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. Continue reading “Ticket Fees Are Bullshit”
Author: capcom
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. Continue reading “Shitty Movie Sundays: The Transporter”
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. Continue reading “Will They Be Called “The Bush Six”?”
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. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Logan’s Run”
New Lipstick, Same Pig
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.
Continue reading “New Lipstick, Same Pig”
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.
Burn After Reading, the Coen brothers followup to their best picture winner, No Country for Old Men, has a very serious plot. A former CIA analyst named Osbourne Cox, played by John Malkovich, is writing a memoir of his days with the company. His wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), is secretly pursuing a divorce, and makes a copy onto disc of files from his computer, including the memoir and some classified materials. A secretary at her lawyer’s firm loses the disc at a gym, where it is found and comes into the possession of Chad (Brad Pitt), a personal trainer. Chad enlists his colleague, Linda (Frances McDormand), in a scheme to extort money from Osbourne in exchange for the disc. Meanwhile, Katie is having an affair with Harry (George Clooney), a Treasury agent who, coincidentally, meets Linda through an online dating service. It’s complicated, and only gets more so when plans crisscross and things inevitably go awry. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Burn After Reading”
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, seem 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. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Soylent Green”
Meritocracy, Anyone? – Part 4
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. Continue reading “Meritocracy, Anyone? – Part 4”
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. It’s nothing more than a camera placed on a conveyor belt in a sushi bar. The camera is pointed outwards towards the customers, and makes a four minute journey through the restaurant, into the kitchen, and back out again. The joy in the film is seeing the faces of people as they look up and realize there’s a camera passing in front of them. Most of them do notice, and smile. A few don’t, and we get a light voyeuristic peek into a moment of their lives, grabbing a meal or having some conversation. For something so simple in idea and execution, it’s a striking film.
Sushi Conveyor used to be available by clicking here, but has gone missing. If I ever come across it again, I will surely link to it.
The Empty Balcony: Robocop (1987)
Dystopian future societies are the stuff dreams are made of. They are what grow 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 freak show of tomorrow. The overriding questions always being: Why are the people onscreen comfortable with this? Why doesn’t everybody see how wrong things are?
Simply put, because that’s how things in the future work. People in the future grow up among the bizarre, things we wouldn’t recognize, as though these were the normal conditions of existence, rather than a manufactured reality that mankind has created for itself. The irony is, of course, that we, in real life, away from the fantasies of Hollywood, live like these silver screen wraiths, embracing the fast pace of technological advance, throwing off the yoke of millennia of human history to embrace the dictates of the electronic age. Implicit in films that depict the future is that civilizational advance is a given, destroying the ways and mores of the past, creating something unrecognizable to those who weren’t witness. This resonates because that is exactly how our ancestors would feel would they awake in today’s world. Continue reading “The Empty Balcony: Robocop (1987)”