Melancholia: No freakin’ kidding [At the Lyric]

The Good: Competent performances from high-profile talent, an intriguing sci-fi backdrop to a genuinely interesting dramatic situation, occasional beautiful visuals and cinematography.

The Bad: Poor weaving of two very distinct stories, over-reliance on classical music leitmotif, distractingly inaccurate take on astrophysics, overly familiar Sundance-darling stereotypical film editing, a determination to violate and exterminate all feelings of happiness or hope in the viewer.

Basically, don’t watch this movie unless you get off on anti-conventional storytelling, indie-film shtick. It’s just one more existentialist filmmaker taking rich actors and forcing them to indulge in their over-privileged disaffection.

Two Laws that the Reddits Say will Usher in Armageddon [In the News]

There’s less than two weeks left in 2011 and, if all goes according to schedule, a little over a year before the collapse of modern civilization. Right on cue, the United States Congress is hastening America’s descent into tyrannical crapsack fallen Empire with two laws that could potentially infringe on our civil liberties and worse, fuck up the Internet. But some of us may not have noticed, because it’s Christmas and we’re trying to find the best deal on the iPad 2.

But you know who did notice? Reddit.

For the uninitiated, the Reddit community is like that one really annoying conspiracy theorist friend who “reads a lot” and looks at really weird porn. And he has it on very good authority that the Illuminati shadow government has implanted a tracking chip in all of our wrists. But also, they still bother with pesky laws and sham elections.

(To be fair, Reddit is actually a huge umbrella forum representing a variety of viewpoints and personalities. There’s just a running joke/observable phenomenon related to the “hive mind” that tends to be most visible in top posts and comments.)

Well, Reddit’s really up-in-arms about these bills that have been worming their way through Congress: SOPA and the NDAA.

The one that poses the most clear and present danger to the Redditor lifestyle is SOPA, which is Spanish for soup and also stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act.

SOPA is a bill with the expressed purposes of preventing copyrighted material from being pirated on the seas of the world wide web (there’s a Senate equivalent called the PROTECT IP Act which does many similar things and may get merged with it, but screw it, this is my first blog post in a while and I’m fatigued, DO YOUR OWN DAMN RESEARCH).

It was introduced by Representative Lamar Smith of Texas. This is what he looks like:

So, besides looking a little like Bill Gates, why does Representative Smith care about what happens on the Internet? Did he recently try to  make an honest profit from a video that was leaked on the Pirate Bay? Does his district contain a lot of families in the entertainment industry who are now facing home foreclosure because their independent films were distributed by the online equivalent of Somali machine-gun wielders?

Did the Movie and Television Lobby donate almost $60,000 to his latest campaign?