One more thing about King Kong

"Beauty killed the beast?" I've never understood this line from the King Kong films. What did she have to do with it? Other than being used as bait?

More like, 'show business killed the beast,' I think. But whatever.

Expressions I'd Like to See Catch On

Here are a handful of phrases I'd like to see catch on. They are basically unrelated, and one of them is not mine.

People, if we all start making an effort to use them at least once a week, I think there's a chance they will work their way into the vernacular. Please. This is what I want for Christmas.

The Loyal Citizen's Contract With the American Government

Head over to the Rude Pundit's site and print off your copy of The Loyal Citizen's Contract With the American Government:

Why wouldn't you do that? Do you have anything to hide?

King Kong

"King Kong" is not the study in sustained perfection that Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" was, but I think he can be forgiven for the attention he has given to this classic, and for providing another major movie thrill.

The movie is slightly long - I think Jackson may have skipped the theatrical version and submitted his extended DVD release already. I enjoyed the backstory of the characters in NYC, but let's face it - we're all dying to get to Skull Island. Maybe if Ann Darrow's story started later, like when she arrives at the theatre to find it's shut down? Maybe if Carl Denham's story started with him tearing out of a screening room with his stolen film cans, the executives hot on his heels? And I think maybe I could have done without the subplot of Hayes and Jimmy with their "Heart of Darkness" quotations altogether.

And then we see Kong and the movie begins to be fairly perfect. Jackson has shown us that for digital characters, it is best to use the CGI merely as a mask applied to a real, live actor - as Gollum was in "Rings," and as Kong is here. Andy Serkis makes Kong a real, breathing creature that you are first terrified of, and later that you begin to empathize with. I didn't think about CGI at all during the movie, not even when they did closeups of the ape's hair (something digital artists love to talk about on the making-of features.)

The initial rush through the jungle, with Naomi Watts clutched in his hand and being wildly tossed around, was terrifying. The only element missing (which I am thankful for) is Watts throwing up all over herself when the ride was done. Kong seemed for the first time less like a movie monster and more like a giant ape.

I wanted there to be maybe one more scene between them before she asserted herself with him. I wanted the brontosaurus stampede to be cut in half, (And no more raptors, please) and I wanted a lot less bugs - but still, brilliant. The Empire State Building sequence should be studied frame by frame - it is absolutely perfect. As I watched it I was thinking how absolutely thrilled Cooper and Schoedsack would be if they could see what came from their original seventy years ago.

Something I forget about this story is that for all the cliffhanger movie-monster fun on Skull Island, the moment Ann Darrow is rescued from Kong, it's all downhill for our title character. The last few reels of the movie are like Ol' Yeller X 100. I remember being deeply upset by the '76 version, and this one is no different. I'm not positive I'd bring a kid.

Brokeback Mountain

Too bad many might skip this movie because of its subject matter, because Heath Ledger has totally redeemed himself from his strange turn earlier this year in "The Brothers Grimm." I often don't remember a whole year's worth of my impressions of movies and performances, and I certainly don't write about everything I see, but his and Jake Gyllenhaal's performances have to be the best of aught five. And Ang Lee has also been totally forgiven for "Hulk."

In this movie Ledger is not only playing a 1960s cowboy dealing with his feelings for another man (tough enough), but doing it with a bare minimum of dialogue. We also see the character age believably maybe a decade or more through the story. I had no doubt we were watching him turn into an old, sad man before our eyes. Maybe not everyone is ready to watch a story like this yet, and if you aren't I'm not one who's going to say you definitely should. But it's a beautiful and heart-breaking movie.

I think Michelle Williams - who plays Ledger's wife - also deserves a nod in this movie. It was not long ago that she was a WB cutey, but here she is completely submerged as a sweet, somewhat mousey wife, totally clueless about how to deal with her husband's secret.

Citizen's DNR

I am calling for the establishment of a "Citizen's Do Not Resuscitate" program.

Much as ordinary citizens sometimes require the power of arrest, I believe there are some people in life so unworthy of extraordinary measures and care, that, should they in fact go into some sort of medical duress or perhaps require much hustling about over a gurney by EMS, with shots being prepared and replacement organs being flown in, that you should be able to step in and say, you know what, doctor? Thanks anyway, but you can put the paddles down. This one's not worth it.

I mean, God forbid and all that, and we'll never actively wish anything bad on anyone, certainly, but, let's be honest. It's time to let them go. They weren't meant to linger long in this world. God has called them home, etc., etc., so put away the atropine. You did all you could. Or rather, you did all that I, as issuer of Citizen's DNR, think you should, considering the person in question.

And maybe it will not surprise you to learn that the first people I am placing on the Citizen's DNR list are - the new Landlords.

Yes, there has been another Landlord incident, sort of a jumbo one involving not only New Landlord(s) but Old Landlord all within minutes of one another one night.

I don't think they were actually in collusion but I do think a sort of low-grade psychic link exists between people of this sort, so that if a chance comes around to combine their crapulence into one unified assault on logic and fair play, they will be subconsciously moved to do so.

It was the kind of multi-incident that makes one search through the remaining unpacked boxes to find out where the hard liquor is stashed. I am not going to recount the details, because this is already close to becoming a single-issue blog lately.

(And I have spent much mental effort in the last weeks trying to determine if my perennial Landlord Woes are something that I repeatedly bring down upon my own head. I ask myself, am I the tenant equivalent of the airline passenger who shows up to the gate drunk and disorderly, and then complains bitterly when he gets bumped from a flight or makes the ride in handcuffs? No, I don't think so.

I WILL admit to being slightly over-sensitive around these situations. But I also think we have drawn the Old Maid card perhaps a bit more than our share in 10+ years of renting.)

So, without getting into too many details, let's say that there was a maintenance issue in new apartment, and when we brought it up we were responded to with a high level of condescending idiocy on the phone (as I have reported before in these pages); that even though the faulty appliance was our own, Landlord was sent for, because I wanted to be sure; that he arrived and was immediately defensive, rude and, yes, condescending, making it very clear that he thought we were trying to bilk him in a spectacularly shoddy manner; and, having misjudged my own tolerance for such behavior on this particular night, my outrage dial quickly went from around 2 right up to 11, and I told new Landlord loudly and with some unfortunate word choices what I thought of his attitude.

It was the kind of incident where everyone gets really quiet for a few seconds after your comment. It was the kind of response that he richly, richly deserved, but which I still wish I hadn't let fly with quite such vehemence. Three weeks into our 52-week obligation at the House of Five Owls, I have firmly established our relationship with Landlord(s) as contentious and adversarial.

I am bothered that I lost my temper, but more than that, I am bothered that I am so easily bothered by these people. When will I be able to spot someone for what they are and then never expect anything but the minimum from them? Instead I always feel surprised, like the rug has been pulled out from under me.

Dealing with people like this is always like calling someone, getting into a conversation, and then realizing you've been talking to their answering machine. OH, you think. I've been wasting my time on a device totally incapable of higher emotion. Someone left this message here that was meant to FOOL me into thinking there was a reasonable human being on the other end. How silly I feel!

The call from Old Landlord came not two minutes after this unfortunate episode, I swear to you. And if you had told me on that morning that I would end the day considering HIM the more reasonable of recent landlords, I would have laughed - but there it was. I was almost comforted by his relatively civil words, even though he was still pushing this no-deposit thing.

I had just put Professionally Threatening and Certified Letter in the mail to him that morning; but I admit that, faced with enemies on both sides, I decided to take the easier way out. I asked him to come up from his earlier "offer" to at least 3/5ths of the deposit, so that we could both avoid unpleasantness - and he did.

Well - at least I've closed on that one. Now we just await what further drama may come our way in the next 49 weeks.

Quote of the day

An old one, and from one of my least-favorite sci-fi writers, Robert Heinlein, but it IS a great one:

To this I would add, "perform one magic trick, and tell a knock-knock joke that amuses kids."

Jay Pinkerton

Hilarious site: www.jaypinkerton.com

Check out his origin comics. The "Superman" origin is hilarious (Somewhat R-rated - this is an editor of the National Lampoon), and the Spiderman dailies - wow.

Questions and Answers About the Construction Work Going On Next Door

I mentioned earlier that right after we moved in here they started construction next door. A bit of bad luck, since this has been a source of six-day-a-week early-morning noise, with the grinding and the hammering and the digging and the yelling, but it has also been a source of much fascination.

My window looks right out on the site and I've had a great, steady view of how so far an empty lot has been changed into a big, neat hole in the ground. I've never watched a construction site for ths long, and it's kind of cool. In fact, my inner Three-Year Old wishes to make an observation at this point:

My Inner Three-Year Old: Truck! Truck! BIIIIIG Truck! Yellow! Yellow Truck! Dozer! Dozer dig holes!

Indeed. I am fascinated by this part of the process, such as how they shore up the sides of the foundation they are digging, how deep they have to make it, etc., and where it will go from here. My Inner Three-Year Old has many questions about it, which I will list here, along with the answers which I have chosen to make up based on nothing, which of course is fun to do to children.

Q: How do they make it so level along the bottom?

A: That's what those men with tripods are doing - shooting lasers back and forth that determine how level it is.

Q: But then how do they make sure the ground is going to be sufficiently packed down when they're done? Won't there be tons and tons of weight on it? How do they know it won't settle down once they get to the fourth story, for instance?

A: They have taken core samples up to a depth of one mile. That's what that particularly big noise is right at 7 AM every morning - it's them hitting the magma level.

Q: BIIIIIIG truck! Yellow!

A: It is technically a bulldozer, but yes, it is big, and it is also yellow.

Q: Where are they taking all the dirt that they remove? Is there an inverse to this sort of construction process, one where they actually need MORE dirt and earth?

A: Yes - they use it for burial mounds and also to create island chains in the Pacific for the rich.

Q: Oh God - this isn't going to be one of those corner malls or something, is it? It's bad enough if it's going to be a mega-apartment building because we lose the small view we have, but a bunch of shops...

A: I don't think this is the right "zone" for that, so don't worry.

Q: Do you think those guys down there have to go through some kind of training to teach them to recognize bones or relics, should they hit any of those in their digging? If they do, they have to stop everything, right? And then somebody has to come in and figure out if it's a crime scene, or worse yet, and archeological find? And they probably don't like that, because it would mean all work would stop, so, do you think sometimes one of them might come across some bones, and he's like, "DAAAAAYUM," and then he calls over the others in a real low voice, doing it very carefully so as not to get the attention of that one guy who seems like he'd be the type to call the University or Police Department immediately, and they all look at the bones, pretending they're talking about what's for lunch or the scores from last night, and then one of them says "It's a dog leg - that's all it is," and they all kind of look at each other sideways like, "That ain't like no dog leg I ever saw," but what they say out loud is "Yep, right," and one of them quickly rolls over it with his truck wheel so it's just dust and they can stop thinking about it and move on?

A: For every construction site, there is one undercover person from the Department of Antiquities, and you never know who that person is. Sometimes this mole will plant fake bones just to see how the rest of crew will handle it. This is why friendships are so tough to make on construction sites. Because who wants to get close to a guy and find out he's one of those Antiquities snitches?

Q: I see they have left a dirt "ramp" for themselves to be able to drive out of the foundation they have dug. But how do they eventually get rid of that ramp? Doesn't it get bigger and bigger, and wouldn't removing it mean the bulldozer was stuck down in the foundation?

A: Yes, that is exactly what happens. A little-known fact about construction is that you have to sacrifice at least one bulldozer per project. It's just simple physics. Whether or not there is still a man inside it when you pour the foundational concrete over it is a matter of site politics.

Q: DOZER! DOZER!

A: Yes, we covered that.

Idea for business

Merry Christmas, World of Business. Here's my present to you: a great new idea for you to exploit, which I give freely in the spirit of the holiday.

Every photo-organizing software tool I've seen has a feature to take the red out of eyes so we don't look like dogs or demons in our pictures. So how about a setting to make our teeth look whiter?

How about a slightly-slimming option? How about something to draw pupils on my eyelids when I have my eyes closed?

Just throwing it out there.

It's Landlord-Suin' Season Again

God, is it that season again? Isn't it strange how time just seems to FLY the older you get! The days are getting shorter, the leaves are starting to change, there's a chill in the air, the Landlord tries to keep the security deposit... Ah, the cycle of nature. So comforting in its regularity.

It seems like only three years ago that we had to sue Landlord, and of course two years after that that our money plus some more came back to us. How does the song go? To everything there is a season! Turn! Turn! Turn!

Old Landlord says, you guys were such good tenants. But oh! I cannot give you this money back because... uh, you were late on giving me notice that you were leaving. Um, I mean, you messed up the counters. I mean, these holes you left in the wall were too big. Yeah, that's it, that's the one I'm going with.

I says, you do what you have to do, I'll do what I have to do, I'm not arguing about it.

Old Landlord says, what do you mean by that? Let's not let this get ugly. Tell you what - it took $2200 to repair all the damage you people did, but I am generous and I will return half of your deposit.

I says, no, I'll take the whole thing.

Old Landlord says, do you want to see the pictures?

I says, no thanks, we took our own pictures, which we're giving to a lawyer.

Old Landlord says, if you want to handle it that way, you'll get nothing.

I says, you do what you have to do, I'll do what I have to do, I'm not arguing about it.

Old Landlord says more but it all amounts to the statements above. (This is the Radio Shack Landlord - he repeats himself a lot.)

And so it begins - again. Stay tuned.

You'll take my Baby Jesus when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers

So I guess this "War on Christmas" talk is going to be an annual event, then? Are we to add it now to our list of Christmas traditions, like watching "It's a Wonderful Life" and midnight Mass? Can we expect to hear this on the airwaves every year along with Nat King Cole and "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" and "Silent Night?"

Maybe this is just what the Christmas season needs, though - a little life breathed into it through some artificial drama. I think a reading of "Twas the Night Before Christmas" is going to have that much more significance if we all pretend that at any time the ACLU is going to break down the door and demand we stop.

And how much more fun will putting up the plastic Nativity be if we can act righteous and martyred while we do it? Remember what Ann Coulter said "Merry Christmas" meant to her last year - we can all hold that thought in our hearts as we defend our traditions.

I guess I feel about the R.R. and their "War on Christmas" the way I feel about a meter maid when he slaps an $85 parking ticket on my windshield. Congratulations on having rid the entire city of crime, I want to say. Thank God you now have the kind of time to deal with infractions like this!

Things My Landlord Actually Said

"Stoves are for cooking." - The gas stove in our new apartment is extremely old and has small flames that are actually visible right down in the middle of each burner - something we have not seen before with pilot lights and which we only discovered after we left a cookie sheet on top of the stove to let something cool. When the cookie sheet wound up scorched even though the stove was off, and when an accidentally-placed dishtowel nearly caught fire, this was LandLady's response.

"Have you been in your bathroom?" - Five days after we'd moved in, Landlady came by to ask if we were missing a toilet paper spindle. When I responded in the negative, she looked puzzled and asked me this.

"Nobody even uses that machine to be buzzed up." - LandLady's response when I asked for the third time to have my phone programmed to be able to buzz people up through our security gate. Ironically when I left my apartment minutes after she said this, I found the cable man had been trying to buzz me for ten minutes.

Do not miss

There is a new "Brackenwood" movie out.

http://www.biteycastle.com/content/animation.php

These are short movies done in Flash by Adam Phillips - but they're not little cheeseball jokes. They're full-fledged stand-alone pieces of animation, and most of the stories - "Bitey of Brackenwood," "Prowlies at the River," "Littlefoot" - take place in an amazing, weird sort of fairy-tale world. Very good. Check out the animation and his whole site.

You may have to install a new version of a Macromedia plug-in to see the latest, but it's worth it.

At This Time We Do Ask

If the airline industry requires their flight attendants to read a guidebook on how to make announcements during the flight, it is called At This Time We Do Ask.

Except for Southwest - they'd require their employees to read At This Time We Ask That You Do Us a Favor.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

Burton's film is perfectly shot, perfectly designed, and perfectly soulless. What a surprise.

There is almost no motion by the actors in this film; Burton positions them against his trademark colorful, warped creations, where they mug to the camera over Depp's outlandishness - and then they are shuttled to the next crazy, wacky Burtonesque set, for the same close-ups to be repeated. That's it.

A few of the actors (Johnny Depp of course, Freddie Highmore as Charlie) manage to insert something into this process that sparks compassion, but it was clearly achieved in spite of their director, not because of him. David Kelly ("Grandpa Joe") is getting on in years and if this ends up being his last film, it will be a travesty.

Burton has completely missed the blackness of the Charlie Bucket story, which is ironic considering he is the go-to guy in Hollywood for palatable gothic visions. It's not a dark fairy tale, it's a child's nightmare. And Willy Wonka is not a sympathetic character to have some lame father-son backstory tacked on (nearly identical to the useless backstory in "Sleepy Hollow"), he is the inventor of a special Hell for Children, which he has populated with fiendish imps that help him torture impure kids according to their particular faults. He is the Virgil to Charlie's Dante, and the tour through the factory is nothing less than Charlie enduring a candy inferno to achieve paradise - the salvation of his family from destitution.

But in Burton's hands "Chocolate Factory" is nothing more than the wispiest visual confection, something without substance that dissolves in seconds. Why do you people prize his work so much?

The only thing more disturbing than watching something like the Violet Beauregard scene - a grotesque parody of a child choking on chewing gum or in the throes of an extreme allergic reaction - is watching it in the hands of a director who completely misses the horror. Burton lazily hands the scene over to the CGI people (almost with a visual jump cut as they switch away from the human actor), and that's it. The only time the film comes close to what it needs to be is the image of Veruca Salt seemingly being devoured by rodents - but how could you miss with that?

The score? At this point in the Elfman-Burton collaboration, I see no sign that the two men even bother to confer about what particular project they're working on at the moment. The music is interchangeable and generic, and could have been created and applied by a clever program.

Still: even in this nothing movie, even though I know he's barely running at 5% of his capacity, Johnny Depp is completely watchable and hilarious. Although I was disgusted by the film, I still queued the DVD back up to some of his choicer moments of revulsion and unease with the kids. And in Deep Roy's multiplied performance, the movie does achieve something like the lunacy it should have had throughout.

Dear Mr. Burton:

"Ed Wood." "Beetlejuice." "Nightmare Before Christmas." Those were perfect films, but then you became less a visionary and more a marketing inevitability. Not that you care, but I'd say the next time a project comes to you from an executive with an attached note reading something like "We just think you'd be PERFECT to revive this one!" then that's a sign that you should go another way. You've ruined enough franchises. Thank God you weren't the one to end up with "Superman."