Movie Hate: War of the Worlds, 2005

I broke my movie boycott to see this thing. L Ron would have wanted me to. Observations follow:

(1) Next time, if there is one, I am bringing earplugs or an iPod to the theater. I could not believe the volume of the pre-show screen adverts, loathsome in-theater radio station yammering and coming attractions. My ears were ringing before the film proper even began. Am I the last person who remembers when people could sit in a theater before the film started and just talk to each other, read a magazine and get an early start on some popcorn munching? Ye gods.

(2) To the fellow who sat behind me: I am tall (6'3"). I am wide. I am a visual obstruction. You should have chosen a better seat. Sorry, but there it is.

(3) Ah, the opening. Good Morgan Freeman voice over. I think he's James Earl Jones' heir apparent for Wise Black Voice now that Ossie Davis has left us. (PS - I would trade the lives of every Gen-X, nose-ringed clown in the theater that night for Ossie to have one more year. What a loss; gifted actor, remarkable man and class act.)

(4) Ah, the film... I was afraid of this. There's an old saying in journalism: Don't bury the lede. It means keep your focus on the point of the story, not the incidental or peripheral. This film sent its lede to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. One might think that the conquest of Earth by aliens (not actually Martians this time) would be the point of the movie, being a pretty important thing, after all. Nope. Here it's merely the setting for a familial reapproachment between an immature father and his children - both of whom are the kind of insufferable "movie kids" I would have doused with A-1 Steak Sauce and thrown to the advancing alien war machines as a peace offering.

(5) Cruise is pretty good, although stopping myself from yelling out Xenu or Katie Holmes jokes caused me actual, physical pain. Truly, I suffer for art.

(6) The aliens are not from Mars, as mentioned previously. Okay. No harm done. And kudos to Spielberg for his old skool use of tripod walking machines instead of the floating manta-rays of Pal's 1953 version - as wonderful as Pal's were.

If the changes had only stopped there. Alas, the 2005 story has the aliens delivering their pilots to machines buried deep in the earth "over a million years ago," as one character observes, rather than the ships arriving in meteor-like LCMs (Landing Craft, Martian).

This revision makes an absolute hash of the invaders' defeat from a microbial Achilles' Heel, since it's inconceivable that such an advanced race, having visited Earth before to bury their machines, would be caught unawares by the basics of Terran biology.

Pal's (and Wells') versions explained this by having the Martians view us from afar, but not actually experience our ecology until the invasion. Wells, in fact, was making a direct reference to the tropical diseases which struck European armies during their colonial and imperial conquests in Asia and Africa.

Spielberg's story has character dialog making pointed references to how well the aliens have "planned" this, yet once they arrive, all it takes is a few deep breaths of our air and a few swallows of water before they're all dropping dead.

Tripod driver Xerghon: Sir, do you smell that?

Tripod commander Gharzhek: Smell what? That's just Terran air.

Xerghon: I don't feel so good...

Gharzhek: Stop goldbricking and get this thing moving. We're due in TEE-neck, whatever that is.

(Xerghon coughs, falls over backwards and dies.)

Gharzhek: What the...?!

(Gharzhek vomits his innards across the control panel, then dies.)

(7) Along those lines, how did hundreds of house-sized war machines, buried a few hundred feet under the ground, go undetected by 20th Century human technology? The film takes place in New Jersey, which was (and is) part of the great post-WW2 buildup of America's east coast. Highways, commercial and residential surveying, tunnel excavations for sewers and utility lines... I doubt there's a single square mile of that area which hasn't been explored, mapped, thermal-imaged, sonar'd and whatnot.

(8) George Pal's version alternated scenes of government and military leaders making plans with the personal story of Dr Forrester. By keeping the story locked on Cruise's character and his brats, Spielberg loses the larger view to the detriment of the story. The aliens are handily conquering the word... and then they all just die.

Bottom Line: As befits a Spielberg film, the technical quality is outstanding. And there are a few scenes - such as the hellish, apocalyptic spectacle of a burning train roaring through a railroad crossing - that are simply marvelous.

Alas, there's too little of that and too much family drama. Near the end I wanted the aliens to disintegrate them all so the narrative could move on to a more interesting viewpoint.

A few other things:

- How did Cruise's son survive? Do the alien war machines have a Great Walls of Fire attack which can obliterate a battle line of armored vehicles but is too weak to take out one moody teen in a hoodie?

- The "All Tom's Children" material was bad enough, but why did the writers have to hit rock bottom by including the I must! / You can't! moment between Tom and his son?

Dad (yelling into son's face): You can't go! I won't let you!
Son (yelling into dad's face): I have to go!

Dad: I can't lose you again!
Son: I have to see! I have to fight!

Dad: No!
Son: Yes!

I mean, COME ON. Does it get more cliche than this?! When you have characters literally yelling out their motivations to the audience and each other, are you even telling a story anymore?

Finally, was there a scene cut wherein it's explained that the red vines were part of the aliens' (orig. Martians') ecosystem, which were transplanted here in order to reform the environment to their liking? Note to screenwriters: not everyone read Wells' book.

PC, In Brief

The central tenet of PC is that people are basically ticking bombs of racism, sexism, homophobia (add your favorite "ism" here), and this bestial inner nature can only be controlled through sanitizing every aspect of intellectual, cultural and aesthetic expression, so as to remove any triggers that might set them off.

Of course, the great unwashed cannot be expected to exercise internal control. Therefore, self-appointed, elect groups of Sensitive People must enforce external control and clean up everything that might negatively affect the consciousness of the masses.

A complementary PC belief is that the members of certain designated "Victim" groups - such as racial or religious minorities - have mental states so porcelain-fragile that great measures must be taken to insure their emotional comfort and the integrity of their self-esteem.

Thus, when one such Victim declares that something is "offensive," the complaint must be treated with the gravest sincerity and resolved with all haste. This need to avoid "offense" and "insensitivity" trumps any and all concerns about freedom of expression.

There's more to PC, of course, but this is the essence of it.

The Good War

First, read this post by the formidable Brian at Peeve Farm.

I've thought about this a bit myself. Here's my (somewhat edited) response to Brian:

I'm of the opinion that the modern Left loves to reverently invoke WW2 because its a safe way to claim they're not completely out to lunch when it comes to national defense and related issues. See, they can say, we were all for fighting Hitler!

It also doesn't hurt that the Nazis were/are the perfect foes for the Left, whose hive mind is notoriously emotion-ruled. Hitler and the gang were downright demonic - right out of Central Casting - and made to order.

The Nazis were also, let's not forget, the target of the "anti-fascist" united front preached by the CPSU and picked up by the American Left, echoes of which can be heard to this day in the Leftist habit of calling anyone to the right of them a "fascist." This is just plain weird, as the Bolsheviks were at least as fascistic as the NSDAP. Yet how many Leftists, past or present, would equate the Hammer & Sickle with the Swastika as a symbol of evil and oppression?

Of course, when Stalin and Hitler kissed and made up (with the corpse of Poland as a token of mutual friendship), most of the American and European Left turned on a dime and, well, so much for the united front.

I can't help wondering... if WW2 had never happened, and a Nazi-Bolshevik entente had gone on to swallow up most of Eurasia into totalitarian darkness, would the contemporary American Left still use "Nazi!" as their epithet of choice? Would "progressives" regard the Final Solution with the same almost-total silence and willful ignorance displayed whenever the subject of Communist mass-murder came up? Hmm. Topic for another day, I suppose.

There is also the issue of phony courage, something near and dear to many "progressives." Hating the Nazis and celebrating their destruction was the safest political stance once could take in the post-1945 era. In the past 200 years, no regime has ever been as comprehensively liquidated as that of the Third Reich. Even the most recent pre-Hitler European conqueror - Napoleon - escaped with his life and one of his Field Marshals founded a royal dynasty in Sweden!

The Swastikettes, on the other hand, were hung, shot, driven to suicide or chased to the ends of the Earth. GOOD, says I. But the point is that dancing on the grave of Nazism and idolizing the war that dug that grave was a pretty risk-free activity after WW2; no matter what you said about the Nazis, there was very little chance that Otto Skorzeny was going to show up at your door with a Luger.

On the other hand, being comprehensively opposed to tyranny - you know, like a true classical liberal - was another kettle of fish entirely. As we both know, a regime just as bad as Hitler's survived the war and its blood-soaked leaders mostly died in bed (unless killed by each other or by Stalin, the worst snake in the nest).

Add to this the decades-long, collective admiration and apologia by "progressives" for the Soviet State - for most of this period, 'Kremlin' was to 'Leftist' as 'Mafia' was to 'gambling' - and the right-thinking Leftist had a real dilemma.

Solution? More WW2 nostalgia, please. Big Red was an ally, the evil Nazis were the foe, and everything was ideologically comfortable.

Let's also not forget to notice the prevalence of the European theater over the Pacific in such nostalgia - even though we fought the Japanese for longer than the Germans. The German Nazis, being Caucasians (indeed, fancying themselves the Whitest of the White) pass the PC test whereas the Asian Japanese make for a somewhat less comfortable foe for the Sensitive.

There's also that messy Atom Bomb thing. And in terms of snappy uniforms, it's no contest.

A Peace of Their Mind

Just finished watching one of those current events chat shows wherein some German whined - as per usual - about how much more "advanced" Europeans are over the crazed cowboys here in the USA.

He said, at one point, that after WW2 Germany and Europe had "learned" the value of peace, diplomacy, etc. And this is why they stayed out of Iraq and Afghanistan, he claimed.

Oh really?

If a man who's spent several days repeatedly punching himself in the face finally decides - after two black eyes, a broken nose, half his teeth knocked out and serial concussions - to stop punching himself in the face, is this a moral epiphany or merely a belated survival response?

The post-WW2 Great European Age of Peace came about because the Europeans, after wrecking themselves in back-to-back wars, were too depleted and exhausted to have another go.

There is also the little fact that two extra-European powers jumped in and pretty much took over the entire European polity - USA from the West, USSR from the East. From 1945-1989, Europe's destiny was wholly in the hands of foreign masters in Moscow and Wash DC, respectively. During this period it didn't really matter WHAT the Europeans wanted.

Europe spent this period serving three uses:

1) Strategic buffer between the American and Soviet Empires (with Germany itself being the actual 50 yard line).

2) Junior member in economic and financial partnerships with whichever foreign master a particular European country had fallen under.

3) Social laboratory for the respective American and Soviet systems to rebuild in their respective images to see which side could create a more prosperous postwar order - no points for guessing who won that contest!

Needless to say, this extended period of servitude has mind-warped Europe something fierce, to the point where many of them are consumed with opposing America before all other goals - incl winning the war on Jihadism.

Some Europeans remind me of teenagers who want to take dangerous and stupid risks just because Daddy America says not to.

They also love the false bravado that comes from ostentatiously "standing up" to the USA, safe in the knowledge that we're not going to do anything more than roll our collective eyes regardless of what they say about our President or country.

So you'll understand if I am less than dazzled by their moral enlightenment.

Oh, one more thing about "peace":

Choosing nonviolence is only morally admirable if violence is a viable option to begin with. If the smallest, weakest kid on the playground solemnly declares, "I will not be a bully," it doesn't mean a goddamned thing.

Show me the big, strong kid who sincerely thinks it's wrong to push his classmates around - NOW we've got something meaningful; now we're talking about conscience and ethics.

The simple fact is that most of the nations who loudly and pompously proclaimed they wouldn't help the USA in knocking over Saddam or the Taliban were in no position to help anyway, even had they been spoiling for a fight.

When countries whose ability to project serious military force is pretty much ZERO tell us they won't fight with us - does that really mean anything, or is it just empty posturing?

Yeah, the Europeans "choose" not to fight - just like sheep "choose" not to attack wolves.

"Peace," my ass. On the other hand, why let them have all the fun?

Here's my contribution to "Peace:" I will not walk into the nearest biker bar and loudly announce Only assholes ride motorcycles!

Not because I'd be beaten into the ground, but... you know, for "Peace."

Bewarez

On the matter of piracy and computer games...

First, I'm not talking about "Abandonware" - old, off-the-market games that you couldn't buy even if you wanted to. As much as it pains me to say this, being a little naughty is just about the only way to get a chance to play some of the all-time classic titles. (Consider the case of the classic economics/strategy game M.U.L.E., which has been unavailable for 20 years. Even if you found and bought a copy, you'd need an Atari 800 or C64 to run it. And after 20 years, how many of those single-sided floppy disks have survived? How many COULD survive?)

I am talking about the mass piracy of current retail products. Let's assume that BananaSoft's hot new game, BananaQuest, arrives in stores for $50. If some h4xxor clown rips the disc image and FTPs/P2Ps it to his favorite warez site, where 500 of his closest friends grab a copy, that's a loss of twenty five thousand dollars. Now, 733t d00dz reading this will immediately object because I am making the assumption that everyone who grabbed a pirate copy would've been willing to buy the game at retail, rather than just giving it a pass altogether. Therefore, they'd respond, we can't know how much money BananaSoft has actually lost.

To quote the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, "Bullshit." While we cannot know for certain exactly how many pirates would become purchasers if they had to bite the bullet and lay down $50, I feel safe in saying most would. Computer gamers, after all, want to play computer games, and a signature title like BananaQuest would be irresistible to the solid majority of them. This argument - "I pirated the game so I wouldn't have to buy it, but if I had to buy it I might not have wanted it after all, but I did want it so I pirated it" - is just nonsense. It's a facile rationalization to smokescreen theft.

Theft? Yes, theft. The folks at BananaSoft put time and effort into BananaQuest and recover their expenses by charging people for the finished work. If you take their work without compensating them, you have stolen their time and effort. It's that simple; a child could understand it.

There is also the detrimental effect on the larger World of Gaming... I was chatting a few months back with several people on a Direct Connect hub who professed to be ardent Sega Dreamcast fans. At one point, I remarked that while the console's death was shame, at least the firesale prices at the end let us all stock up on titles, extra controllers, etc.

They were shocked to hear that I actually bought games for any price. Their entire DreamCast libraries were warezed - every last game. They had dozens of pirated games each, which they offered to share with me. Now, I know Sega made it laughably easy to pirate DC discs, but even so... When I commented that massive piracy might have caused - or at least hastened - the demise of the DC, they became furiously defensive and asked me if I was "some kind of cop."

The next day, the DreamCast pirates got the mods of that Direct Connect hub to banish me. According to the email I got, I am a "fascist" for opposing no-limit, no-questions-asked warezing. Sieg Heil, baby.

The following is a list of defenses of piracy raised in that discussion, and my responses to them.

Piracy is not like theft, because you're not stealing a physical object. It's just computer code

Yes. The special, non-corporeal nature of software makes duplication and distribution very easy, since there are no physical materials involved (as with shoplifting books) and there is no quality or functionality loss over successive generations of copies (as with copying video tapes). The warez folks seem to believe that, since piracy is so damned easy and carries so little individual risk, it occupies a different ethical category than walking out of a music store with the latest Moby CD in your pocket. This is a self-serving lie. It's the Might Makes Right mentality; in this case, the idea that people who are technically clever enough to pirate games are entitled, as some kind of class privilege, to do it.

Okay, let's get this clear: you do not "own" the intellectual property in your computer games, songs, books, videos, DVDs and whatnot unless you hold the copyright. What you have is a limited user license which, under copyright law, allows you to do certain things and not do other things. Generally speaking, personal use and archival copies are okay but mass copying and distribution are not.

Many software stores don't allow returns - I have to pirate stuff so I can "preview" it and not get burned.

The harsh No Return or Same Title Only return policies of most stores are a direct response to rampant piracy. Merchants were forced to take measures to protect themselves against people buying a game only to pirate it and then returning it for a refund. Some stores still accept returns because they prefer to keep people happy and will accept the 'hit' from the inevitable piracy. That's up to the store.

This is where the nature of digital media comes into play. If I buy a book on Friday and return on Monday for a refund, the bookseller knows there is very little chance that I spent those three days making dozens of copies of it - which in turn could be made to make dozens, if not hundreds, more copies, all of them perfect reproductions of the source.

With analog audio/video sources, it's a little easier - I don't need a printing press and truckloads of paper as with duplicating books - but still takes some doing. I'd still need certain equipment and know-how to mass-replicate them without degradation. Even with that, there is a noticeable reduction in quality between generations of audio and video tape - there is also the time element. Unless you have access to high-speed duplication equipment, copies take a lot of time. The gradual loss of quality and the "hassle" of it all serve as brakes upon mass duplication.

With digital media, it's another story. Huge numbers of copies can be made and distributed very quickly and the fidelity to the source material is PERFECT. Little kids can do it. And that's why merchants have lowered the boom.

So what about customers that get stuck with bad games? Well, when a game is "bad" in the sense of being incomplete and barely functional as a software product (like the infamous Ultima 9), then Consumer Rights do come into play. A similar case can be made for games which are advertised and sold on features they don't actually contain (like the infamous Outpost).

If a game is simply "bad" in the sense of boring, cliched and terrible gameplay, then...well, that's life. Be a more careful shopper. Besides, the release of any major game is accompanied by a withering barrage of publicity and critical scrutiny from the paper and online gaming press. Following the release of Morrowind, for example, I counted three dozen detailed reviews on various gaming sites. Within a month of its release, there was more Morrowind information and evaluation than you could possibly read.

Another thing to consider: the better a game is, the more people want to play it and the more inclined they will be to pirate it (assuming the "piracy is no big deal" attitude prevails). One of the most heavily pirated games in recent memory has been WarCraft 3, which is a quality title that's certainly worth the $60 Blizzard charges, put out by a company that is as "pro-gamer" as you can get.

Blizzard is a "good" company making a "good" game. Has this made a difference? No. Warcraft 3 was boosted right and left, which totally gives the lie to the notion that warezing is some kind of consumerist guerrilla action.

Nor is this a new problem; piracy is as old as computer gaming. CD-Burners have been around and affordable for several years now. Before that, pirates relied on the few who had burners to rip the discs and compress/transfer them to a series of floppy disk images, and the titles were moved around in that form. Prior to the availability of broadband Internet access, private BBSs and face-to-face "swap meets" were used to move the goods.

Games on floppy disks were widely pirated - indeed, one of the most notorious pirate operations on the East Coast of the USA - Pirate's Cove, on Long Island - specialized in floppy disk games for the Atari 400/800 and Apple 2/2+. Even then, piracy was not a matter of "customer revenge" against bad games or retailers. The most pirated games were the best ones - M.U.L.E., Starflight, Archon, the Ultimas, etc.

Piracy is not that widespread / that big of a deal.

It's rather hard to quantify something which is illegal and covert by nature. Still, given the prevalence of CD-burners, broadband access for moving large files and ISOs, and easy-as-pie P2P setups like Direct Connect, and given people's proven willingness to get things without paying for them - especially if there is virtually no risk of getting caught - I think it's safe to say that song, movie, TV show and game piracy is widespread.

An important thing to consider is how EASY pirating has become. The whole scene used to be quite "clubby," but with the advent of broadband, burners, etc. it has exploded. Now anyone with a cable modem or DSL line who knows how to set up Direct Connect can run amok in Pirateland like a kid in a candy store. The essential nature of the activity has not changed. What has changed is the ease and scope of it.

Napster, the World HQ of music theft, was a good example. Napster didn't become popular because a few audiophiles were trading handfuls of obscure songs within their little hobby circles. The appeal of Napster was that multitudes of people were "sharing" mountains of MP3s - most certainly including current, commercially-available music.

As for the cost of game piracy, let's do some math. Suppose I run a peer to peer service - like a Direct Connect hub - and I "share" Warcraft 3 with my fellow gamers. Word gets out and 1 person a day downloads it over a three month period until I need the drive space and remove the files. (These are very conservative figures for a hot new game, by the way.)

Blizzard is asking $60 for Warcraft 3. $60 x 31 downloads/month x 3 months = $5580. Five and a half grand is not a trivial amount.

Games are too expensive.

If Blizzard wants to charge $100 for Diablo 3, it's up to them. If I don't like it, I don't have to buy it. If I say, "Well, they need me, Champion of Fair Pricing, to teach them a lesson!" and go around pirating it, I am a nothing but a thief. I've been a computer gamer since the Apple ][+, and I can tell you that game prices have always hovered around the $30-50 range, and often more. $50 for a game that can give you dozens of hours of entertainment is not highway robbery. Am I supposed to feel sympathy for those poor warez kids, who just happen to have powerful computers, high speed CDR drives, broadband Internet access, various video game consoles and the leisure time to consume (and pirate) endless amounts of anime, music, video games, Simpsons episodes and whatnot? We're not talking about people stealing food and medicine. Enough said.

Movie Hate: The Incredible Hulk

... or, for me, the Inflatable Bulk.

A quick list.

I hated the actor who played Bruce Banner.

The Bulk looked like he'd wandered in from a video game.

The Gamma Dogs looked even faker than that and were a stupid idea.

Too long. Way too long.

The final fight between the Bulk and his transforming father-monster was shot so darkly that you could barely make out what was going on. People in the theater were looking at each other and whispering, "Is something wrong with the film?" (Yes, I know it was a night scene... still, what a directorial cock-up. Pure error.)

Where did this scheming bio-tech corporate yuppie come from - you know, the one wanting to "patent" the Bulk's genetics? Were the writers trying to "soften" General Ross away from being the Bulk's fanatical foe through showing someone even worse? It didn't work. It sucked

What kind of asstacular stupidity was that "final visit" scene between the Banners? Ok, the film sets up that Dad wants one final visit with his son. Fine. But would the dozens of soldiers and cops just stand there while the elder Banner rants about power and destruction and overthrowing the government? Would they just let him scream abuse at his son, when Bruce's rage is the very thing they're trying to prevent?

Even in a normal prison with a normal inmate, that kind of thing would result in large corrections officers shouting "VISIT'S OVER!" and hustling you out of the room. This is beyond bad writing. This is what critic Roger Ebert called an Idiot Plot (wherein people have to be idiots to advance the plot).

Why I Am Not Religious

I find all religious systems objectionable. There's no convincing proof and the closer you examine their historical roots, the more obvious their human concoction becomes.

I suspect we humans made all the religions up because life has three unavoidable aspects that just, well... suck. These three things are the S.U.M. of human unhappiness:

Suffering

Into a every life a little shit must fall. Maybe you'll get a little, maybe a lot. Some people drown in it. Whatever the case, it will happen. You will suffer.

Uncertainty

You don't know what's going to hit you next. You never will, and there's not a thing you can do about it. Life is full of surprises, they say, and most surprises are bad.

Mortality

Even if you do manage a relatively pain-free life, with a minimum of bad surprises, in the end you get the same parting gift as the rest of us: You get to die. In fact, there's a high likelihood that your death will be preceded by years of physical and mental decay.

Now, keep the S.U.M. in mind and check out the world's religions, past and present. Notice how they seem tailor-made to counter the despair of the three things listed above? This is no accident.

Suffering? Sure, you'll suffer - but it's okay. There's a reason. And Something knows the reason and keeps a handle on it.

Uncertainty? Yes, there is uncertainty - but it's okay, because Something knows what's going on, and what is to come.

Mortality? Well, you are mortal - but it's okay, because Something will not let you just cease to be. Oh no, there's more to come...

We are unhappy and we want to be happy. So we invent ways to make ourselves happy and soothe our troubled minds. That's it, folks. From a caveman invoking the spirit of the saber-toothed tiger for a good hunt, to the most intellectually sophisticated modern theologian taking existential comfort from an abstracted Creator, that's all religion is: people telling themselves, "It's not as bad as it seems."