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Healthcare Follies: The Assassin of the Senate "If you compared it to the alternative, it looks good. If you compare it to the possibilities, it looks sad." So said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island upon emerging from a closed-door meeting of Democratic Senate leadership on Monday evening, as it became clear that even the compromise plan of allowing Medicare buy-ins by persons aged 55-64 (the replacement for the public option) would not be enough to get healthcare reform to 60 votes. Read more... 12.15.2009 First off, I have to address past opinions expressed on these pages. I was against the Iraq surge. Back in an article from December of 2006, I wrote, in reaction to the report of the Iraq Study Group, which advocated withdrawal from Iraq, that the report "...does not advocate defeat, rather, it recognizes that defeat has already happened. Any attempt to pretend otherwise does nothing but extend our folly." Read more... 12.11.2009 Rover Image #71 
12.11.2009 Halloween, the granddaddy of all slasher flicks. Not the first, to be sure, but a film whose formula worked so well it is still being followed to this day in countless horror films, thirty years after it was produced. It also doesn't hurt that, unlike many of the films it birthed and inspired, Halloween is well made. Read more... 10.31.2009 Shitty Movie Sundays: Freddy vs. Jason Is there anything that can save a movie with subpar acting and a weak story? Yes. Yes, there is. And that thing is outlandish and cartoonish gore. In 2003's Freddy vs. Jason, the two principal antagonists of the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th horror franchises, Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees, come together in a crossover feat of mayhem and blood. The simple prospect of having such characters duke it out in a fanboy orgy surrounded by teenage cannon fodder is enough for any casual horror fan to take a look. Quite frankly, there is nothing surprising about the film, and nothing disappointing, either. The idea behind Freddy vs. Jason is the thing, the spectacular deaths of innocent bystanders is the charm, and everything else, acting and story, is just filler. Read more... 10.29.2009 The Empty Balcony: Land of the Dead Cracked.com recently featured an article about surviving a zombie apocalypse. It concluded that all we know and all we've learned about surviving from zombie horror films is wrong. Tactics such as raiding the local gun store and fleeing from cities have become so imprinted on our psyches, Cracked argues, that everyone will have the same ideas, and those ideas will serve to create nothing but the world's largest smorgasbord for the undead. They have a point. Well, they would, if the danger of a zombie apocalypse were real. Read more... 10.27.2009 Shitty Movie Sundays: John Carpenter's Vampires The year 2010 will be a treat. In this coming year, a new John Carpenter film, The Ward, will be released. It will be his first film since Ghosts of Mars, from way back in the far distant days of 2001. This has been a long layoff for the director, the longest in his career. One could easily have concluded that Carpenter had retired, maybe not completely with his own consent. The backend of Carpenter's directorial career has been one box office bomb after another, none of the films able to capture or build upon the mastery of schlock, and horror, that he showed in his peak days three decades ago. His professional tale is one of the inevitable slide that all creative people who live long enough go through eventually. Depressing? It shouldn't be, because even though his films have kept getting shittier and shittier, he still had the skill to crank out something like Vampires, a film that just reeks John Carpenter from start to finish. Read more... 10.25.2009 Shitty Movie Sundays: Maximum Overdrive "Stephen King's masterpiece of terror directed by the master himself." That's how Maximum Overdrive was billed, right at the top of the poster. There's an image of a bearded King peaking through a jagged rip in the side of what looks like a horse trailer manipulating characters and events in the movie marionette-style. There they are at the end of his strings, right above the chrome and lightning bolt logo for the film, slave to his every command and victim to every twisted whimsy. The poster implies quite explicitly that every other King adaptation to make it to the big screen was shit. But never fear, the master of horror has blessed this film with his presence, total creative control, ensuring that Maximum Overdrive is the quintessential Stephen King film. Suck on that, Stanley Kubrick. Read more... 10.24.2009 The Empty Balcony: Dawn of the Dead (2004) The canon of the zombie genre is not set in stone, but it generally follows that George Romero's films are the authority from which all subsequent variations derive. Not being based in fact, those variations are many. For instance, we all know that in order to kill a zombie, one must destroy the brain. That is, unless the film in question is Return of the Living Dead (a film that prides itself on being zombie apocrypha, as it were), where nothing short of total incineration can kill a zombie, or 28 Days Later and it's sequel, where the zombies (not zombies, according to the filmmakers) are not undead but still living, and can thus be killed by anything that's lethal to a normal person. Or The Last Man on Earth, from before the genre had a rule book, where a stake through the heart was used to dispatch the hordes. Read more... 10.21.2009 Shitty Movie Sundays: Event Horizon Mix one part huge spaceship, one part small cast, and one part gore, blend on high, and what do you get? Alien. Or one of the many Alien clones that have dotted sci-fi cinema for the last thirty years. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Formulas in film that work well are often repeated ad nauseam, and while they never quite live up to the creative spirit at work in the original, they still serve to entertain, and that is the primary purpose of film. Even Alien itself is derivative of earlier films, most notably It! The Terror from Beyond Space, including many, many other sci-fi and horror films that portray a small group of people being mercilessly slaughtered one by one. But these days, where there's outer space and buckets of blood, there is a debt of gratitude owed to Ridley Scott and his crew from 1979. Read more... 10.19.2009 Rover Image #70 
10.19.2009 The Empty Balcony: 28 Days Later / 28 Weeks Later So much horror is garbage that every occasion that sees a thoughtful and intelligent entry to the genre is a welcome reminder that a film that tries to scare the viewer to death is not automatically bad, or packed to the gills with cliché. While slasher flicks and the endless variations of SCREWED scenarios (see the review of Quarantine for a definition) are good feed for the bloodthirsty moviegoer, the need for true quality is still there. All the camp, all the gore, all the outlandishness that gives the horror genre its identity is, unfortunately, as full of as much grace and depth as a carnival funhouse. Enjoyable as that can be, and as much as it keeps bloody murder from being weighed down by too much realism, a well-handled production with a talented cast, a talented director at the helm, and a good story can always be applauded as something that is, my goodness, actually worth seeing. Read more... 10.18.2009 Shitty Movie Sundays: Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter Tom Savini, as with Martin Becker before you, I salute you. In a film that otherwise struggled at times to hold my attention, the exquisite onscreen deaths perpetrated by Jason Voorhees and engineered by Savini saved the day. From the morgue attendant attacked with a hacksaw and a vicious neck twist, to the harpoon crotch lift, to the young lover whose skull is crushed against a shower wall, to the most brutal machete attack put to film since Apocalypse Now, there wasn't much that was mailed in, and I have a suspicion a good deal hit the cutting room floor to bring the film down to an 'R' rating. All that sweet, sweet blood, and the occasional chest shot, is really the only draw to the film. Juvenile? No doubt, yet Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter is still a sight better than most films in the Friday the 13th franchise. Read more... 10.15.2009 The Empty Balcony: The Legend of Hell House The fear that we create in our minds in anticipation of unpleasant events is more often than not more powerful than the event itself. Also, the actions of unseen forces are more unsettling than those by forces we can see, and can thus relate to and understand. Along these lines, in horror cinema, the most frightening ghosts are of the unseen variety. They make their presence felt by being menacing, by toying with those who trespass on their realm. They make noise. They bang, shuffle, and walk loudly across hardwood floors. They spark chills and cold winds. They speak, threaten and cajole. Eventually they move things around, simply and quickly, such as doors opening and closing by themselves, books falling off of shelves, etc. It's usually around here that the separation is made between good ghost films and bad ghost films. Read more... 10.13.2009 Shitty Movie Sundays: Friday the 13th Part 3 The first two installments in the Friday the 13th franchise managed to be oddly engaging, even while being bad cinema. Friday the 13th Part 3 is just bad, what little effort at quality went into making parts 1 and 2 obviously too much for the filmmakers, who must have found themselves overly occupied with tinkering with 3-D effects. That's right, Part 3 was filmed in glorious 3-D, part of the 1980s revival that brought the moviegoer such lasting film gems as Amityville 3-D, Jaws 3-D, and Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone. Like these films, Part 3 pays great homage to the 3-D monster fare of the 1950s. That is, it looks cheap, feels cheap, and lacks much more than contrived 3-D shots to keep the audience engaged. There's no cachet, no horrorshow charm to this film, and therefore no reason to remember it. Read more... 10.12.2009 For about half the film, Mikail Håfström's 1408, based on the Stephen King short story of the same name, is creepy and frightening. By then, the viewer has grown used to Mike Enslin's (John Cusack) predicament, and the film has no other alternative than to fall into convention. That's unfortunate, because if Håfström had been able to sustain the atmosphere of the first half throughout the film, it would rank among the best ghost films of all time. A lot can be said for a film with potential like that. Read more... 10.09.2009 Shitty Movie Sundays: Friday the 13th Part 2 Why fix something if it isn't broken? Well, that depends on one's definition of broken. Friday the 13th was a little movie that could. Little plot, little acting, little in the way of developing much of what makes a good movie. But it had a substantial body count, and had huge returns on its little budget. So a sequel was made, but one that was less a sequel and more a remake. Friday the 13th Part 2 still had a tiny budget, but was blessed with enough funds to afford some of the finer things in moviemaking, like extras, better film stock and lenses, and better actors. Part 2 breaks out of some of the claustrophobia that was a necessary result of the shoestring the first movie was hanging by, but the plot, what little of it, remains faithful to the original: Lusty camp counselors encounter psychopathic murderer in isolated lakeside campsite. Got it? Cause that's it. Read more... 10.07.2009 The zombie apocalypse has struck again, this time in director Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland. Bad meat was the culprit this go around, spreading a virus throughout the population that turns otherwise normal people into ravenous cannibals. That's good for the audience, bad for the characters who inhabit the former United States, re-imagined as a nation/amusement park of the undead in the mind of Columbus, the movie's main protagonist, played by Jesse Eisenberg. Read more... 10.05.2009 There's a subgenre in horror/sci-fi cinema, where a limited number of people are trapped in a contained space and terrorized by some malevolent force. They are picked off, one by one, leading to climax and resolution. There may be a term for this, I don't know. "Alien-type" maybe. I don't really want to put the time in researching whether or not there is. After all, most of these films are awful. I did come up with an acronym, however. Arguably, more time was needed to come up with the acronym than researching terms for these dogs, but it was fun. So, from this review forward, films where a small cast is in a reclusive environment where everyone (almost) dies, will be referred to as SCREWED movies. That's Small Cast, Reclusive Environment, Where Everyone (almost) Dies. How clever. Read more... 10.03.2009 Rover Image #69 
10.03.2009 Shitty Movie Sundays: Friday the 13th There's bad cinema, and then there's bad cinema. Some movies are just unwatchable, displaying a profound lack of skill on the part of the filmmakers. There is nothing to them, not even the satisfaction of shock value. Take, for example, something like Theodore Rex, a film I wrote about last year. That movie was pathetic, with no redeeming qualities at all. It was even uncomfortably racist. But, had the title lizard gone on a murderous rampage, the filmmakers may have had something. Imagine that, a film so bad that it elevates grisly murder to the level of 'redeeming quality'. Truly, a film that must be seen to be believed. Read more... 10.01.2009 Oval Office Thunderdome: Santorum's Tough Road Former Pennsylvania Senator and current hard-right ideologue Rick Santorum will be stopping in Des Moines and Dubuque, Iowa, tomorrow to deliver a pair of speeches to conservative audiences. Iowa being what it is in the presidential nominating process, Santorum appears to have designs on the Republican nomination in 2012, something he and his staffers have only meekly denied. The problem for Rick Santorum is that, despite the GOP tendency towards embracing figures as far to the right as he is, capturing the nomination is far easier for candidates considered to be moderates. Read more... 09.30.2009 Rover Image #68 
09.30.2009 The Senate Finance Committee continued debate on it's healthcare reform bill today, voting down two amendments to add a public plan to the bill. But, that's okay, because this bill should not be passed anyway. If liberal Democrats manage to find the courage to match their rhetoric, they will not vote for the bill on the floor until not only a public option is added, but also needed revisions are made. Read more... 09.29.2009 Rover Image #67 
09.29.2009 Why Can't Some People Read Ballots? In today's "About New York" column by Jim Dwyer of the New York Times, he tells the story of Fun Mae Eng, a resident of New York City who voted in her first presidential election in 1992. She carried a cheat sheet into the booth with her so she could recognize the characters in the English alphabet that made up Bill Clinton's name, the candidate for whom she wished to vote. At the time, Ms. Eng could not read or speak English. The article went on to note the disenfranchisement of Chinese immigrants and Chinese-Americans in our nation's past, and to note how far they have come, as evidenced by the current Democratic ticket in this city's coming elections. The article also praised the efforts of community groups to press the city's Board of Elections to create bilingual ballots in Chinese for areas of the city with large amounts of Chinese-speaking residents, a noble cause. Except for one thing. Why can't people, including immigrants eligible to vote, read ballots? Read more... 09.20.2009 Rover Image #66 
09.20.2009 Reshaping Congressional Districts As Peter Baker reported in today's New York Times, a lawsuit is set to be filed in federal court in Mississippi, charging that the federal government has disenfranchised many of its citizens because they are underrepresented in the House of Representatives. The math behind the lawsuit is simple an unassailable. Read more... 09.17.2009 Rover Image #65 
09.17.2009 Good science fiction films set in space are hard to come by. So many examples embrace the fiction part at the expense of the science that they lose a good deal of intelligence, and stupidity is death to sci-fi. Additionally, it's a challenge to make space an interesting setting without working around so many of the realities that make space not only the most challenging environment there is for human existence, but also the most boring. There's a reason, after all, that space shuttle launches are broadcast on C-SPAN. Read more... 09.12.2009 Rover Image #64 
09.12.2009 How fraudulent was the recent Afghan election for president? In the province of Kandahar, home of incumbent president Hamid Karzai, 350,000 ballots were turned in to be counted, as reported by the New York Times. The problem is, only around 25,000 people actually voted there. Additionally, somewhere along the order of 800 fake polling sites were set up, existing on paper only, where all votes reported went to Karzai. The Electoral Complaints Commission, the organization tasked with monitoring the election, has stated, somewhat calmly considering the numbers involved, that it found "clear and convincing evidence of fraud" in the vote. In short, Hamid Karzai's supporters have created hundreds of thousands of votes for their candidate out of thin air. Incredible. Read more... 09.09.2009 Rover Image #63 
09.09.2009 Shitty Movie Sundays: Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone Along with the title of 'Official Filmmaker of Shitty Movie Sundays,' as mentioned in the review of Soldier, there are a few films vying for the title of King of the Shitty Movies. 1983's Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, directed by Lamont Johnson, is a strong contender. Riding the post Star Wars wave of 80s sci-fi, Spacehunter really is a sci-fi adventure, as the film's hero, Peter Strauss's Wolff, is forced to confront bizarre obstacle after bizarre obstacle in his quest to complete his mission: rescuing three marooned space hotties from the clutches of the evil Overdog (Michael Ironside), a ruthless dictator exercising sadistic control over the desert planet Terra XI somewhere off in the far reaches of space. Read more... 09.08.2009 Rover Image #62 
09.08.2009 Plans? We Don't Need No Stinking Plans! Not exactly an impartial critic on the level of Walter Cronkite, longtime Washington Post columnist George Will has declared the war in Afghanistan unwinnable. He's probably right. If victory for coalition forces in Afghanistan means the country will be at peace, ruled by a representative democracy from Kabul, and that both the Taliban and Al Qaeda will have been eliminated, then yes, the war is unwinnable. American and NATO forces cannot tame Afghanistan, and would be foolish to try. Read more... 09.06.2009 Rover Image #61 
09.06.2009 Paul W. S. Anderson is close to being the official filmmaker of Shitty Movie Sundays. I would present this honor outright to John Carpenter were it nor the fact he has displayed far too much competence as a filmmaker in the past, despite the fair amount of shitty films that mar his oeuvre. Other candidates could include b-movie monster master Bert I. Gordon, or even Cash Flagg, as a tribute to his recent demise. Flagg would be an interesting choice, as he was, without a doubt, one of the most unique filmmakers of all time, quality notwithstanding. Anderson, on the other hand, has written, directed, or produced some of the most quotidian dogs to ever make it to the silver screen, number of explosions notwithstanding. The only factor that keeps me from committing Shitty Movie Sundays to total Anderson worship is that he has peppered his career with films that are so shitty as to be unwatchable, and there is no joy in a bad film that repels the viewer so thoroughly that it can't be sat through without giving up one's moviegoing self to the unique absurdity of substandard cinema. It's almost a religion in that way. Read more... 08.30.2009 Rover Image #60 
08.30.2009 Daranee Charnchoengsilpakul, a political activist in Thailand, was recently sentenced to 18 years in prison after being convicted of three counts of insulting Thailand's King Bhumibol Adulyadej. Her case won't make very many waves throughout the world, it being yet another routine example of political repression is a country that has been slipping away from democracy at a rapid pace in the last decade. Every time an item like this appears in the news, one or two lonely paragraphs from the AP or Reuters, giving a brief glimpse into places in the world that aren't all that free, it reminds me how suspect the nature of mankind truly is, and the remarkable power that agreements based solely on ideals of empathy and respect hold in a country like the United States. Read more... 08.29.2009 Rover Image #59 
08.29.2009 The inmates are running the asylum. Over the past few weeks, the Obama administration lost control of the debate over healthcare reform. In fact, the debate disappeared, replaced by what columnist Richard Cohen has called 'political pornography.' The rational has been overshadowed by the irrational, truth by deception. What remains a desperately needed overhaul of healthcare has been shouted down by right-wing extremists, both the elected and the unelected kind, who reference non-existent plots reminiscent of Nazi euthanasia and Kafkaesque bureaucratic hurdles to demonize a government that many of them are actually members of. Some of these opponents of healthcare reform believe the madness they spout, while some are shamelessly manipulating the gullible for political expediency. How effective is their clamoring? The centerpiece of any meaningful reform, an option to buy into publicly run health coverage, is now in danger. In a disturbing fit of rebranding, President Obama is no longer referring to 'healthcare reform.' Instead, he has been using the phrase 'health insurance reform.' Read more... 08.18.2009 Rover Image #58 
08.18.2009 Shitty Movie Sundays: Deep Rising Yikes. Sometimes a shitty movie crosses my path and I don't know whether to lose myself in the fun of it all, or to hate it. Deep Rising, written and directed by Stephen Sommers, whipsawed me back and forth between deep belly laughs and outright revulsion so quickly that by the end I was praying for something, anything, to appear just for a moment, a fleeting second, and justify the mystifying amount of time I spent with this dog. Didn't happen, so now, instead of letting the experience fade away into the deep recesses of my memory, I'm going to write about it. Read more... 08.11.2009 Rover Image #57 
08.11.2009 Last week, ESPN.com held a mock college football draft, where writers selected the 40 teams from the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) that they would like to see constitute a pared down top division, and subsequently divided them into four regional conferences. It was an interesting idea, one brought forth by the NCAA's inability to put together an effective method of crowning a national champion. A lot of people have spent a lot of valuable time fretting over the jumbled state of the FBS, as if it were some form of national emergency, a tragedy of the first order that oftentimes there is no clear king of college football at the end of January. It is an interesting problem, though. Read more... 08.10.2009 Rover Image #56 
08.10.2009 Politics is a wretched thing. Even when observing it from afar, as I, and most Americans do, politics has an overpowering stench. One of the things that is so frustrating about politics is its constancy. The maneuvers, weak compromises, backstabbing and partisan bickering that we lament about Washington these days has been the modus operandi in the capital for generations. What fools we are to think that snake oil salesmen peddling change every other November will actually change a thing. Read more... 07.29.2009 Rover Image #55 
07.29.2009 The Empty Balcony: Excalibur / Monty Python and the Holy Grail VHS tapes, once upon a time, dominated the space below millions of televisions in American homes. They were in your house, a friend's house, a family member's house, stacked tall and deep in all sorts of cabinets upon which the TV was perched; cheap particle board constructions bought at the local big box with fake wood grain or flat black veneer, peeling up at the edges always. That awful furniture can still be found. The shapes have just changed a bit as tapes have disappeared and been replaced by DVD boxes. Read more... 07.27.2009 Rover Image #54 
07.27.2009 One Giant Leap And Then...Nothing Roughly 102 hours, 45 minutes, and 40 seconds after Apollo 11 lifted off from the launch pad at Cape Canaveral on July 16th, 1969, the lunar module touched down on the surface of the moon. Of course, today marks the fortieth anniversary of the landing. Over the next three years, six more missions were launched to the moon, and five were successful. The Apollo program is arguably the greatest achievement in engineering and courage in human history. Never before, and never since, have human footprints marked the surface of another heavenly body. The significance of these events cannot be overstated. Read more... 07.20.2009 Rover Image #53 
07.20.2009 The Empty Balcony: Three Kings There haven't been that many films made about the Persian Gulf War. A quick search in the tubes only turned up a handful. A quick, forgetful war (from the American perspective, anyway), there would have been no real lasting impact on American society wrought by the conflict had it not been for our recent misadventures in the desert. We tore a bloody swath through Kuwait and Iraq for one hundred days in 1991, and came home intact and victorious. We seemed to dictate everything that happened on the ground and in the air. The war was fought on our terms completely. Mistakes were few, casualties were few, while damage inflicted on the enemy was severe. We decided when it began, and we decided when it was over. For us, it was the perfect war. Our only problem was we failed to recognize that the enemies of the future could learn lessons from it. Read more... 06.30.2009 Rover Image #52 
06.30.2009 The house that once stood in a lot on the corner of West Market and North Highland had been a wine seller's business in its last legitimate habitation. The house had been empty for years by the time it was torn down. Funny enough, even the corner where the house once stood is gone, the stretch of Highland that reached Market having been paved over to make way for an expanded branch of the Akron Public Library. Now that's progress. Read more... 06.22.2009 Rover Image #51 
06.22.2009 One day into filming of 1964's "The Train", director Arthur Penn was fired at the urging of star Burt Lancaster and replaced with John Frankenheimer. Penn had apparently conceived the film as largely a cerebral examination of the effect and importance of art to the French national consciousness during the Nazi occupation. A not unworthy aspiration, and one that could someday make a fine film. In hiring Frankenheimer, who had such films as "Seven Days in May" and "The Manchurian Candidate" under his belt, the decision was made that the plot of "The Train" should be driven by tension and action. Read more... 05.19.2009 Rover Image #50 
05.19.2009 There was a startling sight off the foot of Manhattan this morning. A Boeing 747 trailing a fighter escort was seen making multiple low passes near the Statue of Liberty and many tall buildings in Jersey City. In response, some buildings in Jersey City and in Manhattan were evacuated, for fear another terrorist attack was under way. However, this wasn't the case. The 747 was the backup plane for Air Force One, flying by New York City for an Air Force photo shoot. Apparently, the city had been made aware of the flight path by the Federal Aviation Administration. The NYPD acknowledged this, but also said that it had been barred from alerting the public. What were they thinking? Read more... 04.27.2009 Rover Image #49 
04.25.2009 The Empty Balcony: Apocalypse Now "Apocalypse Now" dropped into my cinematic experience like a bomb. When I was a teenager, I had been vaguely aware that it was a film about the Vietnam War, but I thought nothing more about it other than that it had an interesting title. I had seen other Vietnam War films, notably "Platoon" and "Full Metal Jacket", and felt like I was familiar with the material I would see in "Apocalypse Now", so there was no great rush on my part to seek it out. Also, there wasn't anyone my age (somewhere in the early years of high school, I'm not exactly sure when) who had seen it, so there weren't any peer recommendations or condemnations to go with the film. Read more... 04.22.2009 Rover Image #48 
04.22.2009 The New York Mets are playing a home game against the Florida Marlins on Tuesday, April the 28th. There are plenty of good seats available, but I'm not interested in those. Good seats at a ballgame are a luxury that my friends and I cannot afford. Nosebleeds have been the order of the day for all but rare occasions in my sportsgoing life. Good seats are reserved for rare gifts from corporate contacts or semi-retired acquaintances ready to rip through their retirement funds. The most expensive ticket I've ever bought was for a Yankees/Indians matchup at the Stadium last year for sixty-five bucks...in the upper deck. A similar seat in the new stadium goes for twice that amount, now. But this article isn't a rant about the high price of seats at sporting events. It's about fees. Read more... 04.20.2009 Rover Image #47 
04.20.2009 Shitty Movie Sundays: The Transporter Sometimes I watch movies so you won't have to. I sacrifice hours on lazy Sunday afternoons abusing my eyes and my sense of taste not just because I enjoy bad cinema, I do, but because some bad movies descend so low that even cinematic shit-eaters like myself can find no redeeming qualities to them whatsoever, and viewers need to be warned to avoid them. Like a signpost jutting out of the desert warning of rattlesnake country ahead, or a toxic waste dump, consider this article a harbinger, for there will be trouble for those who ignore it. Read more... 04.17.2009 Rover Image #46 
04.17.2009 Will They Be Called "The Bush Six"? Six former Bush administration officials who were responsible for developing legal arguments justifying torture are likely to have criminal investigations opened against them by a Spanish court. The court is claiming jurisdiction because Spanish citizens were held at the prison at Guantanamo Bay and have said they were tortured. The case is going before a judge, Baltasar Garzon, who has a history of bringing charges against overseas defendants, including Augusto Pinochet. Should the cases move forward, arrest warrants will likely be issued. Read more... 03.31.2009 Rover Image #45 
03.31.2009 The Empty Balcony: Logan's Run Once again, the future is a terrifying place. This is a lesson that Hollywood continues to hammer home to moviegoers. Whether or not anyone is listening...well, that will be evident when we finally arrive in the future, won't it? If the future is a place packed full of brain-eating zombies, cold-blooded murderous cyborgs, endless desert landscapes blasted with nuclear radiation, gigantic mutated insects, alien slave drivers, and any other myriad threats to the existence of mankind, then we have obviously failed to protect ourselves. Heed the warnings of science fiction, fair citizen, for to ignore them is to sow the seeds of our own destruction. Read more... 03.30.2009 Rover Image #44 
03.30.2009 The Daily News and The New York Post both splashed their front pages in the city yesterday with headlines about the renaming of the Freedom Tower rising on the World Trade Center site. "NO MORE FREEDOM" read the Daily News, while the Post roared forth with "FREE DUMB TOWER". New Yorkers can shell out a buck a day for these cupfuls of indignation. Read more... 03.28.2009 Rover Image #43 
03.28.2009 Film Reviews from the Empty Balcony: Burn After Reading Watching a Coen brothers movie is sometimes like attending a blind tasting. There won't be any swill waved under one's nose, but just what is in the glass could be surprising, or disappointing. Read more... 03.23.2009 Rover Image #42 
03.23.2009 This entry gets a little blue. If you don't mind dirty words, click here... 03.03.2009 Rover Image #41 
03.03.2009 Film Reviews from the Empty Balcony: Soylent Green The future is a rough place in Richard Fleischer's 1973 film "Soylent Green". Especially New York City in the year 2022. The population is 40 million, the city is in the grip of an endless heat wave, and apparently the only things to eat are colored crackers. At least the green kind, Soylent Green, to be particular, seems pretty popular. Man, of course, is to blame for the calamities of this bleak future, as the film demonstrates in an opening photographic montage that is artistically compelling. Read more... 03.02.2009 Rover Image #40 
03.02.2009 The saga continues. Only a few weeks after taking his seat in the Senate, dubiously but legally, it appears the Senate's initial wariness towards Roland Burris may have been well founded. First, Burris swore in an affidavit that neither he nor his representatives had any contact with Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich or his representatives prior to his being chosen to fill Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat. Then, he stated that he had been asked to raise money for the Governor's reelection but had refused. Now he says that he did attempt a fundraiser for the embattled Governor prior to his appointment, but had been unsuccessful. Read more... 02.19.2009 Rover Image #39 
02.19.2009 Film in the Tubes: Sushi Conveyor Simplicity can sometimes be sublime. Thus it is with a little film that Andy Scearce made in Japan a few years ago. Read more... 02.16.2009 Rover Image #38 
02.16.2009 Film Reviews from the Empty Balcony: Robocop Dystopian future societies are the stuff dreams are made of. They are what grows from the seeds of our own decadence and shallowness. The moral bankruptcy, and sometimes outright horror, of the settings of films like "Blade Runner", "A Clockwork Orange", "THX 1138", "Escape from New York", and "Soylent Green" wouldn't be possible if writers and directors didn't look around them and see the lightning speed with which we throw ourselves into unknown futures, sometimes without regard for so many of the present realities which work so well and don't need change. The ever-present message is that change, sometimes jarring change, is inevitable. Films that look to the future warily revolve around placing the viewer in the role of Rip Van Winkle. When the theater lights dim, the familiar world of today dissolves into the freakshow of tomorrow. The overriding questions always being: Why are the people onscreen comfortable with this? Why doesn't everybody see how wrong things are? Read more... 02.06.2009 Rover Image #37 
02.06.2009 A quick note before I begin. In the last article under this heading, I cited three open Senate seats, in New York, Delaware, and Illinois. After that article was posted, then President-elect Obama named Colorado Senator Ken Salazar as his pick for Secretary of the Interior. Colorado's governor, Bill Ritter, named Michael Bennett as Salazar's replacement. They've managed, thankfully, to avoid controversy. If only such could be said in the cases of New York and Illinois. Read more... 01.27.2009 Rover Image #36 
01.27.2009 Three days after Barack Obama's inauguration and the new president has instituted perhaps the toughest lobbying rules for prospective and former members of his administration in the history of the office. He has revoked the veto power of former presidents and vice presidents to hide their papers from public view. He has signed executive orders setting a closing date for the prison at Guantanamo Bay, set up a panel to review the status of all prisoners there, and ordered the CIA to close its overseas black sites. He has ordered that all detainees be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions, and interrogations follow guidelines established in the Army Field Manual, which prohibits waterboarding, prolonged sleep deprivation, stress positions, forced nakedness and sexual humiliation, exposure to extreme temperatures, and other techniques up to and including direct physical harm. In announcing that order, President Obama became the first person in the Executive Branch in about seven years who was not lying when he said the United States does not torture. Read more... 01.23.2009 Rover Image #35 
The scientists in charge of the earth rover are sick of writing captions. 01.23.2009 Shitty Movie Sundays: Horror Express "Horror Express" is one of those good bad movies. The budget is low, the plot has twists and turns which serve little purpose than stretching out the running time, and a middling celebrity makes a token appearance to swipe a quick paycheck in exchange for lending some prestige to the film. Ah, Telly Savalas. During the 70s, cheap European horror films must have been how he expensed vacations. His name is in the credits, to be sure, but the title of the film could easily be changed to "Where's Telly Savalas?" Kojak takes his sweet time making his entrance, but such bliss, for Savalas plays a Cossack captain in command of soldiers in Siberia. He's gruff and flamboyant all at once, smoking cigarillos and drinking vodka, never quite sure if he should talk with a Russian accent. It looked like his scenes were filmed in a day. Anyway, Savalas isn't in a starring role. Read more... 01.19.2009 Rover Image #34 
The rover captured this image in the remains of a power station. 01.19.2009 In the City - The Subway Touch Rule Never touch anything in a subway station. Never lean on a column, sit on a bench, or, God forbid, do a pull-up from a rafter. Subway stations have been coated with a hundred years of filth. Brake dust, rust, flakes of lead paint, rotten food, rain water drained from the street, dog piss, rat piss, human piss, vomit, all kinds of fecal matter from all kinds of sources. There's no reason to believe the rare occasions when things are sprayed and scrubbed down that everything is cleansed. Even the smell of the air, a truly unique odor, tells one all they need to know about the tunnels. In the cars, it's different. There are three options. Sit on a dirty seat, a thin layer of clothes between you and the plastic; hold onto a metal bar; or surf, holding nothing and risking falling on the floor, which is just as bad as lying on the track bed in some cars. In fact, the ideal situation would be to ride the subway in a deep sea diving suit which, upon exiting, is dipped in gasoline and set on fire. 01.13.2009 Rover Image #33 
The rover thought this beast was sleeping, until the camera's shutter closed. 01.13.2009 Film Reviews from the Empty Balcony: The Last Man on Earth/The Omega Man/I Am Legend The three films adapted from Richard Matheson's 1954 novel "I Am Legend" vary widely in scope, story, and distance from the original source material. They are all shaky and mostly forgettable, but "The Omega Man" maintains a special place in cinema as one of star Charlton Heston's many 1970s forays into post-apocalyptic science fiction. For that, it is the most interesting of the three adaptations, if not the best, edging "The Last Man on Earth" by a close margin. Read more... 01.09.2009 Rover Image #32 
The rover captured this image in the midst of a strange east coast dust storm. 01.09.2009 Everyone who loves rock and roll has an opinion about the best album ever recorded. Is it "Electric Ladyland", "Who's Next", Led Zeppelin's fourth, "Abbey Road", something else? The arguments one way or another are endless, and fill a damn large percentage of late night bar talk. Every music magazine one could think of has lists all over their web pages. Top 100 albums ever, best 500 songs, best punk albums, folk albums, classic rock albums, alternative albums, 60s albums, 90s albums, all coming out the wazoo. For me, all the history of modern music, rock, blues, jazz, coalesced and circulated in a massive storm over a recording studio in Los Angeles in May 1970. For two weeks The Stooges channeled all the hectic and destructive energy of loud music and put it on tape. The result was "Fun House". Read more... 01.08.2009 Rover Image #31 
This image may look poignant or picturesque, but if the rover wasn't made of metal, it would have frozen it's ass off getting this shot. 01.08.2009 In the City - The Rice Box Rule When living in the city, never buy rice from the corner store that comes packaged in a cardboard box. There is no liner in the box, and you can't see inside. The rice just sits in there, snug against the smooth, brown sidewalls, in an imperfect seal. After you pour out a cup into some boiling water and all sorts of brown stuff floats to the top, that's when you realize that at some point between harvesting, processing, packaging, and sitting on a shelf, your box of rice became infested with bugs. Rice in a plastic bag mitigates this problem. Look in the bag, check for bugs. No bugs? Buy the bag, and store in the freezer. 01.03.2009 Rover Image #30 
Bolt. 01.03.2009 |
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