Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Queen of the Damned


Dr. D. James Kennedy (the D stands for dead), a Presbyterian minister whose avuncular pronouncements on culture and science left him one purple robe and one rich congregation short of handing out the rattlesnakes at some backwoods hillbilly church, has risen from the grave with a new effort from Coral Ridge Ministries, Taking a Second Look at Dover. The clip is short but packed with enough misinformation to have Dead James' clumsy thumbprints all over it. If the Lord loves a liar, D. James made it to the big time. If not, I can imagine the Lord slapping him upside the head when he reached the Pearly Gates; "Jesus Christ, Jimmy, I left you all the fossils. What the fuck were you thinking? By the way, I also made the homos." Whereupon he was sentenced to an eternity of slow dancing with Jerry Falwell in a gay bar in hell, never to consummate the love that dare not speak its name.

We start with the obligatory Scopes trial and a preacher yellin' and an explanation that preachers don't really yell like that, an interview with some clown who said the Dover decision was wrong but didn't matter anyway, an interview with some other clown who has a Masters in Science(?) from (wait for it)........YALE. I looked it up. It's a degree in forestry science, which is fine, but they ask him a legal question, which he, of course, blows. Interspersed with this is about 87 snaps of the letters ACLU carved in stone like some sort of Nazi emblem and a shot of Eugenie Scott on her way to drown some puppies. All leading up to the guest of honor; yes, ladies and gentlemen, that blond bombshell of bullshit, the girl that grabs any limp dick idea that comes down the pike as long as it hangs to the right, the girl who was personally tutored in the intracacies of evolutionary theory by Bill "Patches" Dembski himself, yessir, I'm talkin about none other than Ann "The Man" Coulter.

The iron must have gotten a little too hot and a little too close to her head when she was straigtening her hair. Although the interview is mercifully short it is totally incoherent. She starts out by saying that Einstein would've been prevented from teaching 8th grade earth science because he was looking for God in the universe, that all great scientists were looking for God in the universe, calls Eugenie Scott a "hack" (which is like Hitler calling Mr.Rogers a murderer) and flinging her head around like the crank just kicked in, says, "keeping God out of the science classroom is":
"Prepoth-teroth"

Thuffering thuccotath, Annie, Grab a perm and a cheeseburger and shut the fuck up.

Saturday, April 26, 2008

There Will Be Boredom


There is a reason I usually limit my online rentals to the hillybilly-cannibal/zombie genre and There Will Be Blood starring the uber-actor Daniel Day Lewis is one of those reasons. Zombies are ususally good for an hour and a half, I know what I'm getting, and unless I get suckered in by the pretty box to re-watching one of those SciFi channel retreads, I come away reasonably satisfied. Once in awhile, to get my wife to sit down and watch a movie with me, and considering the fact that her tastes are several magnitudes more refined than mine, I rent a heavily Oscar nominated effort, or worse yet, a Lite Romantic Comedy. What I was hoping for was a film that had enough pointless violence to amuse me (hey, there was blood in the title) and an emotionally engaging character study sophisticated enough to make her think I care.

What I got was an eternity of Daniel Day-Lewis as a wacked out construction worker, endlessly chewing the bleakest scenery in western North America. OK, I get it. He has inner demons. An all consuming ambition. He's not a people person. I just wish he wouldn't take all day letting the demons out. What did he do to prepare for this one? Wear wool trousers 24/7 and shave with a shovel? Somewhere around 3 or 4 hours into this expedition, where the high point was a guy getting conked on the head (to be fair, it was a fatal conk) with various pieces of industrial equipment, she turned to me and said (direct quote time):

"Well, I'm certainly learning a lot about oil drilling."

Uh oh. About 5 hours in I looked over and she was asleep. By this time I had too much invested to back out, although the fingernails on the chalkboard score had me wishing I was deaf like the poor kid who was caught in the gusher blast. She woke up about 6 1/2 hours in, fell back asleep about 8 hours in and woke up about 10 hours in for the exciting 4 hour conclusion. (Direct quote time):

"The great thing about this film is that everytime I woke up I didn't
feel like I missed anything."



So my advice is if you are really interested in oil drilling you can catch up in a half an hour on the Discovery Channel and, if brutal naked ambition is your thing, watch Survivor.

Thursday, April 17, 2008