re: remakes

11 THINGS: Re: Remakes

Thursday, May 31, 2007

1. "The A-Team" (2008): Original TV Series: 1983-1987. Initial reaction: "I pity the fool." Follow-up reaction: What does Mr. T think about all of this? Come to think of it: What does the Mr. T Experience think?

2. "The Birds" (2009): Original: 1963. Initial reaction: No! Follow-up reaction: Nooooo!!! Come to think of it: Naomi Watts as Tippi Hedren actually makes sense.

3. "CHiPs" (2009): Original TV Series: 1977-1983. Initial reaction: Wilson Valderrama is the perfect Ponch. Follow-up reaction: But who is the perfect Jon? Come to think of it: Why am I scrolling through www.robertpine.com right now?

4. "Deathrace 3000" (2008): Original ("Deathrace 2000"): 1975. Initial reaction: Don't say anything ... Follow-up reaction:

... about Iraq. Come to think of it: Don't say that either.

5. "Escape from New York" (2009): Original: 1981. ("Escape from Los Angeles": 1996.) Initial reaction: Why not add the U.S. and call it "Escape from America?" Follow-up reaction: Oh right ... San Francisco already exists. Come to think of it: I'd really like to escape from Hollywood.

6. "Fahrenheit 451" (2008): Original: 1966. Initial reaction: Didn't a used bookstore owner in Missouri recently burn books to protest the decline of the printed word? Follow-up reaction: Didn't most of us learn about this story via the Internet? Come to think of it: Isn't the bookstore owner missing the point?

7. "The Fly" (2008): Original: 1958. (Remake: 1986.) Initial reaction: The remake was an exception to the remake rule. Follow-up reaction: The remake rule is that remakes tend to suck. Come to think of it: This rule isn't good news for remakes of remakes.

8. "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (2007): Original: 1956. (Remake: 1978.) Initial reaction: See reactions to "The Fly." Follow-up reaction: Nicole Kidman??? Come to think of it: All of my human emotions have just disappeared.

9. "1984" (2009): Original: 1956. (Remake: 1984.) Initial reaction: "War is Peace." Follow-up reaction: "Freedom is Slavery." Come to think of it: "Ignorance is Strength."

10. "Sunset Boulevard" (2008): Original: 1950. Initial reaction: Disbelief. Follow-up reaction: Mock laughter. Come to think of it: Has Glenn Close purposefully been fading into obscurity to secure a starring role in the film?

11. "The Warriors" (2008): Original: 1979. Initial reaction: Wrong! Follow-up reaction: Cyrus is dead already. Come to think of it: My initial reactions haven't been strong enough.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/31/NSGMIQ1SIE1.DTL

This article appeared on page G - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

outnumbered

Angry Atheists Are Hot Authors
By RACHEL ZOLL, AP Religion Writer

Thursday, May 24, 2007

(05-24) 11:16 PDT , (AP) --

The time for polite debate is over. Militant, atheist writers are making an all-out assault on religious faith and reaching the top of the best-seller list, a sign of widespread resentment over the influence of religion in the world among nonbelievers.

Christopher Hitchens' book, "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," has sold briskly ever since it was published last month, and his debates with clergy are drawing crowds at every stop.

Sam Harris was a little-known graduate student until he wrote the phenomenally successful "The End of Faith" and its follow-up, "Letter to a Christian Nation." Richard Dawkins'"The God Delusion" and Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" struck similar themes — and sold.

"There is something like a change in the Zeitgeist," Hitchens said, noting that sales of his latest book far outnumber those for his earlier work that had challenged faith. "There are a lot of people, in this country in particular, who are fed up with endless lectures by bogus clerics and endless bullying."

Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, a prominent evangelical school in Pasadena, Calif., said the books' success reflect a new vehemence in the atheist critique.

"I don't believe in conspiracy theories," Mouw said, "but it's almost like they all had a meeting and said, 'Let's counterattack.'"

The war metaphor is apt. The writers see themselves in a battle for reason in a world crippled by superstition. In their view, Muslim extremists, Jewish settlers and Christian right activists are from the same mold, using fairy tales posing as divine scripture to justify their lust for power. Bad behavior in the name of religion is behind some of the most dangerous global conflicts and the terrorist attacks in the U.S., London and Madrid, the atheists say.

As Hitchens puts it: "Religion kills."

The Rev. Douglas Wilson, senior fellow in theology at New Saint Andrews College, a Christian school in Moscow, Idaho, sees the books as a sign of secular panic. He says nonbelievers are finally realizing that, contrary to what they were taught in college, faith is not dead.

Signs of believers' political and cultural might abound.

Religious challenges to teaching evolution are still having an impact, 80 years after the infamous Scopes "Monkey" trial. The dramatic growth in homeschooling and private Christian schools is raising questions about the future of public education. Religious leaders have succeeded in putting some limits on stem-cell research.

And the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a national ban on a procedure critics call "partial-birth abortion" — the first federal curbs on an abortion procedure in a generation — came after decades of religious lobbying for conservative justices.

"It sort of dawned on the secular establishment that they might lose here," said Wilson, who is debating Hitchens on christianitytoday.com and has written the book "Letter from a Christian Citizen" in response to Harris. "All of this is happening precisely because there's a significant force that they have to deal with."

Indeed, believers far outnumber nonbelievers in America. In an 2005 AP-Ipsos poll on religion, only 2 percent of U.S. respondents said they did not believe in God. Other surveys concluded that 14 percent of Americans consider themselves secular, a term that can include believers who say they have no religion.

Some say liberal outrage over the policies of President Bush is partly fueling sales, even though Hitchens famously supported the invasion of Iraq.

To those Americans, the nation's born-again president is the No. 1 representative of the religious right activists who helped put him in office. Critics see Bush's Christian faith behind some of his worst decisions and his stubborn defense of the war in Iraq.

"There is this general sense that evangelicals have really gained a lot of power in the United States and the Bush administration seems to represent that in some significant ways," said Christian Smith, a sociologist of religion at the University of Notre Dame. "A certain group of people sees it that way and that's really disturbing."

Mouw said conservative Christians are partly to blame for the backlash. The rhetoric of some evangelical leaders has been so strident, they have invited the rebuke, the seminary president said.

"We have done a terrible job of presenting our perspective as a plausible world view that has implications for public life and for education, presenting that in a way that is sensitive to the concerns of people who may disagree," he said. "Whatever may be wrong with Christopher Hitchens attacks on religious leaders, we have certainly already matched it in our attacks."

Given the popularity of the anti-religion books so far, publishers are expected to roll out even more in the future. Lynn Garrett, senior religion editor for Publishers Weekly, says religion has been one of the fastest-growing categories in publishing in the last 15 years, and the rise of books by atheists is "the flip-side of that."

"It was just the time," she said, "for the atheists to take the gloves off."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/05/24/national/a111654D33.DTL

painting by numbers

11 THINGS: Painting by Numbers

Thursday, May 24, 2007

1. One:

The Good: "One (Is the Loneliest Number)" by Harry Nilsson.
The Bad: Jet Li's "The One."
The Ugly: The city smelling like number one on a hot summer day.

2. Two:

The Good: Meat Loaf's "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad."
The Bad: 2 Live Crew.
The Ugly: Certain scenes in "Jackass Number Two."

3. Three:

The Good: "Three Is a Magic Number" ("Schoolhouse Rock" version).
The Bad: Threesomes (or was that good?)
The Ugly: Lionel Richie's "Three Times a Lady" (or Buckwheat's "Fee Times a Mady").

4. Four:

The Good: Gang of Four.
The Bad: Foreigner 4.
The Ugly: The decline of the fourth estate.

5. Five:

The Good: Dave Brubeck's "Take Five."
The Bad: Maroon 5.
The Ugly: The smell of I-5 halfway between here and Los Angeles.

6. Six:

The Good: "And if the devil is six ...
The Bad: 666.
The Ugly: Sexdactyly.

7. Seven:

The Good: ... then God is seven, then God is seven, then God is seven."
The Bad: Food at 7-11.
The Ugly: The final scene in "Se7en."

8. Eight:

The Good: Blossom Dearie singing "Figure Eight."
The Bad: "Eight Is Enough."
The Ugly: Adam Rich, post-"Eight Is Enough."

9. Nine:

The Good: The Beatles' "Revolution 9."
The Bad: The Beatles' "Revolution 9."
The Ugly: The Beatles' "Revolution 9."

10. Ten:

The Good: "I'd Love to Change the World" by Ten Years After.
The Bad: "Tenspeed and Brown Shoe."
The Ugly: Dudley Moore's character in "10."

11. Eleven:

The Good: Nigel Tufnel: "The numbers all go to 11. Look, right across the board, 11, 11, 11 and ..."
The Bad: "Ocean's Eleven."
The Ugly: 9/11.

Tim Sullivan, tsullivan@sfchronicle.com

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/24/NSGH6PUQUL1.DTL

This article appeared on page G - 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

to laugh or cry

The Sad, Quotable Jerry Falwell
It's bad form to speak ill of the dead. Good thing this man's own vile words speak for themselves
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, May 18, 2007

You can eulogize. You can mourn and ponder and do a lengthy retrospective, a political analysis, a sociocultural examination of a career and a legacy and a rather remarkable life. When remembering the dead, the journalistic options are legion.

But in the case of the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, the grandfather of the fundamentalist religious right and the foremost champion of the creation of a brutally homophobic, mysogynistic Christian theocracy in America, perhaps it's better to let the man's most insidiously famous quotes speak for themselves, and let time and karma be the judge of whether Falwell left the world a better place than when he found it. (All citations are available at wikiquote.org and elsewhere.)



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals; it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals."
"The abortionists have got to bear some burden for [the attacks of Sept. 11] because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America -- I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'"

"If you're not a born-again Christian, you're a failure as a human being."


"Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions."

"I listen to feminists and all these radical gals -- most of them are failures. They've blown it. Some of them have been married, but they married some Casper Milquetoast who asked permission to go to the bathroom. These women just need a man in the house. That's all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they're mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They're sexist. They hate men -- that's their problem."

"When you have a godly husband, a godly wife, children who respect their parents and who are loved by their parents, who provide for those children their physical and spiritual and material needs, lovingly, you have the ideal unit."

"The ACLU is to Christians what the American Nazi party is to Jews."

"I am saying pornography hurts anyone who reads it -- garbage in, garbage out."

"I am such a strong admirer and supporter of George W. Bush that if he suggested eliminating the income tax or doubling it, I would vote yes on first blush."

"I believe that global warming is a myth. And so, therefore, I have no conscience problems at all and I'm going to buy a Suburban next time."

"It is God's planet -- and he's taking care of it. And I don't believe that anything we do will raise or lower the temperature one point."


"I truly cannot imagine men with men, women with women, doing what they were not physically created to do, without abnormal stress and misbehavior."

"It appears that America's anti-Biblical feminist movement is at last dying, thank God, and is possibly being replaced by a Christ-centered men's movement which may become the foundation for a desperately needed national spiritual awakening."

"There's been a concerted effort to steal Christmas."

"I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them. What a happy day that will be!"

"The First Amendment is not without limits."

"Someone must not be afraid to say, 'moral perversion is wrong.' If we do not act now, homosexuals will 'own' America! If you and I do not speak up now, this homosexual steamroller will literally crush all decent men, women, and children who get in its way ... and our nation will pay a terrible price!"

"If he's going to be the counterfeit of Christ, [the Antichrist] has to be Jewish. The only thing we know is he must be male and Jewish."

"The argument that making contraceptives available to young people would prevent teen pregnancies is ridiculous. That's like offering a cookbook as a cure to people who are trying to lose weight."

"The whole global warming thing is created to destroy America's free enterprise system and our economic stability."

"You'll be riding along in an automobile. You'll be the driver perhaps. You're a Christian. There'll be several people in the automobile with you, maybe someone who is not a Christian. When the trumpet sounds you and the other born-again believers in that automobile will be instantly caught away -- you will disappear, leaving behind only your clothes and physical things that cannot inherit eternal life. That unsaved person or persons in the automobile will suddenly be startled to find the car suddenly somewhere crashes. ... Other cars on the highway driven by believers will suddenly be out of control and stark pandemonium will occur on ... every highway in the world where Christians are caught away from the drivers wheel." (from Falwell's pamphlet "Nuclear War and the Second Coming of Christ")

"God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve."

"You know when I see somebody burning the flag, I'm a Baptist preacher I'm not a Mennonite, I feel it's my obligation to whip him. In the name of the Lord, of course. I feel it's my obligation to whip him, and if I can't do it then I look up some of my athletes to help me. But, as long as at 72 I can handle most of the jobs I do it myself, and I don't think it's un-spiritual. When I, when I, when I hear somebody talking about our military and ridiculing and saying terrible things about our President, I'm thinking you know just a little bit of that and I believe the Lord would forgive me if I popped him."

"The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etcetera."


"The National Organization for Women (NOW) is the National Order of Witches."

"God doesn't listen to Jews."

"Tinky Winky is gay."

numb

A California National Guard detachment tossed its duffle bags into a truck Thursday and said goodbye to the city of Concord.

Concord, much of it with tears its eyes, said come home in one piece.

"This thing is so crazy,'' said Christy Arellano. "Over there, you never know who's going to do what.''

Over there means Iraq, not an easy word to say for the families of departing soldiers. Arellano held her 16-month-old daughter in one arm and hugged her Iraq-bound husband, Carlos, with the other.

"Daddy's going to Iraq,'' Lt. Carlos Arellano, 29, told his daughter, Ayiana. "You don't get to go. Just Daddy.''

The three of them hugged. Eyes were dabbed all around.

Arellano and two dozen fellow members of Detachment 1 chowed down on chocolate chip cookies baked by the lieutenant's wife and stood at parade rest inside the Guard armory on Willow Pass Road while the mayor of Concord made a farewell speech. The citizen soldiers tried to stay upbeat about how the National Guard these days seems to be doing most of its guarding in Iraq instead of the homeland.

"I guess this is not what I had in mind,'' said Pvt. Brian Cole, 24, of San Lorenzo, a former high school wrestler. He said he had enlisted in the Guard "because it seemed cool and I thought I'd check it out.''

Cole, trying to sound as if he had a choice, said he was glad to go where they send him. He said combat stress is all mental and he plans to tune it out. He also said he hasn't been in combat before. He plans to come home next year, after the detachment serves what is supposed to be a 12-month hitch in Iraq.

"Hopefully,'' he said.

The thing is, he said, he's got this girlfriend.

"I'm trying to get a relationship going,'' he said. "A year is a long time. Who knows? I don't know what I'm going to do to get it off my mind. Lift weights, probably.''

Soldiers in harm's way always seem to have girlfriends, mothers, spouses or children. All of them have the same looks on their faces when the troops toss the duffle bags into the truck.

Lt. James Jones, 33, of Tracy, shared some fast-food burgers with his wife, Tiah, and 7-year-old son, JJ. It was his fourth combat tour since 1989 and the family had gone through goodbyes before. Jones, a black beret perched jauntily over his brow, squirted seven catsup packets on his burger. Lieutenants get to do whatever they want.

"I can't promise my men that they'll all come back,'' he said. "All I can guarantee them is good leadership.''

JJ ate his burger quietly. In his other hand was a toy soldier. He seemed to know it was going to be his last burger with his father for a while.

Before leaving, the detachment presented a California state flag to the mayor. The soldiers, attached to the 1st Battalion 143rd Field Artillery, had carried the flag during their last combat tour, in Afghanistan in 2005.

"You gentlemen make us proud to live in Concord,'' Mayor Mark Peterson said. "Come home to us.''

For some detachment members, who have been doing mostly weekend warrior service, it will be their first combat tour. For others, it will be more of what they saw in Afghanistan.

The men will do a month of training in Camp Roberts, north of San Luis Obispo, and then leave for Iraq. They will patrol highways, protect convoys and try to keep their helmeted heads down.

David Lopes, 20, of Danville, said he plans to attend UC Berkeley and become a lawyer when he gets back. He also said he had joined the National Guard last year to protect his fellow citizens in the event of a natural disaster. If Iraq is a disaster, it's a different kind.

"When you sign the military contract these days, you pretty much know you could go to Iraq,'' Lopes said. "Either that, or you're oblivious to the world.

"So it's always in the back of your mind. You just don't talk about it much. It's not for a soldier to say what he's going to do. You don't get to choose.''

E-mail Steve Rubenstein at srubenstein@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/11/MNGRIPPB1L1.DTL