What I Think about Four Brothers

In my review of the Dark Knight, I pointed out how a film must be believable. This doesn’t mean that every aspect must happen as it would in the actual, but it must take the audience seriously. The film must be present the story in a manner consistent with the way it could happen. Dark Knight failed this test, as does Four Brothers.

Four Brothers is a story about the revenge of four adopted brothers following the murder of their mother. Along the way, they discover the corrupt underworld of Detroit city politics. Four Brothers stars Mark Wahlberg, who is one of Hollywood’s most prolific figures. Wahlberg has acted in, directed, or produced some of the biggest films, included the Departed, Three Kings, and the Substitute. Wahlberg is listed as the executive producer of Entourage, which is one of the few TV shows that I watch. Wikipedia, the source of all things true, states that Wahlberg has a criminal record including the use of hard drugs and that he has committed seriously violent crimes against African and Asian Americans.

The Detroit described by Four Brothers is nothing like any city that you or I have been to. Guns, guns, guns, guns are everywhere. There are more guns in Wahlberg Detroit than in a spaghetti western. At one point, Wahlberg walks into a high school basketball game waving a handgun demanding someone tell him who shot his mother. And while gangsters have plenty time to send around their death squad to handle Wahlberg and his brothers, the police are nowhere is sight.

But that’s not the problem. Who cares if the city is called Detroit? It could just as easily be Tombstone or Gotham City. It doesn’t even have to be in the United States except to explain why everyone speaks English. It’s just a setting where the director can produce as much violence as he or she thinks is necessary to tell the story. The problem with Four Brothers is much deeper in the details.

Like Dark Knight, the story may be interesting, the script well-written, and the acting captivating, but there’s something still in the film that tells us the directors are treating us like fools. Following the basketball game I mentioned above, Wahlberg and his brothers discover they need to interrogate another hoodlum. In the process of capturing him, Wahlberg is bitted by 2 rottweilers. Rather than heading to the hospital to see if the leg could be saved, Wahlberg jumps up, runs down the villain and tortures him into telling him whom next he has to beat senseless.

But why even have him bitten by a dog? There are a hundred different ways the scene could have been filmed. I know that Bobby Mercer (Wahlberg) is supposed to be tough but he’s also supposed to be a human being and not some sort of superhero. In having him bitten by a dog and walk away, the director, John Singleton, who wrote and directed Boyz n the Hood, is asking us to ignore this and pretend it’s just part of the fun, like the gun waving and shooting in the streets of Detroit. But it’s not. The city has to have a name, but dogs don’t have to bit Bobby Mercer.

In doing this the film isn’t ruined, but it is that little bit less fun than it could be. Four Brothers has some interesting ideas that it conveys, but like so much of what comes out of Hollywood, it refuses to take the audience seriously and continues in the tradition of telling ridiculous stories.

Gattaca versus The Incredibles

Gattaca is the story of a genetically regular human whose dream is to travel into space. In the future, positions like this have been reserved for a genetically superior brand of humans, and as such, it is impossible for him to achieve this goal. Vincent Freeman, who is played by Ethan Hawke, undergoes enormous difficulty to take over the identity of Jerome, played by Jude Law, one of the genetically superior who has been crippled in a suicide attempt. The Incredibles, on the other hand, a cartoon about a family of superheros, glorifies the principles of exclusion.

Critics greeted both films positively. Rotten Tomatoes gave Gattaca 82%, while the Incredibles received a 97%. But the message of these accolades, we are told is quite different. Critics pan the unfolding of Gattaca’s plot. Void as it is of violence, robots, and spaceships, the film still manages convey a science fiction story through imagery and dialog rather than gadgets and special effects. But the most significant aspect of the film is its moral message. The RT synopsis of Gattaca states that it is, “Intelligent and scientifically provocative, Gattaca is an absorbing sci-fi drama that poses important interesting ethical questions about the nature of science.” Film Freak Central tells us that, “…it ultimately wants nothing more than to argue there’s something in the human equation that can’t be predicted by science.” So it seems that Gattaca is a story of how human will can ultimately triumph over the bureaucratic exploitation of human characteristics; no matter how carefully we engineer humans, we are still people who have desires and make choices that override our genetic destiny.

The Incredibles, we are told, is not a moral story. It is a, “…a family-oriented superhero adventure with the brilliant animation…” Reviews focus overwhelmingly on the quality of the animation, calling it “stunning“, “terrific“, “a triumph of design“, “literally enough to make one speechless…everything that an animated film should be“. No one seems to feel the moral message of the film is worth mentioning. Perhaps they didn’t even notice it. But in contrast to Gattaca, the message is start and bleak.

While Vincent and Jude Law battle genetic discrimination, the Incredibles have solved all this. But there is no winning when it comes to the judgment of an Incredible. Buddy Pine was the first to find this out. Just as resolute as Vincent to overcome the limitations of his birth, Buddy is determined to become an Incredible – even adopting the name Incrediboy. Brushed aside by the Incredibles who seemingly could find no use for his obvious brilliance, Buddy is driven to reinvent himself as the evil Syndrome. While Buddy spends the rest of his life inventing devices that would give anyone the same abilities as a superhero, he would fail miserably in his drive for acceptance as an Incredible. It would seem that artificial powers are not good enough to make one an Incredible. For those not born with superpowers, no acquired ability, enthusiasm, or potential would ever be able to make up for this.

Gattaca tells us that genetic differences are not enough to overcome the human will. This is true even when these differences have clear consequences both for the person in question and for others traveling in space with them. And despite Vincent’s brave words when his charade appears to be up, that he was, “…as good as any and better than most”, there were many clues to his charade shown through lack of performance. The Incredibles tell us the same thing. The difference is, they’re the good guys when they do it.

What I Think about Brokeback Mountain

A couple of years ago, my friend Kerim Friedman wrote a post on his blog about the movie Brokeback Mountain. Kerim had questions about the statement the movie was trying to make. I replied that despite the movie’s overt content addressing homosexuality, I believe it also made a very powerful class statement. Rereading the comment, I really liked what it had to say about the movie, so I have reformatted it to fit here.

I do feel that Brokeback Mountain was genuinely a class statement or at least that a genuine class statement is contained in the film. I grew up in a small logging town, and have met real cowboys and rodeo athletes. I thought the portrayal of this personality type was dead on: the material bleakness of rural life, the way that characters talked to each other, the kinds of things they boasted about, all brought back childhood memories. Before I had seen the movie, I was skeptical it would have much to say to me. But one of my childhood friends who now works in Tokyo as a corporate recruiter described the movie’s message as, “Imagine the troubles two gay loggers would have to struggle with discovering their love for each other.”

It is a kind of urban pride to assume everyone wants and can live life in ‘The Big City’. But making that kind of move just isn’t possible for everyone who grew up in the kind of lives portrayed by Brokeback Mountain. It may be true, as John Scagliotti writes in Counterpunch, that the, “thousands of Western gay boys “that took up urban life in the 1970′s and 80′s” included some cowboys. I’m certain this is true. But I am just as sure that if you grew up to be a cowboy in a place like Merritt, British Columbia (home of the important Nicola Valley Pro Rodeo), you’d better not talk about homosexuality unless you’ve got something negative to say. It may be that homosexuality is one of the few remaining aspects of life that makes it possible to talk clearly about this kind of life.

One final point. Am I the only one who finds it strange that our ‘cowboy’ anti-heroes are shepherds? I have never met a cowboy shepherd, although the film crystallized the fact that they must exist. I have never spoken to a cowboy about this, but my guess is this is low class ranch work. It could very well be that the introduction of factory beef farming has changed the reality of ranch work. Does anyone know anything about this?

What I Think about Dark Knight

Thank God for Ironman. If we had to rely on Bruce Wayne and not Tony Stark for our action, this season’s superhero comic book movies would be a disaster.

The Dark Knight has won over everyone. Fans flock in unbelievable numbers  to see this year’s version of Batman and for once, in-line with popular opinion, the critics seem to agree. Dark Knight is “fabulous” and “the superhero of superhero films“. Even the Guardian tells us that it’s nothing short of breathtaking. But they are wrong. Dark Knight is the movie that shows all that’s wrong with the superhero comic book genre of movies. Dark Knight is not boring or bad. It’s just plain stupid. It’s so stupid that in spite of what the critics or even the rest of world have to say, you should stay home and save your money.

Dark Knight wants you to ask deep questions. It tries to probe into the soul of humanity and ask what we would be do if the threads of order that hold our civilized society together were suddenly broken. In this case, it doesn’t mean what we would do if technology failed us, as humanity was asked in Water World. It’s not about the world we would fall into if aliens took over our souls, as happened in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s not even a chaos like the George Bush and the USA have brought to Afghanistan or Iraq. Instead, the chaos that Dark Knight asks us to imagine is a world where the police and justice system have been neutered and there are killers in our midst striking at random. It is a world where citizens have nowhere to turn to except their own inner strength and even that isn’t enough because the villains in this case are…well you guessed it…super villains.

So in The Dark Knight the Joker runs amok through the heartland of urban civilization. He robs banks that launder organized crime money. He deliberately chooses as his victims those unconnected to his goals. He bombs hospitals and convicts and the rich. He threatens policeman, judges, and politicians and kills them without any sense of fear. There is no victim beyond his reach and no force strong enough to stop him.

But wait. Hasn’t this all happened for real? Was it all so long ago that no one remembers? In 1992, Pablo Escobar, on the run from the Columbian police, offered rewards for the bodies of the police and US soldiers hunting for him, turning the streets into a battlefield. At its height, Escobar was responsible for the killing of 20 policeman and judges a day – that’s right a day – and this lasted for 2 months. In total, 30 judges and 457 policemen were killed. It is estimated that Escobar is responsible for the killing of thousands. The real numbers are so huge that they reduce to almost meaninglessness the 6 police victims cited by the Joker as he taunts a Gotham policeman. But it doesn’t stop there. During the 1980s, the Italian Mafia killed judges and other law enforcement officials before they began bombing tourist spots. Even Canada has had its share of lawlessness. In 1980′s Montreal, a war between the Hell’s Angels and the Rock Machine motorcycle gangs began targeting peace officers and journalists. In the end, it left more than 150 people dead, including a child and several prison guards.

Dark Knight doesn’t ask you to imagine lawlessness in the streets. That happens all the time all over the world. Dark Knight asks you to imagine lawlessness in the city streets of the United States of America.

What makes Dark Knight different from Medellin or a film about the Italian Mafia is that the forces of darkness are so powerful that even Delta Force and the US military could barely dent its will. It is a world of superheros and their counterpoint – the super villain. The amazing thing is that the Joker seems to have crafted this world-bending will from a gang of mental patients. Henri Ducard and the League of Shadows may have powered the dark world of Batman Begins, but the Joker and his gang end up back in the age-old comic book movie problem that I pointed to here – where did their gang learn to fight like that? This was never really an issue for Joel Schumacher because who would take him seriously? But Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale are supposed to be serious. So tell me, how did the Joker craft a bunch of mental patients into an unstoppable crime gang?

And it’s this that drives me nuts. Batman and the Joker aren’t just superheros. They don’t just defy physics and do things that are impossible. They do things that defy the imagination. You might as well call him the invisible man. The Joker can load up a hospital with enough explosives to level the structure without ever being noticed. His gang of paranoid schizophrenics can carry hundreds of barrels of oil or something like that on to, not just one, but two public ferries – and never be seen by the crew. The Joker seems to be invulnerable to concussion when he survives and walks away to fight from the now well-known end-to-end flipping of a semi-trailer, even though Batman falls off his bike and can’t get up. This is not the kind of suspended belief that makes movies possible. I’m an expert at accepting at face value the logic of Movie Magic World. It’s the suspended belief allowing Superman’s ability to fly that makes watching the movie so much fun. Tony Stark is a superhero because he can build an arc reactor from a bunch of scraps while he’s trapped in a cave. But it’s not just suspension of belief that makes it possible to watch Dark Knight. It’s idiocy.

It’s true that Dark Knight has its jewels. There’s Michael Caine recounting his experience as a British peace officer in Burma. There’s Michael Caine explaining why Batman has become a target for all the crazies of the world. There’s Bruce Wayne’s pontification about what he has to do to fight someone who is not moved by money or power but merely by a wish “to see everything burn”, but wait, that’s Michael Caine again. In fact, the dialog itself is very good. It’s sharp, witty, and sometimes profound. It’s just that something about the movie, perhaps the way it is put onto the film, has completely lost the brilliance of the message in the story. All of this is what left me asking, is there something intrinsic about the movie that makes it impossible to tell this story properly?

Of course there is. Superhero comic books are a genre that developed for decades. They are not novels. They are not movies. They are stories done in graphic pictures that appear frame by frame. As a result, there’s a certain kind of story that can be told well. These stories do not necessarily translate onto film anymore than film could be translated into comic book or graphic novel form and still convey all the subtleties of the genre. Why would it? So while the masses and the critics may be swooning from the imagery and the profound message they hear in the script, the film itself can not convey the story without descending into a ridiculous world where idiotic things happen as a matter of daily course. Sure you can ignore this and get on with the fun of the movie, but why would you want to? If you can’t watch the movie without completely suspending everything you’ve learned in your lifetime, what’s the point of watching? Is it just to be able to ask yourself about the limits of humanity? But then why ask the audience to take the movie so seriously? If the whole point of a movie is to do this with film-based images and a plot that captures your feelings, then Dark Knight is doing no less than asking you to suspend all sense of anything you have ever known.

Dark Knight asks you to accept that utterly unimaginable things happen on such a regular basis that it’s just no longer Earth. Every scene is filled with some impossible fact until it hits you – this has nothing to do with anything that could happen in your world. It’s a parallel planet that resembles Earth, but it’s not our Earth. But should this come as any surprise to me? After all, it’s not New York City; it’s Gotham. And what’s the difference between the world of the Dark Knight and the world of Ironman or The Hulk?

Actually, a whole lot. Ironman doesn’t ask you to ponder its deep moral message, so it doesn’t matter what Phil Coulson does. It doesn’t make the movie one bit less fun if Ironman routinely demands a stretch of reality because it’s not meant to have a deep moral lesson for our world. If the Joker’s gang is as meaningful to us as the aliens from Mars Attacks!, then who cares about what choices and problems and decisions the people of Gotham end up with?

And when all this is said and done, there is nothing – absolutely nothing – in The Dark Knight that I haven’t seen before. Watching boat loads of prisoners and socialites choose between blowing up others or saving themselves made me feel like it had all happened before. Was the feeling of revulsion any different from when I was coerced into watching Saw? You know – the horror series where our villain kidnaps people and forces them to choose between saving themselves or doing something horrible to another person. Where have I seen an action hero have to choose between saving others and the beautiful girl he loves? Could it have been the finale of Spiderman? Even the idea of bugging all the phones in Gotham so that Batman could locate the Joker was stolen from the US Delta Force search for Pablo Escobar. Except that when Batman did it to the good citizens of Gotham, General Lucius was mortified. When Delta Force did it to the Colombians, it all seemed in the interest of America. I’m even plagued by this nagging feeling of familiarity when I recall Michael Caine’s wonderful story about burning down the forest to find the jewel thief. It could be my memory of the nameless US military officer at Ben Tre in Vietnam who stated that it “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” In fact, I think I have heard the exact same story somewhere else, but even with the help of the World Wide Web I have not been able to find out where.

So don’t get drawn in by the hype. There is nothing in Dark Knight (other than Michael Caine) that’s worth the effort of watching if only because you have to stand up and go to the theater. To warp film into telling a story that was better left for the graphic comics, it’s had to rely on a trail of images and ideas stolen from various places. To string these together in any semblance of a plot, Dark Knight has had to suspend logic and reasoning to such an extent that its characters are no longer human. And that’s where the fun stops. It’s a movie with a story that has nothing to do with anything that could happen to you or to me or to any other human being on this planet. It’s a fragmented story hidden inside special effects that we’ve been tricked into thinking have an important moral message for us.

Don’t waste your time and money. Avoid Dark Knight as if it were the bubonic plague.

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Cung Le, Kung Fu, and MMA

Cung Le is a California-based MMA fighter. The significance of his victory over Frank Shamrock is that he is not an MMA fighter. His background is primarily in San Shou, which a full contact sport frequently done by fighters trained in kung fu styles. In fact, San Shou appears very much like the more popular Muay Thai and is sometimes called San Da. There are some very talented San Shou fighters and I refer interested readers to the fights of Max Chen for some entertaining examples.

Watching Cung Le fight is a different experience. He looks completely different from the more well-known fighters of the UFC, Pride, or K-1. Some of this is related to his use of slam takedowns that he developed while wrestling in high school. But Cung Le is more than that. His kicks are amazing. He is imaginative. He is creative. Watching Cung Le is like watching a dancer. He uses kicks that no one else can make work. Compare this video of Cung Le highlights with this from Croatian policeman and Pride high-powered kicker Micro Crocop. Crocop is dynamite. He has more power than a steaming locomotive. The problem is that while his kicking is one-dimensional, Cung Le brings a whole different dimension of kicking into the ring.

But then Cung Le has never fought anyone remotely of the caliber of the opponents that Mirco Crocop faces regularly. Sure Cung Le is only 175 pounds compared with Crocop’s 230. But there’s plenty of welterweight power in MMA just waiting to be tested. The fight with Frank Shamrock in which Shamrock’s arm got broken was hardly a real test of what’s out there; in fact, it was kind of boring. But this weightclass is packed full of power just waiting to get released, including some of the sport’s best fighters ever – Matt Huges, BJ Penn, Georges St. Pierre, Karo Parisyan, and Shinya Aoki, not to mention the newest MMA sensation Anderson Silva.

My honest opinion is that the Cung Le’s style and flair come from the fact that his opponents are so outclassed he can do pretty much anything he wants. Cung Le fights in events promoted by EliteXC, which lists some very interesting up and coming fighters. But EliteXC is a new fight league and while starting off very well, does not have the same record for promoting top events as the UFC.

Cung Le inspires a whole different approach to fighting. Up until now, MMA has been dominated by training in boxing, muay thai, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, wrestling, and to a certain degree judo – all are contact combat sports. It is extremely unusual to see techniques that come out of anywhere else. Even Tae Kwon Do and Kenpo, which used to be regular starting points for full contact fighters, have faded into the background. While occasionally very imaginative fighters like Genki Sudo can be seen using techniques that appear more like those of traditional martial art styles, in fact, he has a very conventional MMA background.

But you’d never know this reading the kung fu forums on the Internet. Practitioners continue to post that the most powerful techniques and most effective training come out of styles that claim their origins long, long ago often in mythical battles that involve Buddhist clergy, animals and a source of power in theories of qi. And Cung Le comes from this tradition, or at least much more so than any of the current stars of MMA ring and Octagon.

Don’t get me wrong; I think Cung Le is great. I enjoy watching him compete and I truly hope he makes something new for the sport. I just doubt he can. Sure there will be new techniques that appear in MMA, and some of them will appear to be like the more traditional techniques of kung fu. But there will almost certainly never be a fighter to emerge among the big boys of the sport who came up any other way than through the school of hard knocks in contact combat sports. They just can’t. MMA fighters train the way they do because that’s the best way to train. If there was a better way to train and win, they would be there already.

For an interesting perspective on the Shamrock/Le fight, have a look at this link.

What I Think about Friends

Friends…you know, the show that tells the story of group of six friends who live in the same building in New York. You probably even know their names and can recognize them on sight. Some of them, like Jennifer Aniston, have gone on to be among the among the most famous screen personalities in the world.

For many years, I resisted the urge to watch the show. But finally the demands of teaching EFL forced me to give in. You see, the show fits perfectly into my one-hour-classes. If you have a test and then a half hour or even a full hour left, that isn’t enough for a movie, so Friends works out great. Besides, the level of English in the show is about perfect for my students and with the subtitles running, almost everyone in the class can understand an entire episode. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing about the show, considering it was filmed with an American audience in mind, but it is a true fact.

So I have watched many episodes of the series. I’m not sure I know everything that’s gone on, but I know a lot, and I have to say, it is a very disturbing show.

First, it is not at all a comedy. In fact, it is really quite a tragic story. Rachel is the disowned daughter of a wealthy family and has struggled for a long time adapting to a more moderate but independent lifestyle. Her romantic life has been extremely sad and she seems unable to feel loved by either her partners or her family. Her friend Phoebe Buffay‘s mother killed herself when Pheobe was a teen, leaving her and her twin sister to support themselves through crime.

This is not to say that Friends is not a funny show. It is very funny and despite the disgusting nature of most of the episodes, I often laugh. But this is not because it’s a comedy. It’s as tragic as McBeth or Hamlet. It’s awful. If you’re not a clinical psychopath, you’d want to cry. But in fact, the show is hilarious because it’s so full of jokes. One after the other, they just roll out. I’m not sure that it should be funny that Ross’ wife ran away with her lesbian lover after she convinced Ross to have a ménage à trois, but it sure is. And it’s the market that decides if the show stays on the air.

Perhaps even more disturbing is the economic division between the male and female characters on the show. The three women on the show are portrayed as only marginally employed. Pheobe drives a cab, Rachel works at a neighborhood coffee shop and Monica is employed as a semi-skilled worker in high-class restaurant kitchens. Contrast this with the three men of the series. Joey is an actor whose career swings between ups and downs. While he has trouble making it, in the end, he appears to have established himself as a significant TV personality. Ross, who is also Monica’s brother, holds a PhD and teaches at the Ivy league, New York University. His friend Chandler is by far the most successful of the six. I remember that at some point he goes on the medical school, but a brief read of his Wikipedia profile failed to mention this.

While the three women seem to be lacking in education and career talent, they are extremely beautiful. They are also very sexual and many episodes of the show focus on different aspects of their sex lives and how promiscuous they are. The physical beauty of the women in the show is quite striking; in fact, it is a central aspect of the series. For example, at the chronological beginning of the series, Monica is overweight. She looses a lot of weight becoming extremely beautiful and in doing so, ends up with the high-income Chandler.

It’s hard to say what the show deals with anything other than a lot of jokes about some people with very sad lives. Watching the show is an offensive experience. I wish I had never done this. It truly must distort the already twisted impressions my students have of Americans as narcisistic sex fiends. But I’ll probably keep on showing it, if only because the timing is perfect.

What I Think about the Movie ‘Fight Club’

If you read my blog regularly, you’ll know Kerim Friedman who produces the blogs Keywords and Savage Minds. Lesser known outside of my circles is Kerim’s wife, Shashwati. You can find her blogs and information about her work in film here and here. Shaswati, Kerim, and I often talk about films and recommend ones that we should and shouldn’t watch. The film Fight Club seems to come up a lot.

Fight Club is a 1999 Hollywood movie staring Brad Pitt and Edward Albert Norton that describes the exploits of a group of men who find meaning through participation in an underground fighting club. As the club grows, it becomes the backbone of a revolution of ordinary guys against the established order. In fact, I have seen Fight Club. I saw it when it first came out. At the time, I though it was very hard to follow and I couldn’t quite understand the point. I just watched it again and to be honest, parts of it were interesting. I especially liked the beginning and the almost poetic way in which our protagonist sees his empty life. Some of it was quite beautiful. It was almost worth watching until…well… until they started fighting.

Shahwati asked me about the movie because I actually belong to a real life fight club. Or to be more accurate, a group of loosely affiliated men who fight as part of their recreation. We live in Taiwan, so we don’t get to do a lot of punching. We do a lot of what you’d call wresting, but most of us have fought cage matches and we want to fight more of them. I played a lot of contact sports before this. I played rugby union as a kid, playing again from 1990 until a few years ago. And you know, in all the years I have been involved in combat sports and the years before that in which I played rugby union, no one ever talked about Fight Club. This is not quite true. One of the members of my BJJ club in Taipei (that’s Brazilian Jiu-JItsu) once mentioned he had seen the film and that there was some aspect to it he thought was interesting; something about walking down the street and sizing up strangers for a fight. But that’s it. That’s the end. No one watches Fight Club. No one talks about it. No one even seems to know the movie exists, although I know they do.

This is not to say that real life fighters don’t watch films. They love watching them. These guys get together and watch Bruce Lee movies all the time. They quote Bruce Lee on their websites. They use his Chinese name (李小龍) as their Chinese signature and there was even a brief period where everyone was talking about the recent hit The 300. They just don’t watch Fight Club.

And why would they? It’s a stupid movie. It’s got nothing to do with the things that guys who fight in their spare time fight about. It’s not about people who want to fight. Guys who want to fight for fun really are the way you think they are. They may be nice, Christian folk, but they’re nuts. Have a listen to this interview UFC champion BJ Penn following his victory over Jens Pulver – who is a born-again Christian.

All those people who would do steroids and then complain about people cheating in the ring to win a fight with them – come on. Anybody who does steroids to smash my face in personally, while I’m playing by the rules, I got a serious problem with that. Grow some balls and fight BJ Penn without steroids. That’d be cool…when I go into the Octagon, I’m ready to die… I’m ready to die, and you come in and you kill me somehow and you cheated, I mean where’s the honor? Where’s the whole thing?

BJ is speaking about UFC lightweight champion Sean Sherk who tested positive for anabolic steroids. You don’t need to be shocked by these words. I’ve heard the same things from Penn’s personal friend Enson Inoue,

There is no better way to die, than to die in the midst of a battle, fighting to the very end……like a man.

whose gym in Tokyo uses Japanese military slogans (大和魂) as its motto. Or from Ken Shamrock, once called the most dangerous man in the world.

I will get my respect or I will die

In fact, this neo-Bushido talk is the norm for full-contact fighters. For more psycho quotes from MMA fighters, see this link. And if you want, compare them with some memorable quotes from the movie Fight Club.

In a sense, the realism of the fights in the movie and the people involved in them shouldn’t be an issue. The fights themselves are just a metaphor for rebellion. But this hasn’t stopped the critics. Take a look at Rotten Tomatoes if you don’t believe me. In a ridiculous masturbatory fantasy from vultureculture.net, Tom Block tells us that, “While watching the men knock each other’s teeth out in Fight Club, some women may find themselves eying their lovers and wondering, “Is some part of guys really like that?” Mr. Block goes on to clarify the world of Fight Club. “It’s only fair to point out that Fight Club is about womenless men”, he confides in us. And he is right. Fight Club is a make believe world where men are men and women are just on the sidelines. It’s sort of a Rambo and Bruce Willis-type-thing, but it’s not Clint Eastwood and the anger of a Dirty Harry changing the world. Instead it’s your anger turned into rage against the machine. It’s the pornotopia of kicks and punches. It’s prison without the sodomy.

But when all is said and done, Fight Club is one of those ads in the back of a comic book selling the human growth hormone (HGH) my brother-in-law claims he bought, used, and grew 3 centimeters. But he didn’t. HGH has serious side effects on grown people that are very quickly noticeable. And so does getting in fights. You get hurt; you get really messed up. There is no part of the man next to you that’s like that, if only because he’s afraid of getting hurt too much. There may be in his fantasy, but there’s a reason why he stayed where he was born and things in his life continue to run pretty much the way they did yesterday.

But the twisted thing about the movie is that in the end, it wasn’t an underground club of White men and their buddies banding together in a desperate struggle for humanity that truly shocked our world. It wasn’t a White man angry at the meaninglessness of his job and his life who really had the dream of making tomorrow radically different from today. Instead it was a bunch of religious nuts holed up in some cave in Afghanistan. It wasn’t a claims adjuster frustrated at airline meals and silly conversation who had the balls to finally say, “Hay, the way you’ve been living your life is wrong, and I’m going to do something about it.” It was Osama bin Laden and the crew that George Bush Jr. calls terrorists who really made your tomorrow different from today.

People for whom violence is no fantasy have always known this. Fighting doesn’t set you free. It hurts. The fighting in Fight Club isn’t about fighting. It’s about stupid White guys who are too chicken to live the life they really want. It’s a movie that makes being a stupid White guy seem heroic instead of just the boring thing that it really is. Fight Club goes beyond boring into a whole new dimension of stupid. And that’s where I want to leave it.

I didn’t like Fight Club, not the first time I watched it and not the second time, either. I don’t recommend that anyone watch it.

Other links about Fight Club

What I Think about the Book Fight Club

What I Think about Chuck Palahnuik

What I Think about CSI

I have more than a 100 TV stations on cable. You’d think I could find something I’d like to watch. CSI is pretty much the only major production I can make it through. In fact, it’s only CSI – Las Vegas that I can handle.

Aside from the fact that all the heroes are nerds, the point that sticks out most prominently are their killers. Their killers aren’t members of major crime organizations or criminal geniuses. They’re just a lot of sick people out killing people. And that’s the point of it all. It’s an endless panopticon of psychopaths without a conscience. It’s a world filled with people who will kill your children for fun or your wife because they’re bored with things. It’s dentists who kill their patients and when caught lament that “All good things must come to an end.”

The truth is that CSI used to be much more interesting. Originally, the show was just about crime investigation. And since no one knew much about what went on here, they could show almost real crimes and almost real investigations. Now that we’ve seen all there is to show in a 50-minute TV spot, the crimes and their perpetrators have become even so much more ingenious. And the sex, the sex between married white people has become so overwhelming as a theme for killing, you’d never know that vast numbers of killings occur between coloured people involved in petty drug trade.

But it’s still better than your typical superhero story. There’s Daredevil with one man and all the crime. There’s Batman fighting the League of Shadows. And while the pageant of supervillians is endless, everyone superhero fan knows that all we need to do to wipe out crime and evil is to
get them all. And if it isn’t a supervilllian, these days, as often as not, it’s a government conspiracy or an international crime syndicate.

And then there’s Dr. Gil Grissom, nerd extraordinaire, protecting us from a world of criminal psychopaths who could be and often are our neighbors. It’s not great, but yes, it’s refreshing to know that our lives could be completely destroyed at any second by the smallest trivial random decision that throws us in the path of the wrong trusted acquaintance.

Abstinence and the New Conservatives

I just found this article by US senator Sam Brownback and Ed Feulner, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation. The article addresses the emphasis that US public education places on condom purchase and use, rather than abstinence. It states that in spite of the demonstrated efficacy (or lack there of) of abstinence education, schools continue to focus on condom use and birth control. I don’t have the same interpretation of this research as Senator Brownback and Mr. Feulner, but that’s not what’s bugging me today. I can say that the conservative argument about sexuality is increasingly becoming an aesthetic reconstruction of the struggle against nature.

It used to be the Marxists who argued for the struggle against nature, but our days are seeing increasing numbers of conservatives arguing for a radical battle with biology. Citing the Heritage Foundation, the article states that, “when compared to women who begin sexual activity in their 20′s, girls who initiated sexual activity at the age of 13 or 14 were less than half as likely to have stable marriages…” and a whole bunch of other bad things. They then go on to advocate the promotion of sexual activity among primarily women who are far past the age at which nature has prepared humans for sexual activity. It is the conservatives who are now arguing that reproduction should be reserved for a period of time so late that the health of mothers and their infants is becoming questionable.

I’m not saying this is wrong. I don’t know what’s really right or wrong when it comes to questions like this. It’s just the nature of their point is quite surprising to me. Here are people who call themselves conservative, but whose moral position is quite clearly one that opposes natural processes. Historically, it’s been radical groups, often associated with the writings of Karl Marx, who have spoken about the struggle against nature. Today, in 21st Century America, it is the so-called ‘Conservative Right’ arguing aesthetic reasons that nature is wrong and they know better. In a sense, the conservatives have become the radicals.

Perhaps they do know better because I sure don’t. But I can say, it sure is interesting what ‘conservative’ has come to mean.

The Same Choices as Our Parents

Last time, we spoke about the changing economy and the challenges it’s poses for the education of each of us and for our children. We spoke about the promise of a future for our boys and girls that each and every one of us will be proud of. And we spoke of the failure of our schools to rise and meet this challenge and how the only thing they are providing is more of the same: a lot more, so much more that it drowns our children in so much work they loose their childhood

And how has this happened? Our children are the brightest Taiwan has ever seen. I look around at the children near my and I see children so bright that I know if we can gave them a chance they will be incredible. Their teachers are great. I have spoken with many teachers and I know they understand the troubles of our times and I know they have answers.

But they are trapped in a dark space. The reality of their world is that it’s full of tests. And an awful lot of them are bad tests. But that’s just the reality of the world they know their students have to struggle with. So what is even the very best of our teachers supposed to do? And let’s not forget the parents who worry endlessly and are willing to give almost everything they have for their children’s future: for the future of Taiwan.

How could this combination of talented teachers and students fail? It’s almost unbelievable. But it’s not that it’s failing. But that the world has changed and the test-driven system that built Taiwan is just not what Taiwan needs to train its children for the next generation of companies.

Companies will have to operate far beyond the shores of Taiwan. In the past, tests were enough to motivate students to work hard and learn what they needed for their lives and for their companies. Now, companies operate in a marketplace without borders and just as the workplace has changed beyond recognition, the kind of people these companies have had to change completely. – completely.

The kind of education these workers need also needs to be completely different. And it is not. It is the schools and the tests and the same old choices that our parents had to make. It is not different enough and it is not different enough in the right way. And surely schools that are training students for the factories and the offices of a Taiwan marketplace a generation as a no matter how good the students, no matter how inspiring the teachers, no matter how sacrificing the parents, is bound to fail.