as you (hopefully) know, i'm obsessed with Daniel Day-Lewis.. and therefore, there was no way in hell i wasn't seeing There Will Be Blood as soon as humanly possible. so i saw it the other weekend... and let me tell you, it's immaculate. this is not an exaggeration: Daniel Day-Lewis gives the best performance I've ever seen. he's captivating and dominates every single instant that he's on screen. paul dano is also outstanding, considering his most noteworthy previous role was as the nerdy friend in The Girl Next Door .I'm not going to say it's a movie that you're going to watch and re-watch.. but what it is is genius on display. I'm going to go out and say that the fact that "there will.." is #15 on the IMDB top 250 is not ridiculous. it's one of the great performances of our time, of all time, that stacks up with anything that's ever been accomplished or attempted in movie history. it's a sweeping epic, spanning decades and doing it magnificently. that being said, raving about DD-L is not the primary purpose of this post. that would be to complain about damn simpletons that have no idea how to behave when you're in a movie theater. of course, there have always been idiots, but it seems to me that the problem is accelerating in recent years. prior to my There Will Be Blood experience, the worst behaving crowd i've been around was the first time i saw the Departed, and sat behind 3 children under the age of 10, playing with toys and coloring books. listen. a movie theater isn't a babysitter. that's a hard R rated movie. give me a break, you should lose your parenting license for that shit. (oh wait, there is no parenting license, like that makes sense) anyway, the day care paled in comparison to ma and pa McCormick, fresh off the farm and into their first ever film with color and sound. listen, you aren't in your farmhouse watching Sleepless in Seattle or whatever garbage film you usually participate in, don't carry on full-volume conversations in a movie theater. seriously, what the fuck? just asking questions, chatting it up, stating the obvious, and never once attempting to even whisper. thats a big no-no even for a little kid. how'd you make it to 70 without knowing that YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO SHUT THE FUCK UP WHEN YOU'RE WATCHING A MOVIE. christ. just thinking about it pisses me off. they should actively enforce movie theaters. if you're in there acting like a moron, chatting it up, stating obvious plot developments "is that the son?", then you get kicked out. no refund, no nothing. it's not my job to babysit adults. if you're a moron, guess what, you lost your $9. sorry, but that's the price to pay for having a double-digit IQ. personally, i think that's a pretty nice compromise, because ideally the solution should be to drive you out in the woods and give you a big old blanket party, work you over with pipes and such. that would weed out the retards in a matter of weeks. but, like anything that would actually work, that's a little too extreme for more sensitive sensibilities.
ah, yes, speaking of movies... how absurd has the media storm over Heath Ledger's death been? i mean seriously, it was the lead story on cnn.com as soon as it happened, and every news show talked about it WAY too much. i mean, the guy died. it happens. it wasn't a national tragedy. was he a good actor? yes. and yes, it's sad, but come on now, the media coverage was just a little too ridiculous. it wasn't that long ago that Chris Farley died, i can remember, i was in 8th grade. it was news, but it wasn't NEWS. our celebrity worship is just way, way too over the top. people die in Iraq every day, thousands die in Africa and in endemic conflicts around the world. the world economy is undergoing change on a level it hasn't seen since the 1940s, but we should be worried about heath ledger. i'm not even going to touch on britney spears here, but clearly, that's example #1. who the hell cares about how batshit crazy she is? really, in what way does that matter? she used to be hot in like 1999-2004, but what is her significance as an individual? she's a no-talent pop act who's famous for acting the way that trailer trash the world over act. great, that should be the #1 focus of the news media. basically, to be "famous" today, you have to be attractive, and have no qualms about acting like a complete fuck in plain view of millions. is that something to be encouraged? really, in a perfect world, people like britney spears and paris hilton should be shot in the face and thrown into an open pit, in order to cleanse the gene pool, not paid and celebrated. jesus christ i don't want to live here anymore. this country is going straight to shit, there's no other way to describe it. i pray that we go the way of Rome sooner rather than later, if that's what our "culture" is really all about today.
well, i suppose i wouldn't be a self-respecting american if i didn't talk about the super bowl. i don't trust anyone who's that into the super bowl, it just stinks of being a poser to me. people i know that are into the NFL don't really care about the super bowl, it's basically anti-climatic at that point. unless you're a giants/pats fan, then why do you care so much? honestly, it's just a championship game. it's built up to a ridiculous level. i'm not even going to comment on the absurdity of the prices and hype of the fucking advertisements, it doesn't merit my response or attention. so therefore, if you can remove yourself from the teet of corporate whore-hood, think before you attend your next super bowl party (unless you're a fan of a competing team of course) and ask yourself: "why do i care so much?". if you don't have a good response, stay home. plain and simple. save your celebrations for meaningful games involving team(s) that you actually like, and if you don't like any teams, then don't watch football, because honestly, why just partake in something b/c it's a tradition? especially one that involves worshiping clever advertisements and celebrations of why our nation is fading, fast.
anyway, now that the super bowl is over, we enter the dead time also known as "the worst part of the sports year", and that's from the super bowl until the beginning of baseball/march madness/the NFL draft. those 2 months are filled with nothing except regular-season basketball and the sport formerly known as Hockey, which can now be viewed on such stellar stations as the "versus" network. the regular season in the NBA doesn't mean shit. the regular season in the NCAA doesn't mean shit. (see:2007 dallas mavericks, winners of 67 games, losers in the first round, see: Memphis every year, who goes 29-2 or some ridiculous record and loses in the sweet 16) no one cares. therefore, sports sucks for 2 months, except for the combine. i personally will argue that april is the best time of the sports year, followed closely by august/early september (football's starting, baseball is getting good), and then followed by october (football is in full swing, baseball playoffs), and next is may/june with the NBA playoffs and the excitement of a young baseball season.
also, this tuesday was "super tuesday", hyped up by all of the 24 hour news networks/dregs on society. if you missed the hoopla you're either somewhere that i want to be, or completely oblivious to what's going on. now, hopefully you know i think, and hopefully you think yourself, that presidents are the quarterbacks of the political world. they get way too much credit when shit goes right, and way too much blame when shit goes bad. really, they reap the benefits of the world geo-political scene. see: Bill Clinton, supposed harbringer of the 90's boom. what really happened? he happened to be president during the first peaceful era since the 1920s and got to reap the benefits of a massively expanding global economy. nothing the federal government did was going to have a bigger effect on the economy than the fact that half of the world's markets were newly opened to the US economy and the US and capitalism enjoyed a renewed prestige among the world's nation. this fact coupled with the massive expansion of high technology (spurned by decades of R&D conducted in furtherance of the cold war) was a recipe for economic expansion. the president has no more impact on geopolitical trends in the short term than you or i do, sure, he can influence long term strategy and such things, but short of starting WW3, the President acting alone is not capable of affecting the kinds of trends that bring growth or decline in a global age within the span of a single term. FDR gets jacked off for "saving the nation". sure, he did "save the nation", by becoming the world's largest arms dealer. the US economy did not reach its 1928 level until mid-1941, and by 1943 had doubled its previous high, and was tripled 1928 level by early 1945. so you tell me, what saved america? the propaganda piece known as the new deal? or the fact that America alone among all industrialized nations was isolated sufficiently to sell weapons to anyone who'd buy them, from Britain and Russia and China to the nations of latin america and the middle east. anyway, my point is that the president's influence wanes before that of greater geo-political trends that the United States has only a minimal influence on. for instance, what's the global story now? China and India's emergence as big time economic players. what did Clinton or Bush do to bring on this expansion? ding ding ding. nothing. the things that are happening in the global economy (high fuel and commodity prices, the declining dollar, high trade imbalance) are because of China and India's growth, not some well-intended but insufficient spending bill. the government is good to provide talking points, bad to provide anything worthwhile. congress/the federal government is not capable of acting in a fast enough fashion to resolve any major economic issues, they're always resolved by the time Congress gets around to acting. even the great depression. the GDP hit its low point in mid-1932 and had already started its upswing by the time FDR was inaugurated on March 1, 1933. did the alphabet agencies help? sure, they gave people hope, but they didn't really impact the America economy in a meaningful way, it took World War 2 and the lucky fact that America's factories were out of range of German/Japanese bombers to change that. so basically, following my AP history essay, my point is that i HATE it when people stake their lives on Presidential campaigns. if you haven't met an obnoxious Obama supporter yet... then i wish i was you. honestly, every year people get WAY too into the presidential election. why can't people recognize that any candidate that's a viable possibility to be elected president isn't going to change anything. sure, Obama and Hillary say they're going to change health care. but they were both in the Senate, and how many bills did they write? Congress controls spending, man up, and make something happen. don't just play the part of the enthusiastic high school junior making outlandish claims of "getting more pop machines". don't make baseless claims or start more unfunded initiatives. the debates "we need to fix education, health care, global perception of america", right, we do, but did you ever think that maybe the reason those things are messed up to begin with is federal meddling? (see: Medicare, the FDA, the AMA, decades of global interference by both parties). both parties have lost the ability to see that often times more governmental interference is not the answer. the bumbling bureaucracy that is the Federal Government oftentimes does more harm than good.
on a lighter note and in conclusion, there's an Iron Man movie coming out May 2nd. (http://www.ironmanmovie.com/) if you don't know who iron man is, he's my favorite super hero, and the ultimate badass. he's like Batman, only better. Batman is just a creepy ninja guy. Iron Man is a genius who built himself a suit of armor, and can now take out the Hulk. anyway, http://www.empireonline.com/features/25_most_exciting_movies_of_2008/5.asp. there are several other movies on there that are promising to be pretty badass, hopefully summer '08 kicks some ass, movie wise.
oh that note, i'm out. try not to talk to too many people about the presidential election today.
anyway, see There Will Be Blood.
