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[vovat]

I've had a few dreams over the week that I thought would be worth sharing with the group.

• I went with bethje to a convention at the same hotel as the one where Monster-Mania is held, and there were hardly any people there. Beth went to a nearby store to buy food, while I worked out on an elliptical and listened to The Spine (the They Might Be Giants album, for those of you who don't know).
  
• I was in Virginia, and I met up with my brother, who had taken a car down there. I decided I would drive back home, but when I started the car turned into a small bus, and I had trouble controlling it.
  
• I was in a house that was being robbed by some kids (who were, at least at one point, the bullies from The Simpsons), and I managed to drive them off by hitting them with a pillow.
  
• An amusement park where I was waiting in line for some ride turned into a grocery store, and then into a bookstore. Or maybe the place was just all three at once. I'm not totally sure.
  
• I was trying to investigate a secret society, and I brought Hillary Clinton along, because I thought she would be able to get into places that I wouldn't. I think it backfired, though, because while I was waiting for her in the car, I heard some guys talking about how they thought Hillary's being there meant the government knew about them, or something like that.
  

Getting back to waking life, a few nights ago, Beth and I watched Final Destination, which was pretty good, but seemed to contain some plot holes, or at least elements that they didn't explain very well. Some of the deaths of the people who got off the plane appeared to have elaborately worked out to make the main guy (I can't remember his name for sure, but I think it might have been Alex) look guilty. Now, I can see this happening when an actual serial killer is at work, but here it was apparently just death catching up to them. I have no problem with Death as a conscious entity. As a matter of fact, he's one of my favorite characters in the Discworld series. But the movie never really indicated whether they meant us to think of Death that way or not. Also, it seemed like any hunch that the characters had turned out to be true. Maybe more of this is explained in the other two movies in the series, but taken simply in its own context, it came off as a bit lazy and inconsistent in spots.

Last night, we saw This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which I quite liked. I expected to like it anyway, since I thought a film about the MPAA ratings was a good idea, and because what I'd heard about it made it sound like I would agree with it. But it also made some good points I didn't know it would cover, like how the system is largely anti-gay (they showed some very similar clips of gay and straight sex from various movies, and the gay ones always had received stricter ratings) and anti-female. They also touched on copyright issues, and there are some deleted scenes on the DVD where a guy from the Electronic Freedom Foundation has a lot more to say about those. I believe it was copyright issues that first brought Jack Valenti on to my radar, and the film gave me a lot of other reasons to dislike the guy. There were some interesting interviews with movie directors. It's always cool to hear from John Waters, and while I never got into South Park, Matt Stone had some good points to make. He tells a story in one of the outtakes about how the original intended title for the South Park movie was "All Hell Breaks Loose," but the ratings board objected to the use of the word "hell" in the title of an animated movie. Then they came up with "Bigger, Longer, and Uncut," and they got an okay on it, only to receive a letter two weeks later saying that the board had just gotten the joke in the new title. That about says it all, doesn't it? The parts where the private investigators tracked down the members of the ratings board kind of made me wonder how they could get away with so much (it's apparently legal in Los Angeles for a private detective to go through your garbage, as long as it's on the street), but I did like the confirmation that most of the board members didn't fit the description that the MPAA was trying to sell to the public. There's a lot of other stuff that I could say about the film, but I think I've gone on long enough for now. I think it's time for some quiz results!

You know the Bible 100%!

 

Wow! You are awesome! You are a true Biblical scholar, not just a hearer but a personal reader! The books, the characters, the events, the verses - you know it all! You are fantastic!

Ultimate Bible Quiz
Create MySpace Quizzes

And from unclemilo, here's a political quiz from 1994. I scored an 8, making me more liberal than my secret-society-investigating partner Hillary, but less so than Ted Kennedy.

Comments

[unclemilo.livejournal.com]

I saw "This Film has not been rated" and also enjoyed it very much as well, though it continued my angry views toward the corporate control of art...

Thank goodness for those PIs to expose this board...

[vovat.livejournal.com]

It's totally crazy to me how Fox News and the like can go on and on about how Hollywood is too liberal, when a monopolistic big-business organization like the MPAA controls so much of the film industry.

[unclemilo.livejournal.com]

Well, it's ridiculous that Republicans call Hollywood liberal, it's ridiculous that they call the media liberal... and it's funny that they call the Clintons liberal when they're actually more middle of the road...

but that's how they smear and mock and keep the real dangers hidden.

So long as you tell people Hollywood is liberal, you can keep people's minds off of the corporate stranglehold in Hollywood and over the entertainment industry.

So long as you tell people that media is liberal, you can then post anti-liberal views and make people think that THAT is the leftist view and drive them even further into the right-wing view...

tell people Clinton is liberal, and it will make true liberals look like Radicals and it will make freakishly evil Fascists look like men with a slight right-wing bias.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I remember, back when I was in college during the Clinton administration, hearing my classmates discuss how Clinton was almost more of a moderate Republican than a Democrat.

[obsessical.livejournal.com]

My brain was immediately drawn to the words "matt stone". But yes, the board was all "well why don't you change this and this" for the South Park movie, but when they made Orgazmo, they were like "you're NC-17", with no meetings or anything, and matt and trey were pretty pissed once they found out that when you have a big studio, you get super coddled.

I found this online somewhere. It (hopefully) is an honest-to-god memo that Matt Stone had to send to the MPAA for the movie's ratings and junk.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I've seen TV shows where they'd bleep out the "hole" from "asshole." You'd really think it would be the other way around, wouldn't you?

[rockinlibrarian.livejournal.com]

I dreamed about you the other day, but now I forget what it was about. Except we were at my old neighbors' house.

[rockinlibrarian.livejournal.com]

I think we were playing a really large board game. And you looked like you looked in college, not like your more recent pictures, but you figure a brain works like that anyway.

[kristenjarrod.livejournal.com]

Things like that this film is not yet rated film is reasons why the Trio channel needs to come back.

Even if they were showing the same 12 things over and over again near the end.

[vilajunkie.livejournal.com]

I have yet to see this movie (along with "Fast Food Nation") but now I really want to see it. Thakns for the mini-review.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. I haven't seen Fast Food Nation either, and I'm not sure whether I'd want to. I know I don't have any particular desire to see Supersize Me, but maybe FFN is better.