Saw 5...meh.

As you may have heard, Saw 5 is planned for release for this coming Halloween season. Now, I actually dug the first two movies of the (unbelievably) successful franchise, but the last two flicks sucked barnyard scrotum and I'm sure that this next one will be no different.

Honestly, just watching the series is like a lesson in the law of diminishing returns. The first movie was great, the second was good, the third was passable, and the fourth was tedious. At this rate, the fifth flick should be like a cinematic root canal.

I'm hoping that this movie bombs. That way, we'll only have to deal with a few direct-to-DVD sequels before the series fizzles out.

Quick political complaint

Very, very rarely will I get into anything political on here as there are a skajillion other forums on the web for it, but I do want to voice a complaint.

I'm sick of riders on legislation.

I just read an article about how Bush wants to spend $770 million on alleviating rising food costs for impoverished countries in Africa. When I saw that, I thought, "Really? He actually wants to do something philanthropic?" Helping feed the hungry is awesome! What can be wrong with that?

Well, upon reading further, it turns out that the money to help feed the hungry is part of a larger bill to spend $70 billion on the Iraq war for 2009. In essence, the millions for food is only attained if the billions for war is approved. Not so philanthropic after all.

The bitch of this is that if Congress poo-poos spending any more money on a war that the majority of the American people want to be done with, the GOP will say that the Dems are horrible human beings who won't help the starving. The only other option in this case is to fund a war you don't support for the year after Bush leaves office.

I'm sickened by this tactic of taking something important and using it as a kind of hostage to get a horrible piece of legislation passed. The worst thing is that it usually works. Hey, here's a bill to give all kids with cancer a cute puppy! Of course, it's only a part of a bill that allows mercury dumping in water reservoirs. Don't deny them bald kids the puppies!

It works the other way around too. Sometimes there's a wonderful piece of legislation to be approved, but there's a rider in it to allow something absolutely horrible. For instance, a bill could be introduced that did away with mandatory sentencing on non-violent drug felonies, leaving the sentencing to the discretion of a judge, but in the bill is a rider for immunity to the telecom companies for illegal wiretapping.

I know it won't change, but I sure would like to see some sort of reform made to stop this practice of adding things to bills.

Music Video Product Placement

I'm currently in the development phase of a music video with a friend of mine and while brainstorming our approach, we looked to mainstream hip-hop videos for inspiration. While surfing YouTube, we came across the video for Fergie's Fergalicious single.

At 2:51 into the video, there is gratuitous technology usage, as is typical. The multitude of dancers all take a listen to the song they're dancing to on an MP3 player that opens to reveal a small set of speakers. I'm not exaggerating when I say that the device is held in pure commercial fashion.



Since when did music videos start having product placement? It's literally a commercial within a commercial.

It's not like the label needed the cash to make the video (although you can tell that the budget for it must have been huge). What's happening is that advertising is getting so pervasive that ads are selling adspace in their own ads!

Sigh. I guess it's just all part of the machine to keep people buying crap they don't need. And more importantly, to keep people buying crap that they'll annoy me with on the el trains.

It's official: I freaking hate Michael Bay.

So I had the unfortunate experience of watching The Island the other night. This makes for the third pile of garbage I've seen from Michael Bay; the other two being Transformers and Armageddon.

The thing that really pisses me off about Bay's movies is that everything happens so fast, there's so much spectacle of chases and fights and explosions and sfx, that people watch this tripe and think it's gold, never realizing that they just ate a huge plate of steaming fuck. Second to that is Bay's complete neglect to take his movies into any area where the situations or issues posed could get into any deep contemplation. Of course, who can talk about issues when there's a helicopter/car chase to be had?

Let's take The Island, for example. A huge population of people cloned and grown ultimately for perfect organ replacements for their DNA-original masters. They've no idea about their purpose. They're told a lie about a worldwide contamination and if they're lucky, they win a lottery to go to "the island": the only contamination-free zone on Earth to help repopulate the world. In reality winning the lottery means certain death as they're to be carved up for transplantation.

Yes, farming clones as organ replacements is wrong since the clones have a consciousness and sentience, but that's not an argument that many would counter. It's easy to be on the side of the happy little clones and their cutesy innocence. We can all agree on this and pat ourselves on the back for being humanitarians.

The thing that Bay brings up and skirts around is with Scarlett Johansson's character. Her original has recently suffered a horrible car wreck and has 48 hours to live unless she gets the transplants from her clone. Although she knows that her original is dying, she does nothing and doesn't even seem to care about the fact. Even after speaking via videophone with her original's very young child, she never contemplates her purpose for being: keeping her original alive.

I'm not saying that Scarlett's character should've sacrificed herself or not. I'm saying that you had a delicious ethical issue here and instead of ever devoting any time to it, we get another helicopter chase, some running from mercenaries, and a campy scene where the lead mercenary judges the owner of the cloning company as an unethical man. (A mercenary who saw nothing wrong with firing automatic weapons and bombs in crowded civilian areas, mind you.) Bay dropped the ball.

Add to that all of Bay's awkward expositions, needless secondary characters bloating the runtime to more than 2 hours, and an almost fetishistic love for all things military, and you have a celluloid shit sandwich. You get the equivalent of the teenager who thinks he's all grown up: able to recognize the complexities of adult life, but unable to deal or address any of them.

Photoshopping the flaws away

I was going to write this post a couple of days ago, but didn't get the time to plan out what I was going to say. However, today I saw an article in the Sun-Times about this very subject, so I'm weighing in.

There's been a lot of fervor lately over how Photoshop and photographic retouching are horrible practices that distort the reality of beauty and glamour and blah blah blah. These people are saying that beauty is some lie perpetuated by a dark, shadowy cabal in league with retouching artists.

Let's back off for a moment and look at the reality of the situation. Reality and Glamour are not the best of pals. Hell, the word glamour is the name of fairy-magic. Making something seem like more than it is. We put these models and celebrities on such high pedestals that their reality is that of glamour. No one wants to think of someone like Tyra Banks dropping kids off at soccer practice or Cate Blanchett scooping out a cat's litter box.

Yeah, Faith Hill may be an aging mother of three that leads a hard-working lifestyle and as such, doesn't look like a supermodel. But people have this idealistic idea of who Faith Hill is based on her music and public persona and so, when her image is put out to sell magazines, records, or whatever, she's going to be made to look like the goddess that people imagine. In this case, it's not the fashion world dictating what beauty is, they're dressing up a person in the expectations of the public who consumes these images. To put it simply, as Bill Maher once said, "Hollywood is your mirror."

Remember in the late 90's when some fashion designers tried to hype and use what they called, "ugly models?" We're talking bald women, odd shaped people, too skinny, etc. I don't know about you, but I didn't see a slew of bald, skinny chicks running amok through the city. To be honest, I don't believe that a small group of people could make the unattractive attractive, no matter how hard they tried. Attractiveness plays on certain triggers we have on an evolutionary level. Some guys may have a bald girl fetish, but most guys won't feel attracted to bald girls because a woman's hair is a sign of her health. Good health is attractive.

They reality of the matter is that throughout history, artists have always done what they could to portray their subjects in the most flattering possible way. Moles were just not painted. That spare tire wasn't scultped. Unfortunately, a camera mechanically records the light reflecting off of a subject. That means every mole, every flyaway hair, every inch of flab gets written in the emulsion for all time. It's up to the retouching process to bring out the "inner truth" of the shot, much like the painter may change a model's eyes to blue.

The Sun-Times article also talked about the harmful effect all of this evil retouching was having on teen girls who were undergoing fashionable eating disorders to look like idealized images. I find it reprehensible to place blame on retouchers. This is clearly a result of the public not having the tools to take a critical look at the media that aurrounds them daily. I mean, I've heard people calling reality shows "documentaries." To be ignorant of the retouching process is one thing, but even they most unknowing person has to realize that every photo is the result of a hair, makeup, and wardrobe team under the supervision of a professional photographer with professional lighting who is paid to use his expertise to make the subject look like a million bucks.

Retouching may be able to change reality, but it's only doing what so many artists have done for centuries and should come as no surprise.