Janet Evanovich is a writer of women’s fiction, aka romance novels, except for her ‘By the Numbers Series’, which also appeals to men, teens, adults, and the elderly.

The series is also known as the tales of Stephanie Plum, and the books’ titles are based on numbers such as: “One For the Money”, “Two For The Dough”, “Three to Get Deadly”, etc.

The 16th book of the series is slated for release June 22nd, 2010.

Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series is one of the most popular works of fiction in recent memory that has crossed the barrier of women’s fiction to a large, loyal male readership.

http://www.evanovich.com/

Ms. Evanovich has also accomplished a most treasured feat of having her Stephanie Plum come to life on the big screen next year.

In Movie Theaters: TBA, 2011 (Development)
Directed by: Julie Anne Robinson
Starring:
Katherine Heigl as Stephanie Plum
Jason O’Mara as Joe Morelli
Daniel Sunjata as Ranger
Distributed by: Lionsgate Films
Genres: Drama Crime Mystery

http://www.themovieinsider.com/m1037/one-for-the-money/

Those of us who are rabid fans of Stephanie Plum have speculated for years on the casting should it ever be made into a movie and the actors chosen are not exactly the people her fans would have chosen, but we’re willing to wait and see.

Other books made into movies, such as “An Interview With A Vampire” suffered similar complaints with the casting of Tom Cruise as Lestat, but that worked out nicely and fans of the books were appeased.

Stephanie Plum is a comical character whose life is filled with crazy mishaps and humorous catastrophes once she begins the life working for her cousin Vinny as a bounty hunter.

She has a pet hamster named Rex that lives in a soup can within an aquarium, and she keeps an unloaded gun in the cookie jar on her kitchen counter.

Joe Morelli is the roguish Italian cop that she’s known all of her life and eventually becomes her on-again, off-again boyfriend.

Ranger is the dark man of mystery, always dressed in black with a sketchy background and sketchy heritage, who owns a security company Rangeman Inc. and he saves Stephanie from several hilarious and not so hilarious adventures.

Stephanie is from the ‘burgs’ of Trenton and the book is filled with a zany cast of characters, plus a dog named Bob.

There’s Grandma Morelli with her ‘evil-eye’ and Grandma Mazur who always carries a loaded gun in her pocketbook and has been known to shoot the chicken on the platter during family meals.

There’s Stephanie’s nemesis Joyce Barnhardt that boinked Stephanie’s husband on her dining room table, leading to a very short marriage and quicker divorce.

Eventually Stephanie meets and saves a prostitute Lula, who is one of the most beloved characters in the series.

I’ve always thought that Sandra Bullock would make an exceptional Stephanie Plum and Dwayne Johnson aka The Rock should be Ranger.
Alas, that is not to be, but I’m willing to keep an open mind.

I am hoping that Cloris Leachman will be cast as Grandma Morelli and Betty White as Grandma Mazur.

As for Lula, I think that one of my favorite actresses – Queen Latifah – would be prefect for the comedic part.

I started reading the Stephanie Plum books several years ago and my husband would always hear me laugh out loud. By the time I was on book 4 of the series, he had to read them to find out what was so funny and he’s been a fan ever since.
And he laughs out loud, too.

So, if you’ve never read them, I would suggest that you give them a try, and see if they’ll make you laugh out loud, too.

Tonight begins the eight day holiday of Passover, the oldest continuing celebration among Jews.  In Judaism, there are three ways, or levels, of explaining a tradition or a text—the “simple” or face value meaning (Peshat), the story behind the text (Midrash), and the hidden or secret explanation or interpretation (Sod). Today, at the beginning of Passover, I thought I’d tell you about the basics of this celebration; later, I’ll post about the other ways of seeing it.

Personally, and because my parents were not religious, I learned the Passover story the old fashioned way—by watching Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=guGEM8de0AY

Great effects for 1956, but what a crappy movie. Still, as a kid, I loved it even though I understood nothing. The acting was truly laughable, unless you were seven years old. All I remember was Ann Baxter saying over and over, “Oh, Moses, Moses!” and Edward G. Robinson sneering, “Yeah? Where’s yer God NOW, Moses?”

And that very scary scene where this creepy green fog descends onto Egypt and kills the first born. (YIKES-Me! I am the first born too!) The parting of the Red Sea was awesome cool, but I distinctly remember thinking: What happened to all the fish when the sea parted? Are they spinning around in that turbulence?

Instead of posting that interminable movie, the easiest way to let you know about Passover—and also because I am lazy—is with this short video. It is from The History Channel, about five minutes.

The History of Passover

http://www.history.com/videos/history-of-passover#history-of-passover

So, to recap, the festival of Passover is celebrated in the early spring, from the 15th through the 22nd of the Hebrew month of Nissan. It commemorates the emancipation of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt. And, by following the rituals of Passover, we have the ability to relive and experience the true freedom that our ancestors gained.

Passover is probably the best known of the Jewish holidays, mostly because it ties in with Christian history (the Last Supper was a Passover seder). The seder is the name for the ritual meal we eat, and where we read aloud the story of the Exodus for Egypt. Seder is also the Hebrew word for “order” as in the order in which we tell the story and conduct the ritual.

Passover Observances

The highlight of Passover is the two “Seders,” observed on the first two nights of the holiday. The Seder is a fifteen step, family oriented, tradition and ritual packed feast.

The focal points of the Seder are:

• Eating matzah.

• Eating bitter herbs—to commemorate the bitter slavery endured by the Hebrews.
• Drinking four cups of wine or grape juice—a royal drink to celebrate our newfound freedom.

THE SEDERS

Instead of chametz, we eat matzah— flat unleavened bread. It is a mitzvah to partake of matzah on the two Seder nights (see below for more on this), and during the rest of the holiday it is optional.

• The term “Passover” derives from the Book of Exodus, where the Angel of Death ( the final Plague of Egypt) passed over the houses of the Hebrew slaves.

• The recitation of the Haggadah, a liturgy that describes in detail the story of the Exodus from Egypt. The Haggadah is the fulfillment of the biblical obligation to recount to our children the story of the Exodus on the night of Passover

• Passover is divided into two parts. a) The first two days and last two days (that commemorate the splitting of the Red sea) are full-fledged holidays. Holiday candles are lit at night, and we recite blessings over the wine and sumptuous holiday meals are enjoyed on both nights and days. Observant and Orthodox Jews don’t go to work, drive, write or switch on or off electric devices.

• (The “ch” in Hebrew is pronounced like the Scottish in the word “loch.”)

• To commemorate the unleavened bread that the Israelites ate when they left Egypt, we don’t eat or even retain in our possession any “chametz” from midday of the day before Passover until the conclusion of the holiday. Chametz means leavened grain—any food or drink that contains even a trace of wheat, barley, rye, oats, spelt or their derivatives and wasn’t guarded from leavening or fermentation. This includes bread, cake, cookies, cereal, pasta, and most alcoholic beverages. Moreover, almost any processed food or drink can be assumed to be chametz unless certified otherwise.

• Ridding our homes of chametz is an intensive process. It involves a full-out spring-cleaning search-and-destroy mission during the weeks before Passover, and culminates with a ceremonial search for chametz on the night before Passover, and then a burning of the chametz ceremony on the morning before the holiday.

MATZAH

In many homes, in addition to the ritual foods, dinner usually consists of gefilte fish (a kind of fish pate), matzah ball soup (chicken soup with dumplings), and a brisket with lots of potatoes (because we can’t eat grain and gotta get those carbs in!).

Gefilte Fish

(The red stuff in the middle is horseradish and beets, which makes the fish palatable. And makes our eyes tear.)

Matzah Ball Soup

Four Cups of Wine (Yes—FOUR FULL CUPS!)

Brisket Recipe (OY! Fat Dave has a Jewfro.)

http://www.history.com/videos/beef-brisket

Macaroons (which need no flour) are typical for dessert.

Since as a kid I learned the story of Passover from Cecil B. DeMille, it’s a good thing Mel Brooks wasn’t making movies then!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TAtRCJIqnk

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2skwoHvw-3w

One last thing that I think is so cool—Obama Has a White House Seder.

Tomorrow, I will write about the Seder and its symbolism and later, about what I have learned about the more hidden, sacred meaning of the festival. Happy Passover!

And then a VERY weird thing happened. The amount of smoking shown in movies actually went UP after 1998. That’s right. UP. There were no longer millions of dollars in payments from Big Tobacco to Hollywood (Not as far as anyone knew, at least), but smoking scenes actually went up. In 2003-2004, 77 percent of PG-13, PG and G movies contained tobacco use.
What happened? Hollywood was still enamored with the archaic idea that cigarettes are hip and cool. This had nothing to do with cash payouts any longer. Hollywood just couldn’t quit cigarettes. They were hooked. They were stuck in the days of Bogart and Bergman.
In case you think this is a silly issue, remember, there is no more cigarette advertising on TV. There is very limited cigarette advertising in magazines anymore. Where is the biggest source of misinformation that smoking is cool and hip? Movies! An increasing number of studies started showing a direct cause and effect between “cool” smoking scenes in movies encouraging young teens to begin smoking. In some of these studies and surveys, kids said point-blank they started smoking because they wanted to be cool like some certain movie star.
Well, do-gooder busybodies like me started noting this bizarre situation and started pressuring, via letters, lobbying, etc., for the MPAA to start cracking down on the gratuitous smoking in PG and PG-13 films. Hollywood fought back, whining about “artistic freedom,” (Never mind the fact that any depiction of pot-smoking results in an automatic R rating). We started asking for an automatic R rating for inclusion of smoking scenes. Believe me, I have written dozens of letters to the MPAA. They have received tens of thousands similar letters.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a complete prude. I have no problem with smoking in R-rated movies. If you got ‘me, light ‘me. It’s the movies that are marketed to kids that drive me nuts when I see gratuitous smoking. I also am NOT in favor of fiddling with old movies to remove the smoking scenes (Some people in the smokers’ rights crowd have accused us do-gooders of wanting to do that. No one has ever seriously proposed that.). Smoking in movies from the 30s and 40s is all part of the historical context, which is fine with me. Sam Spade or Rick Blaine sucking on cigarette is as Americana as it gets.

I make the analogy of smoking to the F-bomb. There are very strict limits to using the F-bomb in PG-13 movies. You can use it once, in a non-sexual manner, and that’s it (OK, granted this is kind of a silly rule, but that’s what it is.). Studios know this. They know the rules, and they know how they want a movie marketed before the first day of principal photography, so they work around the rules. They do it with every movie. They don’t includes F-bombs if they want a PG-13 movie. If studios can avoid the F-bomb to keep the PG-13 rating, they can just as easily avoid pointless smoking scenes.
The MPAA compromised with the smoking guidelines, writing up a Byzantine set of rules that it takes a degree in law to follow. To sum up, smoking is still OK in PG and PG-13 movies if it’s set in historical context or if it’s not portrayed in a positive light. A movie like “Good Night and Good Luck,” is a good example. It takes place in the 1950s, when most people smoked like chimneys. (And seriously, I love that movie, but watching it actually makes my eyes feel gritty.). A movie like “Stranger than Fiction,” is another good example, in which a heavy smoker in the film wakes up every morning with a terrible smoker’s hack. These are both PG movies. Personally, I wanted stronger rules, but I’ll go along with this for the time being.

I’ll go along with it, because I think the rules will have a “chilling effect” of discouraging gratuitous and lazy smoking scenes in movies marketed to kids and teens. I’m a big believer in artistic freedom, believe me, I really am, but the “artistic freedom” argument from some Hollywood directors toward smoking is a bunch of bunk, in my opinion. First of all, 99 percent of the time, smoking scenes add absolutely nothing to the plot, nor to character development. They are simply an extremely lazy prop meant to convey “cool” or “rebellion” or some such nonsense. Leonardo Vicario is the best example of this. The guy is pushing 40, still looks 20, and smokes like a damn chimney in almost every movie he appears in because he apparently believes it makes him look tougher or more grown-up. I’ve never seen an actor rely so heavily upon a cigarette as a prop. Second of all, 90 to 95 percent of genuinely “artistic” movies (at least) are rated R anyway.
Remember, in the 1980s, Hollywood put out a bunch of teen movies depicting drug use and heavy drinking as just being part of wacky teen hijacks. Well, after MADD made a big stink about this (A lot bigger than us anti-tobacco types did), you don’t see drug use or heavy drinking in PG-13 movies anymore, at least not depicted in a positive light. Movies are a business as much, if not more, than art. If you want to make a movie with lots of booze and drugs, like “Superbad,” it’s going to be R-rated and you’re going to have to market it as an R movie.
Avatar got caught up in the middle of this MPAA change. One of the characters, Sigourney Weaver’s, was supposed to be a heavy smoker, but the MPAA changed its rules. Suddenly, they couldn’t include “pervasive” smoking scenes in Avatar and keep the PG-13 rating. If you pay attention in that movie, Weaver smokes some early in the movie, but midway through the film, she completely stops. They had to write all the smoking scenes out of the movie in mid-production or risk an R rating!
As an aside, if you haven’t seen it, I would recommend for an interesting take on smoking is “Constantine.” It is the most anti-smoking movie I’ve ever seen. It’s not a great flick (actually genuinely more scary than I thought it would be), but I love the subtle anti-smoking message in that movie. (Ironically, Constantine is R-rated, and a fairly hard R to boot.)
Another movie with a short, subtle anti-smoking scene is “Superman Returns.” In order to make amends for the beginning the era of cigarette product placement in movies, they added a little scene in which Superman keeps blowing out Lois’ lighter as she tries to light a cigarette. He looks at her lungs with his X-ray vision and tells her she has about 20 years left if she doesn’t stop smoking.

So, that is the sordid history of Hollywood and Big Tobacco. Hollywood has yet to kick the habit.
By the way, Humphrey Bogart died of esophagus cancer at the age of 57. Clark Gable died at 59 of a massive heart attack. Gary Cooper died at 60 of prostate and lung cancer. Audrey Hepburn died at 62 of cancer. Errol Flynn died at 50 of a massive heart attack.

Holi (pronounced ho-lee), also known as Phagwa, is marked at the transition from the Hindu months Phalguna to Chaitra. The Hindu calendar being lunisolar, this date changes every year. In 2010 it fell on March 1st. Besides India, Nepal and Sri Lanka, it is observed by the South Asian diaspora in all its regional varieties throughout Europe, America, Canada, Australia, in New Zealand, South Africa, and of course, Suriname, Trinidad, Mauritius and Fiji which are notable countries where South Asians were brought for labor and now constitute a significant proportion of the population.

Background.

Vaishnava

In a timeless past of the Satya Yuga, a ruler from a race of giants, known as Daityas, held power and riches unrivaled, except by his own attire. Thus, he was known as Hiranyakashipu, or, ‘Golden-robed’. After performing austerities (tapas) and being granted a boon by Brahma which had made him nearly invincible, the ‘Demon King’ attacked the Heavens, lorded over earth, demanded people worship him, and squandered his wealth on destruction and his own greatness, even challenging Lord Indra.

This all was at odds with his own son, Prahlada, a pious devotee of Lord Vishnu; a Vaishnava, whom sought to correct his father in the right virtues of a Maharaja and to guide him in Bhakti realization of the Supreme Soul by renouncing avarice and absorbing his thoughts on Him. This only made his father furious,

[T]he daitya ruler daunted upon seeing how the attempts ran futile, devised with determination for a variety of ways to kill him. Crushing him with an elephant, attacking with the king’s poisonous snakes, with spells of doom, throwing him from heights, conjuring tricks, imprisoning him, administering venom and subjecting him to starvation, cold, wind, fire and water and with piling rocks upon him, was the demon unable to put his son, the sinless one, to death… (Srimad Bhagavata Purana, 7.5.42-4)

And yet, the boy through his devotion to the Lord was protected from his father’s persecution time and time again. At long last his father’s wrath brought him before the court, and challenged to see this God who could challenge his own deific powers. He would try to kill his son himself this time, but before the boy’s head could be severed by his father who scoffed that no one could save him, God made his omnipresence known to all assembled from a pillar. The universe cracked open, and a cacophony of sounds and kaleidoscopic dimensions could be seen; the omnipresence of God within everything.  Narasimha, the fourth avatara of Vishnu, a hybrid with man’s torso and lion’s head then appeared from this pillar and mauled the Demon King Hiranyakashipu to shreds. The king had used a boon from Brahma gained by devotion for evil; thus God had to manifest himself in earthly form to correct this terrorizing and subjection of earth and heavens alike.

Among the schemes Hiranyakashipu hatched against his son was when he asked his sister to have Prahlada to sit in her lap in a bonfire. Hiranyakashipu’s sister had received a special boon that gave her immunity to fire. However; she was burned to death and Prahlad saved. There are numerous accounts as to the reason for this, but suffice it to say, the sister of the king died and good triumphed.

Hiranyakashipu’s sister was named Holika, from which Holi is believed to derive. It is this event that Holi celebrates in Holika Dahan (the burning of Holika), in which bonfires are lit, primarily in North India, the day before Holi. Originally these included effigies of Holika, but in most parts this is now replaced by a simple pyre. Comparisons to their fellow Aryans’ (if only common traditional heritage; I have no intent of opening the Aryan Invasion Theory can of worms here) celebration of Cheharshanbe-Souri in Iran and indeed, bonfire spring festivals in Indo-European cultures throughout Europe, are readily seen. The triumph of light over darkness.

Shaivite

The main story as recounted and summarized above, can be considered by some to be a Vaishnava polemic, with Hiranyakashipu representing Lord Shiva. As such, given where you are, an alternate account is of Kama and Shiva.

As recounted in the Saura Purana, there was another daitya called Taraka whom had achieved a boon from Brahma after severe austerities. He asked for the boon of being invincible to the gods; and like Hiranyakashipu, effectively immortal. Of course, Brahma thought this too much so asked for an exception. The wily Taraka made the condition that only the child of Shiva could kill him. Shiva was doing penance and lost in himself after losing his first wife, Dakshayani (which is the subject of another famous myth which is the source of the practice of sati; Sati being another name for Dakshayani), therefore Taraka had reasoned that Shiva would be unable to produce a son.

Of course, Taraka does what demons granted boons of immense power by Brahma do, he terrorizes the universe of gods and men. He battles Vishnu for 30,000 years alone, but Vishnu has to retreat in confusion and hide. Beleaguered, the gods meet with Brahma, who tells them of Taraka’s weakness. They hatch a plan.

Parvati, who had realized she was the reincarnated Dakshayani from a young age, and had performed severe penances for Shiva’s hand in marriage, was put before Shiva. The only problem, is that Shiva was absorbed in yogic asceticism, having renounced the world after the loss of his first wife. So, Kama (yes, as in the Kama Sutra; and, counterpart to Greek Eros; Cupid) is enjoined to put lust into Shiva and wake him from his trance to produce the progeny that will defeat Taraka.

But, when Shiva awakens from his meditation after being immovable by either Parvati or Kama, he sees Parvati there, and then, sees Kama with his five flowered arrow drawn in its bow and aimed at him. Shiva’s third-eye shoots forth a fire accumulated in his tapas and incinerates Kama by its own power independent of Shiva’s will. Parvati is now distressed, and rebukes Shiva. It is now that she asks for her boon from him, having suffered as an example to all yoginis past and present. She asks that Kama be revived. Consenting, Shiva replies, “Let [Kama] be without a body in order to please you, lady with beautiful eyes. In that form he will be able to shake the world.”

Long story short, Shiva and Parvati beget Skanda (the Hindu ‘Ares’), who destroys Taraka. In South India, Holi is thus referred to as Kama Dahanam. But of course, the larger lesson was the victory of love, for now the disembodied Kama, with his wife Rati, could flit from one corner of the earth to another like the wind. In this context, Holi is like an Indian Valentine’s Day.

Radha Krishna

In this spirit, the Ras-Lila is celebrated (literally, ‘Passion Play’ and quite different from the Christian form, of course!); particularly in Mathura and Vrindavan, where Lord Krishna (the eighth avatara of Vishnu) was born and the place of the Ras-Lila, respectively. The Ras-Lila is the all-famous tale of the gopis’ (milk maidens) love and adoration of the perfect youth Krishna, who playfully teased them mercilessly in the 10th Book of the Srimad Bhagavata Purana (not to be confused with the Bhagavad Gita of the Mahabharata), and the tryst between him and Radha, whom is never actually named, in chapter 30, where she is only a mystery woman held in awed jealousy by the pining gopis who follow the couple’s footsteps into the forest. This story with elaborations is a staple of bhajans and Indian poetry, drama, and naturally, today’s transmitter of myth, Bollywood (here’s an example).

A word of warning. To suggest anything unchaste about Radha, or to reduce Krishna to a Casanova, to suggest anything sexual at all beyond romantic metaphor, is extremely offensive to devout Hindus; particularly Vaishnavas. It has an invective history with the Christian missionaries and continues to this day on Christianist supremacist websites. Having said this word of warning though, of Holi, the entry in A Dictionary of Hinduism says,

A spring festival dedicated to Krishna and the gopis. It took the place of an earlier kind of Saturnalia, ‘the survival of a primitive fertility ritual, combining erotic games, “comic operas” and folk dancing’. Some of the earlier elements remain, such as the singing of suggestive songs, the throwing of coloured water, and jumping over bonfires, the ashes of which are believed to possess magical powers.

Indeed, I tend to take this view, and see the other myths as later accretions or adaptations to an earlier Indo-European fertility festival, as do I see the Radha-Krishna relationship a sublimation of an earlier myth. During Holi, caste distinctions are suspended, and the sexes may mix freely; likely customs surviving from the ubiquitous “safety valve” many early cultures observed at least once a year -- just as modern ones do to this day.

Playing

In a 7th century play, Ratnavali, it was said,

Witness the beauty of the great cupid festival which excites curiosity as the townsfolk are dancing at the touch of brownish water thrown from squirt-guns.

They are seized by pretty women while all along the roads the air is filled with singing and drum-beating.

Everything is coloured yellowish red and rendered dusty by the heaps of scented powder blown all over.

This is the first recording of Dhulhendi, the day of Holi most recognizable today. Let me set the scene. You know nothing of Holi, you are a visitor in India. This delightful scenario is played in this scene from the 2006 film, “Outsourced”:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9OY4bIbRQ0

Instruments of Fun:

Abir and Gulal -  colored powders

Originally made from natural dyes, some with Ayurvedic properties, there has been concern over toxic ingredients in recent years, and a move towards organic products. The symbolism with spring, of course, is self-evident.

Pichkari -- soaker type of syringe

While many of these still retain their traditional design, many more kids can be seen with super soakers and custom pichkaris with Bollywood actors and actresses, cartoon characters and other themes, even in shapes like elephants or one designed as a bow and arrow (like the ancient Hindu heroes).

Bhang

Bhang, made from grinding cannabis leaves and flowers into a paste is mixed into chilled drinks and munchie snacks alike. The signature drink of Holi is thandai, a milk based drink flavored with pistachios, almonds, and, of course, marijuana! But, a bhang lassi can also be whipped up, as seen above. Oh, and if you happen upon a sadhu in Varanasi, see if they will pass the chillum. This is one of a few times where social use of marijuana is acceptable, though generally not by women (patriarchal societies’ ‘designated drivers’). Watch this Bollywood song with the information and vocabulary you have just gained!

Hola Mohalla

Although not widely celebrated in Pakistan, in India Holi is now a secular holiday celebrated by all: Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Christian, Jew, Parsi, Sikh, atheist, etc. The day after Holi, as well, is the closely related Sikh holiday of Hola Mohalla, most visible in the Sikh homeland of Indian Punjab. In warrior-saint Guru Gobind Singh’s martial tradition, Sikhs will mock fights, sing, play music, recite poetry and kirtans, and eat communally, as is per Sikh practice.

So, alas, to explain my title. It is common to say “Holi hai!” which means “it’s Holi!” as a greeting. Unfortunately, due to timing, I fell off on writing this, and thus added the Hindi ‘was’, tha, to reflect the belated nature of this article.

To end with, I only chose one Bollywood Holi song among a plethora of possibilities, as this one clearly lays out several elements outlined herein and brings it to life! (plus my crush on Rani Mukerji didn’t hurt the selection process)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o8Cslm9uNc

Holi Mubarak! -- Happy Holi!

But Bill wouldn’t know that, would he? I mean, considering the fact that he rarely ventures outside the Hollywood bubble, except to slide into various cities for one night only, check into a hotel room, deliver 90 minutes of stand-up and then depart for the West Coast, yet again, by private jet, no doubt … but we’ll forgive him, because he’s our lad and speaks for those of us on the Left, so we won’t worry too much about the extra carbon footprint. Hey, we’ll be magnanimous and global and extend the same sort of licence to be hypocritical to Mr and Mrs Sting and Bono too. This trio has the art of preaching virtues to the little men of the world, whilst enjoying the greatest and most gluttonous of excesses themselves … because they can.

Bill calls the Oscars’ night ‘Hollywood’s Prom.’ And we should allow our hard-working and overpaid celebrities one night of libertine fun, because they work so hard for us, entertaining us, whilst pocketing our hard-earned dough that we can ill-afford to pay – either to catch the latest Clooney flick or even to pay close to a hundred bucks to see Bill say the same thing he’s said countless times before on Real Time for ninety minutes.

I don’t begrudge Bill his success. I suppose he’s paid his dues, in addition to being in the right place at the right time; it’s not my problem, but his, that he – like countless others – has appeared to have forgotten his antecedents once he’s tasted success. Ne’mind … I had the same problem digesting Margaret Thatcher’s use of the royal ‘we’, choosing, instead, to remember that she, like Cardinal Wolsey, came from pretty common stock.

What I do have a problem with, in relation to Bill, is the fact that he continues to present himself as a voice of the Progressives in this nation. In fact, in this latest editorial, he refers to himself as a Progressive.

I am sorry. I dispute that.

On the episode which aired on October 2, 2009, Bill remarked to his guest, David Cross, that he favoured the death penalty. Bill’s said this countless times before, and on this occasion, remarked, “I always say, if you get’em once with the old death penalty, they sure as hell won’t kill again.”

Do we know any Progressives who are in favour of the death penalty?

On a tweet rendered in late December, after the successful capture of the Underpants bomber, Bill tweeted that he was in favour of racial profiling at airports, because “little, old, white ladies were not terrorists.” (Hey, Bill … don’t give the terrorists any ideas).

On a program which aired March 13, 2009, Bill enthusiastically remarked how much in favour he was of Obama’s slapping down the teachers’ unions, and he went on to rant about how much he disliked unions in general. Later in the year, he reiterated this again. So, he’s anti-union. How many Progressives are against the concept of collective bargaining and union representation?

And, finally, on the penultimate program of Real Time last season, he admitted to no less than Bill Frist that he didn’t want the government to have anything to do with his healthcare. This was after making a brilliant analogy for single-payer by comparing government-controlled healthcare to be as efficient as the government-controlled Post Office.

I know, I know … the Post Office isn’t really that efficient, but Bill’s a bit of a Luddite when he’s caught unawares. He’s probably not even aware of the cost of a first class stamp. He just knows that when he writes a letter to his sister in New Jersey on Monday, she has it on Wednesday, two days later. That, in this day of e-mail and conference calling, is just a gratuitous Saturday Evening Post moment, but it served its purpose and Bill pushed the single-payer envelope for the rest of the season … until Bill Frist appeared and unsettled him.

So, Bill Maher, Progressive:

1. believes in the death penalty

2. believes in racial profiling

3. is anti-union

4. and doesn’t want the government to have any say in his healthcare.

Because I’m a tolerant person and because I genuinely like Bill and like my heroes to have feet of clay, I’ll be nice and say that sure as hell sounds like a Blue Dog to me; but to others, it might just have a whiff of a closet Republican about it.

Either way, Bill Maher is no more the voice of any Progressive any more than he is the voice of the middle classes, whose fashionable plight he was pushing on Friday’s show.

If Bill were to spend one month in either the South or flyover country, living the life of a middle-aged middle-class man, on an average wage, with credit cards and bills to pay, a mortgage and a clapped-out second-hand car to maintain, without the security guards or an available Whole Foods … if he were to rise to that challenge and do that and THEN presume to speak for the middle classes, I might give him the kudos and plaudits I’m witholding.

But I’d still say he was a Blue Dog, politically.

And maybe a Republican … but until then, most definitely, more than a little bit of a hypocrite.

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://aerofilm.blogspot.com/2010/02/sandpit-short-film-by-aero-director-sam.html

I read an article the other day that Miyazaki is producing a film, called Karigurashi no Arrietty, due to come out in 2010. I can’t wait!

You haven’t heard of him? That’s OK. A lot of people in the U.S. haven‘t. I bet in some way, some how, you‘ve brushed past his influences, at least if you have kids or grandkids.

Let me tell you how I got introduced to Miyazaki.

When I was living on the Oregon Coast in the early 90s, me and a friend heard of a movie playing at the Newport Entertainment Centre (A very trippy avant-garde theatre right off Nye Beach) called “Akira.” It was a Japanese movie from about 1989. It blew …. my … ass. … to … smithereens. It was three solid hours of, “Oh … my …. God.“ I had never seen anything like it. It is to this day quite possibly the Most Violent Movie I’ve Ever Seen. (It’s also been redubbed, which is a relief.)

Well, Miyazaki didn’t make Akira, but that was my introduction to Anime. I loved it. I rented a ton of Anime movies over the next several years and I discovered that …

… about 90 percent of Anime really, really sucks. A lot of it is, well, just plain dopey. Too many robots and ditzy big-breasted women. I guess it’s fine for teenage boys, but none of it measured up to Akira. I liked Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo (incredibly violent) and a show called Paranoia Agent, but that’s about it. I can’t get into Blood, or Death Note or Ghost in the Shell.

Anyway, about seven years after that, I was in Seattle and they were playing a Japanese Anime movie at a big downtown Seattle theatre on 4th Street called “Princess Mononoke.” It looked cool. I decided to check it out. It … did … NOT … blow me away. In fact, it annoyed me. It didn’t make sense. The plot didn’t make sense. The characters didn’t make sense. It was quite literally annoyed throughout the whole flick. Most of all, I was really, really, really annoyed with Billy Bob Thornton, who provided the voice for a character in the movie.

That was my first introduction to Hiyao Miyazaki. Princess Mononoke was considered his masterpiece. It was a huge hit in Japan. It was an even bigger flop in America. People just didn’t get it.

I came to eventually figure out why. More on that later. (Actually, Billy Bob Thornton had something to do with it.)

Many years later, I read about another Miyazaki film playing at an art house theatre called “Spirited Away.” I had a 5-year-old daughter at the time, just old enough that you could take her to movies, so I took her on a daddy-daughter date.

Well, Spirited Away was rated PG, but quite frankly, it should’ve been rated PG-13. I found out the hard way that for a 5-year-old child, it is absolutely, unequivocally TERRIFYING. A little girl’s parents are turned into pigs and she is left all alone at a mysterious bathhouse surrounded by strange spirits and monsters on vacation. (Really, I can’t make this stuff up.). 20 minutes into the movie, my daughter was in my lap, with her head buried in my belly. I asked her a few times if she wanted to leave, but she didn’t. I told her a few times, “OK, this part isn’t scary,” and she would bravely peer at the screen.

I felt terrible. I was yet again, for the umpteenth time, The Worst Parent Who Has Ever Lived, but after the movie, to my abject surprise, my daughter wanted to see it again and again! To this day, one of her nicknames is Chihiro. Spirited Away later that year won Miyazaki an Academy Award for best animated film. He absolutely deserved it.

I got her a DVD of the movie, and then the following year, after she had watched “Spirited Away” 100 times, I got her a collection of Miyazaki movies — “The Castle of Cagliostro,” “Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind,” “My Neighbour Totoro,” “Kiki‘s Delivery Service,” “Laputa: Castle in the Sky,” “Porco Rosso,” “Princess Mononoke,” “Spirited Away” and “Howl’s Moving Castle.” (Since then, I have gotten her “Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea,” so she owns 10 Miyazaki films.)

While reading the liner notes to this collection of movies, I realized Miyazaki was the lead animator to a 1969 version of “Puss in Boots,” and I thought, “Oh, my God!” I remembered this movie from when I was a little kid, and I remembered how cool it seemed when I was 6 years old.

My daughter chewed through those 9 movies in less than a month, and after she was done, she told me … “I want more…” In our household, these 10 movies have probably been played a couple of hundred times. I also got her the 2,500-page Nausicaa graphic novel that it took Miyazaki 13 years to complete. It’s much darker and the character of Nausicaa is much more complex than in the movie. Miyazaki’s complex political and spiritual views come out toward the end of this looooong novel. She’s twice dressed up as Miyazaki characters for Halloween — Chihiro two years ago and Nausicaa last year.

She’s getting more … in 2010.

What makes Miyazaki so damned amazing? For one thing, he’s 70 years old, and he loves children, and he remembers what it is like to be a child. His movies literally reek of wide-eyed innocence. Most of Miyazaki’s movies are all still cel animation. There’s a bit of computer animation in some of his flicks, but it’s 95 percent or more still drawn by hand, with Miyazaki providing all the main animation (apparently all the way up to Porco Rosso.) With the exception of Howl’s Moving Castle, all of Miyazaki’s movies are based on his original stories as well. He is an old-fashioned auteur, who handles the writing, direction, design from beginning to end.

Miyazaki’s style is also dramatically different from most anime. His characters don’t have giant eyes like in much anime, and his women don’t have ridiculously huge breasts. His style is pretty unique and all the movies made at his Studio Ghibli use similar style. A Ghibli film called “Grave of the Fireflies” (definitely NOT a kid’s movie) is one of the most powerful and depressing movies you’ll ever see.

Miyazaki used to be an avowed Marxist, but he mellowed a little in his old age and now says he is a socialist. His films contain very strong anti-war themes. One thing that drives people a little crazy about Miyazaki films, (this was especially a problem in the U.S. for Princess Mononoke), is that his films (and the Nausicaa novel) don’t contain particularly black-and-white characters. A character that might be shown to be a “bad guy” is often later portrayed as having positive attributes.

Speaking of changing, his characters often change forms and identities, and sometimes it takes two or three views to figure out what’s going on. In Spirited Away, a boy is also a dragon, but he is also a river god. A “no face” spirit suddenly becomes a cannibalistic monster, then returns to being No Face. In Ponyo, a fish becomes a little girl. Don’t get me started on Howl’s Moving Castle. Two characters change form constantly throughout the whole movie.

Miyazaki is also fascinated by flying. Most of his movies involve some sort of flying machines. Some people have actually built flying machines based on his designs and discovered that some of them actually work! He is also fanatically pro-environment and many of his films carry environmental messages. Miyazaki also refuses to make sequels to his films. He has been offered a lot of money to make a sequel to Spirited Away, but he won’t do it.

If you ever rent any of these flicks, watch them with kids. It makes me much more fun. A word to the wise, most of his films are designed for kids; if you don’t like kids’ movies, you probably won’t like Miyazaki. Another interesting thing about Miyazaki’s movies is the age range they’re designed for changes dramatically from film to film. I also suggest watching them in the original Japanese with subtitles. Unlike much anime, some of the dubs have been done well, but the Japanese and English languages do not mesh well, and the English at times comes out stilted or rushed.

A brief rundown of his flicks.

Castle of Cagliostro — 1979
A Lupin III movie. I really, really hate Lupin III. I think it’s just flat stupid. This was a TV show that ran in Japan for about 10 years and these were considered the first “adult” cartoons, but really they’re for 10-year-olds. Quite silly and stupid. Castle of Cagliostro was the first theatre treatment for Lupin III and Miyazaki, who had been one of the animators for the TV show, was chosen to make it. Still the animation in this movie is amazing.

Nausicaa — 1984
His first self-funded film. It’s a seminal movie, made somewhat on the cheap, but you can still see lots of gorgeous animation. Miyazaki hated the ending of this movie, which he felt was too corny. He has said he would like to go back and remake it with a different ending. His Nausicaa novel is completely different from the film … the movie takes up probably the first quarter of the book. They released this movie in the states as Warriors of the Wind, but chopped about a third of the movie out and included an atrocious dub, so it ended up making no sense. Miayazaki refused to allow his movies to be shown in the U.S. for years because of this debacle. The movie got fixed in the U.S. after Spirited Away was a hit. This is a big, broad epic of an anime, made a few years before Akira.

Castle in the Sky — 1986
Another movie with lots of flying. Miyazaki returns to his anti-war themes he explores in Nausicaa.

My Neighbour Totoro — 1988
Probably his first movie that got much attention in the U.S. A very sweet movie for very young kids, maybe 4 or 5 years old.

Kiki’s Delivery Service — 1989
Another movie with lots of flying. Again, for very young children. Any kid over 10 will be bored by this movie.

Porco Rosso — 1992
One of his more obscure movies. I actually didn’t like Porco Rosso at first. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea of a pig fighter pilot (while everyone else in the film is human). The more I’ve watched it, the more I like it. Some of the flying scenes are done extremely well. The pig in this film is based on Miyazaki himself, who thinks he looks piggish because he has wide nostrils. This is a good movie for older kids.

Princess Mononoke — 1997
His epic of epics. A huge movie, almost three hours long, with complex hand- and computer-generated animation. It was a flop in the U.S., because people couldn’t figure out the themes of the movie (again, bad guys becoming good guys, good guys playing both sides, etc.) I also believe this film was badly hurt by Billy Bob Thornton’s horrendous voice acting. It’s painfully bad. You MUST watch this movie in its original Japanese. Since its U.S. flop, this movie has gained a big cult following. This is Miyazaki’s only R-rated movie. It is extremely violent.

Sprited Away -- 2001
Miyazaki’s masterpiece. An absolutely amazing film with an amazing story. Think Alice in Wonderland on acid. Scary, scary film for small children (It scared ME!) It has a very corny, sappy ending, but most Miyazaki movies do. It‘s part of the deal. This was his first big hit in the U.S., especially after it won an Academy Award. This movie has a scene that kids love that will remind you of Mr. Creosote in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life. Miyazaki announced his retirement after this film.

Howl’s Moving Castle — 2004
Another anti-war epic. Again, the characters are difficult to understand. This was Miyazaki’s first film not based on his original script. It’s from an English children’s book. This movie might have the best English dub. Miyazaki announced his retirement again.

Ponyo — 2009
After a few movies for older kids, he returned to making a movie for small children. When we went to see this, my daughter was bored because it was too young for her. Instead of flying scenes, this movie has a lot of scenes of creatures swimming underwater.

I thought I would add some scenes from the movie, but in looking at YouTube, I found that some very talented people (with apparently too much time on their hands) had made a number of music videos to Miyazaki films. I thought some of these were cute, so I included them instead:

Spirited Away

www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrM5UTiD9FM

Creepy video of Spirited Away

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nL8l7TlhciQ

Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhHRXpTmUVA

Princess Mononoke

www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkuVQl57OSo

Porco Rosso

Totoro (The movie is not really this creepy. I just thought it was an interesting video.)

(with apologies to Salvador Dali)

I am bothered by movies, such as “Saw” and “Hostel”, that, to me, serve no purpose other than to depict the extremes of human pain and cruelty. I confess to having never watched a film from either of those series, nor have I watched a Hannibal Lector movie, or a Chucky, Freddy Krueger or Jason movie (which, I imagine, at this point seem almost quaint in their depictions of cruelty), so it is not only what is depicted on the screen, which I haven’t even seen, that disturbs me. It is the very fact that such movies exist, and that they pull in audiences. To me, they are a depraved sub-genre of moviemaking that elevates torture to their prime, even sole, raison d’etre (indeed, they have been dubbed “torture porn” and “gorno” by critics), and that bothers me. Are people really entertained by all that blood and gore? And if that is not the right word, what IS the experience that they crave, as they settle their butts into aisle seats? As to the people who make such films, why on earth do they spend precious hours of their lives depicting demoralizing, black spectacles of the last things that any of us would wish to experience, or even wish upon our worst enemies? Oh, believe me, I know the obvious answer to my question (they DO make money after all, and frankly, how hard can they be to make? We all know what we don’t wish to experience; all one has to do is pick up a camera and film that!), but is even money worth the de-humanizing that I feel must go on in the process of creating such films?

 I am not arguing against the presence of violence in films. Indeed, some of my personal favorites, such as “The Godfather” and “Goodfellas”, contain numerous scenes that are not for the squeamish. If push came to shove, I could probably even be called upon to defend Wes Craven’s notorious, ultra-violent 70′s sleeper, “Last House on the Left” ( which took its plot from Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring” and borrowed heavily from Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange”). One might well ask, what’s the difference? Well, in the case of LHOTL, this was an amateurish film by a freshman director, depicting amateurish villains who epitomize the dumb, self absorbed, amoral, societal outcasts we can easily imagine committing the atrocious crimes we see onscreen (and read about in the papers). They are not the incarnations of sadism one finds in slick gorno movies, creatures right out of our nightmares who are intelligent and irredeemably evil, sparing no expense to devise the most ingenious and horrific methods by which to dispense with their victims, for no other purpose than the pleasure that they get from doing so. To arrive at an understanding of the villains of the gorno movies, to place them in any sort of context, we need to go back to a French nobleman from the Age of Enlightenment whose writing was so over the top that he provides the very name for the “ism” that is out and out cruelty toward another living being.

 Sade’s “libertines” (one should not refer to them as  “villains”, when to him they were heroes) were precisely the kind of monsters we see in todays horror movies. Smarter and more powerful than their victims, they operated without restraint, and with no other purpose than to inflict pain. In Sade’s stories, the only way to escape victimhood was to allow yourself to become corrupted by your torturers, to become just as merciless and sadistic as them. These were the only triumphs he would allow in his nightmarish fables, that some would “liberate” themselves from any moral or empathetic impulses, which he insisted came from society, the real “villain” he himself was at war with. One can read Sade’s stories and accept them as he intended, as all-out assaults on society and civilization, on anything that limited individuals from behaving exactly as they themselves chose to. But that would naturally lead one to ask, if people could do anything they wanted to, why would they do that? Looking deeper, I believe that one can find a more pathological motivation, one which is readily on display in today’s torture porn movies as well; a deep seated hatred of the human body.

 Oh, Sade loathed bodies!  He wanted them sliced, diced, beaten, pulled apart, you name it. The one thing he didn’t want was for them to keep their original, native form, to be allowed to go on about their ways in peace. To him, an intact body was a challenge, perhaps even an affront, to his aesthetic. He treated them with nothing but the utmost disdain. And yet, it is telling that for all the descriptions of cruelty he filled page after feverish page with, he was particularly vicious toward the parts of the body that give birth to and nurture other bodies. Although there is no question that his writings and ideas have spiced up the sex lives of numerous couples throughout the years (and hey, whatever gets you through the night…), in the works themselves sex was anything but a life affirming, life celebrating activity. Genitalia, breasts, pregnant women, and fetuses are mercilessly tortured and destroyed by Sade’s libertines. The family itself is attacked viciously. In his stories, fathers rape their daughters, and corrupted daughters do unspeakable things to their mothers. The very reality of biological life seems to infuriate him.

 What’s going on here? In the face of such depravity, one naturally searches for answers. Even if the knowledge goes nowhere toward ending man’s inhumanity to man, we strive to somehow make sense of things so dark and twisted they seem to defy explanation, for the sake of our own sanity if nothing else. My belief is that we see in Sade’s writing a psychological phenomenon that has its roots in the very nature of our sentience. It is the mind’s hatred of the body, because it can suffer, and take the mind along with it as it does so. 

 It is hard to imagine anything more painful than being eaten alive from the hind legs forward, and yet this is a fate that befalls thousands of our fellow creatures, in forests and savannas, every day. The vast majority of human beings will come to far more benign ends, but the important distinction is that we are well aware of what could happen to us, if we are not careful, or just plain unlucky. The fact is that, unlike animals, we can think about things happening to us that are every bit as frightening and unwelcome as the things that are shown in the torture movies. It is with our minds that we think about them, but it is our bodies that we imagine experiencing the suffering. We are the only species that has a distinct separation, a schism even, between mind and body. We can actually live lives, of a kind, outside our bodies. No other creature can. We can daydream, create stories, make songs, paint pictures, have sexual fantasies, relive memories vividly, conceptualize, invent, etc. We can easily imagine a life involving no body at all! Indeed, we have created science fiction stories where our minds are placed inside computers, thereby living eternal, pain-free lives. People who are stricken with cancer or other long term, debilitating and painful illnesses frequently describe themselves as “prisoners” in their bodies. What I am positing is that there is an element of human consciousness that chronically feels this way. Sade was expressing this, first and foremost, I believe, though he himself was perhaps unaware of it and presumedly would have denied it. It is ironic that he, due to his atrocious behavior as well as his writing (which outraged the Emperor Napolean), spent much of his life as a prisoner, in jails and mental asylums, creating through his mind an outward experience of the very thoughts that drove his writing. 

 The mind is frightened by the amount of pain, seemingly limitless, that the body it is merged with can experience. Although our central nervous system has evolved the sensation of pain to keep us from burning or bleeding or freezing to death, this impeccable biological system renders us horrendously vulnerable. So averse to its demise is our body that it keeps pain sensations active even as we lie helpless, and crushed, under the rubble of an earthquake, or trapped inside a burning room, on the off chance that we will somehow manage to get ourselves out of our predicament. Isn’t it plausible that our minds, aware of the stubbornness of the body, and its survival-at-any-cost imperative, would develop resentment against it? Why can’t we shut the pain mechanism down when we want to (apparently some yogis have developed this very ability, but it takes years of rigorous training)? When there is no hope of escape? Every king, dictator, Grand Inquisitor and mafioso throughout history has exploited this “flaw” in the body’s design. In fact, it is impossible to imagine the worst forms of government even existing without it, as such regimes are propped up by the fear they induce in the common folk. All of that suffering, down through the ages; no wonder the mind is pissed!

 And so, the mind acts this out, through the mediums that it has developed, the “art” that is Sade’s writing and today’s gorno movies. Each time the mind, represented by Sade’s libertines or Hannibal Lector, or any of the demonic, merciless,ingenious psychopaths who fill our screens as well as our nightmares, gleefully tortures to death somebody else’s body, it has its revenge, momentarily. That’s the experience viewers are after, I feel. Though I am disturbed by such movies, and by the large following they have, I ultimately see them as merely symptomatic, and don’t expect them to go away. They, or some similar manifestation, will be with us so long as we have the ability to contemplate, and fear, our fate.

For Worst Film:

All About Steve
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
Land of The Lost
Old Dogs
Transformers 2: Revenge of The Fallen

FYI, until Avatar came out, Transformers 2 was the highest grossing movie of the year. So what does it say that a film that no one argues is an awful film is also the 2nd most popular film of the year?

Sort of the McDonald’s hamburger dynamic.

Now movies that are just plain bad are hard to watch but movies that are  unbelievably bad, can be hard to take your eyes off of.

There are the bad “classics” like Plan 9 From Outer Space and Reefer Madness. More contemporary ones like Showgirls and Battlefield Earth. Then there are the annual crop of stinkers.

What other bad movies were out there this year? The heralded Watchmen was unWatchable. Angels and Demons was hell. Bruno was brutal. Funny People wasn’t.

What are your favorite bad films of 2009?

I love quotes from great scientists, philosophers and even politicians because they give you a little insight into the mind of those people. Literature aside for a second I have to admit many of my favorite quotes are from movies. Many times when my wife and I talk to each other when we are with other people we get strange looks because we have almost created a mini-language based on movie references. There are a few films like “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” that we can probably quote from beginning to end. Here are a few great scenes with those famous quote from movies you might remember as well. Feel free to add any of you favorite quotes from movies, television, or any other source for that matter.

The quotes in the battle between King Arthur and the black night in Monty Python and the Holy Grail are just too classic to pass up in a discussion of movie quotes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Uncle Ruckus from Boondocks.  (if you are easily offended you might not want to watch this compilation).

Click here to view the embedded video.

The famous “Far better place…” quote from a Tale of Two Cities with Ronald Coleman (I know I’m cheating because it’s about my favorite quote in literature as well because it demonstrates the height of human unselfishness in a selfish world).

Click here to view the embedded video.

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning” from Apocalypse Now.  The problem was victory in Vietnam was just as elusive and short lived as that smell.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The most damaging mentality that still prevails in our culture.   The “greed is good” speech from Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street.

Click here to view the embedded video.