July 15, 2003

Capturing the Friedmans

/ movies / 1 Comment

Saw Capturing the Friedmans this past weekend.

This is not the feel-good movie of the summer. This is a very hard movie to watch, although, like a car wreck, you can’t help yourself: a documentary about a family in which the father and one of the three sons are accused of molesting children that attended computer classes run by the father. I felt like I needed a bath afterwards.

The documentarians scrupulously present everyone’s side of the story, and perhaps inevitably, it winds up being a very Rashōmon-like mess. At the end, we really don’t know who to believe. We can triangulate on the truth to a certain point, but much is unclear. What is perhaps most surprising is the Friedman family’s penchant for self-documentary–they were avid home-movie makers, and much of their footage is incorporated into the documentary. But there’s no smoking gun to be found there.

Gwen and I joked about what would make the ideal double-feature companion movie to it. I suggested Auto Focus; she parried with Daddy Day Care.

Brights

/ current events / 4 Comments

I had never heard “brights” used to describe anything other than high-beam headlights until Sunday, when I ran across a friend I hadn’t seen in a while, and the topic came up. Apparently brights has been co-opted as a catch-all term to describe agnostics, atheists, etc. It sounds a little too airy-fairy for my tastes–and indeed, following the model of “gay” for homosexual, it was coined to put a cheery word to a ghettoized social group.

In June, Richard Dawkins, who has never been shy about describing himself as an atheist, used the term. More recently, Daniel Dennet came out. Interestingly, the term has stirred up some ire among those it might describe.

Twister, baby

/ current events

“I think the burden is on those people who think he didn’t have weapons of mass destruction to tell the world where they are.”

Ari Fleischer

You’ve got to love this stuff. It’s like a verbal Möbius strip.

Hoaxing

/ tidbit

There’s been a spell of hoaxes making the rounds on the Net lately.

Michael Savage, a right-wing tele-blowhard lost his job after a call-in prankster gave him just enough rope to hang himself. This story got a lot of play in Blogistan.

There was Baby Ink, the website for a toddler-tattoo parlor. Done with a completely straight face, it was revealed as a hoax.

There is the amazing robot cop spec video (bah, annoying redirects: click on “Neil’s domain,” then “reel pt 3”) that some people took seriously. This is not a hoax per se–this simply reveals the credulity of some people.

Now there’s Hunting for Bambi, which purports to be a, ahh, service that allows men with some serious issues to paintball-hunt naked women. Although there’s actually a legitimate news story (and video) on this, it appears to be a hoax.

The thing these hoaxes have in common is outrage, in both senses of the word: they are outrageous (incredible), and they are outrages (atrocious). They get us into a sputtering fit for a moment, until someone pins down that they are, in fact, false.

Of course, when hoaxes appear elsewhere in the public arena, the revelation of falsity provokes even greater outrage.