Friday Frivolity: Spielberg’s Lincoln

Okay, less frivolous than usual, but I want to talk about it, so there.  When I heard there was going to be a movie about Lincoln by Spielberg, I got hopeful.  Spielberg was the kind of guy who could move movie mountains, who could get a studio to waste a ton of money on a likely financial loser in the name of art, and give us a high quality historic epic...

...assuming he didn’t miss the point.  Which is a real problem with him.  The history geek in me absolutely loves the opening scene in Saving Private Ryan for its startlingly realistic depiction of D-Day, warts and all.

And part of me hated the movie’s “Vietnamization” of the war.  I once heard Spielberg say that he believed that all great war movies are anti-war movies.  Well, of course every person should be reluctant to fight a war; the default position, the presumption for every civilized person should be to prefer peace to war unless a moral justification for the war is presented.  And if that is all he means—that a great war movie should make us hesitant to go to war—that is fine.

Monday Frivolity: It’s T Time

So we didn’t run a Friday Frivolity, because with the Batman Massacre, that just didn’t seem right, especially given that most of my choices were Batman related.  I don’t think that the whole world has to be put on hold when this kind of tragedy happens, but there is such a thing as decorum.  For instance, I thought it was in really poor taste that when just before watching The Dark Knight Rises, I saw a trailer for the movie Gangster Squad, about an anti-gang squad in old timey Los Angeles, where in one scene some guys with Tommy guns go into a movie theater and machine gun into the crowd.  This has led to some speculation that the movie could be changed.  I don’t think you should change the movie itself, but putting the preview on seems to have been a really poor choice, especially leading in to that movie, akin to the infamous Spider-Man World Trade Center preview.

Of course cutting out the entire scene from the movie itself made sense in Spider-Man because the collapse of the towers would have dated the movie instantly, as taking place sometime in the past when the movie makers want you to imagine it took place in the present or perhaps the near-future.  But if someone makes a movie that takes place in pre-9-11 New York city, I don’ t think they should shy away from showing us the towers.  We shouldn’t pretend like it never happened.

Anyway, so no Friday Frivolity, but we get Monday Frivolity, which is like Friday Frivolity, only without the alliteration and in today’s edition, you are going to learn why it pays to follow my Twitter account.  Sometimes you get random fun, like me pointing out that my wife made me 4 pancakes—3 regular ones and one that is heart-shaped.  And then there are people just goofing around.  Like people like to come up with “humor challenges” for lack of a better word, so someone came up with the idea of trying to come up with humorous examples of what happens when you take one letter out of a movie title.  So you get this from Bob Owens: “Fat and Furious: Michael Moore gets his dinner bill.#removeoneletterfilms”

Well, I racked my brain, and finally came up with one I thought was funny:

"T: The Extra Terrestrial" Mr. T plays an alien who will pity the fool who screws with Elliot #RemoveOneLetterFilms

I never know how funny my own jokes are, but apparently some people liked it, including one enterprising person going by the nickname @Darth who wrote that “This needs a poster” and then went on to make this very excellent mock up:

My Review of The Dark Knight Rises: The Baneful Threat of Occupy

So last night I went to see The Dark Knight Rises.  I’ll keep things spoiler-free above the fold.

First, did I like it?  Yes.  Look with a lot of these things, you have to manage expectations.  A thing can be so big in your mind that nothing that follows can be appreciated.  So, for instance, I loved the hell out of The Dark Knight and if you are not going to be happy unless Rises tops that, you are going to have a problem.  But if you can say, “it’s not as good as The Dark Knight, but I will appreciate it for what it is,” then you will walk away happy.

So is Rises better than The Dark Knight?  No.  To me this “Nolan Batman” trilogy has a trajectory similar to the original Star Wars trilogy: the first one was great, and benefitted from being the “first kiss,” the second was the high point of the series and the third wasn’t as good, but it was a fitting conclusion.

And I will say that any person who thinks that Bane is a knock on Mitt Romney, is delusional.  No, Bane is a dark prediction of the danger posed by the left in America.

And we all know Obama is the Joker.

And that is all I can say before I say SPOILER ALERT.

Friday Frivolity—The "To Kill a Finch" Edition!

Before I started guest blogging at Patterico’s Pontifications, Patrick started a tradition of running a “Sockpuppet” post every Friday.  In that thread everyone was given permission to use multiple false nicknames impersonating other people in the thread in order to make jokes.  Like with what is in the news, you can expect someone to pretend to be Alec Baldwin, and what do you know?  Here it is.  So when I started there I continued the tradition and added something to it: a Friday Frivolity.  I found some light item and posted about it in the same sockpuppet thread.fou

Well, now that I have came back here, a couple people asked me whether I would run a sockpuppet thread and my answer was that there wasn’t enough of a commenter community here, yet.  That might change.  I have only just begun to allow comments, after all.  And really, if you want to goof around and do an obvious sockpuppet in a thread, including this one, I ain’t going to object, as long as it is obvious in some way.

But I can certainly do frivolity and for this week we have one of Cracked’s excellent lists, this time of movie lawyers who were bad at their jobs (language warning at the link, as is the case with all links to their site).  I am embarrassed to say that I have not seen enough of these movies to really appreciate much of the commentary.  In fact, I am particularly embarrassed to say that I have never seen To Kill a Mockingbird, because it is universally considered a classic.  But I have listened to a book on tape version one time when travelling back and forth from law school and my parents’ home in Texas, and presuming the author of this list is accurately describing the movie, I think this criticism is unfair:

If Peck was such a brilliant lawyer, why didn't he petition for a change of venue? Even Matthew McConaughey's character thought to request a change of venue, and he's Matthew McConaughey.

A change of venue is a legal concept that was basically developed for this very purpose. If it is believed that a fair trial cannot be obtained in the proper jurisdiction, the proceedings can be moved elsewhere "in the interest of justice." There's no way in hell Tom would get a fair trial in Whiteyville, so Peck could just petition to move things elsewhere. One could argue that since the judge has the final say on whether to grant a change of venue, he would just deny the motion for no reason other than being a racist prick, making the gesture pointless. However, Judge Taylor is shown to sympathize with Tom Robinson and holds Peck in high regard (he's actually the one who appoints him as Tom's legal counsel), so there's no reason to believe he wouldn't grant the motion.

Well, of course, the purpose of a change in venue would be to move the trial to a place where your were more likely to have an unbiased jury.  This is takes place just before World War II (at least the book does), and we are talking about Alabama, okay?  They were not talking about changing venue to Massachusetts, they were talking about finding a place in Alabama prior to the entire Civil Rights Movement, where a black man could get a fair trial when he was accused of raping a white woman.