- I live my life a quarter mile at a time.
- That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

Torque is less of a movie then an 85 minute music video. And not a very good one at that. I had it on in the background while I did other things, and my limited attention was still more then enough to catch the massivly complicated plot. Not to mention the sophisticated dialog. To be honest, I bet you could count the number of words in the movie with more then two syllables on one hand.

But that doesn't even take into account the ending sequences, where the movie moves into laughably bad territory.

You can't change who people are without destroying who they were.

I ended up really enjoying The Butterfly Effect. The movie takes too long to get wound up, we spend too much time with kids is crappy situations early on, and too long with the strange blackouts keeping us from important parts of the story.

That said, once the interesting parts of the plot finally get going they make use of all that extra exposition. At least they do in the directors cut ending, which I found to be significantly better then the theatrical cut (more on this later.) The thing I'm most impressed with is the movie stands up to some basic scrutiny. Sure, if you go dig deeper there are some holes and chicken-egg scenarios that pop up but I think all of those are debatable. I didn't notice any clear cut errors in what they did, which is no small feat when time travel type things are involved.

The acting was fine but unremarkable. I suppose you could claim Ashton Kutcher's performance was remarkable, but only because we all had exceeding low expectations of him doing dramatic work (raising quality by lowering expectations...) I've heard complaints that the whole thing was hard to follow, but I didn't really get that. My big problem was that we really weren't given enough information at the start of the movie to get invested. I felt kind of half attached to the movie until the interesting stuff started happening, and I could easily have just given up on it and been switched off by the time they started delivering on all that exposition.

But the ending, oh the ending. I am so glad I didn't see this in a theater. The director's cut ending is, for me, unquestionably better then the theatrical ending. Without getting into spoilers, the directors cut ending is much tighter to the overall story and is where we know the movie must go. It's the truly self sacrificial thing that the theatrical ending just half-asses to let the audience feel better about the experience. I think my overall outlook on the movie would have dropped from "I enjoyed it" to "eh, not so much" if that was the only ending I'd been presented with - and I certainly would have had some more logical quibbles with the whole thing.

We're going to get drunk with Russell Crowe and beat the shit out of a kangaroo.

If the above line strikes you as an interesting way to describe a trip to Austrailia and you're not watching Entourage you need to be. It's ok if you don't have HBO, you can still find the first season on DVD. And judging by how great the second season is (playing on Sunday nights now) those DVD's won't be too far behind.

Seriously, this is my favorite show on TV right now, and it has some good competition...

- They say you can't be killed.
- Well, I wouldn't be bothering with the shield then, would I?

After a very long rafting day I got home last night and watched Troy. I wasn't expecting much, and I initially figured I'd need to go to bed long before it ended. But sure enough, the movie kept me up late. That's not really an endorsement of it's quality, but it is a positive note.

This movie started out great. It had good pacing and there was good stuff going on. But then it kind of lost it's way. It just felt clunky, like the timing was off. There would be too long a pause between lines of dialog, no cut scene when one was needed, too long a cutscene in another place. I actually almost gave up on it for the night at this point, but the quality from the start had me hooked (plus I couldn't remember my Greek mythology and was desperately trying to remember what was going to happen.)

The movie picked back up once the actual fighting and such started. From there on out it was pretty much on cruise control, with some well executed fight scenes and tragic developments.

Oddly enough, I think one of the biggest problems this movie had was Brad Pitt. The guy is a fine actor, but there are some things he just can't do, and really through no fault of his own. There were many moments in Troy when he's called upon to have a quiet furtive look, like he's pondering and angry all at the same time. But Brad's just too damn charming and good looking. It's what makes him a movie star, but limits him here.

Overall it wasn't all that bad, but certainly not great.

You can get out of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" but you can't get out from homosexuality is a sin.

I've really enjoyed the last two episodes of 30 Days, but after last week's I've spent some time thinking about bias and how it interacts with shows like this.

Two weeks ago the show had a conservative white christian guy live as an American Muslim for a month. Last week they had a conservative white christian guy live in the Gay Castro district of San Fransisco. Both of the esisodes followed similar themes, where the subject had negative stereotypes about the group he was exploring and then his experience helped him learn about the group, put a human face on them, and break those stereotypes. Both episodes had some great breakthrough moments. My favorite was when Ryan, the guy in the Castro district, was asked if he still felt gays in the military were a bad idea (he's an Army reservist.) Ryan said they were, but then his roommate Ed, who he had become friends with, asked if that policy extended to him. Now all of a sudden the question wasn't abstract to Ryan. It wasn't some faceless gay guy, it was his friend Ed, who Ryan thought would be a good soldier and a good addition to his unit. This gave Ryan "somthing to think about."

I really applaud moments like this. This is how stereotypes are broken and people learn to accept those that are different then them. We're all people, and we have more in common then we think. By actually getting to know someone who you originally thought would be totally different and foreign to you it makes it harder to blantantly judge all the people in that group.

But then I thought about it a bit more, and got a little uncomfortable. The warning flag for me was the whole thing felt too affirming, and that's usually a sign of some bias or prejudice. My trouble is that these stories always seem to be about conservatives who's eyes are opened to this whole other world of people they had previously written off. It makes us liberals feel all giddy inside, and reinforces our beliefs.

Are we really right though? (Before I continue, I want to make it absolutely clear I do not intend to answer that question, just ponder it a bit.) We like to think so, since we're the ones that are open to different and new things, and we have all this anecdotal evidence of conservatives becoming more open when faced with personal experience with new things. But how would we feel about this show: a liberal hippie from the Pacific Northwest goes and lives in South Carolina for 30 days with a conservative white christian family. Would us enlightened liberals think they have anything to teach our fellow, or would we expect the learning to still be the one way street the last two episodes of 30 days have shown.

I think we'd be surprised. Sure, us liberals claim we're all about openness and such, but we have our stereotypes too, and they typically aren't too kind to white conservative christian families - especially ones that live in the Bible Belt. I like to believe that people in general are fairly bright, and get what's going on around them. I believe we can all learn from each other. There's plenty of bright people who us progressives think are closed off and unaccepting, it would be silly to think they believe what they do just because they haven't been taught the true and correct way. So instead we should buy into our own rhetoric and ask why it is they feel the way they do? Is there value in holding on to our traditions and the way we've been in the past? Is all this acceptance we talk about something that fragments and deteriorates our society?

I think in the end, like most thing, the correct answer is about balance. As the parents of most teenagers can tell you, acceptance is a tricky thing. We'd like to accept people for their differences and let them be whatever they'd like, but at some point you have to recognize where acceptance of differences becomes acceptance of dysfunction (note: I am in no way even coming close to suggesting that being Muslim or Gay is dysfunctional.) So we have a group of conservatives that is slow to accept changes and differences. Then us progressives are cheering people on for being different. As a whole our societal level of acceptance moves to stay a sort of consensus between those groups.

There's certainly a trend though, and it's one of the key things that makes me feel confident about my progressive beliefs. It's clear to me that our societal consensus has consistently favored more acceptance over time. Decade after decage we become a more tolerant, open, and accepting society.

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