Happy Halloween, everyone! Because this is the most fabulous time of the year, I’ll put aside my normal ranting and raving to wish everyone a wonderful day!

For those of you in Denver, dress warm and be safe!

Rod Roddy, RIP. Now I’ll never know if he was really wearing any pants under his jackets.

Today’s Calvin Watch: Calvin has been spotted pissing on “Ex-Girlfriend.” Now you don’t even have to be an embittered ex-spouse to denigrate your former partner on your big ass truck.

I’d like to give a big cheer to my friend Leonard, slogging away at grad school in Michigan. With the days getting shorter and the work not going away, I’m sure that laundry seems like a pipe dream. I’m cheering for you!

Yours truly just went to see ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ at the local gigaplex and I must admit that it’s not a half-bad little slasher flick, as long as you don’t compare it to the original. The cast could come straight out of ‘Dawson’s Creek,’ and so could the dialogue, but there are some genuinely scary Leatherface-poppin-up-all-over moments. R. Lee Ermey reprises his psycho-drill-instructor genius from ‘Full Metal Jacket’ as a psycho-sheriff in this film, and he’s always a welcome addition to any film. The beginning and end of the film are very Blair Witch, featuring crime scene “footage” designed to convince you that the story is true (the serial killer Ed Gein is the “inspiration” for this film and the original – and also was the inspiration for ‘Psycho’ – but neither film delves into actual details about him, other than his affinity for leather neckties). The film is gory and gruesome and features some very tense moments, but in the end it’s pretty standard slasher fare. Leatherface chases teen, teen fights back, teen gets hung up on meathook, etc. What I find so interesting about this remake is the fact that we get a backstory on Leatherface, a psychological reason for his actions and a family story to go with it. None of this existed in the first film, in which Leatherface’s family just seemed to sprout up out of a vast Texas wasteland as cannibals, feeding off of hapless tourists. I think the unexplained Leatherface is vastly more disquieting than the villain of this remake. And I also think filmmakers have responded to our culture’s insatiable appetite for serial killer films, CSI clones and FBI dramas. We absolutely want to know, have to know, what makes killers tick. I’m not sure why, but the use of exposition about it in this ‘Massacre’ makes the film a lot less scary. All in all, I must admit that I enjoyed the few very jolting moments of the movie, but overall it was kind of like watching Leatherface tear through a Diesel Jeans ad.

Two other missing elements from this remake: humor and cannibalism. The 1978 film, directed by Tobe Hooper, was gory and no-budget, and also had some hilariously awful moments. Things get so out of hand when Leatherface dons a wig and puts on lipstick to serve dinner to his family (there is no grandma character in the first film) that you just have to laugh. The second element – cannibalism – is really missed in this remake. While meat references, slaughterhouses and livestock abound (not to mention scantily clad runway-riffic actors who are little more than meat in this movie) I really missed the cannibal overtones in this film. The remake moves from cannibalism to psycho-family drama and the latter is radically less interesting than the former to me.

I love cannibal movies. I think they are terribly unsettling to most viewers, and I have a vegetarian passion for them. I also love films like ‘Babe’ and ‘Chicken Run,’ because the dark undertone of those movies is all about slaughter. How can you watch something you’ve identified with for two hours get killed and served for dinner? I think they’re delightful. Two cannibal movies I would strongly recommend: ‘Parents’ (1989), a twisted tale of suburban cannibals that answers the question about what leftovers are left over FROM and ‘Ravenous’ (1999), a hilarious Antonia Bird film that connects cannibalism to manifest destiny – just briefly – and then entertains the hell out of you. If you haven’t seen ‘Ravenous,’ I suggest skipping this latest ‘Chainsaw’ and renting it on DVD. Or the original ‘Chainsaw’ for that matter. It’s a classic.

Speaking of movies, have you seen the trailer for ‘The Return of the King’ yet? I am COUNTING THE DAYS until December 17th.

One more thing: if you’re finding yourself as frustrated with the world, international politics and the new Disney movie based on one of their freakin’ Disneyland rides, try poking Alex in the Eye. Go on, it’s fun. Keep poking. You’ll feel better.

Yours truly was on a bit of a hiatus to get ready for Halloween and get her mentoring program up-and-running last week. My apologies for the lack 'o blog...

Today's Calvin Watch:
Calvin is now in drag and praying. Calvin Watchers have reported that they've spotted Calvin with long hair, kneeling before a large cross. All things considered, I find a biblical cross-gendered Calvin rather kinky, but I'm sure that's not what the driver had in mind.

Frivolous Lawsuit of the Day:
A woman with a "sensitive palate" is suing Smucker claiming that their jelly is less than the 100 percent fruit that they've claimed. Sure enough, her attorney's tests have proved that Smucker's strawberry jelly is less than 50 percent strawberries! *GASP* While I'm intensely disillusioned by this lawsuit (I'll never be able to eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich innocently again - how could I have been so dumb????) I can't believe she's actually taking them to court. Hey, wait a minute. Is there any actual butter in peanut butter? If not, I'm suing the hell out of Jiff.

More Notable News:
This past weekend, Denver cops increased the number of people they've shot to death this year to eight. And the District Attorney decided not to file charges in the recent police shooting death of a developmentally disabled teen boy. Keep up the good work, guys!

The White House reports that the federal deficit for 2003 climbed to a chart-topping $374.2 billion! But, hey, that's good news, because the original White House projection was $455 billion. What's $80 billion or so between friends? But don't worry...the deficit might only climb to $500 billion next year before we start our road to economic recovery. I feel much better now.

Jeez. Let's be good to each other out there.

Friday night I finally went to see ‘School of Rock,’ the new Jack Black heavy metal lovefest. What can I say? I loved it. Totally formulaic, totally feel-good and it TOTALLY ROCKED. Bless Jack Black and Richard Linklater for making a movie that could have gone horribly awry if, say, Chris Columbus had directed it or Adam Sandler had starred in it.

[Total digression: I believe that Jack Black and Phillip Seymour Hoffman are twins who were separated at birth to pursue radically different paths. One a comic marvel, one a dramatic genius. Let me know what you think.]

‘School of Rock’ is intensely amusing, chock full of music references and fun characters that kept me giggling the entire time. I’m absolutely not going to ruin one single moment from the movie talking about it. If you need a laugh, if you had as shitty of a week as I had last week, please get thee to the movies to see ‘School of Rock.’

One more thing: one of my favorite things about kids has to be that they DANCE – whenever or wherever they need to. I love it when I see kids so totally overwhelmed by a piece of music or music accompanying a scene in a film that they start to wiggle around and finally, after holding it in for a few moments, they just burst out into dance. This happened to a kid sitting next to us during ‘School of Rock.’ He just got so totally into ‘Bonzo Goes to Bigturg’ by the Ramones (a song I’m sure he had never heard) that he started squirming around until he finally just started rocking out in his seat, arms and heads thrashing about. Of course, I wished that I could be doing the same thing.

Two more items of note for your Sunday evening:

Here’s a nifty infographic about the size of $87 billion. I especially like the photo of W at the bottom.

Saturday was National Coming Out Day! Lots of love and hugs go out to all my friends and family – gay, straight, bi, transgendered, charmed, strange, awkward, suburban, distant, or nearby.

Between the time when the oceans drank Atlantis, and the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an age undreamed of. And onto this, Governor Conan, destined to wear the jeweled crown of California upon a troubled brow...

Well, Arnold is now Governor of California. It's a pretty telling state of current political affairs that enough voters feel so disenfranchised and angry at the system that they view him as a legitimate alternative. Of course, if the next three years turn out like the four years Jessie Ventura spent in power in Minnesota, it will be completely underwhelming.

To celebrate Arnold's victory, I've been reflecting on his powerhouse performance as Conan the Barbarian. Here's how I think Governor Conan would weight in on the election...

On the Democratic Party: Infidel Defilers. They shall all drown in lakes of blood.

On the Republican Party: Two or three years ago, it was just another snake cult.

On winning the election:What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!

I wonder if he punched any camels last night at his victory party.

Non-Arnold Thoughts...

Thanks to my friend Chris for forwarding this cool flash piece on Halliburton (otherwise known as Dick Cheney's Evil Empire). [I mean, c'mon, no one in their right mind would even pretend that Dick Cheney doesn't have a personal interest in all those rich, plentiful Iraqi oilfields... well, come to think of it, I guess people who would actually believe that Saddam planned 9/11 might think that Dick has our country's best interests at heart. But I digress...] I would also like to add a plug for flazoom.com, home of the coolest flash around. Plus, it's fun to say. FLAZOOOOOOM!

Today's Calvin Watch:
Looks like it's definitely hockey season again. Calvin has now been spotted wearing an Avs jersey and pissing on the Red Wings. C'mon, people - really!

This weekend, I went to see 'Demonlover,' the new corporate spy flick by French writer/director Olivier Assayas. Three things attracted me to the film: the strong female leads combined with a plot that involved 3D Anime porn and a secret interactive torture website, the split it created at Cannes (people either loved it or hated it), and the soundtrack by Sonic Youth.

I could rave endlessly about the first half of the film. It begins with a French company's deal to invest in a Japanese porno animation company. When the deal is sealed, two internet companies begin vying for the rights to the images. The real concern of the film is the corporate espionage going on behind the scenes, though. Connie Nielsen plays Diane, a corporate spy for one of the internet companies, who begins the film by drugging her boss so that she can take over the initial deal. When she fails to sabotage the contract with the Japanese, she attempts to undermine the French deal with Demonlover, the American internet company. Enter Gina Gerson, representative of Demonlover, who plays it cool as the ugly American (I begrudgingly have to admire the fact that she works really well in this film - I'm not a huge fan) and Chloe Sevigny, an assistant with complex loyalties. We learn shortly that the Demonlover site is a launchpad for a covert, highly profitable torture website called the Hellfire Club, where viewers can request torture scenarios real-time. I won't get into the particularities of the double-crossing (everyone in this film, it seems, works for someone else) because it doesn't matter anyway. The reason this film works so well at the beginning is because of the mood Assayas creates. I loved the contrast between the global reach of the companies in the film and the clausterphobic hotel rooms, nightclubs, and offices where the deals take place. I loved the interplay between languages and the cultural identity - or lack thereof - of the characters (the first hour features a meeting that takes place in French, English and Japanese, deftly handled by Assayas). I loved the way the characters are radically underplayed, the way they consider the implications of every move in a brief hesitation and then move forward with calculated confidence. I loved the paranioa lurking behind the film about corporate control. And I loved, especially, the way that the characters care not a whit about the pornographic product that they move. That detachment says more about the nature of power and profit than any overt moralizing could have. And, interestingly enough, that detachment has been what has unsettled many a movie critic about the film (Roger Ebert was freaked out that nobody in the film cared about the porn, which is exactly the point). And, yes, the soundtrack is great - noisy, distracting white noise. Hooray for Sonic Youth.

But then the film turns down 'Lost Highway' and becomes a mess. Some viewers will see this as the point of the film, but when we start to discover that everyone is a double-agent for Demonlover, when Diane gets thrown into not one, but two, basement dungeons to endure torture and when the film has her attempting to escape down a deserted highway dressed like Diana Rigg from The Avengers, things start to seem silly. The film moves from intriguing and unsettling to irritating. And THEN it gets really bad, with a slapped on ending that has a nice, middle-class, American kid who steals his dad's credit card to log on to the Hellfire Club and request a torture scenario (featuring Diane - do you GET THE IRONY????) It's a frustrating, awful ending because it undoes all of the subtlety of the film with a hit-you-over-the-head moral about the impact of corporate slime on our youth. Ugh. Sorry about the spoiler, but it gets really really bad.

'Demonlover' ends up being an artful debacle. My suggestion is to rent the DVD and stop it halfway. Or just rent 'Videodrome' and watch it all the way through. Yes, it's not one of Cronenberg's masterpieces, but it's consistent and thoughtful.

Whoa, nelly. It’s gonna be a long post tonight.

Just went to see ‘Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator,’ the new documentary about Mark “Gator” Rogowski and his descent from skating golden boy to murderer. It’s a compelling story, better than your average VH1 “Behind the Music” and while it may not really dig into the psychological complexity at work in Rogowski (there’s several suggestions about his mental illness in the film, but it never really gets explored) it works as a cautionary tale about the danger of celebrity. The film all but presents Vision Street Wear as the proverbial second gunman in the murder Rogowski commits. Their relentless crass marketing of skateboarding celebs and bad clothing (during the archival film of the late 80’s, I kept thinking, “Egad, did we really look THAT bad?”) combined with the rising popularity of street skating contributed to Rogowski’s lonely volatility and his rage. The film also made excellent use of old video footage and the soundtrack was pretty damn amazing.

What I find amazing is the way that Rogowski and Tony Hawk moved in completely opposite trajectories at the same time. Tony Hawk has been and always will be a vert skater, but he’s definitely something that Rogowski never was: a marketing genius. Hawk took the opportunity to change from skater to entrepreneur while Rogowski was desperate to maintain his celeb status. What I find so interesting is that all the old skaters in ‘Stoked’ talk freely about how much Rogowski contributed to the mediocrity of skating in the late 80’s. He was such a poster boy that he took the rebelliousness out of skateboarding, he made it too glamorous, he was a pawn in the marketing machine that made skateboarding crappy. Well, it seems to me that skateboarding really isn’t all that rebellious anymore, either. There’s plenty of legal places to do it – so many fantastic skate parks (and don’t get me wrong here, I think that’s awesome) and most of the skate parks have viewing areas so that Mom and Dad can watch their youngsters skateboard. And skateboarding clothes and accessories are a multi-billion dollar industry. And, well, it’s all gotten very legitimate and family-friendly. And now we have the ESPN Xtreme Games and the Tony Hawk Boom Boom Huck Jam. Yes, Virginia, skateboarding really isn’t a crime anymore. And what, pray tell, is the big difference between the late 80’s and the current popularity of the sport? Tony Hawk. And what he represents: skaters running the business of their own sport. Hawk learned how to work the system and unfortunately, Rogowski was just along for the ride. None of this in any way excuses Rogowski. His crime was brutal and unthinkable. But looking at these two guys raises a lot of interesting questions for me about marketing, sports and kids.

The other thing that sticks with me so much from this film is the video footage of a frustrated Rogowski swearing and throwing his board around when he’s unable to do even simple street skating moves. How many times have you seen this at the skate park? As one of the few women in any skate park I’ve ever been to, I have always found this display of testosterone-ridden frustration irritating. After all, what’s the sense in throwing your board around? I know, I know, it’s a dick thing. But when you see Rogowski do it – and you find out about the rage that fuels the murder he commits – it does give one pause. I don’t mean to suggest that frustrated skate boys are latent murderers, but the sport continues to sanction a pretty competitive, aggressive male attitude. And anger. And that, bottom line, is not cool. And I think that’s a big reason that girls are still largely invisible in the sport. It’s changing, definitely, but it’s still a dick thing.

Oh, and while I’m ranting, allow me a few moments to say that I simply don’t get the whole freestyle-BMX-bike thing. On this I won’t budge. I find the whole Dave Mirra-vert-freestyle thing completely preposterous. C’mon: It’s a bike without gears. It’s a bike that a clown would ride in the circus. It’s a bike that represents some ridiculous Peter-Pan syndrome for post-adolescent boys who like to yell at little kids in skate parks. I’m all for most “extreme” sports, but – let’s face it – this one is just extremely stupid. Grow up and get a real bike.

This whole evening made me really want to see ‘Gleaming the Cube’ again. Christian Slater skateboarding in the name of justice for his brother! Now that is a fine movie. Check out ‘Stoked,’ though. In conjunction with ‘Doggtown and Z Boyz,’ it really is nice to see skateboarding taken seriously as the subject of film.

In other sporting news, Rush Limbaugh has already had to resign over NFL Sunday comments - he lasted about 2 seconds at ESPN.