Category: Cinema

If You Are a Guy and You Refuse to Go on Your Rescuing-Supermodels Adventure Because Charlize Theron Is Coming with You, You Really Need to Reconsider Your Commitment to Heterosexuality.

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Virginia Hey, “Warrior Woman”, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981)


Charlize Theron, Furiosa, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

You may be aware that Australian director George Miller has done a reboot of his seminal 1979 film Mad Max.

What you may not be aware of is the fact that various members of the really small penis brigade, aka “Men’s Rights Advocates”, have called for a boycott of the film.

Over at Unfogged, a guest poster notes:

The new Mad Max movie may be the most guy movie ever made. The plot is literally Tom Hardy (Mad Max) and Charlize Theron (Furiosa) rescue scantily-clad supermodels. If you asked me when I was 15 to list movie ideas, the list would have gone something like: scantily-clad supermodels, 18 wheelers, guys getting shot, guys getting blown up, fist-fights on top of an 18 wheeler, guys with chainsaws, guys getting run over by 18 wheelers, guys with guitars that shoot fire, and cars crashing into 18 wheelers and blowing up. This list is basically the script for Mad Max: Fury Road. The only thing missing is a helicoper piloted by velociraptors crashing into an 18 wheeler. But there’s always the chance of a sequel.

He further notes that the this shows just how toxic the “Mens Rights” Movement is. Not only are they demandin “guy films”, they are demanding the exclusion of any strong women from the movie, even though the director, George Miller, has a long history of woman warriors in his films.

His closing statement says it all, “If you are a guy and you refuse to go on your rescuing-supermodels adventure because Charlize Theron is coming with you, you really need to reconsider your commitment to heterosexuality.”

That’s gonna leave a mark.

H/t Brad DeLong

I Really Don’t Know What to Make of This

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But if Sy Hersh’s account of the killing of Osama bin Laden is even ¼ true, this is the biggest story that he’s ever broken:*

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

 The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

 This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

The cliff notes version of this, courtesy of The Stranger, is:

  • Pakistani officials knew about the raid and even helped the US pull it off.
  • There never was a firefight, neither in the yard outside the house nor once the SEALs got inside.
  • The story of the courier whom the reportedly CIA traced, leading them to bin Laden, was a fabrication.
  • The story of the courier dying in the firefight was a cover-up “because he didn’t exist and we couldn’t produce him,” a retired senior intelligence official told Hersh.
  • The way the CIA actually found out where bin Laden was is that a “Pakistani walk-in” who wanted the $25 million reward came in and told the CIA about it.
  • Osama bin Laden was not armed, contrary to reports that he had a machine gun and was killed in a firefight, and he was not killed with just one or two bullets but “obliterated.”
  • “Seals cannot live with the fact that they killed bin Laden totally unopposed, and so there has to be an account of their courage in the face of danger. The guys are going to sit around the bar and say it was an easy day? That’s not going to happen,” that same retired senior intelligence official said.
  • “Despite all the talk” about what the SEALs collected on-site, the retired official said there were “no garbage bags full of computers and storage devices. The guys just stuffed some books and papers they found in his room in their backpacks.”
  • The story about bin Laden’s sea burial may be a fabrication.
  • The retired official told Hersh that bin Laden’s “remains, including his head… were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains—or so the Seals claimed.”
  • Obama was going to wait until a week after bin Laden’s death to announce it, and he was going to tell the American people that bin Laden had been killed by a drone, but after the SEALs had to blow up their malfunctioning helicopter on-site, attracting attention locally, everything changed.
  • The story about the vaccination program carried out locally in an attempt to get bin Laden’s DNA—a story that “led to the cancellation of other international vaccination programmes that were now seen as cover for American spying”—wasn’t true.
  • Retired official again: “It’s a great hoax.”

(emphasis original)

The American press has been completely dismissive of Hersh’s report, and, it’s fair to say that the sourcing is not as solid as I would have liked.

Then again, when you look at the biggest supporter of the “Zero Dark Thirty” narrative, the CIA, we know that they are still lying about torture, that they still nave not come clean about spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and basically wrote the movie “Zero Dark Thirty”.

I know that the movie version is false, at least as to whether torture worked, the Senate Intelligence Committee report proved that.

I’m not sure where the truth lies, and any dealing with the machinations of the “war on terror” in general, and the Pakistani state security apparatus in particular. is a bag full of cats.

At this point, I’ll go with Charlie Pierce’s:

What’s clear is that, in the war on terror, or whatever it is in which we’ve been engaged since we handed the military policy over to the spooks and thrown international crisis diplomacy into the vast, deep underbrush of myth and legend generated by the conjuring spells of the intelligence world, that we willingly surrendered self-government to magic and spellcraft. And Osama bin Laden is still dead, and his body is still at the bottom of the sea. Maybe.

I’m not clear what the truth is, except (of course) for the fact that the CIA tortured, that it did not work, and that Langley lies about everything.

I is confuzzled.

*And yes, I mean that statement. If is just ¼ true, this is the biggest story that Seymour f%$#ing Hersh has ever broken. Think about that for a moment.

Minor Freakout at the Saroff Household

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It was a good one.

I was channel surfing, and saw that The Princess Bride was about to start on one of the cable channels.

Neither of the Saroff children had ever seen this film in its entirety, so I ran around like my hair was on fire getting them down to the TV.

We also made grilled cheese sandwiches and from-scratch tomato basil soup (this started before I saw the movie).

They enjoyed the film immensely. For them not to do would be ……… Inconceivable!!!

I expect to hear quotes from the film incessantly for the next few weeks.

I Have a Very Strange Son

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I have been watching the Dr. Who marathon on BBC America, and this evening, I had an epiphany.

Since I was at home, I shared it with Charlie.

I would have shared it with Natalie at the same time, but seeing as how she is in Hawaii, she will have to read it on Facebook.

My epiphany was that the toys in the Pixar film Toy Story are weeping angels. (See picture the picture with the doctor, I am not the first to come up with this idea.)

Whenever someone looks at Sheriff Woody or Buzz Lightyear they are inanimate, but when unobserved, they move on their own.

They, and Mr. Potato Head, are weeping angels.

I mentioned it to Charlie, and he suffered a bit of a meltdown, and he strongly implied that I had ruined his childhood.

About a half hour later, I talked to him again, and he gave me a high-five.

He told me that after some reflection, he realized that my brief moment of insight actually improved his memories of the whole Toy Story series.

Weird.

FWIW, he’s getting into Dr. Who, though he is still first and foremost a Brony.

In particular, he likes the degree to which the show adheres to the Novikov self-consistency principle, and so does not  create paradoxes.

It Goes Without Saying that Rush Limbaugh is a Blithering Idiot

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As evidenced by his recent racist screed about how Idris Elba cannot play James Bond because the actor is black.

Emails revealed that a senior Sony executive was looking to tap Elba to replace Daniel Craig when the latter is done with the role.

Of course, Rush Limbaugh had a bigotrygasm over all of this.

This begs the question:  Why are sponsors supporting this inveterate racist?

To be clear, I would much rather have Elba playing George Smiley than James Bond:  I’ve always found Bond to be a bit one dimensional.

I will say something here:  If  Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal has mooted casting Elba take the role of Jack Ryan in a Tom Clancy movie, I would be upset: It’s a profound waste of his not inconsiderable acting talent.

Then again, playing Jack Ryan in a Tom Clancy would be a waste of pretty much anyone’s acting talent.

Another Candidate for the Dumbest Guy on the F%$#ing Planet.

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Who in their right mind would mess with perfection?

Everyone who ever suggested that Sophia Loren get a nose job:

When you were starting out, as hard as it is to believe, some people told you to change your appearance, right?

 I always tried not to listen to these people. They were saying that my nose was too long and my mouth was too big. It didn’t hurt me at all because when I believe in something, it’s like war. It’s a battle. But even Carlo said, “You know the cameramen, they say that your nose is too long. Maybe you have to touch it a little bit.” And I said, “Listen, I don’t want to touch nothing on my face because I like my face. If I have to change my nose, I am going back to Pozzuoli.” At that time, they used to do noses like a French nose with a little tip at the end — they liked that. Can you imagine me with a nose like that?

Seriously?

She’s still gorgeous in her at 80.

That is nucking futs.

I’m Back!!!!

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I’ve missed something less than 10 days blogging since I started in 2007.

This is the first time that I have taken 2 days off from blogging in a row.

This was a good thing.

My kids were helping with a haunted house with Open Space Arts, and Sharon* and I decided to make the most of it.

We had a couple of romantic evenings, including going to the movies to see The Judge, which has amongst its stars Robert Downey Jr, Robert Duvall, and Billy Bob Thornton, 3 actors for whom I would pay admission to hear them read a phone book.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Muck Farvel!

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Marvel Comics is cancelling the Fantastic Four comic book, largely because Marvel Studios does not have the movie rights, having sold them to Fox during their broke as hell days:

That, as a result of Disney’s highest single shareholder and Marvel CEO Isaac Perlmutter’s anger with Fox Studios over negotiations regarding the film-and-related rights to The Fantastic Four, that Marvel would cancel the Fantastic Four comic rather than provide any promotion, however small it might be, towards the Fox Studios film. Merchandise and licenses were scrapped and even Fantastic Four posters in the offices were pulled down lest Perlmutter see one and have his ire raised. It may not have been logical, but it was a decision born of personal emotion. It was steadied by sense. X-Men wasn’t cancelled, for example as the Xbooks sell so well. But Fantastic Four? It may have been the first book of the Marvel Universe, but its sales have continued to drag, even after multiple relaunches with high profile creators. There would be less of a hit to the bottom line if this comic was dropped.

Our story was pooh-poohed by all and sundry, save for CBR who independently confirmed that it was intended for the Fantastic Four to be cancelled. Then the letter about sketch card artists being forbidden to use Fantastic Four characters was made public, Mondo talked about being forbidden to use Fantastic Four characters and today, we we were already planning to run another story about Diamond Select Toys confirming that they are unable to make any Fantastic Four toys.

Right now we are not able to make characters from the FF, but as soon as that changes we will consider them.

But events moved on too quickly. Now the catalogues of Hachette, Marvel’s bookstore distributor, seems to confirm the cancellation at least. With June’s solicitation for James Robinson and Leonard Kirk‘s Fantastic Four: The End Is Fourever.

I get it that Marvel Studios wants the FF back, but they sold the rights when they were nearly bankrupt before they got bought by the Mouse, and killing off the Ff comic book in a fit of pique sucks.

Something is Wrong on the Internet

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As you are no doubt aware, the film Guardians of the Galaxy opened this weekend.

As the archetypal summer blockbuster, it got a lot of reviews, and one, at the Village Voice, Stephanie Zacharek, was less than charitable, which resulted in a torrent of sexist abuse directed her way:

“She’s just pissed because she lives in the Village full of gay men and no one wants any of her old, dried out pie.”

………

 “We live in a world where 1000s of people are being beheaded and murdered throughout the world each and every day and this harlot has the nerve to knock it because it’s too fun?”

Harlot? Seriously?

“She should stick to reviewing chick flicks only.”

What is wrong with these people?

You can castigate a movie critic, or for that matter any critic for being unfair.

In fact the (sometimes delightfully and sometimes tediously) bitchy Rex Reed has made a career out of being this.

But simply posting misogynist rants sucks wet farts from dead pigeons, or, as Guardians of the Galaxy writer* Brian Michael Bendis observes, ” You love Captain America? Well, you know what Captain America would never do? Go online anonymously and sh$# on a girl for having an opinion.” (%$ mine)

H/t xkcd for the top comic.

*To be clear, Bendis writes for the comic book, he did not do the screenplay.†
†Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Thoughts on the Passing of James Garner

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The Americanization of Emily
I cannot imagine seeing this in a movie today

I’ve had to think about it for a while.

He paid a big part in my childhood, both as Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files, and as Brett Maverick in Maverick. (I’m not that old, it was rerun in Portland, Oregon during my High School years.)

Well, following his death, I read his Wiki, and discovered a number of interesting facts:

  • He got two purple hearts in the Korean war, one for wounds in his butt from friendly fire while diving into a fox hole.
  • While in Korea, he was the the scrounger for his unit, which kind of mirrors a lot of roles that he played, most notably The Americanization of Emily.

I will note that of all the PI shows and police procedurals that I saw growing up, The Rockford Files was the only show that had a pro civil liberties/due process/privacy bent.

There was an episode about prosecutorial abuse of the grand jury process, “So Help Me God”, another about private efforts to create massive server farms to invade people’s privacy, “The House on Willis Avenue,” and law enforcement misconduct was a frequent theme in the show.

My older (hairier) brother always noted that it was rather ironic that The Rockford Files was regularly scheduled for broadcast with Quincy, M.E., which routinely used civil rights and due process as a bogeyman for plot purposes.

In any case, he was always fun to watch.

I have to turn my kids onto Support Your Local Gunfighter, which is IMNSHO the classic Garner movie role.

Sharon’s* Birthday Movie Review

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Her birthday was today, so last night, we saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

I am going to try to avoid spoilers, so the cast list is after the break, but I will be putting my guesses as to future movies (when not spoiling this one) above the break. 

First, this is a good movie.  In some ways, the best of the Marvel movies, though as I have said before, I would pay money to listen to Robert Downey Jr. read the phone book.

Captain America is simply more compelling than Iron Man, more relevant than Thor, and less contrived than the Hulk.

This movie deals with a lot of things, but at its core, it is the story of an alien, by which I mean Steve Rogers/Captain America.

He is very from another world, one which has ceased to exist, which from that perspective, is rather a lot like Superman, only Cap is far more aware of this than the guy in the red and blue PJs.

Chris Evans is good as Captain America, and Scarlett Johansson and Samuel L. Jackson reprise their roles as Nick Fury and Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow.

It introduces some new characters, most notably Anthony Mackie who plays Sam Wilson/Falcon, a kickass vet with a flying suit who I think that we will be seeing more, and Emily VanCamp as Kate/Agent 13, in what seems like a future role (if the movie follows the arc of the comic books) as Captain America’s off and on love interest. (Though there is also an indication of some future fireworks between Cap and Black Widow)

Interestingly enough, the movie is rather topical, and fairly explicitly offers a critique of our wonderful world of pervasive digital surveillance that Edward Snowden confirmed to the world.

It does all this while it dealing with the issues of loss and friendship that are inherent in Captain America’s back story.

I would give the movie an 8 out of 10.

*Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.


Cast:
Chris Evans     …     Steve Rogers / Captain America
Samuel L. Jackson     …     Nick Fury
Scarlett Johansson     …     Natasha Romanoff / Black Widow
Robert Redford     …     Alexander Pierce
Sebastian Stan     …     Bucky Barnes / Winter Soldier
Anthony Mackie     …     Sam Wilson / Falcon
Cobie Smulders     …     Maria Hill
Frank Grillo     …     Brock Rumlow
Maximiliano Hernández     …     Jasper Sitwell
Emily VanCamp     …     Kate / Agent 13
Hayley Atwell     …     Peggy Carter
Toby Jones     …     Dr. Arnim Zola
Stan Lee     …     Smithsonian Guard
Callan Mulvey     …     Jack Rollins
Jenny Agutter     …     Councilwoman Hawley

Father’s Day Movie Review: Iron Man 3

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As I’ve noted before, I would pay to listen to Robert Downey, Jr. read the phone book, so we went to see Iron Man 3, in 3-D.

Robert Downey Jr. … Tony Stark
Gwyneth Paltrow … Pepper Potts
Don Cheadle … Colonel James Rhodes
Guy Pearce … Aldrich Killian
Rebecca Hall … Maya Hansen
Jon Favreau … Happy Hogan
Ben Kingsley … The Mandarin
James Badge Dale … Savin
Stephanie Szostak … Brandt
Paul Bettany … Jarvis (voice)
William Sadler … President Ellis
Dale Dickey … Mrs. Davis
Ty Simpkins … Harley Keener
Miguel Ferrer … Vice President Rodriguez
Xueqi Wang … Doctor Wu

This movie will not be a surprise. It’s a part of the franchise, and largely true to the conventions of that franchise.

The downside of the movie is the plot, which is overly complex, and it has problems with coherence and consistency.

This was the same problem with Iron Man 2, which I also enjoyed.

Downey is a joy to watch, but the best performance of the movie is by Sir Ben Kingsley as The Mandarin, which I cannot even begin to describe without spoiling the plot.

The dialogue is punchy, and frequently amusing, much like the two previous sequels, though the best single line comes from neither Downey nor Kingsley, but from an unnamed minion of The Mandarin, who behaves in a way in which minions would in reality.

What I can say is that the film was set around Christmas, which is rather odd for a Summer blockbuster, and a child has a rather prominent role, Ty Simpkins as Harley Keener, and he does not suck.

I also found that Gwynneth Paltrow was a lot less annoying that in the last movie.  She had less hand wringing, and did things, as opposed to being an object to be acted upon.

As to the 3-D, except for explosions and action sequences (admittedly half the movie) it was relatively understated.

I would give it a 7 out of 10.