So everybody should go see Rogue One. Maybe twice.
Why? Some Trump supporters are calling for a boycott. The guy who started calling for this boycott also helped circulate the lies about the pizza place that got attacked in DC. I refuse to call that incident "Pizzagate."
Since his followers are going to make an enemy of Disney, which remember, owns LucasFilm and Marvel, you should also go see Dr. Strange and Moana. If you already have, go again.
But since a pack of racist, misogynist idiots already killed another movie this year, I'm going to tell all those bros out there three reasons why the new Ghostbusters is objectively better than classic.
1. All the Busters are Together by the End of Act One
I don't know about you, but I think Ernie Hudson is kind of awesome. And it kind of sucks that he doesn't get any screen time in that movie until nearly the end of act two. Especially since he has one of the funniest lines in the movie (at 1:50). Even in the abomination that is Ghostbusters 2, where he is introduced in the opening 15 minutes, he still gets markedly less screen time than his white team mates. The big conclusion of act one in that movie still just features Ramis, Aykroyd, and Murray busting ghosts.
It does kind of suck that the equally awesome Leslie Jones is introduced last, but once introduced she has more or less equal screen time. Most importantly, she's with them during the big ghostbust that concludes the first act. Where she gets one of the funniest lines (I know the video is terrible quality, but it's the only one I could find) in the movie! Overall, it leads to a much more satisfying final battle. The sense that these four women are a team is much more palpable.
2. We Actually Get to See Them Building and Testing Their Tech
I know the training montage gets a bad rap, but sometimes you just need it. The original has a one and done scene of Ray taking out another mortgage to fund the new business, followed by a brief moment where they do allude to being almost out of cash. Seconds before their first call comes in, and Venkman manages to con the hotel owner out of an outrageous fee because, at this point, our intrepid underdogs hold a monopoly. And during that first act concluding first case, they joke about the untested, unlicensed nuclear accelerators on their backs. You know the very thing the EPA is supposed to investigate!
But instead of those proton packs just appearing between scenes along with the guys somehow able to use them without training, we see Holtzmann doing her mad scientist thing along with interspersed scenes of them trying, and often hilariously failing, to use their gadgets. The heroes to zeroes thus seems like an active effort as opposed to a moment of pure luck.
3. It Actually has a Feminist Theme
Seriously, just read this article. Notice how every single entry on it is "Women want to be believed..." It's no accident that while skepticism about the paranormal is given lip service in the original, it doesn't really hinder the Ghostbusters.
But in the new one, every step of the way the team is hounded by skeptics and hostile unbelievers. Including Tywin Lannister just doing his best being a condescending jerk. Later, we have the most epic middle-finger giving ever captured on camera. Not to mention Bill Murray's cameo as being, well, just the opposite of Venkman, really.
Next, when the government does show up towards the end of the second act, they don't want to shut down the business: they want the girls to start working for them, but as part and parcel they need to recant their statements and start covering up evidence of the paranormal. You know. Lie. And, of course, the ending is the desperate cover-up that isn't working while New York declares it's love for the city's saviors.
Tuesday, December 13, 2016
Friday, December 9, 2016
Concern and Hope
Kyla brought my attention to this.
But earlier that same day, I read this.
What to watch out for, and a blueprint of how to fight it.
Also, keep an eye on this. Scary stuff. All you old Cold Warriors out there ought to be really concerned that the guy about to go into office (and I'm guessing more than some of you voted for) owes his position to Russia and an ex-KGB like Putin.
Lastly, I should clarify that I have disdain for mainstream news sources myself. Most of my adult life I've gotten my news from an optimistically angry super Jew, a man who built a career off of satirizing Bill O'Reilly, a wildly gesticulating British man, and a website specializing in penis jokes. So glass houses, thrown stones, and all that.
But, I am getting better. I first learned about Carrier from a piece in the Sierra Vista Herald. Read me, but support your local papers, readers! They'll be needing it more than ever.
But earlier that same day, I read this.
What to watch out for, and a blueprint of how to fight it.
Also, keep an eye on this. Scary stuff. All you old Cold Warriors out there ought to be really concerned that the guy about to go into office (and I'm guessing more than some of you voted for) owes his position to Russia and an ex-KGB like Putin.
Lastly, I should clarify that I have disdain for mainstream news sources myself. Most of my adult life I've gotten my news from an optimistically angry super Jew, a man who built a career off of satirizing Bill O'Reilly, a wildly gesticulating British man, and a website specializing in penis jokes. So glass houses, thrown stones, and all that.
But, I am getting better. I first learned about Carrier from a piece in the Sierra Vista Herald. Read me, but support your local papers, readers! They'll be needing it more than ever.
Thursday, December 8, 2016
The Culpability of the Media, a Personal Experience
The news isn't getting much better. Except that Trump seems like he doesn't really understand what being POTUS actually entails. And that he seems obsessed with making sure he can do as much of it as possible from Trump Tower in NYC. People in rural communities: you just voted for a jackass who would literally rather spend his time in that bastion of "the wicked city," than doing his job properly.
But I'm going to talk about something different. There's been a lot of bandying about the culpability of the media, and it's failure to properly educate the American public about just what kind of person they would be voting for. People also blame the way news is delivered on the Internet so that it creates an echo-chamber where we only see opinions we agree with.
Kyla showed me this: Edward R. Murrow warning of the dangers of radio and television news as a commercial and entertainment vector rather than an informative one. Some 20 years later, a film called Network would make a similar argument through cynical fiction. People forgot about it thanks to the Truman Show, but in high school I watched a film called EdTV, predicting how the constant surveillance of a reality show could ruin an ordinary person's life. And reality TV is the reason the POTUS elect was a household name.
I got to be on TV once. So far, all I've managed to find on the internet is a reference to the segment in this book. So, I'll tell you the full story from my perspective.
I have depression, and I sought it counseling for it at various times through out my life. I first sought it in high school, and my psychologist at the time called me one evening to let me know that ABC's News Magazine program 20/20 was doing a report on kids with mental illness and/or a history of bullying were able to overcome their problems. He wanted my permission to refer them to me as a possible subject because I was one of his most normal patients.
So a producer contacted me and met me for a series of interviews over the next several months. It eventually emerged that I was just going to be one subject for this segment; I was going to be the star. I'll admit it, my teenage-soaked brain was overwhelmed, and I felt pretty good.
That fall, they took some footage of me playing video games at home, walking in my school's hallway, and even acting in the school's fall play that year. Then, one night, after our dress rehearsal, I got to be interviewed by Chris Wallace. I'll admit, he was a charming enough man in person. Mostly, I remember eating mediocre room service and falling asleep on the couch in the hotel suite the producer had rented.
Everything wrapped and the producer let us know to wait a while. It ended up airing February 9, 2000. It was entitled Boy on the Brink. About an hour or two of interview time with me, a similar amount of time with my dad, the vice principal of my school, and some random kid that lived down the street from me was edited down to the worst and least flattering picture 20 minutes could paint. In short, it made it look like I was going to be the next Columbine shooter and that our school was just crawling with them.
There was a small, mostly local, outcry that lasted a few weeks afterward. It died down. No permanent damage was done to my reputation, my dad's, that kids, or that schools. So that's why we never sued for slander.
Why is this a big deal? There was a Simpsons episode that aired in 1994 that showed the same thing being done to Homer and played for laughs. People barely remember the outcry from Bill O'Reilly and other reporters lying about wartime correspondence. I guarantee by next week, people will forget how one meme made a brilliant, hilarious news commentator look like a jackass and a tragically stupid person look tragically stupid in the wrong way. Hell, I probably have to remind some of you that are old hats at internet about that time a writer for a website outed Stephen Glass.
It's the Broken Window Effect, but for journalism. We accept the little lies and half-truths and they snowball into bigger lies and half-truths. Even the truly colossal ones we'll rant about for 15 minutes, then everything goes back to business as usual.
No wonder conservatives have been so eager to believe absolute bullshit for decades. They see the small mistakes and the slaps on the wrist and nothing being done, so they assume the worst. Gee, kind of like police forces circling their wagons around their worst officers and how that angries up the blood of liberals, who sometimes also believe stupid things.
We have some hope. The Internet is finally taking some responsibility as a news source, in ways that even TV seems to have ignored. Google, Reddit, and Facebook are cracking down on abusive users and fake news.
Also, since I always like to remind those rural poor how truly conned you were, I've been keeping an eye on this Carrier Factory nonsense.
But I'm going to talk about something different. There's been a lot of bandying about the culpability of the media, and it's failure to properly educate the American public about just what kind of person they would be voting for. People also blame the way news is delivered on the Internet so that it creates an echo-chamber where we only see opinions we agree with.
Kyla showed me this: Edward R. Murrow warning of the dangers of radio and television news as a commercial and entertainment vector rather than an informative one. Some 20 years later, a film called Network would make a similar argument through cynical fiction. People forgot about it thanks to the Truman Show, but in high school I watched a film called EdTV, predicting how the constant surveillance of a reality show could ruin an ordinary person's life. And reality TV is the reason the POTUS elect was a household name.
I got to be on TV once. So far, all I've managed to find on the internet is a reference to the segment in this book. So, I'll tell you the full story from my perspective.
I have depression, and I sought it counseling for it at various times through out my life. I first sought it in high school, and my psychologist at the time called me one evening to let me know that ABC's News Magazine program 20/20 was doing a report on kids with mental illness and/or a history of bullying were able to overcome their problems. He wanted my permission to refer them to me as a possible subject because I was one of his most normal patients.
So a producer contacted me and met me for a series of interviews over the next several months. It eventually emerged that I was just going to be one subject for this segment; I was going to be the star. I'll admit it, my teenage-soaked brain was overwhelmed, and I felt pretty good.
That fall, they took some footage of me playing video games at home, walking in my school's hallway, and even acting in the school's fall play that year. Then, one night, after our dress rehearsal, I got to be interviewed by Chris Wallace. I'll admit, he was a charming enough man in person. Mostly, I remember eating mediocre room service and falling asleep on the couch in the hotel suite the producer had rented.
Everything wrapped and the producer let us know to wait a while. It ended up airing February 9, 2000. It was entitled Boy on the Brink. About an hour or two of interview time with me, a similar amount of time with my dad, the vice principal of my school, and some random kid that lived down the street from me was edited down to the worst and least flattering picture 20 minutes could paint. In short, it made it look like I was going to be the next Columbine shooter and that our school was just crawling with them.
There was a small, mostly local, outcry that lasted a few weeks afterward. It died down. No permanent damage was done to my reputation, my dad's, that kids, or that schools. So that's why we never sued for slander.
Why is this a big deal? There was a Simpsons episode that aired in 1994 that showed the same thing being done to Homer and played for laughs. People barely remember the outcry from Bill O'Reilly and other reporters lying about wartime correspondence. I guarantee by next week, people will forget how one meme made a brilliant, hilarious news commentator look like a jackass and a tragically stupid person look tragically stupid in the wrong way. Hell, I probably have to remind some of you that are old hats at internet about that time a writer for a website outed Stephen Glass.
It's the Broken Window Effect, but for journalism. We accept the little lies and half-truths and they snowball into bigger lies and half-truths. Even the truly colossal ones we'll rant about for 15 minutes, then everything goes back to business as usual.
No wonder conservatives have been so eager to believe absolute bullshit for decades. They see the small mistakes and the slaps on the wrist and nothing being done, so they assume the worst. Gee, kind of like police forces circling their wagons around their worst officers and how that angries up the blood of liberals, who sometimes also believe stupid things.
We have some hope. The Internet is finally taking some responsibility as a news source, in ways that even TV seems to have ignored. Google, Reddit, and Facebook are cracking down on abusive users and fake news.
Also, since I always like to remind those rural poor how truly conned you were, I've been keeping an eye on this Carrier Factory nonsense.
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