Everybody do the Django

Never got around to saying what I thought of Django Unchained. Prolly my favorite Tarantino film next to Kill Bill. So many spectacular scenes. The doctor diffusing potentially lethal situations using his foreigner's understanding of English. Him explaining to Django the myth of Brunhilde. Django going after his first targets in his extravagant valet costume. Him bursting down a door with only the words "d'Artagnan motherfuckers" before shooting. It's all very enjoyable to watch.

Samuel L. Jackson gave his best performance ever, in my opinion. His character was so nuanced, so believable, so real. And he was so bad. An article critical of the movie suggested that it was wrong to think of Steven as a villain because the real villains were the slave owners, not that old uncle tom. But I feel like that assessment misses so much of the juicy details. Steven loved to harass and subjugate black folk at least as much as any white man did. He loved to feel so high above the other black people, which is why he was so astonished when Django showed up as a free man. Steven was an ally and an enabler to the white slave owners, and so especially from Django's perspective this made him among the worst of villains. Steven loved Calvin because Calvin gave him this lofty position of power over the other black people whom he then got to oppress. Steven believed wholeheartedly that it was a black man's place to serve white men. I guess it's hard to explain, but his villainy was quite clear to me. The acting was so good because he communicated so much without having to say anything.

I suppose I was expecting a much more disturbing movie, mostly because of Tarantino's reputation for violence. But over the years I've found that the reputation may not be warranted. Other directors put much worse things in their movies than Tarantino does. Tarantino is all about blood splatters and nervous tension. He never goes with all out torture porn, and the most graphic and brutal scenes of gore are conspicuously not shown on screen. Part of it is out of respect for the sensibilities of his audience, and part of it is that he's skilled enough as a director to know when it's a more powerful choice to leave things to the imagination. Sometimes the anticipation of pain is all it takes to deliver the message.

I'd like to address the accusations of racism. Firstly, anyone who thinks this movie is racist should see it before casting judgment. It might do you well to observe how a lynch mob is portrayed. I'll give you a hint: not intelligently. I don't see why a racist filmmaker would try to make racists look bad in his film. Secondly, Jamie Foxx and Samuel L. Jackson are two of the highest paid black actors in Hollywood. They can afford to be very picky about the movies they choose to be in. If you really think Django Unchained is racist in any way, then good, because that means it will get more publicity.

The part of me I will never get to see

On Wednesday January 9th 2013 I had my tonsils and adenoids removed and my deviated septum fixed. That's a bilateral tonsillectomy, a bilateral adenoidectomy, a bilateral septioplasty, and some other surgery that I can't recall. They decided to have me stay the night at the hospital so I just got home today. When they woke me up after the procedure and told me I should spend the night I asked them if I'd be monitored while I slept. The surgeon said yes I would. This was a good thing because it was an opportunity to see if I had sleep apnea and stuff.

Sometime after midnight I started wondering about how they were monitoring me. I asked the nurse if that black circle on the ceiling was a camera. She said it was a light and that there were no cameras in the room. I asked how I was being monitored and she seemed very confused. I had to explain that I was told I was going to be monitored and that it was important for me to be monitored so they could see if I had sleep apnea and stuff. She said I was doing fine and I had to explain that she was only checking on me while I was awake. This hospital stay was a rare opportunity for me to be monitored while I slept and I wanted to take advantage of that. After some arguing the nurse finally agreed to have someone hook me up to a machine.

I was in a great deal of pain and I still am. It's not too bad in terms of constant pain but it hurts a great deal more when I swallow, which I'm apparently supposed to do a lot. I was repeatedly asked where the pain was and of course I always answered that it was in my throat where, you guessed it, my tonsils had been removed. I was given a variety of narcotic pain medications and none of them were able to get me to a point where I could swallow comfortably save one: fentanyl. Naturally I assumed this meant that I'd be getting more of it since it was the only one that I responded well too. I mean otherwise, why would they keep asking how I felt and if the meds were working? Unfortunately the nurse was argumentative about this request as well. The list of tricks she cycled through went something like this:

1. "You don't get any more fentanyl tonight."
To this I would reply that I would like to have some in the morning then. She repeated herself: no more fentanyl tonight. She seemed to have trouble distinguishing "tonight" from "tomorrow morning."

2. "You're already taking three narcotics."
And I only need one: fentanyl. Please give me that instead.

3. "Fentanyl only lasts an hour."
I would much rather have a stronger drug that lasts a little bit than a weaker drug that lasts the whole time between doses. An hour is more than enough time to eat a meal. When I'm not swallowing, I don't need to medicate the pain.

4. "Just stop eating to give your throat a rest."
This defeats the purpose. I want my throat to feel better so that I can eat. If I'm not eating then I don't need my throat to feel better.

5. "You can't take fentanyl at home since it's an IV med and we need to find a medication that works for you to take home."
We've already tried everything and we've already found the one that works and since I can't take it at home you're refusing to give it to me the one time I can take it.

6. "I'm not the doctor so I don't decide what drugs to give you."
Yet you've already demonstrated that you can make suggestions about what drugs I get to take since I asked for a non-prescription throat spray and it was brought to me.

Eventually this culminated in a nurse rant (which is like a normal rant but slow and gentle) where she repeated herself over and over again in broken English (almost none of the nurses seemed to speak it as their first language) until I finally gave up.

I certainly don't think the consent form I signed had anything about giving them the right to withhold my tonsils from me. I asked to see my tonsils many times during my stay, to which nurses always replied that they'd see about it. The first time was right after I awoke from the anesthesia, and I was told my tonsils had been taken to the lab. By the time I was leaving the hospital and I asked to see my tonsils one last time I was told they had already been sliced into little pieces. I asked to see them anyway.

I finally got to the lab and saw my tonsils in little baggies. They looked much smaller than I expected, and apparently my adenoids were in there too but could not be identified to me for some reason. I commented that they looked like crab meat, and one of the women working there started laughing. Either she is greatly deprived of humor in her daily life or she found me attractive, but Occam's Razor would have me rule out the latter for being too unlikely.

Right now I'm having difficulty breathing because tampon-like splints have been sewn into my nostrils. This is supposedly to allow my nose to heal properly, but I certainly wish they could have been tube-shaped or something so that air would have a sure way through. When I woke from the surgery I was not told the splints had been put it and I certainly wasn't told what to do about them. As I was clearing out some blood clots from my nose with my finger (which I wasn't supposed to do and hadn't been told not to do) I found the splints and at first thought they were just more blood clots so I tried to get them out until I realized what they were. So I became worried that I might have shifted them out of place so that they were blocking more air now than they should be. During the night I called for a nurse and a male nurse from Kenya showed up and I asked him to examine my splints and he said they looked fine. But today when I was leaving I asked my regular nurse to have a look at the splints and she wouldn't do it. She said she wasn't a doctor and wasn't the one who put them in and no matter how I explained that another nurse already performed such a check she insisted against it.

When I got home I got to use a squirting device to "irrigate" my nostrils. Reading the instructions for how to do it, I learned that I was supposed to start doing it right after my surgery. None of the nurses told me about this or gave me the tools to do it. I'm supposed to keep irrigating my nostrils to keep the blood from clotting, but I'm afraid a lot of blood has already clotted because I didn't start soon enough and it's too crusty to be affected by the nasal spray alone. But the nurses all told me I wasn't supposed to put any solid objects in my nose, so I'm kind of at a loss here until the medical team responds to my emails. I just hope I don't suffocate in my sleep before then.

I'm glad I got the surgery but I'm not happy at all with how it went.

2012's best picture from 2013?

I saw Zero Dark Thirty yesterday. I thought it was pretty stupid. There is a lot of excitement packed into the last 20 minutes or so of the movie that gives the audience a good final impression of it so that's why I think this movie has a 93% on rotten tomatoes, the highest score of all the newly opened and top box office movies. But on the whole the movie is incredibly boring. I agree with the few negative reviews on the site:

"Bigelow has hamstrung herself by not committing to a viewpoint. This is a by the numbers, cold, emotionally inert, just the "facts" procedural drama that is just barely a step above an episode of Law & Order."

"I was pretty upset that Bigelow got snubbed by the Academy.... until I actually SAW the film. It felt like a really good TV movie, but Jessica Chastain's phony and forced performance drags it down."

And I strongly disagree with the many positive reviews:

"Chastain makes Maya as vivid as a bloodshot eye. Her porcelain skin, delicate features and feminine attire belie the steel within."

"From the very first scenes of Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow demonstrates why she is such a formidable filmmaker, as adept with human emotion as with visceral, pulse-quickening action."

The characters all seemed shallow and the directing felt empty and basic. I had recently seen Jessica Chastain in The Debt and this was exactly the same role. A young woman government agent trying to compete in a man's world, hunting down a notorious war criminal who has eluded everyone else for years. Sometimes I could almost forget which movie I was watching. None of the characters were explored in any depth and none of them were particularly likable. I know this makes me a bad person since the movie is based on true events but one of the characters was so obnoxious to me that I felt relieved when she died (even though it was more than a little predictable). There was seldom any background music, so most of the movie was just bland shots of people doing stuff that is unclear why you should care about it. Inane conversations, office jobs, and paperwork.

I felt like I was watching some kind of acting exercise. Like some acting students were given some scenes and asked to practice what they'd been learning in class. Raise the stakes (which means raise your voice at the right time I guess), pace the scene well (which means put in plenty of pauses), and don't forget to react to your scene partner! I guess what I'm trying to say is that it didn't feel real at all. It doesn't feel like any great amount of effort was put into making this a good movie. It feels like making it was a chore. It's just Oscar bait. "Okay, we're supposed to make a movie now about capturing Bin Laden and stuff. Might as well get to it. I heard we'll win an Oscar for it." You've got all those weird detached speeches that you hear in the trailers. Like "I'm bad news. I'm not your friend..." and "...there's just us. And we are failing." They sound so weird when they're actually in the movie because people don't actually talk like that. They only make sense in the context of the trailer when played over that Clint Mansell / Kevin MacLeod sounding music. And what's up with the scene where Joel Edgerton is asked what convinced him and he gestures toward Maya and says "her confidence"? Is there a joke there? Is she supposed to look not confident? I can't really tell, but I think the audience is supposed to assume that.

So anyway, yeah. What a pretentious load of bull.