What The Hell Happened To...

Movies?

I'm becoming increasingly concerned that we may be almost done with movies. I think about the best movies I've seen lately. The new Star Trek was good, but it's still just Star Trek again. The Dark Knight was awesome, but how many Batman movies can we make? Inglourious Basterds was pretty good, but about a half hour too long and certainly not Tarantino's best work. Then I think about all the bad movies I've seen or heard about lately.

I watched a little bit of the Golden Globe awards a couple of weeks ago. I honestly don't know why, that doesn't really sound like me. But I did. I usually at least pay attention to the comedy category when those award shows are on, because, ya know, I like jokes. The nominees this year were just a mess. It's complicated? I'm not going to see that, but just from the commercials and previews, my guess is I'd be more inclined to file that one under tragedy. Julie and Julia? I'm sure it's a nice movie if you like Julia Child, but I have a hard time imagining it as funny. "oh look, she wants to cook, but it's hard, and maybe she's a little clumsy, HI-larious, but also inspiring". If you're trying to inspire me, or make me feel happy, that's not a comedy, and you won't succeed.

The Hangover won for best comedy. I saw that movie. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great either. I sort of feel like we've already pulled out all the comedy Vegas has to offer. We get it, crazy things happen in Vegas, and there's strippers and hookers and alcohol and stuff. Avatar won for best picture. Maybe it's a great movie, but the contrary son of a bitch in me refuses to ever see it or acknowledge it's existence.

Then, this weekend, I saw two different DVD's. We'll get to the second one later, but the first one was The Invention of Lying. What a disaster. Just a wandering plot with a thin premise and 65 different versions of the same joke. "Ohhh, I get it, people would be really mean and stuff if they couldn't lie". And why do we always assume that people who don't have the ability to lie also can't just shut up? Why does not being able to lie also mean giving voice to every stupid thought that enters your head?

After about 55 minutes of that, out of nowhere, you get 5 or 10 minutes of really good, harsh religious satire. It seems good natured when you're watching the movie, but when you think about it, it's actually a pretty hard ass kicking for the concept of religion. Here's the basic premise. People can't lie and, at the same time, there's no concept of religion or the afterlife. Then, one guy figures out how to lie and, almost immediately, invents religion. After that fun little bit, you get about 30 more minutes of nonsense and there's your movie. So, I enjoyed about five minutes because I'm not religious and I wasn't offended, but if you're a religious person, who might be, ya know, bothered by the suggestion that religion is all a giant lie, it might be the worst movie you could ever see.

Have we just run out of stories to tell? That has to happen eventually, right? I don't know. I don't like this theory because it's sort of untestable. How do you tell the difference between Hollywood being out of new ideas and Hollywood just being lazy? It's impossible.

Maybe we just have too many stupid people around (this, by the way, is one of my theories for quite of few of the problems we have). Stupid people like stupid movies, because smart comedies or well-written dramas make them frightened and angry. Maybe appealing to this lowest common denominator is killing Hollywood.

Don't get me wrong, I've seen some legitimately good movies in the last few years. The previously mentioned Dark Knight and Star Trek, The Lucky Ones, Funny People, The Hurt Locker, Music Within was a really good, little known movie, District 9 was pretty solid. But none of them jumped out at me as a reason to be hopeful. They seemed more like the last remnants of quality being washed downstream in the endless river of crap.

This brings me to the second DVD I saw this weekend. 500 Days of Summer is a romantic comedy that won a lot of film festival awards. Needless to say, it wasn't on the top of my to see list. But I'm a big fan of Zooey Deschanel and it was either that or Pelham 123. Anyway, what a great movie. The romantic part was realistically depressing. The comedy was genuine and never felt forced. The whole thing was spot on from start to finish, I don't think I would have changed anything. And just like that, I feel better about movies.

Hey, you know what. Maybe movies were always mostly crap. Maybe I'm just noticing more now because my mood gets progressively worse as I get older and DVD's make it easier to see the movies I used to get through life without noticing. Yeah, I'm going with that. Hey, could that be the answer to everything? Nothing's getting worse, I just like things less than I used to. No, I don't think so, TV's definitely better (in spite of the Jersey Shore, and if you didn't see a second season of that show coming, you don't know anything about shamelessness), video games are better too. I only play Madden, but still, it's better. Phew! For a minute there I thought it was all my fault.

Tilting At Windmills

I was watching CNN Sunday night and...wait, stop right there. Why was I watching CNN Sunday night? Well, the Mad Men season is over, Fox was showing re-runs and my favorite part of Sunday Night Football (other than Collinsworth) had already happened. For my money, the best part of SNF is when the players introduce themselves. I especially enjoy the Miami guys, as in "Bryant McKinnie, The U" and "Jon Beason, The..U already know". And yes, I saw the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary "The U" and yes, it was awesome. Also, the tag line, "What if I told you college football was hit by a decade long hurricane?", best movie tag line ever, I will accept no other nominees. That was my quickest digression to date, back to CNN.

CNN's Planet in Peril series had taken our intrepid reporter, one Anderson Cooper, to Hawaii. Anderson has a tough job. We were learning about the early stages of Hawaii's energy revolution, which is important because going to Hawaii is like a 17 hour flight for everyone, so I think they owe us all some oil. Of the many things I saw, two stood out.

First, some science guys have decided to air condition about 40 buildings in Honolulu by piping sea water in from offshore (and deep down, so it's cold) and running it through a pipe system which would cool the buildings, sort of like how refrigerators work. When I worked in Manhattan, I worked with a guy who couldn't afford an air conditioner for his apartment. His genius plan was to put a big bowl of ice in front of his fan. I'm sure the sea water AC guys thought their plan through a little more thoroughly than my old co-worker, but this still sounds more like a harebrained scheme than a great idea.

Second, we saw a 20-turbine wind farm in Maui. The turbines use computers to harness the wind in the most efficient way and they power about 9 percent of the island. This sounds a little more promising. The only problem is, anytime you want to put these things somewhere, the locals go nuts because nobody buys beachfront property so they can look at windmills. That's what happened in Maui, these 20 turbines didn't get built until oil prices went so high people just couldn't take it anymore. This stood out in my mind because it really epitomizes the way most people seem to feel about the environment. We're not anti-environment, but the things we have to do to improve the environment are annoying and inconvenient, and why bother saving the planet if we can't have a clear view of the pretty ocean?

I already had climate issues on the brain, because the President was over in Copenhagen last week at some sort of U.N. climate meeting. (Sidenote: I also saw Glenn "Goldmember" Beck recently announce on his show that he refuses to pronounce Copenhagen correctly. If I had the time, I think my blog would just be me watching every episode of Glenn's show and pointing out how consistently stupid he is. He's the best.) I, for one, was impressed with what the world's leaders got done in Denmark. They seem to have struck a very important deal to all go back to their respective countries and pretend they struck a very important deal. Good for them.

Truth is, if I was China or India or a number of other developing nations, I wouldn't be interested in a climate deal either. Picture this. You and I get stranded on an island. We've got water, but very little food. After a few weeks of eating dirt and whatever plants we figured out weren't poisonous, a plane flies over and randomly drops two big, delicious steaks on our island. I find them first and eat one right away. Then you show up, you see the one empty steak box and deduce that I've clearly eaten what was inside, and you go to eat the second steak, but I say you can't. I say it's all the food we have and we better ration it. Would you be cool with that? No, of course not. You'd say I got to eat my steak and the second one is yours and you can do whatever you want with it. We spent quite a bit of time burning fossil fuels with impunity and building our big shiny country. Now other countries want their industrial revolutions and we're telling them they need to watch their emissions and think about the planet. We may be right, but it isn't exactly fair (and sure, life's not fair, but try telling that to China, damn communists).

So, there's a lot of stories swirling around these days about the environment and climate change. Copenhagen, stolen e-mails from scientists, our liberal Congress making noise about trying to do some environmental stuff before they get thrown out of office next November. I have to admit, I'm a little torn on the climate change/global warming issue. I'm not one of these deniers who thinks we can ignore giant pieces of Antarctica breaking off because it still gets cold in the winter (Sean Hannity thought it was hilarious that it was snowing in Denmark during the U.N. conference. Does it ever stop snowing in Denmark? I'd like to see an episode of Jeopardy with Sean, Glenn Beck and anyone from Fox and Friends). And I'm not one of these people who thinks the science is still up in the air, mostly because that's what idiots say about evolution too, and whenever I hear it I get the sudden urge to hit someone over the head with a monkey.

I'm torn on climate change for the same reason you haven't seen an entire blog post from me complaining about MTV's Jersey Shore (I watched like seven minutes of an episode last week, just long enough to get a sense of what was happening but not so long that I could no longer control the urge to kill myself. The apocalypse is coming people, there's nothing you can do about it now). We all agree it's a very bad thing, but can we really do anything about it? Short of giving up all the cars and electricity right now, can we really fix this problem with gradual emissions reductions and solar panels?

Then I think, maybe I'm disheartened because our current ideas for responding to climate change are so crappy. Exhibit A, ethanol. Yes, ethanol produced from sugarcane has done a lot for Brazil, but we don't have sugarcane, we have corn. Currently most (or maybe even all, I don't know, or really care) of our gas is 10% ethanol. Hooray? I can't remember where I heard this, maybe an episode of The West Wing, but I once heard somebody compare dealing with an oil shortage by subsidizing ethanol to dealing with a gin shortage by subsidizing tonic water.

Exhibit B, cap and trade. This is where businesses that pollute get some sort of cap on how much they can pollute. If a business comes in under the cap, they can sell their extra pollution allowance to some other business that just can't help itself, creating a cash incentive for polluting as little as possible. I feel like I shouldn't even have to explain how stupid this is. This is like telling a criminal who killed 20 people this year that he can only kill 15 people next year, and if he wants to kill anyone else, he has to buy more murders from some other, less homicidal criminal. In theory, you'd get some murder reduction, but wouldn't you kind of be missing the point? That murder is bad and reducing it by a little bit only makes things a little bit less bad.

This is where I'm stuck. Are there better ideas out there somewhere that can reverse whatever climate change is already happening? Or, are our efforts to fight climate change just futile attempts that only serve to make us feel better? I don't know. I'm not saying this would mean we shouldn't try. 200 years from now, when our clever descendants have learned how to live under the sea, it would be nice for them to be able to look back at us and say "at least they tried".

This isn't one of those times when I say we need to either come up with a great idea or just shut up and die. I think we should keep trying. Sometimes good ideas come from bad ideas. Like, maybe if we make enough ethanol, we'll create ethanol based leprechauns who can use rainbows to clear all the carbon dioxide out of the sky. This is a great idea because, of course, as leprechauns, their rainbows would all lead to pots of gold, so it's a win all the way around. But let's be realistic, we're at least 15 years away from leprechaun technology. In the mean time, isn't it possible that we're just tilting at windmills with our alternative energies and clever pollution cap schemes?

The good news? The planet isn't going anywhere, the planet will be here long after we're gone. When people say we should save the planet, they mean we should save ourselves. If the worst fears of climate change scientists are realized, life might suck for a while, but we're smart (well, some of us are, a few at least) and we'll figure out a way to get past it. The really good news? If programs like the wind turbines in Maui get more popular, we'll have plenty of windmills to joust with.

Totally unrelated PS...I learned something today. Did you know Toys for Tots is run by the Marine Corps Reserves? I didn't know that. There are a lot of worthy charities out there, and it's hard to choose, but Toys for Tots allows you to help out, ya know, tots, and also the Marines. http://www.toysfortots.org/