Lesson learned

If you want to hear from a lot of people on Facebook, you needn’t bother with cute pictures of your kids, links to your favorite web sites, funny videos or fuzzy kitties. Just say something mean about a candidate.

A remark Mitt Romney made during a recent speech set me off, so this is what I posted:

“Hey Mitt Romney, here's a citizenship test for you: does being born in Michigan automatically make you a U.S. citizen even if one of your parents was Satan and the other was a jackal? I don't want to see your birth certificate, Mitt. I want you to shave your big, stupid, rubbery head on live TV to prove that you don't have a triple-six birthmark.

“Congratulations, jackass. You just made me decide to vote in November. I know the electoral college keeps you safe from the likes of me. But now I'm going to vote against state and local Republicans as well, something I might not have done if not for your birther crap. Keep up the good work.”

So as I expect you’ve gathered from that, the “birther” stupidity really pisses me off. Romney just made it worse by helping de-marginalize it.

Mass media nexus: this rant drew more feedback than anything else I’ve ever put on Facebook.

More from Ma Bell

Speaking of AT&T, here’s the potential fruit of its latest dissatisfaction with the amount of money it makes:

When I posted a link to Freepress’s petition to the FCC on Facebook, the whole mess brought me mindful of those ancient days of yore when the Justice Department actually tried to do anything about monopolies. Seriously, didn’t this noise get broken up back in the 1970s? And now here it is again. This thing is like a T-1000. There’s no point to busting it into a thousand pieces, because it’ll just put itself back together and come after us again.

Review – The Pentagon Papers

This made-for-cable version of Daniel Ellsberg’s biography indulges in just about every possible Vietnam-related cliché. Ellsberg (James Spader) starts as a pro-Domino-Theory enfant terrible working for the Rand Corporation. But personal experience with the horrors of war and lies spun by the Departments of Defense and State thrust him into the hippie camp, motivating him to leak the notorious Pentagon Papers. Once the papers hit newsrooms and the fecal matter hits the air circulation device, the story gets interesting. Sadly, that’s the last half hour of an otherwise dull repetition of A Bright Shining Lie, Path to War and every other disillusioned-with-Vietnam movie ever made. Mildly amusing

Review – Outbreak: Anatomy of a Plague

Though this is the usual pseudo-apocalyptic gloom and doom about humanity’s continuing vulnerability to killer plagues, this one has a creative twist. It’s two stories in one, a series of re-enactments of a 1891 smallpox outbreak that devastated Montreal combined with speculative drama about the possible effects of a similar epidemic in the 21st century. Though the show is a little light on the hard epidemiology and a little heavy on the germs-are-scary stuff, overall it’s a good mix of medicine and entertainment. Mildly amusing

Review – Ghost Bird

In 2005 naturalists announced the rediscovery of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, thought to have been extinct for decades. The news caused a boom for the economically-depressed corner of Arkansas where the sighting supposedly took place. Sadly, the sightings went unconfirmed, and eventually the furor died down. This documentary explores the various aspects of the controversy, from bird-watching tourism to scientific integrity to competition for government funding. The movie could have been shorter and might have featured fewer false endings, but overall it was good stuff. Mildly amusing

Review – Pinochet’s Last Stand

This is a made-for-cable dramatic retelling of the events surrounding Augusto Pinochet’s arrest and detention in England in 1998. Derek Jacobi does a solid job as the ailing mass murderer. If only the story had a happier ending. Mildly amusing

It’s a beautiful day in the fiberhood

This post commemorates our neighborhood’s achievement of the minimum number of pre-registrations for Google Fiber. So now it’s official. When the company starts installation, we’ll get hooked up.

Oddly, it isn’t even the prospect of an internet connection 100 times faster and more reliable than our current arrangement. It’s that long-cherished dream that someday, if I was pure at heart and said my prayers by night, I’d finally get the opportunity to fire AT&T.

Because I don’t just hate AT&T. I hatey hatey hatey hate AT&T. Hate it so much that flames out the side of my face, burning ...

Well, you get the picture.

Review – The Big Uneasy

Harry Shearer serves up a documentary about the mistakes that helped turn Katrina into such a colossal mess. In its better moments it’s a fairly interesting story of government incompetence and indifference to the lives of poor people. However, it frequently strays into less fascinating subjects, such as New Orleans residents carping about how they don’t get any respect. Mildly amusing

Review – Catching Hell

On more than one occasion I’ve found myself wondering exactly why people in general and sports fans in particular have such a powerful need to fix blame on one particular person. I admit I’ve been known to play the scapegoat game myself, but not to the extent that Red Sox fans blame Bill Buckner for the 1986 World Series loss and Cubs fans heap hate on Steve Bartman for messing up a catch in the 2003 NLCS. This ESPN production covers both incidents – though the emphasis is on 2003 – pointing out that in both cases multiple problems led to the unfortunate losses. And in both cases the losing team had a whole other game to stage a comeback. The documentary goes on long enough that eventually it stops making fresh points, but it still raises some good questions about baseball fans and disappointment. Mildly amusing

Review – Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

Oddly enough, I liked this one a little better than the first one. I still think Sherlock Holmes, Robert Downey Jr. and martial-arts-intensive action form a Venn diagram of three circles that don’t touch. But just because they don’t work together doesn’t mean they don’t have their moments separately. In this go-around Holmes squares off more directly against arch foe Professor Moriarty, trying to foil a plot to corner the armaments market and start a war in Europe to drive up demand. Mildly amusing

Review – Small Town Gay Bar

For the most part this is a pleasant little documentary about a couple of small bars in rural Mississippi that cater to gay, lesbian and ally crowds. Though it isn’t earth-shaking stuff, it’s at least nice to have a reminder that not everyone in the isolated corners of the country conforms to redneck stereotypes. Sadly, right in the middle of the movie the filmmakers drop in a mess of footage of Fred Phelps. So even in a documentary that has nothing to do with the Westboro vermin, we still have to look at them. That alone knocked the picture’s rating down a level. See if desperate

Review – The World Without US

Even after sitting through the whole thing, I'm still not quite sure what to make of this movie. The premise is simple enough: what would happen if the United States withdrew its troops from its bases in other countries and stopped committing forces to solving problems around the world? Bad stuff, apparently. But it was hard to get a handle on exactly what agenda the picture was advancing. The Video-Toaster-circa-1994 aesthetics suggested neo-con Christian apocalyptic screed, but that turned out not to be the case. The analysis of our inaction in the Balkans suggested we should be more interventionist, but then the part about Iraq implied that we spend a ton of money to provide economic advantages for European and Chinese companies. The parts about South Korea and Taiwan were even stranger, advocating our continued presence and support of strong economies capable of their own defense. As if we wouldn’t be capable of massive retaliation against Chinese aggression even without a permanent U.S. presence in the region. I’m not saying ambiguity is a bad thing. I’m just saying it was a surprise coming from a production that looks like this. Mildly amusing

Review – Jackass 3D

After the second one, I almost took a pass on this outing. I’m actually kinda glad I didn’t. Some of the stuff in this one was actually, genuinely funny. Of course it helped to keep a finger near the fast forward button for anything that looked like it was going to make anyone puke. But the parts we didn’t buzz were entertaining, occasionally bordering on clever. And for the record, no I didn’t watch it in 3D. Mildly amusing

Review – Inkubus

A demon (Robert Englund) worms his way into a police station to play deadly tricks on the cops and other occupants. Gore and boredom ensue. See if desperate

Review – The Last Remake of Beau Geste

Marty Feldman stars in and directs this send-up of the ultimate French Foreign Legion storyline. The result lies somewhere between Mel Brooks and the English sense of humor best known to American audiences in the form of Monty Python. Though it has a few clever moments, it has just as many “yeah, that didn’t work like you thought it would” gags. On the other hand, I thought this was hysterical when I was a kid, so maybe I’m just not the target audience anymore. Mildly amusing

Review – Asylum (1972)

Peter Cushing? Patrick Magee? Herbert Lom? An insane asylum? Must be another dreary British horror anthology piece. This one sports a number of familiar faces, including Charlotte Rampling and Brit Ekland as her homicidal imaginary friend. Though some segments are weaker than others (an unfaithful, murdering husband pursued by his wife’s brown-paper-wrapped body parts?), overall this was reasonably entertaining. Mildly amusing

Review – A Haunting in Georgia

This ghost story takes the form of one of those supernatural-themed shows from the high band cable channels. Trouble is, they re-create the presentation format a little too closely, frequently re-using footage and making the same points over and over. I wavered between seeing this as a clever, low-budget riff on the ghost show and an inept, low-budget attempt to tell a weak ghost story. By the time they started stirring in a bunch of ambiguous theology toward the end, I started leaning toward the latter. Mildly amusing.

Review – Mothra

The great peril of this movie is getting the “Mothra” song stuck in your head. Beyond that, this is strange even by giant Japanese monster standards. The beast begins life as a big, ugly caterpillar. While I concede that having your city destroyed by a caterpillar would kinda suck, somehow it just doesn’t stack up against radioactive dinosaurs. Even when it transforms into a giant moth, it still isn’t as scary as ... well, something that isn’t a moth. Still, the picture spawned one of the key figures in the giant Japanese monster pantheon. Mildly amusing

Review – Flight of the Intruder

According to the trivia on IMDb, director John Milius calls this one of his worst movie-making experiences. I’m assuming it must have been trouble on location or something, because the final product is the same kind of two-fisted macho stuff he’s famous for. During the Vietnam War, an A6 pilot (Tom Berenger substitute Brad Johnson) and his bombardier (Willem DaFoe) decide they’ve had enough of attacking meaningless targets, so they hatch a plot to hit a missile cluster hidden in Hanoi, much to the chagrin of their commanding officer (Danny Glover). The third act gets mired down in uninteresting search-and-rescue drama, but the rest of the picture is a reasonably good war movie. Mildly amusing

Review – The Undying

Let me begin by admitting that I watched this mostly to see how Robin Weigert would do in a starring role. Otherwise I would most likely have skipped anything resembling a romantic ghost movie. The acting was a cut above the dreadfulness I was expecting based on the reviews on Netflix (and just for the record, other critics: if you thought the acting was bad in this, you haven’t seen many low budget horror movies). But the story proved to be as dull as I’d feared. A doctor living in a haunted house supplies her pet ghost with a recently-dead body to inhabit. The tale doesn’t begin to take a dark turn until nearly halfway through, and just about everything before and after is completely predictable. Mildly amusing

Review – Dragonslayer

Before today I don’t think I’d watched this movie from beginning to end since my days at sci fi cons back in the early 80s. Ah, memories. Apparently it isn’t such a great memory for star Peter MacNicol, as one of the IMDb notes indicates that he leaves this one off his résumé. Can’t say as I blame him, what with the Blue Lagoon hairdo and all. Otherwise, however, this isn’t bad for a bit of sword and sorcery. Sure, I found myself rooting for the dragon, but that’s just me. The picture is also of some minor historical importance, as it employed some innovative animation techniques and represented what at the time was a rare departure from kiddie fare by Disney (working here in cooperation with Paramount). Mildly amusing

Review – The Devil’s Mistress

Originally released as The Devil’s Whore, which I guess was too scandalous a title for the American market. This miniseries recounts some of the key political struggles of the English Civil War from the perspective of Angelica Fanshawe, a fictional, free-spirited and ultimately fallen member of the aristocracy. I was drawn in primarily by the opportunity to see Peter Capaldi play Charles I and Dominic West as Oliver Cromwell. Though it gets a little soapy in parts, overall it’s a good way to learn a bit about this important period in history. Mildly amusing