Transformers: Less Than Meets the Eye

Roger Ebert's review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen appears to be considerably more entertaining than the film itself:

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meager joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination.

The plot is incomprehensible. The dialog of the Autobots, Decepticons and Otherbots is meaningless word flap. Their accents are Brooklyese, British and hip-hop, as befits a race from the distant stars. Their appearance looks like junkyard throw-up. They are dumb as a rock. They share the film with human characters who are much more interesting, and that is very faint praise indeed.

Ebert writes more about the movie on his blog:

The day will come when Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen will be studied in film classes and shown at cult film festivals. It will be seen, in retrospect, as marking the end of an era. Of course there will be many more CGI-based action epics, but never again one this bloated, excessive, incomprehensible, long (149 minutes) or expensive (more than $200 million). Like the dinosaurs, the species has grown too big to survive, and will be wiped out in a cataclysmic event, replaced by more compact, durable forms. ...

The action scenes can perhaps best be understood as abstract art. The Autobots and Decepticons, which are assembled out of auto parts, make no functional or aesthetic sense. They have evolved into forms too complex to be comprehended. When two or more of the Bots are in battle, it is nearly impossible to distinguish one from the other. You can't comprehend most of what they're doing, except for an occasional fist flying, a built-in missile firing, or the always dependable belching of flames.

I'm surprised that Ebert thinks the film will make a huge amount of money. My kids saw the first Transformers but have shown absolutely no interest in seeing them again, thus robbing me of several opportunities to see Megan Fox running in slow-motion. Films that feed dad's nostalgia for childhood don't go over well in my house. No amount of pleading on my part could get the family to see Speed Racer.

Movies · Nostalgia · Slow Motion · 2009/06/30 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Richard Corliss Makes Excuses for Michael Jackson

Before Michael Jackson's death Friday, I wasn't aware that I had any affection left for the King of Pop. Like millions of others, I grew up watching Jackson and the rest of his family grow up. Janet Jackson's my age, and when she played Penny as a 10-year-old on the sitcom Good Times, I was in love. I decided to save myself for her -- not that she appreciated it -- until I finally gave up at age 18.

I'm not the only one who still had some affection for Jackson, but the extent of the tonguebath he's getting from the mainstream media has surprised me. It's one thing to downplay the accusations about child molestation and other inappropriate behavior with children that dogged the last 15 years of his life, but another thing entirely to explicitly make excuses for him. Writing for Time magazine, movie critic Richard Corliss rationalizes that even if Jackson molested kids, he was not a sexual predator because he thought of himself as a child:

Yet Jackson's profound weirdness -- not just the glove or the seaweed hair striping his face but the blanched skin, the pained eyes, the tremulous soul -- hinted that Peter Pan was the wrong role for him. Wasn't Jackson really one of Peter's Lost Boys, stranded between childhood and adolescence, loved by the public yet feeling caged and abandoned, and searching, groping for the Edenic innocence he believed was any child's birthright? ...

When he welcomed handicapped kids to the ranch, he felt he was their equal, and they were friends he could play with, or sing to -- or, he must have thought, love, in the purest sense of the word. The litany of alleged misbehavior in the 2005 trial ... is not unfamiliar among preteens. If Jackson committed these acts, it was not predator-to-prey but peer-to-peer. Having forgiven the father who abused him, could he not forgive himself for bonding with the children who came into his Neverland bed? Could this Lost Boy even understand the difference between hugging and fondling, affection and assault, generosity and lechery?

If you find any other examples of the media making excuses for child sex abuse when celebrities are involved, share the link.

Music · Television · Smooth Criminal · 2009/06/27 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

IMDB Strikes Crude with 'Year One' Content Advisory

The movie reference site IMDb has a parents guide feature that's useful when determining whether a movie contains sexual content that would be inappropriate for your children. (Like most Americans I'm much more comfortable exposing the younguns to movies that contain bloodshed than any film that makes even the slightest reference to sex. I blame my Catholic upbringing and spaghetti Westerns.)

The feature is edited by users in the manner of Wikipedia and does not get editorial oversight from IMDb.

When considering whether to see Year One this weekend, I found that the users had been incredibly thorough in describing scenes that had anything to do with sex or nudity. There's so much raunchy material in the movie that the IMDb warning is 1,048 words long.

We didn't see the film.

Movies · Parenting · Jack Black · 2009/06/22 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Everybody's an Expert on Iran

Dave Winer on Twitter Sunday:

BTW, it's lame to change your location to Tehran and your timezone to GMT +3.30. Instead, our friends at twitter.com should detect and block about 13 hours ago from web

It should be against the terms of service to use the Twitter API to persecute and kill users. Yes? about 12 hours ago from web

There's a lot of cringe-inducing commentary coming from American bloggers and twitterers about the situation in Iran. Although most of it is well-intentioned, the massive outbreak of overnight expertise reminds me of warbloggers lining up Muslim countries for the U.S. to bomb in the days after 9/11.

Who knew there were thousands of people who could speak with authority on the complex internal politics of an anti-American Islamic theocracy halfway around the globe? Take that, Juan Cole! You may have a master's degree in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, but I reloaded Andrew Sullivan's blog 150 times on Saturday alone. And I stayed at a Holiday Inn last night.

The situation in Iran also has sparked numerous calls for symbolic gestures like turning your web site green or switching your Twitter timezone to GMT +3:30 and your location to Tehran, thus making it harder for Iranian authorities to find and crack down on real Iranian protesters using the service.

I love Winer's suggestion that the Twitter API be amended to forbid its use to "persecute and kill users."

If the Iranian regime decides to hunt down its own citizens for participating in Twitter during the election unrest, I'm not convinced that it could be stopped by a terms of service agreement.

Iran · Twitter · Expertise · 2009/06/21 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Meet the Fourth Jonas Brother

You may not know this, but there's a fourth Jonas Brother -- a ginormous bald black guy named Big Rob who comes out occasionally to supplement their musical caterwauling with rap.

Until I found a blog entry by Rickey Laurentiis, I was not aware that Big Rob was an attempt to establish white supremacy in an unsuspecting audience of tween girls:

I've seen them around, figuratively, on the covers of magazines and on the TV, but I didn't really take notice until So You Think You Can Dance final where they performed. I was bored, to say the least, until this big, black guy came jumping onto the stage like the Koolaid Man. He appeared to be some sort of hype man ... rapping or whatever. I didn't really listen after the first few minutes. I was nauseated.

I just couldn't help but think about the (national) image of black men as soon as he -- I've learned his name is Big Rob and he's the brothers' body guard -- appeared. I mean, historically and presently. The black man as monster, brute, murderous; the black man as mandigo, rapist, oversexed animal; gross, perverse. Perhaps, perhaps I'm overreacting (but, sorry, I'm not white so I don't have the privilege not to think of these things), but when I see Big Rob flanked by the three other Jonas Brothers, I can't help but to see a very strategic move:

Big Rob is mostly obviously Other. On that stage, in that audience. His skin, bald head and not mention very large, tall size completely otherize him. In turn, as the surrogate "what is that?", The Jonas Brothers, their whiteness, is cemented, so to speak.

When I saw the Jonas Brothers perform on the broadcast of the Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving game last fall, I noticed there was something different about Big Rob too. I think he's adopted.

Music · Tweens · White Supremacy · 2009/06/17 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Relaunching Watching the Watchers

I recently relaunched Watching the Watchers as an Utne Reader-style digest of interesting political news and commentary published on sites that permit redistribution. In the first phase, most of the content is coming from Daily Kos, which has the following license:

Site content may be used for any purpose without explicit permission unless otherwise specified.

Hundreds of diary entries roll through Daily Kos every day, and a lot of interesting stuff falls through the cracks. I only consider Kos diaries that didn't make the site's front page or get linked on the front page in the 24 hours after they were published. Stories are chosen manually, not through an automated process, and all republished stories have a link to the author at the top and the original Kos page at the bottom.

Here's a sampling of stories selected for Watchers:

I'm trying some new things with the site, including a stripped-down design that was inspired by how Google News displays wire stories from AP and AFP. I also decided not to accept comments.

Because the Kos license permits redistribution "unless otherwise specified," when a diary indicates that it should not be redistributed or contains a copyright statement, I honor that. I also would stop republishing anybody who told me to stop, of course. Some concerns were raised by Kos users when one found his work on the site, but for the most part the community supports reuse. Site founder Markos Moulitsas made this comment:

To be clear this is perfectly cool and within site rules. If anyone has a problem with it, which is perfectly understandable, slap a copyright notice at the bottom of your diaries ...

I'm a content anarchist, so I don't try to hoard and control what's written on this site (even the stuff I myself write). But I've got no problems with people disagreeing and wanting to control their own material.

Although Kos has RSS feeds for the front page and user diaries, so much is posted there that the feeds don't contain all of it. I wrote a Java application that parses the links on the front page and diary page. The Apache HTTP Client Java library makes it easy to retrieve web documents.

In the next phase of the project, I'll be adding the ability to republish Creative Commons-licensed content.

Politics · Journalism · Creative Commons · 2009/06/16 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Andrew Sullivan, Iran News Sites Under Denial of Service Attack

The political weblogger Andrew Sullivan, who has been covering the protests in Iran around the clock for several days, reported early Monday that his site appears to be suffering a denial of service (DOS) attack intended to knock it offline:

The Atlantic magazine is struggling to keep the site up despite what seems to be a digital attack. Please be persistent in trying to reload.

Sullivan's site, which has been passing along updates from the election protests in both English and Farsi, has been unusually slow to load throughout the day Monday. Although it's possible that enormous demand is overloading the servers at The Atlantic, as a longtime reader of his blog I can't recall it ever having problems despite huge demand in the final days of the American presidential election. His site served 23 million visits in October 2008.

The RSS feed for Sullivan's site, which is hosted by the Google service FeedBurner, can still be accessed normally.

Another American site that has been reporting on the election, TehranBureau.Com, has been completely offline since Sunday. The publisher of the site used its Twitter feed to report that they're flooded with requests from Iranian government computers.

problem w/ site pinpointed: webmaster says the Iranian govt is overloading us with requests to disable our site: "denial of service attack"

The site's changing servers, but in the meantime is offering updates on the Twitter account TehranBureau. Sullivan has a Twitter account at DailyDish.

A denial of service attack, sometimes described as a distributed denial of service (DDOS), is an attempt to make an Internet resource unavailable by overloading it with requests. The attacks take many forms, but can be as simple as running a script that requests every page on a web site hundreds of times per second.

Credit: The photo of Andrew Sullivan was taken by Trey Ratcliff and is available under a Creative Commons license.

Politics · Internet · Security · 2009/06/15 · Comment · Link