Month: December 2012

One thing I hate in movies is over-production and absolutely stupid direction that manufactures such absolutely stupid physical business that anyone with more active brain cells than are found in a used Kleenex will experience a complete dissolution of suspension of disbelief.

I saw a video (yeh, a pirated video of a TV pilot for s show that didn’t make it past the pilot *shrugs* Good/bad: interesting concept, well-acted, poorly directed and overly post-produced) recently that threw me off in just about every third scene.

Scene: “burglar” (gal “sneaking” her mom’s home late at night) but post production added excessive shoe noises, overly loud openings and closings of doors, etc. I mean, even just walking around normally on our hardwood floors, I can’t MAKE myself walk that noisily, and no normal door opens and closes (latches, hinges and door itself) as noisily as the post-production sounds made those doors seem to. Just stupid.

Then: protagonist shadowing a hit man driving a glaring puke yellow muscle car. OK, that’s jarring. But… the protagonist is driving an almost fluorescent green car. And stakes out the hit man overnight in that “LOOK AT ME!” color car. The hit man does an obvious 360 sweep checking for suspicious activity both before settling in for the night and before entering his car the next morning AND MISSES THE FLUORESCENT GREEN CAR (which he has seen WITH the protagonist before) WHICH IS PARKED ALMOST DIRECTLY ACROSS FROM HIS OWN!!!

*sigh*

And I’ll just bet you that most folks who did actually see the thing when it aired (and flopped) weren’t affected at all by such things.

BTW, despite the bad directing and bad post-production effects (good direction would have required a fix of the script and props, etc., and KILLED the crappy post production shiite), the concept, casting and acting in general carried this particular example to “low-to-moderately-enjoyable” range.

But examples of stupid directing and post-production abound, nowadays, and make it into even main stream movies. *sigh* I’m at about 50% on the Amazon instant videos I check out. About half of them don’t last past the 15-20-minute mark because of crap like this.

[OK, I’m all over the map on this post, but maybe some of it will spark a thought or two. I blame lack of sleep and caffeine deprivation, both. 🙂 ]

The strange thing to my eye about this post by, urm, David Post in response to an article titled, “The Monster of Monticello,” is that he uses the words of Lincoln, a man I suspect was truly decent in many ways, but also truly blind to his own hypocrisy (just one example: see the hypocrisy of the words of the Gettysburg Address spoken by someone waging a war AGAINST self-determination and the very foundational principles of federalism and the very Constitution he swore to defend) to support Jefferson’s place as a truly great champion of freedom, though his personal practices as a slavemaster were at stark odds with the principles he championed.

While I agree with Post’s general viewpoint that yes, Jefferson WAS a great champion of liberty even though he was an individual example of some of the worst practices of slavery, I’m surprised his defense wasn’t simply, “Ad hominem arguments are invalid on their face,” and just leave it at that. After all, reasonable people would agree that attacking the ideas and principles a person utters (and even fights for) by attacking their character is unreasonable, while unreasonable people will just be unreasonable anyway, so ANY reasoned argument is worthless with such.

Ad then there’s the implicit hagiography of Lincoln in the post. *sigh* I’ll not go down that path right now, but using Lincoln’s words to defend Jefferson on the matter of championing liberty is a briar patch I’d certainly not want to throw myself into, but then I do GARA about the facts of Lincoln’s exercise of power leading up to and during the War Between the States. It’s not a matter of Mr. Lincoln’s personal character but of his very well-spoken propaganda in support of his exercise of office.*

So, hypocrisy abounds, but great men can still do good. I believe Jefferson was by far the greater of the two men and has been a far, far greater force for good, but Lincoln did at least manage to kill over 600,000 Americans with his war. That alone makes him a great man in any history.

Oh, and he said a lot of really nice things, as president, that his actions as president–not as a private citizen–contradict. I’ll be happy to take his words and embrace many of them and their ideals. Just spare me from another hypocritically Lincolnesque president.

Jefferson’s slaves never had it as bad as the men Lincoln had shanghaied and sent to their deaths.

Continue reading “Holes and Gaps, Cognitive Dissonance and Hypocrisy”