Thinking Out Loud

  • Spam Poem No. 1: “Here we come!”

    Spam Poem No. 1: “Here we come!”

    In recent months I’ve noticed my spam becoming increasingly bizarre. Some subject lines are so truly absurd that I cannot imagine their origin. Are they simply really bad translations of, say, Russian or Portuguese? Are they random machine generations meant to foil spam filters? It’s a mystery.

    It has, however, made my daily batch of spam less of a nuisance and more a source of amusement. In a way, I feel lucky for my email address to have been captured on some particularly strange mailing lists.

    Sometimes, a line is strangely poignant: “He worry in unabridged volumes.” Perhaps this unnamed protagonist simply needs more Viagara or a new Nigerian Ponzi scheme in which to invest, but doesn’t it just break your heart that he worries that much?

    Which brings me to what may be the first in a series of found Spam Poems. I’ve started compiling these sometimes gibberish, sometimes evocative lines into verse. Each line is a complete spam subject line, completely unedited. The only thing I’ve done is arrange them in stanzas with an ABAB rhyming scheme.

    This first poem launches with a strong declaration and call to action, explores historic strife and existentialism in the second stanza, and then looks deep into the soul’s insecurities in the third. I hope you like it.

    Here We Come!

    here we come! stop deconvolution
    That organise go bantamweight
    Be open he loon affliction
    Have buy as evaporate

    Be want do holocaust galaxy
    dedicated to you occident inflater
    My travel on minstrelsy
    Which rules are in effect here? devilish calorimeter

    A speak my scared fixedly
    my wife onerous carmine
    you tell do exercise villainies
    As turnon an vine

  • By Zeus’ beard, Oliver Stone’s Alexander is bad

    By Zeus’ beard, Oliver Stone’s Alexander is bad

    Ugh. I should have listened to the myriad critics and friends who warned me off Oliver Stone’s Alexander… it is indeed quite bad. Everything you’ve heard is true: impossibly long, unintelligibly edited (can anyone explain to me Alexander’s supposedly brilliant scheme in the first battle? Running away and coming back will allow greater access to strike the enemy king exactly how?), and schizophrenic with regards to its sexual politics. So Alexander was bisexual, fine. But in this day and age, doing anything to avoid showing an onscreen kiss just calls attention to itself. Two pretty men gazing at each other and saying things like “By Zeus’ beard, you are indeed a great man” is just comical.

    And most amusingly: if accents are to be judged, Angelina Jolie‘s character hails from Transylvania, and Alexander and his father came to Greece by way of down the pub. In fact, the kid who plays the young Alexander sounds more Irish than Colin Farrell himself.

    Angelina Jolie and Colin Farrell in Alexander

    I rented the director’s cut, which bucks the trend in actually being shorter than the theatrical version (the only other director I know of to do this is Stanley Kubrick, who would often continue to abridge films even during release). At 3 hours, 55 minutes, I am quite glad I didn’t decide to go with the theatrical version.

    What was good about it? Jolie is always a pleasure to watch – an old-school movie star in the sense that her presence and beauty are so overpowering that she might as well be from another planet. I’ve always thought Val Kilmer was a fine actor (especially in the underrated Spartan). And in a suprisingly plain-looking movie for Oliver Stone, it’s a great relief when he finally cuts loose in the surreal, literally blood-soaked sequence of Alexander’s near-fatal wounding in India.

  • Bad Santa utterly wallows in its bah-humbug tone

    Bad Santa utterly wallows in its bah-humbug tone

    This from the director of Crumb and Ghost World?

    The big pleasure of Terry Zwigoff’s Bad Santa is definitely that it utterly wallows in a bah-humbug tone, a welcome tonic to the seemingly perpetual holiday season. I write this in June, and I’m afraid to so much as blink, lest the plastic Santas and X-mas lights materialize in the nanosecond my eyes are closed.

    Billy Bob Thornton is gleefully repugnant as the comman Willie, making little or no attempt to make his character sympathetic. And yet he is somehow attractive, shown entertaining numerous one-night stands, and ultimately connecting with a decent woman (if alcoholic and a little crazy). After all, the viewer is reminded that Willie is played by the man that married Angelina Jolie, so there is clearly something there.

    Glimpses of humanity do peek through, if colored by his terrible personality and backstory. For example, when the Thurman (Brett Kelly) denigrates himself, Willie explodes in profanity, extorting him not to think about himself that way.

    Willie’s partner Marcus (Tony Cox) initially seems similarly roguish, in fact the wit and brains of the duo. In a reversal that fatally breaks the comic tone of the film, he is revealed as a cruelly callous criminal psychopath when he outright murders Gin (Bernie Mac). So that makes Willie more sympathetic by subtraction — only because he doesn’t murder, and proves himself at least somewhat capable of forming friendships.

    Unexpected and ultimately short-fused is the eventual turn towards the sappy and sentimental. Bad Santa‘s happy ending, partly told through voiceover) betrays the tone of the movie and even leads me to suspect some post-production tinkering.

  • John Woo’s Paycheck isn’t fun, weird, or subversive enough for a Philip K. Dick tale

    John Woo’s Paycheck isn’t fun, weird, or subversive enough for a Philip K. Dick tale

    When it comes to action cinema maestros like John Woo — I can enjoy the the hyped-up action and weirdness of something like Face/Off, but find that the extreme violence and gunplay can sometimes cross the line from escapism into being inhumane. Paycheck, scoring a mere PG-13 from the MPAA, is less violent than most of Woo’s others, but also unfortunately less weird or even fun.

    It’s also not as smart or subversive as a Philip K. Dick adaptation ought to be. I think Minority Report is the first so far to capture what made Dick’s tales so timeless and relevant.

    Uma Thurman, following her star turn as the Kung-Fu action cinema goddess in Kill Bill, plays backup love interest to Ben Affleck, who himself is no great shakes here. He was funny and self-deprecating when recently hosting Saturday Night Live, if a little juvenile. His 90’s goatee-wearing, ironic geek guy in Chasing Amy was actually quite realistic. Even his Daredevil hinted at the suffering and isolation in the midst of all the superhero silliness (there’s a chilling scene where we see him return home after a night of crime-busting, where he painfully strips off his protective uniform to reveal more than a few bruises and scars, and then blithely chews a handful of pain-killers straight). But he doesn’t read as a convincing engineer in Paycheck, and his good looks and physique directly contradict dialog in the film that describes him as just a regular guy, and not a secret agent action hero.

  • The House of Yes feels stagebound

    The House of Yes feels stagebound

    Theater and film, as media, differ in as many ways as they overlap. Just as with adapting a novel to a movie, there is no simple translation from one media to another — a play takes place from a fixed vantage point, there is no editing, and no digital/optical photographic effects.

    Perhaps the most extreme example I can think of where a play has been fully reimagined as a movie is Julie Taymor’s Titus. On the other end of the spectrum is Glengarry Glen Ross, where the film makes no drastic divergence from the play, and in fact the largest change is just more words. And in still more rare cases, an original movie only feels like it was derived from a play, and is the better for it, like Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.

    But to me, Mark Waters’ The House of Yes retains so much of its origins as a play that it’s difficult to see the advantage of translation to film. It still feels stagebound.

    Unfortunately, the DVD picture quality was heinous. The bulk of the action takes place by candlelight, and the poorly compressed video cannot cope. You don’t have to be a home theater expert to clearly see the smudgy digital artifacts.