Month: July 2024

2024 Summer Movie Talk – Part 1

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When reality collapses under a landslide of madness:

  • POTUS exposed as a human vegetable
  • Cost of living now requires selling kidneys for gas money
  • Illegal aliens and homeless drug addicts now the two largest voting blocks in some blue states
  • Kamala Harris imagining herself as president unencumbered by anyone wanting to vote for her.
  • Morning Joe both extols Joe Biden as the sharpest he’s ever been and begs him to step aside to avoid defeat.

Well then, it’s time to take off the pundit cap and try to enjoy life a little.

I’ve always been partial to watching movies.  My tastes probably fall somewhere in the middle.  I’m definitely not part of the avant-garde by any means.  I’ve never enjoyed Cinéma verité and the various other European schools that abounded in the 1950s and 1960s.  They always just looked like low budget crap that someone made with a home movie camera and no money.  But by the same token I think that at least 80% of the output of Hollywood in its heyday was pretty poor stuff.

I totally believe that cinema is not a single subject.  There are several distinct things that get lumped together as movies.  Hopefully they all contain the characteristic that they entertain.  But beyond that I think one kind of movie makes you feel and another makes you think.  Now that is not to say that a movie that makes you think doesn’t also engage your emotions.  That would be odd in a movie created by humans.  But what I’m indicating is that many, even most movies don’t really make you think.  And that is not to say that only high-brow art-house movies can delve into the human condition.  Far from it.  Even someone as populist and popular as Frank Capra can capture a character or a moment that makes you think about the big questions.

So, I think I’ll divide my discussions about movies into two main categories; entertainment and enlightenment.  And let’s start with entertainment.  Because it is the summer and that is the season when we want to enjoy the beautiful weather and make believe that the world is a happy place where Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are just cartoon characters who dress in primary colors and get chased around by the Tasmanian Devil and eventually eaten.  So, let’s see.

Well, first things first, we’ll divide and conquer.  Let’s divide things into genres:

  • Science fiction
  • Fantasy
  • Action/Adventure
  • Comedy
  • Drama

Science Fiction

I’ll list what I think are among the best or the most popular or the most interesting sci-fi movies in approximately chronological order.  I’ve reviewed almost all of these movies so if you want my detailed opinion you can do a search on the site.

  1. Destination: Moon
  2. The Thing from Another World
  3. Them!
  4. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
  5. The Time Machine
  6. The Day the Earth Stood Still
  7. War of the Worlds
  8. Forbidden Planet
  9. 2001: A Space Odyssey
  10. Blade Runner
  11. Alien
  12. Terminator
  13. Starship Troopers
  14. Independence Day
  15. 12 Monkeys
  16. Jurassic Park
  17. The Matrix
  18. Contact
  19. Firefly
  20. Serenity
  21. The Martian
  22. Dune

 

Now this is just my list.  Your list will be different.  I left out Star Trek and Star Wars.  I consider Star Wars fantasy and I consider Star Trek mostly awful.  But the same could be said for several of the movies I put on my list.  I hope my list will inspire a million spirited comments.  Everyone has their favorites and their turkeys.  Unlike politics we can all have our opinions on sci-fi movies without fear of doing any damage.  Have at it.

What Makes a Good Story?

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An eight-hundred-page book tells the story of a forty-inch-tall man traveling across a semi-mythical world to throw a ring into a volcano.  A famous play is the story of an overly proud king disowning his only loving child for not flattering him and then paying the price for it.  A three-thousand-year-old poem tells the story of a proud warrior being dishonored by a foolish king and the havoc that ensues in a famous war that includes gods and goddesses acting decidedly human.  A boy saves a princess with the help of a space pirate and a mystical monk long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away.  Two almost god-like races, one devoted to peace and truth and the other consumed by war and evil fight a war of extermination in the Milky Way galaxy over the course of billions of years.  A movie tells the story of seven samurai or seven cowboys agreeing to save a town from bandits with glory as the only reward.  A hen-pecked New Jersey grocery store owner sells everything he owns and travels 3,000 miles to California to buy an orange ranch that doesn’t have any oranges on it.  A man drags his wife and young son two thousand miles to an isolated hotel in the Rocky Mountains where they will all be the playthings of ghosts who want to add them to the spectral residents.

What do all of these stories have in common?  Well, almost nothing.  Each of them is a fairly popular work of fiction.  But otherwise, they’re all over the map in terms of plot, characters, genre and the societies they represent.  But what makes them successful stories is their ability to draw the reader (or viewer) into their worlds and spark human empathy.  It’s as simple as that.

We recognize Frodo’s humanity and cheer him on as he pits his tiny strength against titanic forces of evil.  We shake our heads at the pig-headed antics of Achilles and Agamemnon but we nod our heads at the recognition that war will take good men like Hector and make his wife a widow and his son an orphan.  We thrill to the heroics of a small band of warriors pitting their strength and skill against a small army of bandits, knowing full well that most of them will die in the battle.  We laugh at and at the same time see ourselves in a man constantly belittled and frustrated by everyone around him including his overbearing wife and annoying children who then stubbornly heads down the road to ruin only to be saved by fortune and his own indestructible sense that eventually it will have to be his turn.

So, what is the most important aspect?  Plot or character?  I used to think plot.  After all, we all like the quest and the action scenes and all the other hooks that draw us into the story.  But as I get older, I realize that if the characters are mere ciphers, then the hold thing devolves into a video game.  And it can be fun and exciting but on reflection it feels sort of meaningless.  Does it really matter how many monsters he fights if you don’t believe the hero is real?

So that’s the trick for the author.  Somehow you have to invest your heroes and villains with enough humanity to make your reader (or viewer) care.  Breathing life into a stream of words takes a bit of doing.  Usually, you have to take something from your own experience to make it seem real.  But when it’s done right it’s the rewarding part of writing.  Self-satisfaction.

Meanwhile Back on Planet Earth

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Busy day today.  Yard work in hazy, hot and humid conditions.  But physical activity is good for the mind.  It’s not good to dwell too much on the diseased condition of our politics.  And let’s face it, I’ve spent way too much time for the last week gorging on the panic on display in Washington.  What did Nietzsche say?  If you stare too long into the abyss, it stares back.  I think I’ll let Donald Trump worry about whether Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or Morgoth will be the Democrat candidate in November.

We can check back in a couple of weeks or until the Left has a chance to cow Biden into withdrawing from the race.  It should be interesting to hear the excuse if he does withdraw.  I guess he can claim that the Almighty told him to.  Of course, to Biden it’s the Almighty Dollar that speaks to him.  Hey, maybe that’s what he’s waiting for.  He wants a bribe to drop out of the race.  Maybe a $100 million in one of Hunter’s off-shore accounts would convince Jumpin’ Joe that it’s time to park his Parkinson off-stage somewhere else.  Either way, that’s a comedy act for another day.

Probably the more useful thing for me to follow and consider are the people out there who aren’t waiting for the November election but are trying to fix things right now.  Christopher Rufo has been working on state level governmental efforts like the reform of colleges in Florida and Texas and some other places.  He’s on the Board of the New College in Florida and they’ve successfully demolished the DEI and other pernicious initiatives there.  Now he’s gotten started helping a whistleblower in Texas who reported a hospital for continuing a pediatric transgender program after it has been legislatively banned.  It seems that the federal government has gone after this whistleblower and Rufo is raising a flag over these retaliatory efforts by the Justice Department.

It’s going to come down to determined people in red states drawing a line in the sand and taking concrete actions to stop the federal government from crushing the freedoms that they no longer believe in.  If Donald Trump wins in November that might give us a little breathing room to rally the efforts of everyone wishing to stop the government’s encroachment of our rights and try to turn things around.  If Trump is lucky enough to get Republican Senate and House majorities then he can hope to make some meaningful changes to the laws.  If not, then executive orders can undo the damage Biden did with his orders.

But if Biden or some other Democrat is in the White House next February then it will be more important than ever that red state governors, legislatures and judges work tirelessly to find ways to obstruct all the damage that this new administration creates.

I live in a deep blue state.  I have always been a stranger in a strange land.  Every thing around me is imprinted with the code for the hive mind.  Even the local news station from the cable company is impossibly partisan.  I don’t need anything to raise my consciousness as a conservative.  Every day I search the internet for a trail to others like me.  There are a few of us out there and maybe one day we’ll figure out a way to focus our strength into something that provides real results.

I look at the devastation that the Tories in Britain brought down on themselves by lying about their agenda.  They tore down their own party, kind of like the Republicans have done here.  But then I see what Nigel Farage has done.  He’s started a reform party and even though he’s starting from scratch almost alone, he’s not riddled with fake conservatives.  He can try to do it right.  And that’s what I hope eventually happens here.

08JUL2024 – Quote of the Day

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We are brought to a belief of God either by reason or by force. Atheism being a proposition as unnatural as monstrous, difficult also and hard to establish in the human understanding, how arrogant soever, there are men enough seen, out of vanity and pride, to be the authors of extraordinary and reforming opinions, and outwardly to affect the profession of them; who, if they are such fools, have, nevertheless, not the power to plant them in their own conscience. Yet will they not fail to lift up their hands towards heaven if you give them a good thrust with a sword in the breast, and when fear or sickness has abated and dulled the licentious fury of this giddy humour they will easily re-unite, and very discreetly suffer themselves to be reconciled to the public faith and examples.

Michel de Montaigne