Try and beat me.  I dare you.
(that’s my attempt at goading…did it work?)

The film currently has a 96% on Rotten Tomatoes (Top Critics), and an 81 on MetaCritic (also known as “Universal Acclaim”!).  Compare that to the other Vampire film out this weekend, which only has a 54%/56.  I’m just saying, if you only have time to watch one Vampire flick, I think the choice is obvious.

I hope you don’t mind me e-mailing.  I was given your address by some friends of mine.  You might remember them — they ran their businesses so poorly and unethically that they nearly bankrupt the entire financial sector of the American Economy.  Thank God you stepped in at the last minute, or they might have actually had to suffer for their incompetence.

That’s actually why I’m writing you today.  You see, I’m an auto-maker.  For the last several years, we’ve been making products that nobody actually wanted.  Rather than re-tool our business model (I mean, that’s hard!), we just kept pouring more and more money into a failing idea.  It sounded like a good idea at the time.

Well…as you can probably imagine, things are really tight at the moment.

If you could spare, oh I don’t know, a couple-hundred billion, that would be most excellent.

I gotta say, it’s way cool that you guys are so willing to help out businesses suffering through self-inflicted pain.  It really takes the pressure off.

I mean, as long as we employ a whole shit-load of people, we’re pretty much immune to failure!  That really warms the cockles.  One might even say it finally renders those old ideas of “success” and “innovation” or, you know, “business intelligence” obsolete.  Frankly, it’s about time!

So, yeah.  Thanks in advance!!

Sincerely,

The Auto Industry

I think I might be a conservative.

I know, right?  This is crazy!  I’ve always thought of myself as nearly as “liberal” as Bill Maher or Michael Moore.

But then I started listing all the things I am passionate about: equal marriage rights for homosexuals, racial equality, the right to reproductive choice, freedom of religion, legalization of marijuana, separation of church from state, freedom of speech, the right to assisted suicide and a free press.

In other words, I want the government to get off my lawn:  I think the government should stay out of people’s lives.

Which really makes me, in the traditional sense, a conservative.

And yet, I donated to, evangelized and voted for Barack Obama.

So, what the hell happened to Republicans?

As soon as the graphic declaring Barack Obama the 44th President of the United States appeared on the screen, I heard screams of joy echoing through the courtyard of our apartment building. One of them was mine.

I am in shock. And it feels wonderful!

As my wife just said, “we now live in a different country.”

I just…there are no words. It is a live-stream of sleeping puppies.

Sometimes it’s nice to remember that such wonderfulness, such perfect innocence, still exists.

PUPPIES!

Seriously, though. Vote. I think it’s clear who I support, but as long as you TRULY CARE — and care passionately — about your choice, and why they’re the best choice, I don’t care who you vote for.

Just do it.

“Don’t be a douche.”

Bill Maher: Nobody likes taxes. But at some point we have to pay our taxes, and pay this debt off. Otherwise our dollar becomes a doily. Isn’t that true? Joe Biden said in an interview recently that it’s patriotic to pay taxes and Sarah Palin said, “No, it’s not!” Now, who is the real patriot, to get back to “who are the ‘real Americans’.”

Stephen Moore: Let me ask you this: do you think the people who dumped the tea in the Boston Harbor were unpatriotic? Our nation was founded on the basis of a tax revolt. This is supposed to be the country with the lowest taxes, not the highest. The American nation was founded because American’s hate paying taxes!

Stop.

Are you fucking kidding me, Mr. Moore?

The American nation was not founded because “American’s hate paying taxes,” it was founded because the citizens at the time hated paying taxes without representation!

There is an enormous, fundamental difference between the two. If you can’t see what that difference is, someone really needs to smack you over the head with a large wooden object. Or maybe just your own book.

There are no words to express how utterly enraged this topic makes me. Believe me — and you can ask my wife — I’ve tried every epithet in the book, none of them do the trick.

Regardless if you’re a small-government conservative (these people used to be called “Republicans”) or a large-government liberal, the fact is that we all want — we all need — a government. How intrusive or large that government is is the debate topic. But again, no matter which way you lean, safety and stability are two things you want our government to offer. The ways in which they are achieved are debatable, but the end result is the same for left and right.

And yet there are some people out there — Palin, McCain — who think that all taxes are bad, and even worse, that it’s apparently unpatriotic to want to pay taxes.

Yet, without taxes, there can be no government at all. There can be no America. There can be no safety or stability. Without taxes, we would just be tribes wandering around wondering where we can plug in our Nintendo Wii’s (because, you know, without taxes there would be no power).

But beyond that, taxes are our fee, essentially, to BE AMERICAN. We pay taxes so that we can live under the protection of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. We pay taxes so that we can have REPRESENTATION in our government. We pay taxes so that AMERICA can exist, both as a physical idea and a symbolic ideal.

If you don’t pay taxes (or, more precisely, if you can afford to pay them but duck your responsibility), you don’t deserve this country.

And even beyond that is this pervasive, disgusting idea that somehow we should get all the benefits of a well-run government and a strong military — the benefits or safety and stability — for NOTHING.

This is the exact same method of thinking that is the root cause of our economic collapse. The homeowners who thought they could make a fortune investing in real-estate (which is a stupid idea to begin with; but that’s another post) and got into loans they couldn’t repay. The banks who wanted to make a fortune in interest from those loans relaxed their lending standards. The traders who figured out how to trade debt, to make a fortune from misfortune.

All those people wanted something for nothing. And the result of their impetuous, idiotic greed? The country is now $9 billion dollars poorer than it was one year and month ago.

I’m not going to say that I want to pay taxes. I’d love it if we didn’t have to send 20% our our earnings to the IRS, but I’m not going to stop paying them or claim that paying them is unpatriotic. Or conflate historical facts for my own twisted logic. I’m going to continue to do my duty as a citizen in the hopes that my country can grow and become better.

I’m going to pay taxes because I am a patriot. I believe in this country, and I want to do my part.

The best way I can think to describe “Let The Right One In” is as two films. First and foremost, it is one of the most emotionally satisfying coming-of-age stories I have ever seen - on par with “Almost Famous“, “Igby Goes Down“, “Cinema Paradiso” and “Rushmore“. And secondly, it sets a new gold-standard for the Vampire Film.

It doesn’t have as many “jump scares” as the trailer suggests, but instead reaches much deeper and paints a complex and textured picture of isolation, loneliness and despair. It is a quiet movie, but a powerful one. On the one hand, I must confess the advertising campaign has me a bit trepidatious - I would hate people to see it thinking it’s just another vamp flick; but on the other, I am so incredibly pleased that the film has US distribution! The fact that the distributor, Magnet Releasing (the genre arm of Magnolia Pictures, is actually spending quite a bit of money to get the film out there is reinvigorating my hope for cinema in America.

So go! And take your friends. And then, see it again.

I won’t mince words here. I’m just going to come out and say it. “Let The Right One In” is a near-perfect film. One of the best I have ever seen.

It opens in NY and LA on October 24th and hits Seattle on November 14th.