Five Before Chaos

I’ve added a few more links to the left sidebar. If you page down, you’ll see several links that will give you some more background on spaghetti westerns and blaxploitation flicks. Be sure to check out Fistful of Leone for a good background on the groundbreaking Sergio Leone. Shobary’s Spaghetti Westerns has some trailers you can watch of some of the more obscure spag westerns as well as a bunch of other neat stuff to download. Blaxploitation.com has a bunch on jiveass mofo’ cinema, and I put a few other ones on there worth checking out. I also have links above it to all of the reviews I’ve had on here.

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Time for another spaghetti western, 1972’s W Django! (also called ‘A Man Called Django’). Now, you might remember in my review of Corbucci’s Django that due to the success of that film and the tendency of Italian cinema to milk a formula to death, there were over 20 or 30 films afterwards that had ‘Django’ in the title, with nothing else to do with the original. This is one of those films.

This film, directed by someone named Edward Mueller, stars Anthony Steffen (Antonio De Teffe) as Django, in the typical spag western revenge plot, as he hunts down a gang responsible for raping and killing his wife. Steffen looks like he could be the laboratory offspring of Peter and Henry Fonda and David Carradine.

This one falls strictly into B-movie territory here. Nothing unique or even quirky to set it appart from the pack, and very little artistry to be seen, although the sets and scenery look great. It seems to steal a few Leone-isms, such as Django’s music box with his wife’s picture, which seems eerily reminicent of Colonel Mortimer’s pocket watch from ‘For A Few Dollars More’. And Django’s Mexican bandit sidekick, Carranza (Stelio Candelli) is like a knock-off of Eli Wallach’s Tuco in ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’, going so far as to have the same plot device of Django turning him in for reward money and then shooting the rope just before he is about to be hanged, exactly what happened with Blondie and Tuco in TGTBTU.

The soundtrack is typical spag western fare, acoustic guitars and trumpets, and the DVD quality itself is fair. There was no restoration done to it; the film looks dirty and scratchy at times, and the sound has a lot of hiss and background noise.

The best I can say about it is it reminds me almost of a low-budget American no-name western that you might see late at night. It wasn’t horrible by any means, and unlike Sabata, I was able to watch the whole thing. I wouldn’t put it on my ‘must-see list’ either.

If you’re just getting into the genre, there’s nothing in here that would further your interest in it. As always, watch the Sergio Leone films first.

If you like this, please click below and visit my spaghetti western site, where you’ll find more reviews and other great stuff.

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Time for a long overdue photoblog, some more great ones from mine and Jenni’s trip out to the North Cascades and Olympic Peninsula over the summer.

First up, looking northward at Lake Chelan in the North Cascades at sunset:

This is some 600+ year old pictographs on a cliff face on the western side of Lake Chelan:

The Olympic Mountains as taken on the way up Klahhane Ridge:

And finally, some fertility symbol petroglyphs at the Wedding Rocks near Cape Alava, which is the most western point in the continental U.S.:

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Gonna shift away from our usual FBC politics-laden seriousness for a laugh. There’s a series on Youtube now called ‘Yacht Rock’… it’s a 10+ episode comedy bit about the origins of the smooth rock that dominated the music charts in the late 70’s-early 80’s. Let’s just say that Kenny Loggins and Michael McDonald are major players in this series. Who knew Hall and Oates were so crazy?
Here’s episode 1:

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Every once in a blue moon, I journey over to the dark recesses of the right-wingnutosphere, this time wondering how they’re dealing with the meltdown. Although it has nothing to do with the meltdown, I got a good laugh out of this:

Patrick J. Buchanan will be the next President of the United States. Mr. Buchanan is the most qualified man for the position. Mr. Buchanan is the most deserving of the position. Mr. Buchanan is the man whose views most closely align with the vast majority of the American voters. He will win an overwhelming, landslide victory in 2008…
Every American knows that something is wrong when four Mexican families move into the house next door and park their cars on the front lawn…
The election of 2008 may see a majority of African-Americans vote Republican for the first time in decades. This election may be the end of the unwavering African-American allegiance to the Democratic Party as African-Americans realize that Democrats have sold them out for the now more numerous Hispanic vote….

You just can’t make this shit up.

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Will the gifts ever stop? First up. the guy that brought down Nixon, John Dean, with ‘David Kuo’s Book “Tempting Faith”: The Author’s Agenda, the Authoritarian Behavior He Reports, And the White House’s Response’:

“There’s really no reason, then, to think Kuo has any hidden political agenda. He’s admitted his disappointment in the Bush Administration. And he’s sought out the best forum possible — a book where he can set forth the details of how he believes Bush and his aides are politically manipulating Christians — at the best time, to call attention to his inside knowledge to those who share his beliefs. His agenda seems to be the simple one he claims: To convey to his fellow Christians how much he feels the Bush White House has let them down.”

Next up, Blumenthal thinks the game’s up. I think he’s being a bit premature: ‘End of the culture war: Now the religious right has turned against the Republican Congress, the great revolution is over’

Does GOP stand for the Gay Old Party? Good article at the WaPo, ‘Hill Republicans Air Out the Closet’, about the gays in the GOP.

Continue gloating.

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Reuters:

“A fresh wave of atheistic books has hit the market this autumn, some climbing onto best-seller lists in what proponents see as a backlash against the way religion is entwined in politics.”

Harris and Dawkins are mentioned, and they even talk to Paul Kurtz. Worth a read.

Also, over at Smirking Chimp, have a look at Ben Tripp’s ‘I’ve Got Your God Right Here’, where he comments about the relevance of the Reuters article:

“The article is about how atheist books are ascending the best-seller charts, and staying there, and golly, is this a trend?

I’ll tell you the answer, although you already know it. I’m just being cute. There are millions and millions of perfectly sane Americans out there, claiming to be believers, or at worst agnostic, so please don’t hit me, being held hostage by lunatics that really believe that 2000 years ago one guy, a tribal minority from North Africa, was born by magic through the direct intervention of the tribe’s god, frigged around for 30 years, and was executed by the Romans after he took up doing magic. Being capable of magic, he came back to life and then disappeared.

Elsewhere in the world, people are being held hostage by believers in a variety of equally fruity religions, such as the one where a guy announced there was a new version of that earlier tribe’s religion, and the previous version no longer applied; he did a bunch of magic too, including a visit to Heaven on a half-mule, half-donkey with wings, where he got to hang out with the previous guy that did magic.

The thing that is so terribly wrong with Faith is that it’s predicated, every single time, on a terrible fallacy: that god just ‘is’. There’s no evidence of god, so god exists. Or everything is evidence of god, so god exists. Or as most Americans avow, it’s in the Bible, so it’s true. Never mind it’s also in the Koran, which they hate and fear, and that every religion has had similar texts, going right back to the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Mesopotamians, and on and on into the darkness. Faith is the enemy of Truth, because faith requires you take somebody’s word for something, especially something utterly preposterous. Truth requires that you use your senses and your brain to observe what is, while Faith requires you use your senses and brain to observe what isn’t.”

Now, being part of America’s most distrusted minority, I’m not jumping out of my seat here anticipating some big wave of reason and freethought to start sweeping the nation, but it gives me hope that maybe there are more of us than we think. Or maybe some people are starting to feel that it’s ok to question their faith, that it’s not as radical a notion as once thought.

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Do you promise, John? Do us a favor.

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You know, with the complete implosion of the Republican party happening right before our eyes, you’d figure I’d be blogging 24-7. Been busy lately with school and the Osman campaign, so I haven’t had too much time. And there’s just too much good stuff to write about. Every day, it’s something new, whether Foley-related (or some other cognitive-dissonance-inducing Repub gay thing), an Abramoff thing, or another 2 or three house races suddenly becoming competitive.

Hands down, my favorite has got to be the ‘GOP done been playing the Christianists for suckers’ thing, something I’ve talked about quite a bit here on FBC. And, with David Kuo’s new book, ‘Tempting Faith’ making waves, the cat is out of the bag. Kuo, a self-described Konservative Kristian, was the #2 man at Bush’s Office of Faith Based initiatives. The most overlooked signifigant thing about his book is when he reveals one of the few moments that Bushco spoke the absolute truth, when he describes many in the administration as describing Falwell, Dobson and others as ‘nuts’ and ‘kooks’.

What’s even more striking is the reaction from some evangelicals, a shoot the messenger tactic. The White House folks are pedaling the ‘doesn’t sound like the same guy we had working here angle’, and radical cleric James Dobson had this to say, a combination of ’sour grapes’ and ‘waaahhhh, we’re so persecuted’:

“The release of this book criticizing the Bush administration’s handling of its faith-based initiative program seems to represent little more than a mix of sour grapes and political timing. David Kuo’s book doesn’t hit shelves until next week, but excerpts released by media outlets paint the picture of a dissatisfied federal employee taking shots at the White House effort to connect faith-based nonprofit groups with legitimate societal needs.

“Big media will no doubt play this story to the hilt in the next several weeks, because it allows them to take aim at two of their favorite targets: President Bush and socially conservative Christians. Sadly, Kuo’s characterization of his former colleagues, bosses and mission — mischaracterizations, really — will be fed to the public as truth.”

Carpetbagger Report has some more on that.

A few other good links on the subject:
Howard Fineman’s ‘For the Faithful, A Trying Time’
Alan Wolfe’s ‘Are Evangelicals Over?’

I have to say that I’m loving the position the evangelicals are put in right now: continue to be played for suckers(which shouldn’t be that hard when you look at what they believe in the first place), or stay home and sit out the election. They really have no place else to go. Gawddamn, it feels good to say that. Maybe they’ll form a third party that will accomplish nothing but draw away GOP votes, another winning scenario for us in the reality-based community.

Finally, Keith Olberman has featured the Kuo book on his Countdown program last week. Here are parts 1 and 2. You’ll enjoy. try not to gloat. Aw, hell, gloat. We’ve been waiting for this a long time.

Part 1 of Olbermann on ‘The Nuts’

Part 2

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I went ahead and put up a myspace site. I’m still not sure why, because as of yet, most myspace sites seem really cluttered and hard to navigate. The only friend invites I’ve gotten so far are from ‘hot lesbian myspace webcam sessions’, which I suppose have some merit, but isn’t what I’m looking for, I guess. I don’t really know what to put up there. Anyways, it’s http://www.myspace.com/fivebeforechaos, if you’re interested in these kinds of things.

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