Ant-Man had far too many racially offensive stereotypes and plot holes big enough to drive a movie through

So, at the drive-in, there was Ant-Man and the new Mission Impossible movie.  This isn't about the MI movie (short take: it's good if you like spy movies, and I often do), it's about Ant-Man.

In the future I honestly, seriously, sincerely think that people will study the Marvel movie campaign for it's ability to shut off people's ability to interpret and criticize media for the purposes of selling it to them.  In short, Ant-Man is awful.

In particular, and, Marvel, I wish we'd keep meeting like this, Ant-Man is racist and sexist.  Also, the plot is has a lot of holes - by which I mean inconsistencies.

So, the sexism starts and ends with Hope Pym.  It has to start and end with her, because she's the only woman in the whole damn thing.

Despite her competence, she's not the star of the movie.  Why?  Daddy issues.  Her daddy doesn't want to "lose his little girl", so he infantilizes her to keep her away from super-heroing, instead selecting a not particularly good crook to do super-heroing.  Yes, rather than trust your competent daughter who knows all the super-tech to do the job you need done, you're going to risk bring in a literal, convicted thief to quickly learn the super-tech for the job because you're a fucking moron who doesn't value women.

And when Hope Pym learns that her father is over-protective because Hope's mother, Hank's wife, died super-heroing, the whole thing with Hope being really qualified for the job just goes away.  As does literally decades of neglect, like somehow Hank being sad that his wife died somehow makes it better that he ignored his daughter for 25 years or something.

(If you're going to mention that, y'know, maybe Hope will be Wasp because of a thirty second take - that's not a very good retort.  That, in the future, there might be a non-sexist movie with Evangeline Lilly as Wasp does not alter one whit that in Ant-Man, she was an infantilized woman whose objections over being infantilized were dropped in an absurd way to allow the white man to take charge.  Also, Lilly as Wasp is whitewashing the character.  At almost every turn, the Marvel movies show that they're not nearly as socially minded as they claim to be.)

And completely preventable, too.  If Hope was on tech duty, without the physical skills required to do the heist, cool.  If Hope had been injured leading up to the heist and they needed someone else, also cool.  It could have been handled in a number of ways that didn't involve removing the character and setting the groundwork for her being Wasp (though it would have helped if she was Asian-American).

Still, that's pretty light compared to the racism which is pretty boggling.  Pro-tip: if your only Hispanic character is a criminal who is also comic relief, you're being racist.  Oh, there's another black, criminal comic relief character, too!  Hilarious!  Blacks and Hispanics are, after all, naturally criminal peoples, and they're so whacky when they're incompetent!  (Like it somehow balanced the scales, one of the whacky, incompetent crooks was Russian.  I think they put that in there to say that they were making fun of everyone, which is a tactic I've seen before, and it's stupid.  That you also make fun of white people doesn't mean that the racist caricatures aren't racist caricatures.)

I mean, the white guy is a thief for SOCIAL JUSTICE, and then teaches the blacks and Hispanics how to be better thieves!  For while blacks and Hispanics are crooks, of course, they are whackily incompetent at that and under all conditions are superior when a white man is in charge!

So, even when the heist was ongoing, every time they cut to a black or Hispanic character being comic relief, it took me out of whatever moment there was.

That's what makes the movie awful.  Even if it wasn't racist and sexist, it's one of those superhero movies where keeping your story straight seems irrelevant.  The best comics manage to do it, so they should be able to bring that kind of A game with movies.  They don't.  So rather than being an example of comic-style storytelling at its finest, it ends up being a comic-style potboiler, and not even a particularly good one.

So, when Hank Pym recruits Stephen Lange, he does it by bribing a person to tell a second person, relying on them to tell a certain third person who will then tell a very specific fourth person, who then talks to Lange about a heist.

In short, this is stupid.  This is *embarrassingly* stupid.  It doesn't show Hank as being some kind of master manipulator so much as it shows a deus ex machina, crude and unsophisticated.  Anyone with any experience with human beings knows that telling one person to tell a second person something is pretty chancy - but to imagine that one person tells a second person, who tells a third, who tells a fourth, who tells a fifth . . . and by the time it gets to the fifth person that it is in any sense recognizably what the first person says?  That is ridiculous.

And the bad guy - who's name I can't remember, as he wasn't very memorable, so I'll call him Yellowjacket - was supposed to have been driven crazy by Pym particles . . . except he wasn't ever really, well, exposed to them.  At least not moreso than a bunch of other people, including Hope, who showed no signs of violent instability.   Until he puts on the Yellowjacket armor, Yellowjacket isn't really exposed to them at all, except ringside for a few experiments on other objects.  Which is to say as close as Hope was to Yellowjacket's experiments and Lange's numerous transformations.  DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.

Plus, there was this bit where Hank Pym says he can't use the shrinking tech because he used it for "too long" and it's harmed him in some way . . . and Stephen didn't go, "What kind of harm are we talking about?   What kind of exposure, and what are the risks?"  Nope.  The fact that the technology does some kind of lasting harm is mentioned to keep Hank out of the game but then completely dismissed.  This is lazy writing!

I also found the character of Stephen Lange to be narratively muddled.  On one hand, he supposedly went to jail for crimes of social justice - he stole from a corporation who had cheated people to return the money.  But he's also supposed to be some kind of burglar in the more common sense of "stealing for his own gain".  Which is it?  Was he a crusading Robin Hood-style thief engaging in social banditry or merely a weak-willed crook who rips people off when they going gets tough?

Not to mention that Lange, at the start of the movie, says he's a burglar since he doesn't fight people, but by the end of the movie he's fighting up a storm.  Mind you, the character was shown to be physically capable, so I'm not arguing his ability but his desire.  His moral objections to violence simply evaporated without a trace or comment.

There were probably more, but this suggests the various ways the parts of the story didn't fit with each other.  It didn't make sense in ways that it SHOULD have made sense.

If not for the sexism and racism, this alone would have meant I wouldn't have liked the movie very much. I really expect a screenplay to hold together the basic elements in a consistent way.  I think it's one of the basic jobs of the writing and directing staff - to make sure that the important narrative elements in a story cohere intelligently.  Ant-Man failed to do this.

But the movie was racist and sexist.  1980 wants it's childishly and offensive stereotypes back.

Craig Morgan repeats tedious bullshit cliches while defending American Sniper

Once again American Sniper has appeared on too many of my feeds and made me reasonably upset.  I am including a Rolling Stone review of the movie, too, because it says a lot of things with which I agree in regards to Hollywood and war movies, generally, as well as being a very well-written piece.

(Short form: war movies suck because in order to turn a war into a film that doesn't make a person crawl out of their skin requires grave offenses to art and sense.  But for me, the money shot of the RS review is, "The thing is, it always looks bad when you criticize a soldier for doing what he's told. It's equally dangerous to be seduced by the pathos and drama of the individual solider's experience, because most wars are about something much larger than that, too."  I have struggled with his dilemma, myself.  War is so terrible that some balancing the horror that many soldiers experience against critiques of war, itself, that I feel are necessary to prevent future wars.  The most horrifying thing about this, for me, is that I absolutely know that warmongers use the pains of soldiers as cover for further wars - but dismissing the legitimate pain of human beings isn't something I'm good at.  So how does a person talk about the tragedy of war when the people who perpetrate and profit from the misery use the suffering of human beings as a defense . . . to further perpetrate and profit from war?  Drives me crazy.

(Blame Kai for this.  She encouraged me to ramble on.)

Seth Rogan said, "American Sniper kind of reminds me of the movie that's showing in the third act of Inglorious Basterds", which is a mock Nazi propaganda film.  Unlike Michael Moore's comments, this isn't factually in error.  It's a person's opinion and, frankly, given both the overt nationalist sentiments of American Sniper's director (anyone else remember Clint speaking to that empty chair?) and the subject matter, I don't find the comparison unlikely.

Craig Morgan took umbrage with Rogan's opinion in one of the most absolutely tedious ways imaginable.  In particular, Morgan said, "You are fortunate to enjoy the privilege and freedom of working in and living in the United States, and saying whatever you want (regardless of how ignorant the statement) thanks to people like Chris Kyle who serve in the United States military."

Bullshit.  Some assholes in the Middle East do not threaten any rights Americans possess.  They are very far away and can attack us in extremely limited ways.  To believe otherwise is to engage in conspiracy theory of the strangest magnitude.  The last time that the US military actually defended the rights of Americans - the last time they were under actual attack by an enemy - was probably the American Civil War.  Arguably World War II, but since neither Nazi Germany or the Empire of Japan had the physical ability to invade the United States so I don't think they actually threatened our freedom.  Middle Eastern terrorists obviously threaten the lines of some Americans, but their ability to kill Americans has been made much easier by our invasion of several Middle Eastern countries.  Middle Eastern killers now have much more convenient access to Americans, which is why so many have been dying.

Additionally, it is easy to find people who actually do protect American rights, immediately and directly.  People like the American Civil Liberties Union.  I would, furthermore, argue that an artist as bold as Seth Rogan does a great deal to protect freedom of speech - by using it.  One of the things that keeps rights healthy is their exercise.  One of the ways laws form and dissolve is through tradition - by keeping the tradition of freedom of speech alive, through its healthy exercise, Seth Rogan is absolutely defending human rights, and more directly than a sniper in the Middle East.

Sentiments of people like Morgan are also corrosive to the very idea of freedom.  We do not owe soldiers our freedom.  We possess it as a natural right.  Read the Declaration of Independence!  It is integral to American democracy that the people possess rights, not because they are given, but because they are natural to the dignity of humans.  Because if it is true that we "owe" anyone our rights, then they can revoke them, because they own them.

It is that idea - that rights are natural and their exercise is healthy - has done more to expand freedom than all the arms that have ever existed, both here in the United States and all around the world.

Lastly, Morgan said that Rogan's words were insensitive to Chris Kyle and his family.  C'mon, dude.  You can't have a big budget movie with A-list directors and actors made, to considerable profit, and then use that as an excuse for people not to critique the movie!  If you want to live a private life, here's a pro tip: don't have your dead husband's life story made into a movie.  By so aggressively putting the story out there, it opens the door to critique.  Opens it wide.

The documentary Technocalpys not well thought out, I think

I got about six minutes into a documentary about transhumanism, Technocalpys, before stopping.

I'll probably be posting, soon, about how we have a bias towards technologies that are expensive, hard, fast and energetic and how this limits our understanding of technology, but this was definitely on my mind when watching, y'know, the first six minutes of the Technocalpys.

What really lost me is that some talking head was saying that humans are beginning to cheat nature's limitations. Which . . . is very much baffling to me because humans have been reshaping themselves for thousands of years. Pretty much the first time a person decided that they didn't want the body that nature and their own unconsidered habits gave them – the first time a human set about exercise – the decision was made to transform us from the coincidence of our genetic inheritance and circumstance into something different. Likewise, the first time a human set out to consciously discover something, they started the process of education which created a vastly different kind of person.  To a paleolithic human, we are transhuman.

Sure, compared to the future, the ttechniques humans use to improve themselves will be considered crude. Much in the same way an abacus is crude compared to a laptop. But the continuum is there – the ancient Greeks invented progressive weight training, a conscious way to develop and improve physical strength. They decided to be more than nature made them, to be stronger, to be better, shaped by their own conscious desires. To me, that's the pivot upon which transhumanism moves and it started moving long ago.

The bias is, as I hinted above, primarily the bias we have for technologies that are expensive, hard, fast and energetic. For instance, I believe that steroids and human growth hormones intermediary between simply progressive exercise and cybernetic or genetic manipulation for improved strength. If you take steroids intelligently, you become slightly superhuman. If you take them intelligently combined with progressive exercise techniques, you might as well be superhuman. Seriously, take a look at the abilities of professional athletes and the way their abilities tend to increase over time. Much of that improvement is due to various performance enhancing drugs.  Compared to the athletes of yesteryear, modern athletes are slightly superhuman.

But, y'know, that's cheap. It is also hard on a personal level. I suppose that we also tend to approve of technologies that make things easier for us. I'm sure the first robot bodies won't actually be better than the bodies of elite athletes – the primary difference will be that to be an elite athlete takes an awful lot of work whereas, in people's minds, having your consciousness transferred to a robot will be relatively quick and painless.

At any rate, when I realized that the documentary was going to be so tone deaf as to make no connection between historical and present efforts to reshape our bodies and minds past their natural states, I realized that it had nothing to teach me or, I think, too much interesting to say.  

They also used a lot of Burning Man imagery and I've never met anyone who's gone to Burning Man who is capable of seriously talking about futurism.  Just sayin'.

Thoughts on watching The Hunger Games movie

I realized another way that The Hunger Games novel, the first one, didn't work for me. I was thinking about this because I was watching the Rifftrax of The Hunger Games. Anyway, uh, Peeta lives.

The Rifftrax guys were going on pretty hard about their probable impending deaths and, yes, exactly, their deaths were probably impending. Now, really, if you look at it, Katniss – a skilled hunter and gifted archer – is the precise kind of person who has a good chance of winning the games and, in fact, she's the odds on favorite to win at the start of the game. For her to win, okay. Even for Peeta to win, okay, he is a strong guy, physically fit, clever, so forth and so on. But what are the odds of BOTH of them winning? Something that had never before happened in 73 years of Hunger Games? Basically zero, of course.

But then, thinking more (as I was watching the movie), I realized having Peeta win was narrative cowardice. I know that part of what the books were supposed to be about were Katniss' feelings for both Peeta and Gale. But what's better, narratively? A weak love triangle (Gale is barely in the books and don't expect to see a bunch of him in the movies, either) or Katniss having to kill Peeta to win. Think about that. At the climax, Peeta and Katniss have the drop on each other. Neither one moves. Cut to them being told if there is no winner of the Hunger Games, their families will be executed. (You need to do something like that so Katniss remains sympathetic. She doesn't kill for the selfish reason that she wants to live, but has to make a Sophie's choice.) Then, Peeta . . . does nothing and Katniss kills him. At which point she realizes that he did, in fact, love her and none of it was a lie, and she murdered him for the entertainment of the Capitol.

OK, here's the real kicker, too. You could still have the love triangle. Rather than Gale not really being in the next two books, you can put him in there all you want and he would be competing with Peeta's ghost.  It is notoriously hard to win against a ghost.  It would have also allowed Peeta and Katniss to develop real feelings for each other in The Hunger Games.

The book and movie both tried to make you feel the horror of the Hunger Games by killing the little black girl, Rue. I . . . didn't like that in either the book of the movie. Yeah, good going, put in black people to be killed so white people feel guilty. Not just the little girl but also Cinna. Jesus fucking Christ, really? You're really just going to put black people in to be killed so white people can save the world? Fuck you.

Anyway, that's how they tried to drive home the horror of the Games. But the little girl we barely know so her death means little. For other plot reasons, they should keep it in – in particular because it also shows that Katniss is making a connection with the people and is becoming a symbol – but it didn't really drive in the horror of the games. What would do that is killing someone we, the audience, has come to like rather than someone we had barely seen. To put Katniss in the situation of having to kill this really nice guy who drive the horror home in a big way.

By having them both survive, well, it was chicken. And weakens the overall story. It was a forced on happy ending, yay, the good guys win, which was inappropriate given the material of the book and movie.

**

I was also just struck, again, over the general stupidity of the games. The Hunger Games is literally a show where children are forced to murder each other. Worse, the richest districts have ringers – they train kids from a young age to do nothing but win the Games. So for districts 1 and 2, they have volunteer ringers. So, not only do they win most of the time, when they lose, well, they were volunteers. The other ten districts have kids selected by lot, who generally watch their children get humiliated and butchered by the kids from districts 1 and 2.

Like, whose idea was that? Because, let me tell you, it takes a LOT less provocation than seventy-four years of graphic child murder for the amusement of the ruling class to spark a revolution among oppressed people. Every time a child is murdered, that whole family turns instantly and irrevocably anti-government. Sure, most of them won't be hardcore about it, but some will be. That's tens of thousands of people ranging from merely committed to hating the government to actively seeking it's destruction. Not even counting those who are equally committed simply over their horror and disgust over children being forced to murder each other for the amusement of the capitol.

It doesn't even take a lot of thinking to work this one through. Riots started in LA because Rodney King's attackers were exonerated in court. King lived. The living conditions in South LA aren't nearly as bad as in most districts. Uprisings would be constant, every district would be littered with resistance cells constantly plotting the overthrow of the government. The districts would be under constant and massive police violence – we're talking constant ID checks, weapons checks, cops kicking in doors, public executions, the whole lot, if you're committed to something as spectacularly stupid as the Hunger Games.

Yeah, yeah, the author says (in the book, if you just watch the movie you have no such knowledge) that a district was destroyed and that suppressed the revolution.  Except that doesn't really work.  It often creates addition opposition because then the people more forcefully believe that it is a fight of life or death.  It wasn't the destruction of Fallujah that stopped Iraqi resistance to US occupation.  It was the US getting out of Iraq, first of pulling back to our bases and then massively reducing our troop presence.  The same was true of the US in Vietnam.  Who districts were wiped out, two million Vietnamese were killed, but even after three decades of fighting overwhelmingly more powerful countries -- the Japanese, the French, the US -- they still found the will to fight.  So, no, that's not really sufficient, either.

This confirms that it's really hard to make a plot.  But it makes me realize something else, too.  It's really hard to understand a plot.  I hate to say this, but it sorta looks like plot doesn't matter very much, even in plot driven stories.

How Awful is the Battleship Movie?

Battleship was worse than I thought it would be.

First, the protagonist is a fuck up aged 26 who is bullied by his brother to go into the Navy (as he is in the Navy). I thought that meant “enlisted” but at the movie's beginning he is an officer. Now . . . there are three ways to become an officer. The first is to go to the Naval Academy, the second is the Naval ROTC program and the third is to serve as an enlisted sailor for years with distinction and go to Officer's Candidate School.

The Naval Academy is a hard to get into school. Not only do you need the kind of grades and SAT scores of top Ivy League schools, you need things like a letter from your congresscritter. The NROTC program is basically a scholarship program, merit based, meaning that you need, again, a great high school career. Fuck ups do not get into either.

Then the fuck up officer fucks up and is told he's going to be kicked out of the Navy. His response is, “Oh, golly, I'm so ashamed” and not “Yay! I hated this job, it was a bad fit and I was bullied into it in the first place!” I mean, SHOCKER, a job a dude was bullied into doesn't work out.

Then they call the battleship Missouri the “greatest warship in US naval history”. That's . . . almost offensive. The greatest warship in US history is either the USS Constitution or the USS Monitor. I'd tend to say the Constitution, myself, a Revolutionary War ship that repeatedly won engagements with better armed and more numerous British warships. Considering the time, that was pretty epic. The Monitor was the victor against the CSS Merrimac in the Civil War. The battle was a technological turning point, the death of sail powered, wood hulled warships for steam powered, steel hulled ships.

The Missouri, on the other hand, was obsolete when constructed. It was just a leftover from the early 20^th century's focus on big ships. Everyone knew, militarily, real sea power was with aircraft carriers and submarines and everything else was just support for aircraft carriers and submarines. Battleships were always kind of pointless, an egotistical race for side. Easy to target, slow to maneuver, with guns that could not track small, fast ships, they were always utterly pointless. Even for the wars in which the Missouri served, it was militarily insignificant.

But then, cut to the female romantic lead, who is a physical therapist (they probably found “nurse” too cliched, but clearly did not stray far afield) talking to this dude who had his legs blown off in Afghanistan. He's got a bad attitude because, y'know, he has lost his legs and IS SURROUNDED BY CONDESCENDING IDIOTS. He is introduced in physical therapy being told by a dull eyed therapist to correct his form on his artificial legs and to focus. I know different people respond differently to motivation, but a whole hell of a lot of us, when we're tired and in pain, really, really object to people telling us what we already goddamn know.

Then the new pretty white lady therapist shows up and says he's still the same man who won the Golden Gloves and was an elite soldier. That's . . . an awful thing to say to a guy who's lost his legs. Because those are precisely the kinds of things he can't do, anymore. Your stick and move really suffers when you've got not fucking legs. And, of course, the Army puts you on 100% disability when your legs get blown off. He will never be a boxer nor soldier, again. Saying he's the same man is just wrong. And cruel. He has suffered a terrible, permanent injury that is preventing him from doing many of the things he loves.

Of course, in the end, he'll get an attitude adjustment and be okey-dokey. Because a positive attitude solves all wrongs! (I have now watched it all and I was of course right. Stupidest moment in the movie – the legless boxer submitting an alien with a reverse triangle with artificial legs.)

Then they gave us, about the aliens, “No material on the periodic table!” Except for . . . lawrencium! My soul, it aches. I mean, it's quite possible that alien materials would be hard to analyze because any really foreign compound is liable to be hard to analyze, and it could well be produced with technologies we don't know. But atoms are the same everywhere in the universe and some form of stabilized lawrencium, sure, maybe there's a stable allotrope, would be just as hard to analyze. I mean, how do you even figure out something is a stable allotrope of lawrencium? The stuff barely exists on this planet.

OHEMGEE! The Navy fired first! They sent out a warning horn, got a much more powerful one in return and then OPENED FIRE. The aliens might have been peaceful but some idiot yahoo OPENED FIRE on an ALIEN SHIP.

What the aliens were trying to say: “We come in peace. Our planet's environment has been destroyed and we're looking for a new home. We're a primarily aquatic people so you'll barely notice we're there, except for all the incredible technologies we're willing to give you in payment for part of your ocean.”

Afterward: “Fuck you guys.”

Then the cowardly academic! Of course, no academics are intelligent, well-adjusted people with lots of social skills. It's all Big Bang Theory, yep, where academics are awkward, socially inept yobs. (By the end, the Cowardly Lion finds his courage.)

A big part of the “plot” is the aliens need to coopt human communications equipment to phone home because theirs was destroyed in reentry. The idea is that a land based system fired off a command to a satellite that “boosts the signal”, apparently with sufficient intensity to break the light barrier, I dunno. I kept asking myself, “They have space ships. Why don't they just go up to the satellite, directly, and send the signal from there.” I, of course, do know the reason. The script writers are either fools or (and I think this is more likely), well, unmotivated. Some guy comes up to me and says, “So, we're making a movie based on the game Battleship.” “You mean, that double blind target finding game based on WWII sea duels?” Yeah, except instead of that, we're going to have aliens.” “Aliens?” “Aliens. We'll pay.” Not exactly the best material to work with so I'll give them a pass. Indeed, I'll give everyone in the movie a pass except the producers who pushed this through to completion. I understand that everyone else, the director, actors, CG guys, best boys, I understand all of these people need to put food on the table, they need to work. But the producers? Fuck those guys.

And let's talk length. The movie is over two hours long. Which is admittedly over two hours too long, but there's a reason action movies used to be around ninety minutes.

Then they use the Missouri. With WWII and Korean era vets that conveniently happen to be on hand. Now, Korea ended in 1952. By my reckoning, that's sixty years ago. Since enlistment age is 18, the MINIMUM age of any vet of the Missouri is SEVENTY-EIGHT.

Then they fire up the boilers of the Missouri, which is physically demanding labor in extremely hot conditions. Remember, minimum age, seventy-eight. And some of them are from WWII, meaning they're no younger than EIGHTY-FIVE. Of course, some of them will be older.

And then they do that thing that they did in the one horrible Pirates of the Caribbean movie – not that one, the OTHER one – where they drop anchor to swing a ship around by ninety degrees. Well, it would not have worked in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie, that kind of sudden deceleration would either snap the chain (if you're lucky) or rip the chain through the hull of the ship or some combination of the two. When you do it with a BATTLESHIP . . . the ship would either snap in two or the capstan would be ripped out or the chain would shear through the hull, or some combination of the three.

In the denouement, of course the fuck up saves the day and he's awarded a Silver Star – which is the third highest honor a military person can get.

HELLLLLLO, the person who is responsible for saving the SPECIES would get a Congressional Medal of Honor – and then spend the next six months touring the planet while every nation on earth hands him the highest honor they can give to foreigners.

His brother, who DIED, and started the conflict by opening fire on an alien ship, got the Navy Cross, a higher honor than the guy who SAVED THE SPECIES.

They get nothing right. No thing.

I will also say that the screenwriter, at least, realized that these aliens were not military. Their weapons could not instantly destroy our ships. They had no weapons of mass destruction, no armed aircraft much less spacecraft. Our weapons could hurt their ships. Their people on the ground, while wearing powered armor, had no guns. (Lots of reasons, too, why they had powered armor, the Earth has higher gravity, maybe, and they did do a lot of heavy lifting). It's like . . .

Imagine a Spanish galleon from the 16^th century fighting a modern destroyer. The galleon would vanish under the power of the destroyer's weapons – the least powerful of the destroyer's weapons could easily sink a galleon before the galleon was in range of hitting the destroyer. Which it would never get into because it is a wind driven craft and the destroyer has diesel engine.

Now imagine that galleon up against a cargo ship with a top speed of around six miles an hour. Sure, the crew have some weapons, guns and such, but they have no armor, no training, and the galleon's guns would be able to blow holes in the cargo ship's hull – it isn't designed for war. It wouldn't necessarily be an easy fight, but it would be a winnable one for the galleon.

That's what happened in Battleship. We destroyed essentially unarmed recon ships full of civilian crew.

And so what if they don't contact their world? Will that necessarily stop additional exploration of earth? Would it stop humans? And they more less said that the aliens' world is fucked – they might not need to move but they definitely want to. Somehow, I doubt one failed recon mission will put the matter to rest. And next time, they will send a warship. It's what we'd do.

Joan Crawford vs. Charlize Theron

This article isn't specifically about the two actresses -- in art, there isn't a lot of versus, or at least I don't think there should be. This article is more about me and my reaction to actresses. In particular, I generally have greater regard for actresses before, say, the seventies than I do modern actresses in a way that I don't feel about modern actors. I don't hesitate to say that Russell Crowe is the equal, as an actor, as, say, Humphrey Bogart. I do, however, hesitate to say Charlize Theron is the equal to Joan Crawford. I realized the reason why, or at least part of the reason, while watching Crawford's The Damned Don't Cry -- the difference is Aeon Flux.

In particular, Joan Crawford never made Aeon Flux, whereas it one of the defining roles of Charlize Theron's career. There's a big generality here, too, and that's the important difference -- Joan Crawford never has the opportunity to be in Aeon Flux.

Looking at Theron's acting abilities, I don't think it's far to say she's an inferior actress to Crawford. And, certainly, not every movie Crawford did was a masterpiece . . . but in every movie Crawford was in, the quality of her acting mattered. Whereas, Charlize Theron and other actresses like her in this regard (notably Angelina Jolie) are in dismal action movies -- movies that no amount of acting skill can meaningfully improve. Theron's skill as an actress was simply irrelevant to the quality of Aeon Flux, much in the same way it's difficult to imagine Ed Norton being able to improve, say, Schwartzenegger's Last Action Hero.

Nowadays, marque actresses are capable of sabotaging their acting careers with awful movies -- but there is another difference, here, that we must acknowledge. Male actors can become stars through action movies. Female actors become stars because of their acting and then make terrible action movies. So what happens is . . . we see Girl, Interrupted and go, "Wow, Jolie can act" and then Jolie makes Tomb Raider and we wince. Whereas, with actors, we often see Mad Max and then, when watching The Year of Living Dangerously, we go, "Oh, maybe Mel Gibson can act."

But, for actor who has built their career on nuanced performances (a category that includes almost all actresses), an action movie is a sucker's bet. Most action movies make their stars look at least slightly and quite often very ridiculous and there's nothing that an actor's ability can do about it. Not only can you see it in Theron or Jolie's career, you can see it with Nick Cage's career. I admire the man's dedication to geekery and if you go back to the early days of his career (you know, everything before Leaving Las Vegas), he's a fine actor. He still is a fine actor -- he plays every ridiculous comic book action role he's been in with the same straight intensity that he brings to his more "serious" projects. It's just that with most of them, it doesn't matter. No amount of acting skill could save Ghost Rider. No amount of acting skill could save National Treasure. They're inherently absurd roles and they make him look inherently absurd. He's been in so many silly movies at this point, it's hard to remember Adaption or Leaving Las Vegas.

This is worse for women, because of sexism. To which I've fallen prey again. It's good that actresses are able to get the same sort of lousy action movies that have built men's careers for decades. But when comparing past actresses to current ones, I've allowed those bad movies to influence me past the point of reason because of the sexism inherent in living in a world dominated by men.

The Smashing Machine is a racist piece of emotionally manipulative garbage

The Smashing Machine was one of the first documentaries about mixed martial arts, being a slice of life from one of the earlier fighters in MMA, Mark Kerr. Kerr was a multi-time winner of UFC tournaments and was one of the early stars of MMA. At one time, he could make a credible case for being the toughest guy in the world. The movie is critically acclaimed, I guess because critics like blatant emotional manipulation and racism.

I understand that MMA isn't for everyone. They find it brutal, ugly, whatever. And there is a certain element of brutality in it, particularly in the UFC early days and in vale tudo competitions (which is MMA's mean older brother, a Brazilian style-vs-style competition with minimal rules even). But the movie never makes an argument in any sense of the word. It never says, "MMA and vale tudo are brutal sports where people get injured". What the movie did do is . . . every time it showed an MMA competition it played music straight from a horror movie -- a jangling, discordant music. The movie further manipulated the fighting scenes to be high contrast and oversaturated, creating a harsh and ugly glare to everything -- like in the Matrix movies when they scene is set in an official building with that green light washing everything out. Actual MMA events, on the other hand, look nothing like what you see in the movie. There is no discordant music, there is no lurid lighting. Yet, the documentary takes the stand that it's merely presenting the information with neutrality (there are no voice overs, no interviewers, nothing to make a person think they're not witnessing these things straight out of life) when, instead, it's being highly manipulative, using colors and sounds designed to sway judgment in a particular direction. And I find that dishonest.

I find it dishonest because American MMA is reasonably safe. It's safer than boxing, it's safer than pro wrestling, it's safer than football, it's safer than ice hockey, it's safer than surfing, it's safer than skydiving. If the movie was against MMA and presented an argument, I might disagree with it but that's all. It didn't even emphasize the ugliness -- the blood and wounds -- it manipulated the images to make them more horrible than they, in fact, were. Instead of presenting an argument, it's just manipulates emotions, instead.

The movie also showed, or seemed to show, that all MMA fighters were living miserable lives, even though they mostly only interview two of them -- Mark Kerr and Mark "the Hammer" Coleman, another early MMA fighter.

It is my understanding that most pro fighters really love their job. Like artists, you never have a lack of people who are willing to fight professionally. No matter how poorly you pay them or how poorly you treat them, the fighters will always show up. I understand that people might think that fighters loving what they do is not sufficient to allow it in society. People love heroin, after all, and any one of a number of self-destructive activities that we don't allow people to engage in. I grasp that. But, in general, like artists and other exploited professions, the people in those professions love them. However, you can't really context that the fighters don't love to fight. Almost all of them really, really do.

In The Smashing Machine, even victory brings no pleasure. Mark Coleman, after winning the first Pride FC Grand Prix, is shown with the bent around his waist, in his dressing room looking sad. Was that sadness or . . . er, physical exhaustion, since Coleman had just fought three fights in one night. But even in victory, there was no pleasure, just unending pain and suffering. Again, it is my understanding that professional fighters love their work. While it is certainly emotional for them, well, that's part of why they like it. Yet, the movie takes pains to show that there is simply no joy in these men, ground down by their miserable lives.

The movie also touched on Kerr's drug problems. Somewhere along the line, he picked up a morphine habit. The movie attempts to place this entirely on the brutality of MMA. After a fight, Kerr would need something to help him with the pain. Except . . . content-wise, well, Kerr never says that. And, indeed, it sorta seems like his junkie alcoholic girlfriend might be part of his problem with drugs. But the un-subtle subtext of the movie is happy to lay that on the feet of MMA, too.

Even with the brutality and injuries, there's a lot of manipulation. Near the end, when Kerr is knocked out of the Pride FC Grand Prix, the movie treats a stitch on his chin like it's some sort of major operation, taking a long time and causing considerable pain and stress. The truth is, four stitches in your chin is something that's handled in a couple of minutes. I've been stitched. It's no big deal. It isn't some grueling affair. But, hey, the movie can't wait to just rub it in, again, to the discordant sounds of their nightmare soundtrack that MMA is a horrible, ugly, brutal thing where there is no joy.

But that wasn't the worst. The worst is the depiction of the Japanese.

The movie takes place during Kerr's stint in the Pride FC, a Japanese MMA promotion. The Japanese are also filmed in the oversaturated, grainy style of the film and what is emphasized is their, well, inscrutability. The Japanese promoters come off as inscrutable Orientals. It is hard for me to emphasize how strongly I feel that, and Adrienne agrees (and indeed pointed it out to me). The way they're filmed also makes them seem ugly. The naked racism is pretty shocking. The inscrutable, ugly Orientals with their wily ways taking advantage of a clean cut American kid. I don't know that it was intentional, but someone should have gone, "Guys, are we really comfortable portraying Japanese people as ugly and inscrutable?"

I'm certainly not saying that you couldn't criticize Pride FC. Almost all sports organizations are shady and take advantage of athletes; fight organizations more than most. I've heard MMA professionals say that Pride treated its fighters "like cattle". But, again, the film wasn't about facts. It made no arguments. It just showed a bunch of green tinted, ugly Orientals manipulating what should have been, and would have been without their nasty interference, a clean cut all-American boy. It abjured facts for nasty, hateful images and if there was any bearing to fact, it was entirely a coincidence.

I mean, wow, I don't know the last time I saw a movie this manipulative. Without coming out against MMA, it depicts it as a place of literal horror that leads to lasting injuries, drug abuse and systematic humiliation. While doing so, it paints the Japanese with the brush of racist caricature. It's a pretty nasty piece of work. Fuck this movie.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster -- a movie about steroids

I just watched Bigger, Stronger, Faster which is about steroid use in America. I really liked it. The guy who made the movie, Chris Bell, is an amateur weightlifter who wanted to go pro but never managed to break through.

I've heard the movie is nuanced about steroids. No, that's not it. The movie is mostly pro-steroids -- or pro-choice in regards to steroids. Bell, himself, took steroids briefly but was uncomfortable with the moral issues and stopped . . . but both of his brothers took and continue to take steroids.

The movie lays it out pretty clearly: no drugs are safe, but steroids are amongst the safest there are. Most of what is said by steroids in the press and by the government are lies designed to scare people away from steroids. There is simply no scientific information that makes steroids more dangerous than ibuprofen or vitamin C. Additionally, the benefits for using steroids far and away outweigh the side-effects, generally.

By far and away, the most interesting parts of the movie, for me, were the deconstruction of the idea of "cheating" in the United States. The go-to guy for this, in the movie, is Arnold Schwartzenegger. Here's this guy whose whole career was launched by steroids. Yet, he's also the guy who has repeatedly said that through hard work you can do anything. But I doubt anyone doubts that if Arnold hadn't roided up early and often, he would not been governor of California. No Mr. Universe at 19, no movie career, no movie career, no popularity to sneak in a quick novelty governorship.

The movie also says things I've said about training -- about how high-tech training in the US will, for instance, duplicate the effects of illegal drugs. The case he used was the production of red blood cells. The movie lists four ways to improve your red blood cell count, and thus your endurance: sleeping in a hypobaric chamber, training at the US Olympic training center six thousand feet above sea level, blood doping and taking a drug that just increases your red blood cell count. Two of them are "legal" and two aren't, but they all do the same thing. Clearly, I agree with this and go quite a bit farther.

There is also a great scene where he talks about how drugs are used in other areas to enhance performance. Beta blockers are apparently used by a lot of musicians to stop stage fright. One of the people flat out said that if not for beta blockers they wouldn't be able to perform . . . while also identifying steroids as cheating whereas beta blockers used in auditions is not. Also mentioned was Adderall used by students to study longer and more efficiently . . . which is pretty much exactly what anabolic steroids do for your muscles, they let you work out harder and more efficiently. So, why are steroids bad and Adderall just another thing that's prescribed? Why are steroids different than beta blockers?

Obviously, I'm pretty sympathetic towards this point of view. The view the US has on drugs is pretty crazy . . . and it's crazy all over, too. Steroids is cheating, whereas merely submitting to the tyranny of nature, where some are strong and some are not, is okay? I don't buy that. I've never bought that. Why should anyone? Isn't the function of medical science to improve our health and well-being . . . a necessarily subjective standard?

The idea seems to be "if it's not broke, don't fix it". But that's crazy. It's not that you're not alright with being who you are, it's that there's also nothing wrong with wanting to change and improve yourself. And it's definitely wrong to demand that others behave as you behave -- how much less sensible is it, then, to bow to some arbitrary happenstance of nature?

Additionally, we use technology all the time to change ourselves. That's what medical science does. There are lots of things out there that are just horrible for us -- broken legs are natural, cancer is natural, congestive heart failure is natural, but we don't hesitate to use medical science to stop what is "natural" from occurring in those situations. Likewise, we are all for certain uses of science and technology for improving oneself, things like the extremely high tech diets professional athletes use these days. Oh, sure, it's of dubious if that works, but people are comfortable if it does work (I say it's dubious if it works because in high level sports, some people seriously think that nearly 100% of the athletes use performance enhancing drugs, so all that talk about the efficacy of high-tech nutrition and supplements might be the cover to justify the incredible performance of top level athletes when the truth it is it's mostly steroids, growth hormones and amphetamines). But if you "go too far", you're seen as deviating from "nature" and that's . . . bad? I don't think so and the movie doesn't think so, either, or at least it gives people the choice to decide.

In general, I thought it was a good movie. The narrator was charming in a natural, unpretentious way and he handled the difficult subject with sensitivity, humor and occasionally a little bravery (such as when his mother, in particular, condemned steroids but was then incredibly proud of her son for bench pressing 705 pounds . . . whereas her non-steroided son benched about 170 pounds less). I also more or less agree with Bell, so that helps, of course.

Never Surrender is a very bad movie

We just watched a movie called Never Surrender. Here's the cover:



I know most of the people who read my journal -- or, more precisely, look at the titles of my journal articles, hehe -- don't follow MMA. But it is normal for the jackets of movies to actually show the people actually starring in the movie. And there's a lot of MMA talent on this cover, let me tell you, ranging from the pretty good with Heath Herring (far left in back), to the really good with BJ Penn (back center) and Quinton Jackson (front left) to the best in the world with Georges St-Pierre (front right) and Anderson Silva (back right).

Now, all of them are in the movie. Heath Herring has the most screen time and actually qualifies as a "in" the movie, but the rest? Rampage Jackson is in the movie for about two minutes, GSP and BJ Penn are in slightly more, perhaps five minutes total for each of them and Anderson Silva is in for about two minutes with no dialog . . . which isn't too strange since he doesn't speak English, I suppose.

The movie actually stars this guy:



Hector Echavarria is his name. Who is he? I have no fucking idea. His Wikipedia page claims he's won a lot of competitions, such as the "World Vale-Tudo Kickboxing Champion of the World". None of his various world championships are sourced. Uh-huh. And I've never heard of such a thing as "World Vale-Tudo Kickboxing Champion of the World" and, perhaps more relevantly, Google has never heard of such a thing. It doesn't even make any goddamn sense! Vale tudo is basically Brazilian for "mixed martial arts" (though a little crazier). Vale tudo and kickboxing would be like saying the World Boxing Judo Champion of the World. Ugh. I mean, seriously? World Vale Tudo Kickboxing Champion of the World? Isn't that a bad Monty Python joke?

Other things Google has never heard of? World Kung Fu Championship. While there is no National World Tae Kwon Do Federation champion (c'mon, dood, is it national or world!) there is a WTF, which means World Tae Kwon Do Federation. I couldn't find Hector on the WTF webpage or any reference that seemed legitimate when googling them together.

There was a United States Karate Association up until 1999. From the 70s to 1989, however, it was functionally replaced by the Professional Karate Association and became the organization of Shuri-ryu karate (which was the style of the founder of the ISKA). From 1989 to 1999, the leadership of the organization was disputed after the founder of the ISKA died and in 1999 it was dissolved entirely. Uh-huh. I could probably get away saying I was an ISKA world champion, too, on account that the organization no longer exists.

I understand that martial arts isn't frequently very online. And his credentials are good enough so that Black Belt magazine recognizes him training Quinton Jackson and Chieck Kongo. His Wikipedia page also says he's working with BJ Penn . . . which is plausible since he got Penn in his silly little movie. But you compare Echavarria's Wikipedia page with, say, Penn's Wikipedia page -- and Penn's career is sourced out the wazoo. It says who Penn trained with and gives sources. So when Wikipedia says BJ Penn beat Brazilian jiu jitsu world champions, there's a sourced link to NBCSports.com. And, of course, it's superficially easy to find sources that acknowledge BJ Penn fought in the UFC and has held the lightweight and welterweight belts. And, interestingly enough, on Penn's Wikipedia page it makes no mention, at all, of Hector Echavarria training him. Neither does Rampage Jackson's page mention Echavarria as a trainer. Argh. This Echavarria is a tool.

This is just too good. I've got to quote: "Born in Corrientes, Argentina on December 6, 1969. Asthma troubled Echavarria as a young child, and his parents had to take turns rocking him at night just so he could breathe. His father sought help for his son with acupuncture treatments, and thereby came to know the first Shaolin monk to flee China, Grand Master Tung Kou Tsao. Although Hector was only four years old, Kou Tsao recommended that Hector learn Tai Chi Chuan because it would help alleviate his asthma by strengthening his breathing. For that reason, Hector started taking lessons in Tai Chi Chuan and Chinese Boxing with Kou Tsao. By the age of six, he was training in Judo and Jiu Jitsu under Grand Master Mayamoto of Kodokan." Holy shit, this guy's a fucking liar! Trained by Shaolin monks? Really? Grand masters of Kodokan started personally training him when he was six? Uh, yeah, right.

In addition to being a liar, he's also a lousy director and actor. I mean, I know that's what this article was supposed to be about but I was totally derailed by what a giant liar this guy is! Oh, excuse me, I'm sure that the article has no connection at all to Echavarria . . . *rolls eyes so far back I can see my brain*

But it's a lousy movie. Instead of being about all those MMA guys I like so well, it's about Hector and his MMA fanfic. Because that's what the movie is, MMA fanfic and he's the Mary Stu. Totally no kidding. So, he's the bestest MMA fighter ever and he hangs out all the time with a bunch of MMA guys, no, really! And they all just love him and think he's so cool and tough!

But MMA isn't badass enough for Hector, nope! He gets brought into an illegal tournament where he doesn't have to fight by any pansy rules! And for getting into the league, he gets to have sex with a hot girl! And when he wins, he gets to have sex with the other guy's hot girl and his own hot girl is totally okay with that! And he gets paid so much better than MMA fighters, who are always there for him and . . . he can beat up Anderson Silva! That's how tough he is!

It's totally fan fiction that somehow got filmed. The fights aren't particularly good -- so it's also a waste of talent, too.

Oh, god, the whole movie is like that. And it's awful. And I got suckered by the stupid fucking cover with guys I like on it. And there's a sex montage about every fifteen minutes. I think there are four of them in the movie. It's like, "Another fifteen minutes -- so here's some titties!" It's like a fourteen year old boy's power fantasy.

Anyway, the article rambled because I found saw Echavarria's lies about himself. The movie sucks. It's cover is a lie. A piece of my soul died today.

Soylent Green is made of ham!

Last night, Adrienne and I watched Soylent Green, which is a sci-fi movie classic. I had watched it, before, when I was ten or something, but remembered very little of it except the "Soylent Green is made of people" part. I'm certainly changed since then.

For those of you who don't know, Soylent Green, the movie, not the product, takes place in 2022, in a dystopian future where overpopulation has gotten entirely out of control with Manhattan, alone, having twenty million people. There are also unspecified soil and water pollution that make feeding this mass next to impossible, save with the use of the soylent products -- including the eponymous solyent green. Despite the constant food shortages, the people seem pretty well fed, including some fat people. I'm not talking the rich people, either, but the poor ones, too.

Well, the story takes the form of a sci-fi noir and might classify as proto-cyberpunk insofar as the protagonist -- played by Charlton Heston -- is a police officer fighting against a giant corporation. A rich man is murdered and when Heston's character, Thorn, tries to solve the case he's told to back down by the establishment but doesn't, man, 'cause that's the kind of guy he is! Eventually, he discovers that soylent green is made of people. It seems that the environmental degradation is getting worse, so they need a new food source to make up for what farms and the oceans are no longer providing, so they're processing the dead into a high-energy food source.

To me, this was a big, "So what?" It wasn't like they had murder squads going around killing people for the specific purpose of feeding other people. They were content to use people who died in ordinary ways. I mean, right now, every time we eat something, we're eating people who have been reprocessed by the earth into food. Make no doubt, some of the molecules in the food you eat are recycled people. That's the goddamn cycle of life! Sure, the movie uses it a little less naturally, but they've got a food crisis on their hands.

I mean, it gets out that soylent green is people, this is what the company is going to do. They're going to say, "We have a choice. Environmental degradation is getting worse. The other products aren't able to keep up with food demand. So, you can either eat soylent green or do without. Those are the only options." I bet a couple meals later, people will go, "Eating people. I can handle that." Starving people will become cannibals, though the kind of cannibals they are is pretty abstract, making it much easier. Add in some billboards about how they're sorry about the deception, and the whole matter would be swept under the carpet in a few weeks. The big reveal isn't that big a deal, if you ask me.

In truth, the movie isn't very good. It's unfocused, with lots of dead end sub-plots, many of them inherently idiotic. For instance, the murdered man is supposed to be partnered with the governor of New York, and the governor gives a vague nod to goons to "do what needs to be done" to protect the secret of soylent green. We never return to the governor or his association with the murdered man. And there's this incredibly long scene where one of the characters, an old comically Jewish man, goes to a euthanasia center where he's executed to what appears to be an Imax theater experience showing clips of nature the way things used to be before the various environmental catastrophes. In includes a weepy Charlton Heston going on about how beautiful it all had been, damn it!

And the title of this little rantfest comes from Heston's acting "style", which is to show a lot of teeth and ham it up as much as humanly possible. Seriously. There are actual pigs out there going, "I'm less ham than that."

The movie is also deeply sexist. Every woman with dialog is "furniture", meaning prostitutes who come with a living space. I know it was meant to show how, in this dystopian future, people are low grade commodities, the massive population combined with massive unemployment turning humans into sexual commodities. But our "hero" treats the women like shit. He's mean to these literal sex slaves and wastes no time intimidating them into having sex with him. One, of course, falls in love with the hero because he's slightly less abusive than the concierge of the building she belongs to. But even that ends up being a dead-end sub-plot.

I know much of this came from the adaptation from the novel (which I haven't read) to the screenplay. I suspect the novel has these things tied up more completely. And I know the screenplay is trying to show the detail of the sci-fi world that is different than our own and trying to demonstrate that the protagonist is a man of his times, a corrupt cop made corrupt by an awful system. None of this matters. It is possible to write non-sexist scripts about sexist times and the job of a screenwriter and director is to make a good movie, which would have meant cutting out all the crap about euthanasia centers and "furniture" and every bit with the governor.

The movie also has that comical seventies style action. It's like punching didn't exist in the seventies, I swear. People will throw these wild haymakers and when they land, the people will throw themselves to the side, their arms flinging up . . . we all make fun of Kirk's action scenes, but Kirk's action scenes were sublime compared to this stuff.

All in all, it wasn't a very good movie. It's a perfect representation of the horrible crap that sci-fi fans had to put up in the dark years between the end of the original series Star Trek and Star Wars.