The rain continues.
And the wind.
The deadline for the novel has arrived.
I’m not finished.
Haven’t slept.
Car getting towed to the shop today.
Haunted by Oscar nominations.
Feeling feverish.
Some think it’s romantic, but I know the truth about being…
Sleepless in Seattle.
(To taste the fear, watch that trailer.)
(Thanks for the link, Rachel Eby.)
Oh, and if it drives you crazy to get a chorus hook stuck in your head, just try coping with your life after you experience THIS… the pinnacle of Orlando Bloom’s career. (Hey, a visit back to Middle-Earth can’t be bad during this Oscar season, can it? Well, okay, maybe it can.)
I love those trailer recuts. Greatness. Very creative. And so much fun. The Shining recut was the pioneer, and The Christmas Story was great, as well. I think there needs to be a regular on-going contest for this. What fun!
Ladies and gentlemen… PO-TA-TOES.
interesting on the al gore documentary…
this is his topic of great knowledge.
–RC of strangeculture.blogspot.com
Sounds interesting, but what about the last movie Gore encouraged people to see, where he stood outside the theatre proselytizing and handing out pamphlets, “The Day After Tomorrow”. Hopefully this won’t bear any resemblance to that one.
Reportedly, Al Gore’s movie will be targeting faith groups a la The Passion.
Would it be out of line to be skeptical of a politician who seems to have built a career on evironmental fearmongering? Who accused the United States of abusing Arabs in a speech given in that bastion of human rights, Saudi Arabia?
I’m skeptical. When I watched the trailer it felt as if its entire goal was to frighten me.
Lines like:
“Did the planet betray us or did we betray the planet?”
“Is it possible that we should protect against other threats besides terrorists?”
“Think of the impact of a couple hundred thousand refugees and then imagine one hundred million.”
“Our ability to live is what is at stake.”
Not to mention the heart-accelerating music.
I’m no expert, but my guess is that if the ice caps melted, it wouldn’t happen overnight. There wouldn’t suddenly be 100 million people without homes.
It appears that Jeffrey Wells is campaigning for this film to win an Oscar because IT AGREES WITH HIS BELIEF, not necessarily because it’s a great film. Everything I see in his comment praises it because of the position it takes, not because it happens to be a well-done documentary. That is absurd and it’s not the reason a film should win awards.
Based on all of the available evidence I’ve read (from BOTH sides), I do not believe the scaremongers are accurate. When I was a teen-ager, the “scientific consensus” was that we were headed for another Ice Age. Nobody seems to want to remember how inaccurate that was. The same scaremongers who are pushing the global warming agenda were pushing the idea in the ’70s and ’80s that hundreds of millions of people were going to be dying almost immediately because of overpopulation. Why is nobody holding their past predictions up and questioning the validity of the judgment or objectivity? These people have a long history of being 100 percent wrong about their predictions. Why does anyone give them credibility today?
Regardless whether the global warming theory is accurate or not, it’s ludicrous to act as though a film is an Oscar contender because it happens to push YOUR political agenda.
Just by chance, the next place I went after posting my comment a few minutes ago has a link to a newspaper column by an MIT scientist who says that those who dissent from the global warming agenda are being intimidated into silence. If you’re going to watch Al Gore’s propaganda spectacular, maybe you can at least balance it by reading what a professor of atmospheric science at MIT has to say about it.
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220
The thing I love about The Day after Tomorrow is that it’s based on the premise that sudden changes in planetary temperature could happen now because they have happened before … back when humans had nothing to do with them! That kind of makes it difficult to assume that any sudden change now would necessarily be our fault, wouldn’t it?
Well, actually, I believe the conventional wisdom on the issue of global warming is that we have accelerated the process. So it’s a combination of natural cycles and our own actions.
Oh, it certainly could be a combination of those things, yeah. But we can’t assume it is. And the funny thing about The Day after Tomorrow is that it gives us reason to doubt the “conventional wisdom”, as it is represented in that movie, even though it clearly wants us to make that assumption.
Sure…if you take it seriously. But I don’t know many who follow the conventional wisdom that did. I recall a lot of articles from the time the movie came out stating that the movie’s science was a joke. I don’t recall many people outside of maybe the director trying to claim it was possible. I don’t see people bring the movie up when discussing global warming-unless they are challenging the possibility.
Conventional wisdom is that The Day After Tomorrow is a farce. 🙂
Then wouldn’t Al Gore, by hitching his wagon to that movie, be out of step with conventional wisdom? 🙂
At any rate, the underlying point remains: The fact that the planet has gone hot and cold in the past without human input means we cannot assume that changes in the climate nowadays are necessarily due to human input.
I admit that my skepticism on this point sounds a little like the skepticism that Intelligent Design proponents encourage in biology classes. But science thrives on skepticism, so that’s okay.
And, as Elvis Costello once said, skepticism is different from cynicism, because skepticism hopes to be proved wrong and cynicism doesn’t.
aren’t we missing the big point here? al gore is narrating this himself!
seriously, who’s going to watch it?
At least I will.
Gore is not as terrible a speaker as the 2000 election made him out to be. Remember, he was the “hitman” against Perot on Larry King during the NAFTA debate. He can be effective. He’s just not consistently effective.
I do not buy in the radical environmental fringe, but am sympathetic in general. I’m intrigued enough now to see it.
Since it’s part of the original post, I’d only note that I wouldn’t include the 1999 CBS miniseries “Jesus” in a top ten list (I found it veering off into the PC realm with that vision of the Crusades, plus Gary Oldman struck me as still in Dr. Smith mode as Pilate) and I would include in the lower part of the Top 10 the 1961 “King Of Kings” which came off as more sincere in spite of its mega flaws (like having Pilate’s wife as the daughter of Tiberius) but which boasts one of the most glorious scores in the history of film music by Miklos Rozsa that helps elevate the material as a whole greatly.
Well, I cited the Crusades element in the 1999 mini-series as one of that film’s strong points, so I guess we’ll have to disagree there.
And the 1961 version of King of Kings was never in danger of making this list, either; I know the movie has its defenders (e.g. Matt Page, Paul Verhoeven, etc.), but myself, I can’t get past the fact that, in this movie that is ostensibly about Christ, Christ himself appears in less than half of the actual movie (trust me, I timed it). Plus I don’t care for Jeffrey Hunter’s performance at all, and I find the frequent intrusion of battle scenes between Romans and Zealots somewhat annoying.
I’ll grant you that Rosza’s score is pretty good — I listen to it occasionally — but then, it’s kind of a retread of his score for the 1959 version of Ben-Hur, whifch I listen to more frequently.