JUST WHAT WE NEEDED, ANOTHER BEST OF 2011 LIST: THE FILMS

I’m no Roger Ebert, but I do watch movies. And this year I made more of an effort to see more of them, all so you could have this fine Top Ten list.

Okay, I would have gone to see them anyway. But you get the idea.

DISCLAIMER: If yr favorite movie of 2011 isn’t here, it’s likely because (1) I didn’t get a chance to see it, (2) it hasn’t been released in Hong Kong yet (hence the lack of Muppets), or (3) I did see it but didn’t like it as much as you did. Also, if some of these seem kind of old, it’s because their release date was 2010 for yr country, but 2011 for Hong Kong.

TOP TEN DEF FILMS OF 2011

1. Source Code
2. Sucker Punch
3. Machete
4. The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito)
5. The Rum Diary
6. Super 8
7. True Grit
8. Apollo 18
9. Paul
10. Wu Xia

HONORABLE MENTION

Monsters
Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows
Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes

WORST FILM I SAW IN 2011

Dylan Dog: Dead Of Night

( EXTENDED PLAY! )

FUN FACT: This is the only Top Ten Best Films Of 2011 list on the entire Internet that has Sucker Punch and Apollo 18 on it.

Pushing the envelope,

This is dF

YOU’VE GOT SANTORUM ALL OVER AMERICA

Emergency commentary from Team Def Batshit Affairs Editor Lucky Bensonhurst

As a professional journalist and political junkie, it worries me that my role in the political process – namely, to navigate fearlessly through the rivers of bullshit spouted by atavistic politicians, analyze samples, make a casserole out of them and report the ugly results with truth and style – is being supplanted by science fiction writers.

Witness Charlie Stross’ theory on the relationship between SOPA and the Occupy movement. Or John Scalzi’s analysis of the Iowa caucus – in fucking HAIKU VERSE.

See what I mean? I might as well retire. And I’ve tried, believe me. I even tried death. It didn’t work out.

But so what? We are what we are. I am a journalist obsessed with politics, and Rick Santorum is a hack politician obsessed with gay sex. So it goes.

Naturally, the punditry is a-dither over Santorum’s inexplicable eight-vote loss in Iowa and what it means for the GOP. I’m no poet, but I do wear a beret, so fuck it – here’s where I suspect all this is going:

A second Obama term.

Ha ha, Jim.

Well, maybe not. But consider who and/or what El Jefe is up against. The Iowa results codify in actual votes what we’ve already suspected – the GOP is more or less split three ways between:

(1) Establishment Republicans who want to get back to Business As Usual and run the country the way Ronald Reagan used to, which means appealing to the moderate bloc (because there’s no rule saying you have to be sincere – you just have to sound like you are)

(2) Hard-ass no-compromise Libertarians who are serious when they say they want as little govt in their lives as possible and don’t really care if gays get married but don’t mind throwing them under the bus if it means a lower tax bill every year

(3) Hard-ass no-compromise Christian conservatives who want to take the country away from the Liberal Islam Satan Gay Menace and give it back to Jesus where it belongs.

Which is why Mitt Romney, Ron Paul and (this week) Rick Santorum all pulled in at least 20% of the Iowa vote. Which is also partly why Gingrich, Cain, Perry and Bachmann have all come and gone – they could tick one box, but not all three. (That, and their tendency to say weird shit at the wrong time, and the ruthless efficiency of the Mitt Romney PAC TV Ad Assassination Squad.)

Indeed, Rick Santorum is essentially the latest beneficiary of the Anyone But Mitt movement, and I have my doubts that Santorum will be able to translate that into anything other than a narrow loss in Iowa – partly because Santorum is to lobbyists what Romney is to corporations (only in a bad way, and partly because – now that Michele Bachmann is out – he’s the last gay-obsessed batshit peddler in the field, which would be a benefit if the biggest issue of this election was The Gay Menace instead of the economy. Which by most accounts it isn’t.

On the other hand, as I’ve noted before, that also depends to what extent the Tea Party wing and the American Jesus wing of the GOP seriously believes they already represent the majority of the country and thus don’t need the mod vote. If nothing else, it hasn’t escaped the notice of bigwigs in both factions that in Iowa the Un-Romney vote adds up to 75% – which means if they can get organized, they could conceivably send Mittens packing.

Either way, I’m not sure it matters. If Santorum somehow beats the odds, Team Obama should have little trouble sidelining him as an extremist bigot who’s more worried about yr sex life than he is about yr job prospects.

If Mittens gets the nomination – however grudgingly – Team Obama should have fun pegging him as The Guy Most Republicans Didn’t Want In The First Place. Which probably won’t get them extra votes, but no harm in mentioning it. Repeatedly.

L. Bensonhurst

I’M READING AS FAST AS I CAN (JANUARY 2012 EDITION)

As we all know, the New Year hasn’t really started until you’ve read some idiosyncratic amateur book reviews on LiveJournal. I’m here to help.

One item of note: starting with this edition, I’ll be including books that I started but couldn’t finish. Hey, it happens. And I figure I might as well make the most of the time I wasted trying to read a given book by telling you why I couldn’t be bothered to finish it.

JUST FINISHED

How To Watch TV News by Neil Postman and Steve Powers
Heavily updated edition of the book by media theorist Neil Postman and former TV news journalist Steve Powers that critiques television news as a watered-down entertainment spectacle where ratings trump actual journalism. Which is especially relevant in the age of cable TV news where Jon Stewart has more credibility than most anchors. However, I didn’t get much from this book – partly because I learned a lot of this in Mass Comms 101 in the late 80s, and partly because too often the argument seems rooted in the meme of television as malign manipulator in general, which I don’t necessarily agree with. That said, it does make a very good overall point that can’t be emphasized enough: TV news should always be watched with a critical eye, and should always be supplemented with newspapers, magazines books and other media capable of more in-depth reporting.

JUST STARTED

Planet Of The Apes by Pierre Boulle
Oh, you know. And no, even after all this time, I’ve never read the book. But I figured I probably should, if only because I’ve always known that the book is considerably different from the films (to include the ending). So we’ll see how it goes.

( RECENTLY: Block! Rankin! Stross! Gaiman! Doc Savage! And dynamite! )

Fun with dynamite,

This is dF