Peter Krupa

This morning, Slate.com’s always-delightful Jack Shafer skewers a Russian government advertising supplement that appeared in the Washington Post:

Back in the 1990s, Regardie’s magazine attempted to parody the foreign-nation advertising supplements that occasionally run in the Post,albeit to little success, because you can’t parody state propaganda. The only way to slog through the stilted, typo-marred copy of “Russia: Behind the Headlines” is to impose a Boris Badenov-style Russian accent on the stories and edit out the articles the and a as you read along. Sentences such as “Russia’s Central Bank has declared the necessity of a symbol for the ruble, one that would eventually be in league with the $ dollar and € euro signs on the world market” suddenly become bearable. Sentences such as “President Putin promised to create the National Russian Language Foundation, which would promote Russian language and culture all over the world” become delightful.

Sorry, but this is just the best comment I’ve ever read on the Internet. Ever.

Shut up. The Republican culture is a culture that is trying to protect America from sick people like yourselves who do sick and immoral things, like cheat and lie and allow corruption to enter your party. All you can do is sit back and let the immoral do what they want. You let your presidents cheat on their wives, you let gay people “frolick” around and marry eachother, and YOU LET THE TERRORISTS SUPPORT YOU!!! There are terrorists out there who have said before that they supported John Kerry and wanted George Bush to lose. Why? So George Bush would not go into their country and protect the people from the horror terrorists allow. You democrats would have left and let Iraq sit in depravity and poverty and left it with a corrupt government. So shut up about the Republicans. GO GEORGE BUSH!!!

(Stroking beard) Indeed.

Sunshine is an amazing movie. Judging from a few of the reviews I scanned afterwards, mine is not a universal opinion. Some reviewers thought the plot was conventional, others didn’t like the twists toward the end.

Under normal circumstances, I would probably join the throng of nay-sayers, as I have before, nitpicking bad science or absurd dialogue. Hitchcock called people like myself the “plausibles,” people who take the fun out of a movie by pointing out how “that would never happen.”

But, for my tastes, a movie only has to be as plausible as it tells you it will be, and the important thing is that it follows the rules it has set out for itself. Considering Sunshine is about a space ship with a multi-cultural crew of 30-somethings whose mission is to re-start the Sun by dropping a nuke onto its surface, I’d say the bar is pretty low.

That being the case, director Billy Boyle basically just asks you to sit back and enjoy this beautiful, intense, and lyrical fable that he’s spun out of the science fiction genre. Some people aren’t really able to do this.

But for those of you who are, I strongly suggest you go see Sunshine on the largest possible screen available to you, and just let yourself be enthralled for 107 minutes.