#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
If it weren’t so wordy, giving away the punchline right there in the headline, it might be my favorite headline ever. I laughed, I cried, much better than CATS:
Screaming children flee cinema in terror after bungling staff show Paranormal Activity instead of Madagascar 3
And let’s face it, considering the drek that the cinema has been serving up for the last twenty years, this sort of aversion therapy could really be seen as a positive thing.
Foreign Policy interviews a naval analyst concerning what science fiction gets right and what it gets wrong about warfare, especially from the naval perspective upon which so much fictional space war is based.
FP: The United States is in the midst of a major
debate on what our defense policy, especially given shrinking budgets and the
rise of China as Pacific sea power. Does
sci-fi offer lessons on how the United States can resolve this?CW: Fiction does not replace policy analysis. But science fiction is the literature of
“what if?” Not just “what
if X happens?” but also “what if we continue what we’re doing?” In that way, science fiction can inform
policy making directly, and it can inform those who build scenarios for
wargames and exercises and the like. One of the great strengths of science
fiction is that it allows you have a conversation about something that you
otherwise couldn’t talk about because it’s too politically charged. It allows
you to create the universe you need in order to have the conversation you want
to have. Battlestar Galactica spent a lot of time talking about the war in
Iraq. There were lots of things on that show about how you treat prisoners.
They never came out and said that directly. They didn’t have to. At the Naval
War College, one of the core courses on strategy and policy had a section on
the Peloponnesian War. It was added to the curriculum in the mid-1970s because
the Vietnam War was too close, so they couldn’t talk about it, except by going
back to 400 BC.
I’m a big believer in the martial utility of wargaming, but as the article notes, most wargames and all science fiction tend to completely omit the more tedious elements of war, especially logistics and bureaucracy. Unsurprisingly, wargames tend to do a better job of addressing strategic assumptions and strategic goals than other entertainment media, although even the wargaming implimentation are usually built into the game design rather than left up to the player.
LA queries:
I had a question–do you have an opinion on the movie Airplane!?The
humor on this movie has always escaped me. I’ve always found many
comedy movies to be fairly stupid but I can always suspend disbelief,
put aside logical problems in a decent sci fi or comedy movie, and find
some way to enjoy the humor even if it isn’t my normal cup of tea.But this movie has always been the one film I cannot stand.Anyway,
a friend that reads Vox Popoli and I were having a spat about it and it
made me curious if you enjoyed it or if you ever saw it, and whether
you care one way or another.
I thought Airplane had its amusing moments, but would not put it in my personal top 25 movies or even top 20 comedies. I can stand it, but only in short doses; I’ve never been able to watch it all the way through. Its humor is mostly of the sort that I consider to be too broad-based and obvious to be more than moderately funny even when done right. I think an element of surprise, or at least unpredictability, is necessary to make something genuinely hilarious, and most of Airplane’s humor is entirely predictable, being based on stupid and unlikely misunderstandings.
As a writer once said that if the plot of your novel is dependent upon your characters being stupid, you don’t have an actual book. In like manner, I don’t find humor that depends upon the characters being borderline retarded to be amusing. And if a “humorous” pratfall is somehow involved, I am left colder than cold. I simply don’t find people falling down, particularly in a theatrical manner, to be be funny at all. When I see an adult laugh at someone slapping their forehead and falling down, or pretending to faint, I seriously wonder what is wrong with them.
But Airplane! does have its moments. The “I speak jive” line is funny, although the actual execution of the jivespeak borders on the painful. The surely/Shirley bit is almost Wodehousean and is done well in a deadpan manner that probably wouldn’t have worked nearly as well for anyone not named Leslie Nielsen. And the short exchanges between Joey and the Captain are downright quoteworthy. That being said, I looked at the list of what are supposedly the greatest quotes from the movie and noted that less than a quarter of them actually struck me as funny.
To me, easily the funniest movie ever made is Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Other movies that I found to be funnier than Airplane! include Heathers, Weird Science, The Hangover, The Gods Must Be Crazy, The Big Lebowski, Old School, A Fish Called Wanda, Dodgeball, Grosse Pointe Blank, Notting Hill, the first two American Pie films, Stripes, The Pink Panther, and Being There.
There is a simple explanation for why the second and third Matrix movies were so bad, and why the Wachowskis haven’t been able to produce a movie that is one-tenth as intriguing as the original The Matrix. They aren’t genuine storytellers and The Matrix wasn’t their story, they were ripping off a comic book that served as the graphic storyboard for the first movie.
In 1999, The Matrix came out and blew everyone away with its insane action sequences, revolutionary cinematic techniques and, most of all, a mind-fucking plot that left the head of every viewer filled with intense philosophical questions.
What It’s Suspiciously Like:
The Invisibles, a cult comic book series created by Grant Morrison, is basically about a group of individuals who fight the establishment because the establishment is secretly keeping people dumb and hiding the fact that reality is an illusion. Turns out that the “real world” is ruled by horrifying insect-like demons. One more thing: The Invisibles debuted in 1994….
The Wachowskis have never acknowledged The Invisibles as an influence, even though they had invited the comic’s creator Grant Morrison to contribute a story for their website. Morrison — who actually liked The Matrix — says he “was told by people on the set that Invisibles books were passed around for visual reference.” His reaction to the second and third movies? “They should have kept on stealing from me.”
The real problem with Hollywood isn’t the lack of creativity among those responsible for making movies. The real problem is the ridiculous pretensions of those who are technically skilled movie makers to be something that they are not, which is storytellers. At its root, the inability of the Wachowskis to give proper credit and continue to utilize Grant Morrison’s storytelling abilities is no different than James Cameron stealing from Harlan Ellison or Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens crapping all over Tolkien with their idiotic dialogue additions and “feminine energy”. Their pride, narcissism, and incapacity for understanding their limits causes them to produce movies that are much worse than they would be if they would simply focus on their cinematic craft and leave the story construction to the storytellers.
The issue here isn’t IP legalities, but the intrinsic stupidity of trying to claim an idea that wasn’t yours as your own. It’s foolish, because everyone is going to realize that the first idea wasn’t yours just as soon as you’re forced to come up with a second idea and it becomes obvious that you’re completely incapable of doing so.
Women ruin everything. Everything. This is why women have to be ruthlessly kept out of places to which their sex have neither created nor contributed anything. In most such cases, literally the only thing women truly care about accomplishing is adding more women.
Co-producer Philippa Boyens addressed some changes made for the movie adaptation, especially the addition of a new character or two, something that could be seen as heresy by the literary community or Tolkien fans. Boyens said the story felt weighed down by males, so they created a female elf, being played by Evangeline Lilly and seen briefly in the footage.
“We created her to bring that feminine energy,” Boyens said. “We believe it’s completely within the spirit of Tolkien. We didn’t want her to be a ploy.”
What. The. Fuck? Tolkien’s novels are a masterpiece. A classic. They define a genre. So Philippa Fucking Boyens decides she can improve upon them by adding a female character to do what, discuss tampons and boy bands? Does Tokenlass spend her screen time regaling the dwarves with tedious gossip about elves that none of them have ever met? Does she have sex with Borin before making a hypergamous upgrade to Thorin, then demanding that the dwarves replace their battleaxes and warhammers with lighter ones that she can carry?
The problem with Jackson’s LOTR trilogy wasn’t the omission of Tom Bombadil but the addition of the idiotic dialogue invented by Boyens; HBO’s adaptation of A Game of Thrones is much superior due to the fact that Martin himself is being used to create the additional dialogue required by the new medium. Now, I’ll still watch The Hobbit when it comes out. Like The Lord of the Rings, the source material is too good to be ruined by the “contributions” of Ms Boyens’s script. But it’s unsurprising that the Tolkien estate is less than ecstatic about Jackson’s films, which fortunately means there will be future films that will be conceived and advertised as being more faithful to Tolkien’s text instead of presenting the Ms Magazine version of them.
Anyhow, to Hell with Boyens, her feminine energy, and her fear of an excessively male story.
For those of you who find the free trade discussion to be too esoteric, this might be a little more to your taste. I watched the movie last night. It mostly sucked, although not completely, and it did have the occasional, mildly amusing moment. I actually quite like Kristen Wiig, but she’s much better in smaller doses as her little trick of smiling, passive-aggressive, low-key argument becomes less and less amusing as the movie slogs on. Even the title is misleading, as at least two of the bridesmaids could have been cut out of the movie without anyone noticing and the tedious airplane scene is the longest and least entertaining travel piece since Tyrion Lannister floated along the river in A Dance with Dragons.
It was basically one step above the usual SNL star goes to the movies, but if we are to accept that it is “the female answer to The Hangover“, then it usefully serves as definitive proof that women are simply not funny. To put it in perspective, the ESPN commentary by Cotton and Pepper in Dodgeball alone is funnier than the entire Bridesmaids movie and it is an absolute travesty to even mention Bridesmaids in the same paragraph as The Hangover. In fact, I’m sorely tempted to write a post criticizing myself for doing that here.
It doesn’t surprise me that the critics ratings are so much higher than the audience ratings. This is a movie you must find funny, hein? Equality and social progress demand it! But it just isn’t.