Captain Marvel Spoilers Ahoy!
I'm sure everyone remembers Bright (ha ha), but for those of you who have forgotten it was the Shadowrun-knockoff movie set in an alternate Earth where fantasy creatures like Orcs and Elves exist and live alongside humanity. The movie tried to make a point about race relations by making Orcs analogous to African-Americans. Orcs were at the bottom of the social hierarchy not due to the content of their characters, but the size of their cuspids.
Orcs are hated because in the war that ended the last age, they fought alongside the enemy of all the other races. They're physically different and have a genetic disposition towards physical prowess over mental acuity. Unfortunately, despite the best intentions of the filmmakers, they forget that analogies work both ways: by displaying Orcs as this world's African-Americans, they imply that the two groups share any traits that aren't explicitly differentiated.
This is problematic because 1) genetically, skin color (the only phenotypical expression definitively associated with race) is what we like to call polygenic. It is not controlled by a single allele on a single chromosome, but spread over several chromosomes. This means that skin color is randomly distributed on almost all genes: Anglos, traditionally white, are closer genetically to North Africans than they are to Swedes. 2) there is nothing in Black history to justify either the slave trade or the racist systems that have perpetuated since its abolishment.
While trying to help in a worthy cause, Ayer and Landis inadvertently give fuel to racists. In their response to this sort of media, they can say "Look, even Social Justice Warriors acknowledge that Black people are genetically different! We're saying the same thing!"
Wait a minute, why was there a warning for Captain Marvel at the top of this post?
The Skrull are obviously meant to represent refugees, either from the ongoing Syrian Civil War or from Central and South America. The movie makes several comments to this effect, and the end of the movie is Captain Marvel rescuing a ship filled with women and children who simply want to be left alone by the Kree, who require them to stay within the Empire and assimilate (a nod to real world comments by anti-immigrant activists.
Here's the problem, though: because Hollywood loves itself a twist villain, the Skrull have to look like bad guys for the first half of the movie. That means they have to pose a military threat (even if it turns out to be overblown), perform actions that seem menacing (and often don't make sense when you re-watch knowing they're good guys), and have lots of fighting age males around while they're the bad guys (so we don't feel as bad about the hero killing them).
The Skrull who take Captain Marvel hostage at the beginning of the movie are a military cell actively resisting the Kree empire. They have weapons, a ship, and tactical training: they even manage to defeat Kree Team Six. The message of the movie becomes "Look, these people are fighting for peace. If you give them a chance, we can get along."
Real refugees aren't freedom fighters. The vast majority are women and children (52% are under 18 and 27% are adult women, so about 79%), and they're fleeing violence, not participants in it. The ability to fight and survive can actually disqualify you for refugee status. Likewise, asylum seekers and refugees are not fighting the United States (the stand in for the Kree in this analogy) or even acting criminally: it is the United States government that is violating its own laws and ignoring treaties it has signed when it turns away refugees and asylum seekers.
I'm not one to say that art shouldn't try to cover difficult subjects (and Marvel movies aren't anathema to art, even if they are mostly product), but there are better and more impactful ways to discuss ideas about human rights, dignity, and the horrors of war than sloppy analogies. These analogies mean well, but when done sloppily and without nuance, they can actually be used as evidence against the very points we're trying to make.
Tuesday, March 12, 2019
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Black Panther is Good
I feel the need both to start with this and to make it the title of this post, so hopefully no one misinterprets me. Black Panther is good. Great, even. But is it one of the best films of all time? Is it really comparable to films like Casablanca, La Grande Illusion, Alien, or Jaws? These movies are not perfect (though fans will make their case for each), but these are movies that have remained in the film canon for decades. Does Black Panther have that sort of staying power?
Although a lesser issue, I want to start with the CGI. I'm not one of those "practical is always superior" pedants (see Phantom Menace Yoda for why), but nothing ages a movie more than bad digital effects. The Lord of the Rings films stand out to me: the Battle of the Pelennor Fields is a bigger hindrance to Return of the King than a help, mostly because the goofy looking digital oliphaunts and cartoon Legolas. Black Panther will not age well: some its effects already looked dated in the theater (I'm looking at you, dancing waterfall crowd!). With how much time is dedicated to action scenes in this film, this may by itself be a ticking timebomb for the movie's lastability.
The CGI is not the beginning nor the end of the problems the two major action scenes (South Korea and the Wakandan Civil War-spoilers BTW) in this movie create. The South Korean chase scene really hurts what otherwise is a very consistent set of villains tonally: Klaue's been off the Wakandan radar for 30 years, but he's so much larger than life that he brings a small personal army to a clandestine deal (an army which he brings explicitly to deal with the Wakandans and yet he arms with weapons he knows are ineffective against Wakandan armor).
There's also the problem of stakes: the chase takes up a significant portion of the films runtime, but there's never really any doubt of Black Panther's success. He basically just sits in plain view soaking a never ending stream of bullets, and even Klaue's sonic cannon has been seen to basically just knock him backwards while charging his "burst" power. There's not even a real risk of Klaue escaping, as Black Panther is able to just steal any car on the street and have his sister drive it for him. Klaue is driving an incredibly conspicuous black SUV, and we already know that T'Challa's ship can easily track vehicles. With no stakes, there's no tension, and the scene could have been a tenth the length.
The Wakandan Civil War scene is problematic for two reasons, and while neither is "I don't know how to end a drama, so let's just have a CGI fight with giant rhinos," that didn't help. The first is that so much of the tension is deliberately introduced. There is no reason for M'Baku not to help T'Challa. We've already established that M'Baku is real big on preserving tradition (that's one of his biggest reasons for challenging T'Challa) and on his tribe getting the respect it deserves (which he asserts on the day of challenge and with his line about T'Challa being the first king to visit his hall in centuries): as a character, those are his motivations. Both of those motivations should have him backing T'Challa: technically the duel is not over, as T'Challa is not dead nor did he yield, so he has the right to challenge Killmonger. Likewise, Killmonger has done nothing to recognize M'Baku's people, Queen Ramonda offered him the purple heart flower because she saw him as Wakanda's best hope, and T'Challa makes a good case that Killmonger will go to war with him before he tries to bring him peacefully into the fold. So why didn't M'Baku march with T'Challa? Basically so he could show up at the "all is lost" moment and "turn the tide."
The second reason is W'Kabi's loyalty to Killmonger. Withuot W'Kabi's backing, Killmonger would have had no choice but to submit to the ritual duel, as even the Dora Milaje turned against him at that point. W'Kabi's dissatisfaction with T'Challa is the reason for the Wakandan Civil War, and there's no reason for it. W'Kabi backs Killmonger because he did what T'Challa could not: deliver the man who killed his parents, Klaue. But here's the thing: T'Challa knows that Killmonger is the one who freed Klaue. If, during the throne room scene, while Killmonger was making his claim, T'Challa had just said, "By the way, W'Kabi, the reason Killmonger brought you Klaue instead of me is that he was working with Klaue, and in fact he freed him from my custody," at the very least W'Kabi probably would have been a little less in Killmonger's pocket.
So really the two action set piece both have reasons they shouldn't be in the movie, which in and of itself isn't a big deal. Where it becomes problematic is that it breaks the narrative flow of the movie. The final conflict of the film should have been another duel, not an action scene. That may seem like an oxymoron: aren't I saying that instead of a fight there should have been a smaller fight? Why would that matter?
The second reason is W'Kabi's loyalty to Killmonger. Withuot W'Kabi's backing, Killmonger would have had no choice but to submit to the ritual duel, as even the Dora Milaje turned against him at that point. W'Kabi's dissatisfaction with T'Challa is the reason for the Wakandan Civil War, and there's no reason for it. W'Kabi backs Killmonger because he did what T'Challa could not: deliver the man who killed his parents, Klaue. But here's the thing: T'Challa knows that Killmonger is the one who freed Klaue. If, during the throne room scene, while Killmonger was making his claim, T'Challa had just said, "By the way, W'Kabi, the reason Killmonger brought you Klaue instead of me is that he was working with Klaue, and in fact he freed him from my custody," at the very least W'Kabi probably would have been a little less in Killmonger's pocket.
So really the two action set piece both have reasons they shouldn't be in the movie, which in and of itself isn't a big deal. Where it becomes problematic is that it breaks the narrative flow of the movie. The final conflict of the film should have been another duel, not an action scene. That may seem like an oxymoron: aren't I saying that instead of a fight there should have been a smaller fight? Why would that matter?
The reason I don't call the duels action scenes is because their main point is to symbolically explore the characters. The South Korea scene and the Wakandan Civil War scene both, as I hope I've demonstrated, don't serve the plot in any significant way. Their purpose is to show you something cool. The duels, on the other hand, both teach you about characters and their motivations: each one represents T'Challa and where he's at in his personal struggle. In the first duel, he's afraid he's unworthy to be king, with his biggest fear being that he won't be able to live up to the history and traditions that go along with that (and specifically the legacy of his father). Low and behold, who is his opponent? M'Baku, a very traditional Wakandan straight out of the history books. M'Baku is the past, and T'Challa defeats him, demonstrating mastery.
At the time of the second duel, T'Challa is at conflict with himself. He's on track to being a good traditional king just like his father, but he's learned what that really means. T'Chanka's words, "It's hard for a good man to be a king," have been given their full context, but it's too much for T'Challa. Suddenly, there is a new challenger. His opponent? Killmonger, an embodiment of all the pain and suffering the traditional kings ignored, a wellspring of hatred and violence created by their strict isolationism. In response to this, T'Challa rejects his father and tries his hardest to be a good man, surrendering his advantage over Killmonger by asking him to yield, unwilling to accept the nature of his father's sins. Killmonger's response is to disable him and then discard him. T'Challa's outright rejection of his father's words leads to defeat.
At the time of the second duel, T'Challa is at conflict with himself. He's on track to being a good traditional king just like his father, but he's learned what that really means. T'Chanka's words, "It's hard for a good man to be a king," have been given their full context, but it's too much for T'Challa. Suddenly, there is a new challenger. His opponent? Killmonger, an embodiment of all the pain and suffering the traditional kings ignored, a wellspring of hatred and violence created by their strict isolationism. In response to this, T'Challa rejects his father and tries his hardest to be a good man, surrendering his advantage over Killmonger by asking him to yield, unwilling to accept the nature of his father's sins. Killmonger's response is to disable him and then discard him. T'Challa's outright rejection of his father's words leads to defeat.
So what's the conclusion to this arc? We don't really get one. T'Challa and Killmonger fight, but there's not a lot going on symbolically. T'Challa wins due to his ingenuity and skill, which is great, but there's no payoff to his character arc here since he's been ingenious and skilled the entire movie. A duel might have demonstrated T'Challa as master of both worlds, both the traditional as he kills Killmonger without the hesitation present in their first duel, but also demonstrating the new path for Wakanda by showing real remorse at Killmonger's fate and, instead of shutting down Killmonger's project, simply replacing the weapons and sending out the ships anyway. I should say this movie does have two scenes that demonstrate T'Challa's mastery of both worlds, but it's telling that they happen after the climax of the movie (T'Challa taking Killmonger to see the sunset and opening the outreach center in Oakland), not during it.
So again, is Black Panther bad? No. But does it have the staying power of great movies? I don't think so. Great movies stay relevant because of their consistent theming and the coherence: they become the ruler by which other movies are measured. Black Panther has some gaps in both. I hope it will lead to greater diversity and inclusion in the casting and writing of future films, and I think it will last, but I think in 40 or 50 years it'll be remembered as one of the good Marvel movies, but I don't think it'll stand on its own.
Thursday, September 28, 2017
Where My Game of Thrones Gone?
I have been somewhat vocal in my opinion that, despite liking Game of Thrones, there has been a problem with it maintaining a consistent quality (especially since overtaking George R.R. Martin's material). In particular, I found the end of season 7, though not the low point of the series (Dorne and the death of Meryn Trant stand out to me), to be disappointing. I haven't wanted to explain why on a different platform to avoid spoilers, but I guess that's the joy of this blog: no one reads it anyway, so why not spoil it here?
To understand why the end of season 7 was bad, let's look at a major theme of A Song of Ice and Fire: duty vs. emotion. The series begins with a man being executed for abandoning his duty and with Bran being taught an important lesson about how important doing one's duty is. In fact, there's a strong case that Ned Starks death is a parallel to this deserter: upon arriving home from the execution (in the book at least), Ned tells Catelyn that he needs to raise his banners and ride north, beyond The Wall, to deal with Mance Rayder and restore the peace. Instead, he abandons his duty out of love for Robert and Jon Arryn, and the armies of the North are squandered in the War of the Five Kings (a war started by Catelyn's love for her son and lost Robb's love for his new bride). Ned's neglect of duty may have doomed the world.
Then you look at the Night's Watch. Originally an army supported by all the Seven Kingdoms, a force of 10,000 knights from noble houses that could man The Wall, range effectively to the north, and provide for itself by working lands to the south, the Watch has been reduced to less than a tenth its size, and those who remain are mostly conscripted criminals. Only the North and a few houses in the Vale send any knights or nobles at all of their own will: every southron knight of the Watch was forced into service, mostly because they fought on the losing side of a war (for instance, Ser Alliser Thorne was a Targaryan loyalist). The Seven Kingdoms have neglected their duty to support the Night's Watch out of greed: why waste their best men and resources to fight snarks and grumpkins when they can be better used in the game of thrones?
So, to the final scene of season 7: whose fault is it that the Wall falls? It's not Jon Snow's: as Lord Commander he made unpopular decisions that put the duty of the Night's Watch over prejudice, and as King of the North he puts the Long Night ahead of all other priorities. It's not Daenarys: she flew north not because she loved Jon (in fact, she ends up abandoning him), but to save the mission in order to convince Cersei to join the real fight. It's not even Cersei's: she may be planning betrayal, but she hasn't pulled the trigger on that yet.
So whose fault is it? What grave mistake lead to the Wall falling, the the realms of men being vulnerable for the first time in millenia? What betrayal may have cost the world? It's no one's, really. Who could have predicted the Night King had magical dragon insta-kill spears? Who knew that creatures of fire could be resurrected by magic of the ice-infused Others? Nobody. Nobody knew that by riding north, Daenerys would inadvertently give the White Walkers the tool they needed to bring down the Wall (which, speaking of, does the Night King have pre-cognition? What was his plan before a dragon fell into his lap?).
There was no hamartia, no fatal flaw in the rulers of Westeros that allows you to point a finger and say "This person/these people! They abandoned their duty, they knowingly made a choice and the Wall fell because of it." The dead did not attack a portion of the Wall that was under-manned due to the neglect of the lords of Westeros, they hit it at a point reinforced by wildlings, the Brothers Without Banners, and presumably Northern soldiers and soldiers from the Vale, since they aren't currently engaged militarily with Cersei (who, by the way, is suddenly competent). No one has blown the Horn of Winter for short-term military gain. No one allowed a dark sorcerer promising power to be their confidant despite everyone's pleas to the contrary, leading to dark sorcery that compromised the Wall.
Nope. None of the long running themes or ideas of the show mattered: Daenerys just rode in her dragons, and it turns out that it's super easy for White Walkers to kill and resurrect dragons (despite fire being their greatest weakness and dragons literally being described as "fire made flesh"). A character actively trying to do their duty and save the world ends up being the catalyst for its destruction.
The show became famous for its spectacle, but I think the writers have forgotten that spectacle isn't what kept people watching. Ned Stark's death made sense. The Red Wedding made sense. Oberyn and Tywin's deaths made sense. They were the focus of elaborate paintings, paintings with richly detailed and expertly crafted backgrounds. The more recent spectacles seem more like a cheap comic book panel: an awesome dragon breathing fire with a solid red background behind it. I can get that lots of places other than Game of Thrones.
To understand why the end of season 7 was bad, let's look at a major theme of A Song of Ice and Fire: duty vs. emotion. The series begins with a man being executed for abandoning his duty and with Bran being taught an important lesson about how important doing one's duty is. In fact, there's a strong case that Ned Starks death is a parallel to this deserter: upon arriving home from the execution (in the book at least), Ned tells Catelyn that he needs to raise his banners and ride north, beyond The Wall, to deal with Mance Rayder and restore the peace. Instead, he abandons his duty out of love for Robert and Jon Arryn, and the armies of the North are squandered in the War of the Five Kings (a war started by Catelyn's love for her son and lost Robb's love for his new bride). Ned's neglect of duty may have doomed the world.
Then you look at the Night's Watch. Originally an army supported by all the Seven Kingdoms, a force of 10,000 knights from noble houses that could man The Wall, range effectively to the north, and provide for itself by working lands to the south, the Watch has been reduced to less than a tenth its size, and those who remain are mostly conscripted criminals. Only the North and a few houses in the Vale send any knights or nobles at all of their own will: every southron knight of the Watch was forced into service, mostly because they fought on the losing side of a war (for instance, Ser Alliser Thorne was a Targaryan loyalist). The Seven Kingdoms have neglected their duty to support the Night's Watch out of greed: why waste their best men and resources to fight snarks and grumpkins when they can be better used in the game of thrones?
So, to the final scene of season 7: whose fault is it that the Wall falls? It's not Jon Snow's: as Lord Commander he made unpopular decisions that put the duty of the Night's Watch over prejudice, and as King of the North he puts the Long Night ahead of all other priorities. It's not Daenarys: she flew north not because she loved Jon (in fact, she ends up abandoning him), but to save the mission in order to convince Cersei to join the real fight. It's not even Cersei's: she may be planning betrayal, but she hasn't pulled the trigger on that yet.
So whose fault is it? What grave mistake lead to the Wall falling, the the realms of men being vulnerable for the first time in millenia? What betrayal may have cost the world? It's no one's, really. Who could have predicted the Night King had magical dragon insta-kill spears? Who knew that creatures of fire could be resurrected by magic of the ice-infused Others? Nobody. Nobody knew that by riding north, Daenerys would inadvertently give the White Walkers the tool they needed to bring down the Wall (which, speaking of, does the Night King have pre-cognition? What was his plan before a dragon fell into his lap?).
There was no hamartia, no fatal flaw in the rulers of Westeros that allows you to point a finger and say "This person/these people! They abandoned their duty, they knowingly made a choice and the Wall fell because of it." The dead did not attack a portion of the Wall that was under-manned due to the neglect of the lords of Westeros, they hit it at a point reinforced by wildlings, the Brothers Without Banners, and presumably Northern soldiers and soldiers from the Vale, since they aren't currently engaged militarily with Cersei (who, by the way, is suddenly competent). No one has blown the Horn of Winter for short-term military gain. No one allowed a dark sorcerer promising power to be their confidant despite everyone's pleas to the contrary, leading to dark sorcery that compromised the Wall.
Nope. None of the long running themes or ideas of the show mattered: Daenerys just rode in her dragons, and it turns out that it's super easy for White Walkers to kill and resurrect dragons (despite fire being their greatest weakness and dragons literally being described as "fire made flesh"). A character actively trying to do their duty and save the world ends up being the catalyst for its destruction.
The show became famous for its spectacle, but I think the writers have forgotten that spectacle isn't what kept people watching. Ned Stark's death made sense. The Red Wedding made sense. Oberyn and Tywin's deaths made sense. They were the focus of elaborate paintings, paintings with richly detailed and expertly crafted backgrounds. The more recent spectacles seem more like a cheap comic book panel: an awesome dragon breathing fire with a solid red background behind it. I can get that lots of places other than Game of Thrones.
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
Tokyo Drift: The First Fast and Furious Movie with a Plot
I am currently on day 3 of Furious Week: I've never seen a Fast and Furious movie, so I'm watching the first seven, one a day, from Sunday to Saturday. Now, when I first announced Furious Week, a lot of people told me to skip to Tokyo Drift or watch Tokyo Drift then hop to 5. The consensus is Tokyo Drift isn't a higher quality movie than The Fast and the Furious or even 2 Fast 2 Furious (by consensus the low point of the franchise), but it's more entertaining somehow. Now that I've finished it, it's obvious to see why.
In The Fast and The Furious, the story is told wrong. People seem to pick up on this intuitively: in the Wikipedia plot summary the fact that Brian is an undercover cop is explained right away. In the actual movie you don't find out until after the first race, which makes the race pointless as far as the plot is concerned. What's at stake? A dude we just met and know nothing about might lose a car. We have no idea how much, or even if, that matters.
This problem extends to all the racing in the film: was it a big deal that mechanic kid lost his dad's Jetta to Tran? They tell us that, but I don't think it came up earlier, so why should we care? Why did anything that happened at Race Wars (which is probably the worst name for a racing event ever) matter? The racing was a flashy distraction from the real plot, a paint by numbers undercover cop story with an interesting antagonist (Dominic) and a boring protagonist (Brian).
In The Fast and The Furious, the story is told wrong. People seem to pick up on this intuitively: in the Wikipedia plot summary the fact that Brian is an undercover cop is explained right away. In the actual movie you don't find out until after the first race, which makes the race pointless as far as the plot is concerned. What's at stake? A dude we just met and know nothing about might lose a car. We have no idea how much, or even if, that matters.
This problem extends to all the racing in the film: was it a big deal that mechanic kid lost his dad's Jetta to Tran? They tell us that, but I don't think it came up earlier, so why should we care? Why did anything that happened at Race Wars (which is probably the worst name for a racing event ever) matter? The racing was a flashy distraction from the real plot, a paint by numbers undercover cop story with an interesting antagonist (Dominic) and a boring protagonist (Brian).
2 Fast 2 Furious is even worse. The racing matters even less: there literally is no reason for the first race (it's not like Brian is forced to race and him sticking his head out gets him caught, and him being picked up by the police could have happened before the race with as much impact to the rest of the plot as after). The race to the impound lot matters a little for the sake of the plot, but it doesn't tell us anything about Brian and Roman other than they drive well (something we already know), and the race to get those two cars doesn't matter because Roman and Brian have already beat those guys before. Remove the racing, which is pointless, and we've got a hackneyed drug movie that brings us OBVIOUS BAD GUY for boring Brian to bounce off of (but hey, they make up for it with some comic relief black guy!).
So we have two racing movies with pointless races. Now, let's look at the big 3 races in Tokyo Drift. Race one has small stakes: Movie Jock has smashed in Sean's window with a rock. We don't like Movie Jock, we want Sean to beat him.* So, small stakes, but it engages us enough to watch the race, in which we learn a lot about Sean. Sean doesn't care about how much damage he sustains, as long as he sticks it in Movie Jock's face that he won. He even plays just as dirty as Movie Jock, cheating by going off the course and ramming Movie Jock back when Movie Jock rams him. Sean wins, then runs away from the larger consequences of the race.
Race 2, Sean races DK. We care because we know Sean is a good racer, but he's drift racing for the very first time in a very expensive car owned by an associate of the Yakuza. We're curious to see if Brian will do well, and every collision matters because we know the consequences: he's going to owe a lot of money to a criminal. We also see that Brian's recklessness isn't going to work in drift racing like it did racing back home. His world is thrown out of balance because the one thing that gave him worth, winning races by being reckless, won't work. Additionally, both Han and his father make it very clear that, for once in his life, Sean can't run away. For the first time, he has to face the consequences of his recklessness.
Now, the final race between Sean and DK. Sean has changed as a person before our eyes**: he used to run away away from his problems, now he's racing to stay and fix them. We want Sean to win because if he doesn't, everything he's worked for will be undone. Then the race itself is symbolically rich. Sean is driving in an American car, from his father, with a Japanese engine, from his mentor. When Takashi loses his temper and starts trying to drive Sean off the road, Sean doesn't engage with him like he did with Movie Jock, he stays cool and focuses on the race. Sean doesn't just beat Takashi, he beats his old self.
Now, is Tokyo Drift a cinematic masterpiece? Good heavens no. What I've described up above isn't masterful storytelling, it's the first step of good storytelling. To make a food analogy, 2 Fast 2 Furious is a fountain drink: empty calories that could never be mistaken for a meal. The Fast and the Furious is fries and a drink: it almost looks like a meal, but it's missing the meat. Tokyo Drift is a #1 with all the fixin's: it's a full meal. You wouldn't eat it for special occasions, and it's not an example of craftsmanship like a crown roast, but it wouldn't be disappointing if you were hungry and just looking for something simple to eat.
So we have two racing movies with pointless races. Now, let's look at the big 3 races in Tokyo Drift. Race one has small stakes: Movie Jock has smashed in Sean's window with a rock. We don't like Movie Jock, we want Sean to beat him.* So, small stakes, but it engages us enough to watch the race, in which we learn a lot about Sean. Sean doesn't care about how much damage he sustains, as long as he sticks it in Movie Jock's face that he won. He even plays just as dirty as Movie Jock, cheating by going off the course and ramming Movie Jock back when Movie Jock rams him. Sean wins, then runs away from the larger consequences of the race.
Race 2, Sean races DK. We care because we know Sean is a good racer, but he's drift racing for the very first time in a very expensive car owned by an associate of the Yakuza. We're curious to see if Brian will do well, and every collision matters because we know the consequences: he's going to owe a lot of money to a criminal. We also see that Brian's recklessness isn't going to work in drift racing like it did racing back home. His world is thrown out of balance because the one thing that gave him worth, winning races by being reckless, won't work. Additionally, both Han and his father make it very clear that, for once in his life, Sean can't run away. For the first time, he has to face the consequences of his recklessness.
Now, the final race between Sean and DK. Sean has changed as a person before our eyes**: he used to run away away from his problems, now he's racing to stay and fix them. We want Sean to win because if he doesn't, everything he's worked for will be undone. Then the race itself is symbolically rich. Sean is driving in an American car, from his father, with a Japanese engine, from his mentor. When Takashi loses his temper and starts trying to drive Sean off the road, Sean doesn't engage with him like he did with Movie Jock, he stays cool and focuses on the race. Sean doesn't just beat Takashi, he beats his old self.
Now, is Tokyo Drift a cinematic masterpiece? Good heavens no. What I've described up above isn't masterful storytelling, it's the first step of good storytelling. To make a food analogy, 2 Fast 2 Furious is a fountain drink: empty calories that could never be mistaken for a meal. The Fast and the Furious is fries and a drink: it almost looks like a meal, but it's missing the meat. Tokyo Drift is a #1 with all the fixin's: it's a full meal. You wouldn't eat it for special occasions, and it's not an example of craftsmanship like a crown roast, but it wouldn't be disappointing if you were hungry and just looking for something simple to eat.
*For those of you crying foul on me since Brian fought with Dominic in The Fast and the Furious, no, Brian fought with Vince and Dominic broke it up; the first race should have been between Brian and Vince.
**Compare the intro scene, where he lets the bullies spray paint that kid, to the rooftop scene where he protects Twinkie.
Thursday, May 15, 2014
My Problem with Amazing Spider-Man 2
Alright, so I know that a lot of people really like this movie, and I'm not saying it has no redeeming qualities. I'm not sad I saw it, nor am I angry at the writers/director/studio. It was a big dumb popcorn movie (at two and a half hours one could say a gargantuan dumb popcorn movie) and I know that that's all I should have expected.
But here's my deal: this movie has three plots, none of which depend, build, or draw on each other. They barely even interact. With the exception of a single scene, Electro could disappear entirely from this movie and you wouldn't have to change anything else. Even the scene he is in it doesn't matter that he's Electro: he could literally be replaced with an extra with no lines.
That's the difference, I think, between a complicated movie and a convoluted movie. Complicated movies have lots of different plots and characters woven together to make a solid whole. Convoluted movies have lot's of different plots and characters thrown together with no larger purpose than "let's put a lot of guys in here."
Why is Harry Osborn in this movie? So he can become an unintentionally hilarious Green Goblin. Why is there a clock tower right next to a power substation? So they can have a big cartoony fight in it. Why do Harry Osborn and Peter Parker renew their friendship? So that that friendship can dissolve.
In fact, it seems like the only reason Peter Parker makes any friends or talks to anybody is so he be all mopey when he unintentionally ruins their lives. There's no sense of real people or a lived-in world; it's just a set full of people for Spider-Man to interact with so the movie can keep going. It's hard for me to care about what's going on when I know the writers are going to paint by number.
But here's my deal: this movie has three plots, none of which depend, build, or draw on each other. They barely even interact. With the exception of a single scene, Electro could disappear entirely from this movie and you wouldn't have to change anything else. Even the scene he is in it doesn't matter that he's Electro: he could literally be replaced with an extra with no lines.
That's the difference, I think, between a complicated movie and a convoluted movie. Complicated movies have lots of different plots and characters woven together to make a solid whole. Convoluted movies have lot's of different plots and characters thrown together with no larger purpose than "let's put a lot of guys in here."
Why is Harry Osborn in this movie? So he can become an unintentionally hilarious Green Goblin. Why is there a clock tower right next to a power substation? So they can have a big cartoony fight in it. Why do Harry Osborn and Peter Parker renew their friendship? So that that friendship can dissolve.
In fact, it seems like the only reason Peter Parker makes any friends or talks to anybody is so he be all mopey when he unintentionally ruins their lives. There's no sense of real people or a lived-in world; it's just a set full of people for Spider-Man to interact with so the movie can keep going. It's hard for me to care about what's going on when I know the writers are going to paint by number.
Also, when I have to see this goofy a-hole.
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Glory to Arstotzka! Next. Papers, Please.
So I just discovered a fun little title on Steam called Papers, Please. In it you are an inspections officer at the border of an oppressive socialist state. Your job is to check the papers of those trying to enter the glorious country of Arstotzka by passing from West Grestin to East Gresting (SUBTLETY!). This may sound boring, but the real fun comes from the scripted events when criminals, spies, assassins, and celebrities with improper documentation try to sneak past. We've all seen this moment in movies: as recently as Argo we have a scene where the heroes have almost escaped Iran, but their fate rests in the hands of some bureaucrat with a rubber stamp. Papers, Please does an interesting thing by giving you that stamp.
But you don't just have the stamp: at the end of the day you must go back to your tiny apartment and decide if you will spend your meager savings on food or heating (you have no choice about paying rent). You feel genuinely stressed out when a family member gets sick and you must decide whether to starve or freeze to purchase medicine. The beauty of the game is that you get paid based on the number of people you process, not on how many get in or get turned away, and you get fined for making mistakes. So maybe to eat tonight, you have to let the husband in and turn away his wife, who has lost her entry form. Maybe to afford heat, you have to arrest someone you would otherwise simply turn away because the guards are bribing you. Maybe to buy medicine, you have to turn away freedom fighters. Freedom fighters you start to hate, actually, when their terrorist attacks force your checkpoint to close early, meaning you lose the five or ten dollars you could have squeezed out in the last hour of the day.
And this is why I love Papers, Please: it's one of the first games with moral choices that actually are moral. The game doesn't pull the bullcrap so many moral choice systems do, where if you make the right choice you still get the reward (or an even bigger reward). If you save the old man, somehow he has just as much money as the mob boss who hired you to rough him up; if you spare the villain's life, he thanks you and gives you a powerful item. Not in Papers, Please. If you make the right choice, sometimes the only reward you get is the good feeling. Deciding to keep the married couple together got me a citation and nothing more. Letting freedom fighters through on my first playthrough got me noticed by the Ministry of Information and eventually led to my arrest. If you want to do the right thing, you do it only because it is the right thing, and you do it at your own risk.
The game is beautifully atmospheric, and it puts you in a different mindset. I love that I was able to help the revolution with one button press while detaining innocent people for bribe money with the next. It's a fun thought experiment tied to a surprisingly engaging puzzle game, and I would recommend highly recommend it. As long as you're willing to have the Arstotzka National Anthem stuck in your head all day.
But you don't just have the stamp: at the end of the day you must go back to your tiny apartment and decide if you will spend your meager savings on food or heating (you have no choice about paying rent). You feel genuinely stressed out when a family member gets sick and you must decide whether to starve or freeze to purchase medicine. The beauty of the game is that you get paid based on the number of people you process, not on how many get in or get turned away, and you get fined for making mistakes. So maybe to eat tonight, you have to let the husband in and turn away his wife, who has lost her entry form. Maybe to afford heat, you have to arrest someone you would otherwise simply turn away because the guards are bribing you. Maybe to buy medicine, you have to turn away freedom fighters. Freedom fighters you start to hate, actually, when their terrorist attacks force your checkpoint to close early, meaning you lose the five or ten dollars you could have squeezed out in the last hour of the day.
And this is why I love Papers, Please: it's one of the first games with moral choices that actually are moral. The game doesn't pull the bullcrap so many moral choice systems do, where if you make the right choice you still get the reward (or an even bigger reward). If you save the old man, somehow he has just as much money as the mob boss who hired you to rough him up; if you spare the villain's life, he thanks you and gives you a powerful item. Not in Papers, Please. If you make the right choice, sometimes the only reward you get is the good feeling. Deciding to keep the married couple together got me a citation and nothing more. Letting freedom fighters through on my first playthrough got me noticed by the Ministry of Information and eventually led to my arrest. If you want to do the right thing, you do it only because it is the right thing, and you do it at your own risk.
The game is beautifully atmospheric, and it puts you in a different mindset. I love that I was able to help the revolution with one button press while detaining innocent people for bribe money with the next. It's a fun thought experiment tied to a surprisingly engaging puzzle game, and I would recommend highly recommend it. As long as you're willing to have the Arstotzka National Anthem stuck in your head all day.
Saturday, October 5, 2013
Gravity Didn't Pull Me In
Puns!
So, I had problems with Gravity. Maybe I'm just super-anal retentive about how stuff works in zero-g, and maybe I'm just too cynical to enjoy the saccharine tones of triumph as Sandra Bullock quotes George Clooney at the end (Seriously, can we be done with that trope? We get it, the person has changed to become more like their mentor. Do you have to have them quote the person directly, movies?), but the movie just didn't sell me. It seems like the movie took the easy way out: instead of trying to be something new and great, it took the old and easy path.
Picking on the inaccurate portrayal of space seems picky, and it is a bit. But I dislike the inaccuracies for a different reason than you may think. The problem, at least for me, is that they seemed to try for realism most of the time, but they broke the rules when it was convenient for the writers. There is a critical scene between Bullock and Clooney that would make anyone who understands relative motion balk, but allows us to have one of the most important moments in the movie. In real life radio communication is one-way, but ignoring that lets us have a poignant scene where Bullock has an interesting conversation with a stranger. The inconsistency in realism makes the above scenes, and others throughout the film, feel really contrived.
Sometimes even the scenes that could happen are marred by symbolism so obvious it makes you want to say "I get it" to the screen. Sandra Bullock curling up like a little fetus seems like film-school level symbolism. When she did the aforementioned Clooney quoting, I groaned audibly in the theater. There's a moment where she and Clooney talk a bit about her not giving up, and his speech is so over the top he feels like the coach in a 90s sports movie.
And how did Bullock get into space? She's sick in zero-g (for, like, the first ten minutes of the movie, then it is never mentioned again), she apparently crashed every time she performed a simulated landing (and NASA was still cool with sending her up without correcting that), and she seems entirely unfamiliar with everything around her (I guess she just missed all the briefings). Good thing she's got a competent man to save her. Side note, giving your female character a doctorate does not make her any stronger when she has to be repeatedly saved, physically and emotionally, by a man.
Alright, now it just feels like I'm attacking it, and I don't want to do that. It was an okay movie. It was well put together (though a few of the continuous shots just didn't work and really broke my suspension of disbelief) and was a beauty to see. It made some interesting decisions and told a compelling story, but it did it in a really paint-by-numbers, spoon-feeding sort of way. It didn't want me to have to think very hard. But I wanted to think hard. If I was thinking a bit harder, I would have had less time to nit-pick the space stuff.
Seriously, though, that teardrop floating through space was dumb. Plus, that's not how tears work in space.
So, I had problems with Gravity. Maybe I'm just super-anal retentive about how stuff works in zero-g, and maybe I'm just too cynical to enjoy the saccharine tones of triumph as Sandra Bullock quotes George Clooney at the end (Seriously, can we be done with that trope? We get it, the person has changed to become more like their mentor. Do you have to have them quote the person directly, movies?), but the movie just didn't sell me. It seems like the movie took the easy way out: instead of trying to be something new and great, it took the old and easy path.
Picking on the inaccurate portrayal of space seems picky, and it is a bit. But I dislike the inaccuracies for a different reason than you may think. The problem, at least for me, is that they seemed to try for realism most of the time, but they broke the rules when it was convenient for the writers. There is a critical scene between Bullock and Clooney that would make anyone who understands relative motion balk, but allows us to have one of the most important moments in the movie. In real life radio communication is one-way, but ignoring that lets us have a poignant scene where Bullock has an interesting conversation with a stranger. The inconsistency in realism makes the above scenes, and others throughout the film, feel really contrived.
Sometimes even the scenes that could happen are marred by symbolism so obvious it makes you want to say "I get it" to the screen. Sandra Bullock curling up like a little fetus seems like film-school level symbolism. When she did the aforementioned Clooney quoting, I groaned audibly in the theater. There's a moment where she and Clooney talk a bit about her not giving up, and his speech is so over the top he feels like the coach in a 90s sports movie.
And how did Bullock get into space? She's sick in zero-g (for, like, the first ten minutes of the movie, then it is never mentioned again), she apparently crashed every time she performed a simulated landing (and NASA was still cool with sending her up without correcting that), and she seems entirely unfamiliar with everything around her (I guess she just missed all the briefings). Good thing she's got a competent man to save her. Side note, giving your female character a doctorate does not make her any stronger when she has to be repeatedly saved, physically and emotionally, by a man.
Alright, now it just feels like I'm attacking it, and I don't want to do that. It was an okay movie. It was well put together (though a few of the continuous shots just didn't work and really broke my suspension of disbelief) and was a beauty to see. It made some interesting decisions and told a compelling story, but it did it in a really paint-by-numbers, spoon-feeding sort of way. It didn't want me to have to think very hard. But I wanted to think hard. If I was thinking a bit harder, I would have had less time to nit-pick the space stuff.
Seriously, though, that teardrop floating through space was dumb. Plus, that's not how tears work in space.
Tuesday, October 1, 2013
Comediennes: Are Women Funny?
The answer is yes. Of course it's yes. How could a whole section of the population just lack the ability to make people laugh? Does the uterus leech jokes out of the surrounding atmosphere, saving them to be deposited in the zygotes of male children? That's ridiculous. And while women are grossly underrepresented in comedy, I can point to a bunch that I love.
That being said, when someone says "Hey, have you heard [female name here]? They're hilarious!" I'm more hesitant to look them up than when someone says "Hey, have you heard [male name here]? They're hilarious!" I blame this entirely on that question in the title.
So let me start by listing the two types of female comedians I don't like: 1. Comedians who write material based on the fact that they're female and 2. Comedians who try to prove that they're not your typical "female comedian." You'll notice that both of these types come about as a reaction to the "Are women funny?" question; they either answer no (Yeah, I have a vagina and tell jokes. What, you want to fight about it?) or yes (Yeah, chicks aren't funny. But I'm a bro in the body of a chick! Wacka-wacka!).
The problem comes in because these types of comedians are usually so chained down by pushing their answer that they don't tell jokes. Or at least not funny ones. My favorite female comedians are the ones who reject the question as absurd and are just funny. I love Tina Fey as a comedy writer because she writes funny stuff. I love Lisa Lampanelli because she's a really good insult comic. Not a really good female insult comic, but a really good insult comic.
The real bummer is it's not the fault of the comedians I don't like. The industry has been telling them for years that they can't make it because of their sex, and it can easily force them into one of the two paths listed above. If a female comedian isn't funny, it's more than likely men's fault, not theirs.
I know there's so much more important stuff going on like the government shutdown and the Syria stuff (Yes, I do glance at newspapers when I walk past newsstands, why do you ask?), but I think it's important for us to look at something as trivial as our comedy and see that, on a fundamental level, there are some very unfunny things going on that make the world a little less bright. I can only wonder how many great comedians haven't brightened my day because some schmuck at some point in time decided they weren't funny.
That being said, when someone says "Hey, have you heard [female name here]? They're hilarious!" I'm more hesitant to look them up than when someone says "Hey, have you heard [male name here]? They're hilarious!" I blame this entirely on that question in the title.
So let me start by listing the two types of female comedians I don't like: 1. Comedians who write material based on the fact that they're female and 2. Comedians who try to prove that they're not your typical "female comedian." You'll notice that both of these types come about as a reaction to the "Are women funny?" question; they either answer no (Yeah, I have a vagina and tell jokes. What, you want to fight about it?) or yes (Yeah, chicks aren't funny. But I'm a bro in the body of a chick! Wacka-wacka!).
The problem comes in because these types of comedians are usually so chained down by pushing their answer that they don't tell jokes. Or at least not funny ones. My favorite female comedians are the ones who reject the question as absurd and are just funny. I love Tina Fey as a comedy writer because she writes funny stuff. I love Lisa Lampanelli because she's a really good insult comic. Not a really good female insult comic, but a really good insult comic.
The real bummer is it's not the fault of the comedians I don't like. The industry has been telling them for years that they can't make it because of their sex, and it can easily force them into one of the two paths listed above. If a female comedian isn't funny, it's more than likely men's fault, not theirs.
I know there's so much more important stuff going on like the government shutdown and the Syria stuff (Yes, I do glance at newspapers when I walk past newsstands, why do you ask?), but I think it's important for us to look at something as trivial as our comedy and see that, on a fundamental level, there are some very unfunny things going on that make the world a little less bright. I can only wonder how many great comedians haven't brightened my day because some schmuck at some point in time decided they weren't funny.
Friday, August 23, 2013
Ben Affleck as Batman, or Can't We All Just Get Along?
Ben Affleck has been cast as Batman! This is it, the endtimes. In the smoldering ruins of our civilization, our children will look to us and say "You witnessed it? You saw them cast Ben Affleck as Batman, and you did nothing?" and it will be our shame to sullenly nod.
Allow a counterpoint.
Christian Bale wasn't the best Batman. He was an EXCELLENT Christopher Nolan's Batman Batman, but as far as Batmen go, the animated series Batman is the best, for a couple of reasons (which may get their own post eventually, but for the sake of comedy I'll just say "gargling gravel" and walk away). Michael Keaton was the best actor to play a Batman, even if his Batman wasn't a very good Batman. George Clooney was a goofy as hell Batman, but you can't blame him for that: you can only do so much with an awful script. Adam West was also goofy, but the old Batman show was more tongue-in-cheek than we would ever allow the serious subject matter of a man dressed as a bat to be, and it's part of what makes Batman a household name.
What I'm saying is that lots of actors have brought lots of things to the Batman role. Who's to say Ben Affleck won't do the same? Yes, he'll be different from the Nolan Batman. Just like Nolan was different from the Burton Batman. But more than that, it was already going to be different from the Nolan Batman because Nolan isn't going to be as involved. But different is not always bad!
Now some may hop in with "Well, Affleck just doesn't seem like he'd fit." To them I say: American Psycho and Newsies. You think the guy who played Patrick Bateman is a good idea? Sure, Bateman is only one letter off from Batman, but the similarities sort of end there. And he was in Newsies! I think the Joker will need more than a stirring rendition of Santa Fe to take him down!
You see? You can't judge a book by it's cover.
"Well, Ben Affleck is a terrible actor." Yeah, no, that's fair. He was in Gigli. Before he was in The Town and Argo and after he was in Good Will Hunting and Chasing Amy.
Look, I guess what I'm saying is that maybe we should give the guy a chance. If the movie sucks, we can always hate on him together, but why don't we make sure the movie actually does suck before we form a lynch mob? It's Batman AKA the cash cow. It's not like the series will die if they make a terrible move (see "George Clooney" above), they'll just reboot it in a couple of years.
PS, the best thing to come out of this is a tweet from Newark Mayor Cory Booker stating:
"LOL, I'd rather be true to myself & lose than pander 2 Ben-haters & win MT@Frances_Locke Put an end to #BenAffleckAsBatman I'll vote 4 you"
Allow a counterpoint.
Christian Bale wasn't the best Batman. He was an EXCELLENT Christopher Nolan's Batman Batman, but as far as Batmen go, the animated series Batman is the best, for a couple of reasons (which may get their own post eventually, but for the sake of comedy I'll just say "gargling gravel" and walk away). Michael Keaton was the best actor to play a Batman, even if his Batman wasn't a very good Batman. George Clooney was a goofy as hell Batman, but you can't blame him for that: you can only do so much with an awful script. Adam West was also goofy, but the old Batman show was more tongue-in-cheek than we would ever allow the serious subject matter of a man dressed as a bat to be, and it's part of what makes Batman a household name.
What I'm saying is that lots of actors have brought lots of things to the Batman role. Who's to say Ben Affleck won't do the same? Yes, he'll be different from the Nolan Batman. Just like Nolan was different from the Burton Batman. But more than that, it was already going to be different from the Nolan Batman because Nolan isn't going to be as involved. But different is not always bad!
Now some may hop in with "Well, Affleck just doesn't seem like he'd fit." To them I say: American Psycho and Newsies. You think the guy who played Patrick Bateman is a good idea? Sure, Bateman is only one letter off from Batman, but the similarities sort of end there. And he was in Newsies! I think the Joker will need more than a stirring rendition of Santa Fe to take him down!
You see? You can't judge a book by it's cover.
"Well, Ben Affleck is a terrible actor." Yeah, no, that's fair. He was in Gigli. Before he was in The Town and Argo and after he was in Good Will Hunting and Chasing Amy.
Look, I guess what I'm saying is that maybe we should give the guy a chance. If the movie sucks, we can always hate on him together, but why don't we make sure the movie actually does suck before we form a lynch mob? It's Batman AKA the cash cow. It's not like the series will die if they make a terrible move (see "George Clooney" above), they'll just reboot it in a couple of years.
PS, the best thing to come out of this is a tweet from Newark Mayor Cory Booker stating:
"LOL, I'd rather be true to myself & lose than pander 2 Ben-haters & win MT@Frances_Locke Put an end to #BenAffleckAsBatman I'll vote 4 you"
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
Kick Ass 2: Tonally Confusing
Trigger warning, just FYI, it happens in the movie so I discuss it here.
So I saw Kick Ass 2 today (who'd a thunk?) and I was disappointed. I mean, if we were to use a meal analogy, I was looking for a cheap burger off the dollar menu: I know I'm not supposed to eat it, but it's a vice, and honestly I could eat them two or three at a time. What I got was a handful of popcorn and a cup of tap water (which made for a meal at the video store I worked at growing up more than once, unfortunately, when I forgot to pack a lunch and didn't want to wait to get home); the movie was certainly a movie, it did fill up two hours, me and me droogs got our fill of the old ultra-violence, but I'll probably never watch it again.
I think it's because the movie was all over the place tonally. There's a reason that Batman movies are never mob movies even though most of Batman's enemies are, in fact, the mob. It's because while the violence the Joker commits is heinous and dark, it's still not real violence. What I mean by that is that when the Joker shoves a pencil into a man's eye socket, we know that doesn't actually happen at mob meetings. We're seeing an embodiment of evil doing over-the-top evil things. This sets a background for a good vs. evil story. What you don't see is Nicky Santoro stabbing a guy in the neck with a pen, or Tommy DeVito and James Conway murdering Billy Bats in the trunk of a car. That's because that sort of violence is shown so we can realize the brutish reality of what being a criminal is actually about.
The point of Kick Ass, and what I think the first movie does a passable job at doing, is showing the real violence that would actually occur when a man in a mask tries to be a "real-life superhero." That's why my least favorite scene in the first movie is when Kick Ass shoots the guy at the end with a bazooka. And the second movie is full of that stuff: a great contrast is Kick Ass's first fight in the original and his first fight in the sequel: in the original, he gets beaten, stabbed, and hit by a car, and ends up in the emergency room. In the sequel, he gets beat while on the ground for a good while, then gets up. And just in time for "witty banter" with Hit Girl. Now if Kick Ass 2 had only been that kind of over-the-top the whole time I might have liked it more as a guilty pleasure, but it wasn't.
There's a scene that exemplifies what I mean: The Mofo' and one of his goons have captured a female hero and he outright says he's going to rape her. Then he . . . can't get it up? So he . . . tries? All the while his Russian comrade murders ten cops outside while the Tetris theme plays. Here we have a brutal scene of real violence that's then played for laughs as a ridiculous cartoon show occurs outside. Am I supposed to be horrified at the violence? Am I supposed to be enjoying the action? Am I supposed to be laughing at his impotence? Because I can't do all three at once. Also, the Mean Girls parody seemed like it belonged more in a Jason Friedberg movie (Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that a movie must always be somber to be good, but I am saying that an E.D. joke during a rape scene isn't funny or well done. You can put comedy and violence next to each other (for a good example, watch the far superior Cabin in the Woods), but you can't put wacky comedy and realistic (not in the visual effects sense, but in the tonal sense) violence together because only a sociopath thinks that realistic violence is wacky: look at the opening of The Departed. When Frank Costello laughs at the ways the bodies of his victims fell, Mr. French tells him there's something wrong with him. If Mr. French was in the theater of Kick Ass 2, he probably would have thought there was something wrong with anyone who completely, 100% enjoyed every minute of it.
And don't even get me started on the tacked on and confused moral messages. HEY MOVIE! If I wanted a movie to teach me a lesson about being all I can be, I wouldn't be going to Kick Ass.
So I saw Kick Ass 2 today (who'd a thunk?) and I was disappointed. I mean, if we were to use a meal analogy, I was looking for a cheap burger off the dollar menu: I know I'm not supposed to eat it, but it's a vice, and honestly I could eat them two or three at a time. What I got was a handful of popcorn and a cup of tap water (which made for a meal at the video store I worked at growing up more than once, unfortunately, when I forgot to pack a lunch and didn't want to wait to get home); the movie was certainly a movie, it did fill up two hours, me and me droogs got our fill of the old ultra-violence, but I'll probably never watch it again.
I think it's because the movie was all over the place tonally. There's a reason that Batman movies are never mob movies even though most of Batman's enemies are, in fact, the mob. It's because while the violence the Joker commits is heinous and dark, it's still not real violence. What I mean by that is that when the Joker shoves a pencil into a man's eye socket, we know that doesn't actually happen at mob meetings. We're seeing an embodiment of evil doing over-the-top evil things. This sets a background for a good vs. evil story. What you don't see is Nicky Santoro stabbing a guy in the neck with a pen, or Tommy DeVito and James Conway murdering Billy Bats in the trunk of a car. That's because that sort of violence is shown so we can realize the brutish reality of what being a criminal is actually about.
The point of Kick Ass, and what I think the first movie does a passable job at doing, is showing the real violence that would actually occur when a man in a mask tries to be a "real-life superhero." That's why my least favorite scene in the first movie is when Kick Ass shoots the guy at the end with a bazooka. And the second movie is full of that stuff: a great contrast is Kick Ass's first fight in the original and his first fight in the sequel: in the original, he gets beaten, stabbed, and hit by a car, and ends up in the emergency room. In the sequel, he gets beat while on the ground for a good while, then gets up. And just in time for "witty banter" with Hit Girl. Now if Kick Ass 2 had only been that kind of over-the-top the whole time I might have liked it more as a guilty pleasure, but it wasn't.
There's a scene that exemplifies what I mean: The Mofo' and one of his goons have captured a female hero and he outright says he's going to rape her. Then he . . . can't get it up? So he . . . tries? All the while his Russian comrade murders ten cops outside while the Tetris theme plays. Here we have a brutal scene of real violence that's then played for laughs as a ridiculous cartoon show occurs outside. Am I supposed to be horrified at the violence? Am I supposed to be enjoying the action? Am I supposed to be laughing at his impotence? Because I can't do all three at once. Also, the Mean Girls parody seemed like it belonged more in a Jason Friedberg movie (Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie).
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that a movie must always be somber to be good, but I am saying that an E.D. joke during a rape scene isn't funny or well done. You can put comedy and violence next to each other (for a good example, watch the far superior Cabin in the Woods), but you can't put wacky comedy and realistic (not in the visual effects sense, but in the tonal sense) violence together because only a sociopath thinks that realistic violence is wacky: look at the opening of The Departed. When Frank Costello laughs at the ways the bodies of his victims fell, Mr. French tells him there's something wrong with him. If Mr. French was in the theater of Kick Ass 2, he probably would have thought there was something wrong with anyone who completely, 100% enjoyed every minute of it.
And don't even get me started on the tacked on and confused moral messages. HEY MOVIE! If I wanted a movie to teach me a lesson about being all I can be, I wouldn't be going to Kick Ass.
Saturday, August 10, 2013
Why Elysium Disappointed Me
Elysium is not bad, which in and of itself is not the most ringing endorsement. It's definitely heavy handed, and I sort of wonder why, when so much of the cast is part of an insular Latino community, Matt Damon is the main character, but whatever, if you want to see a dude go from living person to strawberry jam in 2 seconds this film is for you.
The bigger problem, to me anyway, is that Battle Angel (and not Burst Angel, as I mistakenly said to a friend earlier) covered a lot of the same ground 23 years ago and did a better job of it. Battle Angel (at least the OVAs, which are what I watched) followed the Steven Spielberg school of thought by never showing their floating city, instead focusing on the actual emotional impact of living in garbage but knowing that paradise was just a few short miles above you.
Another problem is that Elysium pulls its punches. While Battle Angel explicitly shows how little the people in Zalem care about the inhabitants of the city below (by buying the organs of people without questioning the source and straight up murdering those who try to ascend), Elysium is too tied to emulating the border situation between the U.S. and Mexico today: while you see two ships get shot out of the sky (two ships filled with no one we care about by the way), when the third ship makes it to Elysium the people inside are deported instead of being gunned down. You know that Earth is in bad shape in Elysium because everything is dirty and people are lighting fires at night, but you never actually see any wanton crime or violence. In Battle Angel, you see several murders in the streets: you get a sense that things really are bad there.
But okay, you've already shown the WASP paradise that is Elysium (the space station, not the movie), and you don't want to disturb audience members by showing a realistic run-down dystopian future. My next problem comes in how easy it is to A. Get to Elysium (which apparently is so devoid of weapons that it's only orbital defense is a dude with a missile launcher firing FROM EARTH) B. Have a shoot-out on Elysium without any intervention. If it's as easy to get to Elysium as the movie shows it is, why on Earth has it not already been overrun? How does a guy throw a grenade into the Elysium equivalent of a command and control center without a robot death squad murdering his face? Again, other movies have done it better: in The Curse of the Golden Flower we see Prince Jai's army apparently take the Forbidden City only to be brutally massacred in a massive ambush and have their corpses and all sign of carnage cleared away in a matter of minutes. This scene clearly shows the power and control of the emperor, and a similar scene (even if it allowed a small victory to the protagonist to keep it from being so bleak) might have done a better job of displaying the power of Elysium.
Instead we see a film whose legacy is to be heavy-handed and kind of fun at parts, but ultimately forgettable.
On another note, I went to Shake N' Burger after the movie and it was pretty good. I got their juicy burger, which lived up to the name. I topped it off with a good chocolate malt, and unlike some people I went with I didn't spill it all over the floor of Suburbatron.
The bigger problem, to me anyway, is that Battle Angel (and not Burst Angel, as I mistakenly said to a friend earlier) covered a lot of the same ground 23 years ago and did a better job of it. Battle Angel (at least the OVAs, which are what I watched) followed the Steven Spielberg school of thought by never showing their floating city, instead focusing on the actual emotional impact of living in garbage but knowing that paradise was just a few short miles above you.
Another problem is that Elysium pulls its punches. While Battle Angel explicitly shows how little the people in Zalem care about the inhabitants of the city below (by buying the organs of people without questioning the source and straight up murdering those who try to ascend), Elysium is too tied to emulating the border situation between the U.S. and Mexico today: while you see two ships get shot out of the sky (two ships filled with no one we care about by the way), when the third ship makes it to Elysium the people inside are deported instead of being gunned down. You know that Earth is in bad shape in Elysium because everything is dirty and people are lighting fires at night, but you never actually see any wanton crime or violence. In Battle Angel, you see several murders in the streets: you get a sense that things really are bad there.
But okay, you've already shown the WASP paradise that is Elysium (the space station, not the movie), and you don't want to disturb audience members by showing a realistic run-down dystopian future. My next problem comes in how easy it is to A. Get to Elysium (which apparently is so devoid of weapons that it's only orbital defense is a dude with a missile launcher firing FROM EARTH) B. Have a shoot-out on Elysium without any intervention. If it's as easy to get to Elysium as the movie shows it is, why on Earth has it not already been overrun? How does a guy throw a grenade into the Elysium equivalent of a command and control center without a robot death squad murdering his face? Again, other movies have done it better: in The Curse of the Golden Flower we see Prince Jai's army apparently take the Forbidden City only to be brutally massacred in a massive ambush and have their corpses and all sign of carnage cleared away in a matter of minutes. This scene clearly shows the power and control of the emperor, and a similar scene (even if it allowed a small victory to the protagonist to keep it from being so bleak) might have done a better job of displaying the power of Elysium.
Instead we see a film whose legacy is to be heavy-handed and kind of fun at parts, but ultimately forgettable.
On another note, I went to Shake N' Burger after the movie and it was pretty good. I got their juicy burger, which lived up to the name. I topped it off with a good chocolate malt, and unlike some people I went with I didn't spill it all over the floor of Suburbatron.
Monday, November 12, 2012
The Man With the Iron Fists Was Terrible
Yeah, just so you know, not only did it put the "F U in Kung Fu," it put the "RZA" in "RZA probably shouldn't have creative control over a movie."
But more importantly, watching this movie got me thinking about something. Note that everything I'm about to talk about is based on anecdotal evidence and shouldn't be regarded as the sole truth, it's just based on something I've seen that I find interesting.
Fantasy appears to be a fairly white genre. White people watch it, white people act in it, and white people write it. Kung fu movies, on the other hand, tend to be bigger with the black demographic. I mean, even in blaxploitation films, the main characters tend to know some sort of martial art (see Dolemite or Black Dynamite). I started looking at it, and I think I see why.
Fantasy movies/TV shows tend to be about 2 things: 1) an evil king has taken over a good kingdom and the good people rise up and fight them or 2) an evil king rules over an evil nation that is at war with a good kingdom. These sorts of stories have themes of xenophobia, the good nature of people, the evils of totalitarian governments, and the power of the individual to change the whole world.
Kung fu movies, on the other hand, are more consistent in their setting than their stories. They tend to take place in small communities that are ruled by corrupt government officials or crime families. Even stories without the emphasis on community tend to focus on themes of crime, the apathy from national organizations towards corrupt local officials, the abuse of power by those in authority, and the importance of friends and mentors over everyone else.
I think you can see where this is going: white people lead a pretty advantaged life, and because of that they have the luxury to spend more time worrying about big ticket issues that don't directly affect them personally. Black people, however, are hated in their own home, and so are focused on day to day survival in one of the most affluent countries on Earth. I think that it is this difference in life experiences that can account for the two groups's preferences in entertainment.
Just a thought.
Seriously, though, don't see The Man With the Iron Fists when Enter the Dragon is available on Netflix.
But more importantly, watching this movie got me thinking about something. Note that everything I'm about to talk about is based on anecdotal evidence and shouldn't be regarded as the sole truth, it's just based on something I've seen that I find interesting.
Fantasy appears to be a fairly white genre. White people watch it, white people act in it, and white people write it. Kung fu movies, on the other hand, tend to be bigger with the black demographic. I mean, even in blaxploitation films, the main characters tend to know some sort of martial art (see Dolemite or Black Dynamite). I started looking at it, and I think I see why.
Fantasy movies/TV shows tend to be about 2 things: 1) an evil king has taken over a good kingdom and the good people rise up and fight them or 2) an evil king rules over an evil nation that is at war with a good kingdom. These sorts of stories have themes of xenophobia, the good nature of people, the evils of totalitarian governments, and the power of the individual to change the whole world.
Kung fu movies, on the other hand, are more consistent in their setting than their stories. They tend to take place in small communities that are ruled by corrupt government officials or crime families. Even stories without the emphasis on community tend to focus on themes of crime, the apathy from national organizations towards corrupt local officials, the abuse of power by those in authority, and the importance of friends and mentors over everyone else.
I think you can see where this is going: white people lead a pretty advantaged life, and because of that they have the luxury to spend more time worrying about big ticket issues that don't directly affect them personally. Black people, however, are hated in their own home, and so are focused on day to day survival in one of the most affluent countries on Earth. I think that it is this difference in life experiences that can account for the two groups's preferences in entertainment.
Just a thought.
Seriously, though, don't see The Man With the Iron Fists when Enter the Dragon is available on Netflix.
Monday, October 29, 2012
Why the "It's Morally Right" Argument Doesn't Work, Particularly for Mormons
So, whenever I discuss politics, there is inevitably one person in the group who takes a moral stance, e.g. "I think X is wrong, therefore X should be illegal." It's annoying, and stupid, and also annoying. It's a bad argument in general. While it may have a deep seated place in your heart, just know that whenever you use this point in a debate, it holds the same water as "I like X, therefore X should be the norm," or "Steak tastes good, vegetarianism should be illegal." If you really think something is true morally, and your conviction is that strong, take your time to do your research and be able to explain why it's true or, more importantly, why everyone else should think the same way you do.
I, being Mormon, spend a lot of time with Mormons, and so this is who I tend to see making this mistake the most. For example, I get that as a Mormon you are against drugs and see smoking Maui Wowie as almost murder. I, as a Mormon, am against using drugs. But you can't say "drugs are bad" when a person discusses the positives of legalizing marijuana in the United States and act like that's a rebuttal to points about tax benefits, safety through regulation, and the collapse of drug cartels (if you want we can talk about this later, for now ignore the message and focus on the idea). And now I have the ultimate proof that Mormons can't use the "X is bad" argument in an un-ironic fashion.
"We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may."
The eleventh Article of Faith discusses that we worship according to our own conscience (according to what we believe) and that we allow all men the same privilege (to worship or believe according to their conscience). Therefore, if we say "X is morally wrong," we must admit that our opponent's argument, "X is morally right/X has no intrinsic moral value," is to be treated as as valid as our own.
This is not to support the idea of moral relativism, something I myself don't believe in. I believe that for every situation there is a category of "right" responses and a category of "wrong" responses (I say categories because I am in love with the "good, better, best" approach to morality-not all wrong things are equally wrong, and not all right things are equally right). But I am saying that in a situation where you are attempting to expand the influence of your beliefs beyond yourself (politics) you need to justify your opinion.
I am also not against people trying to influence others based on their beliefs. That's what politics is. We get this great uproar of "Don't shove your beliefs down my throat!" when we discuss issues such as sexuality and drug use, but no one seems to think the state is doing a bad job of shoving our beliefs about violence down the throats of murderers or our (markedly arbitrary) beliefs about the age that it's okay to start having sex down the throats of pedophiles. Society is a group of people coming together to create a compromise of beliefs among a group of people and then applying that compromise to everyone: it infringes upon the individual to create a better situation for the whole. But that's the kicker: compromise.
Don't come to me and expect me to compromise my beliefs unless you can prove why it's better for me or society as a whole. Let's see some evidence. Stop talking about the morality of policy decisions and let's start talking about the effects of policy decisions. Morally I've already decided what I'm doing ("As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord"), so if you want me to change you've got to approach from a new angle. Otherwise, you're casting your pearls before swine.
I, being Mormon, spend a lot of time with Mormons, and so this is who I tend to see making this mistake the most. For example, I get that as a Mormon you are against drugs and see smoking Maui Wowie as almost murder. I, as a Mormon, am against using drugs. But you can't say "drugs are bad" when a person discusses the positives of legalizing marijuana in the United States and act like that's a rebuttal to points about tax benefits, safety through regulation, and the collapse of drug cartels (if you want we can talk about this later, for now ignore the message and focus on the idea). And now I have the ultimate proof that Mormons can't use the "X is bad" argument in an un-ironic fashion.
"We claim the privilege of worshiping Almighty God according to the dictates of our own conscience, and allow all men the same privilege, let them worship how, where, or what they may."
The eleventh Article of Faith discusses that we worship according to our own conscience (according to what we believe) and that we allow all men the same privilege (to worship or believe according to their conscience). Therefore, if we say "X is morally wrong," we must admit that our opponent's argument, "X is morally right/X has no intrinsic moral value," is to be treated as as valid as our own.
This is not to support the idea of moral relativism, something I myself don't believe in. I believe that for every situation there is a category of "right" responses and a category of "wrong" responses (I say categories because I am in love with the "good, better, best" approach to morality-not all wrong things are equally wrong, and not all right things are equally right). But I am saying that in a situation where you are attempting to expand the influence of your beliefs beyond yourself (politics) you need to justify your opinion.
I am also not against people trying to influence others based on their beliefs. That's what politics is. We get this great uproar of "Don't shove your beliefs down my throat!" when we discuss issues such as sexuality and drug use, but no one seems to think the state is doing a bad job of shoving our beliefs about violence down the throats of murderers or our (markedly arbitrary) beliefs about the age that it's okay to start having sex down the throats of pedophiles. Society is a group of people coming together to create a compromise of beliefs among a group of people and then applying that compromise to everyone: it infringes upon the individual to create a better situation for the whole. But that's the kicker: compromise.
Don't come to me and expect me to compromise my beliefs unless you can prove why it's better for me or society as a whole. Let's see some evidence. Stop talking about the morality of policy decisions and let's start talking about the effects of policy decisions. Morally I've already decided what I'm doing ("As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord"), so if you want me to change you've got to approach from a new angle. Otherwise, you're casting your pearls before swine.
Sunday, October 28, 2012
In-N-Out
Alright, so I went and saw Cloud Atlas yesterday (and it was gooooood). As my roommate and I were driving home, the traffic was pretty bad, so I missed my turn. Because we were driving past, I had an inspiration.
"Let's stop at In-N-Out." So we did. And . . . I was underwhelmed. Don't get me wrong, it tasted good. But to explain why I wasn't impressed, let me explain my three-burger theory.
There are three ideal types of burger. There's the cheap burger. This burger has a thin patty that is usually a perfect geometric shape like a circle or a square. It comes with fries that are quarter inch on a side or less and are sometimes made of ground up and re-combined potatoes, not cut potatoes. The toppings are pretty standard: cheese, pickles, onions, lettuce. Nothing crazy. The second is the gourmet burger. This burger typically has a irregular and usually thicker burger, also can be pretty big circumference-wise. The fries are fresh cut and usually about a half-inch on the side. The burger has a host of possible toppings outside the "standard." The third is the homemade burger: there's no real consistency beyond made at home. The fries are either store-bought, really thick, or gross. Toppings tend to be standard, but people put some whack shiz on there, for real-real.
Alright, I told you that story so I could tell you this one: In-N-Out is probably the best cheap burger I've ever had. But my favorite kind of burger is not of the cheap type. After I was finished at In-N-Out, I was like: that was good. Now let's go get some real food. The fries: lackluster, at best. When your fries make me crave Mickey D, you've got problems. The shake? Standard. Not great, not terrible, just standard chocolate shake. And I mean, if you love cheap burgers, if Mickey D's is your bag, then you will love you some In-N-Out. I really don't.
You see, I prefer 5 Guys. I go there, I get a stacked burger, thick and tasty fries (and lots of them), and I leave full to bursting. Cheap burgers are all about the same. I know there's some quality difference between Burger King and In-N-Out, but I see the difference between Burger King and In-N-Out is smaller than the quality difference between 5 Guys and In-N-Out.
Sorry Californians. Happy reviews come from happy obese people, and happy obese people come out of 5 Guys.
"Let's stop at In-N-Out." So we did. And . . . I was underwhelmed. Don't get me wrong, it tasted good. But to explain why I wasn't impressed, let me explain my three-burger theory.
There are three ideal types of burger. There's the cheap burger. This burger has a thin patty that is usually a perfect geometric shape like a circle or a square. It comes with fries that are quarter inch on a side or less and are sometimes made of ground up and re-combined potatoes, not cut potatoes. The toppings are pretty standard: cheese, pickles, onions, lettuce. Nothing crazy. The second is the gourmet burger. This burger typically has a irregular and usually thicker burger, also can be pretty big circumference-wise. The fries are fresh cut and usually about a half-inch on the side. The burger has a host of possible toppings outside the "standard." The third is the homemade burger: there's no real consistency beyond made at home. The fries are either store-bought, really thick, or gross. Toppings tend to be standard, but people put some whack shiz on there, for real-real.
Alright, I told you that story so I could tell you this one: In-N-Out is probably the best cheap burger I've ever had. But my favorite kind of burger is not of the cheap type. After I was finished at In-N-Out, I was like: that was good. Now let's go get some real food. The fries: lackluster, at best. When your fries make me crave Mickey D, you've got problems. The shake? Standard. Not great, not terrible, just standard chocolate shake. And I mean, if you love cheap burgers, if Mickey D's is your bag, then you will love you some In-N-Out. I really don't.
You see, I prefer 5 Guys. I go there, I get a stacked burger, thick and tasty fries (and lots of them), and I leave full to bursting. Cheap burgers are all about the same. I know there's some quality difference between Burger King and In-N-Out, but I see the difference between Burger King and In-N-Out is smaller than the quality difference between 5 Guys and In-N-Out.
Sorry Californians. Happy reviews come from happy obese people, and happy obese people come out of 5 Guys.
Saturday, October 20, 2012
So, I ate at 5 Guys today.
Can I just say that this video should be canonized by every major religion due to its statement of eternal, divine truth?
Also, apparently some people (my roommate Dre) don't think it's okay to draw dirty pictures on those slips of paper they leave by the corkboard and then put them back for other people to find later.
Rude, or Why I Sometimes Feel Unbalanced
A note from the author: This post was not written in response to any recent fights/arguments I've had, but more as a response to the general feeling that in today's political and "popular academic" (i.e. when people talk about academic things in a non-peer reviewed venue) discourse we tend to crap on the opposition more than actually try to dissect their argument. Although I refer to people who've condescended to me, I'm referring mostly to the condescending tone of some of the material I read both on the Internet and in books.
I can be super rude. You don't even know. I can also be a tad bit violent (in middle school, a kid flipped me off and I beat him with an umbrella). I recognize that I am both of these things, but when I'm having a real argument with someone I try really hard to tone both of them back.
That isn't to say that I always hold back. One time I didn't like this kid's face so I unleashed the fury on him for about five minutes for saying "Superman is the best hero because he can do everything." I didn't even necessarily disagree with him all the way: I love Superman, and I think if done right he's not as OP as everyone says he is. I also compared a person's condescending attitude about homosexuals to racist people talking down about "uppity" black people, causing them to flee the room in anger and slam the door behind them. I am not always blameless.
But at the same time, when I 1. Respect the person I'm arguing with and 2. Think that the subject matter is worth discussing (note that I did not say relevant, important, or life-changing) I try my hardest not to be condescending or mean spirited, though I will admit to taking a few pot-shots here and there if the person really leaves themselves open. That's why it makes me particularly mad when someone is condescending to me in an argument: I see it as them either not respecting me or something I feel is important.
Now, I know, pot calling the kettle black. That's why I try to have a thick skin and ignore people who do it. I even try to internalize their trivialization of my stance/argument and see why they do it. When I see from another person's standpoint why my argument is so childish as to deserve condescension it makes me a better and more well rounded person. But at the same time, some people are just being mean and not considering fully arguments for the other side.
Take Richard Dawkins as an example. I love the guy: he's a genius, and I agree with a lot of what he says. Reading The God Delusion made me go, "Yeah, I don't believe in that God either. Let's critically and prayerfully re-examine my faith," and, while I don't recommend this to anyone else, it actually strengthened my testimony because I excised aspects of my belief that were cultural holdovers from Platonic and Renaissance thought and not "Truth," as it were. At the same time, he's a bit of a dick. When he discusses the Muslim riots over those Danish cartoons (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/04/muhammadcartoons.pressandpublishing) he says "Fortunately, our political leaders were on hand to remind us that Islam is a religion of peace and mercy," in a tone that I've really only ever heard from racist rednecks. It baffled me to find this sort of rhetoric here, in a supposedly academic treatise on religion. It also seemed kind of ballsy coming from a biologist, because if we looked at every extreme of a group as indicative of the whole, eugenicists would be a pretty good target to shoot at.
I don't get those people, and they kind of piss me off. I'm not used to being crapped on in conversation, mostly because I'm a big kid and I never really put up with it in the past. With a few exceptions (it's not worth ending friendships over a stupid fight) the last time a peer tried to treat me like I was an imbecile for disagreeing with them, I slapped the taste out of their mouths. I just feel like if you want to have a civil conversation, let's have a civil conversation. I don't care if you get heated, I don't even care if you get mad. I don't care if you attack me personally (though don't be surprised when I strike back and strike back hard: I tend to have very different ideas about what is underhanded in a verbal sparring match). As I said before, I don't even mind a few condescending jabs here or there because, really, sometimes an opponent's argument really does seem dumb. But if more than a quarter of your comments are simply condescending parries of an argument with no real attempt at rebuttal, you're not having a civil conversation.
And that's cool sometimes. Some of my favorite conversations have been those where I've torn down a person alongside their argument. But more than a few of those conversations have ended in violence or threats of violence, and again I'm cool with that; if you're going to be uncivil towards someone, don't forget that they tend to uncivil right back. I find it hypocritical how many people are uncivil, and then use the uncivil nature of their opponent's rejoinder as proof against them.
So just stop, okay? Or else I'm going to beat you to death.
I can be super rude. You don't even know. I can also be a tad bit violent (in middle school, a kid flipped me off and I beat him with an umbrella). I recognize that I am both of these things, but when I'm having a real argument with someone I try really hard to tone both of them back.
That isn't to say that I always hold back. One time I didn't like this kid's face so I unleashed the fury on him for about five minutes for saying "Superman is the best hero because he can do everything." I didn't even necessarily disagree with him all the way: I love Superman, and I think if done right he's not as OP as everyone says he is. I also compared a person's condescending attitude about homosexuals to racist people talking down about "uppity" black people, causing them to flee the room in anger and slam the door behind them. I am not always blameless.
But at the same time, when I 1. Respect the person I'm arguing with and 2. Think that the subject matter is worth discussing (note that I did not say relevant, important, or life-changing) I try my hardest not to be condescending or mean spirited, though I will admit to taking a few pot-shots here and there if the person really leaves themselves open. That's why it makes me particularly mad when someone is condescending to me in an argument: I see it as them either not respecting me or something I feel is important.
Now, I know, pot calling the kettle black. That's why I try to have a thick skin and ignore people who do it. I even try to internalize their trivialization of my stance/argument and see why they do it. When I see from another person's standpoint why my argument is so childish as to deserve condescension it makes me a better and more well rounded person. But at the same time, some people are just being mean and not considering fully arguments for the other side.
Take Richard Dawkins as an example. I love the guy: he's a genius, and I agree with a lot of what he says. Reading The God Delusion made me go, "Yeah, I don't believe in that God either. Let's critically and prayerfully re-examine my faith," and, while I don't recommend this to anyone else, it actually strengthened my testimony because I excised aspects of my belief that were cultural holdovers from Platonic and Renaissance thought and not "Truth," as it were. At the same time, he's a bit of a dick. When he discusses the Muslim riots over those Danish cartoons (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/04/muhammadcartoons.pressandpublishing) he says "Fortunately, our political leaders were on hand to remind us that Islam is a religion of peace and mercy," in a tone that I've really only ever heard from racist rednecks. It baffled me to find this sort of rhetoric here, in a supposedly academic treatise on religion. It also seemed kind of ballsy coming from a biologist, because if we looked at every extreme of a group as indicative of the whole, eugenicists would be a pretty good target to shoot at.
I don't get those people, and they kind of piss me off. I'm not used to being crapped on in conversation, mostly because I'm a big kid and I never really put up with it in the past. With a few exceptions (it's not worth ending friendships over a stupid fight) the last time a peer tried to treat me like I was an imbecile for disagreeing with them, I slapped the taste out of their mouths. I just feel like if you want to have a civil conversation, let's have a civil conversation. I don't care if you get heated, I don't even care if you get mad. I don't care if you attack me personally (though don't be surprised when I strike back and strike back hard: I tend to have very different ideas about what is underhanded in a verbal sparring match). As I said before, I don't even mind a few condescending jabs here or there because, really, sometimes an opponent's argument really does seem dumb. But if more than a quarter of your comments are simply condescending parries of an argument with no real attempt at rebuttal, you're not having a civil conversation.
And that's cool sometimes. Some of my favorite conversations have been those where I've torn down a person alongside their argument. But more than a few of those conversations have ended in violence or threats of violence, and again I'm cool with that; if you're going to be uncivil towards someone, don't forget that they tend to uncivil right back. I find it hypocritical how many people are uncivil, and then use the uncivil nature of their opponent's rejoinder as proof against them.
So just stop, okay? Or else I'm going to beat you to death.
Sunday, October 14, 2012
Whitewashing, and Why We Won't . . . Wake it anymore.
Two things: I'm not as good at alliteration as I thought. Two, I realized as soon as I posted my first post that Consuming Life is also the name of a Zygmunt Bauman book that is far more worthy of reading than this blog will ever be. Moving on.
So, I saw Argo this Saturday, and I was very impressed. Ben Affleck managed to make a film that is very topical. It is interesting to see a movie about the Iranian hostage crisis while we are on rocky diplomatic ground modern Iran; I also think that the storming of the U.S. Embassy in the movie is terrifying in light of the recent rash of attacks in the Middle East today. It sort of shows that while thirty years have passed, not much has changed. The film is very much a Lumiere-style film in that it attempts to capture the world as it was/is, and Affleck does a great job. The real news footage spliced in is a great device, and I wouldn't be surprised if Argo gets an Oscar nomination. At the end of the movie they even do a side-by-side comparisons of the cast of the movie and the actual people they're portraying, and they're more or less spot on.
With one exception. Ben Affleck. Great actor? Yes. Dreamboat? Objectively so. Latino? Nooo . . .
And yet he plays Tony Mendez, the main character of the movie. Let's go on a tangent with Moebius the Time Streamer. Before Batman: Dark Knight Rises came out, I was a little disappointed to find out that Bane, a Latino character (he's a luchador), was being played by Tom Hardy, who one might say is less than Latino (he's British, the opposite of Latino. If you touch a Latino and a Brit, I'm pretty sure they explode). I said I was disappointed that they were taking one of the few ethnic characters in Batman and making him white. People responded with "Well, Bane is the villain. Maybe they didn't want to cast a minority as a villain." Okay, well, I disagree, but that's a valid point.
Woooo! Back the the present. WHY ISN'T TONY MENDEZ BEING PLAYED BY SOMEONE OF CORRECT DESCENT? He's a hero, a super-intelligent man of mystery. One might be tempted to say that it's this new color-blind casting thing, but then why is everyone else in the film "ethnically correct"? When Louis C. K. cast a black woman as his wife and the mother of his two white children I was like, "Yeah, okay. That's fine." Why? Because Louis is a more Melies show. The purpose of the show is absurdity, not representing the world as it is, and Ben Affleck was definitely trying to portray the world as it is. Why then would every character except the main character be so spot on?
There's probably money behind it: would anyone see it without Ben Affleck's mug? It's certainly not because there's a dearth of Latino talent (though there are too few non-white actors appearing as main characters these days). Maybe Ben Affleck just really wanted the part because he idolizes Mr. Mendez. That's not the worst motivation in the world.
Argo is a great movie. If you're not a slave to MPAA ratings (the MPAA is the devil, don't let them censor your life!), see it. It really opened my eyes about Iran and U.S. relations, past and present. But you don't have to hate something to criticize it, and I wish that Mr. Affleck hadn't whitewashed the film.
Watch it.
Also, ate at Carl's Jr. after the movie, and while the teriyaki burger was nothing to write home about, the grilled cheese and bacon burger was good. Mhm.
So, I saw Argo this Saturday, and I was very impressed. Ben Affleck managed to make a film that is very topical. It is interesting to see a movie about the Iranian hostage crisis while we are on rocky diplomatic ground modern Iran; I also think that the storming of the U.S. Embassy in the movie is terrifying in light of the recent rash of attacks in the Middle East today. It sort of shows that while thirty years have passed, not much has changed. The film is very much a Lumiere-style film in that it attempts to capture the world as it was/is, and Affleck does a great job. The real news footage spliced in is a great device, and I wouldn't be surprised if Argo gets an Oscar nomination. At the end of the movie they even do a side-by-side comparisons of the cast of the movie and the actual people they're portraying, and they're more or less spot on.
With one exception. Ben Affleck. Great actor? Yes. Dreamboat? Objectively so. Latino? Nooo . . .
And yet he plays Tony Mendez, the main character of the movie. Let's go on a tangent with Moebius the Time Streamer. Before Batman: Dark Knight Rises came out, I was a little disappointed to find out that Bane, a Latino character (he's a luchador), was being played by Tom Hardy, who one might say is less than Latino (he's British, the opposite of Latino. If you touch a Latino and a Brit, I'm pretty sure they explode). I said I was disappointed that they were taking one of the few ethnic characters in Batman and making him white. People responded with "Well, Bane is the villain. Maybe they didn't want to cast a minority as a villain." Okay, well, I disagree, but that's a valid point.
Woooo! Back the the present. WHY ISN'T TONY MENDEZ BEING PLAYED BY SOMEONE OF CORRECT DESCENT? He's a hero, a super-intelligent man of mystery. One might be tempted to say that it's this new color-blind casting thing, but then why is everyone else in the film "ethnically correct"? When Louis C. K. cast a black woman as his wife and the mother of his two white children I was like, "Yeah, okay. That's fine." Why? Because Louis is a more Melies show. The purpose of the show is absurdity, not representing the world as it is, and Ben Affleck was definitely trying to portray the world as it is. Why then would every character except the main character be so spot on?
There's probably money behind it: would anyone see it without Ben Affleck's mug? It's certainly not because there's a dearth of Latino talent (though there are too few non-white actors appearing as main characters these days). Maybe Ben Affleck just really wanted the part because he idolizes Mr. Mendez. That's not the worst motivation in the world.
Argo is a great movie. If you're not a slave to MPAA ratings (the MPAA is the devil, don't let them censor your life!), see it. It really opened my eyes about Iran and U.S. relations, past and present. But you don't have to hate something to criticize it, and I wish that Mr. Affleck hadn't whitewashed the film.
Watch it.
Also, ate at Carl's Jr. after the movie, and while the teriyaki burger was nothing to write home about, the grilled cheese and bacon burger was good. Mhm.
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Letter of Intent
Oh good. Another blog. I need another one of these like the Internet needs another . . . blog? Damn. Analogies are hard. I need another blog like I need a . . .
You know what, let's shelve that topic for now. This is my new blog.
Yay!
I have never had a personal blog (my other blogs were about my tabletop RPG stylings and reviewing old pop culture) so I figured I'd try it out. That probably means I will make this post and 3 others before never ever posting again, but screw it, here I go again. Why the name? I consume things. If I like something, I wolf down as much as I can get: Good TV show on Netflix? Better spend the next 5 hours watching it. That slice of pizza tasted good? The whole thing is probably better. Philip K. Dick books are on sale? Let's buy 15 instead of just one or two.
It's an issue.
But now you can share the journey with me! I'm going to spout some hot stuff sometimes, and other times I'm just going to brain dump. Won't you share it with me? No? Okay. Have fun on YouTube. I recommend cat videos.
You know what, let's shelve that topic for now. This is my new blog.
Yay!
I have never had a personal blog (my other blogs were about my tabletop RPG stylings and reviewing old pop culture) so I figured I'd try it out. That probably means I will make this post and 3 others before never ever posting again, but screw it, here I go again. Why the name? I consume things. If I like something, I wolf down as much as I can get: Good TV show on Netflix? Better spend the next 5 hours watching it. That slice of pizza tasted good? The whole thing is probably better. Philip K. Dick books are on sale? Let's buy 15 instead of just one or two.
It's an issue.
But now you can share the journey with me! I'm going to spout some hot stuff sometimes, and other times I'm just going to brain dump. Won't you share it with me? No? Okay. Have fun on YouTube. I recommend cat videos.
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