Just watched the movie Super 8 and I have to say I am a bit underwhelmed. It starts out fine with a nice retro nostalgia set in a small American town in 1979. A bunch of kids are making a movie and manage to persuade the pretty and cool girl Alice (Elle Fanning) to be in it. Then they become witnesses to a strange train accidents with mysterious and dangerous consequences. All set for an interesting movie.

Unfortunately it’s all down hill from there. The fundamental error lies in the conflicts. A good story is all about introducing and resolving conflicts in an interesting way. And there are a lot of conflicts – between the protagonist Joe’s (Joel Courtney) and his dad, between  Alice and her dad, between the dads and between Joe and his rival Charles (Riley Griffiths). But how are these conflicts resolved? By introducing a monster and a lot of special effects and then just pretend that this bigger external threat resolves everything. In other words: the conflicts are not resolved at all. Or, in one case, it’s on a “I’m sorry”, “Ok then”-form.

So the lack of story is a problem but the characters are also vague and uninteresting. The only original feature in them is that there are three male characters  who are all depicted as flawed in some way – one is a depressed alcoholic, one pothead and the third is constantly blowing stuff up or starting fires – and they all have long blond hair. Seriously, what is up with that?

The only reason I will remember this film a year from now (besides the blond-men-are-inferior theme) is Elle Fanning who shows great acting skills. I will definitely look out for more stuff from her, but hardly from director JJ Abrams, producer Steven Spielberg or any other of the actors.

 IMDB rates it 7.4 which is crazy. I would put it at 5.5, and only because of Fanning.

Turns out popular high-school musical TV show Glee isn’t so popular anymore. According to USA Today  ratings have fallen drastically ever since the Super Bowl episode.

Admittedly I was never a big fan, I mainly watched it because of the addictive voice of Lea Michele. The rest of the show was also mildly amusing for a while with some good actors, funny characters and a high tempo.

But eventually I think this show was killed by the gay agenda. It was just Kurt, Kurt, Kurt. Not that I mind gay characters, there is almost one in every TV show these days. What I do mind is too much of something that wasn’t that interesting to begin with. And hardly any scenes were about Mercedes being black, Rachel being Jewish or Santana being both Hispanic – and gay. Instead it was super important to tell the viewers every problem associated with being a gay male – in every single episode.

According to the article above the ratings have fallen because the show “relied too heavily on guest stars, outlandish plots and inconsistencies among characters”.  But if you look at the comments to this article and on other sites, it is clear that many feel like me in this – Kurt killed Glee. 

Won two Oscars but doesn't know about Google or Wikipedia?

On October 5 two-time Oscar winning actress Hilary Swank and a handful of other celebs attended Chechen warlord/president Ramzan Kadyrov’s 35^th birthday party. At the party Swank praised Kadyrov, and his “passion to make peace and to make something beautiful”.

According to human rights organizations  Kadyrov’s passion takes less than peaceful forms. His regime kidnaps, kills, tortures and rapes civilians on a regular basis. According to The St. Petersburg Times (not to be confused with the newspaper in Florida with the same name, both are in english) Kadyrov also approves of honor killings, commenting on one instance where seven young women had been shot in the head and dumped by the roadside that they deserved it because of their “loose morals”.

When confronted with this Swank says,

I deeply regret attending this event. If I had a full understanding of what this event was apparently intended to be, I would never have gone.

Honestly? I don’t buy it. She gets who knows how much money for attending a president’s party and she doesn’t even google him or look him up on Wikipedia? That would have taken about 20 seconds of her time. And even in this ignorant bliss she praises him for his passion for peace. So she did have some source of information about him. It just doesn’t add up.

Romania - a bit low tech but hardly dangerous

I think most of us think of Eastern Europe as a dangerous part of the world where the common man is at the mercy of gangsters and corrupt politicians. And corruption is no doubt a problem, but how dangerous is it? It’s a very mixed picture. The murder rate in countries like Estonia is 7 per 100 000 inhabitants. But in Bulgaria and Romania it is 2.3 per 100 000 inhabitants. That is not very alarming. Slovenia, depicted as hell on earth in the Hostel movies, has a mere 0.55. These figures compare very favorably with other countries that many believe are much, or at least somewhat, safer, such as Finland 2.5, United States 5.0 or super rich Liechtenstein 2.8.

Eastern Europe may look depressing but it is largely a relatively safe place. I came to think of this when I watched this clip from LiveLeak. The Romanian woman is almost run over by a truck and is clearly in shock. Look at how many people come up to her offering her help. I wonder if that would be the case in London or Paris.

Maybe I shouldn't like this show as much as I do.

You can have a 50’s, 60s, 70’s or 80’s theme for you party, but after that? It’s a scary fact that we live in a time which no longer seems to have any distinctive cultural features. Why is that?

Simon Reynolds, who has written the book Retromania is interwied about this in an article in Salon. Although he too seem unsure of the reason for this phenomenon, he claims it has something to do with the rise of the Internet,

“One of the ways these sort of viable epochal self-images are generated is through a centralized media that can be burst into from an underground scene, and then the underground scene becomes the overground. That’s the old-print-media and finite-number-of-TV-channels model. Now there is such a profusion of narrowcast media and spaces and forums so there isn’t an overground to take over in the way there was with grunge, for example.”

“The nature of digital culture seems to be centrifugal. Before, media was centripetal, pulling people toward a central hub or consensus, but digital culture seems to be about making people disagree with each other and disperse from each other.”

This is very interesting. The idea that the creation of a cultural phenomenon needs some sort of consensus among not only its creators but also distributors. If there is a centralized media, then we have a little group of distributors who can put the spotlight on something new. But with the Internet we have so many producers and distributors which disables any kind of consensus. We then end up with very little in terms of distinctive cultural features, namely those that the global community of consumers agree on – funny pets, cage fighting, celebrity gossip and porn.

Although this seems a likely explanation there is also the question of whether there actually is a new Grunge out there being silenced by and endless stream of trivial nonsense. I doubt it. Given the very fact that people are so crazy about the culture of the past, it seems unlikely that they’d reject a completely new and unheard musical genre for instance? They would be all over it.

So why the Retromania? I think Reynolds has the first half right – consensus. But it’s not about distributors, it’s about producers. This consensus must come from some form of isolation from the rest of the world. Blues was black music from the American South, Punk was British working class and Grunge (the last genre?) was American Pacific Northwest. Ethnic, social and geographical boundaries used to isolate different groups from each other much more than today. And when a group is isolated they start picking up on things that others do and some of it becomes part of their culture. Most obvious example is dialects, that are now rapidly vanishing because of lack of isolation.

Where does this lead us? Forever clinging to the past because the Internet, and globalization in general, has destroyed our basis of cultural innovation? Or will we reach some point at which our innate desire to live in groups distinct from other groups will create some new forms of isolation? Who can tell? But this much I know, all the internationalists,  multiculturalists and techies who insisted that the Global Village was going to be a blast sure have some splaining to do.

Sure, fancy sprouters like GoGreen and EasyGreen will cost 200-300 dollars but there are much cheaper alternatives. You could sprout in a jar with a permeable lid but there is always water at the bottom of it causing some sprouts to rot. The perfect choise if you want to keep it cheap and easy is the bag. There is a hemp bag on the market, costs around 10-20 dollars but that’s a bit pricy for a piece of hemp and it keeps the sprouts in the dark when some need light towards the end of the sprouting.

I think the best solution is this simple bag for making almond milk, seen in the picture above . It has perfect drainage and lets the light in. Just hang it on a hook above the sink and rinse under the tap a few times a day (how many depends on what kind of sprout). Most sprouts will not be ruined if they dry up during the day, just rinse and they will start again. If initial darkness is required you simply put a plastic bag around it. An almond milk bag can cost as little as 2-3 dollars on eBay. They are very easy to clean, just handwash it for about 20 seconds.

Mungbean sprouts, the yummiest I've found so far.

What to sprout? My favorite is mungbean, mainly because it tastes great. You can eat them within 48 hours, or leave them up to a 5-6 days in which case they will swell up to about 8 times the size and get a richer less sweet taste. Another good choice is broccoli. It tastes a bit like radish and is thought to have numerous health benefits. If you know any other good stuff to sprout please let me know about it.

Unless you are a movie buff chances are you’ve seen Casablanca, Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon, but not Mildred Pierce. It’s about a woman (guess her name) who divorces her husband struggles to make a career as a single mom while also finding a new man while handling a daughter with what we today call an anti-social personality. It all ends with a murder, although technically the film starts there and then tells the story leading up to it.

Joan Crawford, who does the leading role, was awarded an Oscar and rightfully so. The role fits her great and she does the best performance in her entire career. But all actors are varying between good and great. Ann Blythe as Mildred daughter Veda is almost on par with Crawford which is saying a lot.  Eve Arden, for instance, makes a great job of her comical side character Mildred’s best friend Ida – funny but still serious enough to become an integral part of the story rather than an amusing distraction.

Then there are the people behind the camera. Michael Curtiz, most known as the director of Casablanca and cinematographer Ernest Haller who really knows how to tell a story in pictures as he proved a few years earlier in Gone with the Wind. Backing his imagery is Max Steiner’s powerful and romantic music. The result is a  beautiful, suspenseful and romantic film with the noir of the 1940s, meaning examining evil in a close up and personal way (rather than the cynical trench coat private eye that became popular later).

In my view Mildred Pierce is at least as good as Casablanca, not quite as good as Citizen Kane and clearly better than The Maltese Falcon. It’s a mystery that it is not considered as equal to these. Although I think in time it will.

Not that I have any scientific evidence, but there are some interesting connections here. One is that Atheists are usually scientifically interested and geeky. Like people with OCD this kind of person is usually neat and orderly. Also, many psychologists have pointed out that OCD is similar to religious fundamentalism. And how would that make sense? Here is how: I’m thinking along Jung’s theory of the Unconscious. He claimed (this being the short version) that all of us share universal human nature but  in a single person some parts are conscious and therefore well developed whereas other parts can be in the Unconscious and be embryonic and primitive.

But even if a part of us is in the Unconscious it still emerges at times. The feminine side in a man, the introverted side in an extravert etc. But it being in a undeveloped state it manifests itself in an inferior form. The man becomes silly or overdramatic, the extravert becomes overly ruminating and so on.

Now religion is according to Jung one such human universal, it exists in every known culture throughout history. So what happens if a person would have his religion in the Unconscious? What inferior forms would it manifest itself in? I’d say OCD is a pretty good candidate. It’s like religion without any thought, intuition or sentiment. Just empty, obsessive rituals to appease the non-existent gods.

Like I said, I don’t have any statistics on how often this atheism and OCD coincide but there are a striking amount of commentators at Blag Hag who also claim to have it, and almost all who read her blog agrees with what she says so it seems her readers are mainly atheists. Browsing the web I also noticed that the über-sci himself, Charles Darwin seems to have had OCD, as did a few other prominent atheists like Howard Hughes, Katherine Hepburn and Woody Allen. That may sound like very few but that’s because it is very hard to find any prominent atheists at all. But that’s a different story.

Hm, did I lock the door? Better check again.

I wonder if scientists will investigate this theory or if they are uncomfortable with the risk of exposing that behind their proud rational stance of atheism lies a primitive embryonic form of religion. I mean, that’s gotta hurt.

Living it up.

Why is there such media frenzy regarding the Casey Anthony trial? Ana Veciana Suarez of the Miami Herald admits with a bit of shame that she like so many others is morbidly curious about this ongoing murder trial. Suarez explanation is that there is a multitude of juicy details that come together in this story – the particular cruelty of a mother killing her baby, Anthony’s good looks in combination with her callous demeanor, the fact that her family is white middle class and on the surface looks so normal, etc.

This is all true, but more than that I think the curiosity comes from the fact that Casey Anthony reflects the kind of society we live in today. The Western culture has become more and more about instant gratification and less and less about duty. The mother who killed her child so that she could party every night is a scary reflection of that culture. We all battle with these dilemmas on a smaller scale, but society in the form of vendors, advertisers etc  are getting better and better at convincing us to give in to temptation, to disregard everything else, including our loved ones. Ultimately, to become Casey Anthony.

Private detective Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) thought he could leave his troubled former life and start over as a gas station owner in a small town. He meets local girl Ann Miller (Virginia Huston) and starts dreaming of a peaceful quite life. But it all catches up with him and he has to face his demons, in the form of the gangster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) who once hired him, and Kathie Moffath (Jane Greer), Sterlings girlfriend.

This movie counts as one of the best in film noir and rightfully so. It has the romance, suspense and gritty realism typical of the genre and is very efficiently written and directed. Not a dull moment from start to finish. Actors are also good, especially Greer. Her looks and her voice make her a perfect Femme Fatale. This was the high point in her career as it was for Virginia Huston who although having a smaller part than Greer is actually even better than her. Mitchum and Douglas are both good but never really shine, which is the only slight disappointment.

Out of the Past is ranked 8.1 on IMDB which seems accurate. It’s really good but not excellent.