Half Sigma

Friends with Money

I watched the movie Friends with Money based on Ilkka Kokkarinen’s recommendation.

The movie stars Jennifer Aniston as Olivia, a woman who quit her job as a schoolteacher at a private school and who now works as a maid. She has three female friends, all of whom have at least upper middle class wealth. Thus the title of the movie. Olivia is also the only one of the friends who is unmarried.

This is a “slice of life” type of movie. One of the topics concerns how money interferes with Olivia’s relationships with her wealthier friends. There is one scene where Olivia’s wealthiest friend, Franny (played by Joan Cusack), chides Olivia for not working hard enough to make something of herself. This makes Olivia justifiably angry because Franny not only doesn’t work, she also has full time domestic help.

My own observation is that it’s pretty normal for women who can afford it to have full time domestic help, even though they don’t work. I personally know people in that situation.

There is also a thousand dollar a plate charity dinner at which Franny has bought a table for her friends. Olivia says, with a certain amount of justified anger, why don’t people just give money to the charity instead of wasting money on expensive dinners and expensive clothes to wear to the dinner. Her wealthier friends just don’t get her point of view. (Charity is a topic I’ve written about before.)

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How realistic is it for a pretty white woman like Jennifer Aniston to be working as maid? Not very realistic at all. Sure there are white women who don’t have good jobs, but they don’t work as maids. Waitress would be a much more likely job. Working at a call center or in some kind of back office operation involving data entry and endless rows of cubicles would also be a likely job if she wasn’t qualified to be a waitress. (Who isn’t qualified to be a waitress? Fat ugly women, because you never see such women working as waitresses except at Denny’s.)

Furthermore, how likely is it that a woman as cute as Jennifer Aniston would be unable to find a boyfriend, assuming she really wanted to find one? This is also not so likely.

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I thought the funniest theme of the movie was not the plight of Jennifer Aniston’s character, but rather her friend Jane’s (Frances McDermond) husband Aaron (Simon McBurney) who people think is gay because he has typical gay interests such as clothes and gourmet food.

Although I was amused, it also made me aware of another double standard of human sexuality. The women, when together, discuss the topic of whether Aaron might be gay, and this is apparently acceptable behavior. But if men accused a woman of being a lesbian because she had typically male interests, this would be considered in poor taste. Thus you never see respectable male characters in television shows or movies accusing women of being lesbians.

This also demonstrates how men’s behavior is much more strictly constrained by societal norms than women’s behavior. A woman can choose to work or choose to stay at home and be a full time mother. A woman is allowed to enjoy masculine pursuits such as politics or finance, but a man must always act like a man, and showing even the slightest interest in clothes or Broadway musicals makes him the topic of snide remarks about his sexuality.

Manhattan, part I

This post is about Manhattan the Woody Allen movie. It's Woody Allen's greatest movie, and it's such a big topic that I could never do it justice in a single blog post. So maybe one day I'll finish writing about it.

The movie begins in Elaine's, a famous restaurant in New York which was also mentioned in the Billy Joel song "Big Shot." Isaac (Woody Allen) is at dinner with his girlfriend Tracy (Mariel Hemmingway) and his friend Yale and his wife Emily. Tracy shyly excuses herself from the table, which gives Isaac the opportunity to explain the premise of the movie.

ISAAC: She's 17. I'm 42 and she's 17. I'm older than her father. Do you believe that? I'm dating a girl wherein I can beat up her father. That's the first time that phenomenon ever occurred in my life.

It should be noted that Woody allen is really 43 when this movie is filmed and not 42. It's Woody Allen's vanity that he thinks he can pass for 42.

The first thing you think of when you hear about Tracy's age is statutory rape! But the age of consent in New York is 17 and not 18. So Isaac isn't violating any laws. He's just incredibly lucky that a beautiful high school student would actually be interested in him, a whiny middle-aged omega male. Well, at least he looks like someone who would be an omega male in real life, but in the movie Isaac is somehow an alpha male who has two girlfriends at the same time: Tracy, who's 25 (or 26) years his junior, and Mary (Diane Keaton) who's 10 years his junior (based on their real life ages). Mary's not a high school student, but I think that someone like Woody Allen in the real world would be pretty lucky to have an attractive 33-year-old girlfriend.

Despite this portrayal of a sexual relationship between a middle aged man and a high school girl, Woody Allen somehow he escapes the vitriol directed at other older men, such as Rick Rosner, who sleep with high school aged girls. (And it's not even known for a fact that Rick had sex with any high school girls, but that hasn't stopped some commenters from being very angry at him.)

I also profess befuddlement over the the second part of Isaac's line. That he could beat up Tracy's father. Of course he's referring to an innocent time of early childhood when being older than someone meant you could probably beat them up. But still, not only is it out of place here, I keep thinking that not only couldn't Woody beat up Tracy's father, he couldn't beat up Tracy. I'm not just saying that to be cute. Mariel Hemmingway is taller than Woody Allen and looks pretty athletic--she played an olympic athlete three years later in the movie Personal Best. If they got into a fight, I really think that Woody would lose. This fact makes their relationship even more unlikely. As Bridget stated, women want a man to make them feel small. Are there really any tall athletic high school girls who dream about shorter whiny self-deprecating neurotic but intellectual and witty middle aged men?

Oh well, let's skip ahead a few minutes. Yale is home with his wife Emily.

EMILY: Yale? You ever thought any more about having kids?

YALE [whiny, but not quite as whiny as Woody Allen]: Oh god. Kids. Listen, I've gotta get this O'Neill book finished, it's never gonna get done. I've gotta get the money together to get this magazine started. Kids. [audible sigh]

EMILY: Well we always talk about getting a place in Connecticut. You could do it there.

YALE [still whiny]: Connecticut. I can't go to Connecticut. It's not practical. My stuff's here. [laugh] It [inaudible] here. It's just the wrong time. What about Isaac? We can't abandon him. You know he can't function anywhere other than New York, you know that.

For some reason, the thought of someone who can't function anywhere other than New York is hilarious. I'm not sure why, but it is.

The rest of the scene is the opening scene of the movie Idiocracy. Idiocracy is the movie about how an average man finds himself five hundred years in the future and he is now the smartest man on the planet because none of the smart people had any children. My favorite blogger, Steve Sailer, seems to think Mike Judge is brilliant for portraying the scene at the beginning of Idiocracy showing a smart couple who put off having children. But it's not really brilliant at all, Mike Judge stole the scene from Manhattan. The original scene from Manhattan is far better because (1) the line at the end is funny and there was absolutely nothing funny about Idiocracy; and (2) Woody Allen isn't trying to make any politically incorrect point about dysgenic breeding, he's just trying to accurately portray an intelligent and neurotic Manhattan couple. The fact that it demonstrates the birthrate gap between the intelligent and the unintelligent is entirely accidental.

This exchange between Yale and Emily also brings up the theme of children in the city. Emily thinks that maybe, if they moved to Connecticut, Yale would want to have a baby. Does city living discourage people from having children? Is that why people have more children in the red states?

Woody Allen (as Isaac) on Jewish mothers:

Years ago I wrote a story about my mother called "The Castrating Zionist."

Mary (Diane Keaton) bragging about her attractiveness:

I could go to bed with the entire faculty of MIT if I wanted to.

Does any woman really want to go to bed with the entire faculty of MIT? Does the faculty of MIT know about this?

Tracy to Isaac:

Let's do it some strange way that you've always wanted to do it but no one wanted to do it with you.

Isn't it every middle aged man's dream to have a 17 year old girl say that to him? But Isaac's stupid response will have to be left to the subject of a future post.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

Last time I was inside a woman was when I visited the Statue of Liberty.

So says the Woody Allen character in the 1989 movie Crimes and Misdemeanors. Unlike most other Woody Allen movies I've seen, in this one Woody Allen plays the loser. This is perhaps why I liked the movie so much. Woody Allen is much more believable as a loser than as a winner who gets to sleep with hot high school babes.

All the characters in the movie seem to be Jewish, but unlike most other Woody Allen movies the Judaism is more overt, with one of the characters being a Rabbi and with many flashbacks to childhood Jewish indoctrination. And there's a lot of guilt, which is the essence of Judaism, isn't it?

Unlike most Woody Allen movies, this one actually has a plot. Two plots rather--the movie alternates between the Woody Allen character's story and the Martin Landau character's story. So don't read the rest of this if you want to enjoy seeing the movie for the first time.

Idiocracy

I rented this movie from Netflix based on Steve Sailer's constant hyping of it.

Sorry Steve, but this movie sucks. That's the last time I let you talk me into watching a movie.

Sure, the future consequences of society's dysgenic breeding patterns deserve some attention, but that concept alone doesn't save the movie, which is simply not funny at all. Steve Sailer suggests that this movie was kept out of the theaters and not promoted because of the politically incorrect background story. Maybe, but that would be an easier explanation to buy if this movie were in any way entertaining.

Mike Judge, who wrote and directed this stinker, also wrote and directed the far better movie Office Space. Office Space was funny and insightful, and anyone who ever worked in a cubicle and lived in a cheap apartment can relate to it.

Hannah and Her Sisters

This movie accidentally got to the top of my Netflix queue.

"Hannah and Her Sisters" is about Hanna, played by Mia Farrow, and her two sisters, played by Barbara Hershey and Dianne Wiest. The three sisters, as well as all the men in their lives, are neurotic Manhattanites.

I was struck by the big age differences between the men and the women. Using the year of the movie (1986), and the birth dates listed in IMDB, below are the approximate ages of the main actors and actresses at the time the movie was filmed:

Max von Sydow 57
Michael Caine 53
Woody Allen 51
Mia Farrow 41
Barbara Hershey 38
Dianne Wiest 38

At the beginning of the movie, the Barbara Herhsey character is the live-in lover of the Max von Sydow character, a 19 year age difference. Hannah is married to the Michael Caine character, a 12 year age difference, but he has an affair with the Barbara Herhsey character, a 15 year age diffence. Woody Allen, who plays Hannah's ex-husband, eventually hooks up with the Dianne Wiest character, a 13 year age difference.

I sure hope that when I'm in my fifties, women 12 to 19 years my junior will be interested in me, but I don't see the attraction of any of the male characters. Woody Allen, of course, is a short whiny character who's the world's biggest pessimist, and in this movie he's also a hypochondriac who spends half his time on screen worrying that he's dying from cancer. Michael Caine is a taller and more portly version of Woody Allen, not very good looking and perhaps only slightly less neurotic. (He also wears these ridiculous looking oversized eyeglasses, but I think they were actually in style in the 1980s.)

The least understandable relationship is the one between Barbara Hershey and Max von Sydow. He plays an anti-social grumpy old man who never leaves his apartment and insults everyone who dares to enter. How did they even meet in the first place?

In Woody Allen's New York, everyone worth being a character in his movie has a cool job. Hannah is a retired actress as are her parents. Woody Allen's character is a television show producer and the Max von Sydow character is an artist. Hannah's younger sisters don't seem to work at all, even though they have no kids to take care of and aren't even married. Michael Caine's character has the only thing that resembles a real job, he's some kind of financial advisor for celebrities. No one in the movie has to sit in a cubicle all day and work for a big corporation, like everyone I know.

Misunderstanding of movie profits

There is a NY Times article about how movies with big stars are often not "profitable" because of the star's high salary.

This is incorrect, the movie is often quite profitable, but because the star has more bargaining power than the studio, the star gets more of the profits.

It is probably true that the movie studio might have higher profits by filming movies with lesser known actors. The movie as a whole would be less profitable, but the studio might have higher profits because a smaller percentage of the total profits would have to be shared with the actors.

Atlas Shrugged, the movie?

This looks like an April Fool's joke to me, except that it's July.

I hope the movie will lead to a radical change in the political thinking of U.S. voters. Assuming it's not a hoax.

Netflix free trial offer

I'm currently enjoying my Netflix free trial offer.

This is far better than renting movies at Blockbuster. Blockbuster is only good for the latest releases. If you want to watch older movies, or television shows, then you're out of luck at Blockbuster.

Netflix is a great deal. Blockbuster charges more than $4 for a DVD, so if you just see five DVDs per month with the Netflix $17.99 plan (which allows you to keep 3 DVDs out at one time) then you're doing better than with Blockbuster, assuming you would have even been able to find the DVDs you wanted at Blockbuster.

Until now, the alternative to rentals was actually buying the DVDs outright at Amazon.com. I wound up buying all eight seasons of Stargate SG-1. At the discounted price of $36/season, I now have $288 worth of DVDs that I probably won't ever watch again. It would have been less expensive to use Netflix, and this is even more true for expensive TV shows like the HBO titles. Carnivale, an excellent series, has a list price of $100. Six Feet Under is also $100 per season. What a rip-off!

The downside of Netflix is scratched DVDs. This is the same problem I always had renting. But considering how much money those HBO TV shows cost to buy, I guess I can put up with the hassle.

The Da Vinci Code, the movie: watered down paganism

Spoiler alert: in order to write anything meaningful about the movie, I need to give away all the plot points. So bypass this post if you haven’t yet read the book or seen the movie, but plan to in the future (although I certainly recommend the book over the movie).

The Da Vinci Code, worst movie ever?

The critics hate it. I mean they really hate it. (At the time this post was written, of 16 reviews only one was positive.)

THURSDAY MORNING UPDATE

There are now five positive reviews, at least some critics liked it.

William Arnold liked the movie and had this interesting comment:

Good or bad, history or hoax, sacrilege or metaphoric feminist truth -- beyond these matters, "Da Vinci: the Movie" holds an added importance to the world that hasn't been fully recognized. It's the first summer blockbuster in two decades that has hugely excited people and is not a sequel, remake, science-fiction extravaganza or sword-and-sorcery kid's fantasy.

Review of Mission Impossible III

Mission Impossible III (MI3), in which Tom Cruise plays black ops secret agent Ethan Hunt, was a modestly enjoyable movie which could have even been more enjoyable if it made more sense.

King Kong sucks

I guess I'm not a Peter Jackson fan. He took The Lord of the Rings, my favorite book from when I was a teenager, and turned it into three visually stunning but ultimately boring movies. And now he has made a really long and boring movie about King Kong, but one with great visuals and special effects.

I appreciate the look of a movie as much as the next guy, and even more so. I enjoyed looking at the movie's early scenes filmed in an amazingly recreated 1930s New York City, even though the story taking place was boring. But after an interminably long time passed and I still hadn't seen King Kong, I wanted to scream "enough is enough, show us the ape!"

The female lead, played by Naomi Watts, is pretty but stupid, exhibiting a classic case of Stockholm Syndrome. Some reviews praised Watts' acting, but I wasn't impressed.

The bad acting in general was probably a result of the bad script, because I thought Adrien Brody was fantastic in The Pianist, yet here you just wonder what this guy was doing in the movie in the first place.

Just as Yoda was the best actor in Star Wars Episode III, King Kong was the best actor in King Kong.

The Upside of Anger sucks

I'm pissed that I wasted the last two hours of my life watching the movie The Upside of Anger. I was fooled into watching this because of the good reviews. I don't know what planet the reviewers are living on.

The story is completely unrealistic. I can't possibly imagine that a man would disappear and his daughters wouldn't try to find out where he is or what happened to him. The whole thing has a sort of Sixth Sense unworldiness to it, but unlike Sixth Sense where the plot twist revealed what was actually going on, in this movie the storyline is tortured in order to set up a surprise ending which just makes you hate the characters in the movie that much more.

Shopgirl has worse reviews but it's a far better movie, and it even had some interesting cinematography to go along with it.

War of the Worlds sucks

Hollywood figures that if you have good special effects, Tom Cruise, and a cute girl precocious for her age in a way only seen in movies, then you don’t actually need a story that makes any sense. Maybe Hollywood is right and War of the Worlds will make a lot of money for everyone involved.

Review of Star Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith

It’s been a few years since Episode II. Anakin (Hayden Christensen) no longer looks like the kid from the Dell commercials. In fact, he now sports a retro hairdo reminiscent of Luke Skywalker circa 1977.

Lucas finally got the message that people don’t like Jar Jar Binks. He only makes the briefest appearance and thankfully has no speaking lines. Too bad the other characters have to talk. Whenever anyone opens their mouth, you have to grimace. Are they all horrible actors, or is it the lines they are forced to say? I’m afraid that it’s both.

One bright spot amidst the otherwise lousy acting was Yoda. He may be incapable of speaking a single sentence with the subject and object in the correct order, but he does it with feeling. Yoda has definitely brought it up a notch since the last movie and deserves to win the Academy Award for Best Muppet Actor.

Episode III is less of a kid’s movie than any other Star Wars movie, even the first one. In nearly every scene, someone’s (or something’s) limbs are being chopped off. Cute robots get very little screen time; most of the robots we see are evil robots. There are no Ewoks. Besides Yoda, the only aliens that are even remotely cute are the Wookies, and those guys have a hard edge to them.

The problem with this movie, besides the acting, is the lack of suspense. Basically, everything about this movie’s plot is pre-ordained. You know exactly what’s going to happen to all of the major characters because we all saw the original Star Wars. So it’s no surprise that Chancellor Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid) is evil, or that Anakin Skywalker joins him and turns to the Dark Side, or that Yoda and Obi Wan (Ewan McGregor) live and all the other Jedi die, or that Obi Wan and Anakin/Darth Vader have a big fight at the end in which Anakin’s body is maimed and he has to spend the rest of his life looking like the Darth Vader we remember from the original movies.

I liked Episode II better. In Episode II, we weren’t quite sure exactly what was going to happen. In Episode II, it was hilarious to see Yoda pick up a lightsaber and have a duel with an evil Sith. Yoda sees a lot more action in Episode III, but it’s no longer funny. We’ve seen this sight gag before. In fact, Episode III is the most humorless Star Wars movie to date.

In Episode III, George Lucas tries to move from sci-fi to sci-phi. That’s phi for philosophy. But it’s not very good philosophy.

“The Jedi only know one side of the Force. To truly understand the Force, you need to know both Sides,” Chancellor Palpatine tells Anakin. It’s almost as if George Lucas remembered the Star Trek episode in which the transporter splits Captain Kirk into the good Kirk and the bad Kirk. Without his bad side, Kirk couldn’t be an effective leader. But of course, ever since his success with the original Star Wars (the story which was shamelessly but very effectively copied from J.R.R. Tolkien), Lucas’ ego is way too big to ever watch someone else’s creative works. Any resemblance to other fiction is purely a coincidence.

“If you're not with me, then you're my enemy,” Anakin tells Obi Wan. “Jedi don’t speak in absolutes,” responds Obi Wan. But don’t they? Aren’t they absolutely certain that only bad can come from knowing the Dark Side? Isn’t this a movie about Good and Evil in which everyone is clearly on one side or the other? At least the first movie had main characters, such as Han Solo and Chewbacca, who gave the appearance of not being on any side other than their own.

Anakin’s “slide” into evil makes absolutely no sense. One day Anakin buys completely into being on the side of Good, except for him secretly marrying Padme Amidala (Natalie Portman) and being eager to be promoted to “Master Jedi.” (Oooh, how evil it is to want a wife and a promotion at work!) But then a day later he’s killing children.

I give Episode III two out of five stars. The special effects were great, but otherwise the movie was boring and pointless. What a huge disappointment.

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Around the blogosphere:

Ed Driscoll agrees that the movie was bad. “These three prequels are so far removed from the tone and the fun of their predecessors from '77 to '83 that it's sad.”

Vodkapundit explains why Anakin’s slide into evil was so believable. Huh? Was he watching the same movie? Pete the Elder was also watching a different movie. “The actual path Anakin follows to the dark side was better and deeper than I expected.”

PunditGuy compares the Jedi Council to the Catholic Church. This is an obvious comparison, because both institutions require celibacy. However, the reason for the Jedi Council requiring celibacy, that being married encourages one to succumb to the Dark Side of the Force (yes, that’s right), doesn’t apply to the Catholic Church.

Ninme rightfully complains about the original version of the original movies not being available on DVD. “George Lucas is to be encouraged to release the original originals on DVD. Hans shot first, damnit.” This echoes the point in my review that unlike the characters in Episode III, Hans Solo was not a caricature of Good or Evil. I would certainly buy a copy of the original Star Wars on DVD if it were ever released.

Marginal Revolution has a fantastic post about whether the Jedi Council is really Good. “As I understand it, they vote each other into the office, have license to kill, and seek to control galactic affairs. Talk about unaccountable power used toward secret and mysterious ends.”

Review of Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones

Below follows a review I wrote a long time ago about the previous Star Wars movie, Episode II - Attack of the Clones.