Infinitive Splitter

I saw For Your Consideration last night, and I consider it awful.

Not relatively awful, in a “Christopher Guest is off his game, but this is still better than most movies” kind of way. It’s just a bad, bad, bad, bad movie. No one involved with it should have agreed to its release.

The degree of badness doesn’t even make sense. All the right pieces are there, but together they comprise a package worth far less than the sum of its parts. The half-improvised dialogue that has worked so well in Guest’s other movies just sounds like bad writing in this one; the losers aren’t lovable; and the jokes are totally lame. It is horrible from start to finish — and with a plodding pace and scenes that last whole minutes longer than they should, the movie feels far longer than its actual 86 minutes.

(The only other two people in the theater left at about the 50-minute mark.)

It’s difficult to think of another movie with so many funny people that fails so miserably to be funny. Parker Posey and Catherine O’Hara give particularly (and uncharacteristically) cringe-worthy performances; John Michael Higgins and Guest are irrelevant; and just about everyone else is forgettable. Eugene Levy plays an indifferent, incompetent agent identical to Stephen Merchant’s character in BBC’s “Extras,” while Merchant’s co-star Ricky Gervais plays pretty much the same character he plays in the series (and repeats some of the same lines). Only Fred Willard — whose “Hey, wha happened?!” in A Mighty Wind remains the most memorable line in Guest’s second-most disappointing film — sparks anything like consistent laughter.

The jokes aren’t too insider-y (”Entourage” isn’t over anyone’s head); they’re just not funny.

As with Guest’s great movies, the plot in For Your Consideration is mostly beside the point. Nobody cared what became of Guffman or who won the dog show. But (and here comes a spoiler, which doesn’t matter anyway, as I’ve just said) if For Your Consideration is such a cutting send-up, at least one of the stars of the movie-within-the-movie should have been nominated for an Oscar. (None are. That was the spoiler.) The suggestion that Hollywood is too consumed with hype looks pretty weak when none of the hyped actors gets a nod.

It occurred to me, around the time that the other couple in the theater was walking out, that perhaps the first hour of FYC might be setting up some truly brilliant finale. Maybe Christopher Guest was putting us on, maybe this was his Springtime for Hitler.

Nope, just a truly terrible film. Oh well.

And now I’ve spoiled the whole thing for you, just as it spoiled my evening.

Way back in May, I wrote that Pennsylvania’s Primary Election Day had been “a good day for right-wing bedwetters in my parents’ neighborhood,” thanks to child candidate Mark Harris’ victory over an incumbent Republican state representative. Not surprisingly, especially in Democrat-friendly 2006 and extra-especially in a district that has been trending Democratic for years, young Mark lost on November 2 and the seat flipped to the Democrats.

The icing on the cake came today, when election officials in another county certified razor-thin Democratic victories in two final races, meaning the next legislative session will feature 102 Democrats and 101 Republicans.

Couldn’t have done it without you, Mark. Thanks.

There is a container of pretzel rods in the office kitchen. I eat a lot of the pretzels. When a container is empty, someone replaces it with a full one.

There is also a water cooler in the office kitchen. I drink a lot of the water (on account of my taste for the pretzels). When I see that the water tank is empty, I replace it with a new one from the supply room. When the supply room runs low on water tanks, someone delivers more of them.

There is always more paper for the copier. There is a constant supply of Post-It notes. Staff meetings are always on Tuesdays, and they always last an hour.

Sisyphus redux.

Since the Cleveland Browns rejoined the NFL in 1999 (after a three-season interruption caused by the original team’s move to Baltimore), the Pittsburgh Steelers have beaten them in 11 of 14 regular-season games and a 2002 playoff contest.

Last season’s 41-0 Christmas Eve rout was particularly enjoyable. Among the highlights of the game was James Harrison’s sideline body-slam of a (presumably, understandably, and likely regretfully) intoxicated Browns fan. It certainly put me in the holiday spirit, but its familiar lopsidedness also struck a damaging blow to what for many people was becoming a “rivalry” of vanishing significance.

That’s why it’s so encouraging to see the advances toward parity the teams have made this season.

As they head into their game on Sunday, both are 3-6, at the bottom of their division and just behind Tennesee and Oakland in the race for Worst Record in the AFC. (Oakland, as you might know, earned one of its two wins against the Steelers on October 29; the Browns beat the Raiders on October 1.)

May the less-bad team win!

How about this fucking guy.

A week after Democrats picked up at least 29 seats in the House of Representatives and six in the Senate, James Carville and his big mouth have decided that the guy who oversaw the effort did a bad job.

Said Carville, of Dean:

“I would describe his leadership as Rumsfeldian in its incompetence.”

It is, to say the very least, a counterintuitive conclusion.

Remember, pending the outcome of a still-close U.S. House race in Georgia, the Democrats did not lose a single congressional seat. Much credit for this surely belongs to Carville’s pal, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Rahm Emanuel, but Dean’s comprehensive effort supported both this success and the hundreds of down-ballot victories in which the DCCC had no hand.

Dean’s so-called “50-state strategy” involved building local- and state-party infrastructure across the country to help Democrats mount viable challenges for elected office at every level. As you may have heard, Democrats picked up at least 275 state legislative seats last Tuesday, winning new majorities in nine chambers and cementing veto-proof power in several more. Only in Oklahoma and Montana, where Democrats held narrow majorities, did Republicans taste anything like victory — both states now have equal numbers of Democratic and Republican legislators. (In Montana, tiebreaking votes will be cast by the Democratic governor; in Oklahoma, by the Republican lieutenant governor.)

Rumsfeldian in its incompetence. What an asshole.

While waiting for an oil change at the Jiffy Lube this evening, I picked up last week’s issue of TIME to find a debate between Richard Dawkins, who “occupies the Charles Simonyi professorship for the public understanding of science at Oxford University,” and Francis Collins, “a forthright Christian who converted from atheism at age 27 and now finds time to advise young evangelical scientists on how to declare their faith in science’s largely agnostic upper reaches.”

Sure to be a close one, this match!

(If you click the link above for the full text, you will need to watch a brief ad before you can get there — unless you subscribe to TIME, which you probably do not.)

Some choice excerpts:

COLLINS: By being outside of nature, God is also outside of space and time. Hence, at the moment of the creation of the universe, God could also have activated evolution, with full knowledge of how it would turn out, perhaps even including our having this conversation. The idea that he could both foresee the future and also give us spirit and free will to carry out our own desires becomes entirely acceptable.

DAWKINS: I think that’s a tremendous cop-out. If God wanted to create life and create humans, it would be slightly odd that he should choose the extraordinarily roundabout way of waiting for 10 billion years before life got started and then waiting for another 4 billion years until you got human beings capable of worshipping and sinning and all the other things religious people are interested in.

…and…

COLLINS: There is a whole field of inquiry that has come up in the last 30 or 40 years–some call it sociobiology or evolutionary psychology–relating to where we get our moral sense and why we value the idea of altruism, and locating both answers in behavioral adaptations for the preservation of our genes. But if you believe, and Richard has been articulate in this, that natural selection operates on the individual, not on a group, then why would the individual risk his own DNA doing something selfless to help somebody in a way that might diminish his chance of reproducing? Granted, we may try to help our own family members because they share our DNA. Or help someone else in expectation that they will help us later. But when you look at what we admire as the most generous manifestations of altruism, they are not based on kin selection or reciprocity. An extreme example might be Oskar Schindler risking his life to save more than a thousand Jews from the gas chambers. That’s the opposite of saving his genes. We see less dramatic versions every day. Many of us think these qualities may come from God–especially since justice and morality are two of the attributes we most readily identify with God.

DAWKINS: Can I begin with an analogy? Most people understand that sexual lust has to do with propagating genes. Copulation in nature tends to lead to reproduction and so to more genetic copies. But in modern society, most copulations involve contraception, designed precisely to avoid reproduction. Altruism probably has origins like those of lust. In our prehistoric past, we would have lived in extended families, surrounded by kin whose interests we might have wanted to promote because they shared our genes. Now we live in big cities. We are not among kin nor people who will ever reciprocate our good deeds. It doesn’t matter. Just as people engaged in sex with contraception are not aware of being motivated by a drive to have babies, it doesn’t cross our mind that the reason for do-gooding is based in the fact that our primitive ancestors lived in small groups. But that seems to me to be a highly plausible account for where the desire for morality, the desire for goodness, comes from.

Highly recommended.

In case you were wondering…

I justify my continued employment with demonstrations of super-human ingenuity and acquiescence to sub-optimal working conditions. Sometimes both.

Above: a table I fashioned from four folding chairs, six boxes of political literature, two laptop-computer bags, and two pieces of spare wood (18″x6′).