So, I Saw Godzilla.

And it was a huge disappointment. I won't go into details, since I could easily do a scene-by-scene analysis explaining why the film is something of a train wreck in spots, but I will point out some of the bits that most annoyed me.

First, Aaron Taylor Johnson is a human potato. Whenever he is on screen the film drags to a near stop. I don't know whether it was him or the director, but a damp rag would have put in a better performance.

His leaden performance was exacerbated by all of the best actors either being killed or given nothing to work with. Bryan Cranston gets offed early on; Juliette Binoche was hired to deliver four lines before also dying; and Ken Watanabe spends the movie doing his best facial impression of a person who is terrified that the fart he just pushed out may have included some poop.

Strange then, you might say, that Cranston is killed fifteen minutes into the movie but appears to be the star in the trailers. That's because the people making the trailers knew full well that Bryan Cranston is the only thing of interest in the film and they damn well better use everything they have.

I'm not kidding. They used everything. Combined with the clips online and the trailers, most people have seen Cranston's entire contribution to the movie.

Second, Aaron Taylor Johnston's character is unnecessary... as are the characters of most of the military, the young boy that Taylor Johnson meets on the commuter rail in Hawaii, Bryan Cranston's wife, Ken Watanabe's side-kick... really, anyone who isn't Watanabe, Cranston, or David Strathairn could easily be dumped from the script.

Third, as with Nolan's Batman films, this is a stupid movie that takes itself waaaaaay too seriously. Pacific Rim was leagues better than this film if for no other reason than because it recognized that it was silly.

And while talking about Nolan's Batman films, I thought the hydrogen bomb run at the end of The Dark Knight Rises, where Batman takes the bomb out to sea to save Gotham, was stupid. He would have never gotten the bomb far enough away in time.

Godzilla does Nolan one better. Instead of having the bomb on a high-speed, flying Bat-Thing, the bomb is on a clunky tug boat!

In the film, the military men describe the Hiroshima bomb as being like a firecracker in comparison to the bomb they're using, so let's assume that it is similar to Ivy Mike, the first full-yield hydrogen bomb that the US tested. I'll let Wikipedia take it from here.

The blast created a crater 6,240 feet (1.9 km) in diameter and 164 feet (50 m) deep where Elugelab had once been; the blast and water waves from the explosion (some waves up to twenty feet high) stripped the test islands clean of vegetation, as observed by a helicopter survey within 60 minutes after the test, by which time the mushroom cloud and steam were blown away. Radioactive coral debris fell upon ships positioned 35 miles (48 km) from the blast, and the immediate area around the atoll was heavily contaminated for some time.

There is no way that San Francisco would have survived. None. Unless that tugboat was doing four-hundred miles per hour, San Francisco, Oakland, and basically all of the Bay Area would been turned into an atomic wasteland.

Again, none of this would matter if the movie didn't take itself seriously. Pacific Rim also ends with a stupidly-wrong atomic bomb solution, but who cares?! It's a movie about giant robots punching monsters! Godzilla desperately wants us to take it seriously, to experience the movie as though it were possible, and it falls on its face because of this.

Fourth, the premise of the movie is entirely wrong. In the original Godzilla, Godzilla is an ancient creature that is released by an atomic blast. In the 1998 Godzilla, Godzilla is a lizard that is mutated. I like the latter explanation, but that's not what's important. In this Godzilla, the creatures "eat" radiation. They evolved over a billion years ago, when the Earth was much more radioactive than today. Alright. Fine. But they have the creatures eating atomic bombs.

That's ridiculously stupid. Let's ignore that you don't just "get" radiation by eating a bomb. Let's ignore that there is no way to digest the bombs. Let's just focus on the fact that the creatures would not be able to tell that the bombs were radioactive. Bombs are completely shielded. They emit little-to-no radiation.

And even if we assume that the bombs emitted TONS of radiation, at the distances that these creatures are detecting the bombs, they would be unable to tell the difference between a radioactive block of Uranium and the radiation coming from the Sun. And if these things are hunting radiation, why aren't they congregating around Chernobyl? Or the Bikini Islands? Or the Yucca Mountain storage facility.

They actually have one of the creatures leave Yucca Mountain! Why the hell would it leave?!

Fifth, Gareth Edwards seemd to understand that this sort of movie must be a game of anticipation. You can't simply throw all your monsters on screen early in the film. This is a calculated, skillful philosophy that should, in this era of Michael Bay-style movies, be commended.

Unfortunately, that meditative philosophy does not extend to his direction and editing. Cuts are short, dialog is perfunctory, and camera angles and movement are basic. The actual craft of the movie is amateurish. Still, I would rather have good philosophy and poor craft than the opposite... which is Michael Bay.

Sixth, filmmakers don't seem to understand the physics of tsunamis. As Godzilla is approaching the shoreline in Hawaii, the water recedes before coming back in a wave. When that actually happens in tsunamis, that only happens because a large section of ocean floor suddenly dropped three feet relative to some other bit of the sea floor. If a giant object — like, say, Godzilla — is heading toward land, that water is just gonna' come at 'ya. It's not leaving, before. In his defense, Edwards isn't the first one to do this. For example, Deep Impact has it happen.


You know what doesn't precede a massive shock wave? A vacuum. But Hollywood seems set on believing otherwise. This is absolutely nitpicking, but it's just one of those things that annoys me.

I don't like to bash things that people have obviously put a lot of work into, but this was such a large disappointment that I'm angry. They should have hired whoever did the trailers to do the movie, because the trailers were awesome. They made the movie appear far more epic than it really was.

What they really did was make it appear like it was going to treat Godzilla in a mythic, almost 2001: A Space Odyssey sort of way. The actual usage of 2001 music in the trailer reinforced this. That's what I was expecting. That's what I wanted. Instead, I got a pretender. Godzilla is a very simple film that thinks its message is far more profound than it really is.

Godzilla deserved better. Whether it would have gotten better is up for debate, since Hollywood is mostly talentless. In that sense, we're lucky. Lord knows, we could have gotten another 1998, and that would have been painful for all involved, especially the audience.

I Received A Copyright Notice Today

I recently received a copyright warning from my ISP via e-mail. They said that my IP had been associated with an illegal download of a movie. In this case, the movie was I, Frankenstein. This is the first warning of such kind that I have ever received. And yes, I did indeed download I, Frankenstein from Pirate Bay.

First off, I was pissed. I was pissed because contrary to what copyright-pushing corporations would like you to believe, there is nothing wrong with piracy, as this video perfectly illustrates.



That's not to say that piracy isn't an issue that needs to be addressed; it certainly is. The problem is that current laws are a poor tool to address the issue, and the issue itself is incredibly complex, with aspects to it that are economic, social, ethical, and legal.

But that's all for another post. For this post, all that you need to know is that I was pissed. I was made to feel like a criminal for simply taking data that was freely floating around the interwebs. Some of you will undoubtedly think that this feeling is reasonable, and I should feel like a criminal. An explanation as to why you are wrong will likewise have to wait for another post.

Secondly, along with being pissed, I was confused as all get out.

I don't pirate that much anymore. Back in the day, I would pirate everything I could get my hands on. The vast majority of it I never watched or listened to, and the vast majority of the software would never be installed. Still, I pirated it. Today, I might download a movie once per equinox. So it was a real shock to receive a warning long after my pirating days were mostly done.

Furthermore, what an absolutely bizarre movie about which to get a warning! I downloaded the movie specifically because it was purportedly so bad as to be nearly a master class in how not to make an action movie. When your movie is famous for being terrible, you should be happy that anyone wants to watch it at all.

And again, shouldn't you, oh hypothetical interlocutor, be more interested in protecting the movies that people actually wanted to see in the first place. Let's face it, after failing miserably in the box office and being drawn and quartered by critics, I, Frankenstein isn't exactly a valuable piece of media. Most of my motivation for wanting to see the movie was to see a ripped Aaron Eckhart.

In the end, there was a good fifty-percent chance that I never watched the movie. Now that I have received this warning, there is a one-hundred percent chance that I will not watch the movie. I have deleted the file.

Someone, somewhere, thinks that this is a victory for copyright protection. I may as well argue with an evangelical Christian.

So congratulations, whichever company sent that notice. You have successfully stopped someone from watching your colossal bomb that has a 7% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. You go, boy. You go.

Piracy Is Destroying The Entire World

X-Men First Class And My Issues With Comic Book Movies

I just saw X-Men First Class. I liked it. It was well-directed, stylish, and some truly excellent performances. But I would never watch it again.

A great review of a movie explains perfectly why the critic did or didn't like said movie. For example, Roger Ebert's review of Dark City made me go back and watch it again, and it is now one of my favorite sci-fi's. My partner, Danielle, ruined the movie Aladdin for me by asking where the hell the narrator/salesman from the beginning of the film went.

Likewise, a great review, by whom I've forgotten, for the first X-Men ruined the film for me and further drove home the importance of keeping comic book worlds and the real world separated. Basically, the whole use of mutation as an analogy for racial undertones and bigotry is just amazingly stupid. Fear and hatred of black or Asian people is wrong because they're just people, they just look slightly different. Fear and hatred of someone who can level whole cities with their mind is very, very legitimate. Even mutants should be terrified of other mutants.

As it is with X-Men First Class. They place the movie during the early 1960's and have the X-Men stop World War III by being the actual reason the Cuban Missile Crisis didn't come to guns. First problem, this opens up a metric-crap-ton of historical inconsistencies, but disregarding those, there are issues on the story's own terms.

For example, people don't know about mutants? How did WWII even happen? You're telling me that not ONE of the people that the Nazi's massacred wasn't a mature mutant? There are just now, spontaneously, millions of mutants? And ALL of them are in hiding? No. I'm sorry. Some of them would turn into superheroes and some into supervillains. And that logical requirement works just fine in comic books, because that's what comic books are: heroes and villains.

It is impossible to shoehorn in comic book logic (I refer to as a cause-&-effect system) into real-world logic. It was the reason why I found both new Batman films insufferable. Batman Begins took itself gravely seriously, and its climax centered around a microwave gun that magically doesn't effect the 80% of the human body that is water. It was stupid.

First Class isn't that stupid, but every second of the movie has logical issues with its setup, logical issues that I just couldn't get past to fully enjoy the film.

I think the reason why my favorite recent comic book film is Iron Man is that the director, Jon Favreau, understands the nature of comic book movies perfectly. When interviewed about the upcoming Avengers film, he said he didn't envy the producers of that film since they had to try to merge the technological world of Iron Man with the magical world of Thor. He said that comic book movies have to operate in their own worlds, disconnected from others, for them to work. Why so few directors understand this is beyond me.

It's not just comic book films, though. It's all of Hollywood. When critics refer to jarring shifts in tone, usually in a derogatory sense, they're frequently referring to shifts in cause & effect. For example, a movie that was borderline unwatchable for me at times was the 2008 film Hamlet 2. There were scenes of slapstick C&E, scenes of real-world C&E, scenes of uplifting teen drama, Saturday Night Live, and genuine attempts at pathos. None of these can live together in a film.

As a filmmaker, you must know precisely in which universe of cause & effect your movie is going to live. All characters must then follow that system. You can't decide that you want some drama, and suddenly have everything shift to a dramatic system in hopes of wringing out a tear or two. You'll end up like Family Guy, which, regardless of its quite genuine humor and inventiveness, is horribly written.

As a writer, this is difficult, which is probably why so few do it. You must think out the complex network of effects that any event in your story would have within the world that you've chosen. This is the reason why so many super-dramas are very tightly scripted. They only write a few characters, and what they do, who they are, and where they live is highly limited. It allows the writer freedom to concentrate on the characters about which they actually care, and not have to worry about potential inconsistencies and plot holes involving hypothetical outside variables.

Unfortunately for those lazy writers that don't want to do go through the trouble, this is what makes good writing. Without it, you may as well not bother. Stop clogging up the gears of movie production with your shitty scripts and make room for story tellers who have something worthwhile to say.

How Did I Miss This?!

The Adjustment Bureau Is Retarded

*SPOILERS*

If you don't want some details about this film revealed, do not read further. First watch the film, then come back to find out why it's philosophically inane.

In the original short story, which is available online in the public domain, the story is essentially simple. God is adjusting the flow of cause and effect to achieve certain ends and some poor schmo discovers this. The book all but directly states that it is God.

The movie goes into much greater detail. It is God, the adjustment guys are angels, and they determine everything that takes place. In fact, the adjustment bureau is adjusting things all the time, we're simply not aware of it because anyone who would be aware of the changes has their mind adjusted as well.

They could have conceivably gone into Matrix-level questions of the nature of reality, only with regards to free will, but they don't. Lots of chases happen and no questions are asked aside from the usual, simpering, movie questions. And to really drive home how intellectually bankrupt the film is, it is the love of the two protagonists that achieves their deliverance.

Why God needs wacky gadgets is never explained. Why an omnipotent and omniscient God would need to adjust his plans is never answered. Why there is any difference between a God picking events to sway our destiny and random events doing the same thing is not addressed. That the brief mention of the "Dark Ages" indicates an all-knowing God that is woefully inept in world history isn't addressed. Why an all-powerful God needs agents to get this stuff done at all isn't addressed.

And, again, whenever the existence of God is known within a film, that results in a number of consequences. The fear of death is eliminated. As with The Lovely Bones, which Roger Ebert called deplorable, if we know that the afterlife is real, all of the drama associated with death is gone. Also, the simpering questions about whether the plan is always right or not is stupid. Of course the plan is always right! It was written by fucking God!

That's only a smattering of the questions that exist between the lines of this film. It could have asked them. It could have gone deep. It, importantly, could have ditched the religious aspect that makes no sense at all if you include the world outside of Europe and the US. But it didn't. And it's the worse for it.

Jurassic Park Sucks

I just finished watching Jurassic Park, and regardless of what you may think of its direction, sound, script, or what have you, the thesis of the movie is faulty! We have multiple speeches about how we're arrogant for trying to bring something ancient back to life. We have no idea what will happen! Life will find a way!

I would like to point out that none of those things happened. What did happen? ONE greedy guy screwed around with the park to try and steal some company secrets. That has nothing to do with chaos theory, or life, or ancient species, or anything at all! People built it and people fucked it up. End of story. Start again, and don't fuck it up this time. You don't just stop with one of the great technological achievements of all time!

No Dilemma At All

I already hate the upcoming move The Dilemma. Why? Because some fat fucks have thin, hot wives. Vince Vaugn is looking more and more dead as time goes on, and Kevin James' entire shtick is being a fat fuck!

Yet in The Dilemma, Vaugn's character (himself married to the luminous Jennifer Connolly) discovers that his brother's wife is cheating on him. Who plays the wife? Winona Ryder. Yeah. There's a good reason why she's cheating on him. She's thin and attractive, and he's a fat fuck. James has an attractive wife in real life because he's famous. If he wasn't famous, for example, if he actually was Paul Blart, mall cop, his wife would be as fat and unattractive as he is.

Look at Kevin James entire oeuvre! Grown Ups, wife: Maria Bello. Paul Blart: Jayma Mays. Hitch: Amber Valletta. And of course, we have The King of Queens, which practically refined the "fat fuck/hot wife" cliche into an art form.

I am so done with this. My girlfriend thinks it's a massive conspiracy to convince women to lower their standards. I'm forced to agree.

Religulous

I'm watching Bill Maher's Religulous and he has just left some Christian tourist site down in Florida. A woman who appears to be something like the floor/general manager confronts the camera crew because she didn't know that Bill Maher was going to be there personally. She's upset because of "who he is and the types of work that he does," or something along those lines.

I actually kind of understand her perspective. These people are, well, idiots. The woman who owns the place might not be, but she doesn't need to be nor does she need to care. She's just running a place that people like to visit. Bill is actually just kind of being an asshole for going there, disrupting her business, and putting people on the spot.

I completely endorse his putting of major characters on the spot. Rabbis, politicians (especially), and people in positions of great power, but everyday people? There's no useful end in it. I don't even derive any schadenfreude from it. I also don't think that his usage of derogatory jokes achieves much. These people are, mostly, wrong on their own terms, and that's more than enough to dig into.

What The Hell Happened in 1972?

I was perusing Wikipedia, as I often do, and came across the list of top-grossing films. I take solace in the fact that Avatar is still very far down the inflation-adjusted and ticket-sales lists... Unobtanium... fuckin' hell.

But regardless! You can view this list, which lists the top grossing films for each year. You have outliers, like Gone With The Wind (and I bet Disney is really embarrassed that Song of the South was a bonafied mega-hit), but what about 1972?

It's frequently mentioned that Jaws was the first summer blockbuster, but the phenomenon seems to have started three years earlier. Previously, the top-grossing films had been measured in double-digit millions for over three decades. Thirty million here, fifty million there. But 1972 brought The Godfather and a box office of $245 million. $245 million! Alright, fine. Gone With The Wind did $338 million in the 30's. But the next year, The Exorcist, $402 million. Then $193m for Godfather II. Jaws, $470m. Rocky, $225m. Star Wars, $782m.

Over NIGHT, Hollywood started producing mega-million-dollar blockbusters. What the hell happened?

The Purpose of Movies.

Movies are meant to entertain. That is it. They are not paintings. They are not meant to challenge or be though-provoking. They are meant to entertain. The best movies do that and challenge you, but things that are so avant garde and artsy fartsy that they become moving paintings stop even being movies. They do not entertain.

Juxtapose the experimentation of the French New Wave with Italian Neorealism. The French understood that a movie should entertain. It should be about being a movie. Italian neorealists were depressed because the war had just ended, so they started making films that were depressing and pointless.

Go watch The Bicycle Thief. It's boring as fucking hell. Yes, yes, it was groundbreaking and has had a generations-long effect on cinema all around the world. That doesn't change that it is tearfully boring. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to sound intelligent. I respect it. I comprehend it. I appreciate it. I still say it's barely a movie.

I mean for Christ's sake, the films were so pointless and depressing (and that was the point) the government told them to stop making them. Compare this to Schindler's List. It's depressing, moving, heart-wrenching, but also entertaining. It fills us with emotion and tells us a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Old Sci-Fi rocks

I try to avoid the generational error whereby a generation considers itself superior to all generations before and all generations that have come since. You know the phrases, "Kids these days!" or "Things were different back in my day" and "my parents live in the stone age."

It's obviously a self-centered predilection, where the world is as you see it, everyone you know sees it similarly, thus that is the correct way. So, I try to avoid that way of thinking and instead search for similarities between generations, because they usually outweigh the differences.

That in mind, as far as pop-culture goes, we were so ridiculously naive not that long ago. I love watching Sci-Fi movies from the 1940's and 1950's. Mystery Science Theater 3000 is also a verdant garden of ripe crap from similar eras to pick apart and laugh at.

The comically overt sexism, racism, and blunt political statements. The ridiculous ways of dress. I love how the men in those Sci-Fi's were so hilariously stereotypical of the ideal, 1940's man. For God's sake, he almost always wore a two piece suit, tie, and smoked a pipe. All that was needed was The Beave (Off topic, but the Beave is going to turn 61 this year. That's just weird.).

And while Science Fiction has always been a mirror on society, in the 1950's it was just silly. They talked, walked, dressed, and acted like us. Hell, they even helpful, yet quiet and demure women on these other, super-advanced worlds! How alien!

My aforementioned generation-centric error applies full well to these works, as well. They assumed that Human life, as it was then, was so already close to perfect that aliens wouldn't be too different. Yes, I can understand that for entertainment purposes, the authors couldn't go too alien for fear of, um, alienating the audience. But still. The audience ate it up. Didn't they bother looking at it with an even remotely incredulous eye?

A good example is one of my favorite movies of all time Forbidden Planet. I can forgive the archaic ideas about how future technology would look; they didn't really have technology, per se, at the time. They were designing blind, so we'll give them a pass. But don't you think they would think that by the year 2200, we might have at least a few women in the space exploration corp? Just a few!? Nope. The only woman in the movie is that aforementioned helpful, but quiet and demure female who is also, thankfully, the damsel in the distress.

Yes, it was based on The Tempest, and yes, there was only one female in that. But last I checked, there wasn't an energy monster, alien civilization, or Frank Drebin. And if source material wants to get involved, in the pilot for Star Trek, future Gene Roddenberry wife Majel Barret played the second-in-command of the Enterprise, and spent most of the episode in control. The network, and apparently the audience, felt that this was unrealistic and that only a man should be in control.

Oh, how far we've come... seriously. I'm not being sarcastic. Well, maybe a little. But hey, Angelina Jolie killed a whole lot of people in Wanted. That's got to be worth something.

Waaaaall-e

I was in the Disney store the other day and was shocked to see Wall-E crap everywhere. Then it hit me, that Wall-E, especially from a company such as Disney, was a $180 million insult to the average Disney product buyer.

Think about that. Who is the average person you see wearing a t-shirt with Pooh on it? This doesn't apply to souvenirs from Disney World, only those shirts purchased at Target or Wal-Mart. That's right. Fat, stupid, trash. I'm not saying that all people who wear these shirts are fat, stupid, and trashy. I'm only saying that a higher than normal number of people who wear these shirts fulfill those three characteristics. Don't even get me started on people who wear stuff with Warner Bros. characters on them.

And I can only hope that Disney realizes the irony of walking into a Disney store and being able to buy disposable garbage that will likely end up in a dump within a few months with the fucking Buy n Large logo on them!

In fact, I'm sure they recognized that, which may account for the relative dearth of Wall-E products in comparison to other Disney movies. For example, on Amazon, a search for Wall-E and then toys results in 294 products, of which about half are actual Wall-e products. Monsters Inc. nets 305, with a little over a third being Disney products. Disney Cars lands an impressive 1,260, with about 75% being for the movie. 532 for The Incredibles. Disney Princess barfs up an amazing 2,585, with almost every item being a Disney product.

Smoke If Ya Got 'Em.

Last Monday, the 18th, The New York Department of Health put a full page ad in the Times about smoking in the movies, directly stating that it is apparently the responsibility of movie studios to prevent kids from smoking. Strange, I thought it was to make entertaining movies. Ah well.

I've read through as much of the data as I can, and I must admit, it's hard to deny that much of the evidence is pretty compelling. Still, none of the research I saw answered one question, whether there was a direct causal link of any real strength. Especially of a sufficient strength to warrant flipping out to such a degree as a full-page Times ad. I frankly think this is all the classic old parents thinking new media is destroying the youth of American. Comics, television, movies, video games, it's all the same thing.

And much as then, many of these studies get close, but never close enough to saying that "we showed these kids this movie and they started smoking." They never find that smoking gun, and in that case, I always defer to the proclivities of the subject. The studies only ever ask whether the kids saw certain movies or not. I find it not only possible, but likely that kids with extant characteristics drove them to both watch movies with smoking, and then smoke, themselves.

And not even involved with the methodology, but the letter, which can be viewed here, said that movies are "the single most powerful pro-tobacco influence on children today." That's wrong even by their own website. Yes, according to there data it had a strong effect on children with non-smoking parents, but far and away, the strongest influence was the smoking habits of the parents. For the last three categories of viewing, the number of movies watched had zero effect on the smoking habits of the children.
In general, the letter makes sweeping declarations about the subject that are comically unwarranted by the research. Even the researchers themselves only use the data the say that "this finding suggests that the process which leads children to initiate smoking begins much earlier than adolescence. Viewing smoking in the movies may influence the decision to smoke in more than a third of children." May? That's the best you've got? May? I'm sorry, you better have something a whole shit-load better than 'may' before you start telling the movie industry to start integrating government-sponsored propaganda into its films. I think it's obvious that the greatest threat to children does not come from movies, but from poor, ignorant, or uninformed parents. I've got nothing against education campaigns to get people to quit, (as long as they actually work) but running around legislating everything we can is not freedom, it's not American, and it's not smart. You just end up with lots of poorly written laws, drawn in haste to get some politician onto a soapbox.

In the same issue, there was an Op-Ed piece, from one of the nameless Op-Ed department typewriter biscuits, about the "Global Threat" of tobacco. I knew I was going to dislike this article just from the title. Basic thrust, poor countries smoke a whole fuck-load, which is one order of magnitude greater than a shit-load, and the answer is government bans on the sale, advertisement, promotion, and big, scary pictures on the packages. As Dennis Leary once said, "It doesn't matter how big the warnings on the cigarettes are; you could have a black pack, with a skull and crossbones on the front, called TUMORS, and smokers would be around the block going, 'I can't wait to get my hands on these fucking things! I bet ya get a tumor as soon as you light up!'"

I find it very easy to believe the tobacco industry's claim of converting people from local brands. They don't need to recruit new people. The local culture is doing that all by itself. Even in Western countries, there's no need to recruit people. Just put your product up for sale, give it a cool name, and extant addicts will be happy to puff your particular brand. Japan, for example; 50% of men smoke. In China, it's even higher. In African countries, where the article specifically mentions, everyone already smokes! Now, the actual data is problematic to interpret because it says that less than a third of men actually smoke in Africa, but that includes people so poor that they can't afford cigarettes. Those that can afford appear to have a much higher incidence. I'm tired of the ridiculous vilification of the tobacco industry. They're a business, they make a product and they try to get people to want it. That's the way this works. If the government wants to stop things, stop people from wanting it. Don't blame the companies, and don't blame the governments of those pooooor, uneducated savages down in Africa. Us enlightened white people don't know everything.

Before you get into a tizzy, I'm against smoking. I hate it. Can't stand it. I've never smoked. It's my single biggest turn-off in women. I flat-out avoid smokers. BUT, and here's a big but, that's my choice. I do not feel the need to blame other people when somebody chooses to start smoking. I do not demand that I can eat or go anywhere free of someone else's smokes. If a restaurant wants to cater to smokers, more power to them. If they want my business, they'll simply have to cater to me, as well, in some way. But no, in this country we pass absurd laws telling people how to run their businesses. Oh, but it's for their own good. Right. No, it's for the good of the grand-standing politician who rode the controversy into another term.

I want to see smoking eradicated, and I think it will be. It's deadly, terrible, and smelly. But if someone chooses to smoke, then they should be allowed to. They have to freedom to light up, just as I have the freedom to get up, and leave. It's not that hard.

Well, What About an A-Bomb?

I know that in certain movies, you can not invade them with certain systems of logic if they function on other, distinct systems of logic. For example, a movie about magic (or majiiiqcck as new-agers say) can not have science brought into it or it all breaks down.

Unfortunately, movies about magic are frequently brought together with modern times. Harry Potter is a good example. Yeah, yeah. All the wizards at Hogwarts are very powerful, but, could they stop an A-bomb? Or, again, any one of the 93,476 modern-day vampire movies where vampires are loaded with bullets and knives and whatnot but keep coming. Well, what about an A-bomb? Like the Grand Poobah vampire in John Carpenter's Vampires, what would have happened if he got nailed with Fat Man.

I'm sorry, but this is actually a knock against movies, for me. If the movie is set in modern times it must be subject to the rules of modern times. Like the bus that picks up Harry Potter in the third book/movie. It frantically dodges people on the road as it drives around at warp 5, and it's explained that people don't see because they choose not to see. Well, yeah, but the bus is still physically there, in some way. So whether they can see it or not they could still walk into it. And what about the tracks that carry the train? Do people just not notice them?

My favorites are still vampires, werewolves, and other such ergot-inspired delusions. I guess ol' B-Dogg Stoker didn't imagine A-bombs. What's more, he didn't need to. But now, if you're writing a movie about magic, vampires, or perhaps magical vampires, I beg you to ask the question, "what about an A-bomb?"