL State of Fear, in which he completely undermines the idea that global warming is a real threat. The article is brief, and you can read it here. James Inhofe, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, likes State of Fear. According to the NYTimes, Inhofe calls global warming, "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

Crichton seems to agree with that assessment. In a retort to those critics who said the premise of State of Fear was predicated on boneheaded science, he gave this lecture in coordination with the Smithsonian (if, by chance, you DO click on the link, you'll find the right link beneath the covers of all of his books). I read through a bunch of it and Crichton sounds a little like an avuncular Ian Malcolm (the character Jeff Goldblum played in Jurassic Park), but instead of talking about 'chaos theory', he's going on about 'complex systems'. He says in the lecture, essentially, that at one point we were all afraid of something called 'global cooling', and Y2K, and the 'population bomb'. He posits that global warming is just another one of these silly faddish things that people are getting freaked out about for no reason other than the news tells us to get freaked out about it. In one respect, he's saying what Michael Moore said in Bowling For Columbine -- that part of the reason we're afraid of each other (and why there's so much gun buying and gun violence in the US), is because of the way we get our information: the news. Crichton concludes his lecture by asking how we can be so arrogant as to think we humans can bring stability to our planet's atmosphere when it hasn't been stable in the history of Earth?

Is global warming just another Y2K? I don't think so, but I went to film-school. So what's a guy like me with no background in science to do in the face of Michael Crichton telling me to relax, that it's all going to be okay? I look to people in the field who do know about it. So when you have a phalanx of world-renowned, Nobel-prize winning scientists and climatologists who all believe global warming is real, that we're contributing to it, and that we can and should do something to stop it, I listen to them. And when a guy who writes heavily-researched, fun-to-read, but generally dopey techno-thrillers says global warming's essentially a hoax, I'll go ahead and take that with a grain of salt.

Tomorrow is Friday. I'll have some more Inanity for you then. I'm out.

Craig Moorhead Has a Blog You Should Visit

Producer, screenwriter, musician, and fellow graduate of the School of Filmmaking, Class of '99, Craig Moorhead started a blog a few days ago. He, like me, is of the belief that time not spent on-line is time misspent. The blog's young but it's pretty awesome. Ya'll should go visit, leave comments. Craig was smart with his blog. It's called 'Craig Moorhead's Website' and is located at craigmoorhead.blogspot.com. Anyone can find it. Easy to remember. And a lot more fun to type than 'cranesinanities'.

My Fat, Old, Bald, White Male Governor's the One on the Right

I saw the governor of Georgia today. I was picking up my wife at school and I saw him and an aide walk across the little road between the business school and the student dormitories and get into a giant black GMC SUV. At first I thought he was going to go INTO what looked to be the girls' wing of the dormitory, but at the last minute he opened the GMC's back door for his aide, and then jumped into the passenger seat, and they drove away. HAD he gone in, I would have been a little concerned. Anyway, I liked the relative lack of ostentation with the governor's in-state travel arrangements. No giant entourage. No bodyguards. Just the governor, a driver, and some other white guy. Too bad so many people want to kill the president all the time, otherwise he (or she) could one day be similarly low-key.

Sonny Purdue (the governor) had just finished speaking to my wife's business school about ethics and leadership. The irony is so heavy here it's actually hurting me. Sonny Purdue, after all, is the guy who, in the election that put him into the governor's mansion, came out for keeping the stars and bars on the state flag (which were only incorporated into the state flag in the 50's as the trend towards desegregation was starting to bear down on the South). He got elected Governor because the incumbent, Roy Barnes, had taken a principled stand against the confederate flag and wanted the symbol removed from the flag. So Sonny got the racist vote, got into office, and then reneged on his original promise. That's playing politics smart and dirty (the Karl Rove way) but what it sure isn't is ethical.

Peggy told me he spoke for an hour and managed to say not a single thing.

Anyway. That's all I got today. More, as always, tomorrow.

Did Stephen King 'Phone It In" With His Latest Novel, Cell? One Fan's Humble Opinion

And now, a review of Stephen King's new novel, Cell:

Cell is Stephen King on horror novel auto-pilot. Cell is self-parody. This is not King's triumphant return to full throttle horror, as some fan-boys have said. This is King writing a first draft, chucking it in a FedEx pouch the instant 'The End" appeared on his computer screen, and then putting it right the hell out of his head so he can start work cranking out his next book. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I worship the guy, but this is one book he should have kept in a drawer.

Cell is the story of a graphic novelist named Clay who's in Boston selling his first graphic novel. He's in line at an ice-cream truck (which happens all the time, right?) when the girl and the woman in front of him answer their cell phones at the same time. The "people" calling aren't actually people at all, but rather a zombie-making "pulse" of unknown origin simultaneously sent out to all cell phones and turning anyone who answers into a frickin' lunatic. The first 50 pages of Cell are not only readable, they're actually pretty good. This would have made a great short story or novella. Has the feel of King's apocalyptic classics like "The Mist" and The Stand. These opening scenes that take place in a world where nothing is known, nothing is certain, and anything could kill you, is shot through with what feels like the genuine panic of impending apocalypse. For 50 pages, Cell manages to be frenetic and even scary.

But with the other 300 pages, however, King's laid out for himself the thankless task of explaining what happens to graphic-novelist Clay and his ever-changing band of New England-area survivors. It didn't take 300 pages for me to figure out that I didn't really care what happened to them. Anyway, those who didn't have cell phones and weren't affected by 'the pulse', are having to survive against a ravening (and much larger) contingent of zombies (or "phoners") who, at least at first, will tear any living they see limb from limb. Each successive plot twist becomes more unbelievable than the last. In order to anchor the rising level of gory goofiness in something that at least has the feel of reality, King has his heroes meet up with a barely-teenage computer nerd named Jordan who essentially intuits what's going on behind the scenes with the rapidly evolving "flocks" of "phoners". There's really no way for this kid to know what's going on, no matter how good King says he is with computers, and yet he does know it, and proceeds to recite paragraph upon paragraph of clunky exposition. Every baffling, completely unsupported-by-the-evidence thing he says, turns out, of course, to be true. It's a slog to get through.

Cell's a little like eating at Waffle House. It goes down fast and easy, but after you're done, you feel oogy, kinda guilty, and worse for the experience. And then, to make sure everyone leaves with a bad taste in their mouth, King goes down the well-trod slacker route he travelled in Desperation, The Shining, and The Stand, and has his heroes emerge victorious by setting off a well-placed, well-timed, giant explosion. King is no stranger to deus ex machina, but he kills us with it here. It's an appropriately lazy climax for this lazy, lazy book. I'm under no illusions any of you Inanity-readers were for one second considering picking this thing up and reading it, but on the off-chance you were, stop it.

King can be a very good writer. Anyone who's read Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption knows this. Same goes for Misery, Pet Sematary, The Shining, or even The Tommyknockers. Cell represents a shift for King. No, not from good writing to bad, but from horror to a more "literary" kind of fiction in the vein of his New Yorker fiction. His last non-Dark Tower "horror" novel was called From a Buick Eight -- his second "possessed car" novel. It was not a horror novel, but rather a somber mystery story with an ending that featured both sci-fi and "weird" fiction elements. The book wasn't bad (nor was it particularly good), but it wasn't horror either. I think what Cell represents, (for all of you still reading this post), is the official end of King's involvement with horror novels. He's moved on. After finishing the sub-par Cell, it becomes very clear why: his heart's just not in it anymore. All right, that's it. More tomorrow.

[Note: His next book, due out this November, is called Lisey's Story. It is not in any way a horror novel.]

Monday's Inanity = Wildfires, Cowboys, Super Bowl, Macon, GA

Happy Monday! It's cold and rainy here in Georgia today, so I hope the rest of you are experiencing better weather. To my California homies: the local news says you can see the smoke from an Orange County wildfire from where you are in Los Angeles -- is that true? Ah, wildfires. I remember the time, back when Peggy and I lived in Glendale, a brush-fire climbed over the top of the ridgeline and down into our part of the San Fernando Valley. It was nighttime and Peter, Josh, Matt, David were over and we were standing out on my apartment balcony. We could see a wide cut of fire blazing in the darkness, hemmed in by the flashing red lights of fire trucks. At times the fire only smoldered darkly, so low you could almost make out the scrub bushes silhouetted black against the deep red, but then, for no apparent reason, the fire would flare up and become a big yellow scar reaching from one side of the mountain to the other. Struck by the dramatic visuals, I said aloud to myself, to everyone, more than once, and because I was literally helpless not to, "The fires of Mordor," trying hard to put that special Gandalf-ian rolling on the first 'r' in Mordor. It should come as no surprise to anyone who reads this blog regularly that I am a mega-dork. Ah, memories.

Anyway. Peggy and I went to a club/bar called Cowboys on Saturday night. One of Peggy's business-school friends was having a birthday get-together of sorts there, so we drove out to rural-leaning Kennesaw and joined in. If you're wanting to drink, holler, line-dance, and find someone slightly drunker than you to go home with, this is the place for you. Late in their set, after we'd been there for a few hours, the house band announced to a rapt and inebriated audience, "If any of ya'll ain't drinkin', you're in the wrong place." I could only nod. Cowboys is kind of a big deal in Georgia. One of the few country stars I've actually heard of, Dwight Yoakam (AKA Raoul), is going to be there on the 24th of next month. I'd consider going if I thought I'd have any reasonable expectation of having my copy of Panic Room signed, but I kinda doubt he'd do it. I bet he's going to come all this way just to play music. Oh well.

And on Sunday was the Super Bowl. The game itself was a massive snore though it had in it the potential to be good. But every time there was an opportunity for it to get interesting, in marched the refs to blow a call that didn't need calling in the first place. I'm not sure the Seahawks were robbed exactly, but the viewers were for damn sure robbed of a good game thanks to those boneheads. More importantly, the commercials were pretty lame. The one bright spot, I thought, was a commercial I haven't yet heard mentioned in the roundups of the best commercials from last night. It was a Nextel spot, and, for my money, featured some of the funniest phone-to-face action I've ever seen. I like violence. I also kind of laughed at the Caveman FedEx commercial. I really liked the way the Jon Heder-like "employee" caveman gestured to his "boss" caveman as he grunted, "But FedEx doesn't exist!" He seemed both desperately frustrated and hopelessly stupid all at once -- brilliance.

And finally, I wanted to include this. I spent a bit of my childhood growing up in 3 different houses in Macon, so I'm glad to see an institution as august and influential as The Onion sit up, take notice, and make fun of it. John Rocker, Janet Reno, and Patrick Crane, all born in Macon.

Sidewalk Art That Will Destroy Your Mind

Stumbled over this and was pretty impressed. This seems like the sort of thing that's already made the rounds through annoying email forwards, but I've never seen it, so I'm posting it up here on the odd-chance some of you haven't either. This guy's name is Julian Beever and he's done these things on sidewalks all over the world. It's like spontaneous trompe l'oeil and it's really amazing. I guess he draws these things mostly through the viewfinder on his tripod-mounted camera. The link to a whole series of them is here. Because these drawings only work from one angle, it's very interesting to see what one looks like from the wrong angle. Near the bottom is a photo of one of the chalk drawings from just such a wrong angle. Very interesting. I know it's Saturday, but I thought I'd share this one.

Blogger Problems

I don't know what's up with Blogger right now. At first the comments for my Friday post couldn't be seen by anyone, then this morning I reposted all of the comments from emails I get and shortened the title to "Danny and Newt", but now Blogger's changed my title back and deleted all the comments I reconstituted. I'm not sure if it's just the one post on Friday or what, so I'm posting this no-frills post to see if it will accept comments. I've read all of your comments, and if this works without problem, I'll repost them in the comments section of this post for everyone else to enjoy.

What Newt Would Have Looked Like Had She Not Died in the Crash; What Danny Torrance Would Have Looked Like 26 Years After He Escaped From the Maze

I mentioned a couple of posts ago how awesome it would be to see what the little girl who played Newt in Aliens looks like today (her name is Carrie Henn), and even more so, what the boy who played Danny Torrance in The Shining looks like as a young man (his name is Danny Lloyd). Heath posted a link in the comments to a current Carrie Henn picture, and suggested the most mind-bogglingly obvious method to procure the photos I was looking for: Google Images. Which happens to be exactly how I get most of the pictures I post up on this thing. So I type in Carrie Henn and Danny Lloyd, and I got what I was after. I share them today, with you. First image is Danny Lloyd as he appeared in The Shining. The second is Danny all growed up. The third image is Carrie Henn as she appeared in Aliens. The fourth image is Carrie all growed up with someone I presume to be her husband. I ccouldn't be bothered to do actual research, so we'll all just have to suppose. Anyway, here they are. Have a good weekend.

Two Caricatures of Me Wearing a Wicked Awesome Hat: My Profile Image Blown Up To Full Size (Yeah, I know it's weak, but today I got nothing.)

What up, Inanity-ers? I've been at a loss all day for a good subject for today's post, so I'm going to do this lame one in the last remaining moments of February 2nd, otherwise known as Groundhog Day. (By the way, 6 more weeks of winter. Big whoop. Did it snow anywhere in the country in the month of January? The news says it was mild all over the place.) Anyway, this first image is the enlarged scan of the self-caricature I did for my blog profile. Originally, my teeth looked as though I'd sharpened them to points (kind of like that dude in Robocop) so I fixed it in Photoshop and this is the result. I know. I'm as excited about it as you are.

This second image is the original photo I drew it from. I think I've already posted a photo from this "series" of photos of me looking completely learning disabled, but I thought it was funny and ripe for a good caricature. Though I made myself look fatter in the drawing than I was in this photograph, I wasn't near as mean as I wanted to be, meanness being the point of caricatures after all. I must have focused on the wrong things because the more I emphasize what I think are my most overstated facial features, it stops looking like me. It used to be an oversized helmet of hair really sold it, but that's not how things are anymore. Not sure. Practice, and narcissism to spare, however, make perfect.

Finally, this third image is the very first draft of the caricature. This version didn't work, I think, because it doesn't really look like me (at least I don't think it does), but I do like how fiercely stupid he looks. Something about the eyes. Hmmm.

Well, it's 11:50PM here on the East coast. Time for bed. If you're after a little more blog-action, head over to Literary Smackdown. Hinesy posted a story, Heath posted an unserious joke-story, and I have one up there, too, like it or not. They're all pretty short, so, if you're of a mind, check it out and kill some time. You can vote and everything!

Anyway, in seven minutes, it'll be Friday. Aren't Friday's great? Okay, I'm done. More tomorrow.

Stephanie Tanner Returns, Joel Coen May or May Not Direct Cormac McCarthy's "No Country For Old Men", and Sandwiches! What a Good News Wednesday!

Dudes. This is Jodie Sweetin, AKA: Stephanie Tanner from Full House! Can you believe she's 24 now? She came on Good Morning America this morning to discuss her recent troubles with the drogas. Turns out she used to be a meth addict. She's getting a divorce from her cop husband whom she married 4 years ago, which is kind of sad. I admit it: I used to watch Full House all the time, so to finally see the only member of the Tanner household who's gone underground since the show went off, kind of makes me grin. She wasn't too cute on the show, but she looks all right now. Good for her. Now, if anyone can dig up a current picture of either the kid who played Danny Torrance in The Shining or the girl who played Newt in Aliens, then I'll be very pleased, and I'll post it up on the Inanities (which may actually be a disincentive).

Other news. No Country for Old Men, a novel by Cormac McCarthy that I talked about on this thing before, is being adapted by the Coen brothers. My suspicion is the Coen brothers are going to both write and direct this thing, though the article says they're going to let Scott Rudin direct. I think the article's wrong. Rudin's a producer. That's all he's ever done. I doubt he'd try and cut his teeth on something like this. (Also, on IMDB it shows that Rudin's producing The Corrections for a 2007 release, and it's got Robert Zemeckis attached to direct. Doesn't this seem weird? Corrections is hardly Polar Express or What Lies Beneath. Maybe this is BS, too.)

And finally, sandwiches. Aren't they good? Here's a question: is it a geography thing when some people see a hamburger and call it a sandwich? For me, they are two totally different things, but perhaps for others, they are just two different forms of the same thing. What's the deal? (said in a Seinfeld voice) A good BLT is one of the best sandwiches you can get (and they're usually pretty cheap if you get one in a restaurant), especially when the bacon is a little on the undercooked side, but I also like a good club with a lot of mayo, smeared right on the tomato slices. Best club sandwich I ever had was at a place in Burbank called the Elephant Bar. I know it's a chain, which makes this claim suspect, but, honestly, never had one better. Chicken salad, egg salad, I'm a sandwich slut. Put it between two slices of bread and get your mind out of the gutter and I'll eat it.

By the way, thanks for all the comments yesterday. I wasn't expecting so many on a downer political post. Me likey. I'm also interested to find out the true identity of "full flavor johnny blaze". I'm pretty sure it's not John Carcieri. The most recent post Johnny Blaze made was posted by, I confess, me. Thinking Heath was the real culprit (which I still kinda do), I was trying to draw him out into the open, which I did, sort of. The answer to Johnny Blaze's true identity may lie in this question: which School of Filmmaking alum currently resides in or around Norco, CA? It's out by Chino Hills and Corona. Way the hell out in the 909. Riddle me that, Batman. I'm out. More tomorrow.