Doubling Down

Conditions: Free!!!

Bye Bye Frying Pan

You know, I think that the world we knew did end after all. At least the world we thought we knew. Only in America could you expect people to react to the horror of gun-toting madmen by calling for even more guns.

National Rifle Association executive vice president Wayne LaPierre blamed Hollywood, video games music, the courts and more on Friday for creating a culture of violence in the United States.

"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," he said at a Washington press event, adding, "With all the money in the federal budget can’t we afford to put a police officer in every single school?"

LaPierre made his lengthy statement to the press one week after the shooting that killed 20 children and six adults at a school in Newtown, Conn.

He said that elected officials had no authority to deny Americans the right and the ability to protect themselves and their families from harm.

- nbcpolitics.nbcnews.com

This is so ridiculous it should come with its own laugh track. The fact that this guy doesn’t want to talk about restricting sales of military grade weapons. Doesn’t want to talk about removing these massive clips from the market. Doesn’t want to talk about the screening of potential gun owners. No, he wants more guns, he wants everyone to have a gun. And this in the direct spotlight of this terrible tragedy.

And it ties into the overall right-wing militant view of gun ownership, this idea that if you’re armed, then you can defend against some bad guy on a rampage. That the world exists in some kind of western setting where the good guy never draws first, but always wins. You wanna know what’s really going to happen to an armed guard at a school during the next rampage? He’ll be the first one to die, because the "bad guy" shoots first. I don’t understand how people can think that turning everything into a fortress is going to solve anything, or not result in even worse happening in the future.

I don't really see how this is actually going to be solved.  I can't see how the genie is ever going to be put back in the bottle.


Film Review: The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey.

You know, I didn’t complain too much when director Peter Jackson made the third Lord of the Rings movie five hours long and ended six times. And I didn’t complain too much when he took the 90-odd minute long story of King Kong and turned it into a three hour dissertation on the economic problems of depression-era New York. But I feel that Jackson is now seriously starting to push it. The Hobbit is one small book, and yet he’s decided to turn it into three three-hour-long movies. Now I haven't read the book, but after sitting through what presumably is the first third of it on screen I suspect Jackson simply sees himself now as being above the nasty business of adaptation. Why collate and interpret the themes and ideas of a book into a movie if you can just get some corporation to bankroll you into doing a direct translation.

Why? Well let’s ask the little kids in the row ahead of mine who spent large parts of the film fidgeting and hopping around. Or indeed the rest of the audience who spent the last hour doing some fidgeting of their own. This is a long amount of time to spend sitting in a theatre seat amongst a large amount of other people. And I feel it should be really worth it. And unfortunately this film is not grand enough or deep enough to justify it. It’s a kid’s film, about a bunch of rambunctious dwarves who - with help from the wizard Gandalf - decide to go on a quest to take back their kingdom, and specifically their storage room full of gold, that long ago was taken over by a dragon. So Galdalf drags Bilbo Baggins into it as well, because a hobbit may come in handy, and away they go. Various adventures ensure, and the film stops fractionally before the average bladder would explode, to be resumed same time next year. Now while the dwarves may well deserve to get their kingdom and their gold back, there really isn’t enough time spent on the plight of the dwarven people in order to make me care enough that they should fight their way back to the mountain they were driven from.

Which is odd because there certainly is time to spend on everything else. Feasts, fights, long walks, even some plate-cleaning features in this oddessy through middle earth. So many long slow panning shots of mountains and rivers and forrests and waterfalls, and mountains with forrests, and rivers on mountains, and forrests with rivers, it goes on and on, and yet on, to such an extent you feel like saying ok, we get it New Zealand tourism council, we’ll buy tickets on the next flight if you’ll cut down on the geography porn. Finally it ends, with the giant eagles showing up yet again to save the heroes, and we can stagger home. So while there is some nostalgia for the old times, the stakes aren’t high enough to justify the length of it. Far too much of a good thing. Two mountain tops out of five.


- Peace out