superbowl

DANCING WITH THE STARS -- Season Three

2006-08-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

(From Cynopsis)

The celebrities hoofing it up for ABC's next installment of DANCING WITH THE STARS are -- MSNBC news anchor TUCKER CARLSON, High School Musical teen actress MONIQUE COLEMAN, country-music singer SARA EVANS, pop singer WILLA FORD, VIVICA A. FOX, HARRY HAMLIN,
JOE LAWRENCE, MARIO LOPEZ, actress/model SHANNA MOAKLER, NFL Super Bowl champion EMMITT SMITH and JERRY SPRINGER.

Season three, hosted by TOM BERGERON and SAMANTHA HARRIS, premieres with a 2-hour special on September 12th at 8 pm.

Super Bowl Loactions for the next four years

2006-08-11T13:04:00.000-07:00

Tickets for the 2007 game are already closed. But you may want to bookmark this superbowl page to remember to get tickets to the 2008 Super Bowl.

Good to know info about upcoming Super Bowls:

Super Bowl XLI, South Florida -- Feb. 4, 2007 (CBS)Super Bowl XLI will be the record-tying (New Orleans) ninth Super Bowl played in the Miami area. Super Bowl XLI will be the fourth Super Bowl played at Dolphins Stadium. The other five Miami Super Bowls were played at the Orange Bowl.

Super Bowl XLII, Glendale, Ariz. -- Feb. 3, 2008 (FOX)Super Bowl XLII will be played in a new stadium that is currently under construction in Glendale, Ariz. The site of the 2008 Super Bowl was decided at the owners' meetings in Chicago on Oct. 29-30, 2003.

Super Bowl XLIII, Tampa, Fla. -- Feb. 1, 2009 (NBC)Super Bowl XLIII will be the fourth Super Bowl in Tampa, and the first one since 2001, when the Baltimore Ravens defeated the New York Giants, 34-7, in Super Bowl XXXV. The first Super Bowl in Tampa was held in 1984, when the Los Angeles Raiders beat the Washington Redskins, 38-9, in Super Bowl XVIII.

Super Bowl XLIV, South Florida -- TBA, 2010 (CBS)The Super Bowl will return to the Miami area in 2010, when it will surpass New Orleans for the most Super Bowls. It will be the fifth Super Bowl played at Dolphins Stadium.

Three movies and a birthday

2006-07-18T11:55:00.000-07:00

Everybody seems to expect everybody else to talk about what they've done over summer vacation, but I want to tell you some highlights from my Christmas 'vacation'.First, as an aside, let me say that the Rightwing has scored a definite triumph this year with their "War on Christmas" campaign and its counter-offensive, "Put Christ Back in Christmas." I say this because people I am close to have mentioned "how terrible" or "what a shame" it is that "they" want stores and public places to use "happy holidays" as a greeting rather than good old Merry Christmas.No, they did not win any 'hardball' shouting debate or intellectual tête à tête brass balls superduperbowl victory. Instead, the Big Two of Christmas Period, John Gibson and Bill O'Reilly -- with a supporting cast of evangelists, nervous merchants, livy-livered liberal losers, and other nervous nellies of the Cultural War -- have achieved the goal of putting the 'tip" in the tipping point of a permanent, joyous new topic for the, uh, Christmas season. The secret is simply the fact that victory consists almost solely on keeping people talking about it. As our illustrious president might say, "Teach the controversy."I confess to my personal involvement in this sordid affair, writing several ho-ho-ho's in Bemusings in recent days on the phony war, despite the fact that our staff here includes 2 Jews, 2 Palestinians, a looney Lutheran, an illegal Catholic immigrant, an atheist, a United Nations-loving One-Worlder who believes in God knows what, and me, your humble servant who is a product of good old American commercialized, instantized, purifiedized, tastlessnessized Christianity. In short, you can trust me, but watch out for the others.I was kidding, trying to make a joke outta other people's real fears. But now I know different. Don't start a joke if you can't get a laugh.Anyway, my Christmas vacation was centered around this here birthday celebration that everybody's talking about in such an argumentive way. I am sure that Jesus himself is pretty confused about what's happening. They say he's going to make a comeback tour here someday, but maybe not if he watches FOX News channel.Expect an even bigger controversy next year, when we will see Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson portraying gay Santas competing for the role of Kris Kringle at the FOX News North Pole Bureau Female Elves Intern Party. Okay, that sounds fair and balanced. Ho, ho! Huh?Now, neither I nor Bemusings (as a corporate entity, of course) usually "do" movie reviews, but in today's fast-paced, hell-bent way-a-life where the man next to you might not be a man -- might not even speak English! -- you gotta roll with the punches, look for the main chance, work for The Man. So, we do movie reviews.Over Christmas, I was out of town visiting my relatives who have one of them there fancy futurized high-definition televisions' with all the doo-dads, bells and whistles you could wish for, especially at this gift-giving time of the year. It must have cost $2,000 and was sure shiny and bright and the picture, well that jumps right out at ya, just like in those IMAX theaters.I saw three movies over the course of three days, interspersed with the usual Christmas family functions. The first was Van Helsing starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsdale. I watched half of it one night but couldn't stay awake. It seemed a worthwhile movie, but top-heavy with nonstop action, Tim Burton-type atmosphere and The Mummy's audacious but implausible plot. (The director of this film also directed The Mummy.)Ah well . . . but the next night, after coming back around 9 p.m. from a Christmas dinner at the relatives, I found the movie on again and right at the spot where I gave up on it the previous night! Woooo! Tell me that's not scary deja vu. So I watched the movie and it blossomed into a fine show. There they all were, like a Gothic Dream Team -- the character Van Helsing as a dashing young Vampire killer with novel weapons, Kate Beckinsdale as . . . a "female warrior" type who gives an impressive performance (photo), and other characters such as Dracula, flying Harpie-like, nearly naked female vampires, Igor (poor job there), Werewolves and Frankenstein. Franky was terrific. It turns out now that Frankenstein can not only speak English (he has been able to do that since 1935), dance and sing (1977) but can now, thanks to this movie, recite the 23rd Psalm ("Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death.") and has turned out to be a good guy. Unknown is whether Mr. Frankenstein has become a Christian, but if he has, I bet he believes in Creationism.The next movie I stumbled into out of sheer serendipity, the comic Undercover Brother, starring Eddie Griffen, Denise Richards, David Chappelle, Aunjanue Elliswith and a walk-on by James Brown. Why exactly this movie was notable I'm not sure, except that a number of the scenes were funny. I guess that's a good reason to watch a spoof of Black Exploitation movies from the early 1970's. This one is better than most parodies and features "The Brotherhood" with the help of the Undercover Brother in an all-out battle with "The Man," an organization that has turned a Colin Powell-like Black American hero into a lackey for the white man.But the movie I most delighted in watching was Men with Guns (Hombres armados), a Spanish language film with some English, Nahuatl, Tzotzil, Maya and Kuna (with English subtitles) written and directed by John Sayles. Haven't heard of it? Neither had I. Here is a portion of a CNN review of the 1998 film:Quote(CNN) -- In her New York Times review of John Sayles' new movie, a Latin American guerrilla tragedy called "Men With Guns," Janet Maslin echoes the sentiments of a great many film critics when she writes that Sayles is "the most courageous and decent storyteller working in American films today."I couldn't agree more with that assessment, but there's a question that nobody seems to want to ask when considering Sayles' consistently dignified output -- namely, are courage and decency really all that's required to make a successful film?"Men With Guns" is yet another well-intentioned but tedious essay by Sayles suggesting that the answer to that question, as much as I hate to say it, is "no." I'm not surprised by the movie's honorable failure, though. Sayles' somber tone and snail's pace, in my opinion, have sunk several of his previous films and even a couple of the music videos he's directed for Bruce Springsteen.Endquote I vehemently disagree with this general point of view, although some aspects of the criticism may, of course, be justified. I found the movie kind of growing on me with a fascinating interest in finding out what the main character, the old doctor (played by Argentina's Federico Luppi, photo left with the boy Conejo Dan Rivera Gonzalez) finally finds in his search for his "legacy" -- young medical students he has trained to return to the countryside and bring medicine to the villages wracked by a nebulus guerilla war. The complete plot can be found here as part of the official movie website.The movie sets its story line without being too specific about the location or specific politics that may or may not be involved. This is a plus. In a commentary on the website about the point of the movie, the author Francisco Goldman, an American of partial Guatemalan descent, said this:QuoteDo places like the unnamed Latin American country seen in "Men With Guns" really exist in our hemisphere, with whole villages massacred and burned off the face of the earth and young girls tortured and raped? A place where young people might be killed merely for providing medical care?Of course it's believable. It happened, during a just-ended civil war of thirty-five years in Guatemala: 440 Mayan villages vanished off the face of the earth during one scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign; 150,000 dead, countless widows and orphans. In the silenced, haunted countryside, people were too frightened to name their persecutors, they simply called them la mala gente, the bad people, the same as the men with guns of this movie . . .The country depicted in John Sayles' movie has a lot in common with the Guatemala of the last few decades, of course, but it resembles, and metaphorically recalls, many other places as well: Chipas, Mexico; the Peruvian Andes; the Argentina of the Dirty War; Colombia; Cuba; South Africa — anywhere on earth where people have been murdered by political forces while terror, censorship and repression keep many of the living locked into silence, into a self-protective stance of not-knowing or denial. Even citizens of the United States can be complicit in this silence, in this blithe attitude of "I'd rather not know" when confronted with the role of their own country in backing and supporting some of these murderous regimes.Endquote I liked Men with Guns more than the other two movies combined. They were fun, but when Men with Guns finishes on the screen, some parts of it continue in your mind.

Three movies and a birthday

2006-07-17T11:34:00.000-07:00

Everybody seems to expect everybody else to talk about what they've done over summer vacation, but I want to tell you some highlights from my Christmas 'vacation'.

First, as an aside, let me say that the Rightwing has scored a definite triumph this year with their "War on Christmas" campaign and its counter-offensive, "Put Christ Back in Christmas." I say this because people I am close to have mentioned "how terrible" or "what a shame" it is that "they" want stores and public places to use "happy holidays" as a greeting rather than good old Merry Christmas.

No, they did not win any 'hardball' shouting debate or intellectual tête à tête brass balls superduperbowl victory. Instead, the Big Two of Christmas Period, John Gibson and Bill O'Reilly -- with a supporting cast of evangelists, nervous merchants, livy-livered liberal losers, and other nervous nellies of the Cultural War -- have achieved the goal of putting the 'tip" in the tipping point of a permanent, joyous new topic for the, uh, Christmas season. The secret is simply the fact that victory consists almost solely on keeping people talking about it. As our illustrious president might say, "Teach the controversy."

I confess to my personal involvement in this sordid affair, writing several ho-ho-ho's in Bemusings in recent days on the phony war, despite the fact that our staff here includes 2 Jews, 2 Palestinians, a looney Lutheran, an illegal Catholic immigrant, an atheist, a United Nations-loving One-Worlder who believes in God knows what, and me, your humble servant who is a product of good old American commercialized, instantized, purifiedized, tastlessnessized Christianity. In short, you can trust me, but watch out for the others.

I was kidding, trying to make a joke outta other people's real fears. But now I know different. Don't start a joke if you can't get a laugh.

Anyway, my Christmas vacation was centered around this here birthday celebration that everybody's talking about in such an argumentive way. I am sure that Jesus himself is pretty confused about what's happening. They say he's going to make a comeback tour here someday, but maybe not if he watches FOX News channel.

Expect an even bigger controversy next year, when we will see Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson portraying gay Santas competing for the role of Kris Kringle at the FOX News North Pole Bureau Female Elves Intern Party. Okay, that sounds fair and balanced. Ho, ho! Huh?

Now, neither I nor Bemusings (as a corporate entity, of course) usually "do" movie reviews, but in today's fast-paced, hell-bent way-a-life where the man next to you might not be a man -- might not even speak English! -- you gotta roll with the punches, look for the main chance, work for The Man. So, we do movie reviews.

Over Christmas, I was out of town visiting my relatives who have one of them there fancy futurized high-definition televisions' with all the doo-dads, bells and whistles you could wish for, especially at this gift-giving time of the year. It must have cost $2,000 and was sure shiny and bright and the picture, well that jumps right out at ya, just like in those IMAX theaters.

I saw three movies over the course of three days, interspersed with the usual Christmas family functions. The first was Van Helsing starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsdale. I watched half of it one night but couldn't stay awake. It seemed a worthwhile movie, but top-heavy with nonstop action, Tim Burton-type atmosphere and The Mummy's audacious but implausible plot. (The director of this film also directed The Mummy.)

Ah well . . . but the next night, after coming back around 9 p.m. from a Christmas dinner at the relatives, I found the movie on again and right at the spot where I gave up on it the previous night! Woooo! Tell me that's not scary deja vu. So I watched the movie and it blossomed into a fine show. There they all were, like a Gothic Dream Team -- the character Van Helsing as a dashing young Vampire killer with novel weapons, Kate Beckinsdale as . . . a "female warrior" type who gives an impressive performance (photo), and other characters such as Dracula, flying Harpie-like, nearly naked female vampires, Igor (poor job there), Werewolves and Frankenstein. Franky was terrific. It turns out now that Frankenstein can not only speak English (he has been able to do that since 1935), dance and sing (1977) but can now, thanks to this movie, recite the 23rd Psalm ("Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death.") and has turned out to be a good guy. Unknown is whether Mr. Frankenstein has become a Christian, but if he has, I bet he believes in Creationism.

The next movie I stumbled into out of sheer serendipity, the comic Undercover Brother, starring Eddie Griffen, Denise Richards, David Chappelle, Aunjanue Elliswith and a walk-on by James Brown. Why exactly this movie was notable I'm not sure, except that a number of the scenes were funny. I guess that's a good reason to watch a spoof of Black Exploitation movies from the early 1970's. This one is better than most parodies and features "The Brotherhood" with the help of the Undercover Brother in an all-out battle with "The Man," an organization that has turned a Colin Powell-like Black American hero into a lackey for the white man.

But the movie I most delighted in watching was Men with Guns (Hombres armados), a Spanish language film with some English, Nahuatl, Tzotzil, Maya and Kuna (with English subtitles) written and directed by John Sayles. Haven't heard of it? Neither had I. Here is a portion of a CNN review of the 1998 film:

Quote(CNN) -- In her New York Times review of John Sayles' new movie, a Latin American guerrilla tragedy called "Men With Guns," Janet Maslin echoes the sentiments of a great many film critics when she writes that Sayles is "the most courageous and decent storyteller working in American films today."

I couldn't agree more with that assessment, but there's a question that nobody seems to want to ask when considering Sayles' consistently dignified output -- namely, are courage and decency really all that's required to make a successful film?

"Men With Guns" is yet another well-intentioned but tedious essay by Sayles suggesting that the answer to that question, as much as I hate to say it, is "no." I'm not surprised by the movie's honorable failure, though. Sayles' somber tone and snail's pace, in my opinion, have sunk several of his previous films and even a couple of the music videos he's directed for Bruce Springsteen.Endquote

I vehemently disagree with this general point of view, although some aspects of the criticism may, of course, be justified. I found the movie kind of growing on me with a fascinating interest in finding out what the main character, the old doctor (played by Argentina's Federico Luppi, photo left with the boy Conejo Dan Rivera Gonzalez) finally finds in his search for his "legacy" -- young medical students he has trained to return to the countryside and bring medicine to the villages wracked by a nebulus guerilla war. The complete plot can be found here as part of the official movie website.

The movie sets its story line without being too specific about the location or specific politics that may or may not be involved. This is a plus. In a commentary on the website about the point of the movie, the author Francisco Goldman, an American of partial Guatemalan descent, said this:

QuoteDo places like the unnamed Latin American country seen in "Men With Guns" really exist in our hemisphere, with whole villages massacred and burned off the face of the earth and young girls tortured and raped? A place where young people might be killed merely for providing medical care?

Of course it's believable. It happened, during a just-ended civil war of thirty-five years in Guatemala: 440 Mayan villages vanished off the face of the earth during one scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign; 150,000 dead, countless widows and orphans. In the silenced, haunted countryside, people were too frightened to name their persecutors, they simply called them la mala gente, the bad people, the same as the men with guns of this movie . . .

The country depicted in John Sayles' movie has a lot in common with the Guatemala of the last few decades, of course, but it resembles, and metaphorically recalls, many other places as well: Chipas, Mexico; the Peruvian Andes; the Argentina of the Dirty War; Colombia; Cuba; South Africa — anywhere on earth where people have been murdered by political forces while terror, censorship and repression keep many of the living locked into silence, into a self-protective stance of not-knowing or denial. Even citizens of the United States can be complicit in this silence, in this blithe attitude of "I'd rather not know" when confronted with the role of their own country in backing and supporting some of these murderous regimes.Endquote

I liked Men with Guns more than the other two movies combined. They were fun, but when Men with Guns finishes on the screen, some parts of it continue in your mind.

Three movies and a birthday

2006-07-13T00:29:00.000-07:00

Everybody seems to expect everybody else to talk about what they've done over summer vacation, but I want to tell you some highlights from my Christmas 'vacation'.

First, as an aside, let me say that the Rightwing has scored a definite triumph this year with their "War on Christmas" campaign and its counter-offensive, "Put Christ Back in Christmas." I say this because people I am close to have mentioned "how terrible" or "what a shame" it is that "they" want stores and public places to use "happy holidays" as a greeting rather than good old Merry Christmas.

No, they did not win any 'hardball' shouting debate or intellectual tête à tête brass balls superduperbowl victory. Instead, the Big Two of Christmas Period, John Gibson and Bill O'Reilly -- with a supporting cast of evangelists, nervous merchants, livy-livered liberal losers, and other nervous nellies of the Cultural War -- have achieved the goal of putting the 'tip" in the tipping point of a permanent, joyous new topic for the, uh, Christmas season. The secret is simply the fact that victory consists almost solely on keeping people talking about it. As our illustrious president might say, "Teach the controversy."

I confess to my personal involvement in this sordid affair, writing several ho-ho-ho's in Bemusings in recent days on the phony war, despite the fact that our staff here includes 2 Jews, 2 Palestinians, a looney Lutheran, an illegal Catholic immigrant, an atheist, a United Nations-loving One-Worlder who believes in God knows what, and me, your humble servant who is a product of good old American commercialized, instantized, purifiedized, tastlessnessized Christianity. In short, you can trust me, but watch out for the others.

I was kidding, trying to make a joke outta other people's real fears. But now I know different. Don't start a joke if you can't get a laugh.

Anyway, my Christmas vacation was centered around this here birthday celebration that everybody's talking about in such an argumentive way. I am sure that Jesus himself is pretty confused about what's happening. They say he's going to make a comeback tour here someday, but maybe not if he watches FOX News channel.

Expect an even bigger controversy next year, when we will see Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson portraying gay Santas competing for the role of Kris Kringle at the FOX News North Pole Bureau Female Elves Intern Party. Okay, that sounds fair and balanced. Ho, ho! Huh?

Now, neither I nor Bemusings (as a corporate entity, of course) usually "do" movie reviews, but in today's fast-paced, hell-bent way-a-life where the man next to you might not be a man -- might not even speak English! -- you gotta roll with the punches, look for the main chance, work for The Man. So, we do movie reviews.

Over Christmas, I was out of town visiting my relatives who have one of them there fancy futurized high-definition televisions' with all the doo-dads, bells and whistles you could wish for, especially at this gift-giving time of the year. It must have cost $2,000 and was sure shiny and bright and the picture, well that jumps right out at ya, just like in those IMAX theaters.

I saw three movies over the course of three days, interspersed with the usual Christmas family functions. The first was Van Helsing starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsdale. I watched half of it one night but couldn't stay awake. It seemed a worthwhile movie, but top-heavy with nonstop action, Tim Burton-type atmosphere and The Mummy's audacious but implausible plot. (The director of this film also directed The Mummy.)

Ah well . . . but the next night, after coming back around 9 p.m. from a Christmas dinner at the relatives, I found the movie on again and right at the spot where I gave up on it the previous night! Woooo! Tell me that's not scary deja vu. So I watched the movie and it blossomed into a fine show. There they all were, like a Gothic Dream Team -- the character Van Helsing as a dashing young Vampire killer with novel weapons, Kate Beckinsdale as . . . a "female warrior" type who gives an impressive performance (photo), and other characters such as Dracula, flying Harpie-like, nearly naked female vampires, Igor (poor job there), Werewolves and Frankenstein. Franky was terrific. It turns out now that Frankenstein can not only speak English (he has been able to do that since 1935), dance and sing (1977) but can now, thanks to this movie, recite the 23rd Psalm ("Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death.") and has turned out to be a good guy. Unknown is whether Mr. Frankenstein has become a Christian, but if he has, I bet he believes in Creationism.

The next movie I stumbled into out of sheer serendipity, the comic Undercover Brother, starring Eddie Griffen, Denise Richards, David Chappelle, Aunjanue Elliswith and a walk-on by James Brown. Why exactly this movie was notable I'm not sure, except that a number of the scenes were funny. I guess that's a good reason to watch a spoof of Black Exploitation movies from the early 1970's. This one is better than most parodies and features "The Brotherhood" with the help of the Undercover Brother in an all-out battle with "The Man," an organization that has turned a Colin Powell-like Black American hero into a lackey for the white man.

But the movie I most delighted in watching was Men with Guns (Hombres armados), a Spanish language film with some English, Nahuatl, Tzotzil, Maya and Kuna (with English subtitles) written and directed by John Sayles. Haven't heard of it? Neither had I. Here is a portion of a CNN review of the 1998 film:

Quote(CNN) -- In her New York Times review of John Sayles' new movie, a Latin American guerrilla tragedy called "Men With Guns," Janet Maslin echoes the sentiments of a great many film critics when she writes that Sayles is "the most courageous and decent storyteller working in American films today."

I couldn't agree more with that assessment, but there's a question that nobody seems to want to ask when considering Sayles' consistently dignified output -- namely, are courage and decency really all that's required to make a successful film?

"Men With Guns" is yet another well-intentioned but tedious essay by Sayles suggesting that the answer to that question, as much as I hate to say it, is "no." I'm not surprised by the movie's honorable failure, though. Sayles' somber tone and snail's pace, in my opinion, have sunk several of his previous films and even a couple of the music videos he's directed for Bruce Springsteen.Endquote

I vehemently disagree with this general point of view, although some aspects of the criticism may, of course, be justified. I found the movie kind of growing on me with a fascinating interest in finding out what the main character, the old doctor (played by Argentina's Federico Luppi, photo left with the boy Conejo Dan Rivera Gonzalez) finally finds in his search for his "legacy" -- young medical students he has trained to return to the countryside and bring medicine to the villages wracked by a nebulus guerilla war. The complete plot can be found here as part of the official movie website.

The movie sets its story line without being too specific about the location or specific politics that may or may not be involved. This is a plus. In a commentary on the website about the point of the movie, the author Francisco Goldman, an American of partial Guatemalan descent, said this:

QuoteDo places like the unnamed Latin American country seen in "Men With Guns" really exist in our hemisphere, with whole villages massacred and burned off the face of the earth and young girls tortured and raped? A place where young people might be killed merely for providing medical care?

Of course it's believable. It happened, during a just-ended civil war of thirty-five years in Guatemala: 440 Mayan villages vanished off the face of the earth during one scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign; 150,000 dead, countless widows and orphans. In the silenced, haunted countryside, people were too frightened to name their persecutors, they simply called them la mala gente, the bad people, the same as the men with guns of this movie . . .

The country depicted in John Sayles' movie has a lot in common with the Guatemala of the last few decades, of course, but it resembles, and metaphorically recalls, many other places as well: Chipas, Mexico; the Peruvian Andes; the Argentina of the Dirty War; Colombia; Cuba; South Africa — anywhere on earth where people have been murdered by political forces while terror, censorship and repression keep many of the living locked into silence, into a self-protective stance of not-knowing or denial. Even citizens of the United States can be complicit in this silence, in this blithe attitude of "I'd rather not know" when confronted with the role of their own country in backing and supporting some of these murderous regimes.Endquote

I liked Men with Guns more than the other two movies combined. They were fun, but when Men with Guns finishes on the screen, some parts of it continue in your mind.

Three movies and a birthday

2006-07-12T10:21:00.000-07:00

Everybody seems to expect everybody else to talk about what they've done over summer vacation, but I want to tell you some highlights from my Christmas 'vacation'.

First, as an aside, let me say that the Rightwing has scored a definite triumph this year with their "War on Christmas" campaign and its counter-offensive, "Put Christ Back in Christmas." I say this because people I am close to have mentioned "how terrible" or "what a shame" it is that "they" want stores and public places to use "happy holidays" as a greeting rather than good old Merry Christmas.

No, they did not win any 'hardball' shouting debate or intellectual tête à tête brass balls superduperbowl victory. Instead, the Big Two of Christmas Period, John Gibson and Bill O'Reilly -- with a supporting cast of evangelists, nervous merchants, livy-livered liberal losers, and other nervous nellies of the Cultural War -- have achieved the goal of putting the 'tip" in the tipping point of a permanent, joyous new topic for the, uh, Christmas season. The secret is simply the fact that victory consists almost solely on keeping people talking about it. As our illustrious president might say, "Teach the controversy."

I confess to my personal involvement in this sordid affair, writing several ho-ho-ho's in Bemusings in recent days on the phony war, despite the fact that our staff here includes 2 Jews, 2 Palestinians, a looney Lutheran, an illegal Catholic immigrant, an atheist, a United Nations-loving One-Worlder who believes in God knows what, and me, your humble servant who is a product of good old American commercialized, instantized, purifiedized, tastlessnessized Christianity. In short, you can trust me, but watch out for the others.

I was kidding, trying to make a joke outta other people's real fears. But now I know different. Don't start a joke if you can't get a laugh.

Anyway, my Christmas vacation was centered around this here birthday celebration that everybody's talking about in such an argumentive way. I am sure that Jesus himself is pretty confused about what's happening. They say he's going to make a comeback tour here someday, but maybe not if he watches FOX News channel.

Expect an even bigger controversy next year, when we will see Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson portraying gay Santas competing for the role of Kris Kringle at the FOX News North Pole Bureau Female Elves Intern Party. Okay, that sounds fair and balanced. Ho, ho! Huh?

Now, neither I nor Bemusings (as a corporate entity, of course) usually "do" movie reviews, but in today's fast-paced, hell-bent way-a-life where the man next to you might not be a man -- might not even speak English! -- you gotta roll with the punches, look for the main chance, work for The Man. So, we do movie reviews.

Over Christmas, I was out of town visiting my relatives who have one of them there fancy futurized high-definition televisions' with all the doo-dads, bells and whistles you could wish for, especially at this gift-giving time of the year. It must have cost $2,000 and was sure shiny and bright and the picture, well that jumps right out at ya, just like in those IMAX theaters.

I saw three movies over the course of three days, interspersed with the usual Christmas family functions. The first was Van Helsing starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsdale. I watched half of it one night but couldn't stay awake. It seemed a worthwhile movie, but top-heavy with nonstop action, Tim Burton-type atmosphere and The Mummy's audacious but implausible plot. (The director of this film also directed The Mummy.)

Ah well . . . but the next night, after coming back around 9 p.m. from a Christmas dinner at the relatives, I found the movie on again and right at the spot where I gave up on it the previous night! Woooo! Tell me that's not scary deja vu. So I watched the movie and it blossomed into a fine show. There they all were, like a Gothic Dream Team -- the character Van Helsing as a dashing young Vampire killer with novel weapons, Kate Beckinsdale as . . . a "female warrior" type who gives an impressive performance (photo), and other characters such as Dracula, flying Harpie-like, nearly naked female vampires, Igor (poor job there), Werewolves and Frankenstein. Franky was terrific. It turns out now that Frankenstein can not only speak English (he has been able to do that since 1935), dance and sing (1977) but can now, thanks to this movie, recite the 23rd Psalm ("Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death.") and has turned out to be a good guy. Unknown is whether Mr. Frankenstein has become a Christian, but if he has, I bet he believes in Creationism.

The next movie I stumbled into out of sheer serendipity, the comic Undercover Brother, starring Eddie Griffen, Denise Richards, David Chappelle, Aunjanue Elliswith and a walk-on by James Brown. Why exactly this movie was notable I'm not sure, except that a number of the scenes were funny. I guess that's a good reason to watch a spoof of Black Exploitation movies from the early 1970's. This one is better than most parodies and features "The Brotherhood" with the help of the Undercover Brother in an all-out battle with "The Man," an organization that has turned a Colin Powell-like Black American hero into a lackey for the white man.

But the movie I most delighted in watching was Men with Guns (Hombres armados), a Spanish language film with some English, Nahuatl, Tzotzil, Maya and Kuna (with English subtitles) written and directed by John Sayles. Haven't heard of it? Neither had I. Here is a portion of a CNN review of the 1998 film:

Quote(CNN) -- In her New York Times review of John Sayles' new movie, a Latin American guerrilla tragedy called "Men With Guns," Janet Maslin echoes the sentiments of a great many film critics when she writes that Sayles is "the most courageous and decent storyteller working in American films today."

I couldn't agree more with that assessment, but there's a question that nobody seems to want to ask when considering Sayles' consistently dignified output -- namely, are courage and decency really all that's required to make a successful film?

"Men With Guns" is yet another well-intentioned but tedious essay by Sayles suggesting that the answer to that question, as much as I hate to say it, is "no." I'm not surprised by the movie's honorable failure, though. Sayles' somber tone and snail's pace, in my opinion, have sunk several of his previous films and even a couple of the music videos he's directed for Bruce Springsteen.Endquote

I vehemently disagree with this general point of view, although some aspects of the criticism may, of course, be justified. I found the movie kind of growing on me with a fascinating interest in finding out what the main character, the old doctor (played by Argentina's Federico Luppi, photo left with the boy Conejo Dan Rivera Gonzalez) finally finds in his search for his "legacy" -- young medical students he has trained to return to the countryside and bring medicine to the villages wracked by a nebulus guerilla war. The complete plot can be found here as part of the official movie website.

The movie sets its story line without being too specific about the location or specific politics that may or may not be involved. This is a plus. In a commentary on the website about the point of the movie, the author Francisco Goldman, an American of partial Guatemalan descent, said this:

QuoteDo places like the unnamed Latin American country seen in "Men With Guns" really exist in our hemisphere, with whole villages massacred and burned off the face of the earth and young girls tortured and raped? A place where young people might be killed merely for providing medical care?

Of course it's believable. It happened, during a just-ended civil war of thirty-five years in Guatemala: 440 Mayan villages vanished off the face of the earth during one scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign; 150,000 dead, countless widows and orphans. In the silenced, haunted countryside, people were too frightened to name their persecutors, they simply called them la mala gente, the bad people, the same as the men with guns of this movie . . .

The country depicted in John Sayles' movie has a lot in common with the Guatemala of the last few decades, of course, but it resembles, and metaphorically recalls, many other places as well: Chipas, Mexico; the Peruvian Andes; the Argentina of the Dirty War; Colombia; Cuba; South Africa — anywhere on earth where people have been murdered by political forces while terror, censorship and repression keep many of the living locked into silence, into a self-protective stance of not-knowing or denial. Even citizens of the United States can be complicit in this silence, in this blithe attitude of "I'd rather not know" when confronted with the role of their own country in backing and supporting some of these murderous regimes.Endquote

I liked Men with Guns more than the other two movies combined. They were fun, but when Men with Guns finishes on the screen, some parts of it continue in your mind.

Three movies and a birthday

2006-07-11T21:22:00.000-07:00

Everybody seems to expect everybody else to talk about what they've done over summer vacation, but I want to tell you some highlights from my Christmas 'vacation'.

First, as an aside, let me say that the Rightwing has scored a definite triumph this year with their "War on Christmas" campaign and its counter-offensive, "Put Christ Back in Christmas." I say this because people I am close to have mentioned "how terrible" or "what a shame" it is that "they" want stores and public places to use "happy holidays" as a greeting rather than good old Merry Christmas.

No, they did not win any 'hardball' shouting debate or intellectual tête à tête brass balls superduperbowl victory. Instead, the Big Two of Christmas Period, John Gibson and Bill O'Reilly -- with a supporting cast of evangelists, nervous merchants, livy-livered liberal losers, and other nervous nellies of the Cultural War -- have achieved the goal of putting the 'tip" in the tipping point of a permanent, joyous new topic for the, uh, Christmas season. The secret is simply the fact that victory consists almost solely on keeping people talking about it. As our illustrious president might say, "Teach the controversy."

I confess to my personal involvement in this sordid affair, writing several ho-ho-ho's in Bemusings in recent days on the phony war, despite the fact that our staff here includes 2 Jews, 2 Palestinians, a looney Lutheran, an illegal Catholic immigrant, an atheist, a United Nations-loving One-Worlder who believes in God knows what, and me, your humble servant who is a product of good old American commercialized, instantized, purifiedized, tastlessnessized Christianity. In short, you can trust me, but watch out for the others.

I was kidding, trying to make a joke outta other people's real fears. But now I know different. Don't start a joke if you can't get a laugh.

Anyway, my Christmas vacation was centered around this here birthday celebration that everybody's talking about in such an argumentive way. I am sure that Jesus himself is pretty confused about what's happening. They say he's going to make a comeback tour here someday, but maybe not if he watches FOX News channel.

Expect an even bigger controversy next year, when we will see Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson portraying gay Santas competing for the role of Kris Kringle at the FOX News North Pole Bureau Female Elves Intern Party. Okay, that sounds fair and balanced. Ho, ho! Huh?

Now, neither I nor Bemusings (as a corporate entity, of course) usually "do" movie reviews, but in today's fast-paced, hell-bent way-a-life where the man next to you might not be a man -- might not even speak English! -- you gotta roll with the punches, look for the main chance, work for The Man. So, we do movie reviews.

Over Christmas, I was out of town visiting my relatives who have one of them there fancy futurized high-definition televisions' with all the doo-dads, bells and whistles you could wish for, especially at this gift-giving time of the year. It must have cost $2,000 and was sure shiny and bright and the picture, well that jumps right out at ya, just like in those IMAX theaters.

I saw three movies over the course of three days, interspersed with the usual Christmas family functions. The first was Van Helsing starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsdale. I watched half of it one night but couldn't stay awake. It seemed a worthwhile movie, but top-heavy with nonstop action, Tim Burton-type atmosphere and The Mummy's audacious but implausible plot. (The director of this film also directed The Mummy.)

Ah well . . . but the next night, after coming back around 9 p.m. from a Christmas dinner at the relatives, I found the movie on again and right at the spot where I gave up on it the previous night! Woooo! Tell me that's not scary deja vu. So I watched the movie and it blossomed into a fine show. There they all were, like a Gothic Dream Team -- the character Van Helsing as a dashing young Vampire killer with novel weapons, Kate Beckinsdale as . . . a "female warrior" type who gives an impressive performance (photo), and other characters such as Dracula, flying Harpie-like, nearly naked female vampires, Igor (poor job there), Werewolves and Frankenstein. Franky was terrific. It turns out now that Frankenstein can not only speak English (he has been able to do that since 1935), dance and sing (1977) but can now, thanks to this movie, recite the 23rd Psalm ("Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death.") and has turned out to be a good guy. Unknown is whether Mr. Frankenstein has become a Christian, but if he has, I bet he believes in Creationism.

The next movie I stumbled into out of sheer serendipity, the comic Undercover Brother, starring Eddie Griffen, Denise Richards, David Chappelle, Aunjanue Elliswith and a walk-on by James Brown. Why exactly this movie was notable I'm not sure, except that a number of the scenes were funny. I guess that's a good reason to watch a spoof of Black Exploitation movies from the early 1970's. This one is better than most parodies and features "The Brotherhood" with the help of the Undercover Brother in an all-out battle with "The Man," an organization that has turned a Colin Powell-like Black American hero into a lackey for the white man.

But the movie I most delighted in watching was Men with Guns (Hombres armados), a Spanish language film with some English, Nahuatl, Tzotzil, Maya and Kuna (with English subtitles) written and directed by John Sayles. Haven't heard of it? Neither had I. Here is a portion of a CNN review of the 1998 film:

Quote(CNN) -- In her New York Times review of John Sayles' new movie, a Latin American guerrilla tragedy called "Men With Guns," Janet Maslin echoes the sentiments of a great many film critics when she writes that Sayles is "the most courageous and decent storyteller working in American films today."

I couldn't agree more with that assessment, but there's a question that nobody seems to want to ask when considering Sayles' consistently dignified output -- namely, are courage and decency really all that's required to make a successful film?

"Men With Guns" is yet another well-intentioned but tedious essay by Sayles suggesting that the answer to that question, as much as I hate to say it, is "no." I'm not surprised by the movie's honorable failure, though. Sayles' somber tone and snail's pace, in my opinion, have sunk several of his previous films and even a couple of the music videos he's directed for Bruce Springsteen.Endquote

I vehemently disagree with this general point of view, although some aspects of the criticism may, of course, be justified. I found the movie kind of growing on me with a fascinating interest in finding out what the main character, the old doctor (played by Argentina's Federico Luppi, photo left with the boy Conejo Dan Rivera Gonzalez) finally finds in his search for his "legacy" -- young medical students he has trained to return to the countryside and bring medicine to the villages wracked by a nebulus guerilla war. The complete plot can be found here as part of the official movie website.

The movie sets its story line without being too specific about the location or specific politics that may or may not be involved. This is a plus. In a commentary on the website about the point of the movie, the author Francisco Goldman, an American of partial Guatemalan descent, said this:

QuoteDo places like the unnamed Latin American country seen in "Men With Guns" really exist in our hemisphere, with whole villages massacred and burned off the face of the earth and young girls tortured and raped? A place where young people might be killed merely for providing medical care?

Of course it's believable. It happened, during a just-ended civil war of thirty-five years in Guatemala: 440 Mayan villages vanished off the face of the earth during one scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign; 150,000 dead, countless widows and orphans. In the silenced, haunted countryside, people were too frightened to name their persecutors, they simply called them la mala gente, the bad people, the same as the men with guns of this movie . . .

The country depicted in John Sayles' movie has a lot in common with the Guatemala of the last few decades, of course, but it resembles, and metaphorically recalls, many other places as well: Chipas, Mexico; the Peruvian Andes; the Argentina of the Dirty War; Colombia; Cuba; South Africa — anywhere on earth where people have been murdered by political forces while terror, censorship and repression keep many of the living locked into silence, into a self-protective stance of not-knowing or denial. Even citizens of the United States can be complicit in this silence, in this blithe attitude of "I'd rather not know" when confronted with the role of their own country in backing and supporting some of these murderous regimes.Endquote

I liked Men with Guns more than the other two movies combined. They were fun, but when Men with Guns finishes on the screen, some parts of it continue in your mind.

Three movies and a birthday

2006-07-11T19:55:00.000-07:00

Everybody seems to expect everybody else to talk about what they've done over summer vacation, but I want to tell you some highlights from my Christmas 'vacation'.

First, as an aside, let me say that the Rightwing has scored a definite triumph this year with their "War on Christmas" campaign and its counter-offensive, "Put Christ Back in Christmas." I say this because people I am close to have mentioned "how terrible" or "what a shame" it is that "they" want stores and public places to use "happy holidays" as a greeting rather than good old Merry Christmas.

No, they did not win any 'hardball' shouting debate or intellectual tête à tête brass balls superduperbowl victory. Instead, the Big Two of Christmas Period, John Gibson and Bill O'Reilly -- with a supporting cast of evangelists, nervous merchants, livy-livered liberal losers, and other nervous nellies of the Cultural War -- have achieved the goal of putting the 'tip" in the tipping point of a permanent, joyous new topic for the, uh, Christmas season. The secret is simply the fact that victory consists almost solely on keeping people talking about it. As our illustrious president might say, "Teach the controversy."

I confess to my personal involvement in this sordid affair, writing several ho-ho-ho's in Bemusings in recent days on the phony war, despite the fact that our staff here includes 2 Jews, 2 Palestinians, a looney Lutheran, an illegal Catholic immigrant, an atheist, a United Nations-loving One-Worlder who believes in God knows what, and me, your humble servant who is a product of good old American commercialized, instantized, purifiedized, tastlessnessized Christianity. In short, you can trust me, but watch out for the others.

I was kidding, trying to make a joke outta other people's real fears. But now I know different. Don't start a joke if you can't get a laugh.

Anyway, my Christmas vacation was centered around this here birthday celebration that everybody's talking about in such an argumentive way. I am sure that Jesus himself is pretty confused about what's happening. They say he's going to make a comeback tour here someday, but maybe not if he watches FOX News channel.

Expect an even bigger controversy next year, when we will see Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson portraying gay Santas competing for the role of Kris Kringle at the FOX News North Pole Bureau Female Elves Intern Party. Okay, that sounds fair and balanced. Ho, ho! Huh?

Now, neither I nor Bemusings (as a corporate entity, of course) usually "do" movie reviews, but in today's fast-paced, hell-bent way-a-life where the man next to you might not be a man -- might not even speak English! -- you gotta roll with the punches, look for the main chance, work for The Man. So, we do movie reviews.

Over Christmas, I was out of town visiting my relatives who have one of them there fancy futurized high-definition televisions' with all the doo-dads, bells and whistles you could wish for, especially at this gift-giving time of the year. It must have cost $2,000 and was sure shiny and bright and the picture, well that jumps right out at ya, just like in those IMAX theaters.

I saw three movies over the course of three days, interspersed with the usual Christmas family functions. The first was Van Helsing starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsdale. I watched half of it one night but couldn't stay awake. It seemed a worthwhile movie, but top-heavy with nonstop action, Tim Burton-type atmosphere and The Mummy's audacious but implausible plot. (The director of this film also directed The Mummy.)

Ah well . . . but the next night, after coming back around 9 p.m. from a Christmas dinner at the relatives, I found the movie on again and right at the spot where I gave up on it the previous night! Woooo! Tell me that's not scary deja vu. So I watched the movie and it blossomed into a fine show. There they all were, like a Gothic Dream Team -- the character Van Helsing as a dashing young Vampire killer with novel weapons, Kate Beckinsdale as . . . a "female warrior" type who gives an impressive performance (photo), and other characters such as Dracula, flying Harpie-like, nearly naked female vampires, Igor (poor job there), Werewolves and Frankenstein. Franky was terrific. It turns out now that Frankenstein can not only speak English (he has been able to do that since 1935), dance and sing (1977) but can now, thanks to this movie, recite the 23rd Psalm ("Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death.") and has turned out to be a good guy. Unknown is whether Mr. Frankenstein has become a Christian, but if he has, I bet he believes in Creationism.

The next movie I stumbled into out of sheer serendipity, the comic Undercover Brother, starring Eddie Griffen, Denise Richards, David Chappelle, Aunjanue Elliswith and a walk-on by James Brown. Why exactly this movie was notable I'm not sure, except that a number of the scenes were funny. I guess that's a good reason to watch a spoof of Black Exploitation movies from the early 1970's. This one is better than most parodies and features "The Brotherhood" with the help of the Undercover Brother in an all-out battle with "The Man," an organization that has turned a Colin Powell-like Black American hero into a lackey for the white man.

But the movie I most delighted in watching was Men with Guns (Hombres armados), a Spanish language film with some English, Nahuatl, Tzotzil, Maya and Kuna (with English subtitles) written and directed by John Sayles. Haven't heard of it? Neither had I. Here is a portion of a CNN review of the 1998 film:

Quote(CNN) -- In her New York Times review of John Sayles' new movie, a Latin American guerrilla tragedy called "Men With Guns," Janet Maslin echoes the sentiments of a great many film critics when she writes that Sayles is "the most courageous and decent storyteller working in American films today."

I couldn't agree more with that assessment, but there's a question that nobody seems to want to ask when considering Sayles' consistently dignified output -- namely, are courage and decency really all that's required to make a successful film?

"Men With Guns" is yet another well-intentioned but tedious essay by Sayles suggesting that the answer to that question, as much as I hate to say it, is "no." I'm not surprised by the movie's honorable failure, though. Sayles' somber tone and snail's pace, in my opinion, have sunk several of his previous films and even a couple of the music videos he's directed for Bruce Springsteen.Endquote

I vehemently disagree with this general point of view, although some aspects of the criticism may, of course, be justified. I found the movie kind of growing on me with a fascinating interest in finding out what the main character, the old doctor (played by Argentina's Federico Luppi, photo left with the boy Conejo Dan Rivera Gonzalez) finally finds in his search for his "legacy" -- young medical students he has trained to return to the countryside and bring medicine to the villages wracked by a nebulus guerilla war. The complete plot can be found here as part of the official movie website.

The movie sets its story line without being too specific about the location or specific politics that may or may not be involved. This is a plus. In a commentary on the website about the point of the movie, the author Francisco Goldman, an American of partial Guatemalan descent, said this:

QuoteDo places like the unnamed Latin American country seen in "Men With Guns" really exist in our hemisphere, with whole villages massacred and burned off the face of the earth and young girls tortured and raped? A place where young people might be killed merely for providing medical care?

Of course it's believable. It happened, during a just-ended civil war of thirty-five years in Guatemala: 440 Mayan villages vanished off the face of the earth during one scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign; 150,000 dead, countless widows and orphans. In the silenced, haunted countryside, people were too frightened to name their persecutors, they simply called them la mala gente, the bad people, the same as the men with guns of this movie . . .

The country depicted in John Sayles' movie has a lot in common with the Guatemala of the last few decades, of course, but it resembles, and metaphorically recalls, many other places as well: Chipas, Mexico; the Peruvian Andes; the Argentina of the Dirty War; Colombia; Cuba; South Africa — anywhere on earth where people have been murdered by political forces while terror, censorship and repression keep many of the living locked into silence, into a self-protective stance of not-knowing or denial. Even citizens of the United States can be complicit in this silence, in this blithe attitude of "I'd rather not know" when confronted with the role of their own country in backing and supporting some of these murderous regimes.Endquote

I liked Men with Guns more than the other two movies combined. They were fun, but when Men with Guns finishes on the screen, some parts of it continue in your mind.

Three movies and a birthday

2006-07-11T18:25:00.000-07:00

Everybody seems to expect everybody else to talk about what they've done over summer vacation, but I want to tell you some highlights from my Christmas 'vacation'.

First, as an aside, let me say that the Rightwing has scored a definite triumph this year with their "War on Christmas" campaign and its counter-offensive, "Put Christ Back in Christmas." I say this because people I am close to have mentioned "how terrible" or "what a shame" it is that "they" want stores and public places to use "happy holidays" as a greeting rather than good old Merry Christmas.

No, they did not win any 'hardball' shouting debate or intellectual tête à tête brass balls superduperbowl victory. Instead, the Big Two of Christmas Period, John Gibson and Bill O'Reilly -- with a supporting cast of evangelists, nervous merchants, livy-livered liberal losers, and other nervous nellies of the Cultural War -- have achieved the goal of putting the 'tip" in the tipping point of a permanent, joyous new topic for the, uh, Christmas season. The secret is simply the fact that victory consists almost solely on keeping people talking about it. As our illustrious president might say, "Teach the controversy."

I confess to my personal involvement in this sordid affair, writing several ho-ho-ho's in Bemusings in recent days on the phony war, despite the fact that our staff here includes 2 Jews, 2 Palestinians, a looney Lutheran, an illegal Catholic immigrant, an atheist, a United Nations-loving One-Worlder who believes in God knows what, and me, your humble servant who is a product of good old American commercialized, instantized, purifiedized, tastlessnessized Christianity. In short, you can trust me, but watch out for the others.

I was kidding, trying to make a joke outta other people's real fears. But now I know different. Don't start a joke if you can't get a laugh.

Anyway, my Christmas vacation was centered around this here birthday celebration that everybody's talking about in such an argumentive way. I am sure that Jesus himself is pretty confused about what's happening. They say he's going to make a comeback tour here someday, but maybe not if he watches FOX News channel.

Expect an even bigger controversy next year, when we will see Bill O'Reilly and John Gibson portraying gay Santas competing for the role of Kris Kringle at the FOX News North Pole Bureau Female Elves Intern Party. Okay, that sounds fair and balanced. Ho, ho! Huh?

Now, neither I nor Bemusings (as a corporate entity, of course) usually "do" movie reviews, but in today's fast-paced, hell-bent way-a-life where the man next to you might not be a man -- might not even speak English! -- you gotta roll with the punches, look for the main chance, work for The Man. So, we do movie reviews.

Over Christmas, I was out of town visiting my relatives who have one of them there fancy futurized high-definition televisions' with all the doo-dads, bells and whistles you could wish for, especially at this gift-giving time of the year. It must have cost $2,000 and was sure shiny and bright and the picture, well that jumps right out at ya, just like in those IMAX theaters.

I saw three movies over the course of three days, interspersed with the usual Christmas family functions. The first was Van Helsing starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsdale. I watched half of it one night but couldn't stay awake. It seemed a worthwhile movie, but top-heavy with nonstop action, Tim Burton-type atmosphere and The Mummy's audacious but implausible plot. (The director of this film also directed The Mummy.)

Ah well . . . but the next night, after coming back around 9 p.m. from a Christmas dinner at the relatives, I found the movie on again and right at the spot where I gave up on it the previous night! Woooo! Tell me that's not scary deja vu. So I watched the movie and it blossomed into a fine show. There they all were, like a Gothic Dream Team -- the character Van Helsing as a dashing young Vampire killer with novel weapons, Kate Beckinsdale as . . . a "female warrior" type who gives an impressive performance (photo), and other characters such as Dracula, flying Harpie-like, nearly naked female vampires, Igor (poor job there), Werewolves and Frankenstein. Franky was terrific. It turns out now that Frankenstein can not only speak English (he has been able to do that since 1935), dance and sing (1977) but can now, thanks to this movie, recite the 23rd Psalm ("Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Death.") and has turned out to be a good guy. Unknown is whether Mr. Frankenstein has become a Christian, but if he has, I bet he believes in Creationism.

The next movie I stumbled into out of sheer serendipity, the comic Undercover Brother, starring Eddie Griffen, Denise Richards, David Chappelle, Aunjanue Elliswith and a walk-on by James Brown. Why exactly this movie was notable I'm not sure, except that a number of the scenes were funny. I guess that's a good reason to watch a spoof of Black Exploitation movies from the early 1970's. This one is better than most parodies and features "The Brotherhood" with the help of the Undercover Brother in an all-out battle with "The Man," an organization that has turned a Colin Powell-like Black American hero into a lackey for the white man.

But the movie I most delighted in watching was Men with Guns (Hombres armados), a Spanish language film with some English, Nahuatl, Tzotzil, Maya and Kuna (with English subtitles) written and directed by John Sayles. Haven't heard of it? Neither had I. Here is a portion of a CNN review of the 1998 film:

Quote(CNN) -- In her New York Times review of John Sayles' new movie, a Latin American guerrilla tragedy called "Men With Guns," Janet Maslin echoes the sentiments of a great many film critics when she writes that Sayles is "the most courageous and decent storyteller working in American films today."

I couldn't agree more with that assessment, but there's a question that nobody seems to want to ask when considering Sayles' consistently dignified output -- namely, are courage and decency really all that's required to make a successful film?

"Men With Guns" is yet another well-intentioned but tedious essay by Sayles suggesting that the answer to that question, as much as I hate to say it, is "no." I'm not surprised by the movie's honorable failure, though. Sayles' somber tone and snail's pace, in my opinion, have sunk several of his previous films and even a couple of the music videos he's directed for Bruce Springsteen.Endquote

I vehemently disagree with this general point of view, although some aspects of the criticism may, of course, be justified. I found the movie kind of growing on me with a fascinating interest in finding out what the main character, the old doctor (played by Argentina's Federico Luppi, photo left with the boy Conejo Dan Rivera Gonzalez) finally finds in his search for his "legacy" -- young medical students he has trained to return to the countryside and bring medicine to the villages wracked by a nebulus guerilla war. The complete plot can be found here as part of the official movie website.

The movie sets its story line without being too specific about the location or specific politics that may or may not be involved. This is a plus. In a commentary on the website about the point of the movie, the author Francisco Goldman, an American of partial Guatemalan descent, said this:

QuoteDo places like the unnamed Latin American country seen in "Men With Guns" really exist in our hemisphere, with whole villages massacred and burned off the face of the earth and young girls tortured and raped? A place where young people might be killed merely for providing medical care?

Of course it's believable. It happened, during a just-ended civil war of thirty-five years in Guatemala: 440 Mayan villages vanished off the face of the earth during one scorched earth counter-insurgency campaign; 150,000 dead, countless widows and orphans. In the silenced, haunted countryside, people were too frightened to name their persecutors, they simply called them la mala gente, the bad people, the same as the men with guns of this movie . . .

The country depicted in John Sayles' movie has a lot in common with the Guatemala of the last few decades, of course, but it resembles, and metaphorically recalls, many other places as well: Chipas, Mexico; the Peruvian Andes; the Argentina of the Dirty War; Colombia; Cuba; South Africa — anywhere on earth where people have been murdered by political forces while terror, censorship and repression keep many of the living locked into silence, into a self-protective stance of not-knowing or denial. Even citizens of the United States can be complicit in this silence, in this blithe attitude of "I'd rather not know" when confronted with the role of their own country in backing and supporting some of these murderous regimes.Endquote

I liked Men with Guns more than the other two movies combined. They were fun, but when Men with Guns finishes on the screen, some parts of it continue in your mind.

Two down, a school bus full of high school cheerleaders to go.

2006-07-10T16:21:00.000-07:00

Last night Jim and I went to a couples engagement party at a gorgeous house overlooking the Missoula valley. It was still in the 90's at 6 pm, but their house bordered a cool, dry forest and the patio was shaded by the big post-n-beam home. Despite the pristine setting, I was not exactly looking forward to the event. In fact, I was pissed to be wasting a babysitter on the deal. Fifty bucks to fake smile and get nauseous on broccoli and small talk.

The party was hosted by Jen, the vapid friend of the soon-to-be-bride and her ex-NFL star husband. I had met her on one other occasion, and she literally looked through my face when I congratulated her on her pregnancy and had nothing to say. I wasn't entirely sure she was a living human, and was worried that the child growing in her womb would pop out only to find her plastic mom had no opposable thumbs with which to change her diapers. In addition, her sister (Amy), lives across the street from us and on more than one occasion I had exchanged pleasantries with her. Pleasantries is actually not the word, because it was extremely painful trying to elicit complete sentences from her plastic, mannequin face. And her husband was a close talker and asked inappropriately intimate questions. The sisters inhabited a portion of my brain reserved for dumb pretty people that I have no use for. It's not a nice place, this section of my brain. It's petty and mean, actually, but fun to visit and play in when I'm drunk-talking to close friends.

So the party... the food was perfect, highlited by yummy sandwiches on croissants (still hate this word), an interesting and refreshing pasta salad, fresh homemade fruit salad, and a Huge Plate of Truffles. So good for you, plastic sister duo, I thought to myself as I ate their delicious food and sipped their tastefully selected wine. Then later I had a mildly entertaining discussion with Amy about preschools and Viggo Mortensen. Okay, so one of the plastic sisters apparently has a heartbeat, I mused as I walked around their beautiful home with a mouthful of Mojito Truffles. Then later I found myself sitting next to Jen when everyone else had vacated the patio to tour the home and we talked about how interesting Macon, Georgia is and how Alison Krausse gives us the shivers. I laughed with her about how we sing crazy-loud in the car, envisioning ourselves joining Alison on tour someday.

And then I finally had to do it.

I excused myself to go to the bathroom, and to grab a couple raspberry liquor truffles, and I sat on the toilet and visited that place in my mind. The one with the dumb pretty useless people. And I tapped Jen and Amy on the shoulder and told them they were actually sitting in the wrong seats. They smiled their gorgeous white smiles and shrugged their beautiful tan soft shoulders and swished their little bums out of the cheap seats and joined the masses of normal people milling around in the rest of my grey matter. They were non-plussed by the transition, unaware the beating they had been receiving by a drunk mean girl.

If you bump into them in my brain, you'll recognize them by their stunning beauty, interesting and funny personalities and chocolate fingerprints on their shoulders. I ate far too many truffles last night.

'Worldwide Leader', My Ass

2006-07-06T16:12:00.000-07:00

How has no one come up with a network to rival ESPN? CNN got their start, and after they proved to be successful, FOX and NBC followed suit with 24hr news stations.

I know FOX does a regional sports thing, but holy cripes - ESPN puts on some absolutely abysmal programming, that it shouldn't take much work to draw viewers away from them on a national scope.

But that's not exactly what's been bothering me lately about the 'Worldwide Leader'. As terrible as most of their coverage is, they at this point have the resources to cover just about anything. So I peruse the company website ESPN.com for a quick overview of my sports stories for the day. But lately, most of the info that I'd like to get from them, is part of their "Insider" coverage - and inaccessible to me, unless I suscribe to the "Insider" package.

I understand that websites should be viable business operations, but in this case, it's actually having the opposite effect. ESPN.com has decided that pretty much every and any article pertaining to college football is an "Insider" article... which means I can't read it. So you know what? I don't even bother with them for college football information. Which sucks, because no one else nationally has the access that ESPN does. But it's gotten to the point that I know ESPN won't even give me the coverage on college football, so I go elsewhere.

There was an article about NFL wide receivers on the site today, and there was no mention of it being an "Insider" article on the front page, but when you click on the link... oops...."You need to be an "Insider" to read this article!" Bitches.

It used to just be college football. Now, on the main page, there's a section that lists the top three articles for each major sport. Two of the three MLB articles are "Insider", as one of the NFL articles ( separate from the one I mentioned before ) ... ALL three NBA articles are, and all three college football articles.

Are there that many people out there that are just cattle, and sign up for this stuff? It used to be free... and that's what bugs me. It's not like they added a new feature, and said that I now have to pay for it.

Way to drive away your target market douchbags. Why can't some rich guy feel the same way I do, and create some competition for ESPN?? I'd sure as hell watch/surf anything else.

Super Bowl

2006-05-09T19:53:00.000-07:00
By any measure, the Super Bowl is one of the most watched television programs of the year. The game tends to have high Nielsen television ratings which usually come in around a 40 rating and 60 share (i.e., on average, 40 percent of all U.S. households, and 60 percent of all homes tuned into television during the game). This means that on average, 80 to 90 million Americans are tuned into the Super Bowl at any given moment. It is also estimated that 130-140 million tune into some part of the game.

2006-01-23T13:06:00.000-08:00
superbowl new articles for Monday, January 23, 2006Three movies and a birthday
No, they did not win any 'hardball' shouting debate or intellectual tête à tête brass balls superduperbowl victory. Instead, the Big Two of Christ mas Period, John Gibson and Bill O'Reilly -- with a supporting cast of evangelists, ...
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In professional American football, the Super Bowl is the championship game of the National Football League (NFL) in the United States. The game and its ancillary festivities constitute Super Bowl Sunday (sometimes "Super Sunday"), ...
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The gifts for the superduperbowl party starring terrell owens arrived today, and a bonus 2k5 parasite pals calendar came with it. Still need to find some referee hosting shirts, however. .bye. OH *meow* I ALMOST FORGOT dont be left out; ...

superbowl

2006-01-15T15:35:00.000-08:00
In professional American football, the Super Bowl is the championship game of the National Football League (NFL) in the United States. The game and its ancillary festivities constitute Super Bowl Sunday (sometimes "Super Sunday"), which over the years has almost become a de facto American national holiday.