Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Archives for January 2003

Adaptation: the review

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The subject of Adaptation came up in the comments section of my post about Catch Me If You Can, so without further ado—well, actually a week of ado, but who’s counting?—here are my deathless thoughts on Adaptation.

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Darin and I have not been having an easy time of it, movie-wise, since Sophia was born. It’s been a combination of not having enough time, having different priorities, and living through one of the suckiest periods in American cinema.

What’s been strange is that a lot of the movies we’ve seen have been critically acclaimed and we’ve still hated them. In the middle of Amélie Darin turned to me and said, “Do you think we’re just out of the habit of watching movies?” And he asked at almost the exact moment I was thinking, “Holy crap, this is the biggest movie in French history?” (Call me wacky, but I don’t enjoy movies that find stalkers “fun.” And the prologue, which explained how Amélie got to be the way she was, was so deeply unpleasant for me I was simply predisposed to dislike the rest of the movie.)

Every review we’d heard about Adaptation had been so overwhelmingly positive. You’d think we’d have learned our lesson on believing reviews after Mulholland Drive (Hated it! And yes, I understood it just fine—I still thought it was pretentious artistic crap), Amélie, Sexy Beast, AI: Artificial Intelligence (I want the 18 hours of my life that movie sucked away back), or Donnie Darko (well, actually, Darin saw that one without me, but I’ll take his word for it).

You’d think we’d learn our lesson, but you’d be so wrong.
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The Scorecard of Evil

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By the way, if you’ve been trying to keep track of the amazingly evil (and amazingly uncommented-on) doings of the Bush Restoration, check out

The Wage Slave Scorecard of Evil

One stop shopping for pointers to the execrable, the egregious, and the utterly outrageous.

What the hell: I’ll go with “Outright evil.”

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AIDS Panel Choice Wrote of a ‘Gay Plague’

The Bush administration has chosen Jerry Thacker, a Pennsylvania marketing consultant who has characterized AIDS as the “gay plague,” to serve on the Presidential Advisory Commission on HIV and AIDS.

Next week, Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson is scheduled to swear in several new commission members. They include Thacker, a former Bob Jones University employee, who says he contracted the AIDS virus after his wife was infected through a blood transfusion.

The 35-member commission, which makes recommendations to the White House on AIDS prevention, is the latest incarnation of a panel that has existed since the Reagan administration. Earlier commissions issued reports strongly critical of the national response to AIDS, and helped to nudge the government and the pharmaceutical industry toward greater action.

In his speeches and writings on his Web site and elsewhere, Thacker has described homosexuality as a “deathstyle” rather than a lifestyle and asserted that “Christ can rescue the homosexual.” After word of his selection spread among gays in recent days, some material disappeared from the Web site. Earlier versions located by The Washington Post that referred to the “gay plague,” for instance, were changed as of yesterday to “plague.”

Update: I see that Atrios and Oliver Willis wasted no time pointing to this story either.