A Blog Named Sue

Because celluloid heroes never feel any pain

I came across something interesting in David Denby's review of Iron Man - it seems that at one point in the movie, Iron Man gets waterboarded:

In any case, the freelance fanatics, or whatever they are, waterboard Tony Stark, which, considering what some American interrogators and their surrogates have done to suspects recently, is enraging to watch. Such are the ways of pop: we cast our sins onto others. The complaint sounds a little wan, but it’s worth noting that, possibly, more Americans will see this dunderheaded fantasia on its opening weekend than have seen all the features and documentaries that have labored to show what’s happening in Iraq and on the home front.

I'm not sure Denby hasn't missed the point here; Jon Favreau, the film's director, is a pretty smart guy and I'm certain that if he decided to show Islamic extremists (or caricatures thereof) waterboarding an American billionaire arms dealer there's a reason for it - and I don't think it's because Favreau was rooting for Captain America during the Civil War story arc.

On the other hand, while I think it's a bit unfair to assume that the creative team behind Iron Man threw waterboarding in there simply to make the bad guys seem worse, Denby's point about Iron Man reaching a larger audience than, say, Standard Operating Procedure or Taxi to the Dark Side is a potentially valid one, given that they've decided to update Iron Man's origin story so that it now features scary brown people rather than scary yellow people. Is there a chance that certain less-informed moviegoers might have some of their negative racial stereotypes reinforced by the waterboarding sequence? Maybe. Does that mean Favreau shouldn't have included it? Well, maybe.

Pardon my equivocation, but I'm genetically unable to tell other artists what they should do with their work - which probably explains why David Denby is reviewing movies for The New Yorker and I'm reviewing his review. But if it were up to me, I'd go for it and waterboard as many superheroes as I could. You can't craft your work hoping the dumbest segment of your audience doesn't miss whatever point your trying to make; eventually you end up resenting your audience and once that happens your work starts to suck.  Someone who doesn't know that the United States is waterboarding prisoners is probably clueless enough to think that Barack Obama really is a terrorist sleeper agent - that viewer's opinion of Muslims isn't likely to get much lower. Also, as I've written before, most people don't really know what waterboarding entails. If this scene gets just a few people thinking a little bit more deeply about what's happening in America today, then I'm for it.

Besides, Iron Man is a tool. Never liked him anyway.

Make Art! Make Art!

I don't have a lot to say about last night's Oscars, mainly because I've been too busy to see half the nominated movies and, frankly, Juno and Atonement look like they might very well be annoying. (My Lovely and Talented Wife Who Is Smarter Than Me™ saw both and told me, simply, "You won't like them.")

I was thrilled to see Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova win for "Falling Slowly" from the film "Once," though - and their performance of the song during last night's telecast must have sealed the deal for doubters there may have been in the audience:

I got a real kick out of that movie. Check it out if you haven't already.

At one point in the telecast My Lovely and Talented Wife Who Is Smarter Than Me™ teased me mercilessly by shouting, "Come quick! Come quick! They've got dancing dwarfs!" I rushed in from the kitchen only to see that one of the dancers in one of the damn production numbers from "Enchanted" was kind of on the short side, but that was it. Bereft of quality dwarf entertainment, I will now console myself with Spike Jones and the late great Billy Barty performing Yankee Doodle Dandy:

Spike Jones - I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy
Uploaded by perruche

When The World Is Running Down, You Make The Best Of What's Still Around

NBC Universal has announced that they will soon begin pulling all of their programming from iTunes. New NBC content is still being added to iTunes for the time being, but the network has announced it will soon launch it's own service, called NBC Direct, at which point NBC Universal material will no longer be available via iTunes.

This is obviously a huge risk for NBC Universal; NBC Direct material will not play on an iPod. I give it six weeks before some code monkey figures out how to make that happen, but as of now, no iPod. In other words, they have just blocked their content from appearing on the most popular by far portable media player. (Don't worry, guys - tech geeks don't make up that large a segment of Heroes audience. Or Battlestar Galactica's.) It's also a significant investment for NBC - rather than simply deliver a high quality downloadable video file to Apple for them to put up on iTunes, they now have to actually host all that video somewhere. That's a lot of video. I'm thinking many, many servers in a series of great big rooms.

But here's the kicker: NBC Direct content will contain commercials that you can't fast forward through. You download the show, you watch the commercials - at least for the seven days you're allowed to watch it before the file self-destructs.

Maybe this model will work for them; I don't know. It sure sounds fishy. It also seems emblematic of a larger problem: no one has yet figured out how to make money in the post-commerical era. And make no mistake about it: we are in the post-commercial era. Unless you're watching a live sporting event, between iTunes and the DVR there's really no reason to ever watch a commerical again.

I don't want to sound triumphal here - I have no vested interest in the commercial era ending. In fact, a good deal of my income and therefore the health and well-being of my family hinges on the commercial era continuing. But, by and large, I think it's done. It's time to realize that and move on. Just because you studied something in school doesn't automatically make it an eternal truth; it just happened to be the truth at the moment you were in school. I realize I'm painting with a pretty broad brush here but I stand by that overall sentiment. It's a lession the RIAA should have learned.

What I think we're really seeing here is typical human resistance to the fact that sometimes shit stops working. It just stops. There can be a one reason, a hundred reasons, or no good reason but every now and again shit stops working. Business models stop working. Governments stop working. Religions stop working.

Sometimes, the shit just stops working.

That doesn't have to be problematic in and of itself. It's just the way of things. But the real damage happens, the real chaos is unleashed when people try to force the issue, to willy-nilly prop up the failing business model, economic theory, government, or religion. Sometimes the damage this causes is inconsequential. If NBC fails in their little experiment no great harm will be done. Sometimes, though, the damage is catastrophic: we start wars to prop up the oil economy and to support the idea that a massive, high-tech military capable of obliterating entire sovereign nations with the touch of a button can be a force for good in this world. A multi-million dollar denial industry has been created to convince us we don't need to do anything about global warming. Brain-damaged children are slandered to maintain the  status-quo of our ramshackle healthcare system.

It never works. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold. So be it. New centers form soon enough. You wouldn't (or shouldn't) govern your life like that, constantly clinging to outmoded behaviors that have long since ceased to do you any good if they ever did in the first place. There's a word for people who do that and it isn't complimentary. I can't say I've learned many things in my nearly forty years on this planet but I have learned this: anyone - anyone - who tries to sell you on some Rube Goldberg plan designed to simply maintain the status quo is doomed to fail. Doomed. This is an absolutely scalable truism: it works on a personal level up to a corporate level all the way up to a governmental level.  The harder you have to work to resist change, the more complicated the scheme you need to prevent it, the more inevitable that change is.

Remember this the next time you're in a meeting with your boss and he outlines some absurd reason why the company can't take a necessary step to adapt to a changing marketplace. Remember this as we head full bore into the silly season, when presidential aspirants will bombard you with Very Importan Reasons why we can't overhaul our health care system or critically examine why the United States is an imperial power and should it continue to be one. Remember this.

Sometimes, the shit just stops working.

You Want to See Whatever Common People See

I recently saw an episode of Charlie Rose that featured Robert Shaye, Co-CEO of New Line and bete noir of Lord of the Rings fans everywhere. It being Charlie Rose, the guest was required to say something completely asinine - and Shaye did not disappoint. He lamented the rise of the Internet in general and movie blogs in particular because, now, all of a sudden, "everyone is an expert." Apparently we all now feel we have the right to pick movies apart and discuss them and in some cases actually give our opinion of the work in a public forum! The nerve of some people!

I genuinely surprised to hear him go on like this  - Shaye always struck me as a pretty smart guy. What did he honestly think we did with movies before the Internet? The first thing everybody does after they see a movie - if they give a damn about movies, and in some cases even if they don't - is go to a pub or cafe and start picking the thing apart to see what worked and what didn't.  Even if they're not aware they're doing it, they do it; "Dood, that was fucking awesome!" is a perfectly valid critique of a cinematic work.

Big deal, so what - some people now decide to do the same thing on the Internet. It's nothing they weren't doing already - except that now Robert Shaye (and his marketing people) can hear them.

$icko

I'm going to let you in on a little secret: I'm married to a foreigner. Worse yet, I'm married to one of those foreigners who hails from a nation that any conservative windbag would assure you is a liberal hellhole on the brink of taxing itself into oblivion. It's been on that brink for several decades now, enjoying a higher standard of living, better schools, lower infant mortality rates and greater life expectancy; that's one hell of a brink. Damn, I should live on that brink.

Anyway, my brilliant and lovely wife from the brink and I sat down the other day and compared paychecks. She works for an organization based on the brink and as she is still a citizen of said brink she is taxed at their rates. It turns out that far from being taxed to death, she's paying marginally less than I am. Now, I live in New York City, so your mileage may vary when it comes to this little thought experiment, but even though New York is one of the most highly taxed cities in the country, its taxes are not so far out of line with the rest of the country that one thinks of it as a proto-European nanny-state.

All of this brings me, in an admittedly roundabout way, to Michael Moore's Sicko. I haven't seen it yet, so please don't consider this a review of any sort. Another relation from the brink saw it over the weekend, though, and that relation was curious as to why the US doesn't seem to have enough money to cover universal healthcare for all of its citizens while the rest of the civilized world does. It's a point my relation felt Moore could have explored in more detail; after all, due to the USA's size and relatively prosperous economy, the money should be there even though we're not taxed at a rate equal to what you see in those states that provide universal coverage.

I'm no accountant, but I'm pretty sure this has something to do with it.

And maybe this. It's tough to tell.

Wild Loose Commas

Sorry about the unintentional radio silence over the past few days; a pre-holiday crunch at the office kept me offline and I've been treating myself to an extended sojourn in the real world for the past few days - a sojourn highlighted by The Worst Haircut Ever; I swear, I look like Steve Ditko's rendition of J. Jonah Jameson. Anyway, a few random bits of trivia that have been rattling around in my head (non-sci-fi geeks can tune out now, if they desire):

-I thought this Entertainment Weekly article about Transformers was pretty funny; I was around 14 when the cartoon debuted so I was never really a fan of it, but you've got to get a chuckle out of the cartoon's fans griping that the film adaptation of a toy franchise is overly commercial.

The story reminded me of when I did some promotional work for the Mattel/Cartoon Network re-launch of the He-Man & The Masters of the Universe line a few years ago. I was shocked to discover that Mattel keeps a full time PR person on staff whose sole job is to maintain good relations between Mattel and the He-Man fan base. Mind you, this was a franchise that had been dormant for nearly twenty years at that point in time. He-Man liason is a tough, unenviable job, by the way - there are literally thousands of He-Man fan sites and it seems that grown men who write He-Man fanfic are a surprisingly prickly and fickle bunch.

I have used this space to wax rhapsodic about the Christopher Eccleston Dr. Who episodes; I've finally had a chance to catch up with the first season of David Tennant's run as the Doctor.

Well.

Um, yeah, let's just say my reaction is a bit less rhapsodic...

Regular transmissions about stuff that actually matters to resume tomorrow.

I'm Gazing Now, Into History Back

So Imus is gearing up to sue WCBS for the balance of his $40 million contract, his primary defense being, "Hey, you knew I was a scorpion when you picked me up." As coverage of the trial ramps up, we can expect a whole new round of hand wringing over who can say what about whom and just what is this thing you Earth people call comedy, anyway?

You know what? I don't fucking care.

You want to know why? Check out this Digby piece* about the fate of Ashleigh Banfield. Since the liberal blogosphere didn't really blossom until the Iraq War was foisted upon us, some of you may only remember Banfield as the good looking MSNBC reporter with the glasses. One of the worst things you can be in American corporate culture today is an attractive woman who's actually good at her job, at least if that job is anything other some type of modeling; you actually have get over the "burden" of your own physical attractiveness in order to be taken seriously. Banfield was at Ground Zero when the towers came down, and nearly suffocated in the debris cloud while on air. She rescued a police officer who had nearly succumbed, hauling him to relative safety. While in Afghanistan and Pakistan she used her Canadian citizenship to gain access to areas and individuals hostile to Americans. All of this earned her the dubious honor of being called a "mind slut" who looks like she used to "do porno" by the illustrious Michael Savage and his ilk.

The trouble started with a speech she gave shortly after she returned from Afghanistan and Pakistan in which she criticized American war coverage for being too sanitized and jingoistic, urging her colleagues to show more than the "puff of smoke" made when a mortar landed. The speech ended her career. She was demoted and fired shortly thereafter. Now she works for Court TV, and if she plays her cards right whe might get a gig on a Hollywood gossip show next year.

Seeing as we live in a society where a well-respected, gutsy journalist can lose her job for taking the radical position that war kills people, I'm going to have a tough time working up any interest in some dessicated millionaire zombie who lost his job for calling some teenaged girls whores.

Who are we allowed to make fun of? Really, I don't fucking care.

*I found the Digby piece via Dr Bopper THP, guest posting for the ailing Steve Gilliard over at The News Blog. Since Gilliard went into the hospital, he's had a virtual legion of incredibly talented people filling in for him - I can't think of any greater testimony to Gilliard's abilities than the number of gifted people taking turns keeping his seat warm until he gets back. Go check them out, right now. And Steve, get well soon. I can't face the prospect of a Giuliani presdential candidacy without knowing you'll be there to play whack-a-mole with any bullshit talking point that pops out of his mouth.

He'd Like to Come and Meet Us But He Thinks He'd Blow Our Mind

(Between the VT shootings, the Baghdad bombings, and Debbie Schlussel, I’m too wiped out to post anything substantial. And so, trivia!)

Well, it looks like the producers of the upcoming Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer have given the matter a lot of thought and decided that the movie should suck.

Actually, I have no idea if the movie’s going to suck and frankly not that much interest since I wasn’t crazy about the first one. (Oh, will Reed ever let Sue know his true feelings? Oh, poor Reed. WHAT THE FUCK? This is the Fantastic Four. Where are the giant goddamn mole monsters?) But the whole business reminds me of something that’s been on my mind about the current spate of science fiction movies in general. Why has science fiction become so timid?

Printed sci-fi is in a deep dark hole, but sci-fi on film and TV seems to be riding higher than ever. Battlestar Galactica is one of the most highly regarded programs on television, and Children of Men* was one of this year’s best-reviewed movies – both deservedly so. The third X-Men film was one of the top grossing films of last year, and as Stan Lee would say the world will tremble when Spider-Man 3 drops next week. So why are they so afraid to show us a giant guy in purple metal armor who likes to eat the occasional planet?

I think part of it has to do with a fear of alienating the audience that seems to have recently discovered science fiction. Obviously, the success of and prestige granted shows like Galactica and films like Children of Men is due to their artful portrayal of the waking nightmare we’re all currently enduring. Fair enough – but have we come down so squarely on the side of science fiction “saying something” that we’ve forgotten how to have some fun with it? I’m not advocating camp. I hate camp. But science fiction can take off on some intense flights of fancy without having to become goofy.  2001: A Space Odyssey is a good example of this, as is Forbidden Planet. When was the last time you saw a well-acted, well-written sci-fi movie that had the scale and ambition of Forbidden Planet? That movie’s over fifty years old, for heaven’s sake.

Nerve.com recently compiled a list of twenty comics that will change your life. All the usual suspects were represented – Maus, Love and Rockets, Watchmen – but the Lee-Kirby run on the Fantastic Four also made the list, precisely because the stories were huge and completely and utterly mad while playing it straight. That’s an achievement; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. 

The only show I can think of that’s even attempting anything like this is Doctor Who, at least the Christopher Eccleston episodes. (I haven’t seen any of the David Tenant episodes so I can’t comment on them.) The Doctor’s survival guilt over being the sole survivor of a war fought across all of time and space that devastated entire civilizations including his own – talk about scale! – provided an anchor strong enough to secure our sophisticated, 21st century sensibilities, but it’s chain was slack enough for us to float with the story in whatever mad, wondrous direction it took us.

Wonder. That’s really what I’m getting at.  Has wonder become too much to ask of an audience? How much grounding is necessary to make wonder palatable? Science fiction’s role as social critic goes back to H.G. Wells, but Wells’ work is also filled with wonder, and horror. Jules Verne was less of a social critic but even more an architect of dreams. Wells’ grounded his work, “matured” it for a broader audience if you prefer, with his social criticism while Verne “matured” his work with as rigorous a basis in scientific fact as possible. (In fact, Verne’s specifications for the rocket used in From the Earth to the Moon are remarkably similar to those of the actual rocket that took the first Earthmen to the moon.) 

Wonder is essential, necessary, and I miss it, because lately I don’t need Battlestar Galactica to tell me life sucks, however brilliantly it does so. Lately I find myself needing time traveling phone booths, ten-mile deep planetary power generators, and titanic alien monoliths to remind me why I should care, and what I might miss if I stop.

*An aside regarding Children of Men: can you think of a single American or European filmmaker who could have adopted a Mexican aesthetic sensibility as well as Alfonso Cuaron adopted an English one for Children of Men? He used a King Crimson song, for God’s sake – and he used it well. What would the Mexican equivalent of that be? I have no idea.