NOW THAT’S A RACE CARD

Yr atavistic headline of the day:



Which suddenly gives the claims that the anti-Obama sentiment is fueled by racism a bit more gravitas than before.

Or maybe not. But while the majority of the racism accusations up to now could plausibly be spun and explained away (barely) as a case of reading too much into this statement or that sign, it’s kind of hard to parse the nuances of a bunch of angry white people screaming “nigger” at a black dude – especially when the President is also a black dude.

“Um, they weren’t chanting ‘nigger’, they were chanting ‘bigger’, as in bigger govt, which we don’t want. Yeah, that's it.”

So far, I haven’t heard anyone from the Tea Party step up to explain it (though I have ten American dollars that by Monday lunchtime, at least two conservative talk show hosts – one of them likely Rush Limbaugh – will deploy the old “How come gangsta rappers get to call each other ‘nigger’ all the time but white people don’t get to say it? That’s RACIST!” routine). I look forward to their excuse.

Either way, it’s worth remembering that these are people the GOP thinks it has to cozy up to in order to take back Congress and the White House. It’ll be interesting to see if this convinces them to backpedal and take their chances without them.

Major uncool,

This is dF

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PRODUCTION NOTE: Apologies in advance to anyone who might be offended by the use of the word "nigger" in full even for journalistic purposes. Believe me, I understand. I grew up in the South and consider it one of the most vile words in the English language. But I don't believe in banning words just for vileness, and when it comes to people using racist epithets, I think their words need to be reported in full. Racists should be exposed for the useless, atavistic meatheads they are. I won't help hide that by cleaning up their language for them.

YOU DON’T SATISFY ME ENOUGH TODAY

Good morning Internet.

It’s Monday. That doesn’t mean you have to settle for less. The Carrie Nations don’t.

"Smash the communism" (Watch on YouTube)

PRODUCTION NOTE: For those who don’t know, the Carrie Nations are the fictional band from Russ Meyer’s Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls. So that’s not really them playing or singing.

Not that it matters. I don’t care if Cynthia Myers is playing that bass or not – it’s still a tasty bass line.

CLARIFICATION: Technically, at this stage in the film, the band is known as The Kelly Affair, before they get discovered by John LaZar who changes their name. But it says “Carrie Nations” in the video title, so I didn’t want to confuse you.

Get me behind it,

This is dF

ARGUMENT THEN WAR, HOLLYWOOD STYLE

Movies, opinion, bloggery, etc.

The Hurt Locker

[Which only just opened in Hong Kong ten days ago.]

The first thing I should say is that this movie was on my radar before all the Oscar hoopla because of Kathryn Bigelow, whose work I generally tend to like (and let’s admit it, Near Dark was possibly the greatest vampire film of the 1980s).

And the second thing I should say is that I generally don’t like war movies. The main reason I gave this one a chance – apart from Bigelow’s credentials – was that I got a little tired of reading columns criticizing Bigelow for not doing a Michael Moore when she picked up her Oscar, which somehow proved their theory that The Hurt Locker is a thinly disguised pro-war Army recruitment film – a theory the characters at Fox News are all too happy to embrace because the Oscar results prove that Hollywood is run by clueless America-hating liberals who wrongly assume America only wants to see anti-war films.

That’s bloggable, I thought.

So I went to see it. And walked away very impressed for a number of reasons.

First the politics – there really aren’t any, other than what the viewer projects onto it. That’s fine by me. And given that we live in a time when people are increasingly insistent that whatever the argument, you must pick a side (and it better be the right side), leaving the politics out of a film set in the Iraq war was arguably the most radical thing Bigelow could have done.

It’s also a valid approach to storytelling when the story is about the experience of the soldiers who had to fight regardless of whether you think the war is justified or not.

As for the experience, a lot of Iraq war vets have complained about the inaccuracies and things that no soldiers would ever do or be allowed to do. This is true, and fair comment, and we could do a whole separate post on whether this is a disservice to the troops that have been there and those that remain. Personally, I don’t think it is – in fact, I rather liked the idea that Bigelow took the maverick cowboy persona that’s practically a staple in American action films (war films included) and put it in an environment where such behavior isn’t appreciated.

In any case, accuracy isn’t a major issue for me for a couple of reasons:

(1) Hollywood is not in the reality business. It never has been. Astrophysicists have been complaining about Star Wars for over 30 years, but a scientifically accurate Star Wars would be a lot less fun. That’s why Hollywood has almost always put dramatic/artistic license ahead of 100% accuracy.

(2) This has always been especially true when it comes to movies about the military. My 3.5-year stint in the US Army taught me this. So I’ve learned not to worry about it.

One thing I think THL did get right was the characterizations. One way I judge a military movie is by how much the characters remind me of people I served with. In that respect, THL nails it, Jeremy Renner in particular.

The film also does a good job of taking the basic elements that make the Iraq war distinct from America’s other wars – the occupation, the IEDs, the insurgency and the subsequent paranoia that results from a war zone in which the enemy blends in seamlessly with the local civilians yr supposed to be protecting, many of whom don’t especially like you being there anyway – and uses them to build up the suspense to nerve-rattling levels. It may not be accurate, but I still left the theatre almost feeling as if I’d just come back from downtown Baghdad.

THL has its downsides too – a few plot holes here, some predictability there, and a few scenes you didn’t have to serve in Iraq to know are pure Hollywood drama devices. Overall, though, it’s a powerful film – and clearly powerful enough to actually get people to start talking more about the combat experience in Iraq.

Which is more than cable news channels ever did. Maybe that’s why people demand more accuracy from Hollywood on things like this. You’d think that’d be the job of CNN and Fox. Now it's up to Hollywood to get it right, even in works of fiction.

Imagine that.

Everybody hurts,

This is dF

VIACOM: DO AS WE SAY, NOT AS WE DO

ITEM: In the opening round of the Viacom/YouTube lawsuit (in which Viacom is suing YouTube for encouraging people to steal Viacom’s content), YouTube’s legal team let loose the following interesting fact:

Viacom has been secretly using YouTube for years and disguising videos to make them look pirated.

[Viacom] hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.

Viacom's efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

To which I can only say:

Damn, Viacom. That’s really f***ed up.

Developing ...

Yr playing yrself,

This is dF

HK AIR POLLUTION LEVEL: CRUNCHY

So here’s how my day went.

Hong Kong's environmental protection department said local air pollution indices soared to levels of around 500, smashing the previous record of 202 recorded in July 2008. A reading above 51 is considered high.

To put it in additional perspective, the pollution index MAXES OUT AT 500. So for all we know, it’s actually higher.

Interestingly, the cause is a sandstorm that hit Beijing this past weekend and is now being blown down the coast. So the odds of it happening again aren’t high, even on some of our worst days when we make our own smog (or import if from the factories just across the Chinese border).

Still, this is definitely the worst air pollution I've ever seen/breathed in here. My eyes were watering to and from work, and I wasn’t outside more than a few minutes at a time. And now my head hurts.

I’m working from home tomorrow.

Dust in the wind,

This is dF