Say Anything Blog

Here and here.

I’ll never understand why these morons think it’s so great to cause their relatives to suffer. Religion can really screw up a healthy mind, and inject unnecessary “controversy” to an eminently commonsense law.

For more information, read this examination of the Futile Care Law.

Link.

A debate over the killings of disabled infants has been requested by the UK’s Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. Although withholding treatment is already allowed in the UK, the debate will center on whether or not active infanticide of disabled babies should be legalized.

What is the morally significant difference between withholding treatment necessary for the disabled infant’s survival and actively giving it a lethal injection?

Every day across the world (and the country), doctors and parents agree to let disabled or terminally ill patients die by not treating them. Those who advocate infanticide and involuntary euthanasia (euthanasia on those who lack the capacity to make life-and-death decisions) are merely saying that rather than drawing out these painful deaths (passively killing them) we simply give these patients a shot that will end their lives painlessly (actively killing them.

If doctors are letting those with terminal diseases die anyway, why shouldn’t we allow them to do it in a way that involves as little pain and suffering as possible?

Why do you want to increase these patients’ pain?

My career as a political commentator resumes tonight at 7:30 PM Central, where I’ll be be participating in a debate on whether our troops should remain in Iraq. Readers on the eastern half of the state can listen live by tuning in to 105.5 KMAV; for everyone else, there’s a live webcast that you can access here. Enjoy!

I’m a supervisor at a small restaurant, and I noticed a sign at work that really pissed me off. We have a buffet, and on our buffet there’s a sign for our customers that says:

“State Law Requires A Clean Plate For Each Trip Through The Buffet”

Basically, if you load up on the salad bar right away, you need to get a new plate when you go through the next time to get pizza.

Anyway, this question popped into my head:

What North Dakota politician wrote this law? I mean, why the hell does the government care what we do at a buffet?!?!?!?! ARGHHHHHH!!!!!!!

(The following is a commentary performed by me for “The Collective,” a show on Comet Radio, the radio station for Mayville State University)

The past 15 years have not been kind to Martin Scorcese. Ever since 1990’s Goodfellas, he’s been saddled with a slew of mediocre films, from 1991’s Cape Fear to 2004’s The Aviator. When The Departed was announced as his next project, expectations were high. It was based on a successful Hong Kong thriller titled Internal Affiars, which was critically acclaimed, though unseen by me. And when more and more actors signed on to his cast—-Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, and Martin Sheen—-it looked like he could return to form. And, for once, a hyped film has actually exceeded its buzz, as The Departed is easily Scorcese’s best work in over a decade, and deserves to be mentioned with Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Raging Bull.

The basic story is very simple: The Boston police force—led by Matt Damon—is determined to bring down the Irish mob (led by Jack Nicholson). However, both sides begin suspecting they have a “rat” in their ranks, and the second half of the movie is about the two sides’ frantic attempts to discover the true identity of their respective double agents.

Now, there are two ways this story could play out. In one version, the audience is kept entirely in the dark about the identity of the double-agents, right up until the very end, in which they learn the truth at the same time as the rest of the characters, in a shocking twist ending. Call this the “Sixth Sense approach”. In the other way, the audience is lifted into a position of omniscience: we know MORE than the characters; we know exactly who the double-agents are right away. It is this second approach that Scorcese uses, and it enables The Departed to make the jump from a good film to a great one.

Just ten minutes into the movie, Scorcese shows the audience who the two double-agents are, a fact known by only two other men in the whole film—-two men who are sworn to secrecy. The rest of the film is a brilliant showcase of dramatic irony, as every conversation has an added edge of suspense, as just a single wrong word by one of the “rats” could mean his death. This all builds up to a rather predictable ending, but one that is handled beautifully by Scorcese.

Watching the film, I couldn’t help but think of Alfred Hitchcock. In his series of interviews with Francois Truffaut, he illustrated the difference between SUSPENSE and SURPRISE by telling a story. Imagine you’re watching a movie in which two men are sitting around a table having a conversation. All of a sudden, BOOM!, a bomb explodes under their table. Everyone is surprised for a couple of seconds, as prior to that, it had just been a normal scene. Now, however, imagine that you--the audience--saw a terrorist plant a bomb under the table, and set it to explode in exactly ten minutes. Now, since the audience knows the bomb is there, the entire scene takes on a whole new dimension. We get to almost participate in this scene, as the men’s banal conversation becomes increasingly important with each passing minute, since the audience knows what’s about to happen. In the first example, the audience is surprised, for the ten seconds or so after the bomb goes off. In the second example, though, the audience is captivated in suspense for the entire ten minutes of the scene.

It’s much harder to generate suspense than it is to generate surprise, which is why so few directors even attempt suspense. Instead we see movies with scary noises or gruesome sights—things that shock us for a few seconds—or plot twists that are just impossibly unpredictable, removing audiences from the story. Think of Shyamalan’s films, or the two Saw flicks. Actual suspense is high risk but, as we see in The Departed, very high reward.

What’s most unexpected in this film is how darkly comic it is. It maintains a delicate balance between violence and humor, similar to Quentin Tarantino’s films, in which half the audience bursts out laughing and the other half covers their eyes after a character gets murdered. The dialogue is fast-paced and very clever, with Jack Nicholson’s mob “Boss” getting the best lines, growling things like “I don’t wanna be a product of my environment. I want my environment to be a product of me.” There are several other wicked lines, but this is a Scorcese film, and there could be children listening.

The opening scene informs us that the film is set “SOMETIME” in Boston, an amusing title card. And, indeed, much like David Fincher’s Se7en, The Departed does not take place at any specific time. The movie always looks like it’s taking place in the 1970s, but the characters talk as though it’s the present time. Plus, the film is obsessed with modern technology, utilizing cel phones and cameras in very interesting ways, a trend I hope takes off in film.

The only people I could see being disappointed are fans of Martin Scorcese the auteur. With the exception of the subject matter and a few subtle nods to his previous films (The Rolling Stones’s “Gimme Shelter” is played several times, and Jack Nicholson’s entrance begins with the same tracking shot used for Ray Liotta’s character in Goodfellas), there is little visually that would identify The Departed as a Scorcese film. I believe, however, that this is a calculated move by Scorcese—with a great script and amazing cast, he just takes a step back and doesn’t interfere with the action. Whatever his intentions, though, the result is nearly flawless.

The Departed is by far the best film I’ve seen this year, and I cannot recommend it to you strongly enough. Go out and see it….now!

Anyone else use Your Top Movies Database? It is a little tool where you can list your top 20 movies, and then compare your list to others’. It can be helpful in seeing what other movies you’d probably like; you get a list of the members on the site whose lists match up the closest to yours, and then you can see the other movies they liked.

My list is right here. What do you guys have?

(The following is a commentary performed by me for “The Collective,” a show on Comet Radio, the radio station for Mayville State University.)

Students,

You remember that term paper you wrote last semester? You know, that 10-page exegesis on “Finnegan’s Wake,” or your examination of the Algerian War of Independence?  Well depending on what class you had, far more than just your professor got that paper. If your professor uses a specific anti-plagiarism service, a small corporation in San Francisco currently keeps your feminist analysis of “Macbeth” in a large database of all submitted student papers. And what’s worse? They’re making money from this.