Wednesday, December 14, 2005

King Kong : A Great Example Of The Power of Film

Peter Jackson's epic remake of "King Kong" contains several scenes where the actors do stunts that you know they'd never survive in real life. But such is the amazing power of this film; you go along with all of them.

King Kong is an amazing film in many technical areas, but it manages to avoid surpressing the story for the special effects. Star Wars' creator George Lucas once said "Special effects without a story is a pretty boring thing." King Kong is certainly not that.

The audience at the midnight show of the three-hour event sat in rapt attention, as Mr. Jackson propelled us through a vast set of environments. Much positive text will be devoted to the presentation of Skull Island. But for me the real star of the show was 1933 New York. WETA has forever solved the problem of depth perception in CGI movies. The city actually feels big on screen. And every detail -- including the popular architectural and urban design features of the New York of that era -- were lovingly captured. It's still very hard for me to tell if what I saw was just a digitally animated image. It's that good.

I also enjoyed the character interplay between Jack Black's Carl Denholm and everyone else. Naomi Watts is the best emoter of any actress stuck with the difficult task of CGI work. Adrian Broady was quite right for his role as the writer Mr. Driscoll, but he could have done with one more tender moments with Ms. Darrow.

The only aspect of the film I found hard to accept was that Watt's / Darrow's fears of possibly failing thousands of feet from the Empire State Building were not activated. In real life, they would be ; it's far too windy up there! My fear of heights was certainly activated in this film, yet I knew it was all digitally produced -- someone forgot to tell my stomach.

Kong was simply wonderful both as a character and as a special effect. You do come away with some feeling for the creatures plight. But I wondered if Watts' Darrow would ever realize the futility of her relationship with the creature. It's as if she was so busy reaching out to have something she was willing to settle for the impossible.

I do recommend this movie. The only thing I'd change is the CGI work on the boats and the actors in them as they were coming away from The Venture -- their lighting was too bright and contrasty versus the digital surroundings.

And does this movie have to have an African American man (Hayes) die an early, dramatic death? Why can't he live? Why does he have to do something heroically dumb? Kong tossing him toward the rock wall made me wish I was there to tell him to stop being a hero and go hide before the gorilla gets him.

It also made me wish I had a set of hand grenades: ten would have done the trick: two for Kong and thrown in his mouth, one each for the T-rexes of which there were three, and the rest (six) to bomb the hell out of those spiders before they got to me.

Yep, with ten grenades -- and a machine gun -- I'd have survived just long enough to get off Skull Island. But the simple fact that I imagined this protection for myself speaks to the visceral impact of this great example of the power of film.

Tuesday, December 13, 2005

Stanley Williams may you rest in Heaven and God bless you

The Lord gives everyone a second chance. I struggled with writing about this, as I too would give pause to the fact that my emotions would be different if it were my family member. But that written, I don't think "an eye for an eye" is the best response.

I also wonder if this case was really well researched. In other words, what is the evidence that can show he's guilty? There were no fingerprints that could be attached to him, according to this article in the "Final Call."

If this case is reopened and he's found to be innocent, then a number of people, including the Governor, should step down from their positions.

Sydney Riot: Wake up Australia, racism is a problem

This link to an article on The Darren Lehmann case reveals a side of Austrialia not know to most Americans. It was written in 2003, and so serves as more evidence of the kind of society that would give rise to the racist riot the World saw over the weekend.

Sydney Riot: White Australia Policy - Immigration Restriction Act

Apparently this law -- click on the title link -- has been on the Austrialian books for 100 years and not repealed. As the rate of immigration has increased, some white Aussies have called for a return to the "White Austrialia Policy." Well, I'll not be visiting Sydney soon.

This is totallly sick. It's also a look into the cultural underpinnings of the rationale for the behavior of the white youths who went on their racist rampage a few days ago. Undoubtedly, their parents were the source of racist hate. Terrible.

Sydney Riot: Sydney's racist mob violence spreads - news account uses word "people" but doesn't report that they're white; why?

Read this carefully. It's from a Melbourne, Austrialia newspaper called "The Age." We know that the victims are Middle Eastern, but we don't know that the attackers are white. Video accounts reveal that all of the 5,000 rioters. Why cover up that they're white?

A day of race-fuelled violence at Cronulla spread through other beachside suburbs in Sydney's south on Sunday night, with one man stabbed and at least 10 arrested.

About 5,000 people descended on Cronulla beach as mobs yelling racist chants chased down and bashed people of Middle Eastern appearance.

Police and an ambulance crew were also assaulted as racial tensions peaked.

Hopes that the violence had subsided by nightfall were dashed when, in an apparent retaliatory strike, a 23-year-old man was stabbed in the back outside a golf club at nearby Woolooware.

Two cars carrying a group of males, described by police as being of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern appearance, approached the man at about 10.25pm (AEDT) Sunday night.

Following a short conversation he was stabbed in the back, and was taken to hospital in a serious condition.

At about the same time, up to 50 carloads of youths smashed more than 100 cars with baseball bats and other weapons in the beach suburb of Maroubra.

Chris Rock not hosting 2006 Academy Awards - apparently pissed off Jude Law


Chris Rock not hosting Oscars

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) -- Chris Rock won't be back cracking wise as the host of next year's Oscars telecast.

"He is not hosting the Academy Awards," the comedian's publicist, Matt Labov, said Friday in a brief statement e-mailed to The Associated Press. He did not elaborate.

Labov told The New York Times that Rock didn't want to do the show "in perpetuity" but would "like to do it again down the road."

The 2005 telecast was Rock's first as host. He drew younger viewers, but his barbs skewering stars like Jude Law, Tobey Maguire and others alienated some members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

In one bit, Rock suggested filmmakers should wait for better talent instead of rushing bad movies into theaters.

"You want Tom Cruise and all you can get is Jude Law. Wait," Rock joked. "You want Russell Crowe and all you can get is Colin Farrell? Wait. 'Alexander' is not 'Gladiator.' "

He also poked fun at himself.

"You want Denzel (Washington) and all you can get is me? Wait," he joked.

Rock's comments prompted Sean Penn, when he took the stage later, to defend Law as "one of our finest actors."

Rock is currently producing and narrating "Everybody Hates Chris," a sitcom on UPN based on his life.

A spokesman for the Academy declined to comment about the hosting duties. Longtime Academy Awards producer Gil Cates is expected to announce his selection in the next few weeks.

Frequently mentioned candidates include four-time host Whoopi Goldberg, two-time host Steve Martin and late-night hosts Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien.

The 78th annual Academy Awards will air March 5 on ABC from Hollywood.

Some of Rock's quotes:

"It's a great night tonight. We have four black nominees. tonight. It's kinda like Def Oscar Jam tonight."

"Black movies don't have real names, they have names like Barbershop. That's not a name, that's just a location."

"Our next presenter is the first woman to ever breast-feed an Apple - Gwyneth Paltrow."

"The only acting you ever see at the Oscars is when people act like they're not mad they lost. Nicole Kidman was smiling so wide (the year Halle Berry beat her to best actress), she should have won an Emmy at the Oscars for her great performance. I was like, 'If you'd done that in the movie, you'd have won an Oscar, girl!'"

"You want Denzel and all you can get is me...wait. Denzel's a fine actor. He woulda never made Pootie Tang. Clint Eastwood's a star, OK? Tobey Maguire's just a boy in tights. You want Tom Cruise and all you can get is Jude Law? Wait! You want Russell Crowe and all you can get is Colin Farrell, wait! Alexander is not Gladiator."

Apartments unaffordable for many - Is the US headed for a depression?

It makes you wonder, considering this news.

Cost of rental housing increased faster than wages

Tuesday, December 13, 2005; Posted: 7:12 p.m. EST (00:12 GMT)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The cost of rental housing has increased faster than wages, making it increasingly difficult for low-income families to afford even modest apartments, an advocacy group said Tuesday.

"The picture is similar to past years, but it's getting worse," said Danilo Pelletiere, research director of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

The coalition, which advocates for more affordable housing, issues a report each year tracking rental costs in every state, county and metropolitan area in the country.

It says families should spend no more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing and utilities, a standard recognized by many housing experts. Under that standard, the coalition said it could not find a single county in the United States where a full-time worker making minimum wage could afford a one-bedroom apartment.

In reality, the report found, many low-income families spend a far larger share of their incomes on housing.

Plus, more and more jobs are being lost to the movement of production offshore, or simply eliminated due to technology. Meanwhile, some Americans allow themselves to be tricked into thinking that the problem is related to illegal immigrants, when nothing could be further from the truth.

Monday, December 12, 2005

Dreamworks Business Model Fails - Studio Purchased By Paramount for $1 billion

Dreamworks SKG -- the studio that produced the great movie "American Beauty" -- was purchased by Viacom / Paramount for just north of $1 billion.

"When Steven, Jeffrey and I started the company and had to put an entire infrastructure together from day one, we had hoped to be able to make enough films to rationalize the cost of being our own distributor," David Geffen -- the "G" in SKG said Sunday."

I wonder if this would not have been the case, had Dreamworks concentrated on producing very low budget movies of up to $1 milllion, each.

Time writer says she may have given tip to Rove's lawyer


It seems that Rove may have been unintentionally warned before his testimory. Check this story out

Richard B. Schmitt, Los Angeles Times
Monday, December 12, 2005

Printable Version
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Washington -- A Time magazine correspondent acknowledged Sunday that she may have unwittingly aided the defense of Karl Rove in the CIA leak investigation by telling the White House aide's lawyer about a conversation Rove had with one of her colleagues about CIA officer Valerie Wilson.

The tip, offered over drinks at a Washington restaurant sometime during the first half of 2004, apparently led Rove to correct testimony he had given to a federal grand jury in the case, according to a first-person account by Time reporter Viveca Novak, posted Sunday on the magazine's Web site.

NY Senator Hillary Clinton's Rein Can't Be Challenged By A Weak Pirro


The bottom line in this Newsday article is the Senator's a certain choice for reelection and may just be the best Presidential candidate the Democrats have, even if she does not run.

Study: Whites automatically React More Negatively to Blacks Than to Whites. (The Cure? Diversity)

This article was from the November 2001 "Monitor on Psychology." The full article can be read with a click on the title of this post.

Social psychologist Russell Fazio, PhD, of Ohio State University, has been examining a related phenomenon he calls "automatically activated attitudes" toward those of different races. He was the first to develop a measure estimating whites' positive or negative associations to and evaluations of blacks, without having to directly ask them for this information.

The technique tests the extent to which briefly flashed pictures of black or white faces influence the speed at which participants identify the meaning of a positive or negative adjective. The research shows that many whites automatically react more negatively to blacks than to whites, even though they claim they don't consciously hold such views.

Understanding hate crimes

In research suggesting why some people may turn their ethnic discomfort into drastic action, psychologist Jack Glaser, PhD, of the University of California, Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy, Yale University political scientist Donald Green, PhD, and journalist Jay Dixit took the novel approach of joining in a white racist Internet chat room to discern attitudes there.

In a study in press in the Journal of Social Issues, the team "chatted" with white racists by describing fabricated threats to their white hegemony, ranging from immediate local threats to more abstract national ones. Included in the chats were scenarios of blacks competing with whites for jobs, moving into the neighborhood or marrying white women. (The team went to great lengths to protect respondents' confidentiality, Glaser notes.)

The closer blacks came to "invading" whites' cultural turf, the more violent the responses, the team found. Job competition didn't pose an enormous threat, for instance, but the possibility of a white-black marriage created major sparks.

"The more extreme responses seemed to be about a threat to their cultural integrity," Glaser notes.

This seems to imply that as American society becomes more economically diverse, and intermarriage rates continue to increase, hate crime rates by those anti-social whites may rise as well. I hope that this is discouraged by stronger law enforcement, education, and treatment of this behavior as a mental illness. The real remedy is greater diversity, so that people "get used to each other" as Star Trek's Doctor McCoy once said.

Study: Blacks Four Times More Likely to Be Hate Crime Victims in LA County When Compared to Their Representation of That County's Population

For the full report, click on the title of this post.

Edward Dunbar Ed.D.
University of California at Los Angeles
and Pacific Psychological Associates

Findings from an ongoing study of hate crime occurrence in Los Angeles County are presented for the years of 1994 and 1995. Content analyses of data from the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission included 1459 hate crimes cases; this encompassed events reported to both law enforcement and community-based organizations. The behavioral analyses of the crime events were considered in terms of victim impact, as was determined via impairment ratings provided by Victim-Witness Assistance staff (a Los Angeles County agency). Key findings are highlighted below.

Severity of Impact

Findings indicated that base rates of victimization varied significantly by race/ethnic groups; most notably African Americans were four times more likely to be the victims of hate crime activity when compared to their demographic representation in Los Angeles County.

When comparing hate crimes motivated by race/ethnic, and religion to sexual orientation, hate crimes against gay men and lesbians were more severe (as measured by the behavioral characteristics of the event, e.g., more perpetrators, more serious attack).

When examining the hate crimes based on race and ethnicity, African Americans were the targets of more severe hate events, (e.g., physical assaults).

The majority of hate crimes were committed in public locations. Those which occurred in the victim's neighborhood were typically more violent.

Law Enforcement Reportage:

The behavioral analysis of the hate crime revealed that more severe hate acts (e.g. aggravated assault, sexual assault) were predictive of the victim not reporting the crime to law enforcement agencies.
It was found that in sexual orientation hate crimes, that significant differences for both gender and membership in a visible race/ethnic minority group were related to lower law enforcement reportage rates.
County Victim Witness Assistance staff also reported that few if any hate crime victims utilize state-funded medical and mental health services subsequent to crime victimization.
Perpetrator Behavior and Characteristics:

Less than five percent of the hate crime perpetrators were identified as members of organized hate gangs or associations.