FALLING SKIES opens in the chaotic aftermath of an alien attack that has left most of the world completely incapacitated. The few remaining survivors have banded together outside major cities to begin the difficult task of fighting back. Each day is a test of survival as citizen soldiers engage in an insurgency campaign against the occupying alien force, whose nature and purpose remains a mystery. FALLING SKIES is a tale of endurance, commitment and courage in which everyday people are called upon to become heroes. The survivors may be outmatched, outnumbered and outgunned, but nothing can beat the human spirit. The series combines stunning visual effects and personal human stories about triumph and survival in the most devastating circumstances.

Falling Skies trailer by blankytwo

Already bored. I used to say I’d watch anything alien related, but after “V” and “The Event” I’m done with another hyper-serious TV series. I’m also done with another show stressing the “heroism” of war.

We are surrounded by anxiety and distress. We are overrun with Tea Party dingbats who want to arm college students and professors alike, wingnut maniacs who think science is a hoax and the president is a Muslim and/or raised in Kenya, Republicans who so openly despise women, sex, gays and themselves that they just can’t help getting busted snorting meth in the gay fetish dungeon with teenage boys.

In short, the levels of hypocrisy and the lack of spiritual and intellectual education on display across the cultural spectrum, from church house to Congress, are so brutal it’s no wonder millions of Americans do the only thing they know how to do — turn to pop culture for salve and distraction, laugh track and a modicum of relief.

Problem is, the distractions must somehow match the level of our ferocious discontent. Gentle entertainments, art, spiritual work, poetry, NPR, a reasonable and calm-voiced president? This will not do. Our tormented and battered souls seek parity with the violent uncertainty we feel all around. Our pop culture Frankenstein must be infused with treacherously high levels of mania, dread, fantasy and looming, melodramatic death.

He also writes this:

Hey, I have an idea! Instead of one more military apocalypse porn fantasia about enormous, screamingly mechanized super-aliens who invade Earth to colonize/impregnate/beat the living crap out of us for no valid reason whatsoever, but oh my goodness they somehow just can’t seem to annihilate our tiny, ludicrous speck of a planet with their insanely advanced superhuman weaponry because our astonishing ingenuity and unquenchable love of life finally proved just too much for them …

How about a movie where the aliens wipe out our petulant species in, say, 10 minutes flat, re-colonize Earth and make it green and fiery and interesting again? Or one where said aliens aren’t disgusting metasoldiers with nine eyes and fish guts for faces and they, instead of war and doom, deliver us such massive doses of radiant wisdom our overwhelmed collective soul simply explodes into a fine powdery tobacco to be smoked by a million laughing deities shaped like trees? I have a screenplay underway.

Think he’s my favorite writer writing for a newspaper.

Eddie Morra (Cooper) is an unemployed writer whose girlfriend Lindy (Cornish) breaks up with him. Eddie believes he has no future, but when a friend introduces him to the experimental drug NZT, Eddie becomes highly focused and highly confident. He is able to recall everything he has read, heard, or seen, and he uses the knowledge to become successful in the financial world. Business mogul Carl Van Loon (De Niro) sees Eddie as a potential tool to make money, but Eddie’s success also attracts hitmen who pursue him for the NZT. Eddie’s stash dwindles, causing him side effects, as he tries to escape being assassinated.

Might want to see it more than “The Adjustment Bureau.” Seeing these posters all over the city makes me think of “Your Nose Has Been Adjusted”:

Something else that’s like TABOTD: Take Shelter:

Directed by Jeff Nichols and starring our favorite under-the-radar actor Michael Shannon, Take Shelter sounds like it might be messing with the audience just a little as the main character (Shannon) doesn’t know if he’s losing his mind, or if it’s the end of the world.

Synopsis:

A working-class husband and father questions whether his terrifying dreams of an apocalyptic storm signal something real to come or the onset of an inherited mental illness he’s feared his whole life.

Sort of like The American Book without the deranged Book of Revelation-obsessed president who believes he’s the messiah. Also Eugene Myers starts dreaming about other people, all of whom are having their own apocalyptic dreams. But it’s like “Close Encounters” with an obsessed family man building a fall-out shelter in his backyard, like Richard Dreyfus building Devil’s Tower.  Wonder if the success of this movie at Sundance hurts or helps the movie prospects of The American Book – the treatment’s with a producer and my agent who have been supportive so far.

It does have one flaw that’s common in post-apocalyptic stories.  With the world obliterated, this group chooses to stay in tents outside – rather than the millions of homes readily available. They discover a zombie eating a deer and the guy says, “They’ve never come this far before.” Well, hmmn, maybe that’s your invitation to leave. I wouldn’t get three minutes of sleep in a flimsy tent with flesh eating zombies outside. And then in last night’s episode it turns out they’re actually in eyeshot of downtown Atlanta, zombie central. Really, this makes no sense.

Nor does it make sense that their bag of guns is “more important than gold.” That bag of guns came from a police station – there are hundreds of empty police stations and gun stores without wading into the city. They have access to cars, so they don’t have to keep going to the most dangerous place imaginable. “28 Days Later” begins with them in the city, and they need to find a way to escape, ending up in a house somewhere in the hills.  But this group consistently makes themselves as vulnerable as humanly possible.

I feel kind of stupid nitpicking like this because I actually like the show. And the show needs to be dramatic – if they find a safe place to hideout, there’s less drama. But then there’s less drama anyway, because when their tent village gets attacked by zombies and people die, my reaction isn’t just “Oh no,” it’s “No shit.”

But this is my problem with many post-apocalyptic stories. Like “The Road” it tends to make people suffer people more than they need to.  In “The Road” there are houses full of clothes, yet everyone’s walking around in rags.  At the end of the movie, they’re hanging out by the ocean, yet still their faces are dirty.  The world they live in is sadistic enough without that extra bit of sadism.  There’s something to be said for people giving into despair and not acting rationally, but this isn’t totally the case because they’re rational in many other ways.

One other thing crosses my mind – do all zombie apocalypse stories exist in a world where zombie fiction doesn’t exist?  Once you’d think someone’d say something like, “Holy shit. ‘28 Days Later’ was real!”  They could even mine zombie fiction for ways to survive. This could turn it into a self-referential “Scream” type of movie, and probably way too meta for a story like this, but in real life it might very well the way people would react – as pop cultural distractions are a survival mechanism, especially evident during these times before the apocalypse.

Your book Soul Pancake is about creativity, spirituality, and, as you say, “chewing on life’s big questions.” What is your goal for the book? What do you want it to be?
A tool used for the revolution.

Which revolution?
The spiritual and creative revolution that’s coming. I was a wee lad in the early seventies, but in that whole countercultural movement in the sixties, people were out to find the truth for themselves, going to India, trying new artistic practices. My mom was doing experimental theater and painting her body blue and running around naked and my dad became Bahá’i. I think that’s just around the corner again. Now, though, you can’t just say, “We smoke pot and don’t bathe and we’re changing the world with thoughts of love.” But a spiritual revolution is in the cards. It has to be, because the world is grinding to a halt. That sounds lofty, but it’s really about getting young people talking about life’s big questions and getting them to expand their minds. Hopefully we’ll be a small, healthy tool in a larger movement.

Incidentally, “The Office” is one of the only shows I watch.  I have a much higher tolerance for comedy than other TV – like sci-fi TV, which is almost totally devoid of humor.

What’s also interesting is the allergic reaction the commenters have to these sorts of ideas (emphasis added):

You’ve got to make arguments that make sense in philosophy. Believing in love is fair enough, it’s made some good music, but it doesn’t deserve a book and it’s certainly not a philosophical argument.

Love doesn’t deserve a book.  If the internet existed 30 years ago, would people have seemed this depressed?  My guess is no, which is why the response to a book like this proves that a book like this is necessary.

For as long as there have been movies, the US government has collaborated with filmmakers to ensure that their view of the world was shared with audiences around the world. From Hollywood shoot-em-ups to Pentagon spin doctors, The Listening Post takes a look at the relationship between the military and the media.

About:

Rumor has it (in ufology circles, anyway) that The Event is the latest in a long line of infotainments designed to raise the curtain ever-so-slowly on truths that many will find too terrible to contemplate. We’re being acclimatized, in other words, to minimize the number of suicides, riots, business failures and bedwettings that are expected to occur when our government reverses its 60-plus-year-old policy of deflection and denial.

UFO historian Richard Dolan’s book, A.D. After UFO Disclosure, will be released October 11, timed perfectly to ride the wave of interest in such matters likely to be generated by The Event. It’s co-authored by former CNN correspondent, now Hollywood screenwriter, Bryce Zabel.

Dolan talking about his book:

Update: So I’m very behind on the current TV schedule, because Richard Dolan’s also going to be a part of this. A UFO version of “Ghost Hunters,” which was inevitable. Still, this takes Dolan closer to the level of Billie Ray Cyrus than Leslie Kean. A job’s a job, though, and maybe things like this are helpful.

On the Hollywood front, there’s an interesting, though overwritten (”from the unmediated crudity of The 40 Year Old Virgin, through the mock cryptoconservatism of Knocked Up, to the pseudosolemnity of Funny People“), piece about Judd Apatow’s movies in N + 1 Magazine.  The gist: Apatow’s movies celebrate ignorance. I’ve sort of felt the same.  He’s better with language than most other comedy writers.  I really liked “Freaks and Geeks” and “40 Year Old Virgin” because of Steve Carell’s performance, but in “Knocked Up” Seth Rogan’s character is idiotic.  Loveable because he’s a movie star, but really a dumb ass.  Saying, “I hoped to get a BJ on the second date” is funny to someone, but it’s almost impossibly stupid.  Katherine Heigl, the smart one, dreams of being an “Entertainment Tonight” reporter, so the movie carefully worships at the foot of Hollywood, even if it has the appearance of taking chances.  And part of Hollywood worship is to trump up the success of the idiot.

Take “Forrest Gump,” “Erin Brokovich,” “Good Will Hunting” – these are all fantasy fulfillment.  They’re superheroes of lazy thinking.  Even if you don’t crack a book, you can be more successful than all the eggheads and their “book smarts.”  It’s Sarah Palin’s fantasy.  I know Erin Brokovich is a real person, but the movie version’s a different story.  I had a whole paranoid theory that “Forrest Gump” contributed to the conservative revolution of 1994 – it came out in the same year. At core, a conservative movie. And Apatow’s movies follow a similar formula.  If you’re entertaining, it doesn’t matter if you’re almost totally apathetic:

He delivers a message Americans crave to hear. As long as you behave yourself, take on a modicum of responsibility, and wear the yoke of commitment, it is entirely acceptable—even preferable and profitable—to be stupid.

One of the greater ironies of “liberal” Hollywood is that they take up left wing causes, but don’t seem to realize that they’re contributing to the culture of stupidity – the same culture that gives rise to the entrenched ignorance of the far right.

Judd Apatow actually responded to the piece, which begins:

“Maybe I’m just dense, but I can’t tell if he likes the movies or not. Maybe because when I was reading his article I was watching The Real Housewives of New Jersey. Go Danielle!

I know you’re trying to look above the fray and that you can deal with criticism, but that’s not helping your cause any.

“I could see where things were headed,” Kurtz said. “The toy business began to drive the [Lucasfilm] empire. It’s a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It’s natural to make decisions that protect the toy business, but that’s not the best thing for making quality films.”

He added: “The first film and ‘Empire’ were about story and character, but I could see that George’s priorities were changing.”

About the original concept of “Return of the Jedi”:

“We had an outline and George changed everything in it,” Kurtz said. “Instead of bittersweet and poignant he wanted a euphoric ending with everybody happy. The original idea was that they would recover [the kidnapped] Han Solo in the early part of the story and that he would then die in the middle part of the film in a raid on an Imperial base. George then decided he didn’t want any of the principals killed. By that time there were really big toy sales and that was a reason.”

The discussed ending of the film that Kurtz favored presented the rebel forces in tatters, Leia grappling with her new duties as queen and Luke walking off alone “like Clint Eastwood in the spaghetti westerns,” as Kurtz put it.

Kurtz said that ending would have been a more emotionally nuanced finale to an epic adventure than the forest celebration of the Ewoks that essentially ended the trilogy with a teddy bear luau.

I’m not sure killing Han Solo would have been the best idea – might’ve worked.

“Star Wars” was my childhood.  As it was for many people, but it dates me – I was born in the seventies.  If I had this blog when the prequels came out, I would have written pages of vitriol, but no one needs to read that anymore.  Instead watch this.  As a kid, this was a prized possession: