movies

Song of the day

“How You Like Me Now?” by the Heavy

Earlier today on Twitter, I was making light of the fact that Newt Gingrich has reportedly been told to stop using the song along the campaign trail, having apparently never obtained permission from either the record label or the band. (And the band is reportedly no fan of the candidate either.)

This follows in a long tradition of politicians using songs without permission — see, recently, Tom Petty and Michelle Bachmann — or without a clue — see…well, again, Petty and Bachmann, but also these song blunders as well.

But with Newt and the Heavy, there’s just so much going wrong here. Let’s leave aside the band’s name, which raises the specter of Gingrich’s weight and the idea of him as the heavy, a big, often outsized character who’s more often than not the villain of a piece. (Iago, for instance, is the heavy in Othello.) Let’s dive right into the lyrics of the song itself:

Now there was a time
When you loved me so
I couldn’t do wrong
Now you need to know

That time, for Newt, was a brief moment in the ’90s. You know, before all the ethics violations, affairs, and forced resignation.

See I been a bad bad bad bad man
And I’m in deep ya

Aw, baby, Newt only hurts you ’cause he loves America so damn much. Why you gotta be like that?

I found a brand new love for this man
And I can’t wait till ya see

Oh yeah, you’ll all come crawlin’ back to Newt. What’re ya gonna do, vote for Romeny? Oh, you are? Damn.

Remember the time when he took over
Ya I was a lie that you can’t give up
If I was to cheat on
Now would you see right through me
If I sang a sad sad sad sad song
Would ya give it to me
Would ya say
How ya like me now?

So just to recap here: Gingrich is playing a song about a man who lied and cheated, then comes back with an apology he admits right there is bullshit, easily seen through, and then (a little petulantly) asks, “How you like me now?”

I first encountered the song about a year ago, when I saw it used really effectively in The Fighter. Gingrich’s use is anything but effective. It reveals a pettiness at his heart — or, at the very least, a cluelessness about that that’s how it will be perceived. “Yeah, you kicked me out,” Gingrich seems to be saying with it, “because I was a bad bad bad bad man. And screw you, I haven’t changed. How you like me now?”

I will say this much for him, though, it’s a damn catchy song. It’ll put a bounce in your step, maybe even make you want to run for President or build a moon base.

Monday various

  • Fringe wasn’t originally meant to have alternate universes. I am not even a little surprised by this. It’s only when the show settled on the alternate universe storyline, when it started having an ongoing plot that wasn’t based in creatures-of-the-week, that it went from being one of the worst science fiction shows on the air to being one of the best. (I highly recommend io9’s primer to anyone looking to get into the show for the first time. There’s a lot early on you can, and will probably want to, miss.)
  • In case you missed it, the best New York Times correction ever. [via]
  • Genevieve Valentine on suspension of disbelief (particularly in the movie In Time:

    If your movie is super high concept, and I decide to see it, I have probably, to some degree, already accepted the concept, you know? “Everyone in the future has a puppy surgically grafted to their chests.” Okay, fine, I promise not to spend a lot of the movie going, “Surgically grafting a puppy to your chest is a weird thing for a person to do.” I will, however, question every piece of outerwear that does not have a dog-head flap in it, or any moment in your movie where a character is like, “Well, now my dog has grown too big for my chest cavity and medical science didn’t allow for that in the many generations we have been living with these grafted puppies, so now it’s too late for me, you go on!” Because that is worldbuilding, and that you need to do. And the higher the concept is, the more work you need to do. (Moon, for example, requires little. Dark City requires more.

  • See also: Why fiction’s freest genres need its most rigid rules:

    In these genres, the fundamental realities of a world can be anything imaginable: There can be wizards, or dragons, or intergalactic spaceships, or time travel, or dragon-wizards in time-traveling intergalactic spaceships. Nothing can be assumed. Which makes it mighty easy for authors to cheat by changing the rules whenever it’s convenient to the plot: “Oh, did I not mention that dragon-wizard time-travel spaceships are sentient and can crossbreed to produce baby spaceships? Well, they can.”

  • And finally, Writers are Like Porn Stars. There, that ought to bring in some more comment spam. (SFW — it’s another io9 link — though the image is maybe a little risque for the workplace.)

Tuesday various

  • Following up on the story last week, the Nieman Journalism Lab digs deeper into The New York Times‘ fact-checking faux pas:

    The hope for building fact-checks into everyday news reports is that it would push political reporters to be more thoughtful and reflexive about their own work — to leave out quotable-but-dubious claims, to resist political conflict as the default frame, and in general to avoid the pat formulations that are so ably managed by political actors. But inevitably, all of us will be disappointed, even pissed off, by some of these routine fact-checks — and perhaps all the more so when they’re woven into the story itself. [via]

  • Can you name the ABCs of ’70s film? I got most of these, although frankly, I think “N” is a bit of a cheat. There are lot more, from different decades and different genres, here. The “I” in the 1980s one is definitely a cheat. I’m sorry, but I refuse to call it Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark.
  • Speaking of which, Raiders of the Lost Archives — a shot-by-shot comparison of Raiders of the Lost Ark and its many (sometimes direct) influences. It’s interesting, although Spielberg and Lucas have never hidden that the movie was an homage to the adventure serials they loved growing up. [via
  • Todd VanDerWerff on NBC’s The Firm:

    It’s like the show wants to be a straightforward copy of the movie, only told over a full season, but it also wants to be a sequel to the movie. Thus, it becomes a story about people who experience nearly exactly the same collection of events, don’t really seem all that concerned about it, and then also take on a case of the week because they’ve figured out they live in a TV show.

  • And finally, there’s a a gorgeous five-story mural in Montreal. See above. [via]

Monday various

A sunless Sunday

The cold and dreary weather notwithstanding, today was an okay day. I did the Sunday crossword, and I watched a couple of Red Dwarf episodes. (The later seasons, when they lose Holly, just aren’t as good.)

After that, it was my weekly writing group. One of the writing prompts we had to work with was “supermodel pregnant with second child,” taken from some headline or other. Only, I misread this and…well, just see for yourself:

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It’s at times like this that I like to remember Harlan Ellison’s advice about mishearing conversations, and how one of his best stories, “Jeffty Is Five,” came about from just such a mistake.

After writing, we went to see Haywire. It was okay, but really quite forgettable. Steven Soderbergh does bring an unconventional take to the action movie, which is what a lot of reviewers and fans were saying in advance of the movie: he makes genre movies but doesn’t pay attention to the established rules of those genres. That can make for some brave and interesting film-making, but can just as often backfire. Sometimes those conventions and rules exist for a reason. What I really wanted from was something much more clever and intricate, completely unconventional, or something more edge-of-the-seat, pulse-pounding action. I got drips of both. Even Gina Carano’s physicality, much touted, feels underused. Yes, as a former MMA fighter, she can do all her own stunts, and quite well, but she’s most often fighting against other actors who can’t. So even if you gain an actress who can do all her own stunts, you’ve still got actors in the scene with her who can’t. (Carano isn’t a great actor, but she’s passable for what the role demands of her. She’s also quite attractive for a woman who could almost certainly crush my skull with her bare hands.)

Basically, Haywire has a lot of good moments — I particularly liked the line “The motive is money. The motive is always money.” — but it’s just not enough.