Rating Art: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Zardoz

Above you will find the trailer for Zardoz. Go ahead; I'll wait....

Yes, that was Sean Connery in a speedo. Yes, he wears it for the entire film. Yes, Zardoz is a giant floating stone head that pukes guns so that other, all-too-hairy men can pillage what appears to be the Scottish Highlands. And yes, if you were to come over and watch a movie with me right now, this would be my choice...or something very similar.

In the past, people have questioned my unflinching dedication to crap movies. Just the other day, my friend D. was flabbergasted by my insistence that The Room is the single best theater experience devised in the last 20 years. It only got worse when he heard my other recommendations (which included El Topo, Deathbed: The Bed That Eats People, The Impossible Kid, The Happening...). We had a passionate debate on the subject, and I reprint my thoughts here in the interest of expanding some horizons.

Let's pretend you and I are having a science fiction film festival (haha...dweeb); I have to rate the quality of the movies we could watch in order to decide which to screen.

1. Blade Runner=GREAT
2. Moon=Really Good
3. Alien=Good
4. Logan's Run=OK
5. Avatar=Meh
6. Lost in Space=Sucks
7. Zardoz=Absolutely Terrible

So here's the thing: it is not as if I don't realize that Zardoz is terrible, or think that any of the other drek that might replace it constitutes superior film-making. We can both agree that this movie is total crap. In fact, no matter what order I put those first six movies in, or what movies I even include on the list, 99 times out of 100 any sane person in the world is going to put Zardoz last based on the trailer alone.

And I propose that is why we absolutely MUST watch Zardoz.

We don't live in a world of singular production anymore; we aren't viewing a freakin' Matisse painting. Everything(at least in Western culture) is mass-produced and ubiqutously disseminated. So I guess if you'd never seen any science fiction movie ever before, certainly we'd start off on Blade Runner. If you'd never seen a MOVIE before, I'd put in some Chaplin or Arsenic and Old Lace or Throne of Blood. But the thing is, you probably wouldn't be coming to science fiction movie night if either of those were the case.

Great art, in the modern world especially, works on man's capacity for wonder; it rises above the Avatars of the world by sticking in our minds after the entertainment has past. But we, in our mass culture, are surrounded on all sides by entertaining films, and if we try, we could watch nothing but fantastically-crafted cinema for the rest of our lives; there are enough of them out there.

By and large, that's what we should do. And when the fantastic begins to seem mundane, we make our own films and innovate, and the medium moves forward. However, maybe we aren't out to change the world that particular night. Maybe we don't even know each other that well, or our aesthetic organs digest in vastly different ways. Maybe we just want to have fun experiencing that elevator ride away from the mundane.

Zardoz does just that, only this elevator goes down, and we can all agree on how far (i.e. to the very bottom). For anyone who understands good film, or good anything, movies like Zardoz can produce the same sublime wonder as finally crafted work. Only with Zardoz, we aren't quietly delving into our own psyches to ask these probing questions. No, with Zardoz, we can ask those questions collectively as an audience.

AS A COMMUNITY, we ask why in God's name the costume department went with red speedos? What poor bastard paid to see this crap? Or worse, make it? Does Sean Connery wake up in cold sweats, haunted by what the floating stone head could have done to his career? Didn't a single person on the set have any taste?

Zardoz and its ilk bring people together like only terrible art can; it unites us with the only boundless human emotion: scorn. All the ingredients of a great movie will still be there, just negatively defined. Instead of merely recognizing the tenants of good art, we can appreciate and long for them, as it should be.

So if you come over to my house for movie night, bring me some Direct-To-Video crap I've never heard of on a bootlegged DVD. We'll be better friends for it. Popcorn is on me.

Aditi Shankardass: A second opinion on learning disorders

http://www.ted.com/talks/aditi_shankardass_a_second_opinion_on_learning_disorders.html

For all those educators out there, this TED talk proposes a solid solution to the "Spec. Ed. first" problem we keep reading about: use the science and tech. available to make the diagnosis, not the behavior. Interesting...

Jack Russell Terriers + Scott Bakula = The Answer to Illiteracy

Just imagine the pitch meeting...

Remember Wishbone? What? You don't! It won a Peabody Award!

I'll help you out. Wishbone aired on PBS after Arthur (a show about a sexually-closeted young Ardavark, near as I could tell) and before all that other crap on PBS nobody ever watches. The title character was a Jack Russell Terrier, who had apparently received a classical education somewhere along the way, and his young master, a teenage boy named Joe. Every episode had a parallel narrative, one that took place in the "real" world and one that took place in Wishbone's imagination. Joe would get into some sort of trouble, then Wishbone would imagine himself as a character with a similar dilemma in classical literature. When Wishbone was remembering these canonical works (how did his little claws turn the pages?), he would be able to speak, the rest of the cast refused to acknowledge he was a dog, and they put him in period costume. Christ, I love PBS sometimes.

So Joe would get falsely accused of cheating on a test in school or something and Wishbone would spend the rest of the episode playing Sydney Carnet from a Tale of Two Cities (the little-doggie guillotine they built for him was adorable!). Every episode was a different book: a different, really-weird book. I mean, they did friggin' Faust, but somehow overlooked White Fang....

Wishbone obviously came from noble impulses, but those impulses just as obviously went unfulfilled. Sure, my friends and I watched it religiously to laugh at a dog dressed as Sancho Panza, but we didn't sprint to a library afterward. I'd bet money no child has ever said, "Mommy! PLEEEEEAAAAASSSSSSSEEEEEE by me a copy of Candide! The doggie was so cute as Dr. Pangloss!"

But the problem was in execution, not concept.

I propose fusing the classical focus of Wishbone with the plot device of Quantum Leap. The show will be called "Are You Still Bored?" and will focus on a maniacal high school English teacher and his victim...er, student. When little Timmy misbehaves in class, the teacher hits a button on his magic fiction time machine. Timmy is suddenly transported to the "magical" world of literature, where he can spend the rest of the episode reveling in the joys of necrophilia as Quasimodo, or gouging out his eyes as Oedipus, or strangling his wife to death in Othello.

In fact, let's just keep the focus on Timmy. We'll spend an entire season of bouncing him around literature's greatest atrocities with his English teacher occasionally popping in to mock him with informative lectures (maybe he could even smoke a cigar like Dean Stockwell). And finally, in the season finale, we'll return the broken shell of a man that was once Timmy to the halls of high school, his haunted eyes telling the story of a hundred horrific deaths and an awareness of what human flesh tastes like. However, everyone else will have learned some valuable lessons, and they'll be motivated (by FEAR) to learn more about the world of Literature.

Season Two: Cindy Lou is caught texting in class.

I work cheap and the pilot is already written. Contact my agent.

Funny but True...and Forbidden

Read this. Now.


The Ten Most Important Things They Didn't Teach you in School


Among the many things I love about Cracked.com, this has to be the single most alluring: if you took out all the dick jokes and smarmy captions (the dick jokes should stay, mind you; they are finely-crafted), this is a lucid, well-researched essay with ramifications beyond entertainment. It may be a top-ten list, but it also would be a fantastic curricullum for a life skills course. Keep in mind, this is coming from a guy who teaches life skills courses.


I would pack up and move states to work at a school that would let me teach kids that success is about "1. Talent 2. Hard Work 3.Randomly Meeting the Right People and Not Pissing Them Off," or a chapter called "Why Hippies Have Never Discovered a Single Disease Cure." Pardon the cliche, but Cracked.com is often funny because it is true. In my experience, most American teens are so steeped in inauthenticity from all sides of the culture that they find a lack of bullshit absolutely intoxicating. But despite the obvious interest kids would show in this stuff, a teacher would get fired for phrasing it this way (i.e. effectively). It'll never be common sense until we teach it to everybody.

Honoring the Iconoclast: F. U. Fitzgerald

Pictured Above: shameless, hate-mongering filth

I present to you my first example of startling critical insight: an expose on that hack F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Waste of Time and a pointless Read

When I first read this book, I thought it was very bad. Then in class it caught my interest again. I do not know why. I wasted much time reading critical appraisals, but they are all junk. So is this book. I don't care what anybody says there are *SEVERAL* parts that *DO* seem to be "scribbled drunk" and are nearly unintelligible. The book is filled with all kinds of errors, particuliarly chronological. There is also plenty of *PREJUDICE* and *RACISM* in this book. Wolfsheim is singled out as "a small, flat nosed Jew" despite the fact that he never mentions this. Nick also constantly refers to his "tragic nose". What garbage. Also when Tom talks about the "Superior Nordic Race nobody seems to care *IN THE LEAST* about the horrible things he is saying. Nick's maid is refered to as "my Finn", which is so racist as to be almost unintelligible. Daisy and Gatsby are proposterous characters. The idea that they can never get together *MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE WHATSOEVER*. I don't care about society standards that is completely ridiculous. That Daisy would even think of staying with Tom dates this book *HORRIBLY* at the very least and more realitically turns into *A VIRTUAL CARTOON*. How and why Gatsby would do what he did is not believably in the least. Gatsby would never have gone to Oxford if he had truly cared about Daisy. The Confrontation makes absolutely no sense. Tom calls Gatsby a bootlegger with a drink in his hand. That is *THE WEAKEST WRITING I HAVE EVER SEEN.* Don't bother to read this book.

Did you know that the plot isn’t in the right order?! And the characters are racist?! How DARE the author fail to correct those fictional peoples’ make-believe prejudices and synchronize their pretend actions with the Navy Master clock!

This great mind not only summoned up the courage to contradict 80 years of critical praise, but the style of writing clearly shows that such bravery was entirely selfless. For example, notice the subtle use of the caps lock key that ever so slightly draws the reader’s eye to the important parts of the review. The reviewer even sacrifices his/her credibility for the sake of the reader's well-being, artfully misspelling “particularly” after pointing out Fitzgerald’s numerous errors, no doubt to provide an example of what those errors might look like. Zounds! This paragraph is practically drowning in helpful spelling examples!

Thank god there are reviewers like this in the world, standing vigil on the ramparts of Amazon.com, to save us from such morally-polluting filth.

Honoring the Iconoclast: An Introduction

Pictured Above: an example to admire

In lieu of actually coming up with a focus for this blog and sticking to it, I’ll be spending a large amount of my time reviewing a bunch of things that fall into my pedestrian areas of interest (comics, books, movies, music, education, politics, etc). I feel that you, the reader, need more irrelevant opinions about things you may or may not be interested in; the internet is running short on such commentary.

Criticism is a time-tested strategy that both provides material to write about and the comforting illusion that the writer is somehow participating in his largely consumer existence. But I’m walking in the footsteps of giants here. Out of deference and respect for my forebears, I present my first recurring series of posts, Honoring the Iconoclasts.

Honoring the Iconoclasts will curate the greatest examples of literary criticism found in the rich scholarly field of Amazon.com. Specifically, I seek out the fearless opinions of those readers unafraid to tackle the enthralled tastes of the canon, those mavericks unafraid “to calls them like theys see them.”

Stay tuned and prepare to have your mind blown.