Monthly Archives: April 2015

'Culture'

Disney Post

I don’t watch a lot of TV. This is not from any hippy-dippy hatred of TV; I just don’t have a lot of time for it. Apart from Game of Thrones, Doctor Who and sports, I’d rather spend my limited spare time reading or watching movies. And this is particularly true of sitcoms, which I’ve slowly grown less tolerant of.

But there is one exception: my daughter has gotten heavily into Disney channel TV shows. They are always on when she’s in the room (and we allow the TV to be on). So I’ve become very familiar with their shows and I thought I’d write a few words about them. Because reasons.

Continue reading Disney Post →

Movies

The Imitation Game

When I went through my year-by-year breakdown of the Oscars, I said this:

Here’s the thing that strikes me about the last 35 years of film history. Over that span, the IMDB ratings for individual years have become populated by a much broader variety of films than ever before. Surprisingly, traditional Oscar fare does well. For all the lashing IMDB gets, great films are popular there. IMDB loves Scorsese, loves Kubrik and loves good film. The difference is the variety — IMDB also loves foreign films, actions films, art films and animated films. These are things the Academy tends to ignore as they pick the same shit every year. Oscar bait has pretty much become its own genre. In other words, the problem is not so much that the Academy has regressed, it’s that they haven’t kept up.

If there is a movie from 2014 that defines “Oscar bait”, it’s The Imitation Game. It’s a good film and I recommend it, especially if you’re over 60. The directing is solid. The acting is superb (although anytime I saw Charles Dance, I thought, ‘don’t help him! It’s Tywin Lannister!’). The script is fine. But it has a a flaw in that it screams “give me an Oscar!” at 100 decibels. At times, it’s like watching a movie by a precocious 16-year-old: “Look how good this movie is! Isn’t Benedict Cumberbatch awesome! Look, Keira Knightly! You love Keira Knightly! Conflict! Homophobia! Sacrifice!”

The Imitation Game doesn’t have the confidence to be its own movie. Instead, it’s a descendant of A Beautiful Mind. Instead of portraying Alan Turing as the eccentric but perfectly sociable person he was, they make him an autistic savant, not far removed from Russell Crowe’s John Nash. Instead of showing the years-long struggle to break Enigma, we get the sudden breakthrough from picking up girls in a bar, a scene so similar to the breakthrough scene of A Beautiful Mind, it’s almost insulting (and stupid; the technique that “breaks” Enigma in the movie is cryptology 101). It’s got plenty of good dialogue and the characters are well-defined. But the plot is surprisingly weak.

(Spoiler Warning: The worst part of the film, for me, is when Turing’s team starts holding back information so that the Nazis won’t know the code has been broken. That decision was real but it was made way higher up the chain of command. Portraying it as Turing’s decision was so unrealistic it jarred me out of the film. I think it would have been better for him to see how little of his intelligence was used and get frustrated.)

As I said, the movie’s fine. I give it a 7/10. It’s worth a rental. I was happy for Graham Moore when he won the Oscar and his acceptance speech was amazing. But like a lot of movies, The Imitation Game is a shadowy reflection of an even better movie: one that tries less hard to win an Oscar and, ironically, would have been a better candidate for one. I hate to go all nerdboy, but I think sticking closer to history: where Enigma was a long struggle, where Turing was the eccentric but brilliant leader of a massive team, where the decision of when to use Enigma decrypts was made by higher up, would have made for a better and more satisfying film.

As it is, this one will likely be forgotten in a few years. Just another piece of Oscar bait. That’s a pity. Cumberbatch, Tyldum and, to some extent, Moore, deserve better.

Humor

Exploring What Now?

1 Comment

This is kind of … odd.

At a recent conference on sex trafficking in Orlando, Florida, members of a panel warned attendees about the dangers of space exploration, saying it would be a gold mine for future sex traffickers.

“Space is going to be like a frontier town,” said Nicholas Kristoff, who chaired the panel on Sex Trafficking: the Long Term View. “There will be no law enforcement in space, which means that girls, some as young as 11, could be easily trafficked to colonies on Mars or in the asteroid belt where they would have to service up to 50 men a day in zero gravity.”

Asked for comment by e-mail, Julie Bindel expressed support for a ban on space exploration, noting that science fiction films have frequently depicted prostitution in space. She derided series like Firefly for presenting an unrealistic and unrepresentative model of future sex work. She noted that the film Total Recall featured numerous prostitutes including one with three breasts. “No little girl grows up wanting to be a triple-breasted Martian prostitute.” She further attributed the recent push for space exploration, particularly the Mars One TV show, as being due to efforts by the “pimp lobby” to create a completely new market for sex outside of the bounds of law enforcement.

After the panel, the organizers pointed to a recent study by Dominique Roe Sepowitz and the Office of Sex Trafficking Intervention Research which claimed that ads for interplanetary prostitution have increased 200% in the last year alone and presented evidence that shuttle launches are associated with major increases in sex trafficking. “We have good evidence that women and girls were trafficked into Cape Kennedy during the Apollo program as well,” she said. “Everywhere there is a rocket launch, there is sex trafficking.”

Such opposition is not new. In her seminal book Intercourse, feminist icon Andrea Dworkin noted that rockets have a phallic shape. “The push for more space exploration is clearly an effort to thrust these phallic rockets into the universe’s unconsenting vagina.” She advocated for an “enthusiastic consent” standard from other planets before further human exploration.

I don’t even know what to say about this. We haven’t even gotten a man to the moon in 40 years and we have people worried about the future of sex in space. Takes all types, I guess.

Update: This post was part of Maggie’s April Fool.