Dorrk Dot Com

Bastard!

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It was inevitable that the Seth Rogen comedy Observe and Report would, regardless of its own qualities, suffer from its thematic association with the ubiquitously advertised simpleminded slapstick of Paul Blart: Mall Cop. What was not expected, however, is that O&A would utilize that same suburban security guard shtick to ambitiously homage, parody and even sort of critique the dark, paranoid fanatasy of Martin Scorsese’s infamous Taxi Driver.

While writer/director Jody Hill’s strange and eventful movie may not be entirely successful (it may take me a few viewings to settle that), it is often surprising and challenging in its wild shifts of tone, in much the same way that Rogen’s other recent movie, Judd Apatow’s Funny People, cavalierly mixed conventional genre expectations with unsettling examination of the psychology of failure and desparation. I wasn’t sure it worked in Funny People, but mostly because I objected to the pathos of that film’s more conventional elements.

Observe and Report treads on somewhat less dangerous ground in that regard, but delves much deeper into the darkness, with Rogen turning in a remarkably effective (and, importantly, understated) performance that enables the movie to swing violently from the absurd comedy his fans expect to bracing contemplations of sociopathy, while never leaving his orbit.

I was beginning to worry about the state of the Apatow-style comedy over the past year, as it began to spawn too many watered-down off-shoots, like last year’s underwhelming Role Models. But this new trend of entries that are trying to subvert the genre from within have the potential to reinvigorate the movement, and Observe and Report is a promising indicator.

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Got home tonight to find our house in a 4000-home blackout. House next door and beyond have power. We live on the edge, literally.

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My 3yrold son likes to pretend his crayons are Jets & Sharks from West Side Story. Constant Crayola rumble. Cool, boy…

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What’s harder than teaching soccer to 5-year-olds? Teaching soccer to 5-yr-olds in 93 degree heat. They call it a “mutiny.”

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Taking Maggie to her first soccer practice. Will try my best not to swear at 5-year-olds.

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Took a rare trip to the movies this weekend and watched the new Judd Apatow movie Funny People. It wasn’t what I expected, in ways both bad and good. If this is Apatow’s attempt at making a Woody Allenesque transition from comedies to dramas, I frankly hope it is a big failure. While Funny People ultimately manages to pull out of its predicament with some honor, I’m not sure I trust Apatow’s instincts.

Adam Sandler stars as a dark lampoon of himself, George Simmons, a major comedy star with a track record of exceedingly silly and unfunny movies (which are quite funny in that context) and now a rare blood disease with little chance of recovery. Yes, Apatow is tackling the doomed-to-maudlin-failure plot of the self-hating success facing his own mortality.  Groans are well earned during the opening act, especially as Sandler’s habit of of overindulging in weepy sentimentality ran his early streak of classic comedies into the mud.

Thankfully, it feels strange to type, Funny People is almost two-and-a-half hours long, and the dire illness subplot only consumes about half of it, as Simmons hires a struggling comic played by Seth Rogen to write some jokes and assist him with the final months of his life. The balance of the movie deals with Rogen’s competitive relationships with his roommates, a mediocre sit-com star (Jason Schwarzmann) and a more promising fellow comedian (Jonah Hill), and Simmon’s reconnection with a former girlfriend (Apatow’s wife, Leslie Mann).

Apatow mostly avoids the emotional landmines laid by his unfortunate plot, filling the movie instead with crass jokes from the filthy mouths of its raw comedians. He also winds the movie into a far more interesting, if no less uncomfortable, story in the unexpected final third.

Ultimately, Apatow’s Funny People is about the miserable lives of people who are obsessed with making others laugh. They are often shallow, spiteful, selfish, cruel and compensate for their chronic self-criticism by showing even less charity to others. It’s a funnier version of 1988’s Tom Hanks bomb Punchline, which is not exactly a badge of honor.

My guess is one needs to carry into the movie a reserve of affection for Sandler, Rogen and Apatow to buffet the movie’s many misfires, but if you can get through the first half hour without walking out, there is a mildly rewarding mess of strange choices in store for you.

IMDB: Funny People (2009).

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John Hughes was just as, and possibly more, important to my teenage years as he was to anyone else’s from my generation. I was 12 when Sixteen Candles was released, the perfect age to inherit Hughes’ warning of impending teenage dysfunction, and my eerie resemblance to Anthony Michael Hall in both looks and manner was often noted, and yet difficult not wear as a badge of dubious honor. Farmer Ted, after all, was the “King of the Dipshits” and he got the hot girl.

However, my early infatuation with the movies of John Hughes receded quickly as I stepped into the real teenage world. In junior high I thought of The Breakfast Club as deeply profound, even going so far as to purchase an early draft of the screenplay from the back of Film Threat magazine. Just a few years later, the movie seemed ridiculously shallow and condescending, with nothing meaningful to say about the gross stereotypes it depicted or their overly maudlin predicaments. When my high school psychology teacher announced that we would be spending three class periods watching a largely worthless middle-age fantasy of adoloescence, I walked out, and nearly flunked the class because of it.

The problem with Breakfast Club is that it so earnestly tries to be profound it completely misses the mark. Hughes was far better when he was funny, and the little profundities slipped in inadvertently.

However, The Breakfast Club still elicits a fond nostalgia in me. Not so with Hughes’ even more pernicious and objectionable “classic” Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I disliked Ferris from the moment I saw it as part of a double feature with Rodney Dangerfield’s Back to School (which I liked much better at the time). Ferris was exactly the kind of smug, spoiled, sociopathic teen most in need of being bitchslapped in real life.

As I wrote in my DVD review of  Wes Anderson’s wonderful Rushmore several years ago: “Rushmore re-invents adolescent angst so wondrously and hilariously that it puts all other teen comedies to instant shame. Max’s gung-ho spirit exposes Ferris Bueller as an empty fraud, and his dark confrontation of conflict makes Bueller look like a pussy.”

While I haven’t seen either Breakfast Club or Ferris in over a decade or more, last year I unfortunately revisited one of my teenhood favorites, Weird Science, which put my nostalgia to shame. What a strange, incoherent, and manically unfunny movie.

Hughes’ work certainly degenerated  in quality as he gained in fame, with his best work in the early screenplays for National Lampoon’s Vacation and Mr. Mom, and his one enduring classic, Sixteen Candles, which effortlessly captures the awkwardness of the age, without trying to harness it for any greater truth.

YouTube – Superbad Sixteen Candles.

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It may be surprising that I’m sympathetic (but not empathetic!) to calls for some kind of public health care system. That is, I understand and even agree with most of the gut feelings that are fueling support for the Democrats’ propositions (insurance companies suck, good coverage is expensive, it would be neat if we could get everything for free). I just think their solution will make things worse, rather than better.

Here’s a nice little rundown of some of the key areas in which U.S. Health Care, despite all of its shitty baggage, is preferable to the socialized systems in Europe, Canada and elsewhere:

(Further info and footnotes at this link.)

1. Americans have better survival rates than Europeans for common cancers.
2. Americans have lower cancer mortality rates than Canadians.
3. Americans have better access to treatment for chronic diseases than patients in other developed countries.
4. Americans have better access to preventive cancer screening than Canadians.
5. Lower income Americans claim better health than comparable Canadians.
6. Americans spend less time waiting for care than patients in Canada and the U.K.
7. People in countries with more government control of health care are highly dissatisfied and believe reform is needed.
8. Americans are more satisfied with the care they receive than Canadians.
9. Americans have much better access to important new technologies like medical imaging than patients in Canada or the U.K.
10. Americans are responsible for the vast majority of all health care innovations.

MORE: 10 Surprising Facts about American Health Care – Brief Analysis #649.

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My 3-year-old son makes me think of this song about 6 times a day.

“Everybody knows, it sucks to grow up.”

So true. Now get over it.

YouTube – Ben Folds- Still Fighting It.

(Special thanks to Sony, who graciously resists embedding this video. Screw free marketing!)

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Will a lawsuit spell the end of Skype?.

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With the european Football Trasnfer window only open for a few days. Real Madrid has splashed out nearly $200 million on the likes of AC Milan’s former World Player of the Year Kaka, Manchester United’s reigning World Player of the Year Cristiano Ronaldo, and French striker Karim Benzema, who was widely favored to replace Ronaldo at United.

With Madrid also the favored club to land popular French winger Frank Ribery,  which young, exciting and emerging talent does United turn to fill the gap left by Ronaldo (and the sulking Carlos Tevez)?

Michael Owen.

The 29-year-old former England star has spent the last five years battling every ailment from a broken foot to mumps (yes, mumps) as his club Newcastle spiralled toward its ultimate relegation at the end of last season.

And now he’s ours. Can’t say I’m overwhelmed with anything other than ambivalence.

The upside of this free transfer is that Owen can’t possibly disappoint.

Or can he?

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“More brains!”

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Rich Lowry mounts a particularly scathing assessment of Obama’s propensity for “above-it-all self-righteousness”:

If Bush violated our fundamental beliefs, then Obama is violating them, too, only a little less so.

Excoriating Bush is good politics for Obama, which is what makes his repeated exhortations to look ahead so disingenuous. In his speech, he rued that “we have a return of the politicization of these issues.” In other words: Dick Cheney, please shut up. But when did the politicization of these issues end? Has the Left ever stopped braying about Bush’s war crimes?

Obama bracingly politicized these very issues on the stump, staking out unsustainably purist positions because they suited his momentary political interest. Now that’s he’s president, he wants the debate to end. He’s above the grubbily disputatious culture of partisans and journalists. And he’s above contradiction because, as ever, he occupies the middle ground, one “obscured by two opposite and absolutist” sides: those who recognize no terrorist threat and those who recognize no limits to executive power.

And there Obama stands, bravely holding his flanks against straw men on all sides.

MORE: President Above-It-All by Rich Lowry on National Review Online.

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Iain Murray looks at Obama’s auto company takeovers through the prism of Britain’s historical example:

The government and the current administration’s political fellow-travelers own 89 percent of an American company. This is a terrible precedent. Just ask the domestic British auto industry. Unfortunately, it won’t answer, because most of it went out of business when the British government tried the same tactic in the 1970s. The government attempted to save a dying domestic industry by nationalization and heavy investment in R&D to produce a “product-led” recovery. That recovery never emerged, because the unions put saving jobs before producing good vehicles (as I detail elsewhere). With the UAW now owning 38 percent of the company, should we expect anything different from GM?

The GM nationalization ignores the lessons of history, and its terms are plainly unjust. The UAW, acting for its members who are former workers and GM pensioners, did indeed represent something like $20 billion worth of GM’s liabilities. So the idea that the union should get an equity stake in return for that is fair enough. However, the UAW is getting three times as much as the bondholders, who represent $28 billion of GM’s outstanding liability. When the bondholders protested, the administration refused to meet with them.

MORE: I’m All Right, Barack by Iain Murray on National Review Online.

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The New Republic has an interesting article tallying up the myriad ways Obama’s administration is clinging to Bush-era policies on terrorism, but it comes to a conclusion that is only correct in a most disheartening way.

Author Jack Goldsmith (a former Bush admin Assistant Attorney General) wants the article to refute Dick Cheney’s claims that Obama’s policies are endangering our country by showing that there is little substantive difference between now and then — and he has a point there (although some have pointed out in response that Cheney’s criticism began prior to Obama’s change in direction).

But there is a bigger problem with Goldsmith’s assessment. The piece is subtitled “Why Barack Obama is waging a more effective war on terror than George W. Bush” and Goldsmith asserts that Obama’s successful repackaging of these same Bush-era policies represents a welcome new era of credibility, but isn’t it really a new era in obfuscation and dishonest politics?

I’ll grant Goldsmith this one point: the Bush admin was certainly woeful on the PR front, consistently failing to accept the need to promote and  defend its policies. Some saw this as arrogance; I saw it as self-inflicted humility. Bush felt he was doing the right thing and didn’t want to participate in the political pissing match, letting the policies speak for themselves and history to be the judge. This was a huge mistake, allowing his political opponents to frame every issue without rebut.

However, why is Obama’s approach seen as so refreshing?

Obviously he deserves credit for taking the responsibility of the presidency seriously and abandoning his contrarian campaign rhetoric to embrace the best tools in fighting terrorism (during the campaign I had written that it seemed improbable to me he would not come around in this way).

Yet, Obama is partially responsible for dark cloud associated with Bush’s anti-terror approach, as he and other Democrats stridently campaigned for 6 years on the moral hazard of the very policies he now embraces! Now that he has reversed course, instead of admitting as much and giving credit where he once laid blame, Obama is pretending his continuation of Bush’s legacy is something new and honorable, despite no substantial change.

Is this the new era of non-ideological politics he has promised us? Is this the change we can believe in? Or is it deeply cynical politics-as-usual? Well, at least he got the policies right.

MORE: The Cheney Fallacy.

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Ken Loach’s Looking for Eric trailer.

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No, I’m not talking about Obama’s McCarthyist tactics in tendentiously defaming the Bush administration tactics he himself is now adopting.

I’m talking about Andy McCarthy, the former federal prosecutor who is National Review’s go-to guy for discussion of our prosecution of the War on Man-Caused Disasters.

Here’s some of his recent hits:

On Military Tribunals:

The need to castigate his predecessor, even as he substantially adopts the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policy, is especially unbecoming in a president who purports to transcend our ideological divisions.

This was perhaps best exemplified by the president’s attack on the very military commission system he has just revived. The dig that the system only succeeded in convicting three terrorists in seven years conveniently omits the fact that the delay was largely attributed to legal challenges advanced by lawyers who now work in his own administration.

On Eric Holder’s muddy torture designations:

Torture, however, is not a general-intent crime. It calls for proof of specific intent. As I recently recounted, the Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals explained the difference in its Pierre case last year: to establish torture, it must be proved that the accused torturer had “the motive or purpose” to commit torture. Sharpening the distinction, the judges used an example from a prior torture case — an example that thoroughly refutes Holder’s attempt to downgrade torture to a general-intent offense: “The mere fact that the Haitian authorities have knowledge that severe pain and suffering may result by placing detainees in these conditions does not support a finding that the Haitian authorities intend to inflict severe pain and suffering. The difference goes to the heart of the distinction between general and specific intent.”

To state the matter plainly, the CIA interrogators did not inflict severe pain and had no intention of doing so. The law of the United States holds that, even where an actor does inflict severe pain, there is still no torture unless it was his objective to do so. It doesn’t matter what the average person might think the “logical” result of the action would be; it matters what specifically was in the mind of the alleged torturer — if his motive was not to torture, it is not torture.

One might have expected Holder to know that. The argument was used in a DOJ filing before the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals only three weeks ago. Indeed, the Haitian example cited by the Third Circuit is quoted here, word-for-word, from the brief filed by Holder’s own department.

More @ the McCarthy Archive…

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There’s plenty of in-depth discussion of both the Obama and Cheney speeches all over the place today, so I’m just going to address a couple of aspects that I don’t think are getting enough attention.

Obama continues to hammer the canard that the out-of-favour policies of the Bush Administration (like Guantamo Bay and interrogation techniques like waterboarding) made the U.S. less safe by diminishing our moral standard in the world and radicalizing our foes.

This is problematic on several levels.

First, the very concept that our moral standards are being diminished runs exactly counter to the usual left/liberal narrative of the United States, who have been riding an almost century-long hobby horse of decrying our country’s iniquities. If you buy the typical liberal intellectual (Zinn/Chomsky) characterization of our past (with the U.S. legacy of religious witch trials, genocide of noble savages, racist slavery and miscegenation, oppression of women, exploitation of laborers, Jim Crow, vicious annihilation of Dresden and Japan, injections of syphilis and AIDS into African Americans, political assassinations in Iran and Chile, support for cruel dictators, Central American death squads, anti-gay violence, regular police and prison brutality and well-deserved blow-back on 9/11) how exactly is the mildest application of waterboarding in history and one off-shore facility for holding terrorist any worse than what came before? Surely, the slow progressive track of the U.S. over the last half-century has improved our moral standing with our recent infractions pale in comparison to the so-called crimes of our past.

So, yes, Obama is being condescending.

Second, let’s say for fun that our Guantanamo Bay prison and interrogation techniques have in some heretofore undemonstrated way made the U.S. less safe. The premise behind this claim is based solely on the way in which these things change perception of the U.S. in the eyes of our enemies or draw focus on our darkest corners.

I think, on the first part, you would need to make a very foolish assumption that our terrorist enemies previously did not mean harm to the U.S., and only after hearing of our detainee treatment did they enlist wholeheartedly in the jihad. This is not only chronologically incoherent, but suggests a baffling superciliousness on the part of our enemies.

On the second part, if focusing attention on the dark and unstomachable practices we have proscribed to combat terrorism is truly damaging not only to our reputation but our national safety, then aren’t the lefty blogs and the elected Democrats who collude with the mainstream media to endlessly focus on and call for justice for these “crimes” the real culprits? If our national safety is really seriously at stake, as they say, should they not at least be more circumspect about investigating and punishing such transgressions?

You would think.

But apparently Obama’s particular brand of post-partisan non-ideological pragmatism justifies incoherent demogoguery to score political points.

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James Taranto, who does a kind of daily “Review of Reviewers”-ish conservative deconstruction of online news for the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion Journal, should really get more credit as one of the wittiest — and sharpist — news analysts working today.

Here’s Taranto’s lede in today’s Best of the Web column:

90-6

During the dark days of the Bush administration, the United States of America held hundreds of innocent terrorists without charge in a maximum-security detention facility in a communist country. Barack Obama was elected on a promise to end this injustice, and just days after taking office, he issued an executive order promising to keep that promise. It was a victory for American values, but it is now being snatched away by Republican obstructionists.

“The Senate voted overwhelmingly Wednesday to keep the prison at Guantanamo Bay open for the foreseeable future and forbid the transfer of any detainees to facilities in the United States,” the Associated Press reports from Washington.

The vote was 90-6, but the lopsided headcount obscures how close it really was.

For one thing, because Norm Coleman refuses to do the graceful thing and crawl back under whatever rock he came from, the Senate seat that rightfully belongs to Al Franken remains vacant.

Another three senators–Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts and Robert Byrd and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia–were not present for the vote. Kennedy in particular would surely have voted to close Guantanamo, given that waterboarding was practiced at a nearby facility thousands of miles away. As a young man, Kennedy lost someone dear to him in a water-related tragedy, so his sensitivity on this question is particularly acute.

If Franken, Kennedy, Byrd and Rockefeller had all voted against the measure to keep Guantanamo open, that would have brought the total vote to 90-10. Now it becomes clear how crucial Republican obstructionism was to carrying out this atrocity.

For reasons known only to the voters, the Senate still has 40 Republicans. And if there’s one thing we know about Republicans, it’s that they never brook dissent. Like goose-stepping lemmings, all 40 of them–every single one–voted in favor of the hell-camp at Guantanamo. If they had voted the other way (and Franken, Kennedy, Byrd and Rockefeller had voted “no”), the vote would have been a 50-50 tie.

In the event of a Senate tie, the vice president casts the deciding vote. We’re not sure where Joe Biden stands on this matter, but it seems at least possible that he agrees with President Obama’s firm position that Guantanamo needs to be closed yesterday. Well, anyway, a year from yesterday.

Yet even with 50 votes plus Biden’s, America’s values wouldn’t necessarily be safe. Republicans could still block the closing of Guantanamo by mounting a filibuster, assuming they could get 41 Democrats to join them. And there is evidence that Democrats may be weak-minded enough to do just that.

Remember the Iraq war? In 2003 Sen. John Kerry* explained that he had been duped into supporting it by Republican mind tricks. Kerry, who served in Vietnam, had plenty of company. In all, 29 Democrats voted for the war, or 30 if you count Arlen Specter (R2-D2, Pa.), who was present for the vote because of a mysterious “scheduling concord.” Dick Cheney worked his sinister magic on them and gulled them into thinking that “to authorize the use of United States armed forces against Iraq” meant, We’ll resolve this with Saddam over tea, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll resolve it over more tea.

Well, guess what? Cheney is still around, blatantly violating the rule that says former vice presidents are supposed to dummy up and support the new administration.** And 19 of those highly suggestible Democrats, including Kerry and Specter, are still in the Senate. Eighteen of them voted against closing Guantanamo. Coincidence?

Thus Republican obstructionism turned what should have been an overwhelming 68-vote victory into a narrow 90-6 defeat. And while it was a defeat for President Obama and for America’s most treasured values, let’s not lose sight of who the real victims are: innocent terrorists who have never done anything worse than participate in mass murder.

* The haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat who by the way vouched for a child-pornography criminal.

** Does not apply if Earth is in the Balance.

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