Jen is back and the podcast has found itself truncated by a good fifteen minutes! This week we talk about the upcoming Silent Hill sequel, a really bad movie idea, the military and its love affair with Batman, and possibly one of the stupidest plagiarists in history. The episode can be streamed or downloaded here (or on iTunes).
The great journey began when my floor, the tops of my bookshelves, my bed, and the random nooks and crannies of my apartment became overloaded with books. Something had to be done. Something drastic! Translation: buy a new bookshelf. That’s exactly what I did. I ended up buying a cheap bookshelf from evil-mart, because that’s all I can afford at this point in my life, and because I’ll end up getting rid of most of my furniture at some future date anyway. Of course, when you buy cheap furniture, you get cheap instructions, and I ended up putting one of the panels on backwards, which made removing it to fix the mistake somewhat difficult. Eventually, I got things in place and started loading up the new shelf with books, and re-organizing my huge collection (by type and then alphabetically by author). First, the before images (you can click the images below if you want to see larger versions): It all looks rather hectic and disorganized, doesn’t it? Well, that’s where this beauty comes in: I was actually pretty surprised by the shine of the wood. It looked quite nice, despite the fact that the whole thing is made of (awful) particle board. The result? Basically a pointless endeavor in being organized. See for yourself: So far so good, right? Still good… And still good. The new shelf is awesome! No! A few stray books on top! And then everything falls apart… The problem? I can’t stop buying books. You should see the other parts of my apartment. They’re piling up again. I love the darn things. They smell great, they look great, and I can’t help snatching them up when I’m out and about. It just means that I start living, sleeping, and eating with paper… But there is some good news out of all of this: most of the books on top of the shelves in the last picture are supposed to be there; I am trying to get some stylish bookends so I can have a section of science books and a section of books for my thesis. I’ve also turned other parts of my house into the space for school books, which keeps them off the shelves for a while (most of those books will end up on the new shelf, which you can see still has space). In any case, the whole thing was good while it lasted. Things were in good order for a short while, after all, but my addiction got the best of me. What is a book freak supposed to do?
I suspect that this edition of the Haul of Books will be less interesting to all of you than previous ones. Still, in case any of you are getting into cooking or care what I got for my birthday, I thought it would be nice to do a special edition to show what my crazy mother got for me after indicating that I wanted my very own Crockpot. I haven’t purchased a Crockpot yet, but you can bet that I will be soon enough! Here’s the image (one book is not a cookbook, but something silly and special): And here are the titles, from left to right, top to bottom (no descriptions this time simply because you can figure out what’s in the book by the titles): 365 Ways to Cook Hamburger and Other Ground Meats by Rick Rodgers (pity that I started this whole diet thing…) 365 Ways to Cook Pasta by Marie Simmons (pasta is nature’s gift to mankind) 1983: Remember When…a Nostalgic Look Back in Time (you should be able to figure out how old I am, in case you didn’t already know; yes I’m going to make you do math to figure out it) 4 Ingredients or Less by Campbell’s (because I’m lazy) Slow Cooker Recipes by Campbell’s Casseroles and One-Dish Meals by Campbell’s (boy do I love casseroles) There you go. So, what did you get for your birthday this year? Let me know in the comments.
My original intention was to do a long post about what exactly went wrong for Democrats, with bullet points and the like laid out and organized appropriately. But then I realized that doing that would mean this post would be extraordinarily long, and unnecessarily so. Besides, if you want to see some interesting opinions on the election, Scalzi has fairly detailed ones here. But I do want to throw out my two cents, in contracted form, for those that actually care about my political opinions. Considering the outcome, I am not surprised. Democrats got exactly what they deserved. I hate saying it, but it’s true. That’s not to say that they haven’t done anything good since taking control of the Presidency, the House, and the Senate. They have, albeit not to the extent many of us had hoped, but they’ve also taken an extraordinary amount of power and squandered it by trying to appease an opposition who publicly declared that they were essentially going to be the party of obstruction (anything Obama was pretty much not a-ok with them). Democrats allowed Republicans and Tea Baggers to control the dialogue and turn public opinion around based on false information and half-truths, and the result was exactly what I thought would happen: Democrats would lose power. At the same time, though, the election didn’t go as poorly as I had thought it would. Democrats barely control the Senate, which means that even if a Republican were our President, hardly any major Republican policies woiuld make it through (assuming the remaining blue senators have the spine to stand up for Americans over corporate interests). There’s a glimmer of hope there, and maybe Democrats will have learned a lesson about what happens when you don’t control the dialogue and point out your opposition’s lies. So, on the one hand, I’m disappointed. Despite pulling in over 800,000 jobs this year (paltry as it may be compared to the 8 million lost) and the announcement that the recession is actually over (which is different than saying that the economy has fully recovered), people decided that the party that claimed to want to change things was better than the party that said the same thing two years before with an actual plan of change, but who didn’t do that at all. The fact that Republicans are essentially running on an economic platform that prizes trickle-down economics hasn’t registered with many voters, perhaps because we constantly hear about how great the system is without also paying attention to the fact that it doesn’t work. It sucks, but I also understand it. There’s good news, though. Several Tea Bagger crazies lost their races (like O’Donnell, who lost by 17% to Coons). Amendment 62 in Colorado was shot down something awful (71% against) and almost 75% supported providing tax benefits for military service men and women in Florida, which is pretty damn awesome in my book. The one thing the election reminded me of is that there are things that we can agree on (like benefits for soldiers, etc.). So, it’s not all bad, and you better bet that I’m going to latch onto the good as things go quickly into the toilet. So, that’s how I view the election. What about you?
When I first heard about 2081, an independent film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” earlier in the year, I had high hopes that something good would come of it. I am always skeptical of adaptations of science fiction works largely because they have been periodically butchered by Hollywood producers for decades. But after seeing the trailer, I had a feeling that this would be a film to see, and when I was offered the chance to review the DVD, I jumped on it. And? I’m happy to say that I am not disappointed. 2081 is both an excellent adaptation of Vonnegut’s short story and a visually arresting, emotionally-charged film that makes the most of its modest runtime (25 minutes). It succeeds where, sadly, most full-length science fiction films have not by presenting a self-contained, complicated (but not convoluted) plot in a developed and fully-realized future. 2081 is set in a world where true equality is mandated by law. The strong must wear weights so that they aren’t stronger than anyone else; the intelligent wear transmitters that send loud, distracting sounds into their heads to keep them from being more intelligent; and the beautiful must wear masks, lest their beauty afford them an advantage over others. Vonnegut’s vision of the future conjoins equality politics and government intervention, pushing them both to their limit. 2081 presents Vonnegut’s world in detail, changing the original story only when necessary and leaving the main thrust of Vonnegut’s narrative, and the ultimate social critique within it, intact. From a film perspective, this is risky, because faithful adaptations (or even semi-faithful adaptations) often flounder due to the untranslatable elements that exist within stories. But 2081 succeeds, partly because of its length and partly because of the cleverness of the creators; instead of drawing the story out into a full-length film or drastically changing the plot or characters, the creators of 2081 instead add minor details to thicken the social critique and keep the story contained within a thirty-minute time span, which prevents already thin narrative elements from being dragged out to infinity. These two elements create a vision that is perhaps darker than the satirical “Harrison Bergeron,” but equally as poignant and gripping. Much of what I perceived as the humor (dark though it may be) in the original story seems to have been lost in the film, but to the benefit of the story, rather than to its detriment. 2081 is supposed to threaten our sense of security, both in our biological makeup and natural right to advantage, and in our strong hold on the protected nuclear family (social Darwinism vs. capitalism’s influence on the nuclear family as the family unit we see today). Drawing out the influence of family on Vonnegut’s narrative and making it far more central and troubling than in the original story makes 2081 into a powerful family tragedy, since the struggles of a family (and father) to remember a lost loved one amidst handicaps that make such remembrance impossible suggest undertones of Alzheimer’s disease–the primary difference being that 2081‘s future is preventable. But the strength of the narrative is not the film’s only strong point. From a visual perspective, 2081 is modest, but expertly crafted. To be fair, “Harrison Bergeron” is not an intergalactic tale, nor an extravagantly scenic one. All of its scenes are set in relatively simple locations: a home and a theater, for example. But these locations are handled well and serve to enhance the more technological aspects of the presented world–the high point of the visuals for me. Televisions are updated to be slightly more interactive and noticeably more advanced (one of the characters fixes the television at the beginning of the film to highlight this); even the programs on the TV are shifted so that we get a sense of Vonnegut’s world both from the interaction of the two primary characters and from the world outside as relayed from a proxy device (the TV). Likewise, the machinery that makes everyone “equal” is marked by lighted displays (CGed as far as I can tell), presumably to suggest that there are details to be seen there that we don’t actually need to see to get the point (except, perhaps, to remind us that the removal of these devices comes with a heavy penalty, which implies that the government is always watching). All of these minor changes to the objects are handled with care in a way that many science fiction films are incapable of doing: they are not gimmicks or CG-extravagant monstrosities to light up the screen, but accessories to heighten the impact of the world. However, the film does not stop there. It becomes obvious throughout who the central figure is, not just because the character in question receives the most screen time, but noticeably because the screen itself distorts as the “equality” machinery works to keep his intellectual capacities at bay. These distortions are nothing new in science fiction (let alone film in general), but are used, much like the slight alterations to the technology presented on screen, to highlight the severity of the reality of 2081‘s future. We, like the characters, are regularly disoriented by these shifts, but only for a moment; the result is that we are left with the truth, while the characters are subjected to full disorientation. But effective disorientation requires good acting, and 2081 delivers just that. James Cosmo (as George Bergeron) is superb here; Cosmo has moments where we can both hear and see the tremendous weight left on his character’s shoulders by a tragic past and the world itself (literally and metaphorically). For a story with very little dialogue, 2081 has to relay a great deal of its emotive power through facial and bodily expression, which Cosmo displays with great aptitude. Even Julie Hagerty (known best, perhaps, for her role in Airplane! some thirty years ago) fulfills her role as Hazel Bergeron with such success, playing the somewhat dimwitted un-handicapped wife/mother with skill (Hazel even has a kind of charm that both amuses and annoys). Armie Hammer as Harrison Bergeron, though in the
