Sheep and Goats

Category: Movies

  • Pop Goes to the Movies!

    Pop hadn’t seen a movie in thirty years. We had to act. No one should be so culturally deprived. He would, no doubt, thank us later.

    Oceans 11 was playing at the time. At the theater, we kept darting Pop sidelong glances.

    Afterwards came the verdict. Pretty violent, he began.

    Seconds later: Pretty loud.

    And why all that cursing? Why is there so much cursing?

    And These guys aren’t cool! You think these guys are cool? Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Dean Martin (the original Oceans 11), those guys were cool! These guys aren’t cool.

    No point trying to argue. We realized we’d chosen the wrong film.

    Lord of the Rings was playing. Let’s show Pop what movie makers with computers can do today! But I started to worry during the film. I liked it well enough the first time around, but now it seemed repetitive. Midway through the movie, I heard snoring.

    “Hey, Pop,” I shook him, “we don’t have to sit through this if you don’t want to.”

    Huh?…what…it stinks? He replied.

    He groused all the way home. And what about Gordon? That dragon came after Gordon and they just left him in the cave! How could they do that to Gordon?

    It was Gandalf, not Gordon.

    What can I say? Some people just don’t like movies.

  • Hal and the Astronaut Farmer

    The name of the rocket was Dreamer. It's builder was a dreamer.

    With "The Astronaut Farmer," my wife and I knew we were in for a quirky film straight from the opening scene, a blend of two American icons. There he is on horseback, riding alone on the deserted plain. But wait! Zoom in steadily and we see he's not a cowboy at all, but an astronaut, or at least a guy in a spacesuit.

    It's an irresistible movie. Part endearing family tale, part reckless pursuit of a dream, part good guys vs bad guys, part fantasy. Fantasy, because clearly, the plot could never happen. If you're one of those picayune people who huff over improbabilities, stay away. Everyone else gets a green light. Billy Bob Thorton plays Charles Farmer, an ex NASA rancher determined to pilot a rocket from his barn, with his family's help. It's a homeschool project, no less. Billy Bob has that eternal optimism, that unshakable good nature, and most importantly, that absolute inability to see when his goose is cooked that makes him unstoppable. In real life these guys make invincible salesmen. In movie life, they orbit the earth.

    Each time we see a movie, I read internet reviews afterwards so I can tell my wife if I liked the film or not, a habit which drives her nuts. Reviews of Astronaut Farmer were mixed. The deciding factor, I discern, is whether you can imagine and appreciate a kook like Farmer. I can. Take Hal, for instance.

    Hal enjoyed the same combination of qualities. Incurable optimism, unyielding good nature, bedrock decency. And absolutely oblivious to obstacles. People loved Hal. True to calling, he was a salesman. You'd sooner get his customers to bump off their mothers than buy from a rival. If only I had half his nature.

    In the congregation, Hal was fully capable of off-the-wall remarks, as unpredictable as they were nutty, like how you could forget the resurrection if you died on an amusement park ride since you had deliberately risked life and limb. Fortunately no one took him seriously. "That's just Hal," they would say. The secret of human relations is to appreciate folks for their fine points, and cut them slack on the rest.

    He'd be offered oversight of this or that department at the circuit or district level. Of course, he'd accept. Never turn down a privilege. They'd dig up some assistants for him. The assistants would putz along, confident in Hal's sure hand and direction. But two thirds of the way through they'd realize, to their horror, that Hal had absolutely no idea what he was doing. So they'd work their tails off, doubletime, tripletime, and as a consequence, all would turn out well. "You see?" Hal would chime in, "Jehovah provides!"

    And who's to say that's not leadership? The assignments got done. Those assistants developed skills they never thought possible. In fact, I believe Hal attracted a corps of young Ministerial Servants eager for the challenge.

    But I wasn't one of them. We both served for a time on a committee looking into a Kingdom Hall build. Hal was enthralled with those then-new fold down baby changing tables. "We have to get one of those," he'd gush. "Put it right there in the men's room! Why should it be only the sisters who change babies? Times are changing! Not just the wives, but also the husbands should share!" On and on he'd go, so enthused.

    For crying out loud, we hadn't even located land yet!

    ********************************

    Tom Irregardless and Me      No Fake News but Plenty of Hogwash

  • Conscience, Movies and the MPAA Ratings

    Noah (theonlyNoahyouknow) was in town and I spoke to him about movies and he ranted how silly was the American MPAA rating system. In Germany, he said, there was no such thing.

    In astonishment, I gasped: How, then, do you know what you can watch?

    They read movie reviews.

    If you’re a moviegoer, you want to shield yourself and family from filthy, gory or sicko films, but how do you do it? How do you avoid grossout scenes before you know they exist?

    Because the American movie rating system is so easy to access, a fair number of our people have, in effect, made it their conscience. They will be safe, they feel, if they just avoid R rated films. Trouble is, the technique doesn’t work too well.

    For one thing, if R’s represent the line in the sand, then anything higher on the scale must be okay. But as any moviegoer knows, a PG-13 movie can easily be more filthy than an R. Directors long ago learned to sidestep ‘R‘ triggers, even while loading their films up to the limit with stuff you don‘t want to see. And sometimes R films are so rated for relatively innocuous reasons: one too many f-bombs, for example. (a PG-13 is allowed one, which is a guarantee that one will appear, usually in the most in-your-face manner imaginable!) Of course, nobody likes f-bombs, but if you work or school in an environment where hundreds of such bombs are raining right and left, you may not even notice 3 or 4 in a movie.

    Of course, R’s at their worst are nastier than PG-13’s at the worst, so if you don’t read reviews, it might be best to avoid both categories. Don’t just go see them at random, not if you care about avoiding sordid stuff. You might as well play Russian Roulette.

    A lot of reviews don’t really tell you too much about what will make you gag, but some do. On the internet, kids-in-mind, and U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops both serve pretty well. To be sure,  the mental image of a room packed with Catholic Bishops eagerly watching Freddy Krueger so as to slap it with a thumbs down rating (presumably) always makes me smile.

    Now….all this searching and reading and screening is a lot of work just for the sake of movies. Are movies essential to life? No, they are not. “I’ll just avoid them all, unless I hear on sure testimony that this or that film is okay.”

    That is a valid position, which some of our people take. For others, however, there are reviews.

    Here are the two sites mentioned, both set for the film Cars: (which carries the Sheepandgoats endorsement)

    http://www.kids-in-mind.com/c/cars.htm
    http://www.usccb.org/movies/c/cars.shtml

  • Super Columbine Massacre Game and the Last Refuge for Scoundrels

    Don’t think it was easy to pry Tom Fishandchips’ fingers off the joystick of his Super Columbine Massacre video game. Doing so was almost as rough as pulling the game’s antagonists’ (protagonists?) fingers off their assault weapons. After all, Fishandchips had scientific research, which he displayed powerpoint style* (see below) all around his work area, that declared violent entertainment did not produce violent people. Science said he was in the clear to blow away sim students all day long, which was well, because that’s what he wanted to do in the first place.

    *Violent media not to blame for violent people
    Scientific evidence does not show that watching violence desensitizes people to it .              [University of Toronto study: Dec 2000, displayed prominently by Fishandchips]

    Nor was he quick to change his tune when other Institute members, guys like Sheepandgoats, Wheatandweeds and Weedsandwheat, pointed out to him that the studies he had cited were most likely dogs, and that 99% of all studies on media and violence had concluded there was a relationship. No, said Fishandchips, might does not make right, the majority is usually wrong, what about tiny David going up against mighty Goliath, etc, etc, etc.

    What finally broke Fishandchips’ pigheadedness was the revelation of who had paid for his study….a study so obviously favorable to the makers of violent entertainment. It was the Motion Pictures Association! Now, I guess that doesn’t mean for sure that their resulting study is so much horse manure, but it sure does raise suspicions that the MPA simply fished around till they found someone who would tell them what they wanted to hear. Their violence-is-golden conclusion would have been easier to accept had it been reached by the Presbyterian Church, or the Girl Scouts, or the Ghostbuster’s Association, or the Evolutionists of America Club.

    Patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, declared Samuel Adams in 1775. But here we can modify that statement to science is the last refuge. Note how the MPA’s contract researchers wrap themselves in the scientific method every bit as much as a rabid nationalist wraps himself in the flag. On the other hand, the 99% other studies which conclude that violent entertainment isn’t great for public moral health, are not said specifically to employ the scientific method, but “many investigative methods.” That’s not to suggest those methods were mere new-age fluff. Doubtless they were rooted in logic and made use of scientific reasoning. But they may not have restricted themselves to the narrow scientific method, which insists on finding causality and is never satisfied were mere correlation.

    VIP commenter Mr. Crowe (VIP because he does comment, which I appreciate and endeavor to return the favor wherever I can) smelled a rat with regard to my last post on this subject. Was I not taking a shot across the bows of science? Why am I anti-science? Isn’t religion also the last refuge of scoundrels, even more so than science or patriotism?

    Actually, religion may be the first refuge of scoundrels. But everybody knows that. The opium of the people, and so forth. We all know how cynical power brokers use religion to stir up the masses. But science enjoys a purer, more rarefied reputation, as if it is above and immune to manipulation by scoundrels. That reputation is not entirely deserved.

    Nevertheless, running down science was not the point of my previous post, though alas, it was not worded skillfully enough to avoid that interpretation. Science is good. Science is useful. We find out a lot of things though the scientific method. What science is not, however, is the be-all and end-all, the uncontradictable one true means of discovering things so that, if science comes up with no answer, then there is no answer.

  • Prophesy and Reality TV

    Pity the poor TV producer of just a few years back. Put yourself in his place.

    Imagine that you want to produce a TV show. First, you have to hire some actors. They’re all prima donnas and most suffer from high self-esteem. They’ll cost you an arm and a leg. Not to mention aggravation. As soon as you turn your back, they go on talk shows to promote their nutty religious views, or they say mean things about psychiatrists, whom we all know are the indispensable good guys in white hats today.

    Then you must build a city. Or clear traffic in a real city, so as to stage your show. People get mad when they’re late for work because they had to detour because you closed their city because you wanted to film your TV show. They send you hate mail. But some of them don’t get mad. They come and appear in your show as extras……the folks just passing by, street traffic. But you must pay them as well, otherwise they gawk at the camera and wave ‘hi’ to Mom.

    Of course, you can’t even get this far unless you have a story to film. You must hire writers. They aren’t cheap either. You will pay substantially for them to write scripts about psychos, perverts, misfits, oddballs, exhibitionists and dysfunctional people, which is all anyone wants to watch today.

    These seemingly insurmountable problems would no doubt have derailed the entire television industry, but for a staggering discovery.

    The audience of “30-somethings weaned on The Real World and Cops….doesn’t judge reality programs any differently than scripted drama.” (Rosenbaum)

    To the TV producer, this statement is as profound as is the pledge of allegiance to the patriot or the Lord’s prayer to the devout person. It is the television equivalent of this verse:

    You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.   John 8:32

    The elusive Rosenbaum, who is on the staff of the Carriertom Into-Wishen Research Institute, or will be as soon as we can track him down, single-handedly saved television!

    Why write shows about psychos, perverts, misfits, oddballs, exhibitionists and dysfunctional people when you can just as easily, and for a fraction of the cost, go out and film real psychos, perverts, misfits, oddballs, exhibitionists and dysfunctional people! They don’t mind at all! They crave the attention. And the rest of us, who are mere wannabe psychos, perverts, misfits, oddballs, exhibitionists and dysfunctional people, love to watch their antics. We can’t get enough of it. Thus, the astounding success of reality TV!

    ………………………………..

    Released 30 years ago, the movie Network was billed as outrageous satire. But each year brings it closer to dead-on reality.

    The film begins with the anchorman for a floundering 4th network announcing the cancellation of the evening news due to poor ratings. Since he’s getting on in years and has no real prospects, he tells his viewers that he will blow his brains out on his final broadcast, and encourages them to watch.

    Friends rally, concerned about his mental health. But the ratings inch up.

    He persuades his network to let him broadcast one last time, so he can apologize for his bizarre behavior under stress, so he won’t be remembered as a loony. Alas, he really has gone nuts, and on his supposed-to-be final night he launches into an endless rant on how all life is B.S!

    Ratings shoot through the stratosphere!

    Some ambitious executives run the network. They rebuild the network around their new “mad prophet of the airwaves!” They surround him with likeminded nutcakes, who spin off into their own programs. They merge the news division with the entertainment division. (Sound familiar?) And when our hero’s ratings start to slip, they….well….I really shouldn’t give that away. But read it here if you must know.

    Of course, rated R (mostly for language, which is substantial, the kind of stuff you hear at work or school), how can the film be a Sheepandgoats recommendation? It cannot be. But it is prophetic.

    In 2000 the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry. The movie depicted the concept of reality television a generation before it actually came into being.

    ……………………………………

    Can’t understand this sayin going round says
    Put more on with lessons and less on for morons   –       D Loftus