As Seen On TV

[josephkahn]

Why Trump

The Republicans produced a stupid, unqualified man for President. Meanwhile the Democrats produced a competent, experienced candidate with a moderately progressive agenda. However the Left rejected this candidate, seeking someone more aggressively liberal and threw votes away in protest. 

Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders 2016?

No.

George W. Bush, Al Gore, Ralph Nader 2000.

The Right didn’t get Trump elected. The Left did, because the Left has no memory. The Russians simply fed into a playbook already written years ago: split the extreme Left from the moderate Left.

It doesn’t matter if the Middle votes for Democrats. There’s always enough knuckleheads on the Left to vote for the Ralph Naders and Jill Steins to lose everything. What the Russians know is that the Democratic Party doesn’t actually exist. 

It’s just a constiuency of people who aren’t Republicans. 

Theoretically this means they’re just people who don’t believe Hillary Clinton is running a child pornography ring out of a pizza parlor basement funded by George Soros and his Jewish conspiracy to destroy the world with the secret Muslim Anti-Christ Obama.

The problem is a small but significant part of these Non Republicans are made up of weed smoking, paranoid, communist dickheads with no clue how the world works. They aren’t actually Democrats, but Illuminati believing, ISIS apologizing, 9th trimester aborting pseudo Libertarians with Bernie Bros names like Tristan, Logan, or Pat Rainwater. All you have to do is give them a flute playing yoga instructor candidate who wants to pay repriations to their past life Eskimo ancestor and they jump ship from the Democratic candidate, inevitably getting another Republican elected.

Any mainstream candidate the Democrats produce will simply be too moderate for these fruitflies of Democracy. They are simply here to reproduce bad ideas and immediately die. They will go to their graves never comprehending that their protest votes got Trump elected, and that no one gives a shit about their google history or facebook privacy settings.

Anyway, a fucking Kardashian will be President one day.

[josephkahn]

THE RESISTANCE

THE RESISTANCE How to take down Donald Trump.

Donald Trump, the racist misogynist demagogue denounced by all former Presidents but enthusiastically endorsed by the KKK, is going to be the President of the United States. His collective of 500 buiness entities, The Trump Organization, is valued anywhere from $3-$10 billion. The Trump Organization is being put into a blind trust. As President, it is a conflict of interest with political and legal ramifications for Trump to manipulate the trust through the entire length of his term.

That’s 4 years to destroy the Trump Organization while Trump is incapable of doing anything about it.

In that time, you could hit all his businesses and we’ll bankrupt him (again). And there’s nothing he can do. He said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and still get elected, but now he’s no longer dealing with voters but the law. As he has successfully gamed the system, we can in return game him. If he improperly runs his business while President, his lost-the-popular-voters can’t help him. He’ll be impeached and jailed.

Here’s a thought experiment. A five point plan to bring Trump down. This is essentially a hack into the fundamental weakness of Donald Trump as President and break his dangerous con - he has a business to run that conflicts with running America.

1)  PROTEST ALL HIS PROPERTIES

Right now in New York, the block around Trump Tower  headquarters has been barricaded as protestors disrupt the area. That’s bad for business inside the tower. Residents are inconvenienced, businesses within it can’t operate normally. Protest there for 4 years and force businesses and residents to leave. Others may replace it but at much lower rates.

He has properties ranging from towers to golf courses all around the world. Protest at everyone of these properties. Make the name Trump synonymous with PROTEST. Rich people will prefer quiter properties for their vacations and meetings. Investing partners will distance themselves from the toxic baggage of his name.

Keep the protests going for his entire term. Fund these protests. Kickstart them. Whatever it takes. Be relentless. Kill his profits.

2) DESTROY HIS BRAND

The core of Trump’s business is his name. He doesn’t even own many of the properties with his name on it, often just licensing his name for millions. Make his brand worthless.

Let’s be clear about this, everything I am saying should be legal. So hotel critics legally write a legitimate review of how terrible his hotels are, which they are. Wine critics legally write about how terrible and cheap tasting his wine is. Customers legally buy his ties but return them online after you test them because they’re horrible and legally make them pay for shipping. Let’s reveal how horrible this name is to the licensees and distributors and then boycott these crappy products, so that no new licensees would dare take him on.

Meanwhile anywhere Trump moves organize a protest. Literally anything he does, protest. The name Trump should be associated with protest. While a President may survive 4 years of protests, a business brand cannot.
 

3) BOYCOTT BUSINESSES THAT SUPPORT TRUMP

New Balance shoes issued a statement 6 hours after Trump was elected praising him and shading Obama. Boycott them and any company that supports him. His supporters will promise to buy any product that we boycott, but we hold the advantage. They have to spend money, we don’t have to do anything. And he’ll only gain a small fraction of alt-right Republicans inside America while the rest of the world joins us. And the more companies we ban, it will be basically a ponzi scheme for his supporters that doesn’t pay them back. New Balance and Home Depot are a good start.

Total destruction of the economic ecosystem that feeds him.

4) FLOP IVANKA

She’s gotten a pass. No more. She is not a friend of women or minorities, otherwise she would have denounced her racist, pussy grabbing father with 20 current sexual assault lawsuits. She was used as a humanizing tool in the Trump campaign to soften his image, and she was complicit in this deception. Every argument how someone could vote for a racist misogynist xenophobe without being one themselves applies to her. She knows how insane her father is and chose to get him into the White House instead of psychiatric counseling. She didn’t sit by, she actively campaigned in the ugliest Mexicans-are-rapists campaign ever. 

Shut the backdoor entrance to normalizing this family. They’re Trumps. They’re all rotten. Boycott all her products. Spray it with Raid. Complete the absolute and final extermination of brand Trump.

5) INVESTIGATE

This is where it all pays off. Journalists, DO YOUR JOB. Even without this theoretical riff, get those tax returns, report his lies, report his shady ties with Russia, and we wouldn’t need 1-4 anyway. But we’re here, so as his empire gets squeezed and create losses, they’ll need capital. They’ll need financing from foreign banks, and this is where the conflict intrinsic to the Presidency will come in. There will be no more scrutinized business on earth than The Trump Organization over the next 4 years. Every influx of capital to cover his losses is open to investigation, lawsuits, and blocks from the Justice Department. We’re shaking his rotten sandbox and his hands will be tied as his Trump Organization gets exposed. As we disrupt it into major losses and the brand goes to shit, Trump will be faced with a real question - does he want to be President, or billionaire?

4 years or less and he’s out.

[josephkahn]

Lovely

I see lots of posts about “unity” and “healing” and “moving past the election.”

And then everyone does a virtual group hug and pretends they are mutually practicing “hope.”

This is not hope.

This is delusion.

This is reality: a government made of right wing racists. A disavowed fringe alt-right candidate denounced by Republicans like John McCain and Mitt Romeny but endorsed by the KKK, which Trump has courted. Women are facing a literal rollback of 44 YEARS of progress as Roe V Wade is overturned and Planned Parenthood defunded. Hispanics, Blacks, Muslims, Gays all in fear. And for the young who will feel it way after these Republicans die of old age, every environmental protection program is going to be wiped off the American landscape.

The tenor of Trump’s campaign was immoral. Bullying. Lying. Evil. Mexicans are rapists and murderers. Nasty women who should go to jail for abortion. Ban all Muslims. Lock her up. Mocking disabled. Encouraging his rallies to beat people up. While Republicans waged a smear campaign comparing Obama to Hitler, this REALLY feels like a fascist state of hatemongers and racebaiters. Hate crimes are spiking.

What you call unity, the rest of us call normalizing hate. What you mean by healing, the rest of us call forgetting. What you mean by moving on, the rest of us call, well, moving on. And we’re not moving on. We’re going to fight this charlaton every day. His presidency will not be legitimized. He is not giving basic humanity to all the people he attacked, and in return we are not giving him the supplication he craves.

We’re taking a stand while you’re sitting down.

So yes, congratulations on being a lovely person writing a lovely post about unity and hope. But that applause you hear in your bubble is called the wrong side of history.

[josephkahn]

Soda

Tonight in Houston, at three o’clock in the morning, I pulled my rented Prius over to a gas station to buy a soft drink. I waited outside while the clerk retrieved it. A voice shouted at me from across the street.

“Do you have a dollar?”

It was a homeless woman in the distance. I couldn’t make her out. Just a figure.

“I only have a dollar,” she pleaded, her African American voice eching across the gas pumps.

A couple things crossed my mind:

1. I wish the clerk would hurry because I didn’t feel safe, but he was taking his time. A 24 hour surveillance sign caught my attention. Houston at one point was the murder capital of America.

2. How one person could work in a gas station while another ended up begging…what was the fine line between employment and unemployment?

The clerk slid my drink and my change through the bulletproof glass. He seemed a little distracted, maybe because I was a customer being harassed by a homeless person. And maybe I was about to get stabbed? Or robbed? Or-

“Do you have a dollar?” the woman shouted again, a little more urgently, seeing that I was getting money back. I had seven dollars an ninety-six cents in change.

“Hold on,” I shouted back. “I’m coming to you. Don’t cross the street.”

This is Texas. Drunk drivers.

I drove my Prius and rolled my window down to give her $7.96, and instead of a black woman, it was a twenty-something blond white girl in pajamas and a cardboard begging sign.

(On a side note, was I being racist? Maybe. But in my defense, I was in a black neighborhood, she sounded black, the clerk was black, and I had seen black homeless people standing there earlier. But nevertheless-)

“Oh my god you’re so young,” I blurted out, quickly handing her the money.

She smiled and said in her thick southern black but coming from a white girl accent, “I’m just waiting for my man to get off work. He’s over there.”

My brain short circuited: Her man was the clerk in the gas station who sold me the drink. She waits outside knowing customers are getting change? Is this how people survive in the jungle? Wha...

She continued: “If I can just get twenty-five dollars I’d just go home, get some weed, and go to sleep.”

Cars whipped past us.

I didn’t have anymore money. I said: “You please be safe.”

As I drove away, she smiled again: “If I had a twin sister, I’d give her to you.”

I don’t understand anything at all.

[josephkahn]

Bad Boys 2 Who The Fuck is Reggie? [HD] (HD Video)

Just a remake of my old video... HD added and shit yeah boy it's the best part in the whole damn movie😂 hope you guys enjoy the video if so drop a comment, l...

Technically, this scene is filmed incorrectly. Martin Lawrence’s eyeline is left to right and when we cut to Reggie, he is also looking left to right. And when Will Smith looks right to left at Reggie, Reggie looks right to left for his reaction to Will. Theoretically the audience should be confused thinking Reggie is looking at Martin. But there is no confusion. The scene works perfectly. The weighted frame in conjunction with rapid editing and immersion in the characters bypasses the 180 degree rule. Basically, eyelines are for amateurs and Michael Bay is the new Yasujiro Ozu.

[josephkahn]

AWM

Whenever a terrorist act happens, you, Awesome White Male, are the first one to point out that it is not one particular religion at fault because you are totally not racist and you are a genius who has figured out all of the world's problems can be fixed through the anti-hate philosophy you just invented: Love™. There is nothing to fear about dark people or their religions unlike what all the other white males think, because you are so very different and better than other white males. You are here to inform us all the terrorism and killing in the world is just a mind game played by ISIS to scare other weaker white men, unlike you who would never take the actions of non white males as genuinely evil because you are just not racist and incapable judging anyone by their skin color. Like Jesus, the other white guy who is almost as cool as you, you are enlightened and you need your powerful voice to be heard to protect the helpless, infantilized non caucasians who are incapable of making rational decisions based on self reliance or responsibility. We non white people need your powerful white male voice on the side of good to shelter ourselves from your god given ability to victimize us at will, and we are thankful that you benevolently acknowledge and relinquish your white privilege otherwise for, as non white males, all of us would be exterminated. What would we ever do without you, totally not racist white male who is so much better than all our other white friends on Facebook.

[josephkahn]

Generation Xed

As a Gen-Xer you basically lived under one giant demographic of ex-liberal, post-politically correct hippies who now swing to the right - the Baby Boomers. Now you watch the Boomers clash with the giant demographic of the overly liberal, politically correct social justice warriors - the Millennials, aka their kids. And you can pretty much see that when the Millennials get older they’ll do exactly what their parents did and swing to the right as well, and then Millennials will start clashing with THEIR OWN kids, who will probably accuse each other of microaggressions on Mars. Basically, the purpose of Generation X is to invent Google and die.

[josephkahn]

This is Rocco my uber driver. His car is old. It is missing a hubcap. It is hot and his AC doesn't work. His dash has a cd player slot. I think he's Transylvanian. When he makes breakfast he pulls the eggs out of the chickens vagina first. He thinks Siri is very polite but talks too much for a woman. He would still have sex with her if he could get her out of the magic box. He cannot. His family was cursed by gypsies in 1974 but the gypsies drowned washing their clothes in a swimming pool so only the youngest child was born deformed. He named her Bjorn.

[josephkahn]

Ads to Movies

Studying great ad directors (not video directors) that went on to make boring movies. The transition fails when they don't know how to shoot and block extended dialogue sequences. Commercials train you think in sequential montages utilizing time compression but a two minute sequence of talking heads is the soul of movies. If they have no narrative control (subjective/objective) in these critical blocks then all their technique becomes intermittent and everything unravels, especially pacing and tone control.

[josephkahn]

Kanye

KANYE: I hate white people.

WHITE PEOPLE: Kanye is so deep.

KANYE: Holy shit white people are annoying.

WHITE PEOPLE: I love Kanye's metaphors.

KANYE: This isn't a metaphor. You suck.

WHITE PEOPLE: 

KANYE: The fuck was that patronizing tweet?????

WHITE PEOPLE: 

KANYE: Why did you write "get" instead of the grammatically correct "gets." Did the O'Brien clan suddenly become masters of Ebonics?

WHITE PEOPLE: Kanye, so misunderstood. He lives on a different planet.

KANYE: I live on earth. 

WHITE PEOPLE: Kanye is a good black friend of mine. Look how we're chilling at a b-ball game. #FriendsForLife

KANYE: I just know that the Grammys, if they want real artists to keep coming back, they need to stop playing with us. We ain't gonna play with them no more. And Beck needs to respect artistry and he should've given his award to Beyoncé.

WHITE PEOPLE: You can't please everybody. I still love him and think he's genius. I aspire to what he does. How many great records has he put out in the last five years, right?

[josephkahn]

I Solved The Serial Podcast

People say it comes down to whether you believe Adnan or Jay and which one is lying.

They’re both lying.

Here’s how I think it went down, based on the established timeline.

Around Christmas 1998, Hae breaks up with Adnan. A week later on January 1 she starts to date her new boyfriend Don.  On January 11, Adnan buys a new cell phone and the next day, January 12, he calls Hae three times. Why did he call her? I bet he was raging against her dating Don, which he probably just found out. His possessive behaviour is established in a letter Hae wrote him in 1998:

“I’m really getting annoyed that this situation is going the way it is ... you know, people break up all the time. Your life is not going to end. You’ll move on and I’ll move on. But apparently you don’t respect me enough to accept my decision.”

He showed this letter to his friend Aisha, by the way, and wrote to her in class “I'M GOING TO KILL.”

Why the fuck do people ignore this shit? That’s called motive, proof of motive, and fucking scary ass writing saying Adnan’s going to MURDER HER.

Anyway, Hae goes and sees Don that night. The very next day she is murdered.

This is what happened:

Adnan went to Jay to get his help murdering Hae. Who is Jay? His drug dealer. Adnan was basically asking a criminal if he knows another criminal who does another type of crime - murder. And in this case, Jay volunteered himself. And this is the thing I haven’t read anywhere but I think is obvious: not only did Jay help Adnan hide the body, Jay was ACTUALLY THERE during the murder.

Afterwards, Jay, as most dumb young criminals do, told a few people Adnan killed Hae and he helped hide the body. One of the people he told anonymously went to the cops and they questioned him. He then admitted he hid the body, pointed out where the car was, editing the story he told them to extricate himself from the murder. 

THIS is when his story gets convoluted turning it into Adnan contacting him randomly out of the blue to hide Hae’s body. He keeps switching the details of when Adnan revealed he was going to kill her (that day? 4 days prior?) because he was improvising how to present a timeline that pointed away from his premeditated involvement. Ultimately he wanted it to look like Adnan just ambushed him with a murder after the fact. The biggest problem I have with Jay’s version of events is why he would ever bother helping Adnan hide a body when they weren’t friends, and why would Adnan even bother to call his drug dealer to help him. In what universe do you call your drug dealer to help you out of the kindness of his heart? Why the fuck does a drug dealer do anything?

Money. Duh.

Meanwhile, Adnan has claimed he can’t remember the day of January 13 when his girlfriend got murdered. Yet he was seen hanging with Jay in his car all day after the hours of the murder, going from house to house, acting strangely. Cell phone records later show he’s in the park that Hae was buried in at the time she was buried. Cops call Adnan questioning him about Hae’s whereabouts. Afterwards, Adnan constantly calls numerous people with his new cell phone, NONE OF THEM HAE. Because the cops don’t know this yet, but Adnan knows she’s dead, so why call her, like he did just the night before three times. He also claims his cell phone was stolen for a couple hours and someone butt dialed a number that implicated him in a location other than school. Seriously why are people even listening to this asshole?

So here’s the problem for Adnan: his accomplice Jay says Adnan murdered Hae, but Jay was nowhere near the murder when it happened. What exactly can Adnan say? He can’t call Jay out and say that he was there at the crime as that would make Adnan admit he killed her. Yet he was clearly hanging with Jay the entire day of the murder. So Adnan’s stuck. His only tactic is to claim he has a faulty memory with no idea what he did, and hope some gullible NPR reporter misreads every piece of evidence and insinuate Jay killed Hae, not Adnan.

They both killed Hae.

Serial podcast is stupid.

[josephkahn]

Same Same

Sitting in post finishing ads for the last two days. Went through tons of music videos, ads, short films, movies. The editorial rhythm and logic of almost all media today are the same. Regardless of camera/lighting aesthetics or editorial speed, the way they invoke cinematic ideas are based on the same principles. It's like watching people do math but only use addition or subtraction (edits). They may increase or decrease the numbers (photography/art direction) but the formula only solves simple problems. It's a glitch of transferring still photography aesthetic which works two dimensional space. Traditional graphic design tries to produce temporal rhythm by the "speed" of a weighted composition, so most editing styles today are just contrast/symmetry splices. Maybe that's why everyone has a hard on for Kubrick today. If filmmaking was singing, everyone may sing different songs, but everyone sings in the same pitch. Anyway, the big takeaway these last two days: the shittier your music, the more abstract your music video.

[josephkahn]

COMPOSITION

It’s weird people assume compositional ideas work without an actual evolutionary reason for them. The rule of thirds says the intersections in the lines create “power points” for composition but what does this mean and why does it work? I honestly don’t even know if the rule of thirds really exists - like someone was playing tic tac toe and made it up - but I have two theories on this, none of it scientifically backed up. I am not a professional eye scientist. I don’t even know what eye scientists are called.

1.  Human beings have eyes at the front of our heads because we are predators. Animals that have eyes at the sides are prey - like deer or Beliebers. They have no binocular vision, trading that for a wider view to track anything that will eat them. They do have depth cues but it’s based on things that only one eye will catch: motion, lighting, defocus, JJ Abrams lens flares. Meanwhile, since we awesome predator animals look forward with two eyes, we use parallaxing to triangulate depth. So on a basic level, those “power points” are just quick guidelines to create separation points that can be composed for parallax tension. But there’s also another thing that predator animals have that prey animals do not: we use the flexing of extraocular muscles to feel distance in our eyes through convergence. So shifting points off the center and forcing our eyes to move and converge magnifies this sensation because we are literally flexing eye muscles that make us feel depth.

2. We spend a lot of time as humans looking for each other’s eyes. I think it may be the most dominant thing we do as social predators - look for eyes. We expect to see two dots staring back at us, spaced at a certain distance, so we see this in inanimate objects as a survival mechanism. Everything we call “balance” in composition is an anthropomorphic reaction to our need to feel two sides to complete both eyes. The closer to the center the more rigid and obviously less human it is - like a tree, a pole, or Lady Gaga. But the further to the sides an object is, the more clearly we are going to have to make a decision - does it have another side…and as a whole are they eyes? Are you looking at me? Are you Robert De Niro? I wish you were, because Robert De Niro is the shit. Anyway, those “power points” in the pic above look like two sets of eyes to me. There’s two eyes on top, then there are two eyes on the bottom. Obviously the guy on top is fucking the guy on the bottom, and the guy on the bottom is bored. Maybe a little sad. I feel bad for him. He should respect himself more and not try to lose his problems with mindless sex.

[josephkahn]

LONE SURVIVOR

Taylor Kitsch tells his team there are only three options in dealing with the three goat herders that compromised their position on the hill:

1. Kill them and hike back in safety to get picked up by a helicopter. The negative is dead goat herders would used by the Taliban as propaganda against the American military.

2. Tie them up and head for the helicopter, leaving the three herders to possibly die by being eaten by wolves, once again giving the Taliban a nice PR moment.

3. Release them and race back to try to get to a helicopter before the goat herders tell the Taliban they just saw Marky Mark and the Battleship guy on a mountain.

But here’s the question: why are there only three options?

Being the coward and atheist that I am, I propose another option:

Shoot those goat herders. Strip off their pants. Arrange the corpses like this: the old goat herder is fucking the teenage one, choking him in death. The youngest one has the gun in his hand a few feet away, tragically killed his elders at having seen this horrible affront to God, then offed himself in depression. Then I would run the fuck out out of there as fast as possible to my helicopter to watch Anchorman. The Taliban can decide if they want to broadcast some child molesting murder/suicide by some goat herders.

The other option is to just take them prisoner and go to the helicopter. 

But what do I know.

[josephkahn]

A little game I play in my head is to track other filmmaker's processes to find the underpinnings of their technique. Everyone decent filmmaker has a methodology that becomes the engine of how their thoughts eventually translate into technique. Some consciously, some not. HER made me realize the core of all of Spike Jonze's best work are transposition metaphors. Replacing a part of reality with a surreal visual substitute. In his 90's music videos it mostly manifested as social swapping.

Beastie Boys as 70's cop show : white rappers in the edges of acceptable misfit pop culture.

Fatboy Slim "Praise You" dance troupe in movie theater line : dance music liberating suburban middle class conformism.

Fatboy Slim "Weapon of Choice" Dancing Christopher Walken: music's power to elevate mood demonstrated by lightening a dark persona.

The transposition is the same process his commercials work with. I think his Ikea ad's anthropomorphism of the lamp is self explanatory.

However, I'm actually not a fan of Jonze's other movies, especially the Charlie Kaufman ones. The surrealism feels too overt to me and the jokes never are that funny because the punchlines feel like they need to be applauded rather than laughed at. All of MALKOVICH feels this way to me. I can't laugh at Malkovich in a dress regardless if he's been head replaced because I haven't laughed at a man in a dress since Tom Hanks in Bosom Buddies. ADAPTATION I need to take another look at to be honest, I barely remember it (I was bored, fuck you, that's still a legit critique). And WILD THINGS feels studio muddled.

But HER really clicked for me. This one worked for me when the other movies didn't for many reasons (photography, performances, plot, emotions), but mainly due to a huge tonal shift. Surrealism in long form movies can get bogged down in exposition and justification of it's conceits...unless fantasy is passed off as science fiction. Science fiction is a natural movie genre fit for Spike Jonze's transposition in that it makes implausible things plausible. Warp drive and energizing and is bullshit, but because Star Trek is labelled science fiction, the magic is masked in the veneer of technology and the audience doesn't question it. The more science fiction spends time establishing the rules of an advanced environmental reality, especially through pure physical production design (seeing is believing), the more it can raise the stakes as to what is acceptable as plausible. In the case of HER, the science fiction genre easily allows us to believe in an artificial intelligence you can fall ironically in love with. The buildings and mechanics of the world do all the exposition so Jonze can get past making the movie about the process of transposition, and make the movie about a relationship that outgrows you.