A Perfectly Cromulent Blog

BCSOL

Longhorn Nation, I have stood with you for nigh on 20 years. I have bled in your streets (okay, peed in the alley behind Joe's Generic Bar) and fought the good fight (screamed obscenities at Gary Gibbs during the Red River Shootout in 1990), so it brings me no pleasure to tell you we're screwed.

In case you hadn't heard, there's a three-way tie in the Big 12 South. The Longhorns has no problem handling crybaby Stephen McGee and the Aggies, Oklahoma did slightly more than eke out a victory against OSU, and Tech...survived against Baylor. All are 11-1, meaning we'll have to wait until Sunday's BCS rankings to see who gets to curb stomp Mizzou in the Big 12 championship.

The sad fact - which has been all but admitted by everyone from Kirk Herbstreit to Bob Allen - is that OU will jump Texas in the standing. Whether that means they'll be the new #2 or, more likely, Texas will swap places with #4 Florida, will be apparent later today. Whatever the case, we'll likely be on the outside looking in at OU vs. Missouri.

I'm not thrilled, but I'm not going to chant "45-35" like an idiot either. We should have handled Tech, and we didn't. And maybe we ought to reconsider scheduling that game against North Texas every year. I imagine the conference will revisit the tiebreaker rule after the season is over, but when you have a very realistic of having every major conference champion emerging with at least one loss (the Gators are going to destroy Alabama), it's pretty obvious the system is still screwed. No playoff is going to make everybody happy, the NCAA Tournament proves that, but anything has to be better than what we're stuck with now

UPDATE: Surprise, surprise, surprise:

The Longhorns beat Oklahoma by 10 points on a neutral field.

But .13 of a point will keep them from playing in the Big 12 championship game.

Oklahoma finished with the highest ranking in Sunday's Bowl Championship Series to break a three-way tie with Texas and Texas Tech in the Big 12 South.

Oklahoma (11-1) will play Missouri in Saturday's Big 12 title game in Kansas City, Mo.

And Florida, which lost to an unranked Mississippi, will probably move to #1 with a win over Alabama. I love college football.

Bi-Polar disorder

Knock it off, Disney.

Thanks to Winnie the Pooh sheets, Ariel underpants, and a near-constant media/retail assault that would've made Joseph Goebbels shake his head in admiration, you mercenary pricks already have your hooks set into most of our kids since birth (and maybe earlier, if the Princess Jasmine speculum is successfully patented). You've insinuated yourselves into our lives to such an extent I no longer offer even token resistance when She Who Shall Not Be Named brings me the Little Mermaid DVD case and the remote control.

Though I must say, her rendition of "Part of Your World" would make even the surliest among you crack a smile.

I'm willing to accept a certain amount of cultural omnipresence, as you can see, but what I'm not going to stand for is the annual push to make The Polar Express the next holiday movie classic.

[EDIT: I (think I) knew Warner Bros. actually made Polar Express, but the push I'm referring to is by ABC and the ABC Family channel, both of which are cramming PE down our throats, and both are owned by Uncle Walt.]

The 2004 adaptation of Chris Van Allsburg's book is, hands-down, one of the creepiest fucking things I've ever seen. Much hay was made about the groundbreaking technology used to capture the live actors' movements ("actors" meaning Tom Hanks and, like, three other guys), and the result is admittedly pretty eye-popping. Trouble is, the overall impression is that of a bunch of Real Dolls suddenly brought to herky-jerky life. There were also reportedly some screw-ups during the final stages of production, resulting in scenes where elves go sliding across the screen with apparently frozen extremities. Advanced technology or not, everything still looks desperately fake, and not in a good traditional animation way,

What's really funny is that the book takes about 15 minutes to read, but because filming a true adaptation wouldn't justify the outlay required for all this "revolutionary" motion capture technology Robert Zemeckis and company went on to bloat the film with instantly forgettable musical numbers and nonsensical action sequences. And what kid wants to endure an hour and forty minutes of this garbage just to see Hero Boy and Token Black Character Hero Girl finally reach the North Pole, a true Industrial Age wonderland where all the workers look the same and Aerosmith is the musical act of choice.

We already have enough Christmas-themed movies to play 24/7 the entire month of December, and that's not counting the holiday cluster bombs released every year (Fred Claus, Deck the Halls). There's always room for a worthy addition every five years or so, like Bad Santa, but I'm not prepared to push aside true classics like A Christmas Story and Die Hard just yet. Disney, you grossed $160 million with Polar Express during its release, I suggest you quit while you're ahead.

Thoughts regarding the series finale of The Shield

Sheeeeeeeit.

Man in the box

I gave Heroes more of my valuable free time than multiple alternate future plotlines and Suresh doing his best audition for The Fly III warranted. Luckily, I found another way to get my Adrian Pasdar fix while digging around Half-Price Books last weekend:

Three episodes in and I'd forgotten how good this was. Look past the goofy Lawnmower Man computer effects, the creepy/annoying stepmom, and the way-too-Stephen J. Cannell soundtrack and you've got a show that was years ahead of its time. Granted, in a post-Sopranos/Dexter/The Shield world the existence of a sociopathic protagonist who blackmails and murders his way up the corporate ladder seems almost quaint, but in 1996 people couldn't turn away from a character who uttered lines like "Sorry Mom, but servicing you tonight is the least of my concerns" fast enough. Fox, already notorious for series infanticide, cut its run after four episodes.

And there's nothing like seeing the look on someone's (like your spouse's) face when they see that closing shot in the pilot for the first time.

Picture this

Oklahoma beats Texas Tech - Already happened

Texas beats Texas A&M (11/28) - Not a given, but it's in Austin this year

Auburn beats Alabama (11/29) - The longest of long shots, but it's a rivalry game, so all bets are off

Oklahoma beats Oklahoma State (11/29) - Sooners are on a roll

Alabama beats Florida in the SEC championship (12/06) - Stranger things have happened

Texas, somehow voted ahead of OU in the BCS, beats Mizzou in the Big 12 championship (12/06)

With an Alabama loss against AU, an 11-2 Florida, and a USC with a horrible strength of schedule, Texas and Oklahoma could play for the national championship.

Should all this bear out, I'll be able to take Miami off of the list of cities I've never been in a fight in.

Rhymes with "pyorrhea"

I made my first trip to the Galleria in about a year last week. It'll probably be my last trip for at least that long.

It actually wasn't that bad, even though I noticed the Christmas rush seems to have begun a few weeks early. I had to drive the West Loop last night to make a screening of Twilight last night (I'm still working on the maximally hilarious way to incorporate "sucking" into my review). From 290 to 59S took 25 minutes.

But that wasn't the case when She Who Shall Not Be Named and I headed over to kill a few hours while The Wife got some cold-induced couch time. We navigated through mercifully traffic-free streets and snaked one of those elusive first parking garage level spots less than two hundred feet from Neiman Marcus. Granted, we didn't actually buy anything but we did come up with some amusing mall activities.

1. Go to the Apple Store and see if an employee ever gives an answer to a question that doesn't start with, "Well, if you go to our web page." And it didn't matter if it was about financing or the relative fragility of the MacBook Air. Why the hell do you guys have a store in the first place?

2. Ask the girl at the Hollister store if they have any clothes that don't say "Hollister" on them. Chuckle at her response and say, "No, really."

3. Allow your four year old to run into the Versace store with a large, slobbery lollipop. Pause briefly to enjoy the horrorstruck expressions before corralling her.

4. Laugh at the hair on the guy working in the Michael Kors store. His 'do says Good Charlotte, but his crows' feet say Charlotte Rae.

5. Count the number of kids and adults-who-should-know-better wearing South Pole and Aerospatiale clothes. Stop when you reach 1,000.

Cold play

Thanksgiving brings with it family togetherness, boring football, and the return of Film Threat's Frigid 50.

Our answer to the ubiquitous power lists put forth by other movie sites has been running since 2000, and details "the least-powerful, least-inspiring, least-intriguing people in all of Tinseltown." It's also an opportunity for cheap shots galore, as should be apparent from the get-go.

I think it's funny the amount of shit we get for dumping on millionaires. I contributed a...significant amount to this year's edition, and it never ceases to amaze me how fiercely protective some are of a bunch of overpaid game show hosts, but those are our priorities as a nation, I guess.

Unfortunate word choice

From an e-mail sent by an immediate family member who shall remain nameless:

NEIL DIAMOND IS GOD!

I don't care if he is 67, he's still got it. Two hours without a break, never missed a beat, had the audience hanging from the rafters in the AT&T Center.

I'll be he did.

Did the nooses have the U-verse logo on them, by chance?

Giving Solace

I didn't review Quantum of Solace for Film Threat, so I'll post some [non-spoilery] thoughts here.

QoS is the 22nd official movie in the James Bond series ("official" meaning "not including Never Say Never Again, the 1967 Casino Royale parody, or either of those TV movies from the 60s), and is a slightly above average entry. Despite having a more "Bond-ian" feel than its predecessor, the entire film is little more than an epilogue to Casino Royale, picking up right where CR left off, and the memory of Vesper Lynd hangs over everything that takes place like a ghost with poorly applied eye shadow.

As I mentioned earlier, Quantum of Solace reinstates some of the classic 007 trademarks; the maybe naked dancing girls in the opening titles are back (the Jack White/Alicia Keys song is a complete misfire, however), there's a new evil organization with a new evil plot that's almost - but not quite - as ludicrous as anything Hugo Drax came up with and director Marc Forster and his quartet of screenwriters also throw in a nice shout-out to Goldfinger. Hell, there's even a boat chase.

I suppose Haggis and Forster deserve some credit for giving Bond some emotional depth, and not just having him hit the reset button romantically after each movie (never mind if that's exactly what Fleming's Bond was like), but it doesn't entirely work. I don't know the big picture, however, and maybe the plan is to have all of Daniel Craig's movies immediately follow the other, gradually exposing the reach and power of the bad guys. We'll see, though it's already apparent from almost the first scene that Mr. White isn't lying when he says they "have people everywhere."

As for what's bad, the main villain in QoS may be the worst of all time. Mr. Greene is a powerful man, but the only villainous thing about him is that Mathieu Amalric looks a lot like Roman Polanski. Both Bond girls are also less than compelling. Olga Kurylenko (Camille Montes) is, surprisingly, a better actor than Gemma Arterton (Strawberry Fields, though her first name is never mentioned), though the latter more capably evokes the "classic" BG. And even with classic elements like a dumb Bond girl name, Forster and company still haven't totally shaken the "Bourne rip-off" accusations. Still, a solid entry. *** out of *****.

The white man's burden

Think the U.S. military is having a tough time snagging new recruits? They've got nothing on the KKK:

Cynthia Lynch, 43, of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was fatally shot Sunday during an initiation ceremony in the woods of Louisiana, the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office said.

Authorities say the suspects recruited Lynch over the Internet to join the Klan. They say she traveled from Oklahoma to Louisiana for the ceremony and was taken to a campsite near Sun, Louisiana, about 60 miles north of New Orleans.

On Sunday, the woman asked to be taken from the camp to a nearby town, and an argument ensued, culminating with [KKK leader Chuck] Foster fatally shooting Lynch, the sheriff's department said.

Some of the suspects then tried to conceal the killing by burning the woman's personal items, authorities said. Police received a tip about the killing and found the woman's body hidden under loose brush alongside a road, authorities said.
[...]
Foster, 44, was charged with second-degree murder. The others were charged with lesser crimes related to trying to conceal the killing.

Oswold said that the Klan group in Sun was very small and that most of the members were arrested.

And the lucky winners are:

Yowza. Lynch was probably hoping for a little more pomp and circumstance for her initiation than simply eating hobo chili in the bayou with the supporting cast of Trailer Park Boys. Still, you gotta feel for the Klan; we just elected a black man President who promptly picked a Jew as his Chief of Staff. Throw in a Mexican Secretary of State and a few Catholics and the remaining members of the KKK might spontaneously combust.

A man can dream.

UPDATE: The Guardian has more details on how these criminal masterminds were caught:

However, authorities were alerted after Foster's son and another member of the group went to a supermarket in the town of Bogalusa and asked how they could remove bloodstains from their clothes. The shop assistant recognised them and called police, who went to the scene and found five members of the group in the woods.

"The IQ level of this group is not impressive, to be kind," Sheriff Jack Strain told a news conference...

Ain't no party like an AIG party

'Cause an AIG party don't stop:

Even as the company was pleading the federal government for another $40 billion dollars in loans, AIG sent top executives to a secret gathering at a luxury resort in Phoenix last week.

Reporters for abc15.com (KNXV) caught the AIG executives on hidden cameras poolside and leaving the spa at the Pointe Hilton Squaw Peak Resort, despite apparent efforts by the company to disguise its involvement.

"AIG made significant efforts to disguise the conference, making sure there were no AIG logos or signs anywhere on the property," KNXV reported.

A hotel employee told KNXV reporter Josh Bernstein, "We can't even say the word [AIG]."

A company spokesperson, Nick Ashooh, confirmed AIG instructed the hotel to make sure there were no AIG signs or mention of the company by staff.

"We're trying to avoid confrontation, keep our profile low," said Ashooh. "Some of our employees have been harassed."

"What do they have to hide," asked Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-MD) who said he had been promised by AIG CEO Edward Liddy that the company would stop such "junkets."

"They came to us and said they were drowning and needed help. A person who is drowning doesn't jump up and start partying," said Congressman Cummings.

You were doing so well there, Elijah, and then you screwed up the metaphor. A better way to put it would have been, "A person who is drowing doesn't jump up and sodomize the person who threw them the life preserver with a five battery Maglite."

We saw the story on the news last night, and were barely finished rolling our eyes when ABC followed it up, unironically it would seem, with this piece:

Three years behind schedule and almost $360 million above budget, the Capitol Visitor Center prepares to open its doors to millions of tourists who now must endure long lines without food, restrooms or shelter to catch a glimpse of the halls of Congress.

The underground center, the largest single construction project in the Capitol's two-century history in terms of size and expense, is to open to the public on Dec. 2. The final cost of the project is put at $621 million, more than double the $265 million estimated cost had the center been completed on schedule in December, 2005.

And I'm driving an eight-year old car.

Balls...Hair Balls

Over on that other blog I'm currently ruining, we're commemorating the impending release of Quantum of Solace by doing a bunch of 007-related Top Five lists, so check Hair Balls throughout the week.

First up: The Top Five Bond Girl Names.

"Octopussy" didn't make the list.

Tech is legit

Even though they beat UT last week, I wasn't fully prepared to anoint Texas Tech this year's Big 12 South champs. The Horns had a lot of chances to win that game, and but for a few key drops, fortunes could easily have been reversed.

But after Tech's 56-20 shellacking of Oklahoma State, it's obvious they're the real deal. They haven't beaten anybody significant away from home yet (OU is next week), but they look pretty much unstoppable. Assuming they take out the Sooners (and Baylor), they should easily win the Big 12 and play in the title game.

Whoever they play (Alabama or Florida are the likeliest choices), I don't envy them. You can probably give Harrell the Heisman now, and Leach finally has a defense...well, as good as anything passing for a D in the Big 12, anyway. Put the over/under around 72.

I rank Red Raiders fans somewhere above Miami and below LSU in terms of obnoxiousness (HWRNMNBSOL's lovely wife excepted), but they've earned their bragging rights so far this year.

Maybe it'll make up for having live in Lubbock.

For Your Review - Oct 24 - Nove 7, 2008

I return once again to inform your movie choices several days/weeks after they've already come out:

High School Musical 3: Senior Year **1/2 - Presenting your remale lead as a chaste scholar loses some of its punch when most of the free world has already seen her naked.

Changeling **** - Melodramatic, yes, and it lapses into Law and Order: 1928 at the end, but Jolie gives a powerful performance.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno *** - Kevin Smith moves to Pittsburgh, brings Jeff "Randal" Anderson, Jason "Jay" Mewes, and his severe scatalogy with him. Still can't write female characters, though.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa *** - The interspecies love that dare not speak its name.

Hello Balls - 11/6/2008

Now that the election's over, I think y'all have earned another serving of Hair Balls. Or at least the few entries I manage to bang out for them every couple of weeks.

What History Tells Us: Five Black Presidents (11/6/2008)
Five Types of Horror Movies That Suck (10/31/2008)
Five Scariest Movie Moments You Probably Haven't Seen (10/31/2008)
The Five Worst Basketball Movies of All Time (10/29/2008)
Five Movie Presidents Worse Than W. (10/21/2008)
Ten Possible Reasons for the Cowboys Missing the Playoffs (10/15/2008)

Older entries after the jump.

Top Five Beatdowns in Houston Sports (10/9/2008)
The Disappearing Local Film Critic (10/9/2008)
NASA at 50: Five Bad Astronaut Movies (10/2/2008)
When Trees Attack: In Movies & Real Life (10/1/2008)
Houston on the TV: The Top Five (9/11/2008)
Slo-Mo Football Movie Finales: The Top Five (9/9/2008)
Top Five Houstonians as Hurricanes (8/29/2008)
The Top Five Ballsiest Actors from Texas (8/27/2008)
Texas Horror Movies: The Top Five (8/18/2008)
Houston Sports Movies: The Top Five (8/14/2008)
Chuck Norris Reaches Out And Touches: The Top Five (8/11/2008)
It's Freaking Hot - So Watch Some Cold Movies (8/7/2008)
Movies For Your Hurricane Party Tonight (8/4/2008)
A Wish List for Austin's Movie Memorabilia Sale (7/31/2008)
Hollywood Destroys Houston: The Top Five (7/30/2008)
Houston as a Movie Stand-In: The Top Five (7/22/2008)

Thank god that's over

Now I can watch The Shield in peace.

Seriously, that was a classy concession speech by John McCain. I applaud him for that.

I don't applaud the fundamentalist war-mongers he sucked up to throughout this campaign however. Each and every one of those Hank Williams Jr.-listening douchenozzles in his audience booing him and chanting Palin's name can eat my ass.

Not to get all Lee Greenwood on you guys, but I'm proud to be American right now. I have no illusions that Obama is going to usher in a new Progressive Age, balance our budget, provide universal health care, and heal all of our nation's ills in one fell swoop, but I hope he'll be able to put together a coalition that will help him try to do so. I also think we've rarely been at a lower ebb than we have during the last eight years. This is - no bullshit - a great moment in our history.

And now that an African-American is the President-Elect of the United States, let me be the first to say I'm sick of being hassled by The Man.

EDIT: Damn, that dude gives a good speech. You made it. Now don't screw it up.

Empty threats

It's time to get our Alec Baldwin on and make ill-advised assertions about what we're planning to do if the election doesn't go our way. Use the following format:

I'm going to _________________ because ___________________________ .

For example, I'm going to smart smoking (again) because there won't be any Medicare to keep me alive in my 80s.

Or: I'm going to stop cleaning my cat's ears because we'll be eating our pets inside of six months.

Please submit you responses in the comments section. I'll be perusing them from my sofa cushion fort, where I'll be watching election returns with a fifth of Bushmills and about 400 mg of Thorazine.

She blinded me with stupid

Less than a day to go. I seriously doubt there are any "undecideds" reading APCB, mostly because I'm not convinced anyone who hasn't made their mind up yet at this point can read. But just in case, please take a moment to read this column by Christopher Hitchens and consider who you might be electing to the second most powerful office in the land:

In an election that has been fought on an astoundingly low cultural and intellectual level, with both candidates pretending that tax cuts can go like peaches and cream with the staggering new levels of federal deficit, and paltry charges being traded in petty ways, and with Joe the Plumber becoming the emblematic stupidity of the campaign, it didn't seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place "in Paris, France" and winding up with a folksy "I kid you not."

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly. Scientists of various sorts continue to find it a very useful resource, since it can be easily and plentifully "cultured" in a laboratory, has a very short generation time, and displays a great variety of mutation. This makes it useful in studying disease, and since Gov. Palin was in Pittsburgh to talk about her signature "issue" of disability and special needs, she might even have had some researcher tell her that there is a Drosophila-based center for research into autism at the University of North Carolina.

Hitchens goes on to point out that McCain blocked plenty of funding for scientific research in the name of "anti-pork," including blocking a grizzly bear study in Montana (a move that may come back to bite him on the ass, ursine style). But he returns to the VP candidate soon enough:

With Palin, however, the contempt for science may be something a little more sinister than the bluff, empty-headed plain-man's philistinism of McCain. We never get a chance to ask her in detail about these things, but she is known to favor the teaching of creationism in schools (smuggling this crazy idea through customs in the innocent disguise of "teaching the argument," as if there was an argument), and so it is at least probable that she believes all creatures from humans to fruit flies were created just as they are now. This would make DNA or any other kind of research pointless, whether conducted in Paris or not. Projects such as sequencing the DNA of the flu virus, the better to inoculate against it, would not need to be funded. We could all expire happily in the name of God. Gov. Palin also says that she doesn't think humans are responsible for global warming; again, one would like to ask her whether, like some of her co-religionists, she is a "premillenial dispensationalist"--in other words, someone who believes that there is no point in protecting and preserving the natural world, since the end of days will soon be upon us.

Videos taken in the Assembly of God church in Wasilla, Alaska, which she used to attend, show her nodding as a preacher says that Alaska will be "one of the refuge states in the Last Days." For the uninitiated, this is a reference to a crackpot belief, widely held among those who brood on the "End Times," that some parts of the world will end at different times from others, and Alaska will be a big draw as the heavens darken on account of its wide open spaces. An article by Laurie Goodstein in the New York Times gives further gruesome details of the extreme Pentecostalism with which Palin has been associated in the past (perhaps moderating herself, at least in public, as a political career became more attractive). High points, also available on YouTube, show her being "anointed" by an African bishop who claims to cast out witches. The term used in the trade for this hysterical superstitious nonsense is "spiritual warfare," in which true Christian soldiers are trained to fight demons. Palin has spoken at "spiritual warfare" events as recently as June. And only last week the chiller from Wasilla spoke of "prayer warriors" in a radio interview with James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who said that he and his lovely wife, Shirley, had convened a prayer meeting to beseech that "God's perfect will be done on Nov. 4."

But if his will is "perfect," surely god has already decided who's going to win.

I guess Dobson thinks the almighty is undecided as well.

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just "people of faith" but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

I have, in the past, put Christopher Hitchens on my douchebag list, but...yeah. I know the theory is that you can't truly recover until you hit bottom, but I don't want that to be the case with my country. We're low enough as it is.

Now get your ass out and vote.