Guns – Misinformation – Fuck Bob Costas

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Our lawmakers are failing us. Our country’s media has failed us. The knee-jerk reaction to the shooting in Sandy Hook is once again threatening to strip rights from law abiding citizens. I’m not going to talk about that, though. I’m not going to belittle their tragedy by putting myself on a soapbox for my own, personal agenda. What I will talk about is the media, firearms, and a general lack of understanding people like Bob Costas seem to have when it comes to the topic.

I’d like everyone to take a step back from mourning, pretending to care, from overreacting, and from spouting bullshit. If you can’t do that, stop reading right now. For the rest of you armed with common sense, we’re going to have a discussion and hopefully shed some light on some of the crap coming out of our media.

First, we need to stop demonizing firearms. They’re an inanimate object. The evil is found within the hearts of those who take the lives of innocents. They do it with guns in America, knives in China, homemade bombs in Ireland, etc, etc. The methods differ but the root of the problem remains the same: people. That is indisputable. If you feel like arguing that point just remember the part where you agreed to remove yourself from the personal and look at things objectively for once in your life.

Along with demonizing comes editorials about how automatic firearms should be illegal–they already are, and the people who can own them are not the problems. They’ll talk about how assault rifles are powerful killing machines. They’ll go so far as to quote the FPS at which a bullet is fired out of them as a testament to how dangerous the guns are …but hunting rifles are okay. Well, here’s some news: most hunting rifles are considerably more powerful than an assault rifle. They fire a much larger bullet. The amount of energy they create is easily double that of an assault rifle. They are designed to kill things much, much larger than a human being. The only difference here is they don’t come with a black stock and a pistol grip.

And that really is the problem. People see the matte black finish and they lose their mind. They freak out. IT’S GOING TO KILL US ALL, IT’S BLACK! If we were talking about people here we’d be racist. Here’s an example:

http://www.ruger.com/products/mini14RanchRifle/models.html

This is a Ruger mini-14. It’s a semiautomatic rifle. It comes in a variety of colors. Can you hunt with it? Sure! I know people who have used a mini-14 to hunt. Let’s take a look at another rifle.

http://www.ruger.com/products/mini14TacticalRifle/models.html

What’s that? If you said “assault rifle” here comes the mind fuck–THEY ARE THE SAME RIFLE. The only difference here is one comes with a black plastic stock that features a pistol grip. They fire the same cartridge at the same speed and can hold the same size magazine–again, THEY ARE THE SAME RIFLE.

The assault rifle you are so afraid of is not an assault rifle at all. It is not any more dangerous than a hunting rifle, or a handgun, or a shotgun–all of which are equally deadly in the hands of a lunatic. The news media are BRAINWASHING you to further their own political agenda. They want you to be afraid of the black plastic, because it somehow turns the firearm into a “killing machine”. Let’s quote a little from the good old Washington Post, shall we?

“THE BUSHMASTER .223-caliber semiautomatic rifle that Adam Lanza carried into Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday is a frightful killing machine.”

Right off the bat you hate the rifle because it’s a “killing machine”. It’s now associated with a horrible massacre of school children (again, we’re taking a step back here, don’t get emotional on me now).

“A coroner said most of the victims were hit with at least three bullets — and some with up to 11 — that exploded with devastating lethality, tearing them apart from inside. The Bushmaster was a juggernaut of death.”

This is my favorite part. It’s like they hired Stephen King to write the editorial. It was a juggernaut of death–that’s gold. And people still don’t think the media have their own agenda? They’re using these tragedies to make you hate. They’re trying to fuel knee-jerk politics with these colorful, misleading anecdotes. I read another article the other day where they talked about how the “Bushmaster” rifle that was used could fire six shots a second. That’s more bullshit trying to sway your emotions. It’s a semiautomatic rifle. Let’s break it down:

The “automatic” from the phrase is referring to the gun’s action (the part that houses the firing mechanism, ejector, etc). Prior to machine guns, as they were originally called, we had manual action firearms. Once fired you had to manually eject the cartridge in order to load another into the firing chamber. Machine guns removed the manual part of the equation. When fired, it used some of the energy created by the explosion to automatically eject the empty and load a new round into the firing position so you didn’t have to.

Semiautomatic weapons stop there. One pull of the trigger fires one bullet, and the automatic action removes the empty and loads another cartridge. That’s it. If you want to shoot again you have to pull the trigger a second time. Fully automatic weapons will continue to fire as long as the trigger is held down. The rifle used in the Sandy Hook shooting was a semiautomatic. That hasn’t stopped the news media from telling you it’s a military rifle, an automatic rifle, can shoot X bullets per second, etc. All of these statements are false and are used to force you into an emotional response–to demonize the firearm.

I don’t care if you hate guns, the gun community, or even me. I really couldn’t give a shit. But at the very least you should know what you’re hating and why you’re hating it, and aren’t just repeating what the talking heads want you to think. Unfortunately, our representatives are spewing bullshit at the federal level. They want to ban things and they don’t even understand what they’re banning. Can we have a fucking intelligent discussion with our policy makers? I doubt it. How some of these people end up elected is beyond me.

The Dark Knight Rises & Falls On Its Ass

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The trilogy has ended. Batman has been immortalized in bronze at city hall while Bruce Wayne anonymously lives out the remainder of his years with Selina Kyle. Happy Ending?

Not quite. In all honesty, the film was pretty boring. Let’s ignore for a minute that Chris Nolan did to BATMAN what M. Night Shamalamadingdong did to THE LAST AIRBENDER–that would be to abandon established lore in favor of writing your own stripped down, anorexic bullshit–the only major difference being that Chris Nolan can actually direct actors. That has never been my problem with the new Batman; the actors generally deliver decent to good performances, my problem is that I just don’t care about them.

Mr. Nolan did his best to reboot the series into a dark, gritty world more akin to our own reality than it is to the comic books. The problem he forgot to address is that in reality life is fleeting and people die. In THE DARK KNIGHT RISES nobody of concern ends up getting killed. You never feel afraid for any of the primary characters. Again, that is not necessarily a problem with movies in general, but it is a problem in this film because of how they have tried to depict the world of Batman. Strip away the violent, dirty exoskeleton of Gotham and you’re left with a run of the mill super hero movie.

The movie, at first, appears to suffer from the trying to do too much in too little a time frame dilemma that many modern movies subscribe to. After closer examination you find that the movie does the opposite–it attempts to stretch the little it has too far and too thin. Here’s a quick timeline: Batman returns to the scene after eight years of absence, Batman has his ass handed to him by Bane, Bane threatens to blow up Gotham with a nuclear weapon, Batman returns (again) and this time manages to win with the help of Catwoman. You need three hours to tell that story? I suppose you should tack on an extra hour for all the whining Alfred ends up doing.

Speaking of Catwoman. I absolutely love (read: loathe) how Bruce Wayne keeps giving her the benefit of the doubt, despite the fact she’s burned him several times throughout the movie. She’s given him no reason to trust her, or even like her, but he still follows her around with puppy-dog eyes. In the comic Catwoman fights an internal conflict over her life as a cat burglar and helping people. She’s not inherently evil in the comic, she’s more indifferent than anything, but she does give Batman reasons to trust her from time to time other than flashing her finely manicured backyard so he begins following the Bat-cock instead of actually thinking.

There was also zero chemistry between the two actors. None. Maybe they just grazed over those scenes and did them in one take. Who knows? I don’t. We’re also constantly reminded throughout the film that Bruce Wayne could have gone anywhere, done anything, but instead he decided to put the cape back on and save the people. As if we needed the movie itself to tell us that we’re watching Batman, what the fuck else is he going to do if not save Gotham for the nth-hundredth time? In the end these scenes serve only one purpose: TO SHAVE PRECIOUS SECONDS OFF OF MY LIFE. Filler dialogue does not make for a good movie going experience.

The usual suspects continue to plague this movie: the “bat voice”, for one. Even when he’s in a scene involving characters who already know that he’s Bruce Wayne he feels it necessary to keep laryngitis bat going. Not to be outdone, the boys in post added so much shitty processing to Bane’s voice that it makes it difficult to not press STOP and EJECT on the DVD. Was there no one around when they were dicking with this shit? No one to say “Hey guys, his voice is coming in WAY louder than everyone else in the scene, and it’s in full stereo. Why don’t we pull our heads out of our asses?”

What do I mean by full stereo? When you watch the movie you’ll notice in scenes where Bane does any amount of talking that his voice seems to fill the entire room. The other actors in the scene have their voices mixed directional, so that if someone is on the left side of the screen their voice is coming out slightly more on the left speaker than on the right, but Bane’s voice fills the entire aural spectrum. It instantly ruins any amount of immersion you may have had in the movie up until that point.

All in all the movie floats somewhere between bad and average. I don’t understand the hype. I would only recommend it to fans of super hero movies. Everyone else should stay clear.

PROMETHEUS IS BAD, YEAH

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I’m not entirely sure what Mr. Scott wanted this movie to be, but I’m positive it didn’t turn out the way he envisioned. If anyone is unfamiliar with PROMETHEUS, he was a Greek God or titan who either helped mankind in spite of Zeus or was our original creator and molded us out of clay. It really depends on what myth you like the sound of the best. Either way, PROMETHEUS helped humanity become what it is today.

The first scene in the movie depicts a humanoid alien seeming to sacrifice himself in order to propogate what I assumed to be the Earth with his genetic code during the primordial stages of the planet, thus fulfilling the PROMETHEUS reference. So far, so good, the movie is taking a page out of the myth.

Afterward we, the audience, are informed that the ship is named PROMETHEUS for reasons that still escape me. They’re on an exploratory mission to find the original creators of man (aka PROMETHEUS) who they decided to refer to as engineers instead. No intelligent quips about the myth can be found anywhere in the movie. In fact, I’m fairly confident at this point that Ridley Scott has no idea who PROMETHEUS actually is and just liked the sound of the word; he branded the ship with it so he could hear his actors say it as many times as possible throughout the movie. In retrospect I suppose I took the title too literally and it’s my own fault for believing Hollywood could get anything right.

Much like James Cameron’s giant loogie to the face of quality film making named AVATAR, PROMETHEUS is one giant cliche from beginning to end. Scientific mission? Let’s get a couple of scientists together who abhor violence of any kind, then recruit some assholes who will be sure to fuck up somewhere along the line and end up getting people killed. First of all, any real scientist is going to understand and appreciate protection in an unknown and potentially hostile alien environment. Somehow, after all these years, Hollywood still believes all scientists to be as dipshitted as Timothy Treadwell.

Let’s also consider for a moment that this is a privately funded expedition by a trillionaire CEO of the largest and most important corporation in the galaxy, and they can’t seem to afford a disciplined crew? Instead they end up with the kind of retards you find hanging out and getting shitfaced at your seedy local bar. Self-righteous scientists, say hello to meatheaded asscans–how many times has this movie been made? Sixty? More? We can’t get a more intelligent premise than this out of Ridley Scott? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. After AVATAR I thought science fiction had nowhere to go but up, turns out Mr. Scott proved me wrong.

Anyway. Our troop of diverse stupidity runs into vats of alien DNA. Fast-forward and they’ve taken a 2,000 year old head of an “engineer” onto their ship, which somehow manages to explode. Apparently it was infected with alien DNA and the result was that it blows up. Seems fine, except that a few minutes later one of the primary characters ends up infected by the same DNA and it doesn’t cause him to explode. In fact, at some point later in the movie yet another crew member is infected by the DNA and it also doesn’t cause E.F.S.–explosive face syndrome–it just turns them into angry zombies with super strength. So you’re thinking, hey, the DNA must react in unique ways when combined with a different species–WRONG! You also find out during the movie that the engineers share the exact same genome as us, meaning they ARE us, meaning the alien DNA should react in a similar fashion BUT IT DOESN’T.

Okay, rewind. Why does Fassbender’s character put alien DNA in the drink of one of the self-righteous scientists? He’s supposed to be a cybernetic being, incapable of emotions, including malice. I guess it could be argued that he was under orders from his father figure to perform research, but to what end? He has already shown that he is capable of reading and understanding the engineers’ language, you’d think he already knew what was in those vats just by reading about it, but somehow he felt it necessary to infect one of the crew members with it, regardless of the fact that once exposed to the DNA the crew member could have, and very nearly did, become a danger to both himself and his father figure.

Cybernetic being, incapable of emotion, but not incapable of reason. In another scene he diagnoses the primary female character with pregnancy, is aware that what is inside of her is not human and displayed three months of growth in the span of ten hours, yet he seems entirely unconcerned with helping her to remove the entity and quarantining it for the safety of the entire ship. The character just doesn’t seem to have proper motivation for any of his actions.

Fast-forward again. It is discovered, or assumed, that the vats of alien DNA are a biological weapon and will be used to eradicate the population of Earth (and probably other planets along the way). However, like I touched on earlier, it doesn’t actually seem to do anything to humans other than turn them into violent zombies. What’s the point? My wife brought up an idea that the DNA is actually a parasite and it requires a variety of hosts in order to go through the many stages before it finally becomes -the- Alien. The problem I have with that is violent zombies don’t have sex with each other to create squid-huggers that then implant the seed of -the- Alien into someone’s body.

I ask again, what is the point of the DNA turning humans into violent zombies if it’s actually supposed to be a biological weapon? You haven’t performed genocide on the planet. You haven’t released -the- Alien en masse on the population. If anything you’ve made an even stronger enemy–they’re really hard to stop, they’re super strong, and they want to kill anything that moves. Turn the entire planet into that and your only accomplishment is making life more difficult for yourself, if a global cleansing was your goal in the first place. So that didn’t make any sense in the context of the movie either.

Most of the things that happen in PROMETHEUS don’t make sense in the context of the movie. Like the aforementioned meathead asscan who turns into a raging, violent zombie. He first shows up again crumpled over into what looks like a contorted scorpion pose, and then demonstrates that he is actually quite capable of bipedal locomotion when he proceeds to kill half the remaining crew. What was the point of him being in some awkward pose if he could move around like normal? It seems like Ridley Scott just wanted to see certain things and hear certain words and phrases in his movie, and he had no intention of actually putting any effort into the making of it.

The movie goes from making no sense to somehow managing to make even less sense. They introduce conflicts that shouldn’t have even existed and served no purpose. Take the cesarean section scene for example. Why, with all their apparent infinite knowledge of technology (they’re flying through space, have mastered putting people in, and taking people out of, stasis, manufactured an intelligent cybernetic being, etc) but their operating table/system is calibrated for men only? It also doesn’t serve any purpose, because the protagonist just puts it on manual mode and inputs a cesarean section anyway.

What was the point? To make her plight seem more frantic? Or to make the guys writing the script seem like uneducated jackasses? The machine was obviously capable of performing the operation just fine, which means it wasn’t a matter of hardware, it was a matter of software. In the future, when you’re zipping through space in your supermassive, I would think you could press a fucking button and BAM, software configuration switched from male to female. No problem.

The more I think about this movie the more I realize how terrible it really was. Scrape away the pretty special effects (minus Guy Pearce’s makeup job, which was shit balls) and you’re left with a story that isn’t so much confusing to us as it illuminates how confused Ridley Scott must have been while making it.

Throughout the film we see holograms of the engineers running from something, scared. One frightened to such a degree he manages to decapitate himself on a sliding door. Yet, later, when we actually meet an engineer, he doesn’t seem to remember/give a shit/is indifferent about the plight of his people two thousand years past and immediately picks up where he left off: destroy all humans. Whatever.

Was there anything I liked? The movie looked pretty. I enjoyed seeing Noomi Rapace half naked a couple of times. I liked Fassbender as David, even though the character was shit, lacked any sort of motivation, Fassbender still managed to be good. I was a fan of the selfless act of the captain as he rammed PROMETHEUS directly into the engineers’ ship.

I didn’t like the final scene where Vickers and Eli are running from the engineers’ ship as it crashes and rolls down hills like an overgrown metal doughnut. They run in a straight line, directly in the path of the ship. STRAIGHT LINE. I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt when Rapace’s character (Elizabeth) trips, falls down, and manages to roll TWICE which somehow magically moves her out of the radius of crush your face. If rolling twice is all that was required to save your ass from the path of the ship why did neither character think of running on a diagnal from it? Because Ridley Scott is an idiot, that’s the answer I’m going with.

So there you have it. PROMETHEUS is terrible.

Artificial Happiness

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I have noticed over the last month or two that I have some friends/guild members and family members who have been increasingly vocal about their social exploits, which are centered around, but not limited to, drinking large quantities of alcohol, eating large quantities of unhealthy food, and smoking cigarettes or pot.

Now, I have never been one to turn my nose up at a fun time. I don’t consider myself a square. But, I do like to think of myself as “health conscious”. And my mental dilemma this week stems from attempting to figure out why people can’t have fun without being unhealthy. Why do people have to binge drink when they go out? Why do they have to eat terrible fried food on a weekly basis? And why, oh why, do people have to fill their lungs with shit that they KNOW will kill them faster?

My first thought is that perhaps these people think that they are above the health problems presented by excessive indulgence. They have a tendency to exemplify the minority as an excuse. “My grandma smoked for 65 years and she doesn’t have lung cancer!!” (what other problems does she have?) “A glass of wine now and then is good for you!” And it can be. But I have never seen these people only drink a single glass of wine.

So what they mean to say is they believe they are immune to the negative effects. And this concerns me greatly. I transcribe for multiple pulmonologists who have 20-40 different patients daily, and while I cannot disclose specific information, I can say that the percentage of people who have lung issues from smoking…extremely high. The correlation between alcohol obesity AND heart issues is also quite obvious and prevalent. And I can’t make these figures up. I see them on a daily basis.

Consequentially, when I see close friends and even relatives regularly drinking, smoking, and eating badly, I instinctively warn them. “These things are bad for you.” “I’m worried about your health.” They seem to be tickled by my concern. “Oh, I know it’s bad for me.” So they do know. Why not stop, then? WHY IS THERE A NEED TO SELF DESTRUCT? Is your life no fun unless you smoke, drink, or eat greasy food? Then you SERIOUSLY might need to step back and self-examine a bit. The whole point of life is to be able to be happy without an excess of shit that makes you artificially happy.

“Smoking is addictive!” people say. My friend Laurel made a good point about this to me today – ever seen someone quit when they have a child and then start back up afterward? All the time!! It can’t be that addictive if you can QUIT STONE COLD TURKEY when you have a child!! So what is calling them back to it afterward? Could it be a subconscious desire for self destruction? Boredom? Obviously they cared enough for the child to stop smoking in an effort to preserve its health…so why can’t they do the same for themselves? Food for thought.

I try to put myself in these people’s shoes. I really do. In high school, I understood that people had nerves and concerns and alcohol and pot easily dull these. But are the long-term side effects of these terrible habits worth the loss of the nerves and worries? Not to me. I just don’t get it. Yes, I understand that you’re stressed and the cigarettes makes you feel better. I understand that you have trouble talking to women, and 6 beers really helps with that. But have you really sat down and thought about what 6 beers three times a week will do to your body eventually? Or what a pack of cigarettes per day will do? Or fast food every day?

I just really want to see my friends and family be healthy and live a long time. I know they’re smart people. It tortures me inside that they would indulge in such self-destructive activities consistently. I would love to just spend time with all of you and show you how much fun you can have while not causing your body to fall apart. I want us all to live as long as we can and enjoy life.

Stop believing you’re above health risks, stop being an idiot, and start being healthy and happy without artificial means. I promise, you can do it.

Dictator Avenges Hugo and His Musketeers

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TL;DR EDITION
– Hugo: Sucked.
– The Dictator: Passable. Should have been better.
– The Three Musketeers: Sucked. Couldn’t finish watching it.
– Wanderlust: Not bad. I am beginning to forgive Paul Rudd for How Do You Know (2010).
– The Avengers: Good. Buy it on September 25th.

HUGO (2011)

Boring, boring, boring. Movie never goes anywhere. Attempts to be quirky/fantastic, ends up dull, lifeless and riddled with scenes that don’t seem to belong together. How this was even nominated for academy awards, much less won them, is a testament to how far sucking off the right people will get you. Or, in the case of Martin Scorsese, how being revered in your field can garner your projects praise even when they don’t deserve it.

Sacha Baron Cohen is really the only reason to watch this movie. His character’s love interest with Lisette, played by Emily Mortimer, is the only genuinely intriguing part of an otherwise underwhelming performance on all sides of the ball. Unfortunately it never gets developed, half the characters in the movie aren’t developed for that matter, and the one thing that could have saved this film is shat on in favor of more disjointed scenes of visual “splendor”.

I’m pretty sure Scorsese watched James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) and thought “You know what? I bet I could make a film about absolutely nothing and get away with it, too.” Unfortunately for him, wannabe students of film are the only ones who pretended to like this movie–it bombed financially–so it never reached the mythical bullshit level of success enjoyed by Avatar.

THE DICTATOR (2012)

Speaking of Sacha Baron Cohen, I watched The Dictator recently. While I really enjoyed the character of Admiral General Aladeen, the film itself falls a little flat. Based on the premise it could have been amazing, but it is spackled with jokes that fall on their face or scenes that go on much longer than they should. I, personally, would have liked to see more of the Supreme Grocer period of the movie.

THE THREE MUSKETEERS (2011)

Do not watch this movie–ever.

WANDERLUST (2012)

Paul Rudd is dead to me. Okay, not yet. After agonizing through one of his previous films, How Do You Know (2010), I vowed to never again watch a movie where Mr. Rudd played a primary role. I would talk about what a piece of work his character was in what was supposed to be a romantic comedy, but that’s a review for another time.

I reneged on Paul Rudd last year when I sat down to watch Our Idiot Brother (2011) and was pleasantly surprised. I allowed him a reprieve, but it wasn’t without some hesitation that I recently decided to watch Wanderlust, his newest film which co-stars Jennifer Aniston as his wife.

The movie wasn’t bad. It was surprisingly good. Paul Rudd has once again convinced me to offer him clemency. That’s not to say the movie isn’t without its faults. Many scenes drag on far too long. I recall one in particular where Paul’s character is trying to psyche himself into sleeping with Eva, a recently converted hippy played by Malin Akerman, by talking into a mirror. The scene itself was awkward in both its length and its dialog, and when completed it jumped right into another scene with the same tired gags.

After the movie finished I realized what Paul Rudd’s problem is. He’s extremely funny, he’s charming, he’s an excellent comedic actor. Wait, what is his problem? The problem occurs when Paul Rudd plays a character trying to get a girlfriend. At which point the movie turns into a raging pile of dog shit and you literally hate his character so much you refuse to watch any movie he’s in, sorry Anchorman. However, in both Our Idiot Brother (2011) and Wanderlust (2012), Paul’s character is not trying to find a girlfriend and both movies end up being really fun.

If you’re reading this, Paul, don’t make any more shitty romantic comedies and people will stop hating you.

THE AVENGERS (2012)

What do you say about the most successful superhero movie of all time? It was good. It didn’t blow my mind. It didn’t change how I think about superhero movies. It didn’t help me find religion or make me want to travel the world in search of my true self. It did, however, make me say “yes”.

Initially I didn’t understand why Loki was chosen as the villain for this movie, considering that he was already the villain in Thor (2011), but the character–played by Tom Hiddleston–does exhibit a certain sleazy charm. After he was given some screen time I settled for Loki and ended up happy that they brought him back into the fold.

Robert Downey Jr was his usual awesome self, but that’s to be expected. I have heard that he also looks a little bit like me, so that makes him even more cool. Everyone did an admirable job portraying their comic book alter egos, however I’m still not sold on Samual Jackson as Nick Fury, but I guess I’ll just have to live with it. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some bad motherfucker, he just isn’t Nick Fury.

I have to say the best part of the entire film is watching the Hulk smash everything within a nine block vicinity of the camera. There is one scene in particular that depicts the Hulk racing through a skyscraper toward one of the flying alien worm/troop deployment system vehicles. Whoever animated him should pat themselves on the back, because they did a fabulous job capturing everything the Hulk represents as he plows through the structure, completely unfazed by everything, and then leaps out through the building and onto the flying worm/personnel carrier and proceeds to bash its face in.

Awesome movie, and you should definitely pick up the home version when it is released on September 25th. Also, staring at Scarlett Johansson’s ass in tight, black leather is never a bad thing. In fact, you literally cannot stop looking at it. I couldn’t. My wife couldn’t. I don’t think anyone else in the theater could have pulled their gaze away from it.