Messy desk, Messy mind.

I had a bunch of ideas this last year that I wrote down, sometimes even found movies for, before I realised they didn't work. Sometimes it was just a stupid idea, sometimes it didn't fit the blog format, sometimes it just took a couple of weeks to get the right angle. Anyway, this is just to clean up.

Mascu-Nazis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masculism made me think this might be an interesting story, but it mostly looks like Feminism for Mysoginists, so it's useless in concept and execution. I still think it might be a good idea, but why talk about a disproportionate amount of physical labour, conscription and things like that? Maybe I'm more old-fashioned than I thought, but that's just whining. There is nothing you can change about biological realities, but that's not what equality is about.
There are a lot of this issues that actually matter, though. But doing that properly is more of an essay length piece at least and would have to have a title like 'Every woman is a rapist; Why women's rights are heteronormative oppression' I'm just too leery of this whole men's rights thing just yet. You could very well end up like those fathers for justice cunts and make a reasonable point and then shit all over it by beating up ex-wives. So here's Mr.Mom (not the Micheal Keaton flick)

KID SCARE!

I thought the paedophilia witch hunt gearing up in the U.S. and the vagaries of the American Justice system would make a good post. Especially Megan's law. Also, the shocking lack of basic statistical knowledge that these people have. Your child is much more likely to be abused by someone it knows quite well, that you simply don't suspect. So hunting for sex offenders in your neighbourhood is a bad idea. Especially if you take the incredibly loose description of sex offense that some states have into account. There really is no justice in lynching someone with a public urination offense, and your children will have to be left with a babysitter while you're there anyway. Somehow I was going to fit the prisoner's dilemma into this, and how people tend to mistrust strangers for all the wrong reasons. But mostly, this was an excuse to use the fantastic Brass Eye episode 'Paedogeddon' as illustration.



Full episode here, part 2, part3.

What would the internet be without Japan?

This was an excuse for that trailer, but at first I thought I might do something about homosexuality in Japan. I looked up Yaoi, after some article about/by Furries used the term and a found another Japanese concept to wonder at. The Japanese apparently think homosexuality is a fairy tale. In women's manga, homosexual relationships are not problematic or unacceptable. Because it's a crazy women's realm where reason doesn't matter. The movie Gohatto sprang to mind. And Jonathan Ross's interview with Hard gay, Japan's first gay comedian popped up as well.



Interestingly enough, Hard gay uses the same technique for forcing people to do good that some Indian collection agencies use, i.e. shaming people with sexually ambivalent characters. In India it's eunuchs that are sent out to businesses that are late paying bills and chanting and dancing in front of the stores. All of this might become a post at some point, I just never reached that point.

That's it for the dramatic parade of failed ideas and crooked reasoning

Comics beat Movies every time

When a friend of mine had to read Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns for a literary theory class, he complained that while the themes of vigilantism, fascism, the media and how these subjects are related to each other were accurately and interestingly portrayed, Frank Miller drew ugly human beings and this detracted from the enjoyment.



I was much too happy that somebody else besides me had read it to argue that this isn't the point. There's plenty to complain about in his writing, especially if you're familiar with the rest of his oeuvre. The oddly non-homosexual Spartans in 300, the plot of Martha Washington goes to War is the plot of Atlas shrugged, etc. He's definitely to the right of the political spectrum, but in that 'Give me Liberty or give me death' kind of way that only Americans really take seriously.

He is a fantastic artist though, and that has nothing to do with what his characters look like. If you are going to read comics, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics:The Invisible Art is essential. The artist can draw the script pretty much any way he wants to. That's like having a movie with an unlimited budget. Except better, because unlike movies, There's really no need to pace it, unless you want to. These bits from that book should give you an idea of the possibilities.





Frank Miller isn't a great artist because his art is pretty, it's great because it tells the story in an incomparably fantastic way. This is what a 60-year old Batman looks like when he can't stand the guilt anymore and has to put the costume on.



Comic fans know that this the real measure of a great comic artist, because they collectively shot themselves in the foot in the 90's drooling over virtually unscripted issues full of tits and guns and muscles bigger than humanly possible. In 1990 Marvel's top artists decided that they didn't need the company anymore and left to start their own publishing company, Image. They spent so much time in love with all the sudden money and fame, most of them barely finished 3 issues a year, almost killing their own retail market and putting thousands of comic book stores out of business.

"As the Image creators chatted on the phone with one another and dallied over Page 3, a chain reaction had begun that some speculate was responsible for virtually destroying the direct market in comics. Retailers invested heavily in Image issues that failed to ship on time, which meant the retailers could not recoup their investment on schedule. Due to the required lead time for orders, retailers had, in some cases, ordered second and third issues of Image titles by the time they learned that the first issue had not shipped on time. The problem was further multiplied by the variant covers and high-priced bagged and foil-covered editions with which Image shamelessly pandered to speculator interests. The money invested could not be regained until the tardy issues finally arrived in stores and found buyers. When issues arrived so late that fan interest had waned, retailers found themselves stuck with titles that were no longer hot. Even so, they were not quick to learn their lesson. "The Pitt, for example, was consistently late every issue," said Valentino, "but every time he [Dale Keown] solicited orders, it sold.""

- From this incredibly detailed article in The Comics Journal

Most Image comics were full of pointless deaths by characters that were introduced last issue wedged into carbon copies of Marvel and DC plots from the 60's but with 'an edge'. They just rotted your brain. No matter how bad it got, you could always defend the X-men by saying it was an elaborate metaphor for racism. This was just indefensible except for vague aesthetic concerns.



Alan Moore's Watchmen, which does what DKR does, but better and a hundred other things as well, is now being adapted by Zach Snyder, the director of Dawn of the Dead (2004) and 300 (Yes, a Frank miller adaptation). Unlike most other Alan Moore adaptations like League of Extraordinary Gentlemen or From Hell which are unrelentingly awful, this one could be but a minor fiasco like V for Vendetta. Zach Snyder did an excellent job of reproducing 300 as a film, and any criticism should be leveled at Miller. If he does the same for Watchmen, he'll end up with a 9 and a half hour movie that will cost half a billion, so corners will be cut. The question is which ones?

Alan Moore won't care. The reclusive, vegetarian magician/author has stated that anything he owns the rights to will never be filmed as far as he's concerned. He's just released the latest volume of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the Black Dossier, which is already being slammed by internet critics as being an impossible dense and unreadable forest of literary and historical references. I can't see what they're complaining about, it's another complex, engrossing story, that's guaranteed not to be turned into a shitty movie.

-Mad props to Edwin Demper for bringing a copy back from the States. Read his blog or perish, never knowing why.

Will no one rid us of these turbulent thespians?

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The world was shocked just before Christmas by a beautiful piece of easily misunderstood or misconstrued reasoning by leading armchair intellectual and movie star Will Smith.



Smith (39), the star of such venerable classics as Wild Wild West and the Legend of Bagger Vance is probably not convinced that intention is the correct way to asses whether or not acts are moral or immoral. What he was probably trying to say in a ham fisted sound bite is that a villain is never a villain in his own mind.

But the really telling part of the quote is Mr. Smith's plans for the re-education of people that don't agree with him. A short course of reprogramming would have cured Adolf, so he could spend the rest of his life helping handicapped puppys or some nonsense like that. It would be an easier world if everyone just believed in the same thing, I couldn't agree more. But it would also be a pointless, boring stale world.

More importantly, when are people going to stop taking actors and actresses seriously? I'm sure Will Smith didn't mean it like that, but like so many Hollywood natives, he spent his all his formative years working at becoming rich and famous, at which point the requisite group of sycophants applauded him for his wit, beauty, etc, everything except the hard work. If you get that treatment, instead of higher education, is it any wonder you end up believing you've just come up with a novel new approach to the problem of Good and Evil?