How to enjoy Christian Bale’s Performance in ‘The Dark Knight’

I was watching The Dark Knight last night, and it had been pointed out to me that Christian Bale, as Batman, was basically barely in the movie. Other than a few annoying quick-cut fight scenes (please god in heaven send us an action director who can direct a fight scene so that it doesn’t make me feel nauseated) and a couple of gloomy lines here and there, Bale doesn’t get to do a whole lot. I figured out why, though, and it helped me enjoy the movie immensely. You see, maybe he’s not actually Bruce Wayne. Maybe he’s Patrick Bateman, who just pretends to be Bruce Wayne. Watching his performance, I knew I had seen this character before. It’s not that he isn’t a fine actor - the two roles just seemed to bring out similar mannerisms that made me realize The Truth.

The next time you watch it, look for that glint of madness in his eyes. It makes sense - like, why doesn’t he seem bothered by death? What happens to his various girlfriends? He probably stabbed them to death and played around in their blood while listening to Huey Lewis and the News. But obviously they wouldn’t show that sort of thing in a superhero movie, so it’s symbolized by the star’s lack of screen time… and that glint of madness that is so obvious now.

So just think - while Heath Ledger is slouching around as the Joker, playing an all-around psycho, Batman is videotaping himself pounding two ‘escorts’ in a big bed and planning to do something awful to them with a coat hanger. Who’s the real villain???

Trust me, it totally changes the movie. I smell an NC-17 rated prequel!

Linux is funny

I went to clear out my history in Nautilus (GNOME’s [far superior] answer to Windows Explorer) and I got this warning message. Hehe.

Probably the best part about it is that it’s programmed to come up randomly or every X times a user clears out the history. Normally it’s a boring old computer-type message.

Tom Waits’ Press Conference

Another Victory in the War on Drugs

Poor Steven Page. He’s looking at five years in a US prison. We’ll see if Canadian Celebrity Status carries any weight in NY. The National Post had the most tasteful headline:

‘Yeah, it’s cocaine,’ Page told police

Innocent until proven guilty, I say. And if guilty… well, it’s just a bit of cocaine. Is it worse than drinking ten Red Bull and a bottle of Jägermeister? From what I’ve seen at the hotel/nightclub where I work, no. Cokeheads don’t vomit on the bar while ordering another shot. They just rent rooms, paint various surfaces with their drug residue, and do anything but sleep.

At least he looked good in his mugshot.

M*A*S*H sans giggles

I’ve been watching M*A*S*H DVDs - seasons 3 and 11. Basically.. I’ve been watching them for like a week straight, pausing only to watch Futurama’s new movie and, you know, work on a bunch of exciting copyediting assignments. But I am re-obsessed with the show. It’s playing right now in a little VLC window so I can blog about it at the same time. My neighbors are probably getting tired of hearing Suicide is Painless over and over again. Let me explain.

Unlike a lot of fans, I prefer the later episodes - I found the pre-Alda-takeover episodes to be just a little bit on the corny side. But the DVDs.. ahh.. the DVDs.. have blissfully given us the option of turning off the laugh track.

(Laugh track.. one word, or two? Blech. I’m all dictionaried out for today. Should there be a comma between word and or? Hmmm.. sigh.. turn off the brain.. it’s a blog..)

Anyhoo.

I didn’t realize how much the laugh track (or laughtrack) wrecked the show until I did a few simple comparisons - watching a scene that made me laugh without the laugh track, and then going back and switching the audio channel to hear how unfunny the fake-sounding giggles made the scene. It just never made sense to me. I could never help but wonder why an audience would follow a bunch of soldiers around and laugh at them? It was just bizarre - disrespectful to the troops, even. Heh.

The raging torrent of anger I felt at the newtork’s incompetence, which, from what I understand, forced this insane gigglefest onto the series in an attempt to make it ‘less dark,’ had clearly overshadowed my ability to appreciate the hilarity of the first few seasons. They’re pretty great. I think it’s just the awful way the laugh track was synced - the giggles tend to creep in just before a witty line, or simply filled in any and all silences during the “funny parts.”

As it turns out, the show can be as funny as any of our fancy modern-day non-laughtracked sitcoms. It’s not corny at all, really. If I can figure out how to post a video comparison, I might do that. After consulting a lawyer. Hah. Or not - It’s becoming sort of a game to guess the amount of copyrighted footage you can post online without getting noticed by The Man. Divide the profit margin of Fox studios by the age of the series (in hours), multiply by the Neilson ratings for the episode in question, factor in the DVD sales and subtract all that from the number of lawyers Fox has on retainer, multiply the answer by 100…. I’m guessing… 9.7 seconds? We’ll see.

So there you have it - Joe recommends you immediately run out and purchase the M*A*S*H DVDs. Or download them, if you’re a dirty filthy pirate who wants to hurt big corporations. And everybody knows, pirates are totally uncool.

Fascist Pigs Kick Out Lil Old Lady for Vicious Anti-McCain Placard

The nerve of this woman. She clearly unleashed the most vicious attack on McCain that anyone has ever seen. Shameless - over-the-line - totally uncalled for. Ready for it?:

She had a sign that said “McCain = Bush.”

And she tried to carry it onto public property. Probably a terrorist!! ! ! !! !! ! !! ! ! ! !! ! !! !

Doesn’t this librarian know her rights? No free expression is permitted on American public property (unless you’re in advertising).

Clearly, she was out of control. I’m surprised she wasn’t Tasered to death.

U.S. interrogators were taught Commie brainwashing techniques.

“To me it looks like they’ve invented a perfect propaganda machine, one that chews up bodies and churns out justifications for everything the Bush administration desires.” - Me

When I wrote that blog back in February, it was because the little information that I could find about prisoner interrogation in “The War Against Terror” reminded me of the techniques used by repressive regimes like the Soviet Union during the cold war to elicit false confessions from anti-Soviet or anti-communist captives. It just seemed like the purpose of “enhanced interrogation” or torture wasn’t to get information, good or bad. Some seem to think the problem with torture is simply that it doesn’t elicit the truth. But it’s not necessarily a problem if the false confession matches the story the interrogator expects to hear, because that makes for some convenient propaganda. “See? He confessed. He can now be convicted. The war on terror works.” Still, I never really expected that there would be hard evidence of a program to elicit false confessions on purpose.

This morning I hit the good old StumbleUpon button and the first ’stumble’ was a telegraph.co.uk article, entitled “Guantanamo Bay interrogations based on faulty Chinese communist methods.” That’s a misleading title. The methods weren’t necessarily faulty, they were just completely evil, but useful for breaking down a human being. Here’s a short excerpt:

American military trainers gave a class to camp interrogators in 2002 on how to use “sleep deprivation”, “exposure” and other “torture” methods to reduce captives to “animals” and obtain information.

But it has emerged that the techniques presented in the class were copied word-for-word from a 1957 US Air Force study which focused on Chinese techniques – that did not work.

The study by sociologist Alfred Biderman, Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War, commented on methods that led to false confessions and “brainwashing”. - Telegraph

The Telegraph is a pretty right-wing newspaper, so it’s not like this is some wild fringe conspiracy theory. Even the centre-right U.S. Democratic Party has clued in and mentioned this scary tidbit of info. Senator Levin was quoted in the article as saying, “What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions. People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.”

No? I think that perhaps they DO need it. How else can a state justify the curbing of civil liberties, the expansion of military powers, the insidious government propaganda, endless war, the suspension of habeas corpus… etc?

People have to be scared into allowing the authorities to play us like suckers.

One way to do that, apparently, is to take a tip from the Commies and torture some brown folks until they say what the U.S. government wants to hear. I’m a little freaked out by this kind of democracy.

This is why I don’t have much faith in Barack Obama, or really any of the nominees or candidates. Can anyone resist this kind of power? You know, the unlimited kind? Already Obama’s going with the Republicans on telecom immunity (see Glenn Greenwald’s excellent reporting), which legitimizes government spying on law-abiding citizens. He has vague plans to end the Iraq war, which isn’t a good sign. Obama calls himself a “uniter” which I naively used to think meant he’d unite the fractured Democratic Party. But now I think it just means he’ll play ball with whatever lunatic fascist sits across from him. What will he do with a bunch of damaged prisoners who’ve been brainwashed into confessing acts of terrorism? Repair and release them? Or make use of them?

Of course I say that, but if I lived there, I’d vote for him. Forget all that stuff, actually.

Americans, (please) Vote Obama..

heheh.. Barack Obama: Better than Dementia.

Fun at work.

After reading over my last post, I’m starting to think it would be fun to try to use the expression “Little Lord Fauntleroy” when dealing with customer complaints…

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Don’t worry. Little Lord Fauntleroy will get his towels right away.”

“Oh? We forgot to set your wake-up call and now you’re an hour late for work? Little Lord Fauntleroy better get moving, then!”

“Awwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww. Little Lord Fauntleroy wanted double beds? Well, let me bend over and do a somersault for you, so you can kiss my…”

(I would only really find it funny if the complaint was legitimate. There’s no fun in overreacting to an overreactor.)

Can’t use it on my boss though - we already call him Napoleon. “Little Lord Fauntleroy has a Napoleon complex” doesn’t really work.

And yes, I realize it’s possible that this is only funny in my head, but it’s still better than calling customers “dickshits” like I’ve been doing for the past few months.

More Tragic Outrage: Rich Kids have Prom Ruined!!!!

From the homepage of thestar.com:

With promises of arriving at their prom in superstretch Hummers, BMWs, Jaguars and Porsches, students pay anything from a $500 deposit to the entire rate upfront for Tuxedo’s services. Then, students say they get picked up in a limousine or tour bus from another company, get only a one-way trip to their prom and are left to find their own way home by foot or by cab.

…

Everything had been pre-arranged. Ram made the booking in advance at a local mall, handing $2,200 to a woman going by the name of Tanya Krajishnik – the only registered owner of Tuxedo Limousines. When Krajishnik met Ram and accepted payment, Ram said all he got in return was a makeshift receipt, written on a scrap of paper.

…

“Our night was ruined. We were all dressed up, and it was ruined,” recalls Shannel. - Toronto Star

Tragedy unfolds under our very noses sometimes, doesn’t it? To think this happened in Toronto…

Sure! Give someone thousands of dollars - up-front! - get nothing in return, and expect to show up at your prom in a SuperStretchHummerLimo™ with a hot-tub. It’s too bad high school can’t teach common sense. Or some small sense of humility, for that matter. Little Lord Fauntleroy can’t get a SuperStretchHummerLimo™ ride home, awww.

Hmm… why don’t I feel sympathetic? Oh right.. my mom dropped me off at all my school dances & grad parties. And heck, in her day they had to walk 40 miles, uphill both ways, with holes in their shoes (if they were lucky enough to have shoes, or feet, for that matter) to go to the prom. And in those days they all had to dance to Freddie and the Dreamers. The groin injuries…. shudder. Could be worse, kids.. could be worse..

Major Nerdage!

I’ve been fooling around with a USB gadget - the WinTV-HVR-950, to be exact - that lets me run analog video to my computer. I picked it up because I have a huge VHS collection and I wanted to record some of them onto my machine. Plus I might have free access to cable TV in the near future, so I’ll be able to record all my favourite FOX NETWORK reality shows, on the FOX NETWORK channel. Boy I sure do love that FOX NETWORK. It’s almost as if the FOX NETWORK is paying me to say FOX NETWORK. But, unfortunately, the FOX NETWORK is not paying me anything. FOX.

Anyways. It’s generally used for viewing/recording stuff via coaxial cable. Here’s Fantastic Planet:

The recording quality is surprisingly good and space-efficient. I was kind of irritated that my fancy nvidia graphics card couldn’t do this because it has a bunch of other esoteric features I can’t possibly use, though it’s not bad at sending video to a TV set with an RCA jack, as long as I use ffdshow to resize the video. I realized after a day that I could do something pretty cool - send the video OUT through the video card and into a VCR, and then connect the VCR output to the USB gadget. The computer sends video to itself, in full-screen.

It’s kind of a neat trick and a good way to bypass DRM/copy-protection scams. I don’t think I’m ‘breaking’ a digital lock, so Jim Prentice can’t come to my door and kick me in the balls. (Yes, lets discourage “piracy” by making the penalty for ripping a store-bought DVD higher than the penalty for simply downloading a digital copy! Another blog, maybe…). So any kind of digital video, even Tom Green’s hard-to-edit live feeds, can be easily re-recorded and re-encoded:

I used DownloadHelper to ‘catch’ his show when it goes Live. VLC can play that format of video as it downloads and sends it to the VCR in full-screen, which sends back to the computer video recorder. The black window is actually live video, it just didn’t show up in the screenshot for some reason. Tom Green’s live shows are fun, but the “commercial breaks” (sometimes ten minutes or more.. with no commercials, just… darkness…) are worth editing out, which I can now do.

But here’s the ultimate - When I shut off the video, the graphics card just sends a clone of the monitor/desktop image. Which gets looped back through the system, again and again and again. It’s infinite and beyond!

Ok… back to STUDYING.