Posts by Craig Ranapia
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David Slack wrote:
I'd also tick The Departed...Meh... I think Scorsese is finally going to get his best director nod, out of sheer collective embarrassment on the part of the Academy. It's just a shame he's going to get it for a messy, self-indulgent remake of a superior Hong Kong thriller whose main feature of interest is Jack Nicholson reaching new lows in hammy camp that is definitely not safe for vegetarians, Jews or Muslims. It's like being poked in the eye with a highlighter while eating your own weight in sugar - once you've admired how many ways the cast can inflect the word 'fuck', and how artfully Scorsese splatters the gnawed sets with corn syrup... so what?
Zach BAgnell wrote:
Was not surprised to find out afterwards that it [The Children of Man] was based on a pulp sci-fi novel.Ahem... I suggest you pick up the novel by P.D. James (who is much better known as a mystery writer who definitely works the high-brow end of the genre) and tell me what's so 'pulpy' about it. If anything, I think it's the film that reduced a rather haunting fable about love, loss and the death of hope into a pretty banal thriller - though one whose politics are impeccable.
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The problem with Dreamgirls (and I am a show queen, get over it) is that none of the music is "acceptable Supremish Motown-lite". (FFS, I know there's the whole Big Chill soundtrack cringe factor is in play, but Motown at it's best was pretty sophisticated pop.) But I agree with you that no amount of tit-in-a-wringer emoting from Jennifer Hudson can obscure the utter musical and lyrical banality of the material. the oppositie happened with Chicago - despite the fact Richard Gere and that Bridget Jones bint couldn't really sing or dance or act, the show itself is so good it's hack proof.
Still, nice to see Pan's Labyrinth get a well-deserved nomination for best foreign language film. It won't win, of course, because it's about as sentimentally life-affirming as a kick in the crotch.
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Che:
Oh come on. I thought it was a pretty uncontentious statement of fact that Germany and Japan most certainly had democracy 'imposed' on them during the lengthy Allied occupations and they're no less functional democracies in 2007 for it. And what exactly did the folks calling for economic sanctions, sporting/cultural boycotts and divestment from apartheid-era South Africa - or post-coup Fiji for that matter - want to achieve, if it wasn't to 'impose' democracy by other means?
Now you can argue that none of the above was a very good idea, or the execution for the former wasn't an unconditional success - and people certainly have. I just thought Deborah made a rather dodgy over-generalisation.
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Deborah wrote:
Democracy is a bottom up affair, not one that can be imposed.Um... I wonder what they'd say about that in Tokyo and Berlin. And with all due respect, I think there are some corners of the world where eyebrows would be htting the stratosphere at such a statement coming from this corner of the world.
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Your patience in these people is touching Neil, but they really are not fit to govern.
And with all due respect, Russell, what the fuck are the Democrats doing to prove theiy're competent to be a loyal opposition, let alone take over the executive? I suspect your average Iraqi would be muttering 'a plague on both your houses'.
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Merc:
Wait a mo', don't they have to nuke Pyongyang first? Seriously, I don't think being the boy who cried nuke really contributes much to an already surreal discussion.
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This is damnation with faint praise, but Coddington and Matt McCarten are a marginally more palatable than the Sunday Star-Times' answer to Dumb and Dumber - Matthew Hooten and Chris Trotter. Sorry, but when you'll print an apologia for election fraud (Trotter) followed by an equally bizarre call for a de facto coup d'etat (Hooters) you've firmly put yourself in the (to paraphrase Merc) 'not worth the eye-strain' column. Perhaps I'm showing my bias here, but I used to quite enjoy Paul Johnson in The Spectator . Even when I thought he was a full burger short of a Happy Meal, the bastard could write, construct and argument and was often refreshingly unpredictable. And that was back in the day when the magazine's masthead contained splendid writers like Alice Thomas Ellis, Auberon Waugh and Jeffrey Bernard (man whose heroic self-abuse made Saint Hunter S. look like a wimp.)
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81stcolumn wrote:
Seems to me that appropriate investment is like a lot of ethical behaviour; constrained by personal dissonance and moral discomfort.Well, up to a point. As I pointed out on Tony Milne's blog, 'ethical investment' is one of those warm, fuzzy cant phrases it's pretty hard to object to. But as I/S pointed out, the Cullen Fund is playing with public money and then you've got to ask exactly whose ethics are in the driver's seat. A while back, I read about a 'Christian' fund that (among other things) doesn't invest in companies that "facilitate or endorse immoral or un-Christian lifestyles". I'm sure Helen Clark and Russell Norman will be pleased to know tobacco companies are verboten (body a temple not to be polluted, and all that); not so chuffed they don't invest in companies that target gay and lesbian consumers, sponsor gay events or offer benefits to the same-sex partners of employees. That's 'ethical' investment, though not a criterion I'd want used to invest my nest egg. If I was looking for investors in a pig farm or a vineyard, I certainly wouldn't be pitching it to my next-door neighbours who are Muslims.
And I'm not being entirely facetious in wondering whether the Greens would feel a tad morally perturbed about being part of a government that own a controlling interest in an airline. :)
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Sorry, that should be take your shirt off - which is merely grubby instead of anatomically improbable and gross.
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Speaking of which: what on earth was Codders on about in her column yesterday?
Take your shit off, and perhaps the scary-arse god will tell you. Because I'll be blowed if I can figure it out. Reminds me of this lovely Peter Cook sketch with him dressed up as Greta Garbo in the back of an open-topped car, bawling "I want to be alone" through a megaphone. :)
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