Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:48 AM

IFilm hosts the Triumph at Spin Alley video, relieving the server pressure on other folk.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:05 PM

Whatever our opinions on Bush vs Kerry or on the quality or lack thereof of Team America, I think we can all agree on one thing: I LOVE YOU EGG! (via Lileks)
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:36 PM

Thanks to how terrible tonight's West Wing is, I find myself with a little spare time. I stayed tuned during the political point with the subtlety of a sledgehammer (missing only a flashing neon sign reading "As opposed to how Bushitler took advantage of 9/11 to invade Iraq") but turned it off during the montage think session of how to get the Israeli prime minister in a peace conference with the fictional doppelganger of Arafat. I'd say the scene was missing a clock with fast-moving hands and a wastepaper basket slowly filling with paper but I suspect I just turned off the TV before they got to that.

I don't know what idea they eventually developed although I suspect it involved inviting each to the White House without saying the other was there, having each get something from the cellar, and "accidentally" locking them in the cellar together.

Or you have them stuck in an elevator together and a pregnant woman who only speaks Spanish goes into labor.

UPDATE: While looking up the first-season episode that my brother alluded to in comments, I found a description of last night's episode. The part where it says "Kate [...]provides Jed with the hook he needs to get the Israelis and Palestinians to sit down together at Camp David" makes me suspect that said hook is so crazy that it just might work.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 3:30 PM

Thanks to spending a five-day weekend at my grandmother's (14.4K Internet connection and no Tivo; it was 1996 all over again), I'm behind on a mess o' stuff.

I should clarify part of the point of my "Humorless Left Review Team America" series which was to highlight reviews where the reviewer liked it up to the point where his ox was gored. So, for example, this Roger Ebert review doesn't count anymore than my grandma's elderly friend complaining about the filthy language does. And the review my friend Chip Pope posts in the comments here doesn't count since he dislikes the whole movie rather than the select parts and I respect his opinion (even if he did like In & Out (but then I liked Wrongfully Accused so who am I to talk?)).

Meanwhile Edelstein clarifies his review and makes fun of his right-wing critics here. He states that his critics probably didn't enjoy "The Passion of the Jew" episode to which I reply:

1. Sez you.
2. Edelstein commits what I call "the Lileks fallacy" referring to how Lileks notes that people often assume that a right-of-center view on the war on terror or taxes means that you're a gaybashing, fundamentalist bigot (or alternately the "Seipp one-drop fallacy").
3. Edelstein conveniently ignored the part of that episode where the Jewish characters were portrayed as overreacting and contributing to the tension caused by the film.
4. Edelstein, in assuming that pro-war folk hated the episode, ignores neocons a.k.a. the Jooooooooos.*

*I didn't use to buy into the idea that neoconservative was a code word for Jew until a) a non-Jewish, liberal, Nader-voter friend of mine asked me if neoconservative was code for Jew and b) I kept seeing Jonah Goldberg's name in neo-conservative lists and the only thing "neo" about his conservatism is his Jewish surname.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 4:58 PM

The JFK assasination conspiracy claimed another victim today as witness Malcolm Summers died at the age of 80 of a heart ailment. Or, as future JFK conspiracy victims lists will phrase it, he died of "a heart ailment."
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:37 PM

Humorless Left React to Team America Part III: Kenneth Turan of the LA Times reviews Team America until it got to the part where it mocks celebrities. He calls the part where it goes from mocking the left to mocking the right a "flip-flop", the joke being that that's what the Republicans are accusing Kerry of.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:15 PM

Humorless Left React to Team America Part II: Slate's David Edelstein reviews Team America (WARNING: Spoiler filled). While he liked the skewering of the right, he didn't like the part where the leftist actors start fighting Team America. That's crazy!!!! That wouldn't happen in real life!

The reason that part is ridiculous is because "[l]eftist actors learned from Vietnam not to cozy up to dictators" to which one can only reply, "See Penn, Sean".

Spoiler Alert:Edelstein has a revealing Freudian slip when he refers to the part of the movie when "Team America destroys the Panama Canal" since it was terrorists who blew up the Panama Canal. And while the terrorists publicly claim anger over Team America's actions in Cairo as their motive, it is made fairly clear in the movie that even if Team America had done nothing that the terrorists would have blown up the Canal anyway.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:01 PM

So my gym was having electrical problems and was turning away folk but allowed me to exercise since I had an appointment with a trainer. The cardio area was like every movie or TV-depiction of a post-apolcalyptic world.

And then my reading glasses broke. Oh, the cruel, cruel irony.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:45 PM

There was a poster at the theater for the Fat Albert movie. I'll probably go see it but I'm worried that if I'm not careful, I might learn something.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:38 PM

Salon interviews Trey Parker and Matt Stone (Warning: Interview a) is full of swears and b) requires sitting through half-minute ad). Predictably, many Salon readers are not amused and write letters to that effect. Equally predictable is that one of the letters says Bush is worse than Osama and Kim Jong Il.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:05 PM

I saw Team America at sneak preview Saturday. Excellent movie. Brilliant parody of action movies which mocks both sides of the geopolitical debate: The titular team are ugly Americans; the peacenick celebrities go on a slippery slope from useful idiots to actively fighting for the villain. And since it's a Parker-Stone production, lotsa songs.

Contrary to earlier speculation, I did see the R-rated version. I judge this by the fact that the credits included a parody of Aerosmith's song during a sex scene in Armageddon which did not appear in the movie. And also the presence of kids in the theater. I don't mean a fifteen-year-old with his parents; I mean a family with little kids where either the parents couldn't get a sitter or just thought "Oh, how cute, puppets."

A smarter guy than I could write an essay on the fact that this movie is as close as we're going to get to a testosterone-laden movie where terrorist ass is kicked and what that says about Hollywood. Granted the lack could just be a matter of the importance of the foreign markets (and, until Pearl Harbor, many studios didn't want to make anti-Nazi movies for similar reasons). Still, three years after 9/11, this is as close as we've gotten to this war's Casablanca or even this war's You Nazty Spy.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:02 AM

Sean Penn writes a rambling letter to Trey Parker and Matt Stone (Warning: Penn uses a swear). He's less mad that they make fun of him and madder about Matt Stone's comments in Rolling Stone that "If you don't know what you're talking about, there's no shame in not voting." When he says that, Stone is not taking into account the vast pro-rape lobby whose hands he's playing into.

(Anecdotal Evidence that Newspaper Registration Schemes Are Dumb Dept.: I was going to link to LA Times story on this but they make their "CalendarLive" content subscriber-only. So I found a better link.)
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:15 PM

Heidi Macdonald expresses surprise that Fox News loved Team America. The clip I saw on Leno featured this exchange:

HANS BLIX: You need to let me inspect your palace. Or else.
KIM JONG IL: Or else what?
HANS BLIX: Or else we will be very very angry with you, and we will write you a letter telling you how angry we are.

Many folk were saying whatever administration figure told Drudge that he was angry at the film was an idiot. Or at least not familiar with the concept of the South Park Republican.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:58 PM

When I bought my ticket for the sneak preview of Team America, it was listed as rated NC-17. This means that either the theater was hedging its bets against the problem* it had getting an R was unresolved or the version being shown for the sneak preview is the full puppet sex version.

*(login: cptspaulding/cptspaulding)
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 4:14 PM

Undeveloped Comedy Concept Dept.: Rodney Dangerfield, Jr, the less successful son of Rodney Dangerfield. He got a little respect, not as much as he'd like but some. So, for example, when he was born the doctor didn't slap his mother; the doctor just glared at her.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 4:11 PM

Last night, Letterman read some Rodney Dangerfield jokes. Here's one that was funny and I hadn't heard:

As a kid, I had no luck with girls. One girl told me "Come over to my place. No one's home." So I went to her place. No one was home.

The joke was so funny that the audience actually laughed at it rather than politely applauded to the APPLAUSE sign.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:33 AM

More on the alleged Moore/Rather connection. Michael Moore, who as you recall saw the documents and dismissed them as phony, trumpeted the upcoming 60-Minutes story based on them:

Later today (Wed.), the Boston Globe, the A.P. and Dan Rather all present new and damning information about how George W. Bush got moved to the front of the line to get in the Texas Air National Guard, and how he then went AWOL. I am putting every ounce of trust I have in my fellow Americans that a majority of them get this, get the injustice of it all, and get the sad, sick twisted irony of how it relates very, very much to our precious Election 2004.

(via Tim Blair)

UPDATE: When I said before that this was likely a publicity push because his DVD came out Tuesday, I was mistaken. It's a publicty push for five things that came out on Tuesday. More from Moorelies.com
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:24 AM

So in yesterday's debate, Cheney accidentally referred to FactCheck.org as FactCheck.com. If you click on the link, you'll see that George Soros bought the .com domain and had it redirected to his site. (Via Hit and Run where a commenter correctly notes that it would have been funnier if it had redirected to gay porn).
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:46 AM

If there was any doubt about that the Dan Rather National Guard memos were forgeries, the fact that Michael Moore says he rejected them should put that to rest.

By the way, I'm positive that Michael Moore really did get the memos and isn't just saying he did to get publicity for the DVD release of his movie.
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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:37 AM

National Review's Kerry Spot's Jim Geraghty writes of a solution to Democrats' flooding online polls and editors saying that Edwards won the debate:

One Kerry Spot reader came up with an interesting jujitsu counter-move: Nothing. Let the DNC win the online polls and the e-mail wars. What will happen when MSNBC or CNN go to discuss the instant results of their online poll... and learn that 99 percent of viewers thought Edwards won?

He then suggested as "a truly nefarious" act of sabotage that readers start sending email to editors in the afternoon. One reader followed his advice and received a profanity-laden reply from an Ohio newspaper quoted in full in the article.
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