Monthly Archive for October, 2008

Happy Halloween, everyone! To celebrate this joyous and slightly spooky occasion, I’ve elected to do a series of essays over the course of today and maybe tomorrow on topics that I think are relevant to the present holiday. Let’s get going.

HORROR MOVIES

I come from a family that does not like horror movies, my sister Holly and I being the exceptions. My mother saw “Night of the Living Dead” when she was a teenager, and her dreams were ruined for weeks; ditto for my father with “Alien,” even though he watched it at ten in the morning with the lights on. Caroline was once tricked by her high school friends into attending “I Know What You Did Last Summer” under the guise that it was some kind of drama, and when the killer first stepped onto the screen, she quietly bludgeoned a man half to death with her fists in the darkness of the theater. My wife sat in the bedroom with her ears plugged while I watched “The Strangers” last night. According to Holly, Brady made it through about ten minutes of “28 Weeks Later.”

But Holly and I love them. We anxiously trade tales of edge-of-your-seat suspense, of leaping from our chairs and diving for cover, plugging our ears and screaming “don’t go through that door!” The strange thing, and it’s been pointed out to us many times, is that when we talk about these experiences later, we normally say one thing and then follow it with another, and the two aren’t supposed to go together: “I was so scared,” and “That was great.” 

Why do we do this? Brady has asked that question many times, indignant at our quiet and very reasonable suggestion that he is a “buh-bAAAAhhhkk chicken!” Why would one seek out being terrified? The human body doesn’t intend this to be a pleasurable experience, so how come there’s a massive, multi-million dollar industry for it? Why would I pay someone to scare the crap out of me?

Since it’s Halloween, I’d like to reflect on that question and offer some answers. I’m not an expert, but I was a minor in psychology at William and Mary, so the stuff I totally make up might have some big words in it.

It’s important, first of all, to consider that fear is an everyday part of life. No person has ever walked the Earth and not been afraid at some point, and since there are so few absolutes in the whole of humankind, it forms a powerful bond between us. Fear is empathetic, we can immediately relate to anyone who experiences it, because we recognize it in ourselves. Horror movies play on this in two ways: the first is that characters who are afraid pull us in and make us care about what happens to them, and the second is that an audience which is frightened by a movie feels a connection with one another. On a rudimentary level, it’s satisfying to know that other people are frightened along with you, and I think this speaks to the level of disconnect we are forced to tolerate in most of life. In our society, we meet a lot of people, most of whom we completely ignore, and over time this makes us feel cut off from the humanity of those around us. Sitting down in a theater and screaming together reminds us that we are connected, and since humans are social by design, this does matter to us.

Still, you can share a laugh too, and that’s very pleasant, so why wander into the darkest corners of our imagination? I think the answer there is that fear, unlike comedy, is a thing we want assuaged, or exorcised, and sharing it creates the sense that we’ve mastered it just a little bit, even if we haven’t. All of us are afraid of something, and most of the time this emotion has to be kept in check, so letting it run wild in the safety of a theater can have a cleansing effect.

And that’s the other key thing: safety. Roller coaster designers will often say that the point of their rides is to trick your body into thinking it’s going to die, while your mind knows better. When you fly towards the ground at sixty miles an hour in a little steel car with no engine, your body instantly red-flags the speed and the sensation of falling as omens of demise. But your mind, which bought you the ticket and put you in the seat, knows that everything is fine, so you don’t panic. So what happens when your body thinks it’s dead and your mind knows death is impossible? Immortality. For those few minutes, a human being feels as if they are beyond death. 

Horror movies work the same way, only the process inverts: now your mind is fooled, trapped in the illusion of a moving image created by pictures that are flashed at rapid speed and sound playing to match it. In any decent movie, and a horror film especially, we spend much of the running time outside of our bodies, locked inside the world that the pictures and sound create. This time, it is our body that keeps us tethered to safety, reminding us that it is warm, comfortable, and feeling no pain. We flinch away as the killer stabs our hero with a knife, but our bodies don’t experience anything, so we feel safe. This is part of why scary movies date very poorly: it requires complete submersion, there can’t be an inch of dead air between the viewer and the movie, and cinema technology evolves too rapidly for a consistent standard. In other words, color movies can retro-actively ruin the effect of black and white ones. 

Fair enough, buy why go into the shadows at all? Why not watch people do happy things? The answer to that is more complex. On some level, we as a species have to come to grips with the fact that most stories, whether novels or movies, comedies or thrillers, are about people experiencing things they are really not enjoying. There are exceptions, but the vast majority of fiction is about problems we ourselves would not want to face; even most comedy is about discomfort, pain, uncertainty and death. We should not consider liking this sadistic, however, it’s actually quite the opposite: our desire is to empathize with the journey of our protagonist as they try to overcome something.

But more than that, things that go “bump” in the night are a universal experience in the human psyche, and like it or not, we have come to seek out and even love that which we’re afraid of, if only in the abstract. I’m not sure why, but people will embrace almost anything if they live with it for long enough, and terror has been there since day one; it’s not unlike an existential Stockholm Syndrome. These things are a part of our lives, and if we’re given an opportunity to engage them in complete safety, our natural curiosity will compel us to do it. 

This is why good thrillers, like the work of Hitchcock and “Halloween,” are a healthy and enjoyable thing to partake of in moderation. These movies do not create fear, we bring them the fear we already have and they play with it. When it’s over and the lights come up, everyone is fine, nobody was harmed, and we conquered, in some small way, the things that frighten us. After we’ve died and entered the Kingdom of God, fear will go extinct and horror movies will be useless, but until then they address a foundation of the human experience.

The downside in all of this is that horror movies can also be used in quite perverse ways, as we can see with the massive sub-genre very aptly called “torture porn.” With these movies, which are never very scary, the fascination with the dark runs overboard into a thirst for titillation, which is one of our kind’s most persistent flaws. People who like this stuff, and even more so the people who stand to make money off of it, will spit a lot of half-arguments at you which amount roughly to “whatever.” They will insist that it can’t possibly be bad for you although they lack proof, and somehow they’ll try to convince you that’s all in some weird kind of fun. Ignore them. Use your common sense and ask yourself what on Earth is wrong with people who like to think about torture all the time. 

The barometer, of course, is not sheer number of minutes spent enduring violence, and to use that standard is hypocritical. After all, there is more torture in “The Passion of the Christ” than there is in “The Devil’s Rejects.” Also, some horror movies are violent or disgusting without slipping into pseudo-sadism, such as Cronenberg’s “The Fly” or “The Descent,” an absolute masterpiece that came out a few years ago. However, anyone who tries to use these movies to justify watching “Saw” is just hiding from the argument, desperately muddying the waters so no one can see clearly. Yes, a lot of people went to see “The Passion of the Christ,” but not so many argued afterwards about what their favorite torture scene was, or how the sequel will be even bloodier, or how awesome it was when they put a nail through his hand. It’s just different, and anyone who says it’s not either knows that they’re wrong or are hopelessly deluded.

The point of all of this is that I don’t want my defense of scary movies to extend to torture porn, which I struggle to even call “movies.” Lovers of a good scare are not necessarily people who like to see fake blood and guts everywhere, and it’s important to make that distinction. With the financial failure of movies like “Hostel: Part II,” “Captivity,” and Rob Zombie’s horrendous remake of “Halloween,” I think we as a culture are starting to get turned off by this crap, and that’s good. It just makes way for better, more intelligent offerings.

It’s also worth mentioning that horror films, like many things in life, should be taken in moderation. Even the tamest, least violent thriller should not be one’s entire cinematic intake, or even most of it. It’s beneficial to think of movies like food, and a good balance like a healthy diet. Violent, scary entertainment has its place and there isn’t anything wrong with it, but studies suggest that too much of it rubs off in negative ways; it doesn’t make people killers, but it’s still bad for you. Remember that no matter how much you are conscious of the fact that movies aren’t real, humans are visual creatures, and we’re highly impressionable.

So that’s it, dear reader. Being scared is just life, there’s no way around it, so I say it’s better to let some fear in on your own terms. God bless a good horror movie, and long may it thrive. 

It is very, very difficult to know where to begin when talking about my mother. Today is her birthday, and I felt you should know that, because if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t even try to put the debt I owe her into words. I’ve got no fancy way to say it, ladies and gentlemen, so I’ll just put it out there: I owe Marie Allen everything. Absolutely everything.

It worked well for Caroline, so I’ll continue the format of listing off memories that spring to my mind when I think about “the momster” (as she is affectionately called).

-Little known fact: my love of movies probably comes from my mom. Very few people, including her, would have believed this a few years ago, and with good reason. Ever since the night my mother saw George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” then woke up screaming in the middle of the night, she had more or less decided that hardcore cinema appreciation would be left to someone else. She reserved herself to a strict diet of cinema: happy endings, no children in danger, no scary scenes. Case closed.

But then her youngest son started caring deeply about movies. Without even the slightest prompting from him, she decided that now she’d see a wider array of films: intense movies, action movies, scary movies (within reason), and even (gasp) movies with bittersweet finales. I really had nothing to do with it; one day I turned around, and mom was calling dad a “sissy” because he wouldn’t come watch Christopher Nolan’s “Insomnia” with her (he did eventually, and he loved it).

This is a defining characteristic of my mother: she takes the concerns of those close to her and makes them her own. Movies became appealing to her because they mattered to me, and that extra push helped mom discover that all along she had a rigorous understanding of good plot structure, a keen eye for the minutia of screen acting, and a honed taste for good cinematography. You want to see proof? Ask my mother why she didn’t like a movie, or why she did. You will get the most educated, thoughtful and incisive twenty-second review you’ve ever heard.

-The story of the bear in the park is now infamous, but it bears (ha!) repeating. The quick and dirty goes like this: while on a family camping trip, my mother became aware that a bear was entering our camp. Without even blinking, she threw my sister into the trunk of our minivan, then roared out towards the gigantic wild mammal in an attempt to draw its attention away from the rest of the family. The truth was, she couldn’t find me (I was in the van), and Brady and dad were too big for her to shove them in a cupboard, so she instantly concluded it was necessary to put herself in the line of fire first. I think the message of this story explains itself.

-I know this one sounds stupid, but it makes me laugh every time. Most of you know that Marie Allen is a champion of women’s rights, and takes a vigorous yet loving stand against anyone who would keep them from total equality with men. In her words, it’s a cause that “the Lord has laid on my heart.”

But I remember one night many years ago, when I was kept up into the wee hours by the romantic troubles that a high schooler is apt to have. My mother, who also couldn’t sleep, found me sitting in the living room, and sat down to patiently hear what was on my mind. After I had whined and whined and whined about the affections of some girl, my mother offered me a glass of water and gave me this advice:

“Honey. Jealousy is for girls. That’s not what men do.”

Even at the time, I laughed so hard my sides hurt. Understand that if anyone but the most ardent feminist I know had told that to me, I wouldn’t be willing to automatically add the necessary grain of salt. But it was my mother. And rather than pander to me, she knew it was time to kick my rear end a little bit, so she gave me a healthy little dose of winking shame. The crazy thing is, it worked: I went right to bed, and the next day I found myself in better control of my emotions. Like it says in Calvin and Hobbes: “mothers know everything.”

-All right, but a serious one now. One of the most incredible things about my mom is her relationship with Christ. All of us who are close to her know that the Lord loves that woman something fierce, and sometimes we feel as if we’re just there to bask in the refracted glow. Mom once told me that when she was younger, she felt a little like the middle child in her family, so she turned to God to make her feel special and loved. “And you know what I discovered?” she told me, “When you let Him, and only Him, lift you up, that feeling never goes away. If you get it from other people, it ebbs and flows. But the Lord is always there.”

He is indeed. The seriousness of her relationship with the Big Guy can be felt, eminating out of her wherever she goes. Some people get put off by it, some people are drawn to it, but it can never be denied that the Lord walks with my mother everywhere. Her connection with him is as strong as any I’ve ever seen with anyone.

I think a large part of why that happens is because my mom was made to be a mother, and she embraces that calling completely. Her joy, her happiness and her hopes are all rested in helping her loved ones and her neighbors, never in glorifying herself. I have never known someone who so honestly desires the best for others. And of course, in one of life’s delicious ironies, the Lord rewards her selflessness by blessing her personally far past her own expectations.

As a closing thought, let me give you an example of this:

One night, my family gathered around a table to play some poker (true story). Brady, Caroline, Dad and I were all competing fiercely, but my mother was folding nearly ever hand, smiling pleasantly and informing us that she’d rather we do well. Several times after losing expensive wagers, my mother would try to float me loans from her own pile before Caroline would smack her hand and demand that she play by the rules.

My mother did not like this. She just wanted us all to do well.

Finally, on an “all or nothing” last hand, my brother coerced mom into staying in the game until the end. Brady proudly displayed a fairly high two-pair, eliciting groans of defeat from his siblings and his father. Then he turned to look at mom, who innocently laid down enough face cards to fill Buckingham Palace. “Um, is this good?” she asked.

Brady’s eyes bulged out. Mom claimed the entire pot and won the game. “Of course,” I remember thinking, “The Lord loves my mother.”

And even as we were walking out, she was still trying to give the whole thing to Caroline and I, insisting that we had “played very well” and should be rewarded.

I love you mom. Happy Birthday!

Corelyn and I went out of our way to see Oliver Stone’s “W” last weekend, mostly out of a desire to marvel at the wonders of our country, and how we may participate in a public excoriation of our most powerful leader with no fear of reprisal. Even to a child born in America, it’s a surprising feeling.

Here’s my review. And by the way, I’m changing over to a 0-10 system on .10 intervals. It’s more nuanced. Consider anything from 0-4 to be awful, 4-6 to be bad, 6-7 to be “meh,” 7-8 to be good, 8-9 to be great, 9 and up is fabulous and possibly classic.

“W”

Rating: 6.5

Oliver Stone’s “W” is, above everything else, a consistently missed opportunity. To make a film about a sitting president, to say nothing of the fact that this one has been in office during some of the most transitional moments in American history, is a tremendously audacious and definitively American thing to do. And despite what many people somewhat accurately think of Stone (conspiracy theory nut), he is a decorated Vietnam veteran, and he did make the overwhelmingly patriotic “World Trade Center,” as well as classics like “Wall Street” and “JFK.” The potential was there for him to be the right guy.

Furthermore, he seemed to be doing his homework in his preparation for the movie, and he claimed again and again that he wanted to make an honest and fair portrait of Bush. It was hard to believe him, but at least he was making the effort. Then came the casting, with several consecutive home run choices: Josh Brolin for the lead, Elizabeth Banks for Laura, James Cromwell as Bush Senior, and Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney. Smart moves, all. There was reason to be optimistic.

Alas, they didn’t pull it off. And I have to admit I’m surprised at what went wrong.

“W” works perfectly well while it’s setting up George Jr’s path to the White House, but when it gets him there, the damned thing falls apart. The “meetings” that are depicted in the Oval Office and Situation Room are amateur, sounding more like Saturday Night Live skits than transcriptions of political bull sessions. Honestly, “Dr. Strangelove” was more authentic than this. Dick Cheney and Condy Rice in particular are effectively cardboard cut-outs, completely absent motivations for their actions. Stone promised us that his rage against the current administration wouldn’t seep into his portrayal of Bush, and technically he was correct, but it did find its way to the supporting cast. I swear to you, there are times that Dreyfuss’ vice president (whom Bush hilariously calls “vice”) comes within an inch of saying, “I’m evil. I’m really evil. Let’s kill people for oil.” Stuff like this keeps us from suspending our disbelief; never once did I get that goosebumps-inducing sensation that I really was a fly on the wall at the White House.

The acting is split, half of it being great and the other half bordering, again, on sketch comedy. Cromwell’s H.W. Bush is decent, flawed and compelling, and I liked the movie’s thesis that even good fathers can create daddy issues in their sons. Elizabeth Banks shines as Laura, putting a warmth and steadfastness in the role that can’t be traced to a line in the script. Dreyfuss’ Cheney is almost a Bond villain, but he’s a damned good one and he looks exactly like his counterpart.

Then comes the pick-up team. Thandie Newton is distractingly bad as Condy Rice, pushing the role too far over the brink. I’m not sure it was her fault, and I think she was a good choice for the role, but Stone pushes her in the wrong direction. The same is true for Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell, and that’s a hard blow for this film, since he’s the voice of reason in the chaos.

Smack in the middle of these extremes comes Josh Brolin in the title role. My overall assessment of his performance is that he did a very solid job, but there were moments where he forced a few Bush mannerisms into places that didn’t seem to require them. Still, I’m happy to let that go, because there are so many tricky moments that he sells completely, reminding us of the real-life person but drafting an original character simultaneously. His best moment comes after a failed speech, as he storms angrily away from the press room and, in a moment of boiled-over emotion, throws his arms out in a spasm of frustration. It’s such a tiny gesture, but the vulnerability of it is real. Little details like that sell him for us.

I’m sure many of you are wondering what the Stone intends to say about our president with “W,” and I think the best answer to that question is this: he’s far from an evil man, but he sought and acquired the presidency for the wrong reasons, and once he got it he wrought accidental havoc on his country with it. Not exactly a burning at the stake, but certainly inflammatory enough to potentially incite controversy, which this movie is desperately hoping to do. It won’t, it’s just not a good enough film.

It’s hard to imagine a bigger creative failure than setting a movie at the dawn of America’s war with terror, and completely glazing over how our country, and its leaders, changed in the face of a new enemy. There is no 9/11 in this movie, the plot skips right past it and if you watched this film in 2000, you’d have no idea anything took place, besides a few off-hand references. That’s just not acceptable, leaving that element out of the story keeps it from being anything more than a bizarre fantasy version of reality. I don’t care how much Dubya wants the love of his father, his life dramatically changed the day those towers fell, as did his cabinet, and we needed to experience that with them for this movie to work.

“W” could have been a lot more, and during some moments in the set-up, it feels like it will be. I personally expected Stone to fumble the ball on the backstory, then get his act together once he sunk his teeth into Washington politics, but much to my surprise the opposite is true. There’s an image at the movie’s end, where Dubya stands alone in a massive baseball stadium, playing a game with himself. He imagines a ball flying through the air, and he shuffles back to catch it, but it disappears in mid-air, and he simply stands there, asking himself what happened. Stone meant this to be a critique of the Bush administration, but I think it applies to his film much more.

This is mostly going to be about video games, people, so if that bores you I would advise skipping it. Still, if you’re curious, stick around! You could learn interesting things about our world!

-”Fable II.” I haven’t played it, it comes out tomorrow, but let me just put out a couple of things concerning it. First, why is everyone in the world throwing their “Fable II” review up at 0800 this morning, while “Far Cry 2,” which also comes out tomorrow, is mostly ignored? Secondly, did you hear that eating any kind of meat whatsoever makes your character fat and ugly? Any kind of meat! If that’s true, and it seems to be, then we have entered a brave new world of preachy video games. I love the idea that slaughtering thousands of wild animals just because it’s fun is somehow a less disturbing moral activity than killing a few for want of sustenance. 

A similar level of quasi-hypocrisy was practiced by the action movie “Shoot ‘em Up,” which found time in between the brutal execution of dozens upon dozens of human lives to strongly lecture the audience on gun control. I’m not saying the cause is unjust, but you have to pick your moments. You don’t get to feed the machine that makes Americans adore firearms and then stick your nose up at us. That’s just ridiculous.

“Fable II” is less egregious, I just can’t believe that in a game that strives so hard to authentically replicate the minutia of life, they’d actually tell you that a protein-less diet will make you big, strong and healthy. It won’t. Serious vegetarians will warn you that a complex regiment of beans and things of that nature is required to augment the protein your body expects to get from meat. And it does expect it. Look at your teeth, Peter, you’re an omnivore. 

Also, Team Xbox’s review of “Fable II” references the idea that Peter Molyneux’s hype machine borders on claiming to “cure cancer,” which is a joke I made on this website about a week or so ago (in reference to the original). I don’t mean to sound proud, but did they get that from me? It’s an obscure joke, I haven’t heard anyone else saying it. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but it’d be cool.

-”Dead Space.” I rented “Dead Space” this past Sunday, and so far I’m quite pleased with it. The game is meant to be a survival horror nightmare on a spaceship crowded with bizarre, deformed monsters, and I think it’s fair to say it hits its target. I’m not positive the game is quite as terrifying as it believes itself to be, but that’s not really a fair criticism since the atmosphere is wonderfully composed and I’ve yelped my way off my spot on the couch several times. 

The feel is very “Doom 3,” for those of you that played that, but the gameplay is much more “Resident Evil 4.” It’s my opinion that video games are like basketball: everything is in the fundamentals. Classic games, even operatic ones like “Halo” and “Gears of War,” may seem built on a foundation of loud graphics and booming sound, but they’re not. They work because they found a way to make something really fun for about five seconds, then they successfully repeated that feeling over and over. The trick to a great game is to make a very similar thing look and feel very different throughout the campaign, so you’re having the same kind of fun, but you don’t know it. 

This is the aspect of gaming “Dead Space” understands and nails. At its heart, it’s running on a gimmick: when the bad guys attack, shoot their arms and legs off to kill them quickest. This is a great mechanic, because it’s both hard to hit the flailing limbs of a scary monster that’s sprinting towards you, and insanely rewarding when you do. The game doesn’t kid around, your aiming reticle contains not one but three laser-sights. They don’t want you to miss because they make it annoying to aim, they want you to miss because they scare you and you can’t concentrate, and to prove it, they give you an obscenely useful targeting mechanism; you can even walk quickly while you aim. I love that design philosophy.

The game is also very nice in terms of level progression. There are saves everywhere, and even when there aren’t, invisible checkpoints routinely boot you up right before your untimely demise. They also give you a little laser breadcrumb trail which tells you where you should be going. Again, the decision to include these things suggest that the good folks at EA Redwood Shores are confident the game itself will prove challenging, exciting and scary. I can’t stand games that heap an arbitrary extra level of difficulty on top of the experience by rarely permitting a save, or deliberately confusing you as to where your next objective is. I’m happy to report that “Dead Space” is having none of that.

Also, the sections of the game that take place outside the hull of the ship (which is, of course, floating in the titular space) are tremendous. First of all, you have a very limited amount of oxygen, and your character begins gasping when your tank gets low, which really quickens the pulse. Also, you routinely get attacked while you’re in space, so you’re forced to find your way through these battles with next to no audio input whatsoever. It’s a harrowing experience, blasting away at five aliens and hearing only a muffled, distant rumble in response. Sometimes a gaggle of these baddies will sneak up on you and deal a lot of damage because you can’t hear them. It’s wicked fun, very well done.

All in all, the game is quite excellent, there’s many things to praise. I do feel a slight reservation about it, nonetheless, and I can’t put my finger on what it is. Most likely, it’s the knowledge that “Dead Space” covers well-tread ground aesthetically, and that dulls its impact. I don’t fault them for using the “horror in space” thing, because they do it so well and refuse to rest on their laurels, but the price you pay is a slightly diminished emotional return.

Fortunately, from what I understand, the story that unfolds as the game progresses is quite good. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens 

-”Age of Booty.” Holy crap, get on Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) right now and download the demo of this game. It’s a riot. Picture a simpler, much faster-paced “Risk” with pirate ships, no turns, and online co-op and you get an idea of what’s happening here. I swear, this game probably cost a tenth of “Dead Space’s” budget, and yet it pulled me away from that formidable experience for hours on Sunday. 

The idea is simple: teams of pirates battle each other to possess towns, and whoever gets a certain number of towns wins. You control a single ship, which can be upgraded, on a team with other ships, preferably controlled by friends on Live. The gameplay mechanics take about two seconds to learn—your ship fires automatically on all targets and you just click on where you want to go—but much like rock-paper-scissors, the core design is so good that it just keeps producing fun, like some kind of video game nuclear reactor.

I can’t stress enough how much you cannot play this thing successfully with AI teammates. There is no means to communicate with them, and they are lousy. You need people. And those people need microphones. But if you’ve got that set up, and come on you really should by now, get ready for a blast and a half. And the best part is, the response to any message you receive in the game is, “Arrr, I get yer point, matey!”

-”Tom Clancy’s Endwar.” Holy crap it works. It works! It’s a real-time strategy game where you tell your units, as in over the microphone with the use of your voice, where they’re going and what they’re doing when they get there. And it works! You don’t even have to speak that clearly! Download the demo, it’s a blast. I will warn you that I’ve encountered one potentially huge flaw: I can’t find a command to order all of my units anywhere. There’s no way they actually left this out, but I can’t find it yet.

Also, the game comes out on election day, and it’s about a nearly post-apocalyptic world war. Maybe they’re trying to tell us something.

-”Left 4 Dead.” If you don’t know about it, go look it up and get educated. For goodness gracious sake, November 17th needs to get here so much faster. 

You all may have noticed that I’m updating much more frequently. This is a response to popular demand, since many of my potential readers have told me their on-again-off-again habits with regards to this website were spawned by an erratic posting schedule. Fair enough, dear reader, expect to hear from me all the freakin’ time. And also, be careful what you wish for.

It’s time for another issue of Pontifications! Let’s get right down to it. 

Ephesians is awesome. I was just reading it last night. St. Paul gets a lot of flak for telling women to be obedient to their husbands and such, but I think that misses the point of the passage. He keeps repeating “be subject to one another,” in the same way Christ made Himself subject to us. Imagine a world run by the kind of behavior Paul is talking about. Imagine a world where humanity was subject to itself, exhibiting care and concern for our brothers and sisters above everything else. I don’t think we’d even notice who was being obedient to whom. Does anyone really believe, in that kind of world, that women would be paid less for the same work, as they are now in this supposedly “enlightened” age that is so desperate to sterilize religion? 

I think the point Paul wanted to make was that gender roles are not the enemy. In our culture, we’re waging cultural wars against enemies we term “sexism,” or “racism,” or “homophobia,” or whatever. Our method so far seems to consist of finding people we don’t like, slapping one of these terms on them, then suing them until they can’t afford a Snickers bar. It’s like the Red Scare all over again. What if we loved and cared for people who commit hate crimes, as well as the victims? And don’t say it’s more than can be asked of us; if Christ forgave the guys nailing Him to a piece of wood for doing nothing wrong, we can do this.

The truth is, being subject to each other works. It’s not glamorous or sexy, and it takes time, but whenever it’s employed, it rocks humanity to its core. I needn’t remind you that Jesus Christ is a poor Jew from nowhere who lived two centuries ago, and He is still talked about more than any of the United States presidents. And anyone who tells you it won’t get the job done should take that up with Dr. Martin Luther King, the most legendary civil rights activist in history (minus Christ, of course). 

I’m sick to death of the courtroom methodology we’re using to try and seek out people to blame for sexism (or whatever) and hang it around their necks. We’re all responsible. And I’m tired to death of these “isms” and “phobias” we come up with, that’s like stomping out a burning leaf in a forest fire. Paul told us how to end homophobia two thousand years ago. We’re just not listening.

Rolling Stone is a crap magazine. Seriously, I can’t take it anymore. They panned every Led Zeppelin album ever made, they called Nirvana’s “Nevermind” middling and unimpressive, and they’ve yet to accurately predict a musical revolution or correctly diagnose one in progress. These so-called music “experts” aren’t really doing a bang-up job calling the plays. They’re useless except as a catalogue of opinions that are considered fashionable by snobby people. 

And that was all before they decided to be a political magazine. I’ll never forget the first time I noticed that the pictures of dead soldiers in Iraq that they were publishing to vilify Dubya were, in fact, taken during the Gulf War. Their soft-handed, utterly biased idol worship of Democratic presidential candidates contrasted with their unilateral burn-at-the-stake tirades against anyone who is a Republican exceeds the ridiculous and reaches into self-parody. Next time you try to tell me how biased “Fox News” is, I’m going to laugh in your face.

Go read the interview that Obama just gave them (it’s something like his third cover story). On page 3, right at the top, they start trying to bait Barack into talking smack about Palin. They press him twice in a row, but both times he politely refuses, even suggesting that Sarah was a smart choice to reinvigorate the party. Does he really think that? Maybe not, but the Senator has something that Rolling Stone has never heard of: class. Or discretion. Or professionalism. Take your pick.

I subscribed to Rolling Stone for over a year, in point of fact, and I did so under the justification of “know thy enemy.” But after a while, I cancelled the stupid thing, because surely, somewhere out there, I have a smarter nemesis than this.

Go watch “A Bronx Tale.” It’s Robert de Niro’s directorial debut, written by Chazz Palminteri. The story is based on Chazz’s real life experiences, and it really shows. It’s about a teenager growing up in New York in the 1950s, stuck between two men he idealizes. One of them is his hard-working, God-fearing father (de Niro), who is raising his son on his own and scraping by every penny to do so. He makes an honest living, and it costs him dearly. The other is a local mob boss (Palminteri), who is wealthy and successful, but must be ruthless and violent to do so. These are two very wise men, both of whom love the boy sincerely and want to help him, but he must choose which of them to believe. This is a movie about the gray area of morality, and about how important solid values are in the face of uncertainty. It does not succumb to ethical relativism, but bravely encounters the harsh realities of life and affirms the desire to be honest, moral and good anyway. It’s a powerhouse film with comedy, drama and heartbreak. I haven’t seen it in two years, and it’s still haunting me. Go buy it.

“Gears of War 2″ is going to consume my life. It will, just watch. I’ve been happily sustained by paltry multiplayer and replaying the same campaign over and over for two years with the original, so when the new one emerges with a bevy of new options, new features, and a brand-new campaign, I fear my social life will be forfeit. 

I like co-operative multiplayer better than competitive. Maybe I’m some kind of pansy, I don’t know, but games where my friends and I have to work together, share ammo, move in teams and communicate constantly are just way more rewarding to me. Yes, it’s fun to beat your friends and laugh, but in the long run you end up getting too competitive, and the fun starts to seep out. Cooperative play, on the other hand, is mutually affirming, because you’re creating something instead of tearing each other down. Teamwork is awesome, that’s all I’m saying.