No one understands the nature of truth, beauty, goodness better than Conan. Although the open-step, a falcon at my wrist, and the wind in my hair does sound like a fine afternoon to spend amidst my subjects in my kingdom.

Gotta love the trollish looking fellow who seems rather frightened and confused when the Hun says, “WRONG!”.

This would have to be it and would take about a day to get through. Could you do it? Inspired by RevDarth.

• Conan the Destroyer
• Delta Force II
• 300
• Caboblanco
• Street Fighter: The Movie
• Masters of the Universe
• Volcano
• No Holds Barred
• Alexander - The Director’s Cut
• Iron Eagle II
• The Last Dragon
• Ninja III: The Domination
• Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
• UPDATE ALERT!: Gymkata

- I remembered this one over dinner. Blech. Nick also makes a sound point regarding The Last Dragon. It’s still cheesy. “Who is the master?”, “I am.” Busta Rhymes before Busta Rhymes doing the Ninja thing.  Used to be cool.  Not so much now.  Like a Newcleus album from 1984.

“If hell had a movie theater, this is what would be shown every day for eternity.”

Darrell Hugueley at The Ooze writes about the film There Will Be Blood (which I have not seen) and notes that there are some anti-Christian sentiments in the film, but that it has marvelous artistic craft to it as well.

He notes an analogy that he considers backward that one poster left:

Suppose these people came into your house and started rearranging your furniture, smearing mud all over the things that were precious to you and calling your family members and the people you love dearly ugly names? What if they told you that your furniture was not right and then began to rearrange it and calling ugly what I called beautiful, and beautiful what I called ugly? Would I have the backbone to speak up against that or would I applaud them and pay them for rearranging the furniture and disparaging my loved ones?

The analogy of someone coming into your home and messing things up is interesting.  This is precisely what Jesus did to all those he associated himself with and with those who simply knew about him.  He is the incarnation of God’s disruptive impact to the social and psychological order that we create to make sense of the world on our terms.

It is here that what we find grotesque and the presence of God’s sacred subliminality intersect in the disruption of our constructions of order.  Rather than be so offended that someone rearranges our furniture, it is better to ask why such a rearrangement is so perpetually offensive that we automatically reject the visitor.  Isn’t that the central reality of the responsibility the human race bears for the crucifixion?  Isn’t that where we learn of God’s grace in the midst of our rejection of Christ in the crucifixion?

This kind of stuff drives me nuts. Rather than do a critical review of a controversial play and the offer a Catholic Response of his own, John Mark Reynolds does this:

As such a lesser being, I point out the harm, the grievous harm, done to Christian education at Notre Dame when a University dedicated to Our Lady and her purity hosts the Vagina Monologues (VM).

According to news accounts:

The sexually explicit play favorably describes lesbian activity, group self-abuse, and hedonistic sexuality. One scene depicts the lesbian seduction of a teenage girl, which is described as the girl’s “salvation.”

This performance marks the abdication of the duty of a Christian institution to act as an alternative community. At best, religious schools are rare islands of diversity, places where minority ideas can thrive, in the broad American college environment.

And at the end says this:

Notre Dame does not need to study VM. That is being done in scores of other places. If she wants to engender controversy, Notre Dame could refuse the trendy for the traditional. She could be an alternative place where men and women freely choose chastity, modesty, and dignity. In short, she could be a place where the archaic values of the culture of Catholics in 1963 would receive a hearing, even more radical would be to become a place where Pope Benedict’s ideas and world view were the norm for academic study.

And how, exactly, would going back to 1963 be good for the church (he is referring to Vatican II if you are not keeping track)? Apparently he does not understand why people have a distaste with the Catholic church as Benedict slowly turns back John Paul II’s clock of progress.

And based on the news source, I seriously doubt that Mr. Reynolds has ever seen or read The Vagina Monologues. Men would do good to see it. It is a raw look at female sexuality that makes even women uncomfortable. But in the midst of discomfort, we can laugh with Eve Ensler at the absurdities of it all.

My friend Melissa has a sense of humor - especially when it comes to cheesy religious stuff. So she sent my oldest son (3) this little piece of the Bible for Christmas - all equipped with “hovering action” (four little wheels under his robe):

Check out the whole line here.

And you can’t miss the guns on this steroid, HGH aficionado version of Samson. Barry Bonds is weak with a pitifully small head compared to this hulk of manhood. Push the button and he says: “I dare you to cut my hair bitch!”

Okay, so he really doesn’t say that, but should. God bless Spirit Warriors for screwing up our kids even more.

Which brings us to the truth of the Gospel.

More people need to see the film Idiocracy by the same Mike Judge of Office Space, King of the Hill, and Beavis and Butthead Fame. It is about an average do-nothing kind of guy who gets volunteered for an experiment only to wake up 500 years into the future in a dumbed down society in which he is now the smartest person alive! The most popular TV show is a guy getting kicked in the genitals over and over again, the sex industry is everywhere and has co-opted all language even the word “latte”. A “rehabilitation” of a criminal is a public execution on TV replete with an electric guitar band and with machines to kill the person being “rehabilitated” that are functional metaphors for sodomy. The top movie getting critical acclaim is a shot of someone’s naked butt, the FDA was bought by an energy drink company that has replaced water with a Gatorade like drink - even to water plants. And water is only used in toilets.

What’s more is that everyone whom our protagonist encounters has only known the world to be this way and they have no clue what a better world would look like and have never asked the question of why a better world would be worth discussing. Buildings that are falling down are literally tied and taped together. With no clue of how to dispose of trash that accumulated to a massive mountain range, an avalanche of trash covered the cities and there was no idea or desire to clean it up. Costco is where you go to get literally everything, including degrees and education and it is the size of a small city in itself. Speaking or acting intelligently get you the label of being a “faggot”. Healthcare is about the same thing as going through a carwash. The entire society is built on pure and raw instant gratification with no rational basis for anything and no desire to improve anything since there are no standards to make the world better and so, no desire for it. Listen to the clip for a little joy and then think about how the same kind of circular reasoning is used by politicians and countless religious personae…

Brawndo - It’s What Plants Crave

So why is it important to have some kind of rational basis for what we say and do? Why do we need to have some kind of moral compass and sense of basic values that are also justified on rational grounds? Why do we need to critique this values and measure them against human experience continually? Hmmm… This film paints a hilarious picture of dystopia if all of those things were almost never to have existed. But behind the sex and fart jokes that are truly funny, there is a very serious commentary on the reduction of cultural production to immediate jouissance.

I am amazed at the amount of discussion everywhere and even on my little spot on the web that has followed from the Sopranos finale! It kind of gave my little blog a blip on the grand radar of the bologosphere even if temporarily which is not what I thought would happen at all. On Sunday I watched the traffic go from about 76 to about 900 unique visitors in about 10 minutes all from about 5 total postings in which I included the link on the NJ.com website forums. People as far as Slovenia and Guam stumbled across it as well. That is a testimony to my very small fraction of the overall buzz that this phenomenon generated in about 12 hours. And the water coolers are still emptying out in offices as a result of people hanging around talking about it even this morning!

But I wanted to throw out one more thought on all of this as I have heard the exegesis of the Book of Chase go through its multiple interpretations and reconstructions by those both intelligent - as are the comments on this site - and those who are a little closer to Paulie Walnut’s superstitious complacency about life.

The truth is that if all of that happened with the demise of Tony and family it would be extremely trite. Tony was never portrayed as something sacred and whose most intimate moments were kept in a shroud of secrecy. We had access to everything. We saw how fragile, trapped, and ruthless he really was. We always saw the underbelly of his veneer and watched him lie, cheat and kill on a consistent basis. We saw how family loyalty was a double-edged sword.

The fact that the show ended in a diner was fantastic. More than anything that diner represents a unique part of New Jersey culture in more ways than one. Everyone goes to or has been to a diner. And only for special occasions do they take reservations, if that diner happens to have a larger dining room (that diner is not one I would think of for that either). That alone was humerous and pretentious on Carmela’s part! Tony Soprano was not a sacred object and if he was ingloriously and publicly killed in that spot with his family, we would have seen it, and it would still leave us unsatisfied because it would only raise a new set of questions and we would still not be happy.

This is why the cut to black was intended to be a jarring shock. It was a play on irony as if to say to the audience, “You have been given intimate access to the family and with that access, comes consequences.” The double-edged sword of loyalty.

But with that interpretation now out there as a clear logical possibility, it is also very clear that what we saw may not have been any ending at all, but a last minute decision not to end it at all. As one discussant here noted, there were three different endings that were filmed. It seems that we saw only part of one of them. So does this mean that HBO will hook people for a replay? Or will it be on the Season 6 DVD set? Either of those choices would be the most awful conclusion to a show that transformed cable television forever. But it would go along with how we saw everything boil down to greed and revenge - this time from the media.

It turns out the show was neither comedy nor tragedy since the ending has no form. It ended without any definable structure, without any sign of meaning, and an ambiguity buttressed by the echo of “Don’t stop…” So in the best postmodern sense, it turns out that we have been the authors of the narrative all along. We have been the ones who have ascribed meaning to what we watched. It is the audience who created the structure. And now we continue that process with only a void as our raw material to compose the continued unfolding of something that ended in emptiness.

Ok…now we can move on to more important things like Paris Hilton’s sentencing or Michael Vick’s puppies

Read the David Chase interview in the Star Ledger!