Santa Monica HS Comes Out Beautifully Against WBC

I've said it before, but the one thing I can say for Westboro Baptist is that they really know how to bring people together in a meaningful way.  Against them. But it's really meaningful and beautiful when they do.

Okay--The Onion Just F'd Up Tweeting the Oscars

Quvenzhane Wallis is a nine year old girl. She's already a really gifted actress, but she is still a nine year old girl. You really shouldn't post that about even a grown-ass woman, but whoever was on the Onion Twitter feed tonight? You really, really, really don't use that word about a nine-year old girl. People would be afraid to use that word because that is not a word that civilized people would use. We don't say it about women because gendered slurs are reductionist cheap nonsense--

But that's a nine year old girl in Hollywood you just used that on, Onion. C'mon. The media and the business and all that will surely screw with her brain enough the rest of her life over her being a woman, celebrity, actress, how she looks and how she acts without you dropping a c-bomb on her for a lazy throw-away joke. Grow the hell up and figure out the line between cruelty and humor.

Well, this is pretty neat--

My admiration, nay, crush, for Hugh Laurie continues unabated as an actor and a comedian. As a vocalist, it seems he's continuing a bit of an American accent, but being the possesor of a ridonckulous American accent myself, I can't kick at what is a pretty good rendition of a sweet standard. So, here's a little jukebox for your Sunday wee hours.

A Good Day to Die Hard Is A Weird Movie to Watch

Okay--this trailer has nothing to do with movie I just saw except that the same people and some scenes are in it. But if you were to take this trailer and spread those scenes out in a movie that served as a justification for some family-based schmaltz and some badass oneliners and some actually mentally insulting chase scene about twenty minutes in that makes you feel a little ashamed for watching--

Oh lord, this is not a smart movie. That doesn't mean it isn't an enjoyable movie--you could like it, if gratuitous car-smashing and shit getting blowed up was your deal, but I'm just saying, if you like your action pictures to make any kind of sense, and have any kind of thin pretext to justify the millions of dollars of collateral damage to cars, trucks, all kinds of infrastructure, and whatnot--not.

This movie has adopted the meta-violence attitude as expressed in such movies as The Expendables franchise, of which Willis is a part. But this isn't even a knowing wink at the gratuitous badness of action movie pretexts--the way any old thing is a gratuitous pretext for porn--for example--so much as a nearly played-straight family movie( the what?) tied up in a genre movie with some real lapses in logical sense and an obvious twist and just some sick lack of attention to the laws of physics or the complete ignorance of the limits of the human body thrown in.

What I'm saying is--this movie is kind of enjoyable, but you really got to put your dumb-hat on to like it. Willis's McClain is a cartoon. His son is a non-entity. Their situation is transparently fucked in a way you can't help but notice all at once before they seem to. And if you can suspend your disbelief that a high-speed truck chase after a terrorist attack on a courthouse can occur without a billionty Moscow police turnout including helicopters and such (because if you don't know, Moscow is kind of the capital city of Russia?), okay. Enjoy away. I'm just saying these lapses killed my enjoyment.

It isn't the worst movie--it just isn't all that good. I can't recommend it unless you are bound and determined to see it, and if that's your thing, you are welcome to it. But it is a damn dumb movie.