I aim to entertain

Via Jim Treacher via Today's Big Thing

In the interests of breaking up monotony, a dash of substance

Michael Mann: Cinematic Visionary or Overrated Hack?

My rule of thumb is simple. Directors who make movies I love are awesome. Directors who make movies I hate are crap.

Which makes Michael Mann horribly difficult. To wit:

Public Enemies (Boring, characters unlikeable [How do you make Johnny Depp unlikeable!?!])

Miami Vice (Like, but only ironically; if Colin Farrel and Jamie Foxx weren't reinventing Don Johnson and Phil Michael Thomas' Crockett and Tubbs I wouldn't care)

Collateral (LOVE)

Ali (Hate, too long)

The Insider (Boring, predictable)

Heat (Hate, good action, awful dialogue, relies too much on Deniro and Pacino as icons, also too long)

The Last of the Mohicans (Like, saved by the soundtrack and DDL)

Manhunter (LOVE, saved by Peterson and Cox)

The Keep (Haven't seen)

Thief (Haven't seen, music by Tangerine Dream)

Mann has ONE film I love without qualification. One. Normally, that relegates him to the crap category with an even-a-broken-clock-is-right-twice-a-day caveat.

But.

He does Collateral so well. Shots are sparse, dark, and absolutely capture Los Angeles in a Blade Runner-esque dystopian vision using only location and natural lighting. Music perfectly suits every scene (I especially love the night club shootout). Colors are somehow muted while still conveying LA's neon gilt.

Granting a smidgen of hyperbole here, I would venture to say he's technically flawless in every single one of his movies.

And yet they all suck.

Mann has two irritating habits qua director: (1) Inability to kill darlings, and (2) Mind-boggling screenplay choice. Collateral is tight for a Mann film, clocking in at 2 hours. Did Ali, Insider, and Heat all really need to be 160+ minutes? Did we really need each one of those scenes exposing the characters to be...exactly what we already knew them to be? And the writing in Collateral is superb; it's hard to believe Mann liked the script. There's a serious clash of worldviews, existential angst, excurses about music (which always point back to the main ideological clash), a sympathetic main character and a charming villain (how novel!). In Collateral, Mann's technique serves a fantastic story. Most of his films feature an orgy of detail, technique for the sake of technique, and feel like a love letter to film-making rather than a conscious effort to entertain.

I am simply at a loss.

And for the record, every time David Fincher makes another movie, I feel him slipping into the Mann zone.

On Cynicism

The opposite of faith is not unbelief. It is not even doubt.

It is cynicism.

The subject of much fashionable derision from our intellectual elite, C.S. Lewis is a large target because he has such an incisive grasp of human beings. His Screwtape explains the benefits of cynicism to a young tempter:

But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armor plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy; it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practice it[.]

Lewis is most clever because he recognizes that cynicism is rarely socially acceptable unless it is humorous. Only the wholly deranged or the truly sycophantic willingly subject themselves to rancorous tirade after tirade. But wait. What if our interlocutor entertains? Well, then. All is forgiven; (s)he's so goshdarn funny.

In this way, cynicism obscures the mature happiness brought on by a serious search for the Good, the True, and the beautiful, replacing it with infantile giggles and meanness at the expense of...whom or whatever. A social pressure is brought to bear against the very idea of serious human living, and this pressure--in the form of a joke no less--releases those of us who laugh from the hard work of virtue because it is, after all, so silly.

Atheist-turned-Catholic(!) Jennifer Fulwiler recommends this as a step to finding God:

Commit to a period of time during which you'll fast from all sources of cynicism: give up watching TV shows and reading websites that make jokes at other people's expense (even if it's about celebrities or politicians); try to change the subject or say something positive if such conversations come up in person; avoid making cynical jokes or comments yourself. You might be surprised at how much this fast will transform your heart.

Mrs. Fulwiler assumes I might want my "heart transformed." How cute. And by cute I mean naive. If I wanted anything like that, why would I spend all my money rewarding stand-up comics and Hollywood writers and pop stars and talking heads for belittling it?

Why reform the prisons when they're working so well?

At Whitzerland, a discussion of privatized prisons based on a report by the Bureau of Justice Assistance:

The basic pros and cons of the argument are simple:

Pros Private Prisons: 1. provide construction as needed in order to reduce government debt. 2. produce facilities in half the time it takes the government. 3. provide economic devlopment. 4. create competition that lowers costs

Cons Private Prisons: 1. may become monopoly in the system through ingratiation, favortism. 2. have financial motivation that is opposite the end goal (i.e. production is the machine so they want to keep the parts working-inmates) 3. procurement is slow, inefficient and open to risk

That sounds like an argument for privatization to me, since all the cons (yes, even #2) are potential problems even in our current system.

Whatever. Whether privatizing prisons works or not, what I don't hear addressed in Whit's post is the question of purpose. So what if private prisons are slightly more efficient than public ones? The issue should be what private prisons are producing. Right now prison is really more like a criminal internship and/or rape-fest. That just doesn't seem to line up with my Christian vision of what internment should be about, namely, rehabilitation. Whit, what does that BJA have to say about that?

Please keep your compassion in a safe place where it can't hurt anyone

The first time Airbear and I went to Haiti, we were shocked by the strict standards for foreign adoption. The price was easy to understand: Haiti is ruled by corrupt politicians who are loathe to lose a major portion of their income by giving starving orphans families. That much made sense.

What didn't make sense was that the process was lengthened considerably by UNICEF's anti-adoption policy.

For children who cannot be raised by their own families, an appropriate alternative family environment should be sought in preference to institutional care which should be used only as a last resort and as a temporary measure. Inter-country adoption is one of a range of care options which may be open to children, and for individual children who cannot be placed in a permanent family setting in their countries of origin, it may indeed be the best solution. In each case, the best interests of the individual child must be the guiding principle in making a decision regarding adoption.

Now, that statement just sounds great. Best interests! Individual child! But wait. Wheresoever thou shalt stumble upon kind sentiment, beware the shadowy caveat that liest beneath:

Over the past 30 years, the number of families from wealthy countries wanting to adopt children from other countries has grown substantially. At the same time, lack of regulation and oversight, particularly in the countries of origin, coupled with the potential for financial gain, has spurred the growth of an industry around adoption, where profit, rather than the best interests of children, takes centre stage. Abuses include the sale and abduction of children, coercion of parents, and bribery.

What, you didn't know? You didn't hear about how the rash of dirty, profit-grubbing American dollars led to rampant sexual violence against kind little Haitian babies? Oh. Well neither did I. Neither did anybody. Because that never happened in Haiti, where a penchant for the macabre predated any spate of adoptions. Thankfully, the UN, in its infinite wisdom, decided to make the adoption process ridiculously difficult, because using that paragon of virtue that is the Haitian government to prolong and regulate the adoption process makes sure that any opportunistic greed-mongers will abandon their ventures in the private sector and...become bureaucrats! Yay! No more graft! Transparency!

Or, more accurately, policy that is literally insane:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Mmm. Guido is worried about child trafficking. White hippie girl wants to keep kids in-country until they're old enough to return to their "communities."

You know, that reminds me of Michelle, one of the children at our orphanage. Michelle is legally too old to remain in an orphanage--they're supposed to cast you back into you're loving neighborhood of origin when you turn 15. The day after she was released into the wild she and her mother were found wailing at the orphanage gate, begging Pierre to take her back inside. I guess the local gang that controls Michelle's birth home in Cite Soleil decided that Michelle would make a pretty decent prostitute. After all why not, right? Michelle is young, inexperienced, naive. Easy to control and totally without any other means of providing for herself. The gang threatened Michelle's birth mother, telling her that she would be denied access to food unless she put her daughter on the street. They also helpfully informed her that they were going to do it either way, so the only real question was whether or not the poor woman wanted to starve to death.

I for one share Guido's carefully thought out concerns about sex trafficking and child slavery. I am deeply sympathetic to UNICEF's heartfelt commitment to "the best interests of the individual child." But I have this crazy feeling that maybe, just maybe, the elite, highly educated policy-crafting gurus at the United Nations should reconsider the wisdom of their oligarchic master-planning, and take a good long look at the legions of God-fearing, do-gooding, would-be adoptive parents living in America's heartland.

And then just get the hell out of the way.



Notes: Mike is the sole voice of reason in the video. Donate to his non-profit here and check out the trailer to his documentary here. And thanks to Neil for snagging this NBC clip and posting it on Facebook.

So what's this dumb cow's life for anyway?

Jon asks:

1.) Is it ethical to eat animals? And if so, what kind of guidelines do we need to follow when hunting / farming animals?
2.) Is it ethical to "own" animals?

(See the link for a Petey Singer video; that guy is a trip)

Jon says his mind isn't made up yet, and he asked for opinions, so I thought I'd oblige him (it's tit-for-tat, people, figure it out).

Now, everybody knows God is pretty weird, but one of the weirder things he does is give human beings the task of cultivating creation. So, God made us farmers. Adam trimmed the hedges, birthed the goats, and apparently he was having a hard time of it, so God gave him Eve to help him out.

For those of us with any farm/ranch experience (however limited), the idea of cultivation is simple. Each thing has a natural capacity; it is the duty of the caretaker to nurture each thing until it reaches that end. So, in the vineyard, the caretaker does whatever is required to maximize the fruitfulness of the vine, to produce the tastiest, ripest grapes each season.

With animals, the same principle applies. Different species and even different breeds within species have different capacities--our job is to help them reach their ends. Retrievers are an easy example. It is in their nature to bond loyally to a few other beings and to go get things. So, in our human vocation as creation's caretakers, it is our job to help retrievers achieve this inborn capacity for fluffy love and catching frisbees (or perhaps dead ducks).

When we have done our part, animals with whom humans interact fulfill their role or maximize their potential. Most non-human animals do not possess the brain architecture to "fear death" (in the existential sense) and, so long as they do not suffer, experience no loss when they die (assuming that we have done our job cultivating them).

Genesis indicates Adam and Eve were vegetarians. It's not until long after they're gone that humans get in the business of raising animals as meat bags. Maybe the renewal of all things will mean we can finally stop slaying our furry little friends and feasting on their flesh, I don't know.

For now, it is enough to support humane treatment. Stuffing meatbirds in pens is not good. Cooping up hogs until we grind them into sausage sucks (that movie Babe actually kind of gets pigs right). At the same time, cows aren't particularly interested in much beyond eating and walking about 10 steps a day. It is criminal to prevent dogs from enjoying the servile freedom of a trained relationship with a human being.

Cultivation not hedonism; animals are not instruments in your pursuit of happiness.

Fiddle on.

(Thanks Whit; keep it up!)

On the echo's lonesome sounding

Well.

I write about sex, I am crushed by an avalanche of opinion. I beg for comments, the deafening silence is broken only by the former Ms. Skoog. Thank you, Missy, for your thoughtful response; I am considering it and thinking about what changes will benefit the Saints of Doubt series.

To everybody else: suck it.

Fiddle on.

(Via Dan)

No. Seriously. Let me go back to sleep.

The story of humanity told by atheists is one of “awakening.” As in, humans were more or less drifting along in a drunken slumber of silly superstition until the dawn of the Modern Age and the introduction of the scientific method. Science pulled up the shades and bathed us in light, shook us from sleep, and is now explaining all that can be explained.

Apres moi, le hangover.

(Atheism story via Jon in the comments)