Culture • SARCASTIGATE.

07.16.2010
Art + Cinema + Commentary + Culture + Media
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July 16th, 2010

Sarcastigate at the Cinema: Inception.

Inception is great. It will make a billion dollars. Chris Nolan is going to have an even blanker check for the next film that he writes/directs and it showcases that he can, in fact, still write. I enjoyed it greatly and will watch it again when it comes out on BluRay. There are some major problems with it (or at least things that irritated me), though.

- It’s dumbed down. Following in the footsteps of other big-dollar, mainstream, intellectual, recursive thrillers, Nolan takes some short cuts. I watched the film once, late at night, and it all made painfully perfect sense. The characters spend a lot of time explaining things to each other that would be criminally obvious for anyone in their shoes. The explanation is clearly exclusively for the audiences benefit. Ellen Pages character serves as an extremely laughable outsider and an excuse to hold the audiences hand even tighter. There may be better precedent for this but the 2004 film Primer serves as a better example in how to challenge the audience through recursion interference (see also Solaris, Following, and even portions of the Matrix series.) Nolan didn’t have to take it to Primer extremes but he also didn’t have to rewrite this down to an elementary level. As a result, I’m not sure it merits the chronic rewatching that other recursive thrillers have leveraged into cultural phenomenons. But it will make a billion dollars.

- Skiing/shooting action scene. Has this ever been done well? Ever? Did Nolan think he could pull it off? As soon as I saw them near the skis I absolutely cringed. The only thing saving this entire ”level” is that they didn’t have Ellen Page strap on a snowboard. I thought for sure it was headed that way. Ouch. Truly awful.

- The effects. Some of them were incredible. Some of them were downright cheesy, though. CGI has come a long way since the Matrix but I still don’t think that this movie is going to age very well. In 20 years it’s going to look like a cartoon. I think it’s fine to be ambitious with your screenwriting but don’t assume you can build worlds from scratch.

- The heavy handedness of Leo’s familial faithfulness. Come on… give me a break…. the only thing driving him was his love for his kids and his wife? He’s really just a big softie that enjoys the game of experimenting in other peoples brains? Buhgaw.

You want to know all the good about the movie? Read another review. They are all covering it pretty well and I agree that the good stuff in this movie is REALLY good. The score is phenomenal (and Nolan didn’t allow the composer to see the movie before he scored it!!), the sound amazing. The cinematography and the set design are astounding. The fight scenes are (mostly) brilliant. Leo is going to be up for many awards. Did I mention that this movie will make a billion dollars? It will. You’ll love it.

My last prediction, though: Contrary to what so many critics are trumpeting this week… this will be nowhere near the best picture nominees come 2011. It just doesn’t have the legs.

Rating: 8/10

Postscript: The lucky gal I was watching this movie with was dozing on and off throughout the movie. It wasn’t because the movie was boring, it’s because it was LATE. While I was watching the movie I was actually thinking about how unnerving it would be to half sleep through… to wake up and feel like you hadn’t really missed anything (or had you?) I can’t imagine that experience. I wonder if it was pleasant or terrifying?

My Life (or Something Like It)

Gurguen recruited five women in their early twenties (all natural brunettes) to stand, one at a time, by the side of a road popular with hitchhikers in France. Their job was to try to get motorists to pull over. Each woman was equipped with three wigs, blond, brunette, and black, which she was instructed to rotate every time forty cars had passed. When a car stopped, she (and two independent observers) kept a record of what color wig she was wearing and whether the driver was male or female.

Drivers prefer blondes, it turns out. Blond hair, compared with brown or black hair, inspired a statistically larger proportion of drivers to stop and offer assistance (18% for blondes vs 14% and 13% for brunettes and women with black hair respectively). Interestingly, this was true only of male drivers. Female drivers, who stopped less frequently for hitchhikers, showed no hair color bias.

There is only one spot on the planet where grains will grow despite sub-arctic sunlight.

It is where the warm waters of the Gulf Stream wash ashore. The Baltic is the only place on earth where ocean currents keep it warm enough to grow grain despite dim sunlight.

When the inhabitants of this region switched to grain about 6 KYA, they suddenly got insufficient vitamin D to survive. They had stopped eating mostly meat and fish in a place where sunlight was too dim to produce vitamin D in normally pigmented skin.

And so they adapted by retaining into adulthood the infantile trait of extreme paleness. Blonde hair and blue eyes were other infantile traits that were just swept along accidentally.

Seven Words That Spell R-E-L-I-E-F.

george carlin 03 extra goofy Well, it turns out a potty mouth does more than earn your conversations an R rating: it actually relieves pain, according to a new study by Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston of Keele University in the UK. But that’s not all: you’d never know it from what your mom told you, but there are many positive, beneficial aspects of swearing, including harmless venting and social bonding (not to mention reams of adult comedy). Bad language does a lot of good. [...]

Going into the study, the researchers believed that swearing was actually a type of pain-related catastrophising—in other words, a “maladaptive response to pain” that made things like horrible agony worse, not better. But Stephens and company found that “…repeating a swear word, compared with repeating a neutral word, allowed participants to hold their hands in ice cold water for 40 seconds longer (on average), they perceived less pain on a pain perception scale (questionnaire) and they had a larger heart rate increase. Because we saw an increase in heart rate we think that people had an emotional reaction to swearing (indicated by the increase in heart rate), bringing about the fight or flight response, which is known to increase pain tolerance (make people more able to withstand pain).” In a nutshell, swearing has an analgesic, pain-lessening effect that could give Ibuprofen a run for its money, probably by working us into an aggressive, heightened state. [...]

“Why do I sleep in so late, I wish sleeping wasn’t so great, I promised you, I promised you that was through.”

4.) Being a night owl may also be a form of “handicap signaling.” Staying up late at night (possibly drinking and smoking) can take a toll on one’s health. Only a man who is fit and healthy would be able to compensate for his lifestyle. Assuming a man seems unaffected by little sleep, his evening orientation indicates a strong constitution — a sexy quality.

“I think it’s because she’s insecure, it’s just, she’s just always trying to hug everybody. You know, some people don’t like that. Some people don’t like to be hugged. But she doesn’t realize that. She takes it personally, and, it hurts her feelings. I don’t know what to do about that. Do you?”

lars-and-the-real-girl-upcoming-movies-581795_500_332[1]

Nisan was wandering aimlessly around the crowded exhibition hall when he suddenly found himself staring into Nemutan’s bright blue eyes. In the beginning, they were just friends. Then, when Nisan got his driver’s license a few months later, he invited Nemutan for a ride around town in his beat-up Toyota. [...] Now, after three years together, they are virtually inseparable. “I’ve experienced so many amazing things because of her,” Nisan told me, rubbing Nemutan’s leg warmly. “She has really changed my life.” [...]

Nemutan is a teenager and wears a little blue bikini and gold ribbons in her hair. Nisan knows she’s not real, but that hasn’t stopped him from loving her just the same. “Of course she’s my girlfriend,” he said, widening his eyes as if shocked by the question. “I have real feelings for her.” [...]

He treats her the way any decent man would treat a girlfriend — he takes her out on the weekends to sing karaoke or take purikura, photo-booth pictures imprinted on a sheet of tiny stickers. In the few hours we spent together, I watched him position her gently in the restaurant booth and later in the back seat of his car, making sure to keep her upright and not to touch her private parts. [...] He knows it’s weird for a grown man to be so obsessed with a video-game character, but he just can’t imagine life without Nemutan. “When I die, I want to be buried with her in my arms.” [...] 26phenom-500[1]

Nisan is part of a thriving subculture of men and women in Japan who indulge in real relationships with imaginary characters. These 2-D lovers, as they are called, are a subset of otaku culture— the obsessive fandom that has surrounded anime, manga and video games in Japan in the last decade. It’s impossible to say exactly what portion of otaku are 2-D lovers, because the distinction between the two can be blurry. Like most otaku, the majority of 2-D lovers go to work, pay rent, hang out with friends (some are even married). Unlike most otaku, though, they have real romantic feelings for their toys. The less extreme might have a hidden collection of figurines based on anime characters that they go on “dates” with during off hours. A more serious 2-D lover, like Nisan, actually believes that a lumpy pillow with a drawing of a prepubescent anime character on it is his girlfriend.

Toru Honda, a 40-year-old man with a boyishly round face and puppy-dog eyes, has written half a dozen books advocating the 2-D lifestyle. [...] “Pure love is completely gone in the real world,” Honda wrote. “As long as you train your imagination, a 2-D relationship is much more passionate than a 3-D one.”

So where did all the inner-city musical theater geeks end up, then?

“It’s crazy how you can go from being Joe Blow,” West begins his rap, “to everybody on your dick—no homo.” No homo, to those unfamiliar with the term, is a phrase added to statements in order to rid them of possible homosexual double-entendre. (“You’ve got beautiful balls,” you tell your friend at the bocce game—”no homo.”) [...]The term’s appearance in hip-hop coincided with the rise of the so-called “down-low brother,” a closeted black figure often demonized as a disease-spreading boogeyman, invisible by definition and thus potentially, frightfully, everywhere. Saying “no homo” might have started as a way for rappers to acknowledge and distance themselves from the down-low phenomenon. As the phrase has spread, many have decried no homo as depressingly retrograde, a pigheaded “That’s what she said” for homophobes. But the term functions in a more complicated way than a simple slur. [...]

Often, no homo appears not just as a disclaimer but as a punch line, a See what I did there? that flaunts one’s cleverness. “Just shot a video with R. Kelly, but no homo though,” Lil Wayne rapped in 2007. In this line—a sly nod to both a music video co-starring Wayne and Kelly and to the R&B singer’s alleged sex tape—no homo isn’t an afterthought; it’s the keystone that holds the whole joke together. A funny side effect here is that the no homo vogue doubtless encourages rappers not only to scrutinize everything they say for trace gayness, but to actively think up gay double-entendres just so that they can cap them off with no homo kickers.

Dance Like You Want To Break Your Penis

“Daggering” is slang for dance moves simulating sexual intercourse, some of which include excitable gymnast-like moves, writes Donna Hope Marquis, a lecturer in reggae studies at the University of the West Indies, Mona, in Kingston Jamaica, in an e-mail to NEWSWEEK. [...]

Jamaican doctors assert that those trying to replicate the powerful moves of daggering in the bedroom can end up with dramatic injuries: they say the incidents of broken penises have increased in the past year; according to an article in the Jamaican Star, some clinics are seeing two a month. [...]

The Culture Category Archive

Sarcastigate at the Cinema: Inception.

My Life (or Something Like It)

Al Franken Loves America?

Married With Children + 22 Years

Seven Words That Spell R-E-L-I-E-F.

“Why do I sleep in so late, I wish sleeping wasn’t so great, I promised you, I promised you that was through.”

The (music) world ends tomorrow and you may DIE.

So where did all the inner-city musical theater geeks end up, then?

Dance Like You Want To Break Your Penis