The Cheap Critic: New in Town

As a general rule, when you find a film you have never heard of that features actors and/or a director or screenwriter of whom you have heard, you have found yourself a stinkeroo. The film New in Town -- with Renée Zellweger and Harry Connick Jr. as the leads, and with J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson in Spiderman) in a supporting role -- is a case in point. It was released early this year; I don't remember a theatrical run for it and I think the studio may have decided to cut their losses and go straight to video.



As with most films that don't quite work there are parts that are perfectly OK. The acting is fine, for instance -- Zellweger does a good to very good job, Connick is a bit better than OK, and the rest of the cast labor through the script with admirable stoicism that more-or-less works for the mid-winter Minnesota setting. The basic storyline is brutally formulaic but no more so that any number of other romantic comedies; the typical chick-flick doesn't need M. Night Shyamalan-style twists and turns. And the film simply drips with heartwarming niceness and, God knows, we can use more of that in the cinema these days.

If I had to put my finger on the problem I would say that the film's Danish director (Jonas Elmer) hasn't quite got the American sense of humor down pat. He finds a few genuinely funny bits -- rural Minnesotans talk funny and a Miami city girl might be surprised by how cold it gets in the winter -- and he proceeds to pummel us with them endlessly. After about forty minutes one arrives at Yes, yes. That's funny. I get it. Ha. Ha. Do you have another joke?

He is equally ham-handed with the thematic material. Zellweger, you see, is an executive sent to re-tool and downsize the plant that provides the main source of revenue for the town. Her romantic interest, Connick, is the local labor union representative. The get off to a bad start but, as the formula demands, they come around in the end. The management-labor relations theme was laid on thickly. There were times I was reminded of Fritz Lang's Metorpolis -- The HEART must be the MEDIATOR between the HEAD and the HAND. When the semi-evil management team comes up from Miami to confront their now-wayward colleague I half-expected the a robotrix to emerge from the black limos to replace her.

In fairness, I should say that it is a likable movie -- if you really, really try to like it. But you have to put on your Pollyanna dress, sit very still and will yourself to enjoy it. It can be done.

The Cheap Critic: The Fallen Ones

The Fallen Ones is a made-for-TV film (SyFy Channel) that offers an extremely enjoyable, immersive viewing experience... to me and a few of my fiends -- but possibly not to anybody else. My DVR caught it almost a year ago. I watched the first bit of it then told the machine to save it so I could finish it later. I was not particularly excited by the first few minutes and it took me a while to get back to it.



There are two ways a film can offer an immersive experience -- can take you out of yourself for a while. The first way is for the film to provide a transparent window on the story. That way, one moment you are sitting in the theater watching the opening credits, and the next you are in the tomb with Indiana Jones, batting at spider webs while you wade through piles of snakes and dodge blowgun darts that seem to come out of everywhere and nowhere. Making that kind of movie requires a high degree of craft for the writer, director and actors.

The Fallen Ones doesn't offer that kind of immersive experience. It offers another kind. One moment you are sitting on the couch watching the tube and the next you are there on the set with the actors, wondering if this will all look as cheesy in the rushes as it does during the shooting; you finish your bit and wait for the director to yell "CUT", hoping that the caterer's trailer still has any more of yesterday's ham sandwiches which were really good, especially the pickles.

The Fallen Ones is totally opaque. While you are watching it you can think about the script, the wooden dialog, how much fun it must be for young actors to work with well known, semi-retired celebrities, and whether the arid location where the film was made is that lot just outside of L.A. (the one where half the westerns of the forties were shot -- and most of the B-movie science fiction films of the fifties). You are free to daydream about all these things without being particularly distracted by the story line.

By any objective standard the film is dreadful... but many god-awful films tend to be uneven and The Fallen Ones has its odd glimpses of failed potential. For one thing, it has a decent concept (from which an appallingly bad script was written) and a few brief sequences that are really, really good. One sequence in particular sticks in my mind. I won't trouble you with too much of the plot but it deals with a 40-foot tall mummy that is found in the desert southwest. We spend most of the movie waiting for it to come to life and then comes a sequence where we think we have finally seen it. We see something in the distance, lumbering through the darkness, but when we get closer it is... something else. That sequence is wonderfully macabre and, although it lasts less than a minute, quite wonderful. It was worth watching the whole mess just to have seen it.

GOP Has No Clue on Healthcare

If you listen to the congressional debates on health care you will hear the members of the GOP criticizing the plans put forth by the Democrats while offering very few ideas of their own. The Republicans have no idea at all how the country's health care industry should be run, and they know it. That's why they are my guys. All they know, really, is that they haven't a clue. But that's one more thing than the Democrats know, and, actually, may be all they need to know.

Let me explain:

The problem of determining the best, the most efficient, the least expensive and the most humane way to deliver health care to the public is hard -- really, really hard -- and there is nobody in Congress who can do it. That's because the members of Congress are all human and the problem is simply too hard for mere human reason to make much of a dint in it. I suppose, as a theological notion, that God ought to be able to figure it out, but the problem is so difficult that those of weak faith may find it difficult to believe in a being who can solve so knotty a problem -- I mean, divine omniscience is fine as a theory, but surely there are limits...

But until that voice from the sky pipes up and straightens us out we are more or less on our own to figure out what to do. God help us. You should have figured out by now, since I a merely a man, and since I make no claim to have a pipeline to divine wisdom, that I have not the slightest notion what to do about health care -- or more accurately, I do have my opinions (don't we all) but I have no convincing arguments that my opinions are right. I have no plan for health care. But I do have a meta-plan -- a plan about coming up with a plan -- and based on the insight provided by my meta plan I am quite confident that the current administration has it exactly, 180 degrees bass-ackward, wrong.

So here is my meta-plan for health care:

Step one is to give up on the idea that we can figure it out. There isn't going to be any clear, universal, over-arching theory that solves all of our problems. It's not going to happen. We need to get over it. A corollary to this is the realization that all the five-year plans currently being touted for health care are wrong in some important particulars, and many of them are wrong in all particulars. This isn't because the people who formulated the plan are lazy, or stupid, or ignorant, or evil. They have merely taken on a task too difficult for them to accomplish, and their only real fault is a certain lack of intellectual modesty.

Step two is to get more people working on the problem. I'm not talking about a hand full of Czars and blue-ribbon panels here, or even a few thousand politicians or tens of thousands of bureaucrats, what I had in mind was more like, well, everybody. I think we should all run off, willy-nilly in all directions, and look for the best way to manage health care in our own personal lives based on our own individual silly-assed notions of how to go about it.

I admit that result won't be pretty. Since we all have opinions about how the problem should be handled, and since all of our opinions are different, we will find ourselves looking out over a chaotic sea of people doing things that strike us as wrong. And most of them will be wrong (remember that the problem is hard) but some will be less wrong than others and people will notice. After a while clusters will start to form. It is perfectly fair to crib off your next-door neighbor's health care plan. If his plan seems to be working out better than the mess you've made of things then maybe you make your plan look more like his. Maybe you and he and some of your other neighbors team up and pool your resources. Eventually, small pockets of spontaneous order will emerge, but mostly, things will still look pretty much a mess.

While this part of the meta-plan will be characterized as "every man for himself" that's not altogether fair. It's more like every man for himself... and for his family and friends... and for his neighbors, his business associates, and for the people in his care... and when need be for strangers in need who appeal to him directly. But the locus of control would remain with the individual and I would expect him or her to be kind and fair to others.

Finally, step three is the step my more progressive readers have been waiting for -- the step where we harvest the empirical evidence gained by our higgly-piggly experimentation and finally condense it down to a coherent plan. Well, I have some bad news. There is no step three. Step two is all there is. The unfortunate truth is that the messy hodgepodge envisioned in step two is probably the best of all possible worlds -- not perfection, because that is seldom possible -- but the best we are going to ever see.

All the plans for "Universal" health care lose me on the word "Universal." The mess we find ourselves in now stems, in large part, from a near-universal plan for health care that our grandfathers thought up fifty years ago. They devised a targeted plan for big-company wage slaves who worked the same job for forty years, and then retired and were promptly buried with their new gold watch. Using a combination of mandates and tax-incentives they managed to herd a majority of the public into employer-provided health care plans, most of which worked reasonably well until the world changed. Then, with people living longer past retirement, and with people changing jobs more often, what used to be a "one size fits all" plan started to bulge at the seams. But the incentives and mandates associated with the old plan prevented the growth of alternative setups that might have been better suited for the new realities. And here we are.

It perturbs me that people look at our current problem that stems from having too many of our eggs in the same basket and they decide to blame the basket. Most of the plans being pushed call for the creation of a spiffy, modern new basket, and this time making sure we put all of our eggs in it. As if the only problem with the current setup is that, last time, we missed a few eggs.

Cheap Critic: Angels and Demons

My wife occasionally watches how-to crafts shows on television. One of the episodes I remember sitting through (keeping her company, mostly) was a lady who took photographs (either personal snapshots or items cut out of magazines) and cut them into strips which she wove together and glued down to make a new composite image that was hoped to be more interesting than the photos she cut up.



Ron Howard's sequel to The DaVinci Code is a cinematic version of the same basic technique. In this film, director Opie took several tired, formulaic plots, cut them up into pieces and wove them together to form a rather-more-interesting composite. I can't think of a scene in the film that isn't a hoary old cliche, but the film, taken as a whole, is much more interesting than the sum of its parts.

It's well worth seeing, especially if you can find it in a reduced-price, second-run theater. (I paid $1.50 at our local second-run multiplex.) And if you don't have a local second-run theater it will be more-or-less OK on a decent television if you rent the DVD; it's not particularly and eye-candy extravaganza.

Spawn of Das Ubermaus!

In a previous installment we demonstrated the superiority of my homemade mouse trap because it captures clearly superior mice. Well, I caught another one last night.

As I was getting ready to head off to my secret location for releasing mice -- in a city park as far from other houses as feasible -- an idea hit me. What good is it to catch such high-quality mice in my garage if I can't find a way to use them to my advantage. That's when it occurred to me.



I had found this device in the Teleodaughter's room after she moved out. When you press the button on top a red ray shoots out the nose. I had immediately recognized it as a mind-control ray projector for mice. Perhaps I could use it on my ubermaus.



I applied the ray to the subject while thinking my instructions slowly and clearly. The mouse was to creep into homes people in the area and impersonate a Microsoft mouse. It should use the mouse-driver software installed on all modern computers to take control of the machine. It should then open the browser to this posting and wait for further instruction in the comments section.



So, my mind-controlled agent was ready for insertion which was performed at oh nine thirty this morning. All that remains now is to wait for him to report in from the field.

Are you there, Perry Rhodent?

9 0 9 0 6

One of my old, bald tires was also flat yesterday when I was leaving for work so I switched cars with the wife who made her shorter commute with the temporary, undersized comedy-tire spare while I drove her car to work. When I got home I swapped back, headed for the tire shop, got very slightly lost, and arrived just after they had closed at 6:00 pm.

Sitting in my car with the key-drop envelope I copied the odometer reading onto the blank -- 90906 miles -- and glanced at the sticker telling when I was due for my next oil change -- 90906 miles. What are the odds?* When Earl (the manager of Bull Tires) called this morning to say the car was ready I told him to change the oil, too. It seems I am supposed to change my oil. I can take a hint.

*about one in four thousand, more or less.

Forth of July Online Card and Newsletter.

Independence Day, 2009.

The 2008 Christmas cards never got out this year so I am doing a Forth of July 2009 newsletter to cover 2008 and the first half of 2009. I am pleased to be able to report that all family members are healthy and otherwise doing well. Here is a rundown of our current status:

Christopher graduated a year ago from the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, Florida, with a four-year degree in Graphics Design. He has returned to the Raleigh area where he works (and works and works) as a graphics designer for Capstrat – a communication company that specializes in advertising and corporate communications (fliers, brochures, etc.). Chris rents a room from his Army friend, Paul, and his wife, Jen, who have just had their first baby. Paul and Jen seem to appreciate Chris’s steadiness, his quiet lifestyle, and the rent that helps with the mortgage. Chris has a girlfriend named Reid who is finishing a PhD in Dye Chemistry at the NC State University College of Textiles.

Amber will be working for a few more weeks as a Medical Services Coordinator in the emergency room at the UNC Hospital. She will then move to St Petersburg, Florida, to attend the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine in Bradenton. She has been living with her parents for the last few months to save up money to finance the move. Amber’s boyfriend, Lee -- Lee the Younger, or Not-Quite-So-Big Lee, or Lee With Hair – is also moving to St Petersburg where his is currently looking for work. If you know of any west-coast Florida opportunities for a young man with a PhD in chemistry let us know. (Yes, both kids are dating PhD level chemists – go figure.) Her mother and I are elated that Amber has been accepted into medical school but will be sorry to see her go.

Irene still manages the Cheese case at the Harris Teeter Super Flagship store in Cary. The cheese biz is not altogether immune to the slow economy and the trips on the corporate jet to visit cheese manufacturers have not been in the picture during the last year. Hopefully, once the recession lets up a bit, Irene can get a bit more traction with her ideas to take Harris Teeter to new levels of cheesiness. In the meanwhile, Irene still enjoys her volunteer work as a Docent at the North Carolina Museum of Art, which will be closing many of their galleries for almost a year starting this summer while they move into a new (huge) facility. During the move Irene won’t be giving many tours but the classes on the collection will continue so she and the other docents can hit the ground running when the museum reopens in April 2010.

Lee is currently sitting at his computer, writing a mid-year family newsletter, and waiting for the phone to ring with job offers. He is switching to the first person -- now. He … that is, I had expected to ride out the tail of the recession working on a contract for the NC Department of Environment and Natural Resources, but a black hole developed in the North Carolina State budget and the DENR contract was last seen near its event horizon. It may yet emerge (my champions at DENR assure me it didn’t actually fall into the black hole) but for now I am available. My previous employer, Keane, could not afford to keep me on their payroll while they found my next assignment but they are hopeful they can recall me, either for the DENR gig should it ever win its way free of the governor’s office, or for any of several other proposals they have bid. In addition, I have several other prospects I am working and, even if Keane comes up empty, I don’t expect to be unemployed for long so I am trying to enjoy it while it lasts.

One item on the plus side of unemployment is that it gives me an opportunity to do things with Irene as long as they don’t cost much money. We have both been getting more into photography. After a somewhat rocky start with her Kodak P712 (during which she struggled with the controls and the balky auto-focus) she has discovered that she really likes the long stabilized telephoto lens and birds without scaring them away. We’ve made multiple trips to the botanical gardens (which is free) in Chapel Hill and several to the NC Zoo (for which we have a membership). I’m glad she is enjoying her camera but I wish she would stop taking better photos that I do.

Hoping this finds all well.

Lee (Irene, Christopher and Amber).

The cover photo on this card is a composite of a photo Irene recently took of a distant thunder storm, and of some fireworks photos that I took from the deck of the Disney Wonder cruise ship.

Random Photos of Stuff We’ve Done.

Alaska Cruise: For our 30th anniversary, Irene and I took our second cruise of the Inland Passage of Alaska. This time we took my father and the kids along.
We sailed from Seattle and while we were there we had nice visits with Mike and Sandra, friends from our FSU days who we hadn’t seen in 30 years, and also with “Dex Quire”, a fellow blogger with whom I have struck up an online friendship through mutual weblog commentary. (http://dexquire.blogspot.com)

On the cruise we went…


... shopping in Ketchikan, and ...


... kayaking in Prince Rupert, and ...




... whale watching in Juneau.

Beach Week: Was on Hilton Head Island again last year. Somehow we never quite got around to that big group family photo – people kept leaving and arriving and we reached the end of the week to realize that there had never been a time when we were all there at the same time. Maybe this year we’ll get that photo for the Christmas card.




Graduation: Chris graduated from Ringling just before we all left for the Alaska trip. Irene and I went down for the occasion and the morning of Graduation Day we went walking on the beach at the Ft. DeSoto State Park. Irene, who has lost the tan that used to protect her growing up in central Florida, got sunburned and spent the Alaska cruise smeared with cocoa butter. Now the kids and I will forever associate the scent of cocoa butter with glaciers, floating ice and the frozen north.

Washington DC: Dad came up in the fall for a Thanksgiving visit and, while he was here, we drove up to Washington to visit his friend George and to wander around the Smithsonian a bit. George and Lenore Cohen were gracious hosts and we had a wonderful time. The first day we were there we took dad with us to see some of the sights but the second day we left him to visit with George and Lenore which he seemed to enjoy. The weather was perfect – more or less sunny days with light snow in the evenings. Dad and George went to high school together (Woodrow Wilson High, class of 1944) and also went to George Washington Medical School (class of 1950).




George invited Dean Martin, another GW 1950 graduate, for dinner and a mini-reunion.



Miscellany: A few photos that speak for themselves.


Pirate Night on Disney Wonder Cruise Ship w/ Irene's Disney Friends.


Lifeboat Drill on Disney Wonder


Irene in Nassau


Wildlife Photography in our Back Yard


Polar Bear at North Carolina Zoo

Das Uber Maus

Consider this mouse.



It is active, ...



... athletic ...



... and elusive.

Clearly it is a superior mouse... a better mouse.

And I have trapped it.

So, by definition, ...



... I have built a better mouse trap.

Those of you who doubted my ability to catch the mice in my garage using a dodgy homemade trap cobbled together from hardware cloth, wire and half a Walmart minnow trap -- you know who you are -- are singing another song now*.

*Probably Michael Jackson's Billy Jean which is playing constantly on all media outlets just now and sticks in your head like superglue.

The most Beautiful Things on Earth...

... may be summer thunderstorms to your west southwest viewed just at sunset, from fifteen miles away.

Photo by the Teleospouse. My contribution was to slow down so she could get the shot and crowd the center line to give her as much clearance as possible of that tree on the right side.

Kung Fu and Cheech Wizard.

The other night at dinner I was talking with the Teleodaughter about Kung Fu actor, David Carradine, and the rumors surrounding his recent death. I mentioned another celebrity who was reputed to have met the same fate and the Teleodaughter admitted that she had no idea who cartoonist Vaughn Bodé was, nor did she know his character, Cheech Wizard (examples). This fascinates me since Bodé, at the time of his death in 1975, was immensely popular and he remains one of the three or four most influential comic artists of the last fifty years. Ask any artist to draw something in the style of the 1970s -- or ask a graffiti artist simply to draw anything -- and they will immediately channel Bodé although many of them might not know who he was. In death, Bodé achieved an odd sort of identity-free immortality. He dissolved into his decade and has become its graphic arts avatar. It's not altogether unlike the Buddhist concept of Nirvana. Bodé, who was interested in alternate spirituality, might have liked the idea, although it would not have entirely made up for finding himself so suddenly and embarrassingly dead.

David Carradine's signature TV show, Kung Fu, was ending its very successful four-year run at the time of Bodé's death. Carradine also made a contribution to the zeitgeist of the decade but, unlike Bodé, he stayed around to give an identity to the phenomenon. He had a presentable career since then -- he wasn't one of those actors who makes a career of signing photos taken forty years ago at media conventions -- but his early 1970s TV work defined him. His hardcore fans may prefer to remember his character, Frankenstein, from Death Race 2000 (also 1975) but for most people he was always "that guy who starred in Kung Fu in the '70s, only now he is doing ads for Yellowbook".

Star Trek Reboot -- Escape from the Swamps of Canon

It is probably a "spoiler" to tell you that the new Star Trek movie takes place in a different universe that runs parallel to the familiar Trek universe of the TV show and most of the other movies. But I don't care. The film does an adequate job of documenting the critical events that caused the time-lines to diverge but some people seem to miss it -- which irks me. So, if I can save one moviegoer from having to sit next to a trekker with a booklight clipped to his dogeared copy of the Star Trek Encyclopedia flipping pages and muttering to himself during the movie, this small spoiler seems worthwhile. The Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, etc. in the film aren't supposed to be the same Kirk, Spock etc. as the ones you have seen before. It's not a mistake if there are differences.

I've heard the alternate-universe plot described as a writers crutch. I guess it is... or, actually, more of a writer's prosthesis -- a marvelous device that lets a lame series with its legs crushed under tons of accumulated detail get up and dance a jig. The Star Trek franchise has been hoisted out of the Swamps of Canon and made fresh and new.

Not of course that the film is perfect. There is, for instance, a scene on an ice planet where our hero is pursued by a series of increasingly large critters and every time the monster at his heels is replaced by one bigger and scarier he screams like a girl and runs faster, his only plan apparently being to keep running until he is saved by the inevitable Deus ex Machina. I didn't like that part very much but it was short. And I wasn't satisfied with the makeup on the obligatory green Orion woman with whom Kirk makes out -- her lip color didn't suit me. But, except for those small flaws I liked the film a lot. I remember thinking during the end credits that I would have liked rent out my house for the summer and move into the theater where I would live on stale popcorn and Star Trek until it was time to move across the hall for Harry Potter.

Last Unicorn Architectural Salvage in 3D

I recently took my Stereo Photo Rig to a local architectural salvage yard. Here are a few of the photos. These "crosseye" 3D photos were taken on the grounds of an architectural salvage company near Chapel Hill, NC. For directions, hours, etc., see their website -- www.thelastunicorn.com/ .

To view these photo you need to cross your eyes slightly so you see three vague images and then concentrate on the image in the middle which will be in 3D. It takes some practice but most people with good vision in both eyes can learn.












More photos are in my Flickr.com photo set.

Tea Party Stereo Photographs

Here are some stereo photographs from yesterday's Tea Party rally on the grounds of the State Capitol in Raleigh, NC. To view these 3D images you cross your eyes slightly so you see three images side by side and then concentrate on the image in the middle. Most people who have good vision in both eyes can learn to do it.

Click on any of the images below to see it bigger or view the entire set in Flickr here.