The Odd Life of Timothy Green Trailer

Okay, this is the weird trailer I've seen in a long time.  Jennifer Gardner and her husband can't have children because her womb has been cursed ever since she slept with Ben Afflack in "Daredevil".  So she and her husband make a wish... and a mud-encrusted child is born, exactly how the parents' dreamed:

So the rest of the trailer is various scenes of people looking vaguely happy.  The kid comes out of his earthly womb recognizing his parents, assuring them that he is their son.  Now I guess Gardner and her husband have to prove to their neighbors that they didn't kidnap some kid.  Then... um... the kid raises his hands, and then apparently delivers the Sermon on the Mount.  The Hell?  What kind of movie is this?  I honestly have no idea what to make of this one.  Disney only wanted to make a vaguely pleasant movie to make people vaguely happy, but instead, they made a trailer that has to be the most thought-provoking thing I've seen in a very long time.

But I do have a couple of latter thoughts.  I'll ignore the Jesus thing for now, that's the least bizarre thing about this trailer:

Review of the Rise of the Planet of the Apes of the Blue Highwind

I'm going to level with you Space Monkeys* here, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" is not a movie I particularly liked.  And it wasn't a movie I particularly disliked either.  It was a movie that I particularly saw, and that's it.  I think I'm only making this post because I get to make a wacky title.

"Rise of the Planet of the Apes" is a movie that dares to ask this burning, emotionally stirring question:  can James Franco save his career after trying to co-host the Academy Awards with Jack Daniels?  The answer to that question is that James Franco's career was never actually in peril, the guy was signing deals to appear in a very ill-conceived "Wizard of Oz" remake.  So he's okay.  I think he's a douche now, and he'll never live down that show, but he'll be in movies and teaching college courses about himself for a very long time.

As for this reboot of everybody's favorite monkey franchise, its going to be okay as well.  The audience in the theatre I went to was loving this movie.  By the end, they all had betrayed their humanity and were rooting for the apes.  I'm not so easily mislead from my staunch loyalty to the human race.  If "Avatar" couldn't get me to side with the blue elves, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" won't get to pounding my chest for primates.  Also, "Rise of the Planet of the Apes" just isn't all that well-made of a movie in the end.  It was "eh".  Whatever.

Foucault's Pendulum

What do you get if you mix the Knights Templar, Nazis, the Cathars, the Freemasons, Rosicrucian, Kabbalah, Alester Crowley, and an immortal 18th century aristocrat?  "Foucault's Pendulum" is a really weird smoothie of every flavor of European mysticism, occultism, and not a small amount of college socialism.  This is a novel by Umberto Eco, probably the only man alive who can write novels steeped in Medieval lore and complex scholarship and somehow or another be widely read.  I suspect its because Umberto Eco, from name down, actually is a Medieval Italian character.  If Dante didn't find a place for Umberto Eco in the "Divine Comedy", he definitely should have.

"Foucault's Pendulum" at its core is a reaction to the centuries of occult conspiracy theories that have dominated Europe's intellectual underground.  Umberto Eco, through his characters, sets out to create a Grand Unifying Theory of Conspiracy, which they call more simply, "the Plan".  In modern America, the conspiracy theories mostly revolve around the Kennedy Assassination and UFOs, but this realm of paranoid insanity has gone back centuries revolving around secret societies, wacky religious orders, and of course, the Knights Templar.  The characters in this book decide immediately that anybody who writes about the Knights Templar are automatically insane, so eventually they decide to make the most insane Knights Templar theory.

Of course, to get that level of insanity, to even understand half the things that Umberto Eco is talking about, you better know your history.  You need to know the Crusades, you need to know the Byzantines, you need to know Kabbalah, and you need to know what the heck Foucault's Pendulum is in the first place.  This is a book you read sitting in front of your laptop, plugging in the dozens of obscure words you'll find.  At one point Eco used a word "Metacyclosynchrotron" - a word so bizarre and esoteric that it beat Google.  I still don't know what the heck a "Metacyclosynchrotron" is, and if anybody has a clue, feel free to prove you're smarter than me.  There aren't many books that left me proud that I was able to slug through them while almost completely understanding*, but "Foucault's Pendulum" was one of them.

Captain America

Oh...  I don't want to be writing a review in this tone.  I want to be glowing, full of love, like my "Winnie the Pooh" post.  What I want is to happily tell you that this is a magnificent find, Marvel's finest movie of the year.  "Captain America" had everything a great movie needed:  the right leading man, a WWII storyline, and a Superhero that's iconic enough that everybody knows him.  Well, I know of him, I have no idea what Captain America's powers are, but you know, he's an icon, I guess.

I know gloated at some point in my contempt for comic book movies that I would happily miss most of them this year.  Well, right now I'm four for four, as a matter of embarrassing fact, I've seen every superhero movie since "Iron Man", even "Green Lantern" when I knew that movie would suck!  This blog seems to force me to watch bad movies - not that I'm complaining.  "Green Lantern" was without a doubt the best comedy of the year - but "Captain America", I think, is a close second.  Because this movie is a joke.  If you want to know why in general I hate comic book movies, here you go, the gold standard example.  You know why these movies suck?  Because they're stupid!

"Captain America" isn't a WWII movie, its a movie that takes place during WWII.  Captain America doesn't fight Nazis, that's too real for the comic book fans, instead he fights COBRA from "G.I. Joe".  What, are the Nazis going to get offended?  Is Marvel afraid of a lawsuit from the estate of Hermann Goering?  Yeah, there's the most important war in all of history taking place, a battle against the worst supervillains that the human race has actually created... but let's instead have Captain America fight something from a Saturday morning cartoon.  This movie has a good cast, good characterization, the right period feeling, but the completely ridiculous, downright hilarious villains sink this movie right down to the dark depths of nothingness.  Definitely not worth seeing.

FIre Everybody

I don't do politics posts all that often anymore, because frankly, its too depressing.  But I figure somebody needs to say what I'm going to say now.

Okay, so America has this thing called "the debt ceiling".  If you turn on CNN or Fox or go to any news source, you'll hear a lot about it.  Congress, as mandated by the Constitution, is the only body that can borrow money.  Before WWI, Congress had to basically vote every single time the nation borrowed money.  But since WWI would require a huge amount of borrowing, we collectively lumped all of our debts into a single pile.  The debt ceiling is the legal limit set by Congress as to how much debt the federal government can take on - right now we're at $14.3 trillion in the hole.  If you don't raise the debt ceiling, you can't borrow more money, which means you physically will not have enough money to pay for things.  So you can't pay salaries of government employees, you can't pay the bills on the debt you already own, and you can't fund the wars we're fighting right now.

US Government Debt, as it turns out, is an important commodity in the world financial markets.  Because the US pays its debts without fail every single time, buying Treasury Securities, essentially lending money to the government in expectation of a higher return, is considered to be a "riskless investment".  The rate of return on US debt is so certain that its actually the basis of all interest rates everywhere.  You might even hold a piece of the US debt in a drawer someplace, you'll call it a "saving's bond".  Grandma gave it to your for your birthday God-knows how many years ago, and you most likely forgot you even had it.  By not raising the debt ceiling, we're essentially shaking the very foundation our entire monetary system is based upon.  You either raise the debt ceiling, or America defaults.  Only a complete moron or a psychopath utterly without any love for humanity would threaten this foundation - and sadly I think today's government is filled with people who are a mixture of both.