Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune (registration required), here is the Official 2004 Presidential Debate Drinking Game!

• Every time President Bush says the word "safer," take a drink. If he uses the word "democracy" in the same sentence, make it a double.
• For every John Kerry reference to the UN, have a drink.
• If Bush uses the phrase "compassionate conservative," you must chug your entire beverage.
• Take one drink for every three times Kerry points with his left hand.
• Any previously recorded Bushism, like "misunderestimate" or "subliminable," used by the president during the debate requires one drink.
• If Kerry exceeds the time limit for any response, take a drink.
• Back-to-back offenses require a double shot and a NoDoz.
• A reference by your candidate to any of the following requires one drink:
  1. Florida
  2. North Korea
  3. Axis of evil
  4. Saddam Hussein
  5. The American people
• And for an exciting twist on the game, anytime anybody mentions the word "Vietnam," everybody has to take a drink.

The author of the original piece, David Martin, hopes that "you'll reach the end of the debate experiencing a warm, pleasant buzz. But if you're really lucky, you'll pass out by 10 o'clock and won't have to listen to the closing statements. Cheers!"

Posted by Mark at 10:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Several news outlets (The Washington Post, for example) reported yesterday on a bill that "would prevent the Supreme Court from ruling on whether the words 'under God' should be stricken from the Pledge of Allegiance." Thankfully, the folks at the Associated Press don't feel it important enough to mention the bill number, so this information required some searching.

The bill in question is not H.R. 3893, the We the People Act, which I wrote about back in June. The bill is H.R. 2028, the Pledge Protection Act of 2003. It specifically refers to the Pledge of Allegiance and is about one sentence long:

No court established by Act of Congress shall have jurisdiction to hear or determine any claim that the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, as set forth in section 4 of title 4, violates the first article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

And the worst part is that Congress does have the power to tell the courts what they can and cannot rule on. Article III, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution says that the Supreme Court has appellate jurisdiction (the ability to hear appeals on cases from lower courts) "with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make." Also note that the federal court system is not established in the Constitution, even though the power to establish such a system is granted to Congress in Article I, Section 8. The federal court system was established by Congress back in 1789, and since it was established by Congress, it can be regulated by Congress.

This isn't the end for this bill. It goes now to the Senate, where it will hopefully be struck down. While Congress has the power to limit the ability of the courts to rule on particular matters, it is a power that should not be used lightly, as it is being used here. The House is attempting to advocate a particular agenda whose constitutionality is still in question. When the Supreme Court ruled on Newdow v. Elk Grove Unified School District, it by no means answered the questions presented. It wussed out and bought itself time before it would have to hear the issue again. Where is the democratic tradition of debate? The House would like to see it gone; it would rather stifle the debate altogether.

Posted by Mark at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

While I was watching Garden State, what was going through my mind was, "Man, Zach Braff looks a lot like Ray Romano. He could play young Ray Romano in the movie about his life!" Some people I know -- socialists, mostly -- disagreed. Well, take a look at this:

 

Isn't it eerie? Come on, tell me they don't look alike! It's like Zach Braff is Ray Romano's illegitimate son!

Posted by Mark at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Alex had a problem with my interpretation of zombie films as dystopian. She didn't think it worked. You be the judge.

We'll start by defining "utopia" and "dystopia," just for the uninitiated. A "utopia" is a perfect world where there are no problems of any kind. The word "dystopia" means exactly the opposite. It is a world where everything is as bad as it could possibly be. The most common examples of dystopias in literature are 1984, Brave New World, or Fahrenheit 451.

Dystopias are, more often than not, a form of social criticism. The author of dystopic fiction recognizes a social problem in his own time and hypothesizes what would happen if this problem grew and grew, taking it to its logical conclusion. Dystopic fiction is often over-the-top, featuring outrageous scenarios that we could never imagine happening (1984's scenario of worldwide brainwashing and near-total control of dissidents seems pretty unlikely). But this why dystopias are often classified as satire: in making sure that no one misses the criticism, the social problems and their end results are exaggerated.

The point of the dystopia, then, is to point out a problem. Something has gone wrong with society and a dystopia is the end result of that problem. Now take a look at zombies. What are zombies? First, they're definitely not alive, but they're not quite dead, either. They have no proper classification; they're an aberration, something unnatural. Second, zombies have no feelings and no thoughts. Only rarely do they ever have the power to speak. Zombies are no better than animals. They're driven onward by their desire for brains. In an interesting twist, even though they consume brains -- the seat of human consciousness and reason, the thing that makes humans better than animals -- they only get a basic, caloric value from the brains. They don't get any smarter and they don't gain the capacity to reason. This is why zombie societies would never become artistic centers: zombies have no ability to produce art.

Imagine if you were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, or John Locke. You worship human reason. Becoming a zombie -- human, but without that key ability to reason -- would be the worst thing in the world for you.

Now we get to the social criticism part. As I explained previously, old-school zombie films (of the George A. Romero variety, like the original Night of the Living Dead) are morality plays. There is no explanation for why people turn into zombies. It just happens that people do. Herein lies the social criticism: human beings have become base, immoral creatures. If left unchecked, humanity's lack of morality will degenerate from an intellectual baseness to a physical baseness in the form of being a zombie. Ostensibly, it is some higher being that has placed this curse on mankind, a punishment for their immoral thoughts and deeds. The only people who 1) are not zombiefied and 2) survive are a small band of ethical human beings. These old-school zombie films are allegories of the Biblical story of Lot (Genesis 19; God destroys Sodom and Gomorrah but allows Lot to leave, warning him not to look back. His wife looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt). Lot is allowed to leave by virtue of his ... well, virtue. His wife is, too. Nonetheless, she disobeys God's commandment not to look back and is punished. This happens in zombie films, also, when the people we thought were safe from zombies get attacked and turned into zombies themselves. Apparently they weren't as virtuous as we thought they were.

Contemporary zombie films (this means post-1980s) are not moral plays, but criticisms of science. Return of the Living Dead introduces us to a rational explanation for zombiefication: the military has developed a chemical that re-animates the dead. The first issue that gets raised here is "why do we need to re-animate the dead?" The short answer is "because we can." This idea of science for science's sake (that is, an experiment whose results could yield no conceivable benefit to mankind as a whole) goes all the way back to Shelley's Frankenstein (arguably the first novel dealing with zombies), Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The modern cinema has not only made all of those books into movies, but has added to the genre, most notably with Jurassic Park (recall Ian Malcolm's line, "Your scientists were so busy seeing whether or not they could, they never stopped to think if they should." Also, a good portion of Michael Crichton's work deals with science that turns against its creators). Our fear of "science" comes into play whenever science does something we view as unnatural -- like re-animating the dead, putting parts of animals together to get new animals, or genetically engineering once-extinct animals. In Return of the Living Dead, the fear is that science -- in the wrong hands and with "unnatural" intent -- could cause us to become not better humans, but worse humans. Again, the worst kind of human you could be is a zombie, a human without humanity.

28 Days Later is probably the seminal modern zombie film. All of the people whom we think "deserve" to die end up dead (all of those people at that compound, for example, are morally decrepit and it's only a matter of time before they get what's coming to them in the form of zombiefication) and all of the people whom we think "deserve" to live end up living. We don't like watching a movie or reading a book where morally upstanding characters meet the fate of the morally corrupt. The morally upstanding characters, we think, should survive because of their values. In 28 Days Later, they do. This film combines both the scientific dystopia (for the zombies are created by way of a virus of some sort -- there's science again, making some sort of mistake) and the moral one (the "good" characters survive, remaining human rather than turning into zombies).

Thus zombie films can be interpreted as social criticism, which allows us to classify them as dystopian. While Alex asserted that zombies can't exist in a society because they aren't rational, I would argue that zombies do live in a society, and their society is the remnants of the old human society they once lived in. It is a corrupt society, but a society nonetheless. There's anarchy for sure, but the zombies exist together all the same. The zombie genre is another attempt at social criticism, one that simultaneously taps into our fear of mortality and our fear of brutality, for the zombie is both a brute and (un)dead. He has neither a soul nor a capacity for reason, making him an outsider to both God and man. And that's really scary.

Posted by Mark at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

For the record, I didn't want to go see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. My standard response to this film has become, "If I want to see a bluescreen, I'll watch the Weather Channel." Sky Captain's gimmick is that the whole film was shot in front of a blue screen, so the elaborate sets and landscapes that you see in the film are entirely computer-generated. Sure, the landscapes are spectacular, but is this really ground-breaking? The last two Star Wars films were practically shot entirely in front of greenscreens. Sky Captain is nothing new and interesting.

And the plot? Well, what there is of it is pretty standard for a 1930s-era adventure film: kidnapped scientists, doomsday device, saving the world. Jude Law is Joe "Sky Captain" Sullivan, the leader of some sort of elite British air force. Gwyneth Paltrow is Polly Perkins, spunky reporter for the New York Chronicle. She and Sky Captain had a thing in the past, and now the sexual tension is reaching new and amazing heights. Meanwhile, giant robots are stealing natural resources from all over the world. It's up to Polly and Sky Captain (with the help of some forgettable sidekicks) to find out what evil genius is behind all this.

Turns out the evil genius is ... Sir Lawrence Olivier! Yes, the man who made Hamlet famous on the big screen, the man who is acknowledged along with Richard Burbage as one of history's greatest Shakespearean actors, is the evil Dr. Totenkopf (what a great joke; translated from German, "totenkopf" means "dead head"). As we later find out, though, Totenkopf is just as dead as the guy that plays him. He died twenty years ago and his robots, running automatically, are still working to carry out his insane dream of capturing two of every animal and loading them into a giant rocket-ship that will start a new world (a "world of tomorrow") on some other planet.

Of course, good wins, Jude Law gets the girl, and the movie ends. But which movie? Sky Captain borrows elements of several films: Batman, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Jurassic Park, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Wizard of Oz, and The Empire Strikes Back. The writing is par for the course, but it seems as though the screenwriter (newcomer Kerry Conran, who also directed), faced with the challenge of writing a movie with a gimmick first and a plot second, cobbled together parts of other action films to get this one.

Where was Angelina Jolie during all this? She gets top billing along with Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow, but she's in the film for about ten minutes. It reminds me of a story told about Psycho: back in the old days, you could walk into a movie at any time, but Alfred Hitchcock wouldn't let people walk into Psycho after it had started because the film was billed as having Janet Leigh, but she gets offed in the first half. He didn't want people to walk in during the second half and be upset at not seeing Janet Leigh. The same thing goes here: I was upset at only seeing Angelina Jolie for ten minutes. And she was wearing an eyepatch! Yaarrgh!

In the end, I was correct. This movie blew super monkey chunks. The gimmick wore off after a little while (if it was ever dazzling in the first place) and this became another run-of-the-mill action film. Not even Art Deco or three Oscar winners could save it. Not even the disembodied head of Lawrence Olivier could save it. I bet even Sky Captain couldn't save this movie. This, like The Phantom, is one to watch on TNT on a lonely afternoon.

Posted by Mark at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The story that's been developing between John Gilmore and John Ashcroft ("the Johns") grows ever better. Even though it's proved biased in the past, PapersPlease.org presents the facts of the case:

On July 4, 2002, John Gilmore went to Oakland International Airport. He had a ticket in his own name with Southwest Airlines to Baltimore-Washington International Airport. The purpose of his trip was to petition the government for redress of grievances -- specifically, the requirement for airline travelers to provide identification.

John politely refused to show his ID and was not allowed to fly.

John then went to San Francisco International Airport and attempted to fly to Washington, DC on United Airlines. There he was informed that if he was not willing to show ID he could fly, but only if he submitted to a far more intrusive search than what every passenger goes through at the security checkpoint.

He politely declined the search and again was not allowed to fly.

[. . .]

At San Francisco's airport, just like the rest of the country's airports, there was a sign that began "A Notice From the Federal Aviation Administration" and includes the sentence "passengers must present identification upon initial check-in.

John worked his way up the bureaucratic chain and was eventually told by United Airlines that there were security directives that mandated the showing of ID, but that he couldn't see them. These secret directives, issued by the Transportation Security Administration, are revised as often as weekly, and are transmitted orally rather than in writing. To make things even more confusing, these orally transmitted secret rules change depending on the airport.

Gilmore is quite the libertarian and, in fact, filed an amicus brief in the Hiibel case.

PapersPlease has this mostly right. Apparently there are "secret directives" and Gilmore argues that if the public has no ability to see them, how could the public possibly be informed of the law? BoingBoing reports today that DOJ tried to file a "secret brief" in the case, meaning that no one but the judges would be allowed to see it. As expected, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals laid the smack-down on DOJ, denying its motion to make its brief secret.

If this thing goes to the Supreme Court, my money is definitely on Gilmore.

Posted by Mark at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

For yet another entry in the "Mark and Alex go to the movies" file, we turn to Resident Evil: Apocalypse. The sequel to 2002's Resident Evil doesn't disappoint, especially since it stars Severe Hottie Milla Jovovich. Following a growing trend, the film was based on the game by Capcom in which you more or less have to kill zombies. In the movie, Milla and her friends kill a lot of zombies. This movie, though, has a plot. And here it goes (with spoilers!).

Raccoon City is home to an underground research facility for the ubiquitously-named Umbrella Corporation. The corporation has released some zombie virus into Raccoon City in order to see how well it works, but first it rescues some of its top scientists. One of the scientists has a daughter whose whereabouts are unknown, and he refuses to go to a secret hiding place until she is found. He finds a way to contact Milla and some renegade security personnel (they're renegade in that they've switched from the side of evil to the side of good) and tells them he can evacuate them if they find his daughter. Meanwhile, Umbrella is test-launching its newest creation, Nemesis, to fight Milla, who turns out to be another one of its genetically-engineered projects. Nemesis is big and ugly and has more teeth than head. But the whole thing explodes in the face of the evil, German-accented director of the Umbrella corporation when Milla realizes that Nemesis is her buddy from the last movie, whom we last saw mutating into ... well, into something. And in the end, good triumphs over evil.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse carries on a recent trend of scientifically explaining the existence of zombies. Years ago, Return of the Living Dead introduced us to a scientific explanation for people becoming undead: the military created some sort of chemical that reanimates dead tissue and turns living tissue into undead tissue. In 28 Days Later, a virus of some sort caused people to become zombies. Now, in both Resident Evil films, the trend continues. The "classic" George A. Romero zombie films -- Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead -- never explain why exactly people suddenly turn into zombies. It just sort of happens. These original films were moral plays: something outside our power turned human beings evil (the most likely proxy for "something outside our power" is God; imagine if, instead of burning down Sodom and Gomorrah, God turned everyone there into zombies). In the more modern zombie films, we have done this to ourselves. This trend takes its cue from dystopian literature, wherein, more often than not, something man tries to do to make life better ends up making life worse. Contemporary zombie films show a deep mistrust of science instead of making statements about the consequences of our lack of ethics. The suggestion that, instead of helping us, science will actually hurt us.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse also continues the popular mistrust of the corporation. The name "Umbrella Corporation" suggests that this company, like an umbrella, closes over and controls all things. The same fear of the totalitarian corporation-state is manifested in Robocop, Alien, and Blade Runner (and to a more satiric degree, the WeSaySo corporation from the TV show Dinosaurs). Corporations will go to any length to make money and, more importantly, gain power. The government is powerless to stop these corporations, since they are at their mercy, and the corporations have little care for human life unless it affects their bottom line (although, in Blade Runner, the corporation has little care for android life, but recall that these androids are so lifelike as to be indistinguishable from humans, so there is no functional difference). These films, though, never imply a trust of the government, for the government is usually also subordinated to the corporation. There is a fear of large, nameless, faceless entities which have the ability to control the lives of human beings. No one likes to think that his life is under the control of someone or something else, and in these films, we often see some sort of "renegade" taking control of the situation, releasing himself from the agency of this corporation and taking his life back into his own hands.

This film is quite worth its money, and there will definitely be another sequel, if the end is any indication. If you like lots of shooting and lots of zombies, then this is a great film. Or, there's always Milla Jovovich. I had hot women in front of me and next to me. What a great night at the movies!

Posted by Mark at 1:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This just gets stranger and stranger. As Ned has pointed out, and other news outlets, as well, the allegedly forged documents provided to 60 Minutes were provided by Kerry supporters. If, in fact, Kerry supporters are responsisble for these forgeries, then 1) they're not very good at it, and 2) I owe President Bush an apology.

The dynamics of this election get more and more fascinating. The kind of candidate support that we're seeing has never been seen before, possibly due to the McCain-Feingold bill which has given PACs like MoveOn.org more power than they would have had in previous elections. Why? Because candidates cannot air advertisements within sixty days of an election. Individual people, however, may do whatever they like. What we're seeing now is candidates' supporters making statements and arguments without the candidates even present! When MoveOn.org or Swiftboat Veterans for Truth makes a statement, it is not Bush or Kerry speaking, but Bush or Kerry supporters usurping the candidates' voices. This election gets more and more interesting.

As an aside, a month ago, I listened as Rush Limbaugh insinuated (but as he is so good at doing, never explicitly stated) that George Soros, the major financier of MoveOn.org, might be in violation of campaign finance laws since he isn't an American. (Rush then proceeded to complain about why no one was taking issue with Soros and relating this to the Buddhist monk scandal of Gore 2000.) In fact, Soros became an American citizen in 1964, and as far as I know, even naturalized citizens are entitled to the same rights as natural-born citizens.

Posted by Mark at 12:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I wasn't even looking for this one. Going to Fark as I usually do, I happened upon a news story at Little Green Footballs that is really interesting.

The story cites a post at Free Republic which suggests that some National Guard records supplied by the Bush Administration are forgeries. As the post notes, the Bush records' age is questionable, since "every single one of these memos to file is in a proportionally spaced font, probably Palatino or Times New Roman. In 1972 people used typewriters for this sort of thing, and typewriters used monospaced fonts." For an excellent look at this, see the Aug. 18, 1973 memo, which contains a proportionally spaced font, "smart quotes," and a superscript "th." Only modern word-processing software is capable of producing superscripts like that and smart quotes (quotes which curl in a particular direction, depending on whether or not they're before or after a word, instead of being just straight lines). The post notes:

The use of proportionally spaced fonts did not come into common use for office memos until the introduction of laser printers, word processing software, and personal computers. They were not widespread until the mid to late 90's. Before then, you needed typesetting equipment, and that wasn't used for personal memos to file. Even the Wang systems that were dominant in the mid 80's used monospaced fonts.

It looks like someone used Microsoft Word to type these documents, then ran them through a copy machine several times to make them look old. But what the forger forgot to do was turn off such AutoFormat options as superscripts and smart quotes! This evidence is damning and cannot be ignored. Look at other, verified Bush records: all in a monospace font (they're available online, I don't have links to them at the moment).

Does this definitively spell out f-a-k-e? Perhaps not, but it does, as one commenter at Little Green Footballs noted, it raises the BS Detector.

Posted by Mark at 11:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Hoo, boy! I saw one movie per night over Labor Day weekend. That's three movies. Holy cow! It was totally sweet. All of the reviews below contain spoilers, so if you haven't seen these films, don't read the stuff!

Let's begin with Hero, the film that was presented by Quentin Tarantino, but not directed by him. In fact, the film came out in China in 2002 and won several awards, but no major American film distributor had picked it up until Miramax came along.

The film takes place thousands of years ago in China at the beginning of the dynasty that first unified China (I'm not a Chinese historian, here. Give me a movie about 17th-century England and then we'll talk.) This emperor, nicknamed "The Tiger of Qin," went through a series of bloody wars to unify the Chinese provinces and create a whole nation. The story is told mostly in a series of flashbacks as a character known only as Nameless appears before the emperor multiple times to describe how he assassinated three of the king's biggest enemies. The king realizes that these "assassinations" were just a ruse to get Nameless close enough to the king to kill him with his patented, deadly move. If ever a film could be described as "beautiful," this is it. Hero has tons of color. Sometimes entire sequences are rather monochromatic, but it works out well, especially during the sequence in which Flying Snow fights her servant, Moon. They fight in an orchard filled with gold-leaved trees that soon turn to blood red. Spectacular. Also, the first shot of Flying Snow and Broken Sword's private, lakeside hideaway is breath-taking. A lake lies in the middle of a small, lush valley with mountains on either side and the sky reflected almost perfectly in the water.

Hero deals with the difficult topic of war. When is going to war right? When is it wrong? Nameless understands that killing the king would put a short-term end to the suffering of the people that the king is killing, but ultimately, China will be worse off for not being unified. If you wanted to sum this movie up in a pithy phrase, it would be, "You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs." Sometimes, people must be sacrificed for a larger cause. Flying Snow only realizes this after she inadvertantly kills her husband, Broken Sword. If this were a Greek tragedy, she would be the tragic hero, who requires death or destruction to solve her tragic flaw. Hero also takes a Zen approach, as the emperor realizes that the progression of the pictogram of the man and the sword is toward the sword and man becoming one and the sword disappearing (cf. The Ten Ox-Herding Pictures, which describe the path to enlightenment). The irony is that sometimes peace can only be acheived through war. The ox can only disappear once it has been found and tamed.

The next night, I saw Garden State. I had heard a little about this one already, particularly that Natalie Portman was in it. She's a severe hottie, so I went to see it. The first thing that impressed me was that the guy from Scrubs, Zach Braff, wrote, directed, and starred in the movie. Whoa! This guy has severe talent. Is that even an adjective?

Garden State follows Andrew Largeman for a few days as he returns home to New Jersey for his mother's funeral. He has demons back home that he has to face. Natalie Portman will help him; she has demons, too. Peter Sarsgaard will also help. He works as a grave-digger. Don't discount the importance of the grave-digger: he has access to both the world of the living and the world of the dead. At the end of the film, he returns to Andrew his mother's favorite necklace -- that she was bured with -- which he thought Andrew would want to keep.

Andrew has to come to terms with his father, who feels Andrew was responsible for parylizing his mother. Andrew has been on medication for years, and that has left him numb to most things. As he comes home, for the first time, he feels things. Even though some of those things may be sadness, he must be free to feel them, as he tells his father. Fear of the unknown is normal, but ambivalence toward it is not. In order to exist, people need to feel something.

The end is kind of strange. Andrew tells his new girlfriend Natalie Portman that he has to go back to California to sort out things on his own. He's on the plane and he thinks about things for a minute, then comes back and says that he wants her to be there with him. The ending is happy like we want it to be -- the two lovers end up together -- but where is the resolution? How are we to learn something from this film? The ending is dulce, but not necessarily util. Aristotle might give it a thumb down, for it doesn't tell us how we can live more virtuously or even how the protagonist solves his conflict. It's a kind of "oh well, we'll see what happens" ending. But it's pretty -- I mean, sweet -- nonetheless (I've been asked to stop using the words "pretty" and "nice" because they're so vague as to be meaningless. I agree).

The next night I went to see Wicker Park. Now, normally I wouldn't pay money to see a Josh Hartnett film, but I went because I'll try anything once (although there are a few exceptions to that rule). And you know what? It wasn't that bad at all! The film is a prototypical Shakespearean comedy whose conflict is predicated upon lies and miscommunication. It's a comedy only because everyone is still alive at the end and the main characters get together.

Josh Hartnett is a junior executive of some sort who's about to be engaged to a woman that he only cares for a little bit. Until he thinks he sees the love of his life (Lisa), who walked out on him two years ago. The relationships are complex, as he ends up hooking up with Lisa's friend, Alex. Alex is the fulcrum of this story. Two years ago, she was jealous of Lisa's relationship with Josh Hartnett because she liked him, too. She actively failed to give him a crucial message, thus making him think that she had dumped him. Now that Lisa is back in town, Alex is going to great length to prevent the two of them from getting back together, even going to the extent of dating Josh Hartnett's best friend, Matthew Lillard, just so she can keep tabs on him. Of course, in the end, Josh Hartnett and Lisa get together and they live happily ever after.

There's a lot of tension toward the end, though. I found myself literally on the edge of my seat, hoping beyond hope that Josh Hartnett found Lisa and that Alex got what she deserved. After the movie, I told the friend with whom I saw this movie that Josh Hartnett should have punched Alex in the face for all the pain she caused to Josh, Matthew Lillard, and Lisa. She replied that Alex's final confession of what she had done was punishment enough. And she's right: Alex has lost everything. She lost Lisa, she lost Josh Hartnett, and she lost Matthew Lillard. All over a little jealousy. Her whole life has been destroyed. That really is punishment enough.

A Shakespearean comedy will often be about the great lengths people go to get love. This film is no exception: Alex goes to great lengths to get love, but it's never real love. Alex is an actress by profession, which is very significant. As an actress, she must assume different personalities all the time. Even when she's not at work, we still see that she's putting on airs. Alex's major problem is that she has no real personality and doesn't know what she wants. Without a part to play, she's not a real person (cf. Kurt Vonnegut's short story, "Who Am I This Time?"). She establishes a love of Josh Hartnett as her reason for being, but this love is false and is predicated upon keeping him from true love. And if there's one thing that Shakespeare hates, it's keeping people from true love. That's a moral crime, and the people who commit crimes against morality get the worst punishment.

So that was Labor Day weekend: three days, three movies, three different messages. Some people think that art isn't supposed to be didactic. I'm not one of those people. When I come out of a good movie, I want to have learned something that I can apply to my own life. This is different, of course, from watching Wild Wild West, Congo, or Judge Dredd, which exist for pure entertainment. The message of Congo, though, was pretty clear: Joe Don Baker is a fabulous actor! Give him a lifetime acheivement award for his work in Mitchell!

Posted by Mark at 11:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)