It's Alive!

RestartWell, I've been sick quite a while now, but I'm feeling better and getting ready to go back to doing/posting stuff.

With that in mind, here is a filler post to help get old stuff off the front page.

American Automakers and the Left

Tiring ShitI am so damn sick of hearing all this pro-Detroit propaganda from the left in the lead-up to the (regrettably necessary) bailout of the pathetic American car industry.

Personally I think of it as a short-term jobs program; we're not paying 30+ billion (or 15 now, more later, or whatever they come up with) to make cars, we're paying 30+ billion to keep the biggest resevoir of old labor in work until the Obama admin is forced to nationalize the 'BIG 3' (god what an annoying nickname) and turn their companies toward making something... anything... that we actually need.

Trains? Buses? Actual fuel efficient vehicles? (the Volt doesn't count and is a myth, more on that later)

We retooled the auto industry before, in World War II. They made great planes, terrible tanks, but basically, they made what we (thought) we needed, and they made a lot of it in a hurry. Under competent leadership there's no reason they can't be expected to make a decent product again.

The issue here is management. Make absolutely no mistake; we cannot trust the current morons at the top of the BIG 3 to do anything right. They've been fighting higher CAFE standards for years, they've been preventing California from regulating carbon emissions (because the Bush administration won't), and most famously, they beat down California's desperate, literally gasping effort to force them to manufacture *any* decent, high-efficiency vehicles so that their citizens wouldn't have to choke to death on carbon emissions. (Naturally Bush lent a hand with that one too)

Destroying the EV-1 was just the icing on the cake. GM's head tool Wagoner claims he feels just awful about that now. Riiiight. That makes it all better. (though apparently he did accept that his own poor decisions are to blame for the lead the Japanese automakers have in actual hybrid technology.. why is he still employed, again?)

While the Japanese companies aren't free of sin on these matters either, note that they capitulate to the will of the people on things like CAFE, while our AMERICAN companies subverted democracy using the Bush junta and the courts to stay in the big SUV business as long as possible.

Obama, to his credit, got out in front of this issue long before he was the President-in-all-but-Name, though I disagree with his idea to, for example, let bigger vehicles slide a bit on fuel economy ratings (that would only encourage people to buy, well, overly large cars).

The institutional culture at the American automakers is *sick*. Profit at any cost, style entirely over substance, and when they cannot compete, they simply double down on bad ideas (SUVs, Hummers/H-2s, etc).

At no point does our national security concern them, nor our health and environment. Ultra-capitalists might respond, 'Why should it?' Well, for one thing, if their cars destroy our environment and ruin our health... we won't be around to purchase them in the future, will we?

The best response for this line of argument, though, is simply historical. The automakers won every battle on pollution and regulation; they got to destroy the EV-1, they got to sell as many fuel-guzzlers as they could make, they got to keep the ludicrously low CAFE standards, they had the full might of the federal government brought to bear to beat states that, in their naive embrace of democracy, sought a better future for their citizens... in short, they operated the full Ferengi business model for the last 30 years.

What did that get them? They were all going bankrupt BEFORE THE CURRENT CRISIS, that's what. Ford, GM and Chrysler, destroyed themselves with their own lack of foresight and terrible business decisionmaking.

It really isn't hard to understand the plight of the American automakers. They made lousy cars that fell apart and cost a fortune to maintain for thirty straight years. They responded slowly to market forces, lagging behind their competitors, especially wherever efficiency and reliability were concerned. They gorged at the glut of SUVs and H2s and super large trucks, a glut that relied on a temporary abundance of very cheap oil... which the automakers relied on to last forever.

As if oil is a renewable resource, or OPEC a bunch of powerless buffoons.

Ask yourself: who do you know who drives American cars and *likes* it?

My family always bought American cars, and they almost always came to regret it. My stepdad has had a series of GM cars over the last decade, and they always suffer from mysterious sensor failures that require them to spend extended periods in the shop, at great expense.

Nothing actually breaks, mind you; it's the sensor. (I wonder when GM will cut the randomness out of it and make the sensors activate according to their stock price; whenever they drop more than 5%, sensor-powers-activate! and thus the revenue kicks up)

My dad had a series of abysmal Dodge cars, particularly a Talon that was tiny, cramped, and riddled with engine troubles; I drove a used Chrysler that broke down 13 times in one year. Et Cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

The best American car anyone in my family has ever owned is an old Dodge Caravan I still have as a used car. It's falling apart but refuses to die despite being over twenty years old... but even it was defective when it was driven off the lot, as they used bad primer on all the Caravans of that era (which led to a later recall that my grandfather, who originally drove this van, didn't take advantage of for some reason. You still see lots of dodge vans on the road with the same distinct pattern of paint peeling from that era to this day. An otherwise solid vehicle that will always suffer from a bad reputation as a result of cheap paint. Nice.)

There's a happy ending though; my father purchased a shiny new Prius a few years ago, and has had nothing but driving bliss ever since. He claims to get an average of 50 mpg, and can drive from his home in Indiana to Alabama for vacations on one tank of gas.

You see this same, sad story wherever you look. Automakers haven't just destroyed their brand; they stomped it into the ground, set it on fire, and pissed on the ashes.

Even in a friendly forum, you get this same litany of complaints. I was actually shocked, way back in November, to see how quickly the comments on a post about whether or not to save the auto industry, on a BIG 3 friendly liberal site, turned into a bitchfest about American cars.

But it did.

Even the author, who worked FOR the American automakers for years, won't drive American -- they love a particular Honda to death (like a classic romance, the very type of foreign car they were supposed to analyze so the Americans could copy and corrupt it).

It's like a comedy of errors, when even your natural allies can no longer overlook your decades of greed and excess.

Here, have some handy examples from Left Blogistan:

A man who found an American car he liked -- until they canceled the model (no worries though, he could always buy a big truck!)

Another person who drives German cars -- because they never break on him, not after years of driving.

A prominent writer for the site who hasn't driven American for 30 years because they suck -- and would only buy American as a masochistic last ditch to save the industry

On and on and on.

The question isn't how can we save the American auto industry. The question is; how can we save them from themselves?

An Evening with Mr. Campbell

His Name is BruceWednesday night, the roomie and I went to see My Name is Bruce at the Sundance Cinema in yuppie Hilldale. Afterward, there was a Q&A session with Mr. Bruce Campbell himself, making it quite the special moviegoing occasion.

First, a little about the film: My Name is Bruce is a satirical horror-comedy, a style/genre that has gained a lot of visibility and credibility since the groundbreaking Shaun of the Dead. (Dark Reel, another great example of this trend, was the big winner at The Dark Carnival film festival this year.)

Of the three, Bruce is probably the lightest in tone and the least 'serious'. Semi-autobiographical, the film shows an exasperated and impoverished B-Movie star (Campbell) struggling to get through the days, succumbing to despair, debauchery and truly grotesque amounts of cheap whiskey, until a deseprate young fan unleashes an ancient Chinese war god on his town and seeks Campbell out to save everyone (just like he does in the movies).

The movie is quite snarky and biting when it comes to the issue of obsessive fans, which made it all the more interesting to be paired with a Q&A session sure to attract... lots of Bruce Campbell's more obsessive fans. The whole experience could get pretty 'meta', as the roommate would say (and did, if I recall correctly).

Besides Bruce Campbell, the movie is mostly full of new faces/unknowns, with the exception of Ted Raimi, who plays three different roles (including a potentially dicey Chinese-American stereotype by the name of Wing). Despite being a movie that gives the fans a hard time, it's loaded with fan-pleasing cameos from previous Bruce Campbell movies (and Sam Raimi pictures) in the Evil Dead trilogy, some of whose characters... explicitly talk about their previous roles in these other movies.

So you've got a bit of a snake eating its own tail thing.

Anyway, long story short, Bruce, in Bruce, has to get over his self-loathing and despondency to, in half-assed fashion, save a small town from an inept monster (Guan-Di, who is supposedly based on an actual Chinese war god/legend, who, and this is critical to the plot... was also the God of Bean Curd. Right.)

(Also of note is the movie's use of music; not unlike Dead and Breakfast, yet another great horror-comedy, Bruce features a number of plot-advancing songs and musical numbers where cast members directly address the audience.)

The end result is a hilarious, nonsensical, rambling, raving movie, bouncing from one scene to the next, never taking itself too seriously, and always giving you a chance to laugh. It's difficult to describe it any more precisely than that; this is what I sometimes call a 'cotton-candy' movie... it goes by so fast, and you enjoy it thoroughly, but it sort of melts/disappears into your memory after the fact.

(I will say that Mr. Campbell must be incredibly self-confident to make a movie so much at his own expense. Then again, this is a man who proudly refers to himself as a B-movie actor.)

After the movie, Campbell came out and took questions for quite a while, and he is incredibly funny and quick in person. Sometimes the questioners were pretty snarky themselves, and he always took it with humility, without ever being a pushover.

For instance, someone asked him about whether he was doing the Old Spice commercials just for the money (he said of course he was, that they paid very well and he'd rub 'that smelly crap' all over himself for the cash). Another person asked if there were any movies he wished he'd never done, which led Campbell to play a game with the audience, where he'd turn his back and people could yell out movies he'd acted in that they'd like refunds for.

He couldn't even get turned around before someone mentioned Congo.

Campbell readily admitted that Congo, as well as some of his other movies, were unwatchable; he noted that Congo had such an impressive pedigree that no one thought it would suck when he signed up though, featuring as it did many of Steven Spielberg's technical collaborators, based on a book by then-megahit author Michael Crichton, etc. "They just forgot to hire a director!" according to Campbell.

At the same time, when he felt that someone was being unfair (like when an audience rudely asked whether he did Burn Notice just for the money, a show that he's actually quite proud of), he was willing to fight back (that particular jerk got called, well... a 'jerk', by Mr. Campbell. Rightly so too. There's a thing called etiquette in these situations).

He talked at length about the process of making the movie (the entire fictional town was built as a backlot on his Oregon property), casting and directing a small budget film, (Ted Raimi is great because he works so cheap for example, or the horrors that can befall a small cast, say from poison oak in a hastily built mountain town), the difficulties of working in Hollywood, demand for making new versions/sequels of your past successes, and the like. At times it almost seemed like he had a rehearsed answer for everything (which led an audience member to ask if he in fact had any more ready made answers to common questions, which was a funny moment that didn't phase him in the least).

Still, even for topics that he could never have anticipated (like a lunatic woman who thinks that Madison in the summer is as hot as Miami, or a man who repeatedly tried to pick a fight between Campbell and Ron Perlman, who is replacing him as the lead in a Bubba Ho-Tep sequel), he was never rattled or distracted, and showed a great deal of patience. It was one of the best personal appearances I've ever seen, and all the more noteworthy because he had originally only been scheduled to do one session that evening, but had his schedule literally quadrupled after they added shows to meet demand. (It must be nice to be popular though, and Campbell thought it was hilarious that My Name is Bruce beat the pants off of Clint Eastwood's high-brow Changeling movie, starring Angelina Jolie, in per-screen take thanks to his fans).

All in all it was a great evening, and shocking in that the theatre didn't charge one thin dime extra for the special, sold-out shows with Q&A sessions either. Thus, their normally somewhat elevated ticket prices became a fantastic bargain; I honestly expected, for the privilege of being in a small theatre, seeing the local premiere of a movie with the star/director doing a talk afterward, that there'd be some sort of surcharge, if not a hefty fee. I appreciate the lack of venality on Sundance's part, and it garners a lot of good will from me.

(Which could be the goal, for all I know. If so, it's smart business; there are a lot of indie theatres in this town, but Sundance is really starting to stand out with its customer friendly atmosphere.)

I heartily recommend that people see My Name is Bruce, either on DVD or in the theatre if they can. It joins an impressive list of movies that, whether on their own or through venues like The Dark Carnival, show us that horror movies don't have to be restricted to big budget cruelty porn ala Hostel, or low-IQ direct to dvd slasher/rubber suit flicks.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course.

Who knows; maybe his next movie can show at The Dark Carnival itself. I can dream, at any rate. (Don't fuck this up if you get the chance, Dr. Calamari, you squid bastard)