Yeah, I read the reviews, which is a significant part of why I waited so long to see it. Now that I have, let's talk about

27/2597. Babylon (2022)

I adore writer/director Damien Chazelle's La La Land. I like old movies. In fact, I probably prefer them. I'm familiar enough with their work to recognize the pastiches of Clara Bow and John Gilbert and Ana May Wong. I've read Hollywood Babylon and Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks. This movie is aimed squarely at people like me. And I didn't care for it.

The narrative, scattered as it is, is at its core the same story as The Artist or, even more explicitly, Singing in the Rain. But it actually has more in common with Citizen Kane, by which I mean Chazelle has reworked the legends of sordid Hollywood stories into a stylish (and mean-spirited) fictional history morality play. And like the epics of yesteryear, it's also too long, containing too many shots that seem to be in there just because someone didn't want to admit to wasting the money they spent filming them. Here you really feel the length because of how uncomfortable it is to spend time with any of the scenarios or characters. Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie are the stars, but the minority characters are more engaging, if only because the racist system pushes them out before it can grind them down.

To be clear, Babylon is impressively well made (even if by its nature it can't help but feel derivative), but its core problem is that it was made for an audience of one. It feels as if Chazelle is exploring for himself whether the Hollywood Magic is a Faustian bargain, and his ultimate answer, appropriate for someone the film medium has already made a star, is an unsatisfying "yes and no." If anything, the real lesson here is that just as you can't make a war film without glorifying war, you can't criticize Old Hollywood by repeating all its worst excesses.

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I tell you something else I heard, and I think about this, because at one time science said, man came from apes. Did it not? If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it.

The ex-bobsledder has a point. Who needs apes anymore? Mankind is way better at swinging in trees and foraging for insects than those other primates. God only keeps apes around so humans will have something to laugh at in zoos. Stupid monkeys!

Well, I'm sold. Anyone who can manage thoughts that deep is certainly qualified to be a U.S. Senator.

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Welcome to the 15th Annual Wriphe.com Batman and Football Month, now with 80% less football! Past Septembers have included travelogues of my adventures attending UGA football games in Athens, GA, (and occasionally elsewhere around the South), but there will be none of that this year. (Thanks COVID-19!)

I find I'm not excited about football this year. I mean, I haven't been excited about anything the Miami Dolphins have offered in decades, but college football is usually another story. My ennui is probably COVID's fault, too. What is there to get excited about when everything we've seen in the past six months points to a significant disruption in schedule? Do I really need entertainment so badly that I'm willing to watch football players get sick and die needlessly for the sake of a game?

The Big Ten, Pac-12, Mid-American, and Mountain West conferences have all decided that the risk to fans and players alike is too great to play football in 2020, but the SEC is pushing ahead despite already having the highest percentage of cases per population (31 per 100k) of any football region in the country. As I've already said, I won't be attending. "It Just Means Moreâ„ " makes a fine motto, but let's not get carried away.

Maybe I'm just a snowflake. Maybe everything will turn out fine. It might happen. Sh'yeah. And monkeys might fly out of my butt.

In the meantime, I'll be following the advice of a billionaire philanthropist who doesn't have a financial interest in selling me football tickets.

It's easier for him. His parents are dead.

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While I've been lately filling this blog with movies that I've watched for the first time, that doesn't mean that I don't watch movies that I've previously seen. For example, this past weekend, I re-watched 3 movies.

Even though I'm a snob, not everything I watch is highbrow. Take, for example, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I doubt that I've seen this movie in more than 20 years, although my brother owned both the video cassette and soundtrack. To be honest, I cannot remember liking this movie when it was new, watching it in a theater in Lithonia, GA. Re-watching the other day brought back mostly bad memories of my high school years. Nineteen-ninety was not a good year for me.

TMNT was clearly intended to be a kids' movie — it represents "big, dumb summer action" at its worst, and the soundtrack is so dated it ought to be wearing Hammer pants — but the puppetry is still captivating, especially when you think that these days there is NO WAY that a studio would do the turtles in anything other than CGI. While I suspect that next summer's remake will look better, I doubt it will have half as much heart. It seems to me that the remake is missing an opportunity if it doesn't find a way to include Sam Rockwell, who I was flabbergasted to see had a speaking part in the original.

Everyone who knows me knows that occasionally I open my mouth when I should really know better. In 1996, I vociferously complained that there was no way that a movie about a talking pig could be worth a Best Picture Oscar nomination. My girlfriend at the time told me I should withhold my opinion about Babe until I had seen it, so we watched it on limited re-released at the now-defunct Lefont Toco Hills Theater. I was wrong; Babe is a timeless classic. She was right about a lot of things. That's probably why I broke up with her.

(Not every movie decision she made was right, though. She realized that she had made a mistake talking me into seeing Nine Months. There is a scene in that movie in which commitment-phobe Hugh Grant fantasizes that Julianne Moore has become a giant praying mantis who plans to eat him after coitus. Upon seeing that, I swore off sex, and that proved to be a bit of a problem for her.)

I was channel surfing after lunch and caught the beginning of Grosse Point Blank, so I went ahead watched it. I have no memory of the first time I saw this film; I suspect that it was watched at the AMC North Dekalb Mall 16, which was the theater my friends and I attended the most often around that time. (Side note: I applied to be one of the inaugural employees when they were constructing that theater and was hired, but I didn't make it through training. As I recall, the management team didn't quite have its act together yet, and I decided that I didn't want to wait for them to figure it out because I needed a paycheck asap. I went to work selling calendars for the bookstore inside the mall instead.)

About the time that John Cusack's character screws up the courage to approach Minnie Driver for the first time in 10 years, Mom came into the room. We discovered that we both liked the movie but for different reasons. I liked the comedy and action, mom liked the nostalgia and romance. I credit this multifaceted awesomeness for the film's enduring popularity. It probably remains my favorite John Cusack film (although I do love One Crazy Summer). It's definitely my favorite Joan Cusack film.

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Movies, week of May 13-19.

120. The Triplets of Belleville (2003)
I liked the way this movie looked, but I enjoyed it even more after I discussed it with my brother who had coincidentally also watched it last week. It is in all ways broader than Sylvain Chomet's follow-up, The Illusionist (more caricature, a wider scope of humor and drama, less bound by reality), but less deep. Don't get me wrong: it's good. It's just a different sort of movie.

121. Bikini Beach (1964)
Mom loves these beach movies, but she had to admit that this one is not very good, even by the standards of the genre. Drag racing, driving monkeys, and a parody of the British Invasion (with Frankie Avalon in two roles!) combine to put you to sleep.

122. Get Yourself a College Girl (1964)
The skimpy plot was right out of an Elvis movie, and like an Elvis movie, the plot only served to link the musical segments. I think the highlight was Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto performing "The Girl from Ipanema." I love that song.

123. Down to Earth (2001)
The movie, based firmly on Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait, is just an excuse to shoehorn some Chris Rock stand-up routines into an extra paycheck. Funny, but unnecessary.

124. Grandma's Boy (2006)
My friend Chris loves this film about the semi-complicated life of a video game tester. In its own way, it's just like my mother's beach movies: a simple, unrealistic story designed to be something to hang some jokes and good times on in order to kill a few hours of time. Differnet generation, same concept.

125. The Lost Squadron (1932)
More Richard Dix! The climax of this film about former WWI pilots-turned-Hollywood stuntmen forces the protagonists to do something completely stupid for no apparent reason other than provide a dramatic ending to the story. Very disappointing.

126. The Phenix City Story (1955)
My grandmother was from Columbus, Georgia, and frequently called Phenix City, Alabama, as "the wrong side of the tracks." This movie explains why. It is surprisingly entertaining to watch some of the stupidest gangsters ever ruin their own racket by being really, recklessly stupid.

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Three things I learned from the internet:

Lesson 1: Sea-Monkeys® support hate. Harold von Braunhut, the man who in 1957 began marketing brine shrimp -- specifically a patented hybrid involving Artemia salina, used his fortune to support the Aryan Nation. This despite the fact that von Braunhut was born an ethnic Jew. Note: other than Sea-Monkeys, von Braunhut literally holds patents for, among other things, X-Ray Cameras and an aquarium watch. ("A wearer of such a timepiece is then able to contemporaneously tell time and enjoy watching the aquatic pets." Thank you, Google Patents!)

Lesson 2: Eat dolphins and die. Further investigation into the life cycle of the brine shrimp accidentally led me to discover that the Japanese annually hunt dolphins. Many in the East consider dolphin meat to be a delicacy, and the hunting of dolphins continues despite the fact that they frequently contain more than 10 times the legal Japanese allowable tolerance of mercury. Note: Mercury poisoning is blamed for many neurological conditions, one of which may be developing a taste for dolphin meat.

Lesson 3: Mormons control the world's fish supply. Utah is among the world's foremost suppliers of brine shrimp (at one time controlling up to 90% of the market), as the Great Salt Lake is an ideal breeding ground for the little critters. (The brine shrimp is, in fact, the largest animal living in the saline lake.) Commercially, brine shrimp are used as food for birds and farmed aquatic life, biomedical experimentation, and, of course, pets. Brine shrimp fishing on the Great Salt Lake has its own lobby, the Utah Artemia Association, that relies on the tiny organism for life support like a tapeworm. Note: despite their nearly microscopic size, brine shrimp can carry and transmit real tapeworms.

If I can learn all of this, quite by accident, in 5 minutes on the internet, I believe that this clearly demonstrates that it is finally time to stop throwing away money on public education. I never learned anything as interesting or useful in my high school French classes. (What did I learn in French?
Je ne sais pas.)

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Headlines across the internet are screaming about a chimpanzee named Travis that went bananas and mauled a family friend. I first noticed the story when I flipped past MSNBC, which had apparently had enough of reporting the terrible news from Wall Street ("DOW in Bottomless Free Fall!" "Automakers Beg for $20 Billion More!" "New Investment Scammer Revealed!") today and turned to an in-depth investigation of the case of the crazy chimp.

Travis was apparently treated like a member of the family for over a decade, even joining the family at the dinner table. (Which makes the owner's reported screams of "Just shoot him!" make me wonder how she treats her real children.) Every incident report about the situation includes something similar to "he appeared in advertisements for Coca-Cola." I'm sure that the suits at Coke never considered their association with a sociopathic chimp when they were casting for the part of star Coke-swilling monkey: "Kill Humans! Drink Coke! Ahhhhhh!"

Now, I'm no fan of the primate. ("They're like little, furry people," supporters say, and that's exactly why I hate them.) But, I don't really think this is that big a story, people. It just seems to me like we're looking for something other than the now-commonplace bad economic news. So we've turned to "Monkey Mauls Man" as escapist fantasy.

I mean, who didn't see this coming? Animals snap all the time. (If it were a human, we'd say they "went postal" or whatever phrase is en vogue these days.) We've all seen Planet of the Apes, Monkey Shines, and The Wizard of Oz. We've all read The Monkey's Paw, The Jungle Book, and Curious George. We're all familiar with >shudder< Gleek.

They may seem friendly, start out as "helpers," but soon they're going through the garbage, cooking methamphetamine over your stove, and beating the hell out of your loved ones. Monkeys are bad news. Always have been, always will be. Stay away, people, stay away. Let global warming do it's job.

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I had a crappy day. I woke up very early (for me), paid to gas up my car ($50!), and drove to work where I spent the better part of 8 hours arguing with an Apple Mac that had none of the software to complete any of the tasks that I was given. (I once thought that Macs sucked. They are worse than that, they're evil. What designer decided "let's see what we can make those monkeys do with just one button!"?) When the software was right, the hardware was wrong. In those rare cases where the software and hardware were in alignment, some other piece of critical information was missing. All around fun, I tell you.

Meanwhile, my co-worker was busy appearing in the local business center newsletter and receiving praise for the "great job" he's doing. Schmuck. I've known this guy for almost 20 years, and I can count the number of pictures I've seen of him on one hand. I was beginning to think that he was a vampire. But you give him one Certificate of Merit, and he starts mugging for the camera like he's won Publishers Clearing House. Gee whiz. Maybe you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Anyway, I've decompressed by spending the last few hours watching humorous and notable game show clips on Youtube. If I've learned one thing, it's that Drew Carey will never be Bob Barker, no, siree, Bob.

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I would like to go on record as saying that Vonage has the worst television advertisements in the history of recorded man. Essentially, their commercials boil down to the simple phrase, "idiots and criminals use our product!" Now, I'm all for the peer-pressure approach to mass marketing, but I really think that Vonage has done something wrong here.

Vonage's previous marketing campaign, something that can only be called the "Hey, look! Things are happening in the world that are much more interesting than our sales pitch" sales pitch, was bad enough. But now their ads feature an orange-painted van, some cross between the Scooby-Doo Mystery Machine and B. A. Baracas' A-Team fortress, driving by and hitting people in the heads with pizza boxes like some twisted Grand Theft Auto side-mission. (I'm sure these pop references are intentional, as Vonage is trying desperately to reach people like me who are computer literate and have a, shall we say, invested interest in popular culture.) While this would seem to be a step in the right direction, rising from "please ignore our product" to "assault and battery," the recipients of the products are always the lowest common denominators of society: the stupid, clueless, or criminally stupid or clueless.

Some people will tell you that the purpose of television advertisement is to simply get the name of your product stuck in the heads of potential buyers so that when the time comes, they think of your product. And, granted, most people don't think about the commercials on tv, their eyes simply glaze over as they wait for bumper music to tell them that Wife Swap is coming back in seconds. (I had a roommate once — hi, Jason! — who had the uncanny ability to perfectly time all commercial breaks in his head. We'd be watching something and he'd channel surf during commercial breaks. I'd always get nervous about returning from commercials and missing the cliffhanger resolution, but he'd always click back exactly as the show was coming back. Really, I think it qualified as a super-power. I'm sure that he'd make a fascinating case study for some up-and-coming Raleigh St. Clair. As a result of this ability, however, he NEVER watched tv commercials and had no memory of any ads.) However, I think this approach to television marketing is too simplified. What you don't want your customers to do is to think about how they don't like the message that your sending.

Take, for example, the recent Visa ad where a well-oiled machine of holiday shoppers wanders in lock-step through a cafeteria line until some well meaning but unenlightened individual pays with cash instead of his Visa card and the entire operation is halted in its tracks as the cashier fumbles with change. Visa, while everyone does wish for smooth transactions, telling them that they are robots when they use your card isn't going to endear yourself to anyone's use. Mindless automatons hate to be reminded that they *are* mindless automatons.

Vonage is trying to hit that same market that Quiznos tried to tap with those two talking rat-toejam things a few years ago. (I once heard them described as Mr. Potato Rats, but I think they are officially called spongmonkeys.) As Quiznos soon learned, having unidentifiable rodents pitch for your sandwiches is a bad idea, even if it does get people to recognize your product. I haven't eaten at Quiznos since, and for the same reason, I won't even consider using Vonage: I just don't want to be among the people who respond positively to your bad advertising. (On a related note, Quiznos recently ran ads calling prime rib the "king of steaks," which so angered my father, I got an hour long lecture on cuts of meat. Needless to say, he's not eating a Quiznos, either. Related note number 2: It may come as no surprise that an Executive Vice-President of Marketing for Quiznos was recently arrested for soliciting an underaged girl for sex. Clearly Quiznos' marketing department has a hard time figuring out what their target demographics should be.)

Why do I mention all of this? No reason, really. I just hate those Vonage ads.

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Why wasn't Mr. T ever asked to join the Justice League? He's stronger than Superman, wittier than Aquaman, dresses better than Hawkman, and has more wealth around his neck than Batman has secured in the batcave. And he really, really cared about saving the children.

Not to mention the fact that T had experience in the field of super-heroics. He had his own cartoon and his own group of super gymnasts who fought crime. (Come to think of it, everyone on children's TV of the late 70s/early 80s seemed to have their own crime solving group. It sure seems like TV is telling me that I should be part of a crime solving posse. Or I should be committing crimes for a crime solving posse to solve?)

Clearly the Super Friends could have used the diversity. They let Black Vulcan in just because he had the word "black" in his name. (Apparently, space monkeys didn't qualify as an ethnic minority in the eyes of Uncle Sam's anti-discrimination laws.) Seems to me that Mister T was much more qualified than Black Vulcan.

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