Tag: movies

An impossible conundrum

It’s rather remarkable that in this long article about female fans doing to the new Star Wars what female fans always do – which is turn literally everything into sordid romance – that the author can’t possibly figure out why nearly all of them are intent on putting Rey together with Kylo rather than with the nominal hero of the piece:

In those days, as now, fan-fiction was a hobby largely undertaken by women; though solid data is sparse, most of it shows cisgender men in the minority by a wide margin. There’s no single agreed upon answer to the question of why this is, but one common explanation cites the desire to create narratives outside the male perspective that has historically ruled the entertainment world. Interviewed by Fangirl Chat in 2014, Maggie Nowakowska, a prominent member of the early Star Wars zine scene, recalled that this was an explicit goal of hers: “We wanted to make sure we got some female Jedi in there because we were afraid the boys would get on it first and the next thing you’d know women were never Jedi.”

Not all fan fiction centers on romance, but a good portion of it does. In many fandoms (The Force Awakens included), “slash” stories about men getting with men tend to be very popular: perhaps for some of the same reasons lesbian porn is popular among straight men, or because pop culture generally tends to create more (and more fleshed-out) male characters than female ones, or because media has historically lacked for queer love stories. Even when the subject of a story is a heterosexual relationship between leading characters, foregrounding romance can be a transgressive move depending on the source material. At one point in the ’80s, Lucasfilm broke with a policy of mostly ignoring fan fiction by sending publishers warning letters because of a story that featured love scenes between Han and Leia….

 “There’s a curve as to which ships are the most popular and which are the least. That Reylo is bigger than Finn and Rey is surprising to me.”

It’s true: Stories by fans about The Force Awakens’s two lead heroes falling in love are far outnumbered by ones about the movie’s heroine and its village-slaughtering villain doing so. One common explanation for this says that Rey and Kylo are simply the most fascinating people on screen. J.J. Abrams has talked about his philosophy of movies being “mystery boxes,” and certainly both of these characters, with Rey’s unexplained backstory and Kylo’s hazy motivations, fit that description.

There’s also a level of moral unsettledness that make them stand out. Kylo is visibly tempted to turn back to good; Rey has more pressing concerns than the fate of the galaxy. Ricca explained it to me in terms of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Rey’s focused on the bottom, on survival, while Kylo highmindedly obsesses over being the best Dark Sider he can be. “Having the two meet as equals is bizarre, and hints a lot of things,” Ricca said. “Some of those things are explored in Interstellar Transmissions, and a lot of them aren’t, because there’s so much potential.”

The problematic fact that they are attempting to avoid mentioning is that Finn is black. The reason so little fan fiction is written about Finn and Rey is because, despite being under constant barrage by Hollywood and the advertising industry pushing miscegenated propaganda, the vast majority of white women simply don’t find black men to be as attractive as white men. Like calls to like, as it has always done and as it always will do.

However, the article does indicate the primary problem with science fiction and fantasy today. Most of it simply isn’t genuine science fiction and fantasy, it’s merely professional fan fiction.

When Man forgets his Creator

He forgets how to create. Once you read this, you will know why John C. Wright’s review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens was the only one I was actually interested in reading. One should not read this being wary of spoilers, but rather of having one’s ability to mindlessly enjoy the cultural detritus of Western decline irretrievably hampered. As always, Mr. Wright cuts to the chase by stating an obvious fact that has nevertheless escaped most of the movie’s critics and fans alike:

How can this movie both at once be a really enjoyable return to a beloved childhood favorite, and be a bland and dull, and in places offensively stupid and politically correct, piece of trash?

Because it is a remake, not a sequel.

Oh, I know that technically it is a sequel, allegedly taking place decades after the close of TEDDY BEARS OF THE JEDI, but the story follows the same plotline, except that the roles of Han, Luke and Leia are all played by Junkyard Girl, since she is the cynical rogue, the innocent novice, and the girl with the McGuffin needing rescue all at once. Except she escapes on her own. The rollerball robot is not as cute and sassy as R2D2, because he is not given as much to do, and the Exhenchman and the Ace Pilot don’t actually do all that much.

There is a way cool scene when the X-wings come screaming across the lake to the rescue. The hollow star-eating weapon-planet with forests and snowy mountains and atmosphere above its hull was a convincingly impressive weapon, but, again, there was no moment where the impressiveness was played up, no moment when someone whispered, that’s no moon…

So it is a fairly good remake as remakes go, and it does what it sets out to do, and recapture some, or almost some, of the energy, cleverness, craft, excitement and innocence of the original.

So why is this not the review I wanted to write, with me dancing jigs on the steeple, painted with woad with bells on my toes, yodeling for joy? Because the jerkwads of Hollywood had to take a favorite movie and crap it up with political correctness. Because this film is critic-proof. No matter how bad it is, everyone and his brother will go see it.

And the political correctness is subtle. It has to be subtle, because if the poison tasted of poison, the victim would spit it out: so it is sugar coated to go down easy. Do you think controlling the myths and dreams of a generation has no effect on the generation? Story tellers are the secret legislators of mankind.

The scene where Luke tosses his lightsaber away rather than using it in righteous wrath to smite the evil Emperor may have only been a scene in a kid’s space opera flick: but the majority of the American public regards exactly that same maneuver, preemptive self-disarmament,  as the only moral and right thing to do in the face of the appalling evils of our present war, a war they dare not admit exist, lest they feel a split second of anger, and like a lightswitch being flipped, turn entirely evil themselves. That is what they think will happen if we fight back. If you smite a Sith, you become a Sith.

Why can’t the modern Leftist tell a decent story? Even when he is copying a good and healthy-minded original scene by scene in a paint-by-numbers fashion, it turns out sick-minded.

The answer is ultimately where all ultimate answers reside, in the deep places of the soul.

When we forget God, we forget how to tell tales. I submit that when a man forgets his Creator, he forgets how to create.

It is rather remarkable, when you think about it. Abrams is no different than Brooks is no different than Scalzi. They are not only “creators” who cannot create, they are parasites who, regardless of their technical skills, cannot even successfully execute a paint-by-the-numbers imitation. Like a colorblind painter, their moral blindness renders them fundamentally incapable of utilizing a full moral palette.

This is, I think, the best realistic outcome for Star Wars fans, and one that is pretty close to what I assumed would be the case. Abrams is a technically competent remaker, and he was never likely to resist the conventional SJWisms. Better a competent and mildly poisonous remake than an incompetent or virulently poisonous one, but all the same, it is a remake, not a genuinely new story.

For that, you’ll have to turn to the Expanded Universe, or, later next year, to an entirely different science fiction universe entitled Faraway Wars: Embers of Empire.

Merry Christmas….

The true lesson of Star Wars

Markku helpfully summarizes the Star Wars Saga:

The plot so far:
-Empire builds a Death Star
-Empire builds a bigger Death Star
And now… Wait for it…
-Empire builds EVEN bigger Death Star

And
the movie knows how silly this is. When the rebels hear, they basically
go “Oh come on, not this shit again? *sigh* Ooooh-kay. Where’s the
shield generators? There. Where’s the weak spot? There. Ok, guys, let’s
go blow this up.

Now, it’s really nice that the movie is
forthright about how much the central plot element sucks, but I wonder
if the alternative occurred to anyone, to make it NOT suck and not have
to apologize for it.

That’s the real weakness of the movie.

The third one burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one will stay up! And that’s the true lesson of Star Wars, kids, just keep building bigger and better Death Stars until one finally survives the arduous construction and beta testing process and you rule the galaxy.

Settle down, ladies

La, such a catfight! It’s always a bit amusing to see when a disagreement here moves to rhetorical metargument, where instead of arguing about the actual point of disputation, the argument is transformed into who can generate more feelbads in the other side.

It is readily apparent that “you’re arguing like an SJW” has become the new “that’s a logical fallacy”, pseudo-dialectic that is both rhetorical and ineptly applied. It’s not quite as irritating, of course, as SJW is a more recent and less perfectly defined term; it used to make my teeth itch to see people use “logical fallacy” as a synonym for “statement with which I disagree”.

I stomped that inept rhetorical device out by the simple tactic of always asking the individual a single question: what was the logical fallacy? Was it the Undistributed Middle? Denying the Antecedent? Ignoratio elenchi? The fact that they could neither identify nor even describe the “fallacy” they had decried usually sufficed to teach them their error in a sufficiently embarrassing way to prevent them from again resorting to the rhetorical tactic.

Now, who is “arguing like an SJW?” Neither “the new Star Wars is a great movie everyone should see” nor “the new SJW Wars sucks and I wish I hadn’t seen it” crowd has, as far as I can tell, lied. Neither side has decried the other’s right to hold its opinion, or made any attempt to shun, discredit, or disemploy the other. Neither side has attempted to claim that the other side is intrinsically immoral, racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, or bigoted.

Both sides have indulged heavily in rhetoric, but while SJWs are limited to rhetorical communication, so are most non-SJWs.

So, it’s simply not true that anyone is “arguing like an SJW”. And the fact that someone could imagine the other side doing so is not reflective of anything but the individual’s own imagination. I could imagine that JJ Abrams might one day make a movie that I want to see, but that does not indicate that he has actually done so, or that he will do so in the future.

I knew I wouldn’t bother seeing the Disney movies as soon as I learned he was the director. Mr. Abrams has had a long, distinguished, and successful career in Hollywood, during which he has not made a single movie or television show that interested or entertained me in the slightest. Considering that I saw one of his Star Trek movies when it was on TV one night, I was not surprised to learn that he has delivered what is essentially an repetitive remake of one of its predecessors. He may be a master of lens flare, what he is is not is an original story teller.

And to turn the old saying on its head, while history rhymes, it does not repeat. The absurdity of what Abrams has produced, from a story perspective, can perhaps be best understood if one applied his storytelling technique to a hypothetical remake of Lord of the Rings.

Imagine the Shire. Imagine a party, not a birthday party, but a 50th wedding anniversary for Sam and Rosie Gamgee. In the midst of the party, they disappear, and leave behind them a mysterious piece of jewelry for their daughter, Frodette Gamgee. Then, one day, a grey-bearded, dark-skinned stranger appears; it is Gandhi the black dwarf, warning Frodette that it is a shard of Morgoth Bauglir’s iron crown, in which the fallen Ainur had imbued with his immortal essence. The shard had escaped notice in the War for the Ring, but now that Sauron and the One Ring are gone, it is the key to ruling Middle Earth.

A new power, an evil power, an invisible power has risen in the East, and the King of Gondor, Aragorn’s son Sarugorn, has been acting strangely of late. Frodette must bring the iron shard to Aglarond, where the King of the Glittering Caves will know what do… but beware, the Knight Riders of the Invisible Empire are hunting for it!

Personally, the only movie review in which I am genuinely interested in is Mr. John C. Wright’s. Those who have read Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth
 will understand why.

The Farce Awakens

A reader posts a scathing review of the new SJW Wars episode at Alpha Game:

You’ll be glad you didn’t see Star Wars VII: The Farce Awakens. The glaring questions it begs are projections of the female imperative. Darth Vader, Luke, Kylo Ren, Obi Wan Kenobi, and all other force using experts in any previous Star Wars story, needed training based on years of apprenticeship with a 24/7 mentor to master the force. The entire premise of Jedi powers, like all martial skills, is that they must being “learned” and they develop over time with practice. Our heroine Rey, hinted heavily as being Luke’s daughter, instantly and without training or foreknowledge gets abilities with the force that took all other Jedi, Sith, decades to develop. So with no Jedi’s around, how does she even know the force can control weak-minded storm troopers, much less use the old “you don’t need to see his papers” shtick.

There is more, and none of it is good. The usual spoiler warnings apply, although the review doesn’t so much contain spoilers as it calls into question the core conceit of the film.

It occurs to me that there is probably a market for books, and even films, that “continue” the story of SJW-infested properties in a traditionalist manner. What should the Star Wars prequels have looked like? How should the post-Jedi story actually proceeded?

I shall have to think on this further… about Star Lords battling for power in a galaxy far, far away.

The evil of the Rebel Alliance

Or, as Milo calls it, Space ISIS:

There’s so much wrong with Star Wars that it deserves a book-length treatise to cover properly. After all, the famous Red Letter Media takedown of The Phantom Menace is longer than the film itself. For that reason I will focus on three of the worst mischaracterisations: the Rebel Alliance as good guys, the tragically misunderstood Jabba the Hutt, and Palpatine’s supposedly evil Empire.

This is going to upset some diehard fans, but who do you trust more? Milo, who always tells you the truth while being witty, charming, handsome and having great hair, or the filmmakers who tried to tell you that Jar Jar Binks is a hero?

THE REBEL ALLIANCE
The Alliance is a ragtag band of fighters from many different cultures bonded together by a hatred of the Empire, fighting an asymmetric war resulting in massive collateral damage and loss of civilian life. They take their lead from mystics hiding in caves and swamps, and want to return the galaxy to a primitive religion that hasn’t changed for 600 years. That’s right nerds: the Rebel Alliance is ISIS.

The Jedi are a typical wishy-washy Mother Gaia-style progressive cult. Their most obvious failing is not using the real Force powers. Force lightning is actually quite humane; it’s like hitting a bad guy with a taser instead of cutting him in half with a lightsabre.

Same thing with force choke: do we really need to shoot a criminal resisting the will of the Emperor? Why not subdue him with a choke–or the term we use in the Sith community, enhanced persuasion techniques? Besides, in the far-flung future of Star Wars, SJWs have ensured force-sensitive individuals get affirmative consent every 10 seconds while using their powers so there’s really no big deal.

The Jedi are sick bastards. They use the Force to cloud the minds of others. The movies show this being done to stormtroopers, but you just know Luke uses it on dates at the cantina.

You can argue about the details. But the core thesis that the Star Wars film franchise is garbage? As much as it pains me, a former fan who once successfully collected the entire blue-card set, who saw the original film seven times in the theater as a child, to say it, he’s right.

You see, I saw The Phantom Menace. “Garbage” is too kind.

Professional note: Milo is a master, no, he is THE master of social media PR. This is perhaps the most epic large-scale trolling in the history of social media. You can’t imitate him. Unlike Mike, you can’t even learn anything from him; it would be like trying to take lifestyle advice from an exploding supernova or trying to pick up a few composition tips from Mozart.

Sorry, make that Wagner. As we are reliably informed, Mozart, too, is garbage.

Sometimes, all you can do is sit back and admire the incandescent artistry.

Star Wars justice convergence

The LucasFilm president explains her vision for Star Wars:

They are really, really making a huge effort across the company to put more focus around casting women and putting women in positions of responsibility, with directing and various other positions inside, different lines of business in the company. It’s not just about casting female protagonists. It’s gotta be across the board throughout the industry.

I think Hasbro, who’s making toys for a while, they were perhaps a little reluctant to move too quickly with something that’s been such a successful boys line. I think they’re recognizing that selling to girls is just as effective as selling to boys. More and more the lines are being blurred as to deciding ahead of time that some things are for boys and some things are for girls. I think that’s a big part of the conversation. It’s all of these areas that are contributing to change really happening.

Over the last several years that I’ve been in the business it seems to me that this has been a topic of conversation every few years. Then everybody thinks it’s a trend or that it’s a significant change. And then it doesn’t really move the needle. I think that’s — hopefully— what’s going to begin to happen now. It’s going to be real change. And not just perceived change.

Among those “real changes” are going to be declining sales, frantic PR spin to explain away the declining sales, and eventually some bitter diatribes about how the market is not worthy of their brilliant, progressive, and socially just products.

It’s at times like these that I am very, very happy that I was able to convince myself that Star Wars ended with The Empire Strikes Back. (I put Return of the Jedi in the same category as The Star Wars Christmas Special, which I also saw and was rather confused by, what with the Wookies living in trees and all. In retrospect, that should have been our first sign that George Lucas just go lucky, he didn’t actually know what he was doing.) I did give the Phantom Menace a go on opening night; I remember how we all felt almost as if we’d gone back in time, we were so excited that the future we’d imagined when we were kids was actually upon us!

And then, after about five minutes, we all realized that our imaginations were now rather preferable to George Lucas’s. I walked out of there and never again gave any subsequent Star Wars-named product another thought.

Anyhow, as Jeffro observes, this is classic SJW entryism at work. They’re essentially cargo cultists, they have no understanding of what made Star Wars valuable in the first place, and so they will further destroy what has already gone far, far past tragedy and is now well into self-parody.

Easton Ellis on Foster Wallace

Brett Easton Ellis kind of likes the movie about David Foster Wallace, he just doesn’t recognize the character in the movie:

For many of us who couldn’t get through the David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest
(and tried a few times), and found the journalism bloated and minor-key
condescending and thought the puling Kenyon commencement speech was
pure BS, and resisted the coronation of Wallace since his suicide in
2008 as St. David, based on a particular and very American brand of
sentimental narrative, the new film about Wallace, The End of the Tour, is surprisingly easy to take even though it’s reverential to a fault….

Wallace is presented as a guy who was just too sensitive for this world —
and that strikes a certain emotional chord, especially with younger
viewers and actors. The movie portrays Wallace as an angelic Pop
Tart-sharing schlub, a lovable populist, a tortured everyman and
ex-addict who loves dogs, loves kids, loves McDonalds, exudes “realness”
and “humanity,” and the movie completely ignores referencing the other
Wallace: the contemptuous man, the sometime-contrarian, the asshole with
an abusive side, the cruel critic — all the things some of us find
interesting about him. This is the movie that prefers the Wallace who
was knighted into sainthood with his Kenyon commencement speech called —
deep breath — “This Is Water: Some Thoughts Delivered on a Significant
Occasion About Living a Compassionate Life,” which even his staunchest
defenders and former editors have a hard time stomaching, arguing it’s
the worst thing he ever wrote, but which became a viral sensation as
well as a soggy self-help guide for lost souls.

And the David in this movie is the voice of reason, a sage, and the movie succumbs to the cult of stressing likability. But the real David scolded people and probably craved fame — what writer isn’t both suspicious of literary fame and yet curious in seeing how that game is played out? It’s not that rare and — hey — it sells books. He was cranky and could be very mean and caustic and opportunistic, but this David Foster Wallace is completely erased.

I never bought into the cult of DFW. Unlike Ellis, I actually read Infinite Jest, and it struck me as one part genuine literary talent, one part imitation Irving, two parts literary posturing, and three parts unrealized ambition. He was hailed as great when he did nothing more than show potential, and I suspect that had more than a little to do with his self-inflicted demise.

Media as weapon

We’ve certainly seen this with both #GamerGate and Sad Puppies. But given how resorting to it has failed against us, I very much doubt it will work against Google.

If you talk to the reporters who work for various big media companies, they insist that they have true editorial independence from the business side of their companies. They insist that the news coverage isn’t designed to reflect the business interests of their owners. Of course, most people have always suspected this was bullshit — and you could see evidence of this in things like the fact that the big TV networks refused to cover the SOPA protests. But — until now — there’s never necessarily been a smoking gun with evidence of how such business interests influences the editorial side.

Earlier this month, we noted that the Hollywood studios were all resisting subpoenas from Google concerning their super cozy relationship with Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, whose highly questionable “investigation” of Google appeared to actually be run by the MPAA and the studios themselves. The entire “investigation” seemed to clearly be an attempt to mislead the public into believing that it was somehow illegal for Google’s search engine to find stuff that people didn’t like online. A court has already ruled that Hood pretty clearly acted in bad faith to deprive Google of its First Amendment rights. As the case has continued, Google has sought much more detail on just how much of the investigation was run by the MPAA and the studios — and Hollywood has vigorously resisted, claiming that they really had nothing to do with all of this, which was a laughable assertion.

However, in a filing on Thursday, Google revealed one of the few emails that they have been able to get access to so far, and it’s stunning. It’s an email between the MPAA and two of Jim Hood’s top lawyers in the Mississippi AG’s office, discussing the big plan to “hurt” Google. Beyond influencing other Attorneys General (using misleading fake “setups” of searches for “bad” material) and paying for fake anti-Google research, the lawyers from Hood’s office flat out admit that they’re expecting the MPAA and the major studios to have its media arms run a coordinated propaganda campaign of bogus anti-Google stories:

    Media: We want to make sure that the media is at the NAAG meeting. We propose working with MPAA (Vans), Comcast, and NewsCorp (Bill Guidera) to see about working with a PR firm to create an attack on Google (and others who are resisting AG efforts to address online piracy). This PR firm can be funded through a nonprofit dedicated to IP issues. The “live buys” should be available for the media to see, followed by a segment the next day on the Today Show (David green can help with this). After the Today Show segment, you want to have a large investor of Google (George can help us determine that) come forward and say that Google needs to change its behavior/demand reform. Next, you want NewsCorp to develop and place an editorial in the WSJ emphasizing that Google’s stock will lose value in the face of a sustained attack by AGs and noting some of the possible causes of action we have developed.

In other words, Jim Hood and the MPAA were out and out planning a coordinated media attack on Google using the editorial properties that supposedly claim to have editorial independence from the business side.

I don’t know anyone who still takes the media at face value. If you do, you’re obviously either a) not very bright, or, b) not paying attention.

Mailvox: favorites in A GAME OF THRONES

AL is curious about the characters in A GAME OF THRONES:

Who is your favorite character? Would you be interested at all in a discussion on that on your blog? Maybe you discussed it before but after searching through your posts I couldn’t find who you thought your favorite character is.

I think one has to distinguish between the characters as written in the books and the characters in the TV show. For example, I think Roose Bolton is creepy and disgusting in the books, but I rather like him on the show. The former is The Leech, the latter is not.

On the show, easily my favorite figure is Littlefinger, Lord Peter Baelish. He might occasionally overreach himself, but I like his ambition, his ruthlessness, his confidence, and his style. I don’t like the Littlefinger of the books as much, as that Littlefinger is more of a self-conscious social-climber who tends to lack the confidence and style of the TV Littlefinger.

In the books, I liked the two Starks, Ned and Robb, although I found their cluelessness about the nature and behavior of evil, untrustworthy men to be as frustrating as it is realistic. I see them in many a conservative who is determined to lose as nobly and graciously as possible. I liked Tywin Lannister of the books and absolutely loved Charles Dance in that role – how could you not – although I found his hatred for Tyrion to be somewhat inexplicable given that he has no other heirs. I also found it highly implausible that he didn’t free Jaime from his Kingsguard oath; these are not people who respect oaths, priests, or gods.

The female character I find most attractive is Myranda, the psycho little daughter of the kennelmaster. The female character I most disliked was Caitlyn Stark, in the books and on TV. She was nasty to Jon Snow and kept trying to interfere, ineptly, in things of which she knew nothing. The showrunners were wise to leave her undead version out of the TV show. And the Sansa of the TV show is much more interesting and complex than Martin’s Sansa, who appears to exist mostly to absorb Martin’s Gamma hate for female innocence and hope.