The Old School Lunch

An absolute, absolute must read.

I think reading it just changed my vote.

[DNF = Did not finish. DNA = Did not attempt to watch. Ratings: Out of a possible best four **** stars.]

[Disclaimer. Yes, I realize I rent some stupid shit. Employee of the Month? Aeon Flux? What?]

[UPDATE: Disclaimer #2: Yes, Christina, I do seriously rent some awful movies. I know.]

Nobody’s Life - A drama of absurdity but pretty good.
30 Days: Season 1: Disc 2 - Spurlock has good intentions, but so many of the episodes are problematic. At one point, he says “The Costa is one of the most notoriously gay cities in America.” Notoriously?
Monster - Brutal. Absolutely brutal. ****
30 Days: Season 1: Disc 1 - Nickel and Dimed.
Speak - I posted about this a few days ago.
He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not - DNF
Shooter - Not bad.
The Treatment - **
Dark Angel: Season 1: Disc 1 - I watched several episodes when it was on TV but I saw about 3 minutes of the first episode and had to turn it off.
Drugstore Cowboy - ****
Shanghai Kiss - Saw this on AngryAsianMan. **
Escape from L.A. - **
Grindhouse: Death Proof - I saw this first at the theater and it was hilarious when right as the one character is about to do the lapdance, there’s a “film error of lost footage” to which the audience erupted in laughter. They added the lapdance scene in the DVD, however.
Spider-Man 3 - The infamous “emo” spidey.
Kickin It Old Skool - *
Mouth to Mouth - DNA.
Notes on a Scandal - ****
Weeds: Season 2: Disc 2 - I’ve wrote about this series before a bit. Overall good, funny but some issues here and there.
Weeds: Season 2: Disc 1
Weeds: Season 1: Disc 2
28 Weeks Later - There is one scene in this movie that I will always just fast-forward every time but otherwise i’m a big fan of this franchise.
Transformers - In all ways this is an American fourth of July sort of movie. And by that I mean sexist and racist.
The Corporation - The “Animatrix” voice narration was funny. But great documentary.
Grey’s Anatomy: Season 3: Disc 3 - DNF. Sandra Oh and that Meredith character are the two single most annoying personalities on TV.
Grey’s Anatomy: Season 3: Disc 4
Heroes: Season 1: Disc 6 - Season two is all over the place.
Heroes: Season 1: Disc 7
But I’m a Cheerleader - ****
Heroes: Season 1: Disc 5
Weeds: Season 1: Disc 1
Heroes: Season 1: Disc 4
Heroes: Season 1: Disc 3
Grey’s Anatomy: Season 3: Disc 2
Heroes: Season 1: Disc 2
Click - I broke my “No Adam Sandler/Jim Carey movies” rule and actually rented it. ***
Gilmore Girls: Season 6: Disc 6 - Hands down the funniest show i’ve seen. ****
Heroes: Season 1: Disc 1
Grey’s Anatomy: Season 3: Disc 1
This Film Is Not Yet Rated - Kevin Smith saves the day. A must see.
Gilmore Girls: Season 6: Disc 5
Running Scared - Surprisingly good. From what I remember.
Avenue Montaigne - DNF.
Gilmore Girls: Season 6: Disc 4
300 - Where to start?
Gilmore Girls: Season 6: Disc 3
Pan’s Labyrinth - DNA.
Gilmore Girls: Season 6: Disc 2
Gilmore Girls: Season 6: Disc 1
Gilmore Girls: Season 5: Disc 6
Gilmore Girls: Season 5: Disc 5
Gilmore Girls: Season 5: Disc 3
Gilmore Girls: Season 5: Disc 4
Me and You and Everyone We Know - ****
Y Tu Mama Tambien - Ebert had a good point about this movie and the MPAA.
Gilmore Girls: Season 5: Disc 2
Gilmore Girls: Season 5: Disc 1
Gilmore Girls: Season 4: Disc 6
Gilmore Girls: Season 4: Disc 4
Gilmore Girls: Season 4: Disc 5
Kingpin - Bill Murray at his best.
Gilmore Girls: Season 4: Disc 3
Gilmore Girls: Season 4: Disc 2
Thank You for Smoking - ***
Million Dollar Baby - Got all the praise for a reason, I see.
Jesus Camp - ****
Gilmore Girls: Season 4: Disc 1
Gilmore Girls: Season 3: Disc 6
11:14 - I had to think for a while what this movie was. OK now I remember. *
Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price - ****
Gilmore Girls: Season 3: Disc 5
Gilmore Girls: Season 3: Disc 4
Gilmore Girls: Season 3: Disc 3
Devil’s Playground - ***
Maxed Out - ***
Gilmore Girls: Season 3: Disc 2
An Inconvenient Truth - One of the only people to see it for the first time on DVD.
Gilmore Girls: Season 3: Disc 1
Grey’s Anatomy: Season 2: Disc 3
Gilmore Girls: Season 2: Disc 2
Gilmore Girls: Season 2: Disc 3
Gilmore Girls: Season 2: Disc 1
Grey’s Anatomy: Season 2: Disc 2
Gilmore Girls: Season 1: Disc 5
Gilmore Girls: Season 1: Disc 6
Grey’s Anatomy: Season 2: Disc 1
The Fountain - This would be amazing to see in IMAX. Amazing.
Blood Diamond - ***
Gilmore Girls: Season 1: Disc 3
Gilmore Girls: Season 1: Disc 4
Grey’s Anatomy: Season 1: Disc 2
Fifty Pills -
Gilmore Girls: Season 1: Disc 2
Batman Beyond: Season 1: Disc 1
Grey’s Anatomy: Season 1: Disc 1
Gilmore Girls: Season 1: Disc 1
Half Nelson - ****
Crime and Punishment in Suburbia - Don’t really remember. Bad sign probably.
Employee of the Month - **
Confetti - ***
Elektra - *
Dave Chappelle’s Block Party - ****
10 Items or Less - Glad to see films like this still being made.
Kissing Jessica Stein - Annoying characters.
Fast Food Nation - This is what Super Size Me had the potential to be. ****
Cake - Don’t remember.
Hard Candy - Brutal. But good.
The Prestige - ****
Red Planet - ***
Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman - **
Ghosts of Mars - Ebert gave it a good review. *
Harsh Times - Christian Bale is out of his goddamn mind.
Blade: Trinity - Not bad!
The Departed - ***
Rocky Balboa - Mason “The Line” Dixon. Right.
Ghost World - ****
13 Going on 30 - This movie single handedly brought back the Thriller dance at weddings.
Flags of Our Fathers - I seriously don’t remember renting this so I was surprised to see this on the rental history.
The Quiet - Brutal. **
Jarhead - ***
The Descent - **
Aeon Flux - DNF.
Everything Is Illuminated - **

Bruce Lee lives on through…Breeze Loo?

I would also check out their main movie webpage where you can see Anson Ho’s making of documentary “Building A Journey” which talks about Justin Lin and going from Better Luck tomorrow to Tokyo Drift to FTG. Who woulda thunk that MC Hammer saved the day for FTG? Also a must see moment with Roger Ebert at Sundance in the documentary.

“LANSING, Mich. - Gov. Jennifer Granholm has issued an order that bars discrimination against state workers based on their “gender identity or expression,” which protects the rights of those who behave, dress or identify as members of the opposite sex.

The order, which Granholm signed Wednesday, adds gender identity to a list of other prohibited grounds for discrimination that includes religion, race, color, national origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, height, weight, marital status, politics, disability or genetic information…”

I was very skeptical of e-readers thinking why anyone would spend something on what essentially could be seen on a regular laptop but the Kindle has me convinced otherwise. Jeff Bezos pulls off another stunner and got some big literary names to back him up.

Yes, it’s $400 but as you’ll see in the videos, the damn thing comes with broadband access meaning that you never plug it in to a computer, you don’t have to have a wi-fi access point to download books, it’s just that onetime fee and there’s no monthly which is pretty unbelievable. I mean, you’d really have to love books and always want to be in tune with your RSS feeds and really be on the go and read a lot to invest $400 in something like this, but if you have the money then hey.

I don’t even know what you’d say to something like this if you’re Sony and you work on the sony e-reader. Unless Sony charges theirs for about 100 bucks…I see it going the way of the Clie line…

[Cross posted at Shrub.com blog]

The backstory: Assassin’s Creed is one of the most anticipated games of the year. When Yahoo! is talking about your game on the front-page, you know the buzz is pretty significant. The producer for this game is Jade Raymond who, like the lead-producer of every other game created in the modern age, gives a good portion of the interviews with the press. That is, if you’re a producer of a game and you’re noticeably articulate, you’re the one talking about it, you don’t tell the advertising executive or the intern to do that. As the game is being released, a comic/drawing surfaces, most infamously on the Something Awful forums depicting Jade performing fellatio on male fanboys (not to be confused with the photoshopped nude photos of Jade that are floating around). This comic is seen and shared by members of the SA forums at which point Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka of SA receives a cease and desist/threat of lawsuit letter from the legal representation of Ubisoft telling them to shut it all down and to let them know everything about where they get the image, who drew it, etc. At this point, the story becomes popular outside of SA and other blogs start picking it up, forming their own opinions (yes, just like me and just like this one). The story appears on digg and with it a rash of the most sexist comments (and some countering the sexist comments) appear.

The fact that someone felt the need to draw a pornographic comic of Jade Raymond is in itself is pretty disturbing. But what’s also mind-numbing is the consequent backlash you read from the blogosphere because Ubisoft dropped the hammer on SA. Reading some of the comments on SA, on digg and you start to see a trend. Most notably, the criticisms of Jade and Ubisoft go something like this:

1. It’s just a drawing. You made it a bigger deal than it was. By you making the lawsuit you just drew more attention to it so now more people know about it.
-Actually, no, I think it was SA who posted it on Digg saying that they were being contacted the attorney from Ubisoft so in fact they brought it to the public. It seems like Ubisoft wanted to keep this matter under wraps but Kyanka wanted to appeal to the public and get sympathy from the digg community (which, sadly enough, he actually seems to be getting). But getting back to the larger point, if someone draws something unbelievably offensive about you, you’re supposed to just ignore it? Brush it under the rug? Isn’t this what we tell women who get sexually harassed at work? “You don’t want to cause a fuss, it’s just going to take forever to fix it anyways to better to just ignore it.” If you ignore it then it implies that they don’t think it’s offensive. Ubisoft is doing what any employer should do when one of their own gets attacked like this: you stick up for your staff. Ubisoft is doing the right thing.

2. She’s just a pretty face who Ubisoft is using to “pimp” the product. She deserves what she’s getting because she’s just a show model for the game.
-Now, I didn’t think anyone would really be this stupid to actually say this publicly but alas, I am proven wrong again.

Quick history lesson. In prehistoric times, pretty cavegirls with cleavage hanging out sold rocks and sticks to horny cavemen. Sex sells. It’s always been that way and will never change. Everyone knows that. So when Ubisoft started pimping Assassin’s Creed, released this week for Xbox360 and PS3, they made pretty girl/producer Jade Raymond the poster child for the game. Whether or not she’s qualified to represent the game, or really had any involvement with its development is besides the point. To the jaded videogame nerd, she’s a set of breasts saying “Buy my game!”

It’s “besides the point”? Really? How is that besides the point? I think it very much is the point. If Ubisoft hired Jade Raymond and sold her as the “producer” and she has no experience or education whatsoever, then of course she’s there as a spokesperson, but Jesus H. Christ, look up her biography, she actually studied this shit as some people have figured out already. How are you going to dismiss the fact that this is what she does for a living? Have you seen one single interview of her talking about the game? There’s an obvious difference between a producer talking about a game and a spokesperson talking about a game and she very obviously is the former.

3. “That a surprise..Jade will act slutty to sell her game but can’t deal with the consequences of that.”
-Now, I haven’t been following this game obsessively since conception to release but since the story of this comic broke out i’ve been watching clips, interviews, reading stories, etc and i’m really struggling to see where this person gets where Jade acts “slutty.” She doesn’t pose for Playboy or Maxim, she doesn’t take “sexy” photographs (I mention these things becase they’re usually seen as indicators of one being “slutty”). I honestly think that his perception of “slutty” is Jade merely being in a stereotypically male-dominated space and simply being a woman, being attractive and having pictures of herself online where she’s smiling and looking happy and actually being confident, intelligent and articulate.

I can’t begin to imagine how something like this has to make a person feel after all the hard work they’ve put into something like this. After all the crap that she’s probably already gotten on the daily as a woman in the video game industry, to have this incredible achievement in her career marked by a select few idiots who decided to try and reduce her to a sex-object. Let’s make no mistake here, the men who do this are uncomfortable at the idea of women in power and women being in spaces where they see it being male-dominated. The men who do shit like this draw comics of women professionals performing oral sex on their “male fanbase” because it’s their literal attempt at inverting the actual reality: a woman producer is at the helm of an innovative game that is getting a lot of buzz and people are buying up in hordes. I don’t think these men can accept the fact that Jade is a success, I really don’t. I don’t think they can accept the fact that she did this without posing in Playboy or pandering to their ideas of what those Game Expos say women should look like and do to sell a product: wear practically nothing, smile, pose for pictures and just look pretty.

3 steps on how to fix this mess:
1. If the comic is still around somewhere, delete the image of the comic, delete links to it, delete posts to it.
2. Apologize. To Jade. Whether you created the comic or spread the image or posted it on a forum.
3. Shut up about the game being some advertising ploy with Jade as the sex-tool. You’re going to make judgements about someone’s credibility as a professional when you don’t even know them? You’re going to base everything on her being a woman and you believing that she doesn’t belong in what you see as a “man’s space”? Really?

Speak is a film based on a book and, well, this was some interesting shit. Part of I think a film or book’s impact or how it comes across to the reader is just looking at the sort of questions we pose in discussions, in classrooms, to ourselves. In the DVD of speak, in the bonus features, there is a “Penguin Books Study Guide” Provided by Associate Professor Grant T. Smith of Viterbo University. He asks the question,

Is this book about making intelligent decisions? List three decisions that Melinda makes and tell why tou think she made the decisions. What are the consequences of these decisions and were there any consequences of her decisions that she could not have reasonably expected?

Now what the fuck is that shit? What the fuck kind of question is that especially considering this is a book for teens? Excuse the massive spoilers here, but this is a story about a teen girl who is raped by a teen boy. She meets this boy at a party where they’re both sorta drinking alcohol and he convinces her to go off to his car and then the rape occurs in his jeep. For some time, she does not tell anyone and a chunk of the story is her being a “selective mute” and not telling those around her about the rape. At the end of the story, when she is attacked and nearly raped again by the same rapist but this time she wounds the rapist with some paint thinner or some shit, has him by the throat with some sharp glass and then has a dozen girls come to her aid when they hear the commotion, she realizes that she is ready to “speak” and tell someone, namely, her mother.

So what, I ask you, is the guy trying to get at when he asks about “intelligent decisions”? What, that Melinda shouldn’t have been drinking? That she shouldn’t have gotten in that car with the rapist? That she shouldn’t have even been at that party or started to make out with the guy? That she should’ve told someone immediately after the rape? His entire question is completely pointed in such a way that leads the person answering the question to blame Melinda and see a billion reasons for why she was raped and how she could’ve gotten help, gotten justice, gotten revenge, or gotten out of the situation (read: it must be all her fault).

And then there’s this gem of a study guide question:

Melinda demonstrates many of the symptoms of clinical depression. What behaviors does she manifest that would cause you concern if you were her friend or teacher? What would you do to help her?

I don’t know how you write a study guide with questions about a book where the central character is raped by a man and then you don’t have a question talking specifically about the actual rape but instead chalk it up to “clinical depression.” You think kids are going to just forget those hundreds of pages of the story? Why ask this ridiculous question to kids? Kids aren’t equipped to deal with this. I don’t know what I would have said if a female friend told me in high school that she’d been raped. I would like to hope that i’d have been smart enough to have listened to her, provided an ear and then helped her figure out where she wanted to go from there, maybe helped her find different resources but I was a pretty stupid kid. I’m afraid that when kids hear “clinical” they’re going to think that it’s something wrong with them in their heads…that they need mental help because they’re the problem. Of course, there are always benefits to counseling and such but when you say “clinical” that has a very medical and sort of prescriptive, drug connotation to it, doesn’t it?

Back from Bellingham after going to hear Jackson Katz’ speak at WWU. Exhausted from driving there and back with a bunch of co-worker and then dropping off folks, getting home at midnight and then having to wake up early for a meeting and then…having to drive some more tomorrow to Snoqualmie (I don’t know if i’m spelling that right, who cares!) for work. My brain hurts (not as a result of the speech). Great lecture but definitely lots of emotions. Too tired to write about at this point. More later.

My boss’s boss gave the green light/paid time to go see Jackson Katz‘ speaking engagement (!) at Western Washington University sponsored by Western Men Against Violence this coming Tuesday along with a bunch of co-workers. I finagled this by saying that it fit into a forum that a co-worker and I would be working on. So then my boss is not so happy with me because i’m behind in my work and if i’m going to spend half a day going to Bellingham, then i’m just going to be that much more behind. So i’ve been trying to catch up but then last night our national online system crashed. Which means nobody getting any work done. And then I just came down with the illness.

Anyways, if you’re near the area, I hope you can make it.

Wow.

It’s one thing to say that you’re going to go to serve “specific communities of color” and go to the “African American, Hispanic and Native” communities. It’s another to say that you’re going to reach out to the “communities of color” and just name those three which is what our CEO recently did at our big all-staff meeting. Apparantly all the Asian and API folk in Washington who make up more of the population than the Black community doesn’t warrant any attention. She talked all this fluff about how we’re going to work extensively with members and organizations at this and that place while she said nothing and had no plan to work with the Asian or Pacific Islander communities. I guess I was hallucinating when I saw those statistics saying that Asian Pacific Islander teens have the highest rates of suicide out of any ethnic group in America. I guess I might’ve just read wrong when I saw that Filipinos girls ages 14-19 have the highest number of suicide ideations and attempts out of any single group. Keep in mind, again, that just looking at the population reports, Asian and API residents in Washington outnumber Blacks and Latinos. Specifically, Filipinos are the largest Asian subgroup in Washington. And wow, we’re not going to address that issue right there?