You're gonna be bothered by how cool I am.

I wish I were spending less time writing about other people's stuff (much less other people's comments *about* other people's stuff), but this has been annoying me for several weeks now, and I must rant.

Why is it that people stick with a show/book/whatever when there is a huge element that they hate so much and that they can't really escape? I don't just mean a character they don't like. Obviously, it's perfectly commonplace to love a story that has a villain you hate, mostly because you know they'll probably eventually get their comeuppance, or at the very least you know that the creators intend for you to feel that way about such a character.

I'm talking about Xander-haters in the Buffy fandom. Ron-haters in the HP fandom. Ziva-haters in the NCIS fandom. Doctor Who fans who think Steven Moffat is a revolting misogynist and is ruining the institution (or Davies-haters who thought *he* ruined it, yet kept on watching). HP fans who used to lambast JKR for being a terrible writer. People who have a burning hatred for something that is not going away any time soon and is meant to be liked and yet they STAY IN THE FANDOM for the Thing that is no longer (or perhaps never was) that appealing to them.

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I was reading a frankly depressing article linked on ONTD about sexism in Hollywood and saw a reference to this movie, What's Your Number, where Anna Faris plays a woman who is afraid that if she's slept with too many men already, she'll never get married. First of all, the book this is based on has the woman reading in the New York Post (not exactly the most respectable bastion of journalism in the first place) that the average person has 10.5 partners in their lifetime; she then sets a number for herself, saying that 20 will be her limit before getting married. Naturally, the story has her hitting that limit and then freaking out because she's not married yet, and she goes on a quest to seek out her former lovers and determine if she let The One slip away. I haven't read this book, but I really hope the point is not to encourage that kind of arbitrary quantification system.

But then again, maybe that's exactly what it does. ONTD's linked source describes the film as being about a woman who learns in a "ladymag" (oh, what a lovely, condescending little word) that if she sleeps with one more person than the 20 she already has, she'll never get married. So the NY Post has become a "ladymag" and the woman gets her "limit" advice from the mag, not her own relationship issues. Great. But that's not even the worst part.

Apparently, the studio is haggling over the number, trying to figure out how many partners they can give the character without making her a slut.

Did you hear that? That was my foot kicking something hard.

If this were an independent movie or a foreign movie, this would not be an issue. I'm FORCIBLY reminded of a theory I had several years ago, when the script was being written for the second Bridget Jones movie. Renee Zellweger apparently had some issues with the initial script, and I was musing over the plot elements of the book to try and figure out what might be amiss. After seeing the final film, I became convinced that earlier drafts of the script must have included both Bridget and Mark seeing (and sleeping with? I can't remember from the book) other people while they were broken up. In the book, there is nothing terribly appalling about this - just your normal obstacles to getting the couple back together. But I KNEW - especially after they turned Bridget's rival into a sweethearted lesbian with a crush on her - that somewhere, in some meeting, it had been decided that audiences wouldn't forgive Bridget (and probably not Mark either) for being with someone else.

At another point in the article, Anna Faris mentions a movie she made with Kate Hudson called Gold Diggers, which was supposed to be the feminine answer to Wedding Crashers. But she says that they couldn't really make it a female Wedding Crashers because, and I quote, "the big hitch was, nobody's going to like those girls if they seem like sluts... We realized we can't make an actual female ‘Wedding Crashers,' because then it would be ‘Call Girls.' " I'm telling myself that she said this sadly and with resignation, because ... *boils*

I'm also picturing that scene from Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, where Matthew McConaughey looks out upon this sea of former flings - I don't know how many there actually are, because I've never seen the movie, but in the trailer it sure looks like more than 20. Nothing wrong with that, though, is there? No, sir. Men can have all the conquests they want, with however many people they want, because they're Manly Men of Manparts.

I could draw a parallel here to female circumcision, a practice that is still used in many places in the world to make sex painful for women so they'll look upon it as a duty to their husbands, not a pleasure, and won't seek sexual encounters outside the marriage bed. Oh look, I just did.

THIS has to be the most absurd piece of deconstruction I have seen in a very long time. I'm actually starting to wonder if I encountered this guy under another name in the Harry Potter fandom, because throw in a few "y'all"s and he would sound SCARILY FAMILIAR.

First of all, in the very first paragraph, the guy's true motives are revealed. This is not about the commercial at all; this is yet another chance to smack George Lucas and the Star Wars prequels around. Second, I had no idea this thing was "the rage of the internet." Maybe because I don't spend every waking hour ON the internet, but to me it's simply one of the very few Super Bowl commercials this year that was not skin-peelingly horrible. Seriously, between Doritos and Pepsi Max, I think we hit a new low in racial stereotypes, woman-hating, and just general tastelessness in the ads this year, and I don't have to dig deep at all to see it.

To call this 30-second commercial a "national moment" is quite frankly insane, but that's not even the crazy part of Mr. Faraci's post. Nor is the Captain Obvious conclusion that the ad was aimed at 30 and 40 somethings who have fond memories of the original Star Wars movies. (REALLY? Marketing people use cultural touchstones to sell their products? HEAVEN FORFEND!)

No, the REALLY weird stuff is when he goes all Godwin's and brings the Nazis into it (which is presumably the point of his entire post). Once one has uttered the phrase "fine cars that don't run on the blood of Jews," I think it is time for one to take a step back and get a firmer grip on one's senses. And while I realize that yes, Darth Vader is a Hitler-esque villain, to link them in the way the writer does here is much more offensive to me than anything in this silly commercial. And the Orwell reference at the end is especially ironic.

Finally, I leave you with this sentence. Fifty points to the Hogwarts house of your choice if you can diagram it: People have accused me of being cynical simply because I wasn’t taken in by forced cuteness in a commercial for a giant corporation featuring the intellectual property of an artistically bankrupt blockbuster mainstream film series aired during the single most corporatized sporting event in the history of corporatization.

Well, I'm not calling you cynical, Devin. I'm calling you CRAZY.

This may be gobbledegook to most of you, but it is all over the coverage of the Sundance Film Festival, and it's getting on my nerves and I have to rant.

I'm a little bemused by the outrage coming out of Sundance over Kevin Smith's Red State stunt.

For anyone who's not aware, Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back) made a film called Red State. He explained to the internets that this was a horror film, kind of like The Exorcist, only the church was the bad guy. He did not market the film at all, except to release a short teaser trailer and some posters, all on the internet - no traditional marketing whatsoever. He made a pretty big deal (on Twitter and his podcast) about taking it to Sundance and auctioning off the distribution rights to the movie.

In actuality, judging from the reviews, the movie is not as Smith has sold it in the trailer or posters, which I'm sure is the first time that has ever happened in the history of both filmmaking and advertising. (*sarcasm sign*) Summaries coming out of Sundance describe it as a very thinly veiled indictment of the Westboro church and call it preachy (LOL you'll get that when your main character is a preacher) and talky and whatever. The movie, however, is secondary to the "circus" that happened after the premiere, where Smith gathered distributors and the press into a room for the Big Auction and proceeded to sell the film to himself for $20, adding that he was planning to do a tour with it (starting at Radio City in NY and taking it to similar venues around the country) and that this was the business model he was adopting for this and his next (and apparently final) film, Hit Somebody.

Big deal, right? Who cares? I certainly don't, except that it means I'll probably have to pay more to see Red State (before it becomes more readily available in October - still fuzzy on what that means), which ... whatever. I mean, yeah, he was dishonest about his intentions, but again, I fail to see how this is a new thing. Well, apparently a great number of internet critics care, because you'd think Smith ate a baby on stage last night from a lot of the reactions I'm seeing to this stunt. In particular, Drew McWeeney has basically pulled a Christian Bale and is done with Smith professionally, which might have more meaning for me if he didn't regularly throw tantrums about stuff that, while I'm sure it's annoying to him, strikes me as just part of the rough and tumble of the movie business. (Seriously, I think EVERY SINGLE TIME that someone has broken an embargo and early-reviewed a film, he has made some passive-aggressive remark and rolled around in pissy Twitter comments like a dog in a smelly thing.)

I don't know. Maybe this is some huge deal that I'm not getting because I'm not an "insider." All I see is some bloggers foaming at the mouth and giving Smith and his movie a lot of free press (while adding the utterly meaningless refrain of "I'm done writing about this guy" - yeah, done except for THIS ONE LAST THING). So, go Kev, I guess!

[THE TEXT CONTAINED WITHIN THIS POST AND THE COMMENTS TO IT ARE NOT TO BE REPRODUCED OR COPIED ON ANY OTHER SITE OR MESSAGE BOARD WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE WRITER.] ;)

So, again the latest LJ kerfluffle is not *quite* as bad as we originally thought. Just don't click the Facebook and Twitter boxes if you don't want your post linked there. And don't EVER do it when leaving a comment. Actually, I'm not sure how many people would even *want* to post just their comment to Facebook or Twitter, out of context and everything. Is there really a demand for that feature?

I have to say, this decision is (once again) a pretty staggeringly bad read of the LJ usership. I don't know a soul on LJ who doesn't keep their journal and their Facebook/Twitter page (if they even have one) completely separate entities for completely different audiences. This ain't some Reese's candy confection! This is one peanut butter I DO NOT WANT getting its cooties on my chocolate!

It's bad enough the way Facebook keeps tweaking its settings without telling anyone (thank goodness LJ at least tells us when they do something stupid). I swear it must be every other week that I see a post on my Friends feed telling me how to get around some new privacy breach on FB. But I sincerely hope that this is not the beginning of LJ being in bed with Facebook and increasingly assimilating to its business model. The greatest thing about LJ as a service has always been how easy it is to control who sees what you post. Please, PLEASE don't start messing with that, LJ!

[THE TEXT CONTAINED WITHIN THIS POST AND THE COMMENTS TO IT ARE NOT TO BE REPRODUCED OR COPIED ON ANY OTHER SITE OR MESSAGE BOARD WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE WRITER.]

I think I have mentioned before my smoldering loathing for a sleazeball movie called I Spit On Your Grave. This ... film (if you can call it that) is about a woman who rents a house in the country and is gang-raped by four men in a sequence that lasts - I wish I were exaggerating - nearly forty minutes. After recovering somewhat, she goes to a nearby church to ask forgiveness for what she's about to do (repentance, ur doin it rong) and proceeds to brutally kill the men one by one. In the most notorious scene in the film, which is pretty much the only reason people seek it out, she castrates one of the men in a bathtub and leaves him screaming for his mommy until he bleeds to death.

This is a dare movie, pure and simple, with no artistic merit whatsoever and no apparent reason for its shocking violence and disgusting, interminable real-time rape sequence. There is no characterization, no real story, and the production value is so poor that - violence aside - it is nigh unwatchable. It is a product of its time, from an era when you could literally make a movie about anything.

So now, of course, in a time where you can REmake literally anything, SOMEONE IS REMAKING IT. The producers, one of whom was the director of the original (yay, consistency), are planning to make it just as controversial but keep it to an R-rating. Good luck with that, I guess. The original, incidentally, was banned in several countries and originally had to be cut to pieces just to get an adult rating in the UK and Australia.

The original is a nasty, ugly film, but it exists, for better or worse, as part of the history of exploitation cinema. Can't we just leave it at that and not do it over with hotter, younger, douchier actors?

I'm not bothering to cut this, because I'm that incensed.

I thought nothing could top my disgust for the gleeful partisan meanness of last night, but kudos to whoever put that video together that was supposed to be a tribute to 9/11 heroes but has now become my number one reason why the Republican party needs to let someone else cut in for a while.

There was an unspoken taboo in the media that graphic images from 9/11 were not to be used for partisan purposes, and that has just been broken. Someone in the GOP's convention team thought it would be awesome to show 3 minutes of cut-together footage that even the "liberal media" won't dare show. And then the crowd burst into applause and cheers at the end. For God's sake, even Michael Moore's propagand-ish film about 9/11 had the decency to black out the screen and not show us all that.

It's on YouTube, but I'm not going to dare link it. If you're curious, it's easy enough to find. Keith Olbermann may be a sexist ass who is so far in the tank for Obama he's digging a ditch in the bottom of it, but he's absolutely right this time: that was inappropriate, to say the least.

I'm not bothering to cut this, because I'm that incensed.

I thought nothing could top my disgust for the gleeful partisan meanness of last night, but kudos to whoever put that video together that was supposed to be a tribute to 9/11 heroes but has now become my number one reason why the Republican party needs to let someone else cut in for a while.

There was an unspoken taboo in the media that graphic images from 9/11 were not to be used for partisan purposes, and that has just been broken. Someone in the GOP's convention team thought it would be awesome to show 3 minutes of cut-together footage that even the "liberal media" won't dare show. And then the crowd burst into applause and cheers at the end. For God's sake, even Michael Moore's propagand-ish film about 9/11 had the decency to black out the screen and not show us all that.

It's on YouTube, but I'm not going to dare link it. If you're curious, it's easy enough to find. Keith Olbermann may be a sexist ass who is so far in the tank for Obama he's digging a ditch in the bottom of it, but he's absolutely right this time: that was inappropriate, to say the least.

But this has to be one of the worst exercises in poor taste that I've ever seen. It's called the "Titanic Adventure Slide." Come on, kids! Slide down the ship's deck just like the real people who really died!

I saw this thing at a mall, with kids playing on it, and I felt like I was the ONLY person who was appalled. What are people thinking making a plaything like that?!

But this has to be one of the worst exercises in poor taste that I've ever seen. It's called the "Titanic Adventure Slide." Come on, kids! Slide down the ship's deck just like the real people who really died!

I saw this thing at a mall, with kids playing on it, and I felt like I was the ONLY person who was appalled. What are people thinking making a plaything like that?!