Peter Krupa

In no particular order:

1. The Big Lebowski
2. Amelie
3. High Fidelity
4. Bubba Ho-tep
5. The Apartment
6. The Man Who Wasn’t There
7. The Royal Tenenbaums

“We Are the World” remake: Helping Haiti? Absolutely. I bet a lot of Haitians breathed a sigh of relief on February 2 and said to themselves, “Boy, I feel a lot less hungry and a lot more housed now that a bunch of famous musicians got together and sang for 14 hours. All I need now is my very own pony!”

Or here’s an idea! Rather than waiting for a few dollars to trickle down thanks to this once-in-a-lifetime marketing opportunity, why don’t all you bumble-fuck celebrities just sell a couple of your houses and donate the goddamn cash to the Red Cross?

And finally, Jeff Bridges? Really? Like, the Jeff Bridges who’s up for an Oscar this year for his role as a musician, but has never, like, you know, done anything else musical in his life? You people are shameless.

Reuters headline of the week: Pope tells Irish bishops pedophilia a heinous crime.

Now that James Cameron says he’ll be directing a sequel to The Most Derivative Movie Ever Made, I thought I’d throw out some ideas for the new film.

• Jawal is a Na’vi cop. He’s a rebel who uses unorthodox methods to get results. But when he crashes another winged batty thing in a madcap aerial pursuit, his superiors have had enough. They assign him a new partner: A human fresh from the academy, who does things strictly by the book.
• An evil inter-galactic emperor rules Pandora with a heavy hand. With only her pluck and indigenous  ingenuity, as well as the help of a mysterious human who can make things float with his mind, a Na’vi princess is able to mount an insurgency that frustrates the Evil Emperor and brings him to their planet. She leads her people to victory in a climactic battle against a bunch of walking machines. The emperor and the floaty human have a showdown in which it is revealed that the emperor is his father.
• A giant meteorite is threatening to destroy Pandora. The humans have to work together with the Na’vi to stop it – BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE.
• Uhllanta, a beautiful Na’vi female, invites her fiancé over to spend a weekend with her manipulative mother and authoritarian father. Hilarity and awkwardness ensue when it turns out her fiancé is a human.
• Jenny really wishes her boyfriend Nummbata – a Na’vi worrier – would propose to her. After all, they’ve been dating long enough. But all he’s interested in is hanging out with his friends, smoking pot, and killing things with spears. She wishes he would get serious and take that job her dad has offered him as a mid-level manager at Staples corporate headquarters. Then, God appears in the form of Anthony Hopkins. He whisks her off on a journey through time and shows her the true meaning of Pandora, or whatever.

There’s more where this came from. Cameron: Call me.

From Oliver’s birth2

Oliver Simon Krupa Flores, born February 9, 2010.

I’ve decided I like Gail Collins a lot. She’s sarcastic, but she never quite looses her shit, which I’m afraid I would do if I had to write about the mind-blowing stupidity in Washington on a regular basis. (This is a big reason I am not – not – a columnist for the New York Times.) From her column this morning:

Now Shelby has upped the ante with a blanket hold on (all Obama administration nominations). His incredibly grave reasons were the desire to see that a defense contract for a new tanker is awarded to a bidder who will do the assembly work in Alabama. Also, he feels that a new F.B.I. facility for testing explosive devices should be conveniently located in Huntsville.

“If this administration were as worried about hunting down terrorists as it is about the confirmation of low-level political nominations, America would be a safer place,” said a spokesman for the senator.

Those two paragraphs nicely encapsulate the two prongs of Republicans’ incredibly confusing philosophy of governance, which are:

1. All government spending is bad, but some government spending is good.
2. ZOMG LOOK OVAH THERE A TERRORIST!!1!

What is going on.

I have two things to say about The Bonfire of the Vanities. First, it’s profoundly racist. Not that Tom Wolfe is racist, necessarily. I don’t know the guy. But there’s not a single sympathetic black character in a 700-page book full of black characters. If there’s a non-racist explanation for this, I’d like to hear it.

Second, who ever thought that this book’s description of the excesses of Wall Street would someday sound, well, quaint? I mean, Great Jove! Sherman makes one million dollars per year? That makes him… like… a millionaire! And try to imagine an I-banker worried about losing his job over one $6 million mistake. Are you kidding? That’s petty cash! HIGH FIVE BRO!!!

I guess I don’t regret reading The Bonfire of the Vanities as a part of my cultural education. It’s just that as a piece of culture, it hasn’t aged well.

From The Bonfire of the Vanities:

And in that moment Sherman made the terrible discovery that men make about their fathers sooner or later. For the first time he realized that the man before him was not an aging father but a boy, a boy much like himself, a boy who grew up and had a child of his own and, as best he could, out of a sense of duty and, perhaps, love, adopted a role called Being a Father so that his child would have something mythical and infinitely important: a Protector, who would keep a lid on all the chaotic and catastrophic possibilities of life. And now that boy, that good actor, had grown old and fragile and tired, wearier than ever at the thought of trying to hoist the Protector’s armor back onto his shoulders again, now, so far down the line.

From the New York Times:

The blacks who are enraged by “Precious” have probably figured out that this film wasn’t meant for them. It was the enthusiastic response from white audiences and critics that culminated in the film being nominated for six Oscars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, an outfit whose 43 governors are all white and whose membership in terms of diversity is about 40 years behind Mississippi. In fact, the director, Lee Daniels, said that the honor would bring even more “middle-class white Americans” to his film.

Scalia tweets.