Chubby Checker Doesn't Want Your Chubbies Checked in his Name

In what has to be the day's most surreal headline so far, Guardian contributor Sean Michaels posts a brief story about Chubby Checker's lawsuit against Hewlett Packard for using his name for their new penis measuring app.

Apparently, it's all about the shoe size!

Here's the link:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/feb/14/chubby-checker-sues-hewlett-packard?intcmp=ILCMUSTXT9385

Exploitaion > History = Django Unchained

Tarantino chose to make Django Unchained into a blaxploitation film.

Because he likes exploitation films more than History.

Despite the fact that slavery is already the vilest form of exploitation.

Does he not feel that the slaves were exploited enough the first time round?

Tarantino's Works the Word Nigger Like a Slave

I'm tired of "Lame Rationalization Game" Tarantino has been playing in defense of his (ab)use of the word nigger in Django Unchained.

It begs the question:

What exactly is realistic about a movie whose plot pivots on the cartoon contrivance of a bounty-hunting dentist who rescues a slave in exchange for help in identifying the principles in a particularly lucrative bounty. And if that weren't implausible enough, the beneficient bounty hunter (His name is Dr. King Y'all!)  offers to further assist by offering to teach said slave the fine art of gun slinging and to rescue his wife from the clutches of a leering Mandingo fight loving slave owner.

In any realistic movie Django would have been the bounty. Runaway slaves practically sustained bounty hunting business in the day, almost as much as they did the field of advertising. (but that's another story)

It seems disingenuous in the extreme to assume that in a film as contrived as candy floss, the word nigger is taxed with the burden of sustaining the realism of the film. That's a lot of work for nigger to do.

You could almost say that tries Tarantino works the word nigger like a slave!

While that fact may not be literally true, it is certainly literarily true: The word nigger was uttered 110 times in Django Unchained.

Are we supposed to believe that the number 110 was the actual result of some rigorous formula devised by Tarantino for tallying the exact amount of times the word nigger could be uttered in a 2h45 minute movie so that it corresponds "realistically" to the amount of times a that slave would have heard the word in hs day, month, year lifetime? Or is he just playing a lame rationalization game knowing that no interviewer would have the sand to stand up to him, like the guy from Channel 4 did. (Would that Tarantino had the sand to stand up to a major American Interviewer in that manner...in the weeks leading up to the release of his film...when the controversy was in full rage?)

Whatever his reason for exploiting the word as vigorously as he does in his film, it certainly couldn't be because of a preoccupation with the "real". Otherwise he wouldn't have stopped there and realism would have pervaded his production.

No. His lame excuse is just a rationalization for abuse.

What's the point of the being a "provocateur" if you lack the courage to cop to your deeds.

Zero Dark Thirty

I can't fathom how the critics could fall over themselves with love for Zero Dark Thirty. Besides being cowardly is a really banal cia military police procedural film, the directing is dull as dish water.

The script feels constrained and restrained of dramatic juice, interest, detail, character, insight, and isn't abetted one bit by the the cold mausoleum compositions that she feels the need to parade on screen incessantly one after the other, like the outtakes of a much more interesting film. AS IF the paucity of dramatic material substance juice  conflict, LIFE at the films core could sustain such hollow cinematic treatment. Hollow hollow film I tell you -- which is  a real shame because Bigelow used to have a great eye and direct her films with vigour and passion.

But at the end of the day, wihtout having something interesting inciteful important INFORMATIVE to say about the war on terror ZD30 ain't nothing more than a warmed over rerun of Homeland.

And lest that sound like an overly unreasonable or exigent request, just depict the events how they fucking happened, allow the transparency to be your aesthetic, allow translucency to be your statement or condemnation of events.

I mean you preach respect, you preach realism, you happily mawkishly to accept awards form making something other than an base action film (ooooh shudder the thought)  fine, stick to the fucking facts. Why in the name of fairness and accuracy in reporting, would diverge from the facts at such a critical moment in the narrative, in such a conspicuous manner within the narrative structure, with something as provocative and as weighty in your narrative as torture.

That tells you all you need to know about her as a propagan...*cough*  i mean filmmaker.

And why are we harbouring her drippy lies when we know that boat don't float, and that she's just trying to market her leaky vessel as qualified conveyor of cogent facts.?

And why is she given a pass for flip-flopping on her priorities in making the film. One moment she's justifying the existence of her film by cowering behind the shield of realism, then when it suits  her she advocates for artistic license, cowering from the controversy that her artistic license provoked.


So blantantly,disingenuous...Fascinating that we just sop it up.

Cassano's Curious Crime

Cassano is an atavistic arsehole for saying what he said about gays in azzuri, but he is entitled to his opinion. And that (incidentally) is my opinion. See how that works? Everyone doesn't have to love everybody. You say can say stupid things if you want, but we have the right to criticize and vituperate in kind. We may even, at times, retaliate in ways that trespass the boundaries of those rights. And I say this as black male, who's withstood racist remarks from whites, and homophobic ones from blacks (despite my ardent heterosexuality).

As a society we do not have the right to dictate the content of the thoughts or beliefs that people espouse. Nor does a bigot have the right to harass any individual with their unsolicited opinion. However, answering a question honestly is not harassment.  Having said that we do have the right to ridicule, ostracize, banish in order to contain/curtail such virulent comments. And when racial abuse reaches levels deemed unacceptable to society, legislators can pass laws to ban certain offensive arrangements of syllables.

Fact: Being allowed to play football is a privilege not a right, but as a player, Cassano does have a right to free speech. Indeed it is not only his duty to express himself honestly, it is essential to future progress.

Consider this: how else are we to rehabilitate a bigot if they feel forced conceal their beliefs?

People are always cynical about post slur apologies but often the expression of such narrow thinking is demonstration of a certain lack of public awareness.  (He comes from a very insular society) And the backlash often acts as a sobering jolt to the system and makes them aware of the heinousness of their comments. And even if's pretending, its a start. You walk before you can run. You pretend before you become.


My point is that Cassano's right to express his opinion, when asked, is the first step in the process of his racial rehabilitation. A process, which could result in there being on less racists in the world. A preferable alternative to a scenario where we inhabit a perpetually edgy society populated with closet racists too paranoid to express their pernicious views.

Sensitivity to the various forms of unacceptable verbal abuse, is an essential trigger in the process of social enlightenment. But have we become overly sensitive (and i mean that in the counter-productive sense).  Process of progress is impeded when our sensibilities become too fragile for dialogue and discussion. An indication that a rethink of our tactics is in order.

The goal of mainstream racial tolerance will continue to elude us unless we are sane in our response to insane responses and maybe gradually the sanity would be contagious.

24fps Speed Limit

Critics always speak about our bias in favor of 24fps, as though it were just an arbitrary thing that we became accustomed to. Is it not possible that 24fps is the sweet spot that our visual cortex finds the most seductive. Is it not possible that flicker, dancing grain, motion blur, lower frame rate are candy to the eye? Is it not possible that 24 fps survived this long because of its inherent seductive qualities. Comparing film to video can be like comparing oil paint to gouache. Whatever it's virtues gouache doesn't have the same subtlety and seductive force of oil paint because it just isn't a supple a tool.

Django Unbrained!

DJANGO UNBRAINED!!!

I've seen the movie, and though I loved it, it is certainly not the film that a black filmmaker would have made, even one as obsessed with  the spaghetti western sub-genre trappings, as tarantino is.

The narrative power of the film is diluted by insistence of shoehorning a slave drama into the spaghetti western structure. It's not that the "low brow" sub-genre denigrates  the theme of slavery, it's just that the spaghetti western sub-genre  (in Tarantino's hands)  is too narrow a scrim to view a slave narrative through because it automatically (unnaturally?) limits the range of events that could potentially fit such a film.

As the lovingly recreated Sergio Corbucci and Sergio Leone inspired scenes unfurl on the screen in all their gleaming recycled freshness, we are in equal measure delighted by the director's aesthetic largesse, as we are deprived by the inherent stinginess of the director's approach. Our minds lag behind, detained by some throwaway detail on the periphery of a scene, or distracted by some interesting narrative event that raises issues that director didn't deem fit to explore beyond the need move the story forward, leaving the audience to weave our own speculative narrative parellel to the one on the screen. 

Indeed, the rigidness of the any container serves to define what resides within it as well as what resides without. And even as Django and Shultz traverse the arid sun scorched landscapes typical of spaghetti westerns,  we, as an audience, thirst for more detail on the texture of slave life -- the plantation politics, the mechanics of fleeing a plantation, and underground railroad, etc. In short, anecdotes and scenes that were more morally provocative in their depravity and brutality than just ones that lent themselves to a splashy presentation. In that sense the film just was not deep enough -- even for an exploitation film.

Apologists would say that there is no way that Tarantino could have fit more of these evocative details without compromising the flow of his film. A false claim that  brings us to the other problem of the film: it's bloated running time. 

Clocking in at an inflated 165 minutes this Spaghetti Western less pasta and more push-ups. Rambling dialogue scenes (which the director uses increasingly as a narrative crutch in lieu of narrative event) go on interminably and should have been truncated. There is nothing in this film, despite what amnesiacs in the critical community say, that is as good as Sam Jackson in Pulp Fiction, though all of the actors acquit themselves admirably. (Jamie Foxx's understated performance is film's best)

Adding further to the empty calories are the films extraneous endings. Would that the script were tighter and ended in the first shoot out at the plantation house. Indeed, one feels that the these scenes were tacked on not for narrative reasons, but to indulge Tarantino's need to serve more desert after the desert had already been served. Those precious minutes could have been used to depict Hildy's thirst for freedom, her courage craftiness in fleeing the plantation, and the tragedy of her eventual recapture. 

That may have robbed us of the narrative punch of the hotbox surprise, but it would also have added some honestly earned emotional weight the story. 

Given priority Tarantino places on the spaghetti western tropes over the narrative content, however, it is not surprising that subtlety is sacrificed for surprise in this instance.

That being said, if with Django Unchained Tarantino has served up a spicy but rather modest repast instead of the sumptuous holiday feast that we expected, it's probably because this spaghetti western could have used a little less red sauce and a lot more meat.