Death & Life - and - Life & Death

!SUGGESTION! - In order to get the full effect of this post, I suggest you play "La Petite Fille De La Mer" by Vangelis in my sidebar after you read this post. Don't blame me though if you cry... After watching The Dark Knight recently, I naturally got thinking about my own mortality. How long will I live? Out of habit, I went to the place with all the answers: GOOGLE. Which is starting to scare me, becuase I mindlessly plug queries into that search engine and often just accept what I see in the top 10 results. Wouldn't Bill Gates and Dick Cheney kill to have that power? But maybe they do already...

So who was at the top of the list for caluculating life expectancy? Our good friends at Wharton University. Are you going to question them? I didn't think so. Here is the link if you care to discover your own expiration date:

http://gosset.wharton.upenn.edu/mortality/perl/CalcForm.html

I shall forbear the details of my own entries. The results are what fascinate me. Here they are:

Life Expectancy: 84.39

Lower Quartile : 76.63

Median Lifetime: 86.87

Upper Quartile : 94.83

Not bad, assuming Julie can handle all of my bad humour, manners and unyielding flatulence for another 53 years. But wait! It gets better, I took the option of analyzing my health risks. I selected all of them since I'm hungry for precise, indisputable information about my future.

ANALYSIS RESULTS [Law & Order sound]

-Not smoking is a great choice! Your life expectancy is maximized by not smoking

-If you have 2-3 drinks per day, your life expectancy would be 0.26 years longer

-If you do not drive, your life expectancy would be 0.34 years longer

-If you do not have any stress listed in the table, your life expectancy would be 0.51 years longer

-If you become a conditioning exercizer, your life expectancy would be 0.59 years longer

-Consuming all 5 classes of food everyday has maximized your life expectancy

-If you do not have any sexual partner, your life expectancy would be 0.34 years longer

-If you sleep 7 hours a day, your life expectancy would be 0.30 years longer

If all of the above choices are adopted, your life expectancy would be 2.11 years longer.

That's it?!? Two measly years if I start drinking, quit driving, eliminate all stress, exercise like a fiend, abstain from my wife (that one really hurts), and stew in bed for one more hour per day.

Talk about a bad commercial for healthly living. Maybe the statisticians and actuarial scientists that cooked these calculations are just trying to justify their current slothful, beer-filled, sleep-in lifestyles and show that change is futile. And maybe it is. After all... (I'm kinda serious here) the world may not make it to 2061. Nuclear holocaust, global warming - brought on by Buy n Large (the satanic corporation in Wall-E), hostile alien invasion, or religious events such as the Second Coming or End of the World. Why bother saving for retirement, changing lifestyle habits or abstain from skydiving?

If none of the above happens. I get two more years. Honestly, it dosen't seem worth it. Like Austin Powers, "I also like to live dangerously." So I say: ROCK ON, go to Disneyland, climb Long's Peak, Hang 10 on a pipeline, go cliff diving, splunking and fight crime as a vigilante - Assuming you can get away from your desk job for long enough to do that stuff.

In honor of this auspicious discovery, I have added a widget on my side bar that will now track the days I have left on this beautiful planet (Unless I am compelled to take it off the site by forces much more powerful than me). The painting on the right is entitled, Obscured by the Passge of Time by David Luksha. It helps make this post seem much more deep than it really is. In closing, let us say as as Cameron from Ferris Buller's Day Off : "Have a nice life..."

The Dark Knight

"Nothing. No name, no other alias. Clothing is... custom. Nothing in his pockets but knives and lint." This essentially sums up the Joker. He is a mystery, unique and completely evil. Heath Ledger has given us a rare moment in moviemaking. He left us with the performance of a lifetime.

However, before going any further, I should say the Director, Christopher Nolan has out-done himself. What makes this movie so strong is Nolan's belief in bending reality just a bit, but not too much. He avoids CGI, directs every shot (dosen't use a second crew with an assistant director), does not use story-boards - which allows for pure creative energy on set (just may have something to do with Ledger's performance), and co-wrote the film with his brother. He has themes and ideas he wants to communicate. In Batman Begins, he told us about fear. This time, he shows us Chaos.

The Joker sums up the plot of movie with, "This is what happens when an unstoppable force (Chaos) meets an immovable object (Batman)." He later tells Batman, "We could go on like this Forever" Which is indeed what the comics do. The endless struggle between Batman and the Joker. Fight fire with fire.

Everyone is saying Ledger and Oldeman just disappear in their roles. But don't overlook Christian Bale. I thought he did the same with Batman. He really is getting the character down, especially the Bruce Wayne side. Oddly enough some of the best humour in the moive comes from him.

Despite the loathing I felt for the Joker, you just can't get enough of him in the film. He has an almost other-worldly persona, like he was sent straight from hell. If the Joker were to exist in reality, he'd be close to this incarnation. Some of his stunts are just too well planned, but very interesting and entertaining. His jokes are purely sadistic, yet you find yourself laughing. I may be wrong, but I think the character was hugely influenced by the Saw movies (which I have not seen - I'm not a horror guy), which revolve around placing people in situations where they have to make terrible choices. Bottom line: if this performance does not win an Oscar, then I don't know what would. Give Heath the credit he is due.

Take away the masks, make-up and gadgets and it feels like this story could be real. I read one review that call this movie The Untouchables with the Joker as Al Capone and Batman as Elliot Ness. Almost no one can be trusted, anyone can be bought or sold. This movie is dark, demoralizing and wildly entertaining.

One performer in the film we never see is the music and it was terrific. It did such a good job of heightening the tension, bleeding emotion and spicing up the action, yet you forget it is there, but I realized after it was over, just how well crafted it was. Hats off to Zimmer and Howard. All great movies have unique and memorable scores.

Finally, I think this move hits home on a deeper level as it deals with curent issues of terrorism and how to fight it. I daresay this movie was practically propaganda for the Patriot Act. Shunned of course within the film, but it raises the question, how far would you go to stop a bomb from expoloding in a hospital? Would you kill someone to save others? What does it really take to win a war with people who only want one thing - death? This is where Nolan finds a way to give us our popcorn and food for thought as well.

Wall-E & The Haters

I'm back in at the anvil of critical justice...and sparks will fly. I just saw Wall-E, the latest PIXAR creation last night and I'm overwhelmed with mixed feelings. For real, I'm going to do some serious spoilers. I can't imagine who would be worried about them, but I feel it my duty warn you gentle reader to the perils below. Let's start with the good and then go to the jagged pill.

Flat out, this is one of the best, if not the best PIXAR film to date. The animation was fluid, the colors were vivid, the audio was crisp and powerful and the soundtrack was moving. Wall-E is such an endearing character you can't help but love the guy. He is a hard worker, kind, thoughtful, curious and most of all a hopeless romantic. The opening 10-15 minutes of the movie is almost entirely free of dialogue as is much of the movie. I find it actually makes the story more emotional because it allows you to just see and feel what is going on instead of processing dialogue. The screenplay is excellent. Each scene is well crafted and draws out laughter, suspense or sometimes sadness. It reminds me of how hard I used to laugh watching Wile Coyote and the Road-runner. No dialogue, but tons of humor. I will even volunteer that I actually "welled up" at one point in the movie. The scene where Wall-e and Eve fly around the spaceship is so beautiful and carefree, I really did forget about all my troubles for a spell. Simply put, this is great film making.

The robots in the film are well crafted and inventive. The contrasts between Wall-e and Eve (the female gun-slinging protagonist) are interesting as well as a commentary on the differences between men and women. Wall-e is dirty, old, clumsy and deals in garbage all day but has a heart of gold. Most of all, he has proper respect and fear for his woman. Eve is a beautiful, smooth, sleek and hot tempered woman that can fly and will blow away (with extreme prejudice) anything that threatens her. I find these two emulate popular contemporary views of men and women nicely. It was funny and entertaing to watch, although I'm not entirely thrilled about the characterizations. But what the heck, it's just a cartoon right?

WRONG. All entertainment has a message whether we like it or not. Even Charles Barkley came around and admitted he was a role model whether he liked it or not. PIXAR is a Bay-Area company and let's face it, this was the equivalent of An Inconvenient Truth in animation for kids... and adults. This movie rails on corporations, consumerism and bad environmental practices. So effectively, this is a Socialistic critique of Capitalism carried to its extreme.

In this film, we see that if we allowed corporations the power to eliminate the government, they would pollute the earth to an uninhabitable degree, force robots into slavery to fix it and blast us into outer-space where we would turn into nothing but fat, bloated, idiotic, weak-boned, pleasure seeking hedonists that lay around on floating carts all day doing nothing but drinking liquid hamburgers and watching TV endlessly. Did I miss anything?

Perhaps I'm a bit defensive, but this is basically the contempt that socialist tree huggers have for America. The land of the obese, indolent, polluting capitalists that would sell their planet for a buck. On a whole, I could not escape the feeling this was an extra-sugar coated pill of hate for America (or the right half of it).

In a perfect world, we'd have the government run everything for us - because let's face it, no one does things more efficiently or fairly than bureaucrats. Big Brother would monitor our carbon footprint within an inch of our lives and make sure the earth never got trashed by the likes of Ken Lay and his buddies at Enron.

I'm sure if you asked the people who made this movie, they would say they have contempt for current environmental standards and if we don't act now this could be our future. They probably feel they are doing us a favor by opening our eyes and hearts to the cause of environmentalism, which in my opinion has become the new religion for Atheists and Agnostics. I bet there are a number of people that will show this movie to their kids in a pseudo Sunday school fashion. I'm well acquainted with people treating me with contempt for choosing to be different in my religious views. I follow my convictions because I believe I am making a difference in my life and those I love for the better by following the principles of my religion. The blessing in this life are great, but the payoff in the life to come is far beyond what I can comprehend.

Likewise, I've known people that do not follow religion or are just spiritual, but downright intense about their carbon foot print. They do "weird" or "unusual" things to make a difference. Is it all that different from religion? One chooses to put faith in God, others faith in Science... and Al Gore. Here is an interesting article from Time about indulgencies for modern followers of the Green Faith:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1599714,00.html

I try to recycle, use cleaners that don't violate the earth, avoid littering, shut off the water when I brush my teeth and live by sunlight as much as possible. But I'm no saint with my carbon footprint, just as I'm no perfect saint in my religion either. However, I will always put my religious convictions ahead of other considerations. Why? I've come to understand the big picture and realize that some things are not as important as others. Some truths are eternal and some ideas and so called "facts" are constantly changing.

OK. I got carried away. Let me just say this: I love my country. Despite its flaws, some of our history and current policies. It is a great place to live and has afforded many the protection and opportunity to enjoy life and the pursuit of happiness like never before in the history of the world. We are not all gun-toting, fat, intolerant morons that are out to destroy the earth for our own gratification. Corporations are not entirely evil. Competition is generally a good thing. We have brought some wonderful things to humanity and it makes me sick to see such consistent, subtle attacks on our way of life. Will I buy this movie? Yes. It is a fantastic film. Am I thrilled with some of the implied messages? Obviously not, but to be fair, protecitng the earth, staying fit and avoiding runaway corparate greed are good things. Maybe I'm just a Communications major that should be quiet, eat my popcorn and enjoy the movie.