Memories of Spamland

Strap in, folks. I'm about to tell you about the greatest spam mail chain I ever had that made Hotmail jerk off directly in my face about... cripes, ten years ago. Aging, man. It happens.

Oh and it's kinda porn-y spam, so you've been warned about that. Still, the language was less offensive than what I regularly use here.

Okay, get this; MAD-LIBS SPAM. If there's an underground awards circuit for this kind of thing, like the spammies or whatever, whoever did this should receive top honors. Every single email followed the same exact pattern with different words dropped in each time. The pattern was as such:

"[Do something destructive] to her [euphemism for vagina] with your [euphemism for big] [euphemism for penis]"

The practical upshot? Shit like this:

"Shatter her snatch with your mammoth johnson."
"Annihilate her cooch with your huge sausage."

And on and on. It was pretty magical, because as I recall they avoided using the same words to a rather impressive degree.

I was actually sad when I lapsed from that spam list.

Die Hard Frenzy: Olympus Has Fallen

A few days ago, a bit late for my usual Christmas ritual, I rewatched the first Die Hard. It is one of those classic action movies with a pedigree that occasionally gets trotted out as a bright example of the genre, and with fairly good reason. Despite a few cliches and structural problems, it's somehow survived a barrage of follow-ups that, even if they aren't the worst things ever to flop out of the rapid-fire industry sequel hole, have become a serious joke that somehow fails to tarnish opinion of the original. You can mention Die Hard and not apologetically say "and it's inferior sequels." That's a seriously neat trick.

Inevitably, it also gets remade with enough variance that people don't need to pay for rights or royalties. Speed was legendarily pitched to Hollywood execs as "Die Hard on a bus."

The latest in this particular mantrain is Olympus Has Fallen, which as I pointed out recently is part of a trend that makes me think our national psyche is taking a royal beating from having a rather sterling military-industrial complex at the expense of the rest of our infrastructure. What I didn't mention is that it's kind of awful, despite being semi-decent violence. In brief: About forty Koreans wipe out the entire secret service, a large chunk of the metropolitan police department, drop the hood of the Washington Monument on a group of tourists like the cartoon foot from the Monty Python intro, and then get taken out by a single disgraced agent, here played by former actor and current scream queen Gerard Butler, whose breasts are now so big he should be required by law to wear a bra.

What follows is a comparison and involves a lot me playing amateur film theorist. I'm likely to nail down a few things, might make a few wild miscalls, but it's more to get thoughts down right now than really set down rules.

The big thing that defines Die Hard and successful imitators, to me, is this; It is the worst night of the main character's life. There's a lot that adds up to this:

Our man has history: We meet John McClane as his plane sets down in Los Angeles. The guy sitting next to him notices our hero is white-knuckling it and offers him some crazy advice, to go barefoot on a carpet and make fists with his toes. "I've been doing it for eight years and I'm just fine." he says. McClane gets up to retrieve his luggage and his new friend spots his gun. "It's okay, I'm a cop. I've been doing this for eleven years." (I may be completely screwing up the exact words as I'm bare-backing this off a not-completely-fresh viewing.)

He's here in LA to see his family for Christmas, but the relationship with his wife is rocky. The limo driver taking him to the office building she works at manages to guess some information even though McClane won't readily talk; she came out here for the job and he thought it wouldn't work out. It did. When he gets to the office and looks her up, he realizes she's using her maiden name.

He meets up with her, her surprisingly kind boss, and the office cokehead who is clearly hitting on her. Things are tense between them, but they also obviously still love each other despite her 80s hair and his unemployed-in-the-40s fashion sense. She has to do a few work-related things despite this being the office Christmas party, so she leaves him to get cleaned up. As he's doing so, he makes fists with his toes on the carpet and smiles. Apparently it works.

Pretty rounded out, pretty human, just a touch of authentic quirk.

Our man is isolated: A very careful balance was struck here. From the moment the terrorists show up and everything goes south, McClane is truly on his own. He's given contact with the terrorist leader and a nearby cop via a radio, but since the bad guys know nothing about him and he doesn't have a private line to his friend, he can't really reveal anything about himself, especially where he is or what he knows about the terrorists that gives him an advantage. Not only is it a chance to make your hero and villain intelligent (and brother, do they), it gives McClane a chance to interact with others without giving him easy access to solutions.

It also gives the movie a chance to give human qualities to supporting roles, kind of a lost art form even in dramatic films these days, as Carl from Family Matters (that's such a lazy joke but I honestly had to look up the actor, Reginald VelJohnson, and realized I never knew his name in the first place) has to coax McClane through the rough times by revealing more and more about himself. The conversations are well-paced and feel relevant.

Though I have to point out that this character's constant chagrin at his boss's obligatory bull-headed attempts to control the situation to the peril of McClane and the hostages is a bit too obvious as an attempt to control our perception.

Not an intro that inspires confidence, but It Gets Better.

Our man is clever: One or two slip-ups, but as mentioned, McClane goes well above the usual doofiness of film protagonists, action or otherwise. His plans are decent to brilliant, his improvisations sound (as far as that goes), and the only reason he doesn't rule the situation is that he's up against a similar mind with superior resources. Tell me, how often do you see a film where the entire dramatic situation could have been avoided by the protagonist just NOT being a bozo?

The scene we'll pick apart here involves McClane actually running into his arch-enemy, who he hasn't seen yet. The guy acts like an escaped hostage and fools McClane just long enough for the two to get some important information out of each other, but when he thinks he's got the drop on our hero... nope. McClane figured it out just in time to dodge a bullet.

Action takes many forms: This would require another viewing, but I'm pretty sure at least half the time he doesn't even end up shooting his opponents. Gunfights are depicted as wild, dangerous, and difficult to get a handle on. The feeling is that if McClane came out of cover long enough to actually line up a shot, his head would pop off half a second later.

We see the toll the evening is taking: In a very physical way. Lots of jokes still get thrown around about Bruce Willis' filthy wife beater, but the film does an excellent job of punctuating that McClane is going through hell by continually degrading his appearance, both through wear and tear, and injury. This probably also helps deflect the reality that at least three events in the movie would have really killed a man, even at peak fitness.

His injuries are similarly severe, and not as thoroughly shrugged off as they usually are in action cinema. Going barefoot over glass late in the story serves to really punch home the savage evening of buggery this guy's morale must be going through. It also helps control the tempo and naturally segue into another conversation as he fixes up the wound.

The wife serves a purpose: Sure, she's a hostage, and eventually she'll wind up with a gun to her head in a stand-off, but McClane's wife is also allowed her strengths and what background they can fit in around the narrative. She's the one the other hostages look to, and she makes the case for what they need to make things go smoothly to the terrorists. She even gets her own licks in at the end. So half a point here, I'd say.

Well, maybe more. The movie isn't pedantic enough to spell it out, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where her influence is removed and McClane survives the finale.

The UK poster for Olympus Has Fallen, which could

double as the entire experience if you were hit with a

stun grenade while looking at it.

So, Olympus Has Fallen, the Red Dawn for the yuppie set. Man, it wants to be Die Hard. It really, really does. For the sake of argument, I'll go so far as to call it a film.

The plot what happens is that our man, Mike Banning, is a top secret service agent, likeable lug, and close friend of the president who is escorting the first family one night when... some shit happens. I don't know, it's like a log falls on the limo and the film doesn't care enough to explain, just SHIT HAPPENS and the car nearly goes off a bridge in the snowy spinout. He saves the president but, in a token act of tragedy, has to let the first lady do a half gainer into the river below.

Speed forward to Banning now a burnt-out desk jockey at the treasury, upsetting his girlfriend by not going to barbeques with her, and oh god whatever the fucking Koreans attack. They just attack, okay? NORAD and everything else designed to stop far technologically superior threats from doing this? Whatever. It's time to smack the audience in the face repeatedly with a two hundred million dollar plank and get to our Die Hard.

So how's it stack up on my arbitrary scale?

Our man has history, or at least we assume so: Pretty much what you saw in the opening. He gets along with the president and his son. He has a girlfriend. Other than that, he's apparently his job. An entirely passable scene in a cafe has Banning running into his former Secret Service pals and us realizing how much he misses it. Awww.

Our man is isolated, mostly because he just gets down like that: Well, mostly. Getting him inside the White House before it went on lockdown was clumsy enough, but got the job done. Isolating him by slaughtering virtually everybody with a gun in the course of thirty seconds was ham-handed, but whatever. Having him able to bring in the cavalry at the end but leaving this plot hole open to go do the obligatory cinematics himself was just Caligula crazy, though.

 Idiots forgetting academy training about cover or a

very special episode of Cop Rock?

In addition, his radio banter (mirroring Die Hard rather directly over multiple sources) serves less of a purpose. They could have replaced most of his dialog with the big bad with "Fuck you!" "No, fuck you!" and been just as well. In fact, there is a one-liner that ups the clever factor on this suggestion by... virtually nothing. "Let's play a game of fuck off. You go first."

That quiet munching sound you hear is my backbrain eating my forebrain.

Our man isn't that clever: Only thing that pops out to me is that he knows what secret passage the president's son is hiding in, which is telegraphed by this conversation he has before the incident: "Is the president's son still sneaking around the White House, making everybody crazy?" "I wonder who taught him that." Which is about as subtle as an exploding sledgehammer rammed up the backside. It ranks up there with seeing the Korean ambassador with Rick Yune at his shoulder and instantly knowing who's going to kill who in a huge surprise reveal when the shit hits the fan.

The fact is, Banning will veer wildly from one end of the spectrum to the other. He'll expertly kill the White House's security system and then have an intense mental struggle with simple devices. Like most fiction, he generally thinks at the speed of plot.

The direct comparison with Die Hard, of course, is that he meets somebody he assumes is friendly who really wants to kill him. It plays out with striking similarity to the scene from that movie, except A) it's not his arch-nemesis and so B) he's free to kill the guy at the end of the scene.

Did I fail to mention Die Hard had only twelve villains to dispatch? I believe the Banning body count here is more like twenty-eight, twelve terrorists dying beforehand, countless civilians and military personnel, and of course pride.

The action is samey: One scene has Banning whack a guy to death with a bronze bust of Lincoln. Other than that, the answer to any situation is always more bullets. It's a fucking video game, okay?

Our demi-god wears clothing made out of tanks: Banning gets one gash on his forehead, a mild abrasion on his cheek, and his vest is pretty much just dirty. Was he stabbed at one point? Shot? Doesn't matter, he found a glowing green health kit or something when we weren't looking.

Also, those two injuries are going to vanish by the end.

The girlfriend stares at news reports: Yes, the same framing device that stretches the acting abilities of many a woman in action films past the breaking point, the marathon television viewing at work. Like a bored twentysomething Netflix binging on Orange is the New Black, whatshername has little to do beyond stand on a line of tape somewhere and radiate enough concern to make her skull pop out of her skin. Bonus points for having her work at a hospital in a desperate bid to make her the least bit relevant, but then that just creates the problem that she's probably the busiest doctor/nurse/medical fetishist since Pearl Harbor and mostly she's just staring past us and hoping her boyfriend is okay.

Oh, the hell with what little objectivity I have; up yours, movie. Like most of my dates, this will go a lot more easily if you just get in that hole I dug in the basement and do it quietly.

There are some other connecting points I steamrolled over, like those oh so stupid superior officers being out to get everybody killed through sheer bullheadedness, the quality of the one-liners (Die Hard mixes the absolute best with some groaners, Olympus... mostly the latter), and some other themes. These aren't quite as important to the formula, but again that's my own opinion.

This isn't to say that Olympus Has Fallen is completely without merit, because it's not. You can watch it, and those of a certain patriotic bent who can shrug off the accidental self-satirizing elements will take something away from it... even if that something is the cinematic equivalent of "look out for the snakes on level five." But if you want something that really takes it to the next level or even just matches the existing high notes we have, this movie doesn't work. It's completely flip attitude toward extinguishing life wholesale in the opening attack makes any attempt at gravity through threatening individual lives cartoonish (save for one well-acted White House staffer played by Melissa Leo, who also happens to be the only one aside from the president who survives).

But considering it really wants to be something that it clearly doesn't understand, it must be held up to that standard and in this, it also clearly comes short.

Next time I'll compare another, more favorable Die Hard influence that happens to be a video game. No, really.

I think time vindicates the film critic

There is an idea amongst some screenwriters working in the industry that critics are fast becoming outdated in the face of the internet peer review.

I think a certain group's feelings are hurt, personally.

Professional critics have both the greatest and least enviable job in a lot of ways. They get to go see movies, they get to write about movies, and they accept many bribes from studios with no promise of a moral payout. That is just really damn cool. But they're also usually a lot more insightful than the average consumer, and can have a hard time balancing the form's potential for art against the commercial reality of the public's tastes. I'm not sure which one should weigh more heavily on them, and how much the personal slant needs to be submerged when reviewing a film, but this is something that quite often earns them the ire of studios, writers, and also a portion of the public that is now given greater strength of voice by technology.

Though in the last case, let's be clear; people who call out critics on Rotten Tomatoes are usually just Buffalo Bill levels of insane and take offense at anything not resembling their own opinion. A good critic will voice sound reasoning in why a film falls short of the mark for them (and brother, I know many of them aren't that good). The average respondent's reasoning is usually roughly "fuck u".

Now here's the thing, and this is by no means a scientific observation yet; I think, over time, the public's tastes begin to conform to what the critic has previously said. I'd have to spend some time with the Wayback Machine to really prove it and have all intentions of creating graphs, which means

THIS WILL NEVER HAPPEN

but here are some observations.

The 90s, which according to one of the five patron saints of the screen William Goldman, was a horrible time for film, saw a lot of real flash in the pan movies. I remember 54 and Cruel Intentions being a couple of must-see films that kind of got panned but were popular with audiences. Over a decade latter, you can look at imdb.com scores and the like to see that audiences are now closer to critics in their esteem of these titles. Pretty middle of the road, really.

Look, I'm a supposed screenwriter myself, so what I say next isn't the easiest bit, but we have pros who need to step back and think about their stance on this. I saw a working writer on a forum, great guy and I cherish the fact that he walks among us, who had a movie produced recently that utterly bombed. This is one of the guys who thinks that the professional critic is an artefact of a previous era, but it kind of dropped a Tetris block into place when he thanked a user for their kind review. That review? The user had just lost a parent and needed a laugh.

Hey, it's a compliment and you should take it, that you brought a bit of light into this person's temporarily miserable life. But that's not a review, it's an emotional reaction. No less valid, but one is not the other.

My roundabout point is this; the technology of communication has not invalidated an old profession so much as it has allowed us to insulate ourselves from dissenting opinion by allowing us to wrap ourselves in the warm, selective afterglow of those who agree with us. The ego is a reflexive muscle like any other and if you don't allow it it's wounds, it won't strengthen.

And it's not like most critics want to see bad movies and tear people down. I've worked on a few films, all of them pretty horrible, but I think most people orbiting the industry see that the worst film still has a lot of people bleeding over its creation. A good critic is going to give you the tools you need to do better the next time out. Ignore them at your own peril.

Wherever did you get to, Paul Tatara? This one was for you.

The Da Vinci Load

So there's been a non-ending stream of joy and mirth surrounding Shia LaBeouf's inability to be coherent without directly carving chunks of language from another source and repeating the sounds exactly as they originally occurred using his own voice.

It's called plagiarism, but let's have fun with it.

So he makes a critically acclaimed short film that apparently rips off Dan Clowe (of Ghost World fame) and then gives a bunch of different apologies when he's called on it. And I mean many varied apologies, which are promptly found to each be copied word for word from different sources. It's like LaBeouf was trying to get a leg up on the inevitable Youtube sketches.

So the final bit of this, and the thing that makes it absolutely lovely to go and read for yourself, is a kind of moon-based email interview between him and bleedingcool.com. In it he manages to be obnoxious, crazy, AND stupid all at once. Seriously, go read it.

The thing is, I'm trying to be a nicer person. Really I am. But the way he's cornered several times and doesn't slip out of it so much as he oozes destroys my resistance here. And if you get to the end, there lies the ultimate treat; the chance to imagine LaBeouf saying "thug life". Comedy fucking gold.

But at the same time, getting to that statement is a real slog through an incomprehensible landscape that kind of resembles, if you squint very hard, written language. I'm about to run an experiment to see if I can make this more legible, or push it over the edge into the absurd. I'm taking LaBeouf's statements from this interview, translating them into Klingon, then Korean, then Russian, then back into English. Let's see what happens!

"What does an artist do – they just point and say look at this."

Translation: Iran is good, the only artist, subtle look.


"I agree with Julian Schnabel , Jeff koons, Duchamp ect……
You agree with?"

I agree with Julian Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Duchamp, etc.

Ready to give you?

(Okay so that one worked)


"Cool, u stick with ur squad
I’m good with mine
Live good player"

Squad mix

I have a good

The players have a good life

"Of course – art is not about itself, but the attention we bring to it.
Art is a lie the makes us realize the truth.
In the 21st century there is NO personal language.
Just personal selection of language.
We are products of editing.
Not authorship.
Appropriation has been the most influential theme in art sense the 70s.
If you look at Warhol’s work and say ” oh well he didn’t paint that – its just silk screens ”
Your missing the point.
Our notion of genius- a romantic – isolated figure – is fucking outdated
An updated notion of genius would have to center around ones mastery of information
And it’s dissemination
It’s the 21st century, thug life
It wants to be fee."

OK-you have to escape the attention, but it's not.

Learn the truth lie in Flash.

There is a private in the twenty-first century through the language.

Selection of individual language.

Editing product.

Author (s).

But you long influential theme ' 70 's nonsense.

So Warhol saw a victory and said: "Oh, we have the following screen only green silk mangoh Vichel»

There is thin.

Genius-thanks to a romantic figure in isolation is a concept of fucking

The concept, in the center of them, you can update the reason around the genius whose mastery

And dissemination of information

life in the twenty-first century, thug

Only a few are essential.

"Authorship is censorship
Should God sue me if I paint a river?
Should we give people the death sentence for parking violations-
You’ll not only have less parking violations but less DRIVERS."

Authorship censorship

The next day, I pray to God we can be sued for green, River mangoh?

Thus we provide parking dead

If you have a parking Bay, while the old driver.

"The word law is against my principles.
The problem begins with the legal fact that authorship is inextricably
bound up in the idea of ownership and the idea of language as
Intellectual property. Language and ideas flow freely between people
Despite the law.  It’s not plagiarism in the digital age – it’s repurposing.
Copyright law has to give up on its obsession with “the copy"
The law should not regulate “copy’s” or “reproductions” on there own.
It should instead regulate uses – like public distributions of copyrighted work -
That connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster.
The author was the person who had been authorized by the state to print there work.
They were the ones to be held accountable for the ideas.
THE FIRST LAWS ON AUTHORSHIP WERE USED TO CENSOR & PERSECUTE
THE WRITERS WHO DARED PUBLISH RADICAL IDEAS.
Simple – should creation have to check with a lawyer?"

For the principle of the word grammar.

Lung problems, legal and the fact that the author is inextricably

Are you sick of property thought and design language

Intellectual love. The expression language reduces the flow and freely, those who

It's the law. Reuse of Digital plagiarism-old know it.

The Act of «copies» surrender copyrigt obsession

"Copy" and then "clone" normative or VNS still dies.

Business manners and public works management instead of copyrigt distributions and thus the Tao

All the laws of the Empire and the copyrigt means economic incentives to grow.

Before working on the state name print artist-certified people.

One of them, which in theory of liability.

The author can be danohmeh Chou wa'dich censors persecution

Ngil ' 4 xech radical writer, posting.

We remember a simple check necessary the creation of lawyers?

"Both
I never asked to be paid
And never profited off anyone’s back
acting is Plagiarism
Like magicians
We tell you we’re gonna lie to you"

In their honor

Do not pay what you have to say

Will never again.

Plagiarism smoke

Mage as

He'min ' or lies, we

"I’m very sorry
I have agents to suss out material
I have a lawyer to get me out of jail
Nothing is original
Creativity is just connecting things"

Sorry

I have a space to explore general deposit

I have not had a third attorney tyurma

The source or

The only thing connecting creativity

 *                *                 *

Jesus, guys, I think it's a tie as to which version is more legible. I think in the end this all just kind of made me sad inside.