Movie references in Shrek 2
Dy and I took in Shrek 2 last night, and I watched it with a keen eye to catch references to movie classics within this sequel. (I'd read a few pieces about how the movie skewers pop culture, so I tried to watch it with that in mind. I'm sure I missed a lot of the movie references, but here are a few that I caught.From Here to Eternity
The Wizard of Oz
Lord of the Rings
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner
Meet the Parents
Camelot
Peter Pan
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
The Godfather
Zorro
Mission Impossible
The Matrix
Titanic
Ghostbusters
Blazing Saddles
Those are off the top of my head (and I didn't even try to mentally catalog any of the other pop culture references - to music, TV shows, celebrities, etc.). Fellow Shrek fans, did I miss any?
:: Andrew 11:28 + ::
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:: Friday, May 28, 2004 ::
In denial about a weighty problem
I'm not afraid to admit that I'm one of those six in 10 Americans in denial about the extra weight I'm carrying around. At 6'1" and 200 pounds, I'm not what most people would consider obese. And I'm about 25 pounds lighter than I was 5 years ago, right before I was diagnosed with diabetes. (The diagnosis came after I dropped about 30 pounds in a month's time during a bout of the flu and severely blurred vision.) So, becuase I've dropped that excess weight, and I exercise regularly, and I've lowered the amount of bad cholesterol in my system to a near-managable level while maintaining the ideal level of glucose on most days, I usually feel pretty good about my health. But I'm carrying around an extra 20 pounds, and losing it would do me a world of good.
Yet, when people tell me I look fine, that I don't need to "get any skinnier," inwardly I glow with a smug sense of self-satisfaction. I am the captain of my fate, or so I begin to think.
We humans all are little caesars, demigods who could benefit from that whisper in the ear, that constant reminder: Thou art mortal.
:: Andrew 11:16 + ::
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The decline of western values
We live in tumultuous times, but we in the West are barely cognizant of the shifts in values that are occurring on a global scale. (In the USA in particular, we're also clueless about our rapid descent from global hegemony, but that's another topic, though the two are interrelated.) From Australia's The Age comes this wake-up call from UK economist Martin Jacques, who writes of the rise of Asian (both East and South Asian) virtues. I figure that if anyone should know about the decline of Western powers, it should be a London intellectual who has witnessed said decline in his own culture. So, pay Jacques heed when he writes:After the collapse of communism, the victorious US increasingly came to see itself as the saviour of the world, and the arbiter of each and every nation's future. If this proposition was less explicit during the Clinton era, it became the organising principle of the Bush regime.
Where nations were not prepared to bend to the American will, they were classified as "rogue states" and threatened with force. Barely had the world entered the 21st century than it found itself returning to a century earlier and the exercise of naked imperialism - all in the name, as a century earlier, of Western moral virtue.
Such was the shift in the ideological climate that the new imperialism gained a band of adherents from the liberal wing of politics, as it had in the late 19th century. They not only regarded the US as the only game in town; more importantly, they saw it as the embodiment of virtue in a failed or failing world. ...
Already the West has been reminded by growing Iraqi resistance of the forgotten lesson of the anti-colonial period, that people of different races and cultures do not want to be ruled by an alien power from the other side of the world. Meanwhile, the revelations of widespread criminal behaviour by American troops are a poignant illustration of the fact that "Western moral virtue" is only one element of the Western story.
Link via ChristianityToday.com weblog.
:: Andrew 10:02 + ::
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:: Thursday, May 27, 2004 ::
Take your true self to work day
Great thoughts about the compartmentalization of life from Fast Company.
Putting values at the center of our work and our home lives makes for better decisions and better companies. More radical than SEC regulations, integrating our values across work and home cultures is the only way to change fundamentally the rotten cultures that bedevil the business world today.
If we take our whole selves to work, we can transform the culture and sustain ourselves. Think about this the next time you go to the work. When you leave your home or lock and park your car, what are you leaving behind? Take your whole self to work tomorrow and watch what happens.
Nah, don't do it tomorrow. Enjoy the long Memorial Day weekend instead. That's my plan. Try this on Tuesday.
:: Andrew 09:47 + ::
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:: Monday, May 24, 2004 ::
Where have all the protest songs gone?
Remember protest music -- that relic of '60s activism? It's still around, as MSNBC commentator James Sullivan writes in this piece. You just won't hear much of it on the radio -- or see much of it on MTV.
But -- protest music lives on, and punk prophetess Patti Smith is one of the leaders. Sullivan writes:On her new album, “Trampin’,” the rock poet Patti Smith leads her veteran band through a squalling diatribe against the war in Iraq. The devastated Iraqi capital, she laments on “Radio Baghdad,” was once the cradle of civilization, the world center of scholarship.
"We created the zero, and we mean nothing to you!" Smith thunders, putting herself in the historic shoes of her own country's latest mortal enemy.
You won't hear this song on commercial radio anytime soon, and not simply because it’s a 12-minute noise mantra. War in Iraq and other policies of the current presidential administration are effectively off-limits on the popular airwaves.
It's perhaps not surprising that one of the top songs in America right now is called "I Don’t Wanna Know." Despite mounting evidence that the war is dividing the nation, our pop music -- at least on the surface -- seems oblivious. We're clearly living in a much different social climate than the era that made No. 1 songs of Edwin Starr's "War" and Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction."
But all hope is not lost. Sullivan notes that "there is little indication that artists are actually shying away from the headlines and the hard subjects."
"If the vast majority of commercial hip hop is caught up 'In Da Club' and 'Tipsy,'" he writes, "there is an entire brooding underground making modern protest music. Public Enemy, members of Oakland radicals the Coup and an ad hoc turntable collective calling itself the DJs of Mass Destruction are among the acts featured on the new protest compilation 'War (If It Feels Good, Do It!).' And the Beastie Boys' long-awaited new album is said to contain some pointed criticisms of the Bush administration.
"Punk, too, is reconnecting with its traditional voice of dissent. The long-running Southern California band Bad Religion sounds revitalized on its forthcoming album, 'The Empire Strikes First,' which features bitter rants such as 'Let Them Eat War.'"
Link via Rock Rebel.
:: Andrew 07:28 + ::
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Viva punk
Thank you, Larry Clark, for making a movie that will show the world Latinos who like punk.
Clark is planning a new flick, Wassup Rockers, that "is based on a real group of Hispanic teens in LA's South Central district, who reject the predominant hip-hop culture of their area for punk rock, skateboards and clothes less than four sizes too big for them."
:: Andrew 12:33 + ::
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Technorati: 2.4 million blogs and counting
Blog-tracker Technorati began on Thanksgiving 2002 and now monitors some 2.4 million. It ain't as tough as it sounds, apparently, as nearly 45 percent haven't been updated in three months. So that's a mere more than 1.2 million. (Or something like that. You can do the math yourself if you want more precise figures.) Anyway, I figure that if nearly half the people who create blogs can leave them untouched for 3 months at a time, it's okay for me to step away from this beast for three or four days at a time.
I like Technorati. It makes for good ego-surfing on a scale more limited than Google. One of the features I like best about Technorati is its booktalk, which tracks the books bloggers are discussing at the moment. For news junkies, the site also tracks discussions about breaking news and current events. Now, if Technorati would only add a feature for music discussions, I would be close to ecstatic.
:: Andrew 12:18 + ::
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Protest and invest
Worthwhile reading on the subject of economic justice, from Rudy Carrasco. He writes that those who rail against the injustices of capitalism too often are ill-equipped to help lift people out of poverty. It's refreshing to read essays on the evils of poverty from one who has been there.
:: Andrew 11:59 + ::
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Simon Dawes, 
