Rather than expressing my own opinions on this candidate, I just want to post a link to an article a good friend of mine wrote shortly after Palin’s nomination. I think it’s an extremely fair and thoughtful evaluation of her credentials.

]]> http://www.emelianova.com/ben/2008/10/03/dont-forget-to-register-vote/feed/ http://www.emelianova.com/ben/2008/09/07/enfj/ http://www.emelianova.com/ben/2008/09/07/enfj/#comments Mon, 08 Sep 2008 00:18:25 +0000 Ben http://www.emelianova.com/ben/2008/09/07/enfj/ For reasons I won’t go into, I have had a chance to do some significant self-reflection in the last few weeks. My final academic year as an undergraduate started a few weeks ago, and I’ve had a few developments in my personal life which have caused me to look inward and think about the kind of person I am and the type of person I aspire to become.

While I normally shy away from these sorts of “MySpace” self-identity quizzes – both because I think they’re largely a waste of time and because I question the motivation behind anyone who feels the need to constantly post surveys about themselves on the Internet – I have recently felt the urge to go ahead and list some qualities about myself that I think have become a rather permanent and an important component of my identity. While this list is hardly a commitment to these traits, nor is it a complete description, these are some things about myself that I feel are important to my identity. The subject refers to the acronym that describes my personality type according to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. I personally feel that it is an extremely good description of me, although all personality tests have their limits.

Things I am:
· A leader whose management style relies heavily on getting feedback from multiple parties before making a decision.
· Eager-to-please, desiring to make as many people happy as possible.
· A social perfectionist that hates to be criticized or embarrassed, particularly publicly.
· Flirtatious, a flatterer.
· Someone with an active and playful sense of humor.
· Creative and expressive.
· Someone who tries to be positive even while being critical.
· Analytical, capable of understanding the way systems and people connect to one another. Frequently uses analogies to make points. “A big picture person.”
· Prefers having a small number of close friends to a large number of distant ones. Often not comfortable with people at a first meeting.
· Someone who thrives on interaction with others.
· Self-aware.
· Strong moral center.

Things I am not:
· Neat and tidy.
· Extraordinarily handsome or extraordinarily ugly.
· Detail-oriented.
· Athletic.
· Driven to make plans for the distant future.
· Good at remembering names and faces.
· Spatially oriented – good with directions.
· Someone with an proficient memory.

There was once a great Ant Hill of Higher Education. Every day thousands of ants would ride their caterpillars from all over the countryside to learn how to be productive members of the colony. One day the Queen of the Hill heard a loud noise.

Opening her window, she saw a crowd of angry stud-ants below. “Why aren’t all of you in class?” she asked.

The crowd yelled back, “We are tired of being forced to buy parking passes for our caterpillars! We pay enough as it is!”

Worried, the Queen replied, “But if you do not pay to park your caterpillars, how can I afford to maintain the parking lots you use?”

But the ants were unconvinced, and so the Queen let all the ants park their caterpillars for free. Several months went by and the roads around the hill and parking spaces began to deteriorate. Once again an angry crowd formed outside the Queen’s window.

“We demand better roads and parking!” they cried.

“Oh dear,” said the Queen, “I simply cannot afford to pay for all the upkeep now that we don’t have parking passes anymore.”

“We don’t care about the details,” the crowd replied, “just fix the potholes and repaint the lines so that our caterpillars don’t trip or bump into each other.”

So the Queen pondered about the problem and finally decided to increase the tuition for all the ants in order to pay for the parking improvements. “At last,” she thought, “I have finally made all the stud-ants happy.” But to her surprise, only weeks later a new crowd had formed.

“What is it this time?” she said in exasperation.

“My Queen, we are the stud-ants that do not have caterpillars. Every day we walk to the Ant Hill, and we don’t think it’s fair that we should have to pay for the parking and the roads,” the stud-ants explained.

“That sounds fair,” said the Queen, “but how can I pay for the parking upkeep without the tuition increase?”

The stud-ants thought and thought, when finally the smallest ant in the group had an idea.

“Why not create a special parking pass and charge the stud-ants money to purchase it? That way stud-ants with caterpillars will pay for the parking lots that they are wearing down and stud-ants without them aren’t charged money for a service they aren’t using!” he declared.

The Queen thought this was a fine idea and quickly went about implementing it. Finally, she collapsed on her throne, exhausted from all the fuss about parking. It was only then she realized that she had ended up exactly where she had started.

The moral of the story: “Stud-ants will always be upset about parking.”

The protagonist was probably one of the most unsympathetic, dislikable characters that has ever been set up to be a hero. At the beginning of the film, he’s whiny, indecisive, and spineless. In the beginning of the film he’s angry, self-righteous, and bitter. By the end of the film he’s just self-righteous (X3). At the beginning he tells the audience that he “used to be a loser like you.” Look bud, I came here to watch a movie, not get insulted! The abuse doesn’t stop there. The final line of the movie is delivered by our hero speaking directly to his audience, “This is me taking back control of my life. What the fuck have you done lately?”

Apparently the only two lifestyle choices are working a normal job as a spineless nobody and being an assassin with a bad attitude.

The script was terrible. Just awful. Even fine actors like Morgan Freeman were unable to deliver some of these lines. I was literally squirming in my seat throughout the film after being subjected to some of the must unnatural dialog ever uttered in a theater (yes I am including the audience in that measure.) The language alternated from being extremely lofty, “we are an elite fraternity of assassins operating for 1,000 years to maintain order in a chaotic world” to a lot of childish cursing, often within the same sentence.

The plot is predictable (I totally called the “surprise” twist) and to call it implausible is a massive understatement. I have three words for you “Loom of Fate.” All the likable characters died and the the unlikeable characters weren’t unpleasant enough for the audience to be happy when bad things happened to them, just bad enough to wish they had less screen time.

Oh, and I would like to confirm the underlying misogyny of the film. Every single female character was portrayed very negatively with the exception Angelina Jolie’s character, and she was basically portrayed as a sex symbol.

Which brings me to my final point - this movie was in almost every way a male adolescent fantasy. Youth finds out he has super violence powers. Beats up all the mean people who made his life miserable before. Gets trained by hot sex symbol babe who is older and inexplicably attracted to him. In the end he has “taken control of his life” through a lot of violence and swearing. If I were thirteen, I would probably think this movie was the coolest thing since I discovered HBO shows softcorn pornography at night. However since I am not thirteen, I am forced to call it what it is: an awful film that should not be viewed by anyone outside its target audience.

*Edit.* I wanted to add that this movie is based on a comic book which, from the synopsis I read on Wikipedia, looks like it has a much darker and less juvenile premise than the film that carries its name. Too bad.

I say “fact” in quotation marks because something as innately opinionated as the quality of an actor’s performance can never really be considered fact. However, after watching The Dark Knight with a fair share of skepticism, I have to admit that his role as the Joker was not only good, it was extraordinary. I much prefer his portrayal of the character to that of Jack Nicholson in the 1989 Batman. The aptly named Dark Knight was dark, cynical even in its portrayal of the heroic characters. It was also extremely entertaining. I know the “audience at the edge of their seats” cliche is over used, but in this case it definitely merits use. The only criticism I have is that the film was a bit long. While I never felt that the movie dragged, there were several scenes where it felt like the movie was going to draw to close, only to have it continue for another 40 minutes. However, considering the quality of that extra 40 minutes, a length of 152 minutes is easily forgiven.

There is a scene in this film in which Hitler’s Generals finally convey how utterly hopeless the situation is to their Fuhrer.  Orders to attack that Hitler gave earlier in the film had not been carried out because the unit to whom he sent the command is so hopelessly disorganized and beaten that they had no ability to function cohesively.  Hitler orders most of his lower officers to leave the room and then goes a tirade about how he has been betrayed and how he “should have purged his officers ranks like Stalin did.”  This is actually one of the most powerful scenes in the movie and, again, is an amazing portrayal of Hitler, particularly considering the entire film is in German which gives it so much more authenticity than any English production could have, such as “Hitler: The Rise of Evil.”

However, the fact that the scene I described is all in German has given rise to yet another entertaining and frivolous web meme.  The premise is fairly simple: add subtitles to the scene that totally change the meaning of what Hitler and his Generals are saying.  Several popular examples include: Hitler ranting about the loss of HD DVD to Blu-Ray, Hitler ranting about his console getting banned by Microsoft, Hitler ranting about a bad suggestion for the replacement of his stolen car, Hitler ranting about the loss of Hillary Clinton during the primary, and (perhaps most creatively of all) Hitler ranting about becoming an Internet meme.

Now I have always taken the stance that any Hitler or Holocaust joke is “too soon,” and will always and forever be “too soon.”  Nothing funny about that, period.  However, I have to admit that I find these parody clips extremely entertaining.  In fact, it was one of these parody clips that led to me watching the actual film; I was so impressed by the acting in that scene that I wanted to watch the rest of the movie.  Maybe because, to me, they are more poking fun at the film-makers’ intent than they are the actual historical events.

Perhaps the film-makers are aware of this, because many of these clips have now been removed from YouTube.  I had a much harder time finding links than I would have a month ago and I expect the two I embedded will become non-functional at some point in the near future.  It’s a shame.  While I recognize the extreme copyright infringement that was going on, at the same time I know I never would have discovered this excellent film had I not stumbled across the Blue-Ray War version of the scene.  I am sure that I am not the only one.  If you do stumble across any other “Downfall” clips, I highly recommend that you watch them… and then go rent the film.  I definitely recommend both.