Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Today's Bonus Video Link

Keith Olbermann awards his coveted "Worst Person in the World" awards on tonight's broadcast. The bronze (to Bill O'Reilly) is of little importance, the silver (to James Dobson) is on-target and the gold (to Walmart) is scathing and gutsy and the kind of thing more people on TV should do.

• Posted at 9:22 PM · LINK

McCanned Laughter

Just had lunch with one of the three most talented people on this planet, Chuck McCann, and I'm taking him down to USC later this afternoon to speak to my students. (I teach Comedy Writing down there on Wednesdays. So if you see a future generation of comedy writers who can only do "mulch" jokes, you'll know the reason.) Chuck is an actor and a writer and a filmmaker and a voiceover genius and if I ever need to have someone do a liver transplant on me, I'm betting he can handle that, too.

Each year, he organizes the Brown Paper Pete Film Festival featuring short movies that are made in a helluva hurry. They give you six weeks and a topic and then they see what you come up with. This coming Sunday at the Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills at 1 PM, they'll be unspooling this year's entries, which are in some way about cars. If you're anywhere in the area, go and I'll bet you enjoy yourself tremendously.

In the meantime, if you click on this link, you can watch a film that Chuck made for some past festival...or something.

• Posted at 3:00 PM · LINK

Wednesday Morning

In January of '05, a man named Juan Manuel Alvarez did what has to rank right up there with the crappiest things any human being has ever done to other human beings. After what were reported as several failed attempts to take his own life, Alvarez parked his Jeep Grand Cherokee on some railroad tracks in Glendale, apparently figuring that the Metrolink train that ran along those tracks would destroy it and him. He also, just to add to his certain demise, doused the Jeep in gasoline.

At the last minute, it is said, he got cold feet...or something. Whatever his motives, he fled the Jeep and so escaped death or even injury when the train collided with it. Alas, others were not so fortunate. Eleven people died and close to 200 more were injured, some of them quite seriously. Alvarez was taken into custody and now, more than three years after the horrible incident, he's about to go on trial, charged with 11 counts of murder, one count of arson and a number of other offenses for which prosecutors are seeking the Death Penalty. Jury selection began today and in this article, it says the trial is expected to last through June...

...to which I say, "Huh?"

Through June? Three months? Why should this trial take more than twenty minutes?

I'm not suggesting they should just throw the book at the guy, schedule the electric chair and adjourn to Chili's for the Smokehouse Bacon Burger lunch special. Everyone is entitled to a Fair Trial and Due Process. I'm just wondering what they have to talk about that's going to take that long.

It is not in dispute that he parked the Jeep on the tracks, intending to have the train hit it. There seems to be some disagreement as to whether he really was suicidal and ever intended to be in the vehicle at the moment of impact but, in the immortal words of Dick Cheney...so? Motive and mindset are obviously important in some cases but do they really matter a lot in this one?

The lawyers for Alvaraz are apparently not going to argue that he was framed and that a mysterious one-armed man actually parked the Jeep on the tracks and made it look like Alvaraz did it. Their primary defense will be that, okay, you're right...because of what he did, a train was wrecked and people died or were maimed. But he didn't mean to. He thought the train would just hit the SUV, destroy it and him, and then continue its merry way along the track. It will be further claimed that the train striking the Jeep did not cause all those deaths; that they were the result of a chain reaction of events — this hitting that which hit that, etc. — which could not have been anticipated. It will further be asserted that Alvarez was emotionally distraught and not in full possession of his faculties...

...to which I still say, "Huh?"

Apparently, the three months (and they're saying it could be longer) will be to determine if Alvaraz was really trying to kill himself, and there will be witnesses for both sides discussing what he was like as a child and to what extent he'd ever displayed suicidal tendencies. So what we'll have here is the Prosecution arguing he should die because he didn't want to kill himself...and the Defense saying he shouldn't get the Death Penalty because he did want to kill himself.

This is silly. Either way, this man should not be free to walk the streets...maybe not for the rest of his life but certainly not for a long time. I don't see that it matters a lot whether he spends all eternity in prison or if he's executed...and I don't mean just that the difference doesn't matter to society. I mean, it doesn't even seem to matter to him. A lot of my general opposition to the Death Penalty is because I don't believe it's sagely enforced. I think it's applied to a horrifying number of people who are either innocent or just plain did not receive fair trials and might be. That doesn't apply in this case.

This whole story is a great argument for some sort of government-sanctioned program for Assisted Suicide. I think you have a moral right to end your own life...and if things are going so poorly that you're thinking of parking your SUV on the Metrolink tracks, we oughta help you do it in a neater manner. I've written here in the past about a friend of mine who ended his botched-up existence by leaping from the top floor of the tallest hotel in Manhattan. I don't know if his life could have been put back together with professional help but it sure could have been ended in a less destructive (for others) way. He did great damage to total strangers who were there that day and witnessed that horror, to say nothing of what the spectacle did to his friends and family.

Unmentioned in any recent article I've seen on Alvarez is a follow-up on something that was reported at the time of the tragedy. There was some question as to whether the injured and the families of the deceased had any financial recourse. The train company has insurance but the train company did not seem to have been at fault in any way...and Alvarez didn't have the funds to buy a bottle of Bactine, let alone pay for any of the destruction he caused. At last report, some of those injured were trying to recoup on huge hospital bills by suing the train company for not doing a better job of anticipating this kind of thing.

All of this — the deaths, the destruction, the injuries, the medical bills, the millions of dollars in legal fees from the trials, all of it — might have been averted if there was a place this Alvarez guy could have gone and gotten help, either to end his life or to help him save it. There are counselling services out there but they don't offer the option that Alvarez allegedly (if we believe his lawyers) felt he needed. I don't know if he did or he didn't...but if he was determined enough to do what he did, wouldn't it have been better if someone could have shown him a more efficient way to go about it?

• Posted at 9:43 AM · LINK

4 Times the Fun

Every so often, the software that maintains this site hiccups and something that I post once shows up twice or thrice on the page you read. Last night, I posted the previous message once and it somehow wound up on here four times. I deleted three of them but have to note the irony of four copies of a posting about It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

• Posted at 8:38 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

Someone posted the animated opening title sequence for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World to YouTube so I might as well link to it and point out the following.

I first saw this movie (one of my favorites) shortly after it came out...a few days after John F. Kennedy was murdered. My family and I were in the front row — way too close — of the Cinerama Dome Theater on Sunset in Hollywood. If you think Jimmy Durante's nose is frightening in normal viewing, you should have seen it from those seats.

One of the eight million things that fascinated me about this movie came in the titles...at the moment when the "world" blows up and the names of the stars rain down on the screen. Sitting there in the Dome, my eleven-year-old eyes thought they saw other names in there, names other than the performers in the film. I have always read very fast but that evening, I made Evelyn Woods look like...well, fill in your own joke. I definitely spotted other names in there. When I saw the film again a year or two later in a non-Cinerama theater, I again thought I saw the mysterious other names...but of course, in those days, we didn't have VCRs and TiVos and means by which one could slow-mo or freeze frame a movie.

The day I got my first home video copy of It's a Mad4 World — in Beta! — I immediately checked and sure enough, there they were...the name of men who'd animated the title, plus the names of what I guess were friends and family members. Years later, I asked one of them — Bill Melendez — about it. He remembered the staff all inserting their monikers but didn't recall which ones he was responsible for.

Anyway, they're in there if you want to peek for yourself. The cartoon world explodes around 2 minutes and 15 seconds into the clip. Happy hunting.

• Posted at 12:59 AM · LINK