By complete coincidence I ended up watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Friday (each for the first time) back to back this week. I watched Fast Times because it was being covered by Paul Scheer and Amy Nicholson were covering it on Unspooled, their film podcast. As for Friday, well, that’s a slightly more convoluted story. Five Iron Frenzy, one of my most consistently favorite bands, was doing a Kickstarter for their new album. As part of promotion for the campaign, Reese Roper appeared on Mike Herrera’s podcast, The Mike Herrera Podcast. Herrera is the lead singer and songwriter for MxPx, a band I’ve been listening to off-and-on since 1996ish. The Roper episode led me to lookup MxPx’s latest release, MxPx. There’s a song on there called Friday Tonight that had some lyrics that didn’t make sense to me:

I used to hate Hunger Games because I considered it to be yet another example of America getting credit, fame, etc from another culture’s work; Battle Royale in this case. Eventually, I got the Hunger Games Trilogy from a Humble Bundle and read it, realizing that while the plots were the same in the abstract (kids are sent to an Island to kill each other in a dystopian future) they were different in the messages they were communicating to two different cultures. In the case of Battle Royale it was a response to a growing distrust of the younger generation that led to a novel in which the youngsters are sent to compete both to sow seeds of mistrust, but also as a punishment. In Hunger Games it’s less about being able to mistrust your best friends and more about mistrusting people from other states (or districts in the parlance of the book). That youth are used is more a function of entertainment value (kids at or near their physical peak) and the first book is almost more of a satire of reality TV with a lot more of the typical YA dystopian tropes coming in the second and third entries in the series.

I was watching Gold Diggers of ‘49 the other day with my daughter as we made our way through old cartoon shorts. That’s how I grew up - on Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the other WB shorts along with the Disney shorts. Sometimes, late at night, they’d show the black and white cartoons like this one, but I mostly found the black and white cartoons boring. They came from a time when animation was very experimental and new so people were impressed that these drawings could move around. There often isn’t much in the way of plot and the jokes are usually broad gags carried over from vaudeville.

Everywhere on the net that I go where any discussion of media takes place, people get upset whenever someone takes a critical look at the roles the women play in any one piece of media. But Caroline Siede has the perfect explanation in her most recent AV Club article titled, If you like Return of the Jedi, but hate the Ewoks, you understand feminist criticism:

“ Return Of The Jedi is great, but the Ewoks are so annoying.” That’s a pretty common refrain from Star Wars fans. In fact there are whole fan edits dedicated to removing the little fuzzy bears from the film’s climax; I can only assume they’re made by the most hardcore of Star Wars lovers. The idea that a movie can be good despite its weaker elements is one of the most basic tenets of film criticism. Yet when it comes to dissecting films from a feminist viewpoint, we seem to have trouble keeping that in mind.

May the Fourth Force Be With You!

…. but pretend there aren’t.

Main quote:

In some ways, this is so incredibly shortsighted. Here Sony is so committed to the idea that torrents can’t be shown to have any legal, non-infringing uses (even though there are plenty), that it won’t even allow its own staff to experiment with ways to use the new technology to their own advantage. But just the admission in the email alone shows that Sony’s top execs know damn well that there are legitimate, non-infringing, uses for BitTorrent, and they’re deliberately trying not to use them just to make BitTorrent look much worse than it is.

I haven’t seen Gone Girl, but my wife condensed the 2 hour movie into a 30 minute play-by-play summary. There are three things I don’t like about the plot. (In case it’s not obvious….spoilers ahoy)

1. In a world in which women already have a hard time getting their rape allegations believed, the plot point in which she fakes a rape to ruin her ex is quite damaging. Not quite Rolling Stone “we made up a story  because it was too perfect to fact-check” sort of damaging, but still provides a frame of reference for everyone who doesn’t want to believe a rape victim.
2. It remains to be seen how well this works for anyone in practice, but I can imagine defense attorneys mounting the “my wife is Gone Girling me” defense in mariticide. At the very least, it may be just enough to create a shadow of a doubt in juries given how popular this movie is and how much it’s penetrated the popular culture.
3. This is the least offensive point as it can be used against anything: movies, video games, books, etc : It’s probably given some of those less balanced members of society ideas they may not have had. Just as playing Team Fortress 2 or any other shooter hasn’t made me shoot up the world, most normal people wouldn’t act on this movie (starting with the fact that things need to go perfectly correct for this to play out well in real life), some people out there might now be planning some interesting scenarios.

http://youtu.be/7PCkvCPvDXk

This isn’t the first time I mention this song on here. But I’ve been thinking about the lyrics a lot recently as it continues to play on the radio at the gym. A conversation on twitter yesterday with @AprilTara spurred me to put my thoughts on the blog. At first blush, the lyrics seem to be a positive antidote to the rampant Photoshopping and fat-shaming we’ve been railing about in vain for at least two decades:

Watching Marx Brothers A Day At The Races with my two year old. She likes it. But asked me, “Daddy, why doesn’t that man talk?”