I wasn’t going to bother reviewing “The Hulk” until I ran into a few positive reviews of it online. How dare you!Damn you all! Hang down your head, Tom Dooley, hang down your head and cry! Have you at long last no DECENCY? Here’s a little clue, when the bulk of the audience is grinding their teeth, moaning, and beating their heads against the floor, it might not be a good movie.

I realize that all you people are Communists, and as such find it morally offensive that anyone would dare to make a product to the taste of its intended consumers, but we are living in a capitalistic society in which movies are products that people pay money for, and the terms “good movie” and “bad movie” are really only meaningful in that context. Clarification: Many people do like bad movies and dislike good movies, but it does not follow that a movie no one likes is necessarily good. Even if the people who don’t like it are bourgeois.

I hearby state with confidence that no movie has ever been as bad as “The Hulk”, and I sat through every frame of “Robot Monster”, carefully listening to the entire “Must and Must Not” monologue. Say what you will about Ed Wood, he never caused his audience to suffer INTENTIONALLY. (Not sure if Wood had anything to do with “Robot Monster”, I mean those to be two separate examples). Ang Lee clearly acted with malice aforethought here. At many points in the movie, you can hear him saying “The audience wants to see some action or hear some coherent exposition at this point, but I’m not going to give it to them because I’m so artistic”.

In order for a movie to be good, there has to be something good about it. All of the qualities that Ang Lee apologists praise in this film are not to be found in the film itself. This exemplifies a cheap little bit of tawdriness that must have been going on in film schools for some time now. Apparently, effete young cineasts are being taught that the quality of “artfulness” consists of the mere absence of action, coherence, or in fact anything that could give any pleasure to a normal viewer. Since “Alien” proved that what you don’t see of the monster can be scarier than what you do see, according to this theory, the ideal horror movie would be ninety silent minutes of pitch darkness.

Having viewed “The Hulk”, I am left, for the first time in my life, with no idea what caused Bruce Banner to be afflicted with hulkism in the first place. All that is clear is that the GIANT GREEN MUSHROOM CLOUD had nothing to do with it, or anything else in the movie. I sat through that fifteen second flashback for about forty-five minutes. If that flashback conveyed anything at all, it conveyed it the first three times. I estimate that it was replayed about a dozen times. People who can’t tell if something is good or not without consulting their primer of Aristotelian aesthetics call that “character development”, or “subtlety”, or “sensitivity to a woman’s needs”. The proper cinematic term is “padding”.

Out of every character in the history of fiction and mythology, Hulk/Banner is without question the easiest to identify with, at least for anyone who has ever been an infant. In order to identify with this film’s version of Bruce Banner, the viewer would have to have seen his father stab his mother, become functionally amnesiac, and spent the next couple of decades among co-workers who don’t seem to find it at all odd that you don’t know who your damn parents are and have apparently made no real efforts to find out.

This sick Lee bastard has managed to make a movie about THE INCREDIBLE HULK, with less internal conflict than exists within a box of Raisin Bran, between the raisins and the bran. The Hulk of the film is, in fact, merely Bruce Banner with super-powers. The Banner character actually goes as far as to explicitly state that he “likes it”. Without Banner and the Hulk struggling to annihilate each other, little reason remains to tell any story about them. Whenever he’s in a difficult situation, he might as well just say “Shazam”.

The defenders of this monstrosity are exactly the type of wieners who are wont to rhapsodize about the heartbreakingly intricate beauty of non-linear storytelling. They have nothing to say about the fact that this is the most sadistically chronological movie to be produced since we were all forced to watch everyone Forest Gump ever met die one by one just because that’s what happens in real life. But if you don’t enjoy this protracted CBT, the only possible explanations are that you have something against comic book movies, or that you need to see an explosion every six seconds like some ghastly American.

Certain critics have officially gone through the looking glass, into a bizzaro world in which phoned in crap that makes children cry is “good”, and sincere and successful efforts to entertain are “bad”.

For some time now I’ve been wondering just what specifically were the fundamental civil rights that we are being deprived of as an immediate effect of the current administration’s policies. It’s been like pulling teeth, but I think I’ve managed to deliniate most of them:

1 - The right of non-citizens to citizenship rights.
2 - The right to freedom from ambiguity.
3 - The Constitutionally implicit privacy right not to be investigated in order to determine whether or not you have commited crimes.
4 - Property rights (No, wait, those were a casualty of the mammoth environmental crisis we went through in the 20th century, that led to huge increases in infant mortality, and precipitous declines in average life expectancy and air and drinking water quality (No wait, the exact opposite happened))
5 - The right to burn flags without having your patriotism questioned.
6 - The right of foreign heads of state to determine U.S. policy.
7 - The right to throw yourself in front of moving bulldozers without being run over.
8 - The right to violate any laws that have been inconsistently enforced under previous administrations.
9 - The right to freedom of worship, if your religious convictions require you to possess controlled substances and/or trespass on military bases.
10 - The right to freedom of speech, if speech is defined as “expression”, and means of self-expression include vandalism, arson, and blocking traffic.
11 - The right to freedom from the embarassment caused by being called cowboys because of leadership so arrogant and provincial that it’s policies promote the interests of this nation, even when they conflict with the interests of other nations.

Here is the tongue-out-of-cheek version of the above list, and Here is something in a similar vein which, remarkably, does make a few good points. At least I though so the last time I read it.

I think I'm going to give this template a chance. If it stops erasing the links and lets me change the title into the bitchen' hand logo I made, then I'll consider it the best template I ever had.

Apropos of nothing, I think that I'm the world champion of this game, which posseses a certain stark beauty. It keeps erasing my high scores though, so it's possibe that someone has gotten a higher score than me, and also had it erased. The highest recorded score was under 9,000 last time I checked, and I've gotten over the 11,000 mark.

. . . C o n t i n u e d _ f r o m _ b e l o w

Then they came to take a census, and I did not speak out because it didn’t really seem all that bad.

Then they came for the people who do some of the same things that I do sometimes, and I did not speak out because, unlike these dinguses, I do not do these things practically right in front of a cop, and it’s fine with me if people that stupid get busted.

Then they came for the enemy combatants, and I did not speak out because I was neither and enemy nor a combatant, nor was I under the impression that there was anything “Orwellian” about the phrase.

Then they came to filter the internet (in federally funded libraries) and I did not speak out because in the event of a particular site being filtered out that I need to see in a library for some reason, it is still possible for me to get the librarian to shut the filter off for me.

Finally, they came for the bloggers who are critical of the President’s inconsistentcies, and there was no one left to riot and burn a flag for me.

Here is the Indian version and here is the Pakistani version of the same story, about the same fire. It’s a pretty old story, but my point is just to draw attention to the contrast. Actually, it’s someone else’s point, and I’m ripping it off. This is the internet, baby!

___ ASSORTED ASSERTIONS ___

I keep meaning to review the e-book God Exists: An Engineer Explains Why, but I should probably read it first. It looks pretty good. I think that as a rule, though, physisists are better at this sort of thing.

If George W. Bush detirmined the exact velocity of a particle, the domestic press would ask "Where is the particle?", and the foreign press would assert that it never existed.

The time has come for Spike Lee to be humanely put down. He is attempting to copyright the concept of pointyness. I sincerely blame society for this. We played along with him when he decreed that in the Spikeleetopian tongue, movies would be called "joints" (so when he's in a commercial, is it called a "frog"? When he does a cameo on a sitcom, does that make it a "tree stump"?). We're suposed to help each other stay gounded, man.

What have been called "states rights" are not the rights of states, theyare the rights of citizens, as state residents, to legislative
representation.

Here's a re-run of an entry I made some time ago, but the link was screwed up: You should probably buy a pizza or some soup for an Israeli soldier, like I keep meaning to do.

Who do you think plants more trees, GreenPeace or Weyerhauser?

All of the American women smart enought to be President are too smart to want to be President.

Emails/ I Get Emails/ I Get Stacks And Stacks Of/ Bizzare, Enigmatic Emails!

From: "KhodaNitai" NitaiGouranga@aol.com
To: wmunger@sincom.com
Subject: Gouranga
Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 20:26:11

Call out Gouranga be happy.
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga.
Say Gouranga my friend.
Gouranga....That which brings the highest happiness.

Quote of the Moment ______________________________

“It may be that someone is more likely to commit an antisocial act when under stress. But that does not mean that we should make it even more likely that he or she commit the act by reducing the punishment.”

- Stephen Hawking, Black Holes And Baby Universes