Cowboys and Aliens, the Prequel

Sorry folks. Cowboys and Aliens just didn’t do it for me. The reviews I read were promisng, and I wanted to believe, but there were too many things going on that didn’t make sense. One reviewer said we’re past the idea of aliens as strictly evil. Maybe that’s part of the problem. These aliens are grotesquely ugly in a conventional reptilian way and apparently motivated pretty much by greed, which is a one-dimensional moral lesson in the tradition of the Western for human observers, but maybe that’s one of those simplistic portrayals we’re past. An intriguing thing about District 9, for instance, is the hint that the aliens are more complex than humans give them credit for.

No danger of that here. There is a good alien, the mission-focused Ella, but only in the form of an attractive human female, another convention of the Western, portraying heroic characters as attractive Anglo-Europeans regardless of nominal ethnicity or nationality, but not necessarily all that admirable of a convention of the Western. There is actually a disturbing lack of diversity in the characters. What ethnic diversity is involved is highly anglicized. Westerns weren’t renowned for acknowledging diversity, but they were also part of an anglo-supremacy that is another not-so-admirable convention.

Aside from diversity issues, however, the film suffers from some severe lapses of logic and tortured attempts to resolve contradictions that simply don’t fly. The aliens lasso humans, keep them in a kind of hypnotized storage to collect any belongings or parts that might involve gold, and eventually perform invasive procedures on them for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. Meanwhile, they carry on subterranean mining for the same stuff. What they want it for, we don’t exactly know. Ella says it’s as rare for them as humans, but whether they use it for intergalactic jet fuel, cancer treatment, or money isn’t explained. Presumably we’re left to assume the aliens are just greedy top-gun types that underestimate the power of people to unite and prevail against overwhelming odds. I don’t know if that’s a convention of Westerns or not. I sort of have a recollection of the odds being bad but not insurmountable. The biggest obstacle is often personal inadequacy. There are attempts at that, but they are so superficial that they are almost humorous, as when the cattle baron and the Indian Chief have to reconcile their mutual suspicion of each other.

That however is not necessarily a critical failure. They got the two-fisted mysterious stranger right, but the past he’s running from is a conglomeration of law, injustice, and bad behavior. He stole money and double-crossed his friends for the sake of the girl who ends up fried by the aliens as a consequence, when Jake and his squeeze are abducted for the gold. By pluck and luck he escapes and picks up an alien wrist-gun in the process, but has no recollection of who he was or what happened prior to the abduction. Now he’s on everybody’s list and he doesn’t know why. It works up to the point where we start to find out what happened, but by the time the story is all out, it’s like okay, whatever. The entire last half of the movie is anti-climax with a sort of frenetic, Jar-Jar Binks, Star-Wars feel to it. They lost me when the posse formed up because I couldn’t understand what good these guys were going to be, but maybe that’s the point somehow.

Yeah, they got the conventions of Westerns, every one of them, ruthless bad guys, the cavalry galloping in, courageous coming of age, pacifist learns to stand up for self, etc. etc., but they missed the context. The real failure here is the failure to recognize that westerns had conventions, but every classic Western also had a unique take on the characters and a variation on the narrative that involved more than replacing the bad guys with strictly one-dimensional conventions from another genre. As hard as it is to believe, westerns like Stagecoach, High Noon, even True Grit were about individual characters in the bigger events of westward expansion. Indians, bandits, rustlers, or ruthless cattle barons are portrayed as conventional bad guys, but they function in a context of territorial conflicts that are the consequence of people struggling to mark their own space and define their own identity. Those are motivations we may not sympathize with, but we can appreciate in an intuitive way. We understand something of the psychology that produces the conflicts. Aliens whose only motivation is gold? Not so much. They’re just not really very interesting. They could give a five-year old nightmares, but so can I. They look like every evil alien since Alien, and they don’t even have reproduction at stake. They’re just mean.

Aliens trying to survive I can appreciate in an adversarial way because I can personalize somebody trying to survive, us or them. Aliens collecting gold I just don’t really care about very much because I find it hard to attribute such one-dimensional motivation to an entire race (another problem of diversity?). Greed is one thing. An entire race of greed-charged aliens that doesn’t even go through some kind of introspection is something else. The whole thing screams “VIDEO GAME” in the voice of a production marketer. Like it or not, the classic Westerns, even the bad ones, are more complex. That doesn’t mean the movie won’t be successful, just that it does not acknowledge the fundamental context of Westerns. If it hadn’t been for Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford and one of the best space craft destruction sequences since Challenger, it could have been a ridiculous mess. I can hardly wait for the sequel, Cowboys and Zombies. At least zombies don’t have to account for any expectations of personality. Oh wait, it’s already been done? That will be an instructive take.

Nude Women on Facebook

If I was Casey Anthony, I’d probably be in big trouble again, because somebody would want to know why I was using my computer to search for Nude Women on Facebook, which is exactly the point. What I was searching for wasn’t actually Nude Women on Facebook. What I was searching for was an article about women who post nude pictures of themselves on their Facebook pages, which are then hacked, and the pictures end up for sale somewhere as amateur adult entertainment, which gets sort of embarrassing for Ms.Universe contestants, Dental Technicians, and Supreme Court Justice Nominees. What if Ruth Bader Ginsburg had nude law school photos floating around on the Net. Would anybody take her seriously in that robe? And that goes double for Clarence Thomas.

From the publicity, you would think that women have some kind of Freudian compulsion, or maybe just a compulsion, to post nude pictures of themselves (or pictures of themselves nude) on the first available web page, as if the social expectation of attraction requires validation by visual display. Now don’t get me wrong, in principle, I approve, but as a matter of personal security, I reluctantly suggest this is not a good idea.

People underestimate how fast and how far things can go bad with personal information on the net.

http://www.wesh.com/video/28690471/detail.html

Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy

http://www.google.com/imgres?q=women&um=1&hl=en&rlz=1R2ADRA_enUS393&tbm=isch&tbnid=aTb23Rbd8vt6zM:&imgrefurl=http://video.stumbleupon.com/stumbler/Abyssmia/tag/women/&docid=Ah6Qx5bJuLu9qM&w=1680&h=1050&ei=xH8xTqugKojL0QHbyYSjDA&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=126&vpy=161&dur=1716&hovh=177&hovw=284&tx=179&ty=96&page=5&tbnh=128&tbnw=171&start=97&ndsp=24&ved=1t:429,r:18,s:97&biw=1117&bih=713

Whose Wand was it Anyway?

As my previous Harry Potter reviews have explained, I’m not a raging Harry Potter fan (actually not much of a movie fan at all, but my wife makes me, so I’m sort of a reluctant critic, the most objective kind). Maybe my response is best described by the scene in the movie where the loyal defenders of Hogwarts gather and unite in resistance to the evil horde, draw their weapons, and what they raise over their heads in defiance is a fringe of silly little sticks. I nearly fell over laughing.

You have to be somebody who believes in more than the power of market license to make a kazoo wannabee into the convincing equivalent of a giant bug zapper. I have a hard time suspending disbelief enough for the handle of a back scratcher to be the moral equivalent of an assault rifle, even with an automatic flash.

As far as the plot goes, what would be the point? Hogwarts ain’t big enough for Voldemort and Potter. Somebody’s going down. Find the ancient chalice and cut off Voldemort's supply. Oh wait a minute, that's another movie, but the supernatural bank experience was kind of amusing. I see an amusement park ride in the future. No matter. Snapes comes clean. The Snitch of Dumbledore reveals its secret. A couple takes of emerging Hermione gratuitously leaning forward in her low-necked sorceress outfit, but that's as racy as you're going to get in Harry Potter. The acting is about what you would expect.

Speaking of wands, maybe the Potter fanatics out there can explain to me who owned the infernal wand of wands anyway. Early in the movie somebody says you have to kill the owner to really get control of the wand, but at the end that seems to have morphed into something like getting a grip on it. Harry didn’t kill Malfoy to get the wand, and I’m not real clear about where Malfoy got it, or why exactly he wasn’t able to contend for king of the world with it, but the ways of wizards are winsome and weird to us mere mortals. The wand, so it seems, has its own ideas about who or whom it serves, so maybe it justifies its own behavior, like an ATM machine, although wouldn't that would make merely breaking it in half and tossing it out in the yard a bit risky? Suppose it finds itself? After all, Frodo had to haul the ring off to some volcanic eruption in New Zealand to get rid of it. I guess wands just don’t have the durability and determination of rings. Maybe it’s a gender thing.

Never mind the wand. The first half of the movie was a successful action adventure , and the Hogwarts siege had a couple of nice effects. I would have been happy for Voldemort to have Hermione and consider my money well spent for that much, but of course the whole alpha male thing had to be resolved. I’m sorry, but I have a hard time even getting up any antagonism for Voldemort anymore. He’s been named so many times now that he’s got better image recognition than Martha Stewart. The idea of sharing something with Harry was promising, but the expression of it sort of evaporated like bubbles from a cauldron of lizard tails. The whole thing could have ended at the King’s Cross white-out and faded into a hazy glimpse of the future. I think it would have been really cool if the ending credits had run over the actors on the set saying goodbye to each other with a final shot of Radcliffe looking around at the set, laying down his wand on a table and walking out. And how about this? One of the stone statues in the hall is Rowling on a pedestal. At the very end, the statue comes to life, jumps down off the pedestal, picks up the sword and the wand, climbs back on the pedestal, and turns back to stone? Would that just break the spell, or would that send chills up your spine? What I fear most is that the whole franchise has moved irrevocably beyond either spells or fear into the morbid realm of the commercial, but maybe that’s where it really was from the beginning.

Here’s Thinking for You,
Iffy

The New Like

I was thrilled when I got an email from one of the discussions on Linkedin to notify me that I had a comment on my post. I eagerly connected with the discussion to find out what kind of response my brilliant education comments had inspired in the professional community. I discovered someone named Amy "liked" my post and left me a link to the thought-provoking publications of a hot lingerie retailer, and I don’t even mean hot like in stolen property hot, although maybe there is a little of that in there somewhere too. Loward knows I do what I can to consume my share of racy women’s underwear, but somehow I feel more exploited than the models. I signed up for Linkedin to find a job, not as a convenient marketing tool for some enterprising juvenile-delinquent, social-media manipulator.

The truth is that the fast and loose, free-spirited exchange of blogging, like the internet in general, is morphing into a giant multi-level marketing promotion, with the marketers using their family connections to promote commercial enterprise. The concepts of social network marketing hardly apply because networks are no longer any more social than any infomercial exploitation. Every business has a Facebook page and a Facebook link. Hell, we even have a Facebook page and a Facebook link at the Office of Information Fluency. Sometimes we even talk about doing something with it, but the truth is also that if you can’t somehow integrate that in your identity, it becomes additional baggage in already complicated lives.

Why complicate it more with commerce? An inevitable consequence, the complexity of life has caught up with the convenient illusion that electronic communication is somehow more sanitary than the people who produce it. Sorry folks, our ideas aren’t much better than we are, at least in application. Conceptually, maybe, but you have to consider who comes up with this stuff and what it is they really want. What they really want is to sell underwear, or whatever it is they really sell, probably Viagra or Botox treatments.

Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy

A Farewell to Ereck Plancher

Okay, aside from the emotional and spiritual aspects of the Ereck Plancher situation that are beyond price, and the challenge of putting money value on the life of a human being, he was was worth ten million. I’ll give you that. Wide receivers are hard to come by in a recession. UCF knew or should have known he was at risk for serious health problems. But at that rate, let’s see. We squandered about 5,000 American lives in Iraq if you only count fatalities, and the truth is that we spent a lot more money getting them going than we spent preparing Ereck Plancher for higher education and athletic greatness, but ten million is a nice round number, lots of zeros. (If it bothers you to think of them as squandered, just explain to me what exactly we accomplished there, please. I wish someone would, someone with something like normal human sensibilities, meaning not Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.) The U.S. knew or should have known invasion of Iraq was a risk of fatal injuries. At ten million a pop, that’s (10 X 5,000) million = 50,000 million, or fifty billion, right? My eyes sort of glaze over in the billions, so you have to check my numbers.

Then there are the 75,000 Iraqi collateral civilian deaths. Iraqis aren’t worth as much as Americans, of course, which explains why so many had to be eliminated, and 75,000 is vaguely in the realm of the requisite ten-to-one ratio that we approved for Viet-Nam with a comfortable margin, so for the sake of convenience, let’s do something crazy to humor my challenged arithmetic and assume (at least for financial purposes) that Iraqis are worth as much as aspiring American athletes. 75,000 Iraqi fatalities at ten million each is (10 X 75,000) million = 750,000 million, or 750 billion, right?

You know and I know there is no validity in making our military and those Iraqi civilians equal in value to college football players. The military chose to get involved, and the Iraqis had no choice, therefore, they have no legal recourse and no practical monetary value, but I’m just sort of wondering. You know what I mean? The odd thing is that the total comes out to about what has been spent on “operations” in Iraq so far.

Maybe that’s a good place to stop in more ways than one, so we don’t have to look at it too closely.

Here’s Thinking for You,
Iffy

Test the Dangerous People

I have an idea. Let’s have drug tests for state legislators. They get state money. In fact, you have to apply and meet income restrictions for public assistance, but your friends put you in the legislature regardless of how much money you have. Who is the most likely to steal the most public money? An unemployed construction worker looking for a job, or a greedy manipulator with control of state revenue? The answer to that is pretty clear, and the answer is not welfare mothers.

Here's thinking for you,
Iffy

http://www.dreamstime.com/royalty-free-stock-photography-hypodermic-needle-image17107497
http://reidreport.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Rick-Scott-batboy.jpg
http://blog.reidreport.com/2011/04/rick-scott-puts-crony-firms-on-the-state-payroll/

The Crock Heard Round the World

For once I’m about half sympathetic to Sarah Palin’s plight, which for me is going the extra light year or so in the name of fairness. On the other hand, I’m more inclined to laugh at the irony than leap to her defense. The problem, as usual, is Palin’s choice of words. Her sense of history may not be as distorted in this case as even Fox News wants to believe. The truth is that Paul Revere could have actually warned the British about the consequences of rashly intimidating the colonists by occupying their property and confiscating their weapons, but as everybody who went to the fourth grade in US public schools knows, Paul Revere warned the colonists about the British, not the other way around.

Paul Revere was a fairly prominent activist in Massachusetts. That’s partly how he happened to be tasked with surveillance and communications for colonial opposition to unilateral British administration. Whether Paul actually ever spoke directly to responsible British authorities, I don’t know, but it’s perfectly plausible. Suggesting that Revere warned the British, not in the sense of imminent action by the colonists, but warned them in the sense that their aggressive actions were going to provoke a reaction from the colonists if they didn’t cool their jets, would be within the realm of possibility.

In any case they didn’t listen to good advice, and the words “Paul Revere warned” have been forever since indelibly connected in the American psyche with raising the alarm to resist invading red coats, not with a cautionary message to the invaders themselves. Ask any properly programmed American who Paul Revere warned, and they aren’t going to reply that it was the British. To suggest any other application is as un-American as Mohammed, pedophiles, and tofu turkey. No wonder even Fox News has her on their hit list. Facts aren’t an issue for Fox news, but regardless of Paul Revere, you still have to wonder if you want someone for President with Palin’s instinct for word choice. The next thing you know she’ll be cheering on the Seventh Cavalry in memory of Wounded Knee. Well, why not? They got more Medals of Honor than any other US military engagement in history, and they should have. The Indians were poorly equipped, freezing, malnourished, and way outnumbered. That’s the real secret for carrying out any kind of successful preemptive military action. What do you mean that’s not how it’s supposed to work? Didn’t Paul Revere warn them the cavalry was coming?

That’s the best I can do for you, Sarah, and unfortunately, it ain’t much.

Here's Thinking for You,
Iffy