One of my favorite things in the world is Netflix. My queue has 400+ titles. I’ve rated almost 3000 movies. I love movies, and I love discovering movies. Seriously. Netflix’s decision to add a buttload of Criterion movies made me giddy.
But sometimes I don’t feel like watching anything artsy or cerebral, hence the presence of some pretty questionable titles in my queue. Which brings us to one of my guilty pleasures: bad movies.
I’m not talking something starring Will Ferrell. No, I’m talking bad movies that think they’re good, but are in fact total pieces of shit. Movies that I can start at 1 in the morning when I’m kinda sleepy or bored, but not tired enough to actually go to sleep. Movies that will undoubtedly make me groan, yet vaguely entertain me at the same time: Awesomely Bad Movies.
And sometimes, as I’m browsing titles, I come across a wannabe-good bad movie that not only sounds completely wretched/offensive/mockable, but has a bad movie poster to boot. My friends, I present you with Grey Owl:
No mix today, just St. Vincent’s new video for “Laughing with a Mouth of Blood,” featuring ThunderAnt (Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and SNL’s Fred Armisen):
I don’t have too much information yet, but detainees at the Port Isabel, TX immigration detention center recently began an indefinite hunger strike in an attempt to bring attention to their plight; it the second such strike at that detention center in less than a year.
I remember Michael Mineo vividly. I wish I didn’t, but I don’t think I can ever forget that moment, as I sat alone in my apartment watching the evening news, when his humiliated face flashed upon the television screen. He had just been raped by NYPD officers and was being “interviewed” as he sobbed in his hospital bed.
My blood ran cold at that moment as I watched in sick shock. Did they really just flash a sexual assault victim’s name and face all over the news while he was in a hospital gown, crying in bed and trying to bury his face in his hand?
Yeah, they did.
In the days that followed, they also gave all kinds of updates on his medical status. Police baton. Rectum. Ruptures. Bleeding. The media was more than happy to throw those terms around repeatedly, sensationally.
Mineo has long since come out to talk about the rape. He’s spoken about the extensive damage done to his body, and the case is now in trial.
The media, however, seems unwilling to call the assault what it is: rape. They’re still more than willing to talk about the rape in graphic terms, but won’t use the actual word. Thomas at Yes Means Yes makes an excellent point on the subject:
What they will and won’t call rape is part of what shapes public consciousness about what is and isn’t a rape narrative…The man alleges a rape. I think the newspapers should say that what he’s alleged is a rape. They largely have not, but they also largely have not said why.
Not only did Mineo experience a gross injustice when he was splashed all over the news in one of the most vulnerable states a person could possibly be in, the media continues to exploit his ordeal with their sensational headlines (‘Anal Assault’ Trial Begins?). It’s even listed in Wikipedia as the NYPD subway sodomy incident. Again, not one mention of rape in those headlines. It’s sickening, andit’syetanotherchillingreminderofthemedia’snarrative on rape.
I’m aware of the impending Super Bowl at all is because of the hilariously offensive anti-abortion ad sponsored by Focus on the Family. (It’s hilarious to me, at least; personally I long for an ad in which a mother explains how she was advised to get an abortion and refused — and now her grown son is a serial killer. If only I’d aborted the little creep!) Some muddled souls are saying that this ad is about “choice,” but it’s not. It’s about patriarchy.
My lack of football enthusiasm doesn’t come from the fact that I have a vagina, it’s because I grew up in a baseball household and football was just never interesting to me, as it was never something my family really made a big deal of or something I connected to personally. That said, I have several female friends who live and breathe football, and several male friends who are just as disinterested in it as I am: so why are all the idiot’s guides to the Super Bowl aimed at the ladies?
~Gloria Anzaldua~ She had diabetes. And I remember being mad, so mad, when died. Diabetes is preventable, first of all, and second of all, it’s manageable. Everybody in my family who is my parents generation or older has it. And some struggle to contain it, but they all do…Why do we expect–why did *I* expect–Gloria, one of our stars, my star, to deal with the effects of racism and sexism and nationalism and heteroviolence–all by herself? Why was I so angry that she “didn’t take better care of herself?”
It’s February First, so I can sincerely say — Happy Black History Month! I’ve met a lot of white people who don’t ever say that, or if they do, they’re not being sincere. Sometimes, I hear white people wonder aloud instead — or more often, grumble aloud — “Why do black people get to have their own history month, and white people don’t?”
Today, someone said a slur. It actually doesn’t matter what slur it was, because you see, he didn’t intend to hurt anyone and therefore it couldn’t possibly be a slur. Much like how intent magically protects the actions of all privileged fuckjobs, intent means that anything you say, no matter how many groups it hurts…it mystically negates all of that.
The day that Maxo’s remains were found, the call came with some degree of excitement. At least he would not rest permanently in the rubble. At least he would not go into a mass grave. Somehow, though, I sense that he would not have minded. Everyone is being robbed of rituals, he might have said, why not me?
Haiti already had the Western Hemisphere’s highest infant mortality rate, with 671 out of 100,000 women dying in childbirth, and that was before the earthquake struck. 7,000 Haitian women are expected to give birth in the coming month, and 15 percent of them are likely to suffer from potentially fatal complications.
Rather than providing their viewers with an examination of how Haiti came to be what it currently is—a nation of the descendants of slaves who carry with them the generational consequences of Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome and all of the political, economic and social insanity that goes along with that—the Western media remains content to share with its viewers only that Haiti is poor, illiterate and incapable of governing itself. Talk about blaming the victim.
By the weekend, it was clear that something perverse was going on in Haiti, something savage and bestial in its lack of concern for human life. I’m not talking about the earthquake, and certainly not about the so-called “looting,” which I prefer to think of as the autonomously organized distribution of unjustly hoarded goods. I’m talking about the U.S. relief effort.
When the earthquake struck the impoverished island country last Tuesday afternoon, human traffickers suddenly gained access to a new population of displaced children. With parents dead, government offices demolished, and international aid organizations struggling to meet life-or-death demands, these kidnappers are in a unique position to snatch children with very little interference.
Fueled by press releases from breastfeeding advocates, parenting blogs and even The Los Angeles Times’s health blog have been encouraging donations to milk banks to be sent to needy babies in Haiti. The trouble is, there doesn’t seem to be any infrastructure available to transport or store it. According to an MSNBC report, donations are actively being discouraged.
I can’t stand Jessica Alba for a myriad of reasons. I think she’s a hypocrite, and she’s always putting her foot in her mouth, saying stupid things like, “I’ve got cousins galore. Mexicans just spread all their seeds. And the women just pop them out.”
So here she is again, most recently talking about how she got a lot of backlash a while back for not being authentic enough as a Latina, and how she and her daughter are going to take Spanish lessons. Which…fine. I totally get that; I’m not as fluent as I’d like to be in the language either. But then she qualifies her reasoning with, “I grew up eating enchiladas… I identify with Mexicans. It’s in my blood whether or not I speak Spanish.”
*headdesk*
Good to know all those enchiladas are keeping me Mexican.
However, he wasn’t shy in voicing his dismay about the arrest of film-maker Roman Polanski on a 30-year-old statutory rape charge. In 1999, Polanski directed him in The Ninth Gate.
“Why now?” Depp asked rhetorically. “Obviously, there is something going on somewhere. Somebody has made a deal with someone. Maybe there was a little money involved, but why now?” Polanski, Depp continued, “is not a predator. He’s 75 or 76 years old. He has got two beautiful kids, he has got a wife that he has been with for a long, long time. He is not out on the street.”
Great, Johnny. As if Polanski’s age and the fact that he’s not “out on the street” negate the fact that he’s a rapist.
WICHITA, Kan. – Jurors swiftly convicted an abortion opponent of murder Friday for shooting to death one of the only doctors to offer late-term abortions in the U.S., a killing the gunman claimed was justified to save the lives of unborn children.
The jury deliberated for just 37 minutes before finding Scott Roeder, 51, of Kansas City, Mo., guilty of premeditated, first-degree murder for putting a gun to the forehead of Dr. George Tiller on May 31 and pulling the trigger.
Defense attorney Mark Rudy described his case as helpless and hopeless.
“I’ve never seen anyone lay himself out as much as Mr. Roeder did,” Rudy said after the verdict, referring to his client’s confessions.
Roeder faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years when he is sentenced March 9. Prosecutor Nola Foulston said she would pursue a so-called “Hard 50″ sentence, which would require Roeder to serve at least 50 years before he can be considered for parole.
