Ticket Stubs #30: Ticket Chads

Remember dangling chads from the first time Bush got elected? It didn't go so well for Al Gore in Florida that year, but I grew to admire the chutzpah Dubya had, even while I was laughing at him. Unfortunately, voting Bush in for a second term didn't work out that great for U.S., either.
Now, it's time to decide whether we want to give Obama a chance to finish cleaning up the mess he inherited or hand it over to another noob whom we'll just be complaining about in two years because we realize we should have given one of our most historical presidential choices ever a fair shake. In honor of the polls, here's a collection of old reviews and rantings with a political slant.

FROM October 18, 2004 (SW@ Ticket #21: Moore than I Can Take): I haven't done much political ranting lately (haven't done much political ranting, period). But it suddenly came to me that Michael Moore is a F***ing Jackass. I speak in reference to Farenheit 9/11.
Not just because it's election time and he had the balls to trash the guy who shoved an army up Saddam's ass, but because a great deal of the trash talk was true. And because F911 is peppered with pictures, film clips, and Moore's sarcastic commentary, all having the common goal of making our kick-ass president look not just inconsiderate of the public, but ignorant of the location of his own feet. F911 also follows the formula of Bowling for Columbine; starring Moore and his overinflated ego, harassing important people, ending in Moore's hometown of Flint, MI (where--I hoped--Kid Rock would be waiting to beat the living hell out of him), and centering around Moore's favorite cause for everything: fear. I also want to add at this point that during his speech at UCSD, Moore--with microphone turned up to his mouth like a Nestle Drumstick and hand waving in the air like a hippie on an acid trip--looked quite similar to an old, fat, washed-up white rapper performing his twelfth farewell tour. Disgusting.
On the other hand, some of the few points he made had some foundation. HW's relationship with the Saudi's => Osama & Al Qaeda are Saudi => Instead of finding Osama, W gets revenge on Saddam for trying to kill his dad <=> Cheney & W run companies that hold stock in Iraqi oil. It's all well researched and connected, and presented in a way that made me doubt my desire to vote for Bush.
F+

On the other hand, one must remember that if we don't want Bush for president, we wind up with our country in the hands of not a pussy-whipped flip-flopper, but his wife. John Kerry doesn't have a dime to his name that wasn't claimed by the ball and chain first. He sings country music at a press conference (which is bad enough) while she glares at their child for sucking his thumb on national TV and tells her pet husband to sing closer to the microphone, which he immediately does. John Kerry doesn't want to be President of the United States, she does. I don't agree with how Bush set up the war on Iraq, how he half-assed the hunt for Osama, how he infringed on American rights with the Patriot Act, or how he recruited unprepared soldiers for a suicide mission to democratize an undemocratizable country. But he did what he wanted to do--what he felt he needed to do: get Saddam Hussein and keep our country running. If you don't want to do what you need to do, you're either going to do a shitty job of it or you're not going to do it at all. The man for the shitty job is John Kerry, and that's all I gotta say about that.


FROM November 2, 2004 (SW@ Ticket & Crank Yankers Say Vote Bush):
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
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--------------------- Waste the Kerry Ketchup Fortune! ---------------------
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
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Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
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----------------------- I racked up two more votes! --------------------------
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
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Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush Vote Bush
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--------------------------- Vote for Bush! ------------------------------------
 YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!
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SW@ Ticket and Crank Yankers thank you for shoving Farenheit 9/11 up
Michael Moore's rooty-poo candyass by voting for Bush. SW@ out.
YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!

The following is a review/commentary I wrote in college as part of an assignment for my English class. I never really give my critical opinion of the movie itself or assign a grade to it, but the message behind the film is given sufficient acknowledgement, and my defense of the argument earned me an A on the assignment. It is posted here FROM November 5, 2006: In Man of the Year, Robin Williams plays political comedian Tom Dobbs, a figure recognizable from any late night talk show or news commentary show on television these days. We see Dobbs in the person of Jon Stewart and Jay Leno. It even seems like we pay more attention to news that comes from The Daily Show or a Tonight Show monologue than we do when it comes from “real” news programming. Some of us have even thought Hey! This person seems to know so much about corruption in politics. Maybe they should run for president and clean things up.
So, a la Chris Rock in the 2003 comedy Head of State, that’s exactly what Williams’ character does. Dobbs begins his campaign as just another serious candidate, putting his audience to sleep with talk of the same boring issues, but emerges in the final days of the election as a stand-out protagonist who’s proficient at stand-up.
Dobbs wins the presidency, only to find out later that his victory is the result of a glitch in the latest voting software. Of course, Dobbs is only a fictional hero; but most—if not all—fiction has some basis in truth. So as a shrinking community of voters in the real world, struggling to sift through the many contradictory campaign ads and choose the best rhetorician from a cult of personalities, we hope for what the Dobbs character represents (and what no other candidate in Man of the Year seems to know how to offer): something new. Certainly, we want democracy. We want to be able to make up our own minds, provided our decision is a reasonable, informed one that will benefit our country. On the other hand, we want the decision to be an easy one to make. We want a person or a piece of legislation or advertising that grabs our attention and informs us in such a way that we can clearly vote for nothing else. But what we don’t seem to want is more of Miss America wishing for world peace and Al Gore campaigning to stop global warming and George Bush promising a democratic Iraq.
Much like Jack Menken (Dobbs’ manager, played by Christopher Walken), we don’t want our protagonist—who personifies the newness and over-the-top honesty he promises—to give up the opportunity he has earned. To our dismay and understanding, Dobbs does resign as President Elect by the end of the film. But it would seem that if Hollywood found it financially necessary (and the public did not find it ludicrous) to make a Man of the Year 2, Robin Williams’ character would be more likely to win legitimately because of his resignation.
The bottom line here is as follows: We already have a president who, through such intelligent sound bytes as “don’t misunderestimate me,” has made an unwitting comedian of himself; not to mention a bad actor running the state of Kullyfwornyia, Leno and company joking about a drunken Kennedy and a trigger-happy VP, and terrorists looking for some confirmation that our country is a joke so they have sufficient reason to blow us off the map. There is a time for movies with happy endings and a time for movies with real endings. In the case of Man of the Year, it was more appropriate to have a real ending than to leave America in the hands of a real comedian.


FROM August 3, 2008 (SW@ Ticket #55: DisadVantage Point): Apologies for not posting in over a week. I have been busy working on a King of Fighters game for MUGEN. For those who don't know what MUGEN is, it's an open-source 2-Dimensional fighting game engine (open-source meaning that, provided you know how to program in the language very well (which I don't, at all) and you have the time and patience to make or copy every image (I wish), you can build your own game from the ground up. So you can wind up with Capcom vs Marvel vs Mortal Kombat vs SNK vs The Simpsons vs Family Guy vs .... Well, hopefully you get the idea). I've just been using and tweaking other people's characters and stuff, but it's coming along great.

While you may have never heard of MUGEN, you probably know about movies; otherwise you wouldn't be reading this. On to an overdue review of another all-star project, the assassination thriller, Vantage Point.
Unfortunately, combining such a cast (Forest Whitaker, Matthew Fox, Dennis Quaid, etc.) with a multiple-viewpoint structure nearly spelled disaster for Vantage Point. Don't get me entirely wrong; the star power makes this deja vu tale of terrorism in Spain bearable to watch, and the car chase sequences and visuals are spectacular, providing shock value without much blood, which is a great accomplishment in my book.
But on the other hand, Vantage Point's plot goes nowhere fast and everywhere at once, its twists are few and far foreseen, and the film itself serves no discernible purpose (unless it aims to be weakly political--and then, of course, there is some promise of financial gain to those involved in the production). It's as if, in focusing on one event from many different angles, Vantage Point loses focus on itself, even ends up focusing on what could be considered the wrong end for the supplied means. It takes on the trajectory of a pesticide-intoxicated honeybee and dies far from its intended mark.
It's good to know that the ending, such as it was, was a happy one. But if I see one more explosion or rewind sequence, I promise to scream in anguish.
Rating: C-

I leave you with something else that will make me scream,
The Annoying Coffee-Culture Word of the Week: FInch.
A "FInch," as used by Eric Roberts' character in the should-have-been-direct-to-Lifetime mystery-thriller Dark Honeymoon, is shorthand developed by and for Blue-tooth-dependent, self-important, in-a-hurry super-business (wo)men who are too busy to tell you they want an inch of foam on their Cappucino/Macchiato/whatever. I know I work at Coffee Bean, but if I misspelled your favorite drink, I don't give a crap. You people are pathetic.
SWOut.


From August 12, 2008 (Wilson, Pick It): Take The West Wing, move it back to the era when a pathetically-armed Afghanistan was waging an almost futile war against Communist Russia, add Tom Hanks' honest politician (yes, there used to be a few of those at one time or other), Julia Roberts as the witty love interest, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman (who could win an Oscar for playing a roll of toilet paper, he's so good) as the smooth-operator CIA agent, and you have Charlie Wilson's War.
Wilson follows Senator Charlie Wilson (Hanks) as he tries, in all his highly-connected, good-old-boy honest Hanksian glory and subtle underhandedness, to get funding so that Afghanistan can have sufficient weaponry to "help" the USA stamp out Communism.
As revealed in the opening scene, Wilson succeeds and becomes the first civilian recipient of the purple heart (cross? I don't remember, really, but it's something military and purple and distinguishing). Charlie Wilson's War, like The West Wing, is full of charisma, comedy, and government-centric fast-talking, and it is a charming little hit of a movie. But what really makes it good are the self-referential moments when, like a Ninja Turtle calling something a bad Saturday-morning cartoon, Hoffman's character plays Zen master to Charlie Wilson's little boy, saying "sure, you beefed up Afghanistan and that allowed them to defeat the Russians for us, but is that really such a good thing?"
The characterizations of Wilson and company seem a bit too Disney-perfect to not have been spun that way by omission, but any movie that can otherwise turn 20/20 hindsight into sarcastic 1960s foresight and not beat the audience to death with controversial political issues is worth a look.
Rating: B+

I'm not going to tell you how to vote this time via either angry rants or juvenile puppet show references, but I am going to make the same suggestion that the writers of Man Of the Year had in mind: Vote for personality and hope for change. I also suggest what I suggested in my review of Farenheit 9/11: that you vote for the candidate you believe has the most clearly stated plan and the greatest will to execute. In short, vote for results.

Here now is a two-part If the Lyric Fits:
"I'm so in love with you" - Al Green
"If you feelin' like a pimp, n----, go on, brush ya shoulder off.
Ladies is pimps, too. Go on, brush ya shoulder off.
N----s is crazy, baby. Don't forget that boy toldja
Get that dirt off ya shoulder." -Jay-Z

Back to the one-shots next time, as Ticket Stubs takes a bad weather day. Stay tuned and get informed.