Politics & Government

Hypocrisy, Hollywood be thy name.

So, a lot of Hollywood types have latched on to the whole Bloomberg “Demand A Plan” scam. Mayor Bloomberg already has some of the most onerous gun laws in the nation yet it doesn’t stop criminals from killing lots of people. Maybe the Mayor should spend more time wondering why people use the subway for murder in his fair city but I digress. Chicago’s laws are tougher where gun owners have had to sue to own or carry a gun, yet homicides exceeded 500 this year.

Who are these Hollywood folk who see fit to use their celebrity to try to convince us they know something we don’t? Let’s take a look.

Jamie Foxx

Maybe he’s looking for publicity for his new film but Jamie Foxx is right at the top of the list. The very same Jamie Foxx toting a gun on a blood spattered poster for Django Unchained the new Quentin Tarrantino film he’s starring in. It promotes those important morals, “Life, liberty and the pursuit of vengeance.” In 2007 he starred as a blackmailing gun-wielding FBI agent in The Kingdom.

Jason Bateman

The guy who brought his career back from life support on the cult hit Arrested Development. They were happy to feature a dopey security guard running around shooting mice with a gun in the episode “Not Without My Daughter”. It’s also damn funny to teach the nerdy character a lesson at the business end of a loaded shotgun carried by a probation officer in “Making A Stand“.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus

Another Arrested Development star, see above.

Carey Mulligan

Young new star who last year starred in that placid film Drive where an all-around bad ass Ryan Gosling has to protect her from her estranged convict husband’s friends with just a car. Well, of course, it wasn’t just a car it was pistols, shotguns and the beautiful scene where Ryan just kicks the ever loving crap out of a guy in an elevator.

Beyoncé

Come now Beyoncé, did you really think we would forget “Thug Love”? Let me remind you:

A thug is what I want
And a thug is what I need
And my friends don’t understand
How my baby laces me
A thug is what I want
And a thug is what I need
And my friends don’t understand
And I think its jealousy

I know, her thug must not use a gun.

Jeremy Renner

I’m amazed Mr. Renner has the gall to open his mouth on this topic at all. Let’s run down his IMDB hit parade shall we?

• Hawkeye in The Avengers (I guess shooting people with bows and arrows is okay)
  
• The Bourne Legacy
• Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol
• The Town
• The Hurt Locker
• The Assassination of Jesse James…
• 28 Weeks Later
• S.W.A.T.

It appears to me Mr. Renner has little interest in a role unless he’s using a gun or other weapon to mow down a bunch of people in it.

Amy Poehler

Seems most of the cast on Arrested Development took time to put down their guns and join in this “PSA”.

Jessica Alba

Double duty packing heat for Robert Rodriguez in Sin City and Machete not to mention her big break starring in one of my faves, Dark Angel where she was a gun-toting wunderkind. She even brandished one of those evil “machine guns” with a “high capacity clip”, an HK MP5. She’s going back for more as well, the Machete sequel is in post-production and she’s filming the Sin City sequel. Lock and load Jes!

Rashida Jones

Rashida got her hunt on for some great laughs on Parks and Recreation when the whole gang hit the woods and Rashida was happy to mishandle and break various safety precautions with a Remington shotgun. But hey, it was just in good fun wasn’t it?

Aziz Ansari

Yep, Aziz was in that episode of Parks and Recreation as well, he had a Mossberg shotgun to greet visitors at his cabin door.

John Legend

As if his lyrics weren’t criminal enough he was happy to hook up with Talib Kewli for a little ditty called “Around My Way”, take a sample:

No place like home when the cops ask you about your neighbors
Beat on you, threaten to incarcerate you
Till you spill your guts like you a Garcia Vega
We roll blunts not the papers
Cop the greatest take it coast to coast
L.A. to Chicago like Smooth Operators
Cop the Dro and cop the blacks
Cop the four, cock it back
Drop the flow, rock a hat on top a stocking cap

Roll the blunts and cock one back John, priceless.

Nick Offerman

Another Parks and Recreation cast member who apparently can’t remember what he puts to film. His character has a claymore (not the sword, the explosive device) and a sawed off shotty on his desk. For fun and games he likes to wield a revolver around the office with his finger on the trigger.

John Slattery

Now we come to two points of disappointment for me for I am a huge Mad Men fan. I thought John was clean until I checked out an appearance he made on 30 Rock. Um…yeah.

Jon Hamm

It should be no surprise that he who portrays Don Draper is the cleanest of the lot. Yes, he wielded some guns in The Town but nothing that glorified them as he was “the law”. He’s also carried portraying a soldier in We Were Soldiers (a personal favorite) as well as Mad Men.

Selena Gomez

Does dating Biebs count?

Jennifer Aniston

Badly handled a revolver on 30 Rock and a shotgun in The Bounty Hunter. No, I didn’t even know about that movie until I started working on this.

Conan O’Brien

Another disappointment but like Jon Hamm he’s also clean.

Chris Rock

I saved the best for last because when I saw him come up in this I could not believe my eyes. Chris Rock? Really Chris? Are you kidding me? If you know Chris Rock you know why, for the rest of you perhaps you have heard of one of Chris’ most famous routines known as, and I quote, “Black People vs Niggas”. Check it out on You Tube if you haven’t already.

So, after exploring some issues concerning propagators of the thug life shall we say, Chris drops some knowledge with the line, ”What, you think I’ve got three guns in my house ’cause the media is outside?” So, apparently Chris thinks we need to do something about the guns “as a human being” but I guess he’ll be keeping his three?

There were more folks in this video but the point has been made – Hollywood doesn’t just live in hypocrisy, it takes hypocrisy to the bank. When someone like Jeremy Renner, who would be flipping burgers if it wasn’t for the “gun culture” propagated by his films, has the gall to tell me I need to demand a plan from politicians things have gone far enough alright.

These folks are the ones putting the guns in your living room every day goofing with them and killing lots of bad guys with them. After all, guns are funny as hell right? Meanwhile mine and those of respectable gun owners are locked, secured and out of sight.

Whether it’s comedy or action there’s really no difference though because the money is made one way or the other and guns are things of amazement instead of dangerous tools to them. Do we need to look for ways to prevent Newtown from happening again? Absolutely. However, we don’t need lectures from those who earn their living glorifying guns to tell us what they are.

Another tragedy, another missed opportunity?

Yesterday’s horrific massacre in Newtown, CT has grabbed every bit of media time and attention throughout the social webs and stratosphere. Most of all, it’s moved your erstwhile lazy blogger to resume his blogging status because this opportunity can’t be missed.

Everyone is of heavy heart today and while I may disagree with a lot of the politicking I won’t disagree with the reaction. What happened yesterday was truly awful and only someone subhuman would not ask “what can we do to prevent this?” However what happens next is the easy route – blame the inanimate object. It’s far easier to point your finger at something that can’t point back on its own. So, there we have it, blame the gun, walk away from it all and feel better.

What’s missing is the true soul searching that needs to take place – the soul searching about mental illness and how we handle it in our society. These warnings have been there before and the circumstances have been very similar.

In 1988 Laurie Dann, a woman suffering from what we now call bipolar disorder as well as obsessive-compulsive disorder walked into a Winnetka, IL school with three handguns and opened fire. Fortunately she only took one child’s life before taking her own hours later.

In 1999 Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris staged a savage attack on Columbine High School in Littleton, CO. Klebold was a depressed and easily manipulated child who had been taking mental health medications for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Harris was an undiagnosed malignant narcissist and likely suffered from paranoid personality disorder. They were both bright and had little difficulty securing a cache of weapons to bring into the school that awful day.

Earlier this year James Eagan Holmes, under psychiatric care and texting a friend about dysphoric mania days before, walked into an Aurora, CO midnight movie showing after sneaking out the back door to his car to retrieve his cache of weapons and proceeded to gun down various member of the audience.

The first similarity is, again, the guns. People wanting to just move on and get past trying to explain the inexplicable go for the gun as the easy way out. What they fail to see in all these cases, including yesterday’s, these are children of privilege and affluence. There weren’t any economic or logistical barriers to these people getting help. In fact, in all the cases except for Harris they did get help.

The barrier that was there though is a social one. It’s very hard to try to change society and so people would prefer to just continue to blame the gun because, after all, it saves them from blaming themselves. We are all responsible for this happening because of the way we treat people with mental illness – they are the dregs of society, they are to be shuffled aside and cast off and left to be dealt with by their families.

Maybe, as a father of a child on the autistic spectrum I know this pain and pressure all too well. I know the looks from across a restaurant as my son engages in a completely normal behavior (for him) of stimming. It means he’s enjoying himself and is nothing I wish to stop. When he was 8 years old the police were called to his school at the behest of a teachers aide who had put him in a hold during one of his “meltdowns”. He was beating his head against her and she insisted the police be called. The officer asked to interview my boy and I promptly let him know that was not going to happen, his interview would only compound my problem. What did happen I came to find out was he was drawing and wouldn’t stop so the aide yanked the pencil away from him thus inducing the meltdown.

This is the way we deal with mental illness in society – we stare, we force to make it stop, we call the police to lock it away. Dann’s parents were accused of refusing to admit she had any kind of problem yet they went to great lengths including enrolling her in a special program at the University of Wisconsin. Harris and Klebold’s parents have been demonized as those who ignored the problem and in Kelbold’s case tried to “medicate it away“.

I was a lucky man, people who understand mental disability set up New Connections Academy in Palatine not far from where I lived.  I was able to end a lifetime of poor educational assignments and put my son in an environment of care for the disabled. These are people who understand and know how to use behavior therapy to treat these disabilities. My ex and I had to be persistent parents to make that happen though and refusing to accept “good enough” as an answer for our son. That’s a hard fight though, especially with society staring down its nose at you.

So while people damn Adam Lanza to hell, blame a mother dead at her own son’s hand and cry for more gun control I will sit and wait. I’ll wait for the story to be told like it was in the fantastic book Columbine by Dave Cullen. I’ll wait for people to answer questions posed by Lt. Col. (Ret.) Dave Grossman’s campaign to attack the real enemy of denial. Once the roar is over maybe we will take some time to look at ourselves and the stigma we so stridently affix to mental illness because do we really need more Columbines and Sandy Hooks to understand?

Photo Courtesy of infomatique via Flickr.

And the band played on…..except in Round Lake

A hundred years ago, according to accounts, the band on board RMS Titanic played until its members were taken below with the ship. The event inspired the phrase “and the band played on.” That same phrase was taken for the title of a groundbreaking book about the AIDS epidemic and how it was ignored  for so long. Now, it appears, after being ignored for so long the marching band at Round Lake High School won’t be playing on. Its existence is in jeopardy due to a decision to go to a single teacher at RLHS for band, choir and music.

My fellow RLHS alumni know the history and stature of our band well. We have seen a host of renowned educators take the baton at RLHS and inspire generations of students to be musicians. I myself picked up a trombone and then a baritone and then a tuba for RLHS and took that to the USC Trojan Marching Band where the band is the center of school spirit and adulation. Friends from there are professional musicians now and some still work for the band.

Over the past several years, sadly some on my watch, the band has been gradually suffocated. When myself and many others were in Round Lake there were two band teachers and a choir teacher at Magee Middle School and two band teachers and a choir teacher at RLHS. There was a Fine Arts director because, as was properly seen then, band programs do not begin at RLHS, they end there. The program begins in the elementary schools and the elementaries have been almost put out of the band business. I implored two CEOs and several more administrators privately and in public meetings to put decisions about music and band especially on the district level and not on the school level. It is a DISTRICT WIDE program and needs to be approached that way. Sadly that’s never come to be and the fate of each band, choir or music teacher in Round Lake Area Schools has been at the whim of their principal. The scheduling conflicts, the time band staff is needed in other buildings, the lack of any coordination, cohesion or leadership in the music program is because of this faulty approach to running it at the building level.

The death spiral started when Magee was reopened and renovated. Scheduling conflicts between buildings were used as a reason to no longer bus elementary students to participate in bands at the middle schools as was the way before (somehow for decades that was accomplished, suddenly now there are “scheduling” problems”). It was an integral part of the program and by introducing a learning musician to a group of players with more experience, they saw what they could achieve as a band. No more and has been that way for some time now.

When the students have nothing to do in band for 5th grade it’s not difficult to imagine, they drop out of band. Bored with being stuck in an elementary band where a teacher doesn’t even regularly have an opportunity to rehearse the student quickly loses interest and drops out. Before where every band teacher led the recruitment drive in school assemblies with impassioned pleas about the importance of music they mesmerized a gym full of 4th graders. No more, they can’t get the time away from their own buildings.

So where our band was some 75 members strong for marching season it has gradually dwindled. It had almost bottomed out in the mid-90s with the scathing cuts. It had nicely rebounded with a small but dedicated band in competition and in the past few years as a show band. Their drum line got some separate instruction and I can assert is better than any drum line we ever had. Now, 2012 with one of the healthiest fund balances in the state, numerous administrators making six figures, a whole new influx of new midlevel assistant, deputy and director administrators and new positions that never existed before it’s been decided RLHS can get by with a combination band and choir teacher. After all, with all the trailers in the parking lot we need the band room for study hall (aka a place to put the kids when we don’t have classes for them).

I have held off writing this blog since I became aware of the news, I can’t sit here silent and watch 50 years of RLHS history go out with a whimper. While the RLHS Marching Band may find some way to still exist it can’t exist as it has been before. With a single teacher how can there be a meaningful band camp? How can a single teacher possibly do all the rehearsals for marching band, jazz band and pep bands outside of normal school hours? The Pep Band, a famous tradition at RLHS complete with Pep Season attire and filling a quarter of the stands with band members has been dead and buried for some time, victim of a single band teacher for a decade. Now there’s not even that.

Perhaps the plan is to take the new uniforms the band members and parents themselves strove so hard to get funded a few years ago and put that new throng of administration to work. For six figures I would think they should easily be able to put in the time. Maybe then they would learn something themselves and realize that if band and art and music and electives are all taken away, what is the point of learning then? What good do math or language do if they are not used for the betterment of us all? Those are the things that keep us alive, the things that make us human, what’s the use of living if you can’t be a human?

A hundred years ago thousands of people met their death and thousands more lived to tell the tale of the band that played on. The band that knew how important music was to life and how it was of comfort when one was facing death. It’s sad to me to think that future products of Round Lake will not have the opportunity to realize what a difference band can make, because it was starved out by administrators, a school board and increasingly a community that didn’t care.

For my part in not doing more, I apologize to all the band kids in Round Lake. I chose to pick my battles and not fight all the time, I was trying to push for things like fixing the roof that was leaking on band equipment and carpet that had been there since I was a student. I was wrong to not fight for you earlier and harder and I’m sorry. Don’t give up, make band what you know it can be and don’t let any administrative decision get you down.

The band I played in after RLHS. Hopefully the RLHS Marching Band won’t be relegated to rising from the dead.

News

Another tragedy, another missed opportunity?

Yesterday’s horrific massacre in Newtown, CT has grabbed every bit of media time and attention throughout the social webs and stratosphere. Most of all, it’s moved your erstwhile lazy blogger to resume his blogging status because this opportunity can’t be missed.

Everyone is of heavy heart today and while I may disagree with a lot of the politicking I won’t disagree with the reaction. What happened yesterday was truly awful and only someone subhuman would not ask “what can we do to prevent this?” However what happens next is the easy route – blame the inanimate object. It’s far easier to point your finger at something that can’t point back on its own. So, there we have it, blame the gun, walk away from it all and feel better.

What’s missing is the true soul searching that needs to take place – the soul searching about mental illness and how we handle it in our society. These warnings have been there before and the circumstances have been very similar.

In 1988 Laurie Dann, a woman suffering from what we now call bipolar disorder as well as obsessive-compulsive disorder walked into a Winnetka, IL school with three handguns and opened fire. Fortunately she only took one child’s life before taking her own hours later.

In 1999 Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris staged a savage attack on Columbine High School in Littleton, CO. Klebold was a depressed and easily manipulated child who had been taking mental health medications for obsessive-compulsive disorder. Harris was an undiagnosed malignant narcissist and likely suffered from paranoid personality disorder. They were both bright and had little difficulty securing a cache of weapons to bring into the school that awful day.

Earlier this year James Eagan Holmes, under psychiatric care and texting a friend about dysphoric mania days before, walked into an Aurora, CO midnight movie showing after sneaking out the back door to his car to retrieve his cache of weapons and proceeded to gun down various member of the audience.

The first similarity is, again, the guns. People wanting to just move on and get past trying to explain the inexplicable go for the gun as the easy way out. What they fail to see in all these cases, including yesterday’s, these are children of privilege and affluence. There weren’t any economic or logistical barriers to these people getting help. In fact, in all the cases except for Harris they did get help.

The barrier that was there though is a social one. It’s very hard to try to change society and so people would prefer to just continue to blame the gun because, after all, it saves them from blaming themselves. We are all responsible for this happening because of the way we treat people with mental illness – they are the dregs of society, they are to be shuffled aside and cast off and left to be dealt with by their families.

Maybe, as a father of a child on the autistic spectrum I know this pain and pressure all too well. I know the looks from across a restaurant as my son engages in a completely normal behavior (for him) of stimming. It means he’s enjoying himself and is nothing I wish to stop. When he was 8 years old the police were called to his school at the behest of a teachers aide who had put him in a hold during one of his “meltdowns”. He was beating his head against her and she insisted the police be called. The officer asked to interview my boy and I promptly let him know that was not going to happen, his interview would only compound my problem. What did happen I came to find out was he was drawing and wouldn’t stop so the aide yanked the pencil away from him thus inducing the meltdown.

This is the way we deal with mental illness in society – we stare, we force to make it stop, we call the police to lock it away. Dann’s parents were accused of refusing to admit she had any kind of problem yet they went to great lengths including enrolling her in a special program at the University of Wisconsin. Harris and Klebold’s parents have been demonized as those who ignored the problem and in Kelbold’s case tried to “medicate it away“.

I was a lucky man, people who understand mental disability set up New Connections Academy in Palatine not far from where I lived.  I was able to end a lifetime of poor educational assignments and put my son in an environment of care for the disabled. These are people who understand and know how to use behavior therapy to treat these disabilities. My ex and I had to be persistent parents to make that happen though and refusing to accept “good enough” as an answer for our son. That’s a hard fight though, especially with society staring down its nose at you.

So while people damn Adam Lanza to hell, blame a mother dead at her own son’s hand and cry for more gun control I will sit and wait. I’ll wait for the story to be told like it was in the fantastic book Columbine by Dave Cullen. I’ll wait for people to answer questions posed by Lt. Col. (Ret.) Dave Grossman’s campaign to attack the real enemy of denial. Once the roar is over maybe we will take some time to look at ourselves and the stigma we so stridently affix to mental illness because do we really need more Columbines and Sandy Hooks to understand?

Photo Courtesy of infomatique via Flickr.

An Open Letter To AT&T

Dear AT&T:

To fill you in on where I’m coming from regarding the iPhone 3G S upgrade that you state I have to wait until December 12th to get without paying in full for the phone:

I’m a purchaser of the original iPhone, I didn’t wait in line the first day but I got it the first weekend it was available. I ditched my previous carrier of several years that I was perfectly happy with to get your service as the exclusive carrier for the iPhone. I paid $200 to cancel that contract on top of the $500 I paid for the phone (unsubsidized).

Happy with your wireless service and seeing your new uVerse service available in my area I switched from Comcast to AT&T for my internet, television and phone. My wireless bill is combined with that bill.

I was in line the first day the iPhone 3G came out. That phone was subsidized but I had to extend my contract which I happily did as I was pleased with your service.

I have been pleased with my service aside from a couple of dead spots (all carriers have their dead spots) and have been an evangelist for AT&T and its wireless and uVerse services as providing me good service and value.

Because of me, and people like me, who are using the iPhone and extolling its virtues to others (I know of several people I convinced to get one) you’re able to sell more contracts to go along with all those phones. Market data clearly indicates AT&T has reaped great windfalls from the iPhone having sold over one million of them on the first weekend of the iPhone 3G release alone.

How do you reward me for being an early adopter of your service, paying good money for your services and advocating it to others? You tell me I have to pay $600 for the new iPhone unless I want to wait until December 12.

I don’t expect you to fully subsidize my next iPhone but you could at least come up with a nominal charge to keep me satisfied with your service.

I hear you’re in negotiations with Apple regarding your exclusivity agreement for the iPhone. I wonder how many of us you will be keeping having stuck it to us on the iPhone 3G S if say, Verizon is added as a carrier for the iPhone. I also wonder how long it will take me to call Comcast and get them to cut me a good deal to switch from uVerse.

You alone can answer that question.

GuyNet

The Hurt Locker (2008)

This movie has been out for a long time now (a really long time when you consider when it was made) and hauled in a bunch of awards yet I just saw it.  Why?  Don’t know, sat there with some other Blu-rays from Netflix for a while.  Rather than write an entire treatise I will do a micro-review, a quick snapshot of what I liked and didn’t like.

Liked

• Fantastic cinematography: Really wish the Academy voters would have rewarded some great old school cinematography over the 3D gimmickry.
• Great core characters: The three core characters of the film are well fleshed out, they are what drives the film.  Wow, a film with characters, how un-Hollywood!
• Kathryn Bigelow: Best Director was well deserved, I was floored.  I thought this was hype (i.e. how could the director of Point Break get best director?) but it surely was not.  Excellent work.
• Core theme:  The core theme about combat and what it does to soldiers was, I think, well done.  In that regard this film is probably one of the best films about war ever made.  I don’t like all of how it got there (see below) but it was well done.
• Jeremy Renner: Absolutely fantastic job.  He had his John Wayne game face but could flip it around and show the vulnerability (i.e. Beckham parts and shower scene).  It’s too bad he ran into someone who was owed an Oscar.

Disliked

• Complete fancy: This film is a joke when it comes to representing the job of an EOD.  They don’t act like this, if they do they are dead EODs.
• Unit of supermen: Hey let’s make ourselves snipers and we won’t call for any support we’ll just hang out here with these mercs all day!  Let’s split up in a hostile area at night!  Let’s never use a radio or call for support!  It helps isolate the core characters but there is no doubt this film fails miserably when it comes to realism.
• Military stereotypes: We have another “all officers are idiots” film.  I love David Morse, he’s one of my favorite actors but to see him do this cheesy stereotypical good ole boy full bird colonel imitation was terrible and pointless.  Depicting our troops acting this way I think bordered on disrespectful and stretched artistic license.  Then we have the lieutenant colonel psychologist which was equally nauseating (like the team would just leave him to hang out in the street).
• US stereotypes: Just what we needed, another movie portraying Americans as a bunch of “yee ha let’s go kill ‘em all” types.

I’ve never had such a film that struck me with this kind of mixed verdict.  I am going Machiavelli on this one in that I like the point the film made and I liked this as a film so overall I score it as a great film.  However, I certainly didn’t like how it got there.  It leaves me asking the question if Bigelow could have gotten to that message without taking the shortcuts or not?  Did she have to create these utterly unrealistic situations to isolate the core characters?  I’ve come to the conclusion that, to an extent, she did.

There’s a great risk you take when you make a war film about a war that is still going on.  Many will demand accuracy and this film was very inaccurate in a lot of areas.  Also, as I said, it bordered on being disrespectful and cartoonish with how it portrayed its characters.  Do I think there are some characters like this in the military?  Probably, but not many and not the ones we should be focused on.  At the same time I loved one of those characters even though he was completely unrealistic.

So there you have it, if you are looking for an accurate war movie, this is not your film.  However, if you are looking for a great movie about war, that sums up The Hurt Locker I believe.

Clash of the Titans (2010)

If you are looking for a faithful remake of the great Ray Harryhausen cult classic keep on looking, because this isn’t it.  No, this Titans is a stripped down (although there we more stripping in the original) no nonsense action flick and that’s pretty much it. The screenwriters on this film got way overpaid because there is very little dialogue in this film at all other than to fill in and drive Perseus and his band of gods haters on to the next part of their task.

The beginning starts out true to the original, Perseus and his mother are cast off in a coffin by his father Acrisius (who later comes back as Callibos is a bizarre time saving twist), you don’t know why at the time but they just are.  The coffin is pulled from the water by, to my shock, Pete Postlethwaite (In The Name of the Father) making his appearance as the first character you will have no clue what his name is (there will be many more).  You will only know him as Perseus’ dad and, amazingly, we all have British accents in Ancient Greece.  The first departure of the film takes place as Perseus’ mom dies (didn’t happen that way in myth or the original) and Pete and his family raise Perseus until, you know, he gets that higher calling.

From there on the stories really have little in common other than the general framework — the gods are pissed and they’re going to let the kracken out to go aggro on Argos (Joppa in the original) unless someone does something about it.  They get the magnificent Polly Walker (Rome and now Caprica) and they kill her after about three lines.  Perseus leaves with his band of droogs after a little encouragement from another demi-god named Io (hey, we know someone else’s name and it’s a hot Bond girl, Gemma Arterton). Perseus is out to avenge his human father, no saving the damsel this time, he doesn’t have a thing for Andromeda like Harry Hamlin did.

Then non-stop action takes place as they quickly dispatch one trial after the next and whittle the band of droogs down.  You learn none of their names really even though they are about the only human element to the film.  I’m completely serious you only hear their names a couple times and usually when they’re dying, “Eusebios!” Perseus utters as the stone head crumbles to the floor and you say to yourself “oh wow, that was that dude’s name.”

All in all a few things save this film from being completely mindless.  Mads Mikkelsen, the Dane better known for previously playing Le Chiffre in the last two Bond films is great as the captain of the guard who heads up the droogs who head out with Perseus (he also gives Perseus a 2 minute sword lesson and immediately after Perseus nearly kills him, being a demi-god rules). I wouldn’t be surprised if he had the most lines in the film, he’s earnest and personable and quickly allows you to build some admiration for him with very little dialogue. His partner in crime, who I’ll be darned if you ever hear that character’s name in the film is played by Liam Cunningham, he gets all the jokes as a character called Solon apparently. The play between Mikkelsen and Cunningham is great and really livens things up and hits you on a human level.  Aside from that you’ll find yourself grasping at a lot of names — those two funny dudes who come along (we don’t know who they are or where they came from but, by all means, come along with us and survive even), another sort of weird creature made out of scorpion hides and blue fire and one hot yet deadly looking Medusa and you have this film summed up.

Sure, there’s Liam Neeson as Zeus and Ralph Fiennes as Hades but there’s little for them to do except play it easy as two brothers in need of a serious intervention and some time to hug it out but that’s about it. Sam Worthington is buff and does a bit of fighting, he’s the reluctant hero we really don’t get invested in at all. You think he doesn’t care about anything until he starts to put the moves on Io on what turns into Charon’s fantasy pleasure death cruise ship of the River Styx apparently!  Oh sure, the moment gets broken up but the gratuitous romance was thrown in. A completely forgettable performance from Worthington as far as I’m concerned.

The effects are pretty dang good, the girls are gorgeous and it moves along quickly and before you know it it’s over.  If this film were a magazine it would be Maxim, what can I say. There is a nice tip of the hat to Harryhausen with Bobo the owl but he only makes a cameo. We also have two interesting “oh that’s where they are now” moments with Alexandar Siddig of Deep Space Nine fame as Hermes and Jane March (The Lover and Color of Night) as Hestia where she not only manages to not have sex with anybody, she keeps her clothes on as well! Well done, Jane!

Overall a relaxing piece of afternoon fun, I’d catch it at the matinée showing, definitely not worth paying full price for or just catch it on video. I wasn’t expecting a faithful remake, I was expecting it to stand on its own and it really doesn’t do that. But for the fame of the original I don’t see the appeal. Percy Jackson & the Olympians had a far better plot, action that was at least as good and actual characters. Your two coins for the boatman are far better spent there.

Sports

Where’s The Bulls’ Daedalus?

In Greek myth there is the well known story of Icarus. Daedalus constructs wings made of wax and instructs Icarus to be careful and not fly too close to the sun. Icarus ignores the warning and falls to his death after the wax melts in the warmth of the sun and the wings disintegrate. The Bulls could have used Daedalus yesterday, instead they have Tom “Icarus” Thibodeau.

You see “Thibs” as he is called (to avoid spelling his name) lacks self restraint and he has demonstrated this on repeated occasions in his brief tenure as head coach of the Bulls. One look no further than his voice where night after night he screams himself hoarse unable to control himself and let his team play without his constant instruction from the sidelines. He’s free to do that, he’s only damaging his own vocal cords, but last night it was Derrick Rose crumpled on the floor like Icarus because, again, Thibodeau asked too much.

Rewind to the 2011 Eastern Conference Finals. The Miami Heat finally get the Bulls’ number when they put LeBron James on Rose at the end game. Why not the whole game? Clearly James could not keep up with him for the whole game for certain but also because Rose is worn down by then. Rose is severely limited in the series and looks, quite frankly, exhausted. The rumbles of criticism had already been seeded all season that Thibodeau is unable to take his foot off the gas and get his stars, particularly Rose, enough rest despite the deepest bench in the NBA.

So after the lockout this year and the resulting compressed schedule one would think Thibodeau would be ready for this development and have a plan to rest his players. No such luck. In February Thibodeau was quoted: “If a guy is injured, he shouldn’t play. But if he can play, he should play.” Not surprising from a man who can’t take his foot off the throttle, even to spend the holidays with his family. This may be a sharp point to make but if you connect the dots you see the Type A maniac that resides within the shell of Tom Thibodeau. After his quote about being injured or not he went on to say: “Somehow there’s this notion of guys sitting out games. Pretty soon we’ll be at the point where a guy sits out the whole season and just plays in the playoffs — if he can get there. I don’t get that.”

Do you get it now Tom? The worse part of it, he is passing this ethic on to his players. Just a few days ago he stated how he wouldn’t get his players rest for the playoffs. ”When you look at what the starters have done, our guys up front, really no one’s playing starter’s minutes,” Thibodeau said. “And they haven’t all season. And then when you look at the backcourt guys, I think Derrick played 1,300 minutes this year.” Thibodeau went on to mention other players but Rose was at the top of the list. The other players circled to support the philosophy, voiced by Taj Gibson, “I know Thibs isn’t a fan of resting guys. We don’t want rest. It’s the time of the season where you can’t really rest. You have to go into the playoffs ready and have a good spark.”

The problem is these statements are completely ignorant of this year’s compressed schedule. They are played 16 less games so of course minutes were down from normal. It is also ignorant of the concept of recovery time that is needed in a sport like basketball. Given the heavy level of exertion and endurance demanded of NBA players they need time to recover to avoid exhaustion and injury. This year every team played three games in three nights, some played five games in six night and despite only losing 16 games two months were lopped off the front end of the schedule. This has been a recipe for disaster for team trainers with many teams, including the Bulls, suffering the injury bug. This isn’t an outside fringe theory, this is fact and this was predicted by many including former NBA head coach and ESPN analyst Jeff Van Gundy.

With these facts in the back of my mind I sat stunned watching the Bulls’ franchise player crumpled on the court. I had gone to my computer with the win secured thinking he had been removed from the game. When the call of him being hurt was made I turned in dismay and before even seeing it I thought “what was he doing in there?” I’m even more dismayed by the likes of Sam Smith who will readily give Thibodeau a pass and wax romantic about how the Bulls could still do something in the playoffs and how “there’s no blame there” for him. Michael Wilbon rightfully blames the NBA as part of the problem with this ridiculous schedule but also gives Thibodeau the pass.

I’m not buying it. Thibodeau and the apologists are free to claim “The score was going the other way” yet when injury made the substitution Thibodeau should have the Bulls still won the game by the exact same margin. The Bulls also do not play baseball where once a player is removed he can’t go back in. Say in the La-La land Thibodeau and the apologists exist the Sixers put up a quick six, why at that point you can put Rose right back out there can’t you? There were seventy-two seconds left in the game.

What crumpled Rose to the court on Saturday was surely a freak thing. Is there any surprise the knee that suffered the injury is the same leg where he suffered his big toe? The knee has been compensating for the injured toe all season. If you ask any physician or any competent trainer they will tell you of the dangers of overexertion. The fact the injury was suffered from a collision, accident or coming down wrong is further proof it is from overexertion. Rose was driven to overexertion by Thibodeau. He has been driven to try to come back and play too early all year. This isn’t an otherwise healthy player who suddenly had a freak injury, this is a player who has been hampered by injuries all season.

It’s pretty clear that all concerned are willing to give a pass to Thibodeau on this, his fantastic record has earned him that pass. It will be interesting to see how this plays out in the future though. Every ACL recovery is different and while I certainly hope Rose will return with that same explosiveness he had that is no guarantee. That’s an awful big gamble for seventy-two seconds in the first game of the first round with a double-digit lead. I think Thibodeau’s vocal cords are on my side at least.

Chicago Bulls – What We Forgot

I dragged myself out of bed this morning with the sound of Maureen McGovern bouncing around in my brain reminding me “there’s got to be a morning after.” Well that ship sank and so did the Bulls’ last night so where does that leave us? Before long it dawned on me that we, as Bulls fans, forgot a lot of stuff. We have the Bulls to thank for that but we should take note of them.

Derrick Rose Is VERY Young

He makes us forget it with his unselfish play, his calm demeanor, his lack of outbursts, but D Rose is still but 22 years old. This is only his third year in the league and he won the MVP. Many times I get irritated at the NBA for announcing their awards in the middle of the playoffs, it makes you forget just how big of a deal and how uncommon it has been for someone this young to win an MVP in all of sports let alone the NBA.

LeBron James hasn’t been to the Finals at all in his 7 years in the league, it took Kobe until his 4th year. Dwyane Wade got a championship his second year in the league but it was only with a team of thoroughbreds around him. The fact we are even mentioning D Rose in the same breath of these guys is a testament to how special the kid is (and how wrong I was about him).

He made some mistakes with decisions and a lot of turnovers. He lost a lot of his aggressiveness but that was in large part to a very effective game plan against him run to perfection by the Heat. He’s got time and he learned something.

Tom Thibodeau Is A First Year Head Coach

After being subjected to two years of a graduate assistant the Bulls finally had a real head coach for the first time since Scott Skiles was dismissed after essentially giving up on his own team (which was hardly head coach-like). Thibs was so impressive he too had the fantastic accomplishment of being selected NBA Coach of the Year overshadowed by the playoff run.

We forget the 53-year-old’s previous head coaching gig was with Salem State during the Reagan Administration. He’s been an assistant, a great one but still an assistant, for most of his career. He’s only the third first-year coach to win 60 games. These phenomenal accomplishments made us forget he’s still learning the ropes too.

I think it’s clear Thibs needs a better offensive mind on the bench with him. He failed to put a play out there in the last two Bulls losses, games they could have and arguably should have won. Clearing out for a 3rd year player to manufacture a shot out of thin air with probably the best defender in the NBA on him is not a plan. It was unfair to do that to Derrick and I hope Thibs recognizes that.

Down the stretch of games he has also shown he can close in on what he feels the right lineup is and will stick to it – even when it’s failing. Why can’t Keith Bogans be trusted in the 4th Quarter? Why continue to run Kyle Korver out there when he hasn’t been making his shots? Why hardly play Kurt Thomas at all and then suddenly throw him in only after Omer Asik went down? These are all legitimate questions to ask a head coach.

The Heat Were Supposed To Win

Let’s just be honest with ourselves now. I hate them just as much as the rest of you do but the team Miami has put together is truly scary. They got some serviceable players to put around their Big 3 and the Bulls may well have woken Chris Bosh up for Miami. To their credit the Bulls were in every game with Miami, only Miami got blown out and gave up in Game 1. They took that and responded and the Bulls were never able to close down the stretch – being worn down by some of the best players in the game will do that to you.

It’s alright to hate them. It’s alright to notice the Bulls well could have been the ones celebrating last night if a few things go their way. Don’t deny the pure talent Miami comes to the floor with night after night though and while, yes, I don’t believe Derrick gets his due from the referees they weren’t the reason it didn’t happen for the Bulls this year.

The Finals Aren’t Given

It’s been so long since the Bulls had a legitimate shot at the NBA Finals that we forget what Michael Jordan et al went though when they went for the first time – a tough Detroit team that took them years to beat. I will predict right now that we will see Bulls v Heat Part II next year. It took the Bulls four attempts before they were finally able to defeat the Pistons and go to the Finals, if the Bulls make the right moves in the offseason (OJ Mayo please) they could one up MJ and the boys and do it in two.  Maybe then we can forget about this and celebrate another NBA title.

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