"Buddy cop blocking"

Mild spoilers for The Hurt Locker will follow. Although if you haven’t seen it and aren’t planning on seeing it tomorrow, I’m not going to give away anything that will ruin it, and I might help you understand what all the fuss is about.

Is this familiar to anybody?

Sergeant [JT Sanborn] is an [aspiring] family man and sensible veteran [soldier] just trying to make it through the day unscathed. [Staff] Sergeant [William James] is a suicidal loose cannon [bomb defusing specialist] who doesn’t care if he even lives to see the end of the day. Reluctantly thrown together to solve the mysterious [bombing of a street in Iraq], the unlikely duo [encounters] a dangerous ring of [Iraqi insurgents] employing ex-military mercenaries. After a tragic turn of events, the mission becomes personal and the mismatched investigators must learn to trust one another as they wage a two-man war against [ennui, meaningless death and the inhumanity of neocolonial geopolitics].

Oh, I know where I saw this! It was drawn from an IMDB Plot Summary:

Sergeant Roger Murtaugh is an aging family man and sensible veteran police officer just trying to make it through the day unscathed. Sergeant Martin Riggs is a suicidal loose cannon cop who doesn’t care if he even lives to see the end of the day. Reluctantly thrown together to solve the mysterious murder of a banker’s daughter, the unlikely duo uncovers a dangerous ring of drug smugglers employing ex-military mercenaries. After a tragic turn of events, the mission becomes personal and the mismatched investigators must learn to trust one another as they wage a two-man war against a deadly criminal organization.

Look familiar? Unless you’re one of OTI’s valued younger readership, it should. It’s from 1987’s Lethal Weapon, perhaps the definitive “buddy cop” movie of the last forty years, made back when Mel Gibson was the sexiest man alive.

Yeah, the world has turned upside down several times since then. I hear there’s an iPhone app that can measure the rotational velocity. But one thing has held constant – the buddy cop movie is still close to all our hearts. Oh, except now they give it Academy Awards (or maybe they will – check out the Oscars next weekend).

How far does the similarity between The Hurt Locker and Lethal Weapon go? (Farther than you think) What are the differences? And what does this say about how we’ve changed as people since the salad days of Riggs and Murtaugh? Read on…

I’m not going to say that Ke$ha is the next evolution of pop…

Eh, why not, I’ll say it, whether it’s really true or not – “Ke$ha is the next evolution of pop.” I sorta did anyway already. Let’s court controversy.

Observe:

But remember what evolution actually means. People often erroneously assume evolution is like progress. That is means things are getting better. Evolution doesn’t mean that at all; it isn’t normative. There is nothing inherently better about a rabbit that is white in the winter versus a rabbit that is brown in the winter.

Evolution is the product of things that survive and breed. It’s about adapting to hostile environments. Popular music faces a very hostile environment these days – sales are way down, noise is way up, and getting a single anything to last in the popular conscious for more than an afternoon is a herculean feat.

What sort of song evolves in this environment?

What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

And when it wakes up in the morning, why does it feel like P. Diddy?

Read on. Don’t stop. Don’t ever stop. Keep going. Read read read. Tonight, I’mma fight ’till you see the sunlight!

“Alt wisdom comes from spelling terrors.”

- fenzel

Why is it that, in teen high-school sit-coms, all events that happen seem to happen to same the core group of friends? In all the possible ways that high school life could have played out, how is it even remotely possible for all the things that happened to Zack Morris in Saved by the Bell to have actually happened to the same person and not to have happened to a larger distribution of people in the same population (perhaps some of whom wore belts when they tucked in their shirts)?

One easy explanation is that Somebody wrote Saved by the Bell so that it works that way. The complexity and low probability of the glee club episode and the boys vs. girls episode involving precisely the same people proves that it must have been planned. Screech cannot have come up with all those crazy inventions; they must be planted there by a “writer.” A.C. Slater cannot have always happened to have turned the seat backwards before sitting on it – somebody must have planned it that way to teach us all a message about his character.

Personally, I find it hard to believe that anybody just wrote a show like Saved by the Bell. Next thing you’re going to tell me is there is a big Peter Engel in the sky who made it all happen, and that TV deity Aaron Spelling sent his daughter to live among the Saved by the Bell cast and love the least among them. Crazy talk!

But there is another explanation, borne to us by the cosmology of the 1960s and 1970s and a spelling mistake I make all the time for no reason. I am of course, talking about The Anthropic Principal.

The anthropic principal gives us an alternative explanation for various extremely unlikely things that we encounter in teen high school sit-coms. It frees us of the need to ascribe the rules of The Max or other such places to the sit-com version of legal positivism. It’s elegant, it’s startling, and it’s real.

On the two types of the Anthropic Principal, plus a bonus piece of topical humor after the jump –

Overthinking It’s overthoughts and overprayers go out to the people of Haiti at this great time of crisis.

One of OTI’s favorite Perfect Gentlemen, Wyclef Jean, is already on his way to Haiti through the Dominican Republic (probably there by the time you read this) to help out people on the ground. His foundation for Haiti, Yele, is one of the many organizations gathering donations to help with relief efforts. OTI knows you can find any number of other organizations doing good work, but there’s little substitute for having the people who sound the call be people like to listen to. So, whether you give to Wyclef’s foundation or to somebody else, listen to Wyclef, and do something—however you figure out how to do it—to help these folks.

Wyclef is also soliciting donations to his foundation, which looks like it is refocused now on earthquake relief through his twitter feed. (I’m not going to recommend those text to donate things because I don’t have confidence in them; but if you do, sound off in the comments.)

Here’s Wyclef on Anderson Cooper 360. An interesting cultural moment:

And here’s a repost of Wyclef’s message from www.yele.org.

STATEMENT BY WYCLEF JEAN ON HAITI EARTHQUAKE

Wednesday, January 13, 2010 at 02:05PM

“Haiti today faced a natural disaster of unprecedented proportion, an earthquake unlike anything the country has ever experienced.

The magnitude 7.0 earthquake – and several very strong aftershocks – struck only 10 miles from Port-au-Prince.

I cannot stress enough what a human disaster this is, and idle hands will only make this tragedy worse. The over 2 million people in Port-au-Prince tonight face catastrophe alone. We must act now.

President Obama has already said that the U.S. stands ‘ready to assist’ the Haitian people. The U.S. Military is the only group trained and prepared to offer that assistance immediately. They must do so as soon as possible. The international community must also rise to the occasion and help the Haitian people in every way possible.”

Many people have already reached out to see what they can do right now. We are asking those interested to please do one of two things: Either you can use your cell phone to text “Yele” to 501501, which will automatically donate $5 to the Yele Haiti Earthquake Fund (it will be charged to your cell phone bill), or you can click here to DONATE.

Thank you,
Wyclef

The regular Yele Haiti website will resume in a couple of weeks. In the meantime our focus is on providing real-time information about the situation in Haiti.

Oh, and one more note from OTI — if you think there’s any reason why you shouldn’t do what you can to find some effective way to lend a hand or a dollar in Haiti, well, Wyclef has this much to say about whatever stands in your way (out of context, of course):

Target sighted. Target confirmed.

This is the follow-up to 5 Reasons Avatar Will Suck, enhanced by the fact that, at this point, I have seen the movie. Feel free to go back and see how prescient I was. This one has spoilers; the last one did too, but they don’t count, because it’s not a spoiler if the movie just happens to be predictable. You have to see it first.

Barring the few slobbering orientalists who get jazzed by how Avatar fetishizes the exotic, everyone I’ve talked to has the same basic opinion of this winter’s biggest megamovie — the visuals are groundbreaking and all fancy (and crap), but the characters and story are not so good (and crap). Overall judgements on the film seem to differ based on the watcher’s priorities. Which is more important, spectacle, or the other five Aristotelian elements of drama?

If you’re the kind of movie-watcher who values shiny objects over all else, you probably love Avatar, and I don’t know if Overthinking It can do much for you other than recommend some other all time cinematic greats.

But if you are the kind of movie-watcher who sees movies as a medium for storytelling, Overthinking It can do quite a bit more for you. We can vindicate you. We can set you free. We can speak truth to power. And we can go back later, see whether or not we were right, and talk about ourselves.

We can tell you why Avatar sucks. We can even add a sixth reason, because we’ve actually seen it this time. It’s a new year, with new possibilities and new, higher Arabic numerals.

The re-debriefing on cat boobies and more, after the jump —

A few times a generation, a book comes along that is so revered, so respected, that copies of it become heirlooms. The physical objects become mementos of joyful reads as well as signs of status and conversation pieces.  Many more times a generation, a book comes along that is so overprinted, so unnecessary, that copies of it are stashed in the corners of warehouses for a decade until they are donated in bulk to Goodwill.

On the Court with . . . Hakeem Olajuwon is one of those books.  Yeah, it’s one of the second kind of books.

So, when one of my friends managed to score five copies of it in a Yankee gift swap (along with matching Captain Picard and Commander Riker commemorative plates and three bags of Chocolate Reisen), it seemed doubtful anyone would read it. But here at Overthinking It, doubtful doesn’t stop us. We specialize in taking the doubtful and making the dubious.

Plus, there were those two words at the top: “Matt Christopher.”  If those words don’t make you cry out in joy, read on to find out what you’re missing.

More on the Dream Shake as rite of passage, the mid-90s perception of Islam, and the zombie Tom Clancy of Little League Baseball, after the jump!

"What is it, human dude in a giant cat dude's body? Is something wrong?"

By now, you’ve heard the murmurings. You’re polite, so you don’t want to believe it. You have faith in James Cameron. You haven’t seen the movie yet — almost nobody has, and they might still be putting in a few tweaks here and there. It’s not fair to condemn a film before you see it, right? But you probably feel it somewhere yourself. As Galadriel said in her own huge-budget fantasy-fest, “I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air.” As the biggest movie of the winter approaches, I think we all feel a little like Galadriel – or at least that we hear the whispers of prophesy.

Avatar is going to suck.

Maybe it will be entertaining. Maybe it will have fun parts. Maybe, in the end, it will be worth the $11.50 or whatever it costs for you to see a movie these days. But it’s still going to suck.

Like me, I’m sure you hope you’re wrong; but it’s time to discount the possibility — roll it around in our minds and get used to it — so that, when the movie actually comes out, if it turns out to be about as good as it probably will be, it is met with pleasant surprise rather than crushing disappointment.

This process seems to already have begun in the Jungian collective subconscious, but I don’t mind jogging it along a bit.

Have you ever heard the wolf cry to the Blue Corn Moon? Have you ever watched the lesser Gundam properties? The top five reasons why Avatar will suck await . . .

“I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us, that the less we use our power the greater it will be.”

— Thomas Jefferson

–

“The spirit of enterprise, which characterizes the commercial part of America, has left no occasion of displaying itself unimproved.”

— Alexander Hamilton

–

“Excuse me, I have to go. Somewhere there is a crime happening.”

— Robocop

–

I had always intended for the second installment of this oldest and most waited-for (if not awaited) Overthinking It series to be about a character I have often described as the Quintessential American Tragic Hero: Alex Murphy, a.k.a. Robocop from the truly excellent Paul Verhoeven film of the same name. Then, of course, other things happened.

Well, this is VerhOeverthinking It week, and as Darren Aronofsky will hopefully showcase for us Robocop’s durability — both as a cinematic subject and as a cybernetic apparatus — so will I persevere in hewing to one of my earliest intentions on this site.

Let us venture into the glory, the flaws, the fall and the suffering of that bechromed bulwark of semivoluntary justice — the American who is Half Jeffersonian, Half Hamiltonian, All Cop.

Do you want to learn more? Well, dead or alive, you are coming with me –

As a follow-up to Lee and Sheely’s excellent Think/Counterthink on the Miley Cyrus track “Party in the U.S.A.,” this edition of Musical Talmud wades into the shin-deep puddle of pop that ebbs and flows in the general area of the Jonas Brothers — the sunny shoal of music that feels comfortably warm until you realize it is the kiddie pool, at which point it becomes gross and creepy.

Listeners to the podcast (and other people who make the quixotic choice of hearing me talk) know that I have my money on a dog in the Disney Channel Music fight — although she is a young girl and it’s not a nice or appropriate thing to call girls dogs. And no, I don’t have inappropriate designs on her. But I like her music and think she has a bright future.

Today in Musical Talmud, we discuss “Get Back,” the first single off the first solo album (which came out last year) by the talented singer and, in the time-honored and resurgent American tradition of pop stars who rise to stardom from movie musicals (talk about the new Great Depression!), not-especially-great-actress Demi Lovato.

And yes, she actually wrote it.

In “Wrestling with Wild Things, Part 1“, I promised to go through the 2009 movies that made me cry and break down why I broke down. But I first spent some quality time with the most recent of the bunch, Where the Wild Things Are, parsing what it’s about and how it works.

I’m glad we’ve got that out of the way, because it’s time to turn on the floodgates.

Today, we talk about why memories make people sad, the narrativization of loss, advances in clinical psychology, and why everything you think you know about therapeutic art may be wrong. Oh, and there are references to Star Trek V and Wing Commander. You know, to get everybody in the mood.

The Wrestler, Wild Things, Up, and the secret to happiness, after the jump.