People who claim they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us. It's people who that they're good, anyway better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.


The lack of posts for the last few weeks is because I decided to take a real vacation. I've been bumming around Thailand with Kai, one of my best friends (we go way back to high school days.) I come back this week, and will get around to writing up a whole big thing about the trip - hopefully quicker than I did the New York write-up a few years ago - but for now I'll just talk about some of the things I used to pass the time while here. I can't spend all my time running around seeing cultural sites! Plus it's like 95 degrees and humid here in Bangkok and I'm happy to get out of the mid-afternoon sun for an extended visit to an air conditioned internet cafe.


Elizabethtown

I watched this quirky movie on the flight from LA to Hong Kong. It's mostly a dialog movie, which is good, because the screens on the airplane kind of sucked. It's bad though because the audio wasn't much better, though everything was understandable. Wait, I should clarify: I heard all the words, why some of the characters were doing the things they were doing wasn't always so clear - but they were a bit crazy so I guess that covers it.

Kirsten Dunst plays a girl who is quirky and upbeat to the point she would clearly be annoying in real life but is kind of fascinating on screen, and Orlando Bloom spends most of the movie in a confused daze, almost as if he's drugged (which, in a way, he is.) They're an odd pair, and most of the time I just wanted them to get on with it - they do a lot of stalling and deflecting. Still, it's a cute, quirky movie with great music. It certainly worked to help pass the time on the 14 hour flight.


Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities

Most of you probably don't know that I was in a fraternity in college. This meant I was at least involved in the greek world and I was friends with lots of girls in sororities. Granted, greek life at Cal Poly was pretty tame, and my fraternity used to joke that we were the "revenge of the nerds" fraternity (as you might gather from the slick website.) But still, it's a window into the world.

Pledged describes a much more intense world than anything that was at Poly. The author talks about sororities in the South, where they are an institution. Initially, from reading the book jacket I thought it would be just a tale of the ugly things that happen in sororities - and it is that. But it's more too. The author follows four real girls through a year of their sorority experiences. She tells a personal story, and then intercuts that with chapters giving background about the issues that came up in the girl's lives. The structure works remarkably well and the book covers all kinds of issues from eating disorders to racism.

My biggest take away, and what I remember from my greek experience, is people can change a lot when they're inside a group. Groups have their own culture, and naturally exert pressure on the members to become that culture. Almost all the greeks I met at school were nice interesting people. But those same people, when they were with their fraternity brothers or Sorority sisters, were all of a sudden people I didn't like at all.

Deciding if you want to be in a fraternity is about deciding if you like how the group behaves when it's together as a group, not deciding that you like some of the guys. There's lots of destructive groups out there (perhaps more than there are constructive groups?) and Pledged lets us see into some of them.


Wicked: The Life and Time of the Wicked Witch of the West

I was excited for this book, since I'd heard lots of good things about it, and the concept seemed so great. Who can resist the story of the Wicked Witch of the West, told from her perspective?

Alas, it turns out that I can. It was hard for me to pinpoint exactly why I didn't like this book much as I was reading. But on reflection I came up with a couple of reasons.

The key is that the author just doesn't want to explain things. He sort of hints at things, like he wants people to read his book and then spend hours talking about it in passionate debate that will add meaning to their lives (this is supported by including 14 questions/talking points in a "readers group guide" at the end.) I find this kind of arrogant. It really felt like he was being intentionally obtuse for the sake of style, but I didn't think his story was good enough or interesting enough to warrant that - so the whole thing turned me off. I certainly don't want to spend time afterwards talking about what the witch's green skin signifies...

Similarly, the witch turns out to be a little crazy. She's not evil, she's just an anti-social, radical activist who never really lets anyone in her life. The bad thing is we don't get in her life either. We're always watching things though the characters around her, trying to figure out what she's thinking or why she's so adamant about things. I suppose this is part of the literary style (look! She doesn't let anyone in, not even the audience! Wow!) but I didn't really find it enjoying.

Lastly the book was just hard to read from a world standpoint (disclaimer: the only Oz stuff I know about is the movie, I know there is much cannon on the world.) It's full of Oz slang and geography and names and animals and religions (oh, the endless fictional discussions about fictional religious that are only explained through context, ug.) It just makes it a harder read.

But now as I just totally unloaded on the book, it's important to note that it's not *that* bad. It's a fine book, but it had many things that annoyed me, and they all combined to annoy me a lot. It's sort of like all those annoyances stacked up, and there was nothing that stood out as really cool, so they didn't get cancelled out.

It does make me want to watch the movie again, but mostly just so I can see if they were consistent with the source material in reimagining the story.


Random Movies

Since Sukhothai is a pretty slow town we had time in the evenings to kill, and watched two pirated movies on the house TV (they were in the guest house library.) The Man on the Moon is a great biopic on Andy Kaufman, a comedian that seemed to do acts not for the benefit of his audience, but for his own benefit. It didn't matter if the audience thought something was funny or not, it mattered if Andy and his friends thought it was funny. I think this works better in movie form that it did when he performed these stunts life, because now we get to be on the friends laughing about it from the inside. We also watched Pirates of the Caribbean, mostly because the sequel is coming this summer and I wanted to watch the original again, and might as well do that here when I have time to kill. The problem here is we didn't see the end and the disc was pretty screwed up (things are cheap over here, but the standard "you get what you pay for" rule still holds up.) Lastly, on the seven hour bus ride to Bangkok they showed two movies. The audio for both was in Thai, but I casually watched them anyway. The first was some Thai horror movie that it the bloodiest movie I've ever seen (yes, bloodier that Kill Bill and Sin City.) I think at least half the movie was just one creative new gory death scene after another. Then was a the real theatrical gem, Komodo Vs Cobra. This was an American movie that near as I can tell was made for TV. It was dubbed in Thai, but that didn't stop Kai and I from making up dialog as we went along. It starred two laughably bad giant CGI beats, a komodo dragon and a cobra, killing people on some remote jungle island in the pacific. They didn't even try on this movie. My two favorite parts: when a guy standing right behind the cobra during an extended feeding sequence and fires at least 50 shots out of his semi-automatic pistol (creating no reaction at all from the cobra mind you.) Then there was a supposed US military base that looked like a small office building, and the commander had a "Customer Service" motivation poster behind his desk.


That's it for now. I've had a great time over here, but I'm happy to be on my way home on Wednesday.

Anonymous Question at Company Meeting: Should we invest our entire 401K in Enron stock?
Company Executive: Absolutely! Don't you guys think?
Other Company Executives: [Nods Affirmatively]

Wow, did Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room piss me off. I already knew there was a lot of crap that went on in that company, but I didn't quite realize how much of a ponzi scheme the whole thing was.

Before I get sidetracked ranting about the corporation in general, I feel I should talk about how the movie is as a movie. I think it was good, but not great. I think my core issue is the movie had thesis statement problems. They had a baseline thesis: this company was strong on gree, short on morals, and setup in a way that checks and balances failed - causing lots of problems. But they don't really stick to it. They stray and hint at other things all the time. The talk about the Bush family relationship with Enron. They talk about low level workers who got screwed. They talk about how Enron manipulated the California energy market. It had the feel to me of a scenario where the filmmakers had enough evidence to clearly say something, but wanted to say more, they just couldn't back it all up. They clearly said the things the could back up (that thesis statement) and then hinted at all the other stuff. This kind of hinting doesn't sit well with me, because it sets off my propaganda sniffer.

It was a good movie, and very interesting, but I'm not sure if it was deserving of it's Best Documentary Oscar nomination. There are better documentaries out there, but not many that will anger you like this one (which, I suppose, makes it an effective documentary.)

Now I'll move on to my rants about the company. Oddly enough, they suffer from a lot of the same things that the movie does. They're just not that focused. I have lots of things I'm pissed about, and lots of thoughts related to all that, but there's no ovarall theme to them.

The focus on the stock price in the company is a big one. This is a company that was ruled by the stock price. It's almost like that was their primary purpose as a business - make the stock go up. The executives preached it, and it was the mantra all the way down. Interestingly enough, that's not only why the company failed (more on this in a bit) but why it failed so spectacularly. The company had been living a lie for years, claiming untrue things and bullying people to keep the stock price going up. It was the immense wealth made possible by this growth that incentivised both Enron, and all their checks and balances, to do the ridiculous things they did. Eventually the world caught up with them and the house of cards came crashing down.

We heard a lot of stories as Enron callapsed about regular blue collar employees who's retirements were destroyed by the whole thing (plenty of white collar people got screwed too, but they aren't as attractive to news crews.) I had sympathy for these people, but at the same time they were playing a risky business. They had a major investment (their retirement funds) that was not only homogenious, but invested entirely in their employer. This is bad. You should diversify major investments, and in general, not have them be tied to your employer (this adds resiliency to your finances.) Instead these people chose to take part in the gold rush, and got screwed.

Sure, the executives did bad things. But this was still clearly risky behavior, even if everything had been on the level. And it bugs me when people claim these people didn't know any better, as if due to their simplistic blue collar ways they aren't capable of understanding basic finances (that always seemed elitist and insulting.) But then I saw the movie, and I saw the Enron executives clearly tell people it was a good idea to invest their entire 401K account in Enron stock. This is ridiculous advice, especially coming from an Enron executive to an Enron employee. But I understand how an employee might trust it and be inclined to follow it. Of all the despicable things I saw in this movie, that one line angered me the most.

Overall a company like Enron is doomed to fail. They don't produce anything. As a company they don't add value any where. Their entire business plan involved trading energy. They didn't create energy. They didn't do something to the energy market to make it more efficient. They just bought and sold it. They didn't add value to the process.

People ocassionaly give me a hard time about where I work. We're called the evil empire and it seems like a good chunk of the world thinks we make crappy software (news flash: making software is hard! Have you used much that wasn't written by Microsoft? A lot of it is crap.) But the one things I know is I add value. I'm involved in producing something that I know people will appreciate.

This is incredibly important to me. I couldn't work at a place like Enron. I'd wonder what I was actually doing, what I was making better.

It's clean, like my conscience.

In my effort to be a better movie nerd I've been trying to go back and watch classics that I've never seen. I mostly use Roger Ebert's great movies lists for this, and that's how I came to watch Taxi Driver this weekend.

This is one of those movies that is masterfully made, but I just didn't like it that much. Yeah, we get to see some seedy underbelly parts of New York in the 70's. Yeah, we get to see a great perfomance by DeNiro. But his character is a disturbed, dysfunctional guy who's incredibly lonely and can't seem to take a right step when dealing with people around him. He's not really someone I want to spend two hours of my life watching, it's not that interesting to me.

What is super interesting is seeing all the big names in this movie. Robert DeNiro, Jodie Foster, Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepher, and Albert Brooks (the first time I've seen him in a non-comedic role.) That part I'll admit was fun. I almost turned the movie off halfway though, but stuck it out mostly because I wanted to see Keitel's and Foster's roles near the end.

The art of good business is being a good middle man

I think they screwed up the audio mixing on the Layer Cake DVD. I had a terribly hard time watching this movie and understanding the dialog. The audio dialog was mixed way lower than the general sounds, so the dialog was often drowned out by the music or general movie sounds coming in on the other channels. It didn't help that my reeiver had somehow messed up the audio settings (I typically have my center channel louded by the receiver, it was the same as the other channels.) And it really didn't help that there were lots of fast talking guys with strong accents in this movie. I actually turned on the english subtitles about half way through, that helped a lot.

Now it's hard for me to figure out if I really like the movie that much. Since I spent a lot of it trying to figure out what was going on. For the first half I was focused on trying to understand the dialog, and the second half I was reading it. This doesn't mesh well with a stylized movie like Layer Cake. They kept doing overpowering sound effects which annoyed me in the first half (since they caused me to not hear the dialog or narration) and I couldn't really absorb the tricky visual stuff in the second half because I was reading subtitles. I would have liked this movie much more with better audio mixing.

That's not to say I didn't like it. I did. It's anonther one of these criminal thrillers where a bunch of people are all trying to be clever and the audience is trying to figure out who's going to be most clever - hint: typically the main character. There are some strange tangents, most notably with a girl that I didn't really see a point to but to add sex appeal and extra tragedy. And it's sometimes hard to keep track of all the different gangsters and their relationships with each other, but it's still fun to watch.

Just another story about a criminals who don't act like criminals most of the time. If anything, that's what this movie is about. For this guy, drugs are just business, and he's a good middle man.

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