HereAndGone
1mo ago
We're all griping here, but I suppose we have to remember that Hollywood is a business, and what the people who run the studios want is a successful formula. "X movie made a killing, quick, we must produce our own X movie!" and everyone flogs it to death (see the decline of the MCU) until the next Big Thing comes along, then everyone copies that.
Disney making live-action remakes of the hit animated movies is just more of that, we forget that the hits like "Aladdin" etc. got plenty of straight-to-video sequels (and some pretty good cartoon series). Think of the "Disney on Ice" versions or how they squeezed as much juice as they could out of the original "The Little Mermaid" before the 2023 remake with the race-swapped casting (and if that had been more successful, we'd be up to our knees in sequels, prequels, animated series, etc. etc. etc.)
Making movies is about money, not art, at least on the scale of Hollywood and Disney et al., and they run on P.T. Barnum's adage of "give the people what they want" until the people are sick and tired of it.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
The failure mode for plot-driven media is when the writer(s) are too in love with their own genius and spend so much time adding on baroque twirls (Christopher Nolan seems to be the exemplar of this, by what reviews I've read) that they disappear up their own spirals and leave the audience with an unsatisfactory experience. "The Usual Suspects" is a great movie, but once you know the twist at the end, there's not much more to it. Sure, you can rewatch it to pick up all the clues you missed the first time round, but that's more like doing a crossword puzzle ("aha, there is the cup!" type of watching out for clues).
Juggling all three elements successfully is very difficult, pulling off two of them is probably more achievable, and it probably is easier to get characters + action to work than a combination like characters + plot or plot + action. I think this is why Hitchcock was so well-regarded as a director, he didn't pull it off every time, but he could manage to pull off plot + characters + action.
(1) Our attention spans have been shot by media; we're accustomed to everything from video (old fashioned tape) to videos (e.g. Youtube) to streaming where we can fast-forward to The Good Bits and skip all the boring talky parts
(2) Because of that, modern scripts have to be full of The Good Bits to hold our goldfish-attention spans, that's why when you watch the trailers now you more or less have seen the movie because they put a lot of The Good Bits into the trailers to grab our attention and make us want to see the movie
(3) Also, modern script writers are just bad. I know I've banged on here about "The Rings of Power" before, but you can tell that Payne and McKay are movie writers not TV writers. They treat every episode like a mini-movie, so there's little development of plot and characters flowing on from one episode to the next (and that gives us things like 'in this episode Galadriel is threatening to commit war crimes in her pursuit of revenge, in the following episode she is preaching about revenge bad') and plenty of pointless activity (what did Isildur wandering around actually achieve? nothing, but hey we got a Cool Fight* with a bog monster)
- It was not a Cool Fight, it was embarrassing for all concerned, including the bog monster
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Just that in the week where there's new stories about the young girls drowned in the Texas floods, a statement about "a certain amount of violent deaths of children happens and we shouldn't get our knickers in a twist over that" sounds a little tone-deaf.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Part of the entire mindset, though; doing this thing isn't really a crime, it's... [fill in the blanks] and only the sheeple keep the dumb rules.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
(1) Re: the overrunning of the vampire population if everyone killed is turned, yes you are absolutely correct and this has been a problem that vampire fiction has had to deal with (hence why they take the scene from the novel of Dracula about Dracula forcing Mina to drink his blood as "yeah but just dying of vampire bite doesn't turn you, you need to drink vampire blood too" which directly contradicts the folklore and the novel).
(2) "Remmick is a pre-Christian Irishman (They steal his fathers lands and forcibly convert him apparently)" That doesn't exactly work with the history of how Ireland became Christian, unless Remmick is talking about when the Normans invaded - but Ireland was already Christian by then and after a bit of pillaging and dispossessing the Normans settled down to assimilate into the native society, hence "more Irish than the Irish themselves"; it fits better with a later historical period, say the Tudor era or later, especially the 17th century when land was taken and efforts to anglicise the Irish were very pronounced. A bit of a mixed bag there, unless Coogler is trying to indicate that all along there were pagan Irish surviving down the centuries but that's not really so.
Anyway, expecting high levels of historical accuracy from a vampire movie is missing the mark! But damn it, the clips I've seen are making me interested in this movie - the scene where Remmick is reciting the "Our Father" along with Sammie is a reverse or perverse baptism scene (they're both standing in the river, they both pray, and then Remmick keeps pushing Sammie's head under the water then pulling him back up as he tries to 'convert' Sammie to joining him and becoming a vampire and what is his statement of faith about universal belonging).
I don't want to be thinking thinky-thoughts about a dumb vampire movie!
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Possibly the same sources as the Wikipedia article:
Epstein allegedly showed inappropriate behavior toward underage female students at the time, paying them constant attention, and even showing up at a party where young people were drinking, according to a former student. Other former students also often saw him flirting with female students.
But at the same time, this doesn't say how old the underage girls were, and if the kids were holding drinking parties then they must have been around 17. This was the 70s in a progressive school, he was being the cool hip young teacher who was more like a friend than an authority figure. Yes, still creepy, but he isn't the first or the last teacher to be too attentive to certain pupils. See Don't Stand So Close To Me by The Police.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
a private school teacher who seduced his students and blackmailing their dads by threatening to reveal their daughter was no longer a virgin
The only way that works is "your 14 or 15 year old daughter is no longer a virgin" and then the parents get him for having sex with minors. Besides, I thought he got his real start in the whole "getting accepted as part of the social circle of extremely wealthy people, not just the hired staff managing their money" by being a very good friend of a rich gay guy? (Not stated outright that he's gay but he didn't get married until he was in his mid-fifties and handing over everything to a young man seems a little too trusting for a guy who made his money, not inherited it:
The only publicly known billionaire client of Epstein was Leslie Wexner, chairman and CEO of L Brands (formerly The Limited, Inc.) and Victoria's Secret. In 1986, Epstein met Wexner through their mutual acquaintances, insurance executive Robert Meister and his wife, in Palm Beach. A year later, Epstein became Wexner's financial adviser and served as his right-hand man. Within the year, Epstein had sorted out Wexner's entangled finances. In July 1991, Wexner granted Epstein full power of attorney over his affairs. The power of attorney allowed Epstein to hire people, sign checks, buy and sell properties, borrow money, and do anything else of a legally binding nature on Wexner's behalf. Epstein managed Wexner's wealth and various projects such as the building of his yacht, the Limitless.
By 1995, Epstein was a director of the Wexner Foundation and Wexner Heritage Foundation. He was also the president of Wexner's Property, which developed part of the town of New Albany outside Columbus, Ohio, where Wexner lived. Epstein made millions in fees by managing Wexner's financial affairs. Although never employed by L Brands, he frequently corresponded with the company executives. Epstein often attended Victoria's Secret fashion shows, and hosted the models at his New York City home, as well as helping aspiring models get work with the company.
Epstein was a creep, no doubt about it, but he was probably more of a "guy in the same social circles who throws lavish parties where pretty young women are very attentive to important men" than "yeah he'll fill your order for three fifteen year old blondes".
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Feck it, I'm starting to get interested in this dumb movie now. I've seen some clips of scenes on Youtube (the end fight) and the way Remmick is going after Sammie makes me think this is about cultural appropriation and exploitation; taking the products of black culture (songs, stories) and absorbing that into mainstream/white culture. Remmick literally tells Sammie he wants his songs and stories, and it seems that the memories of the thralls become part of Remmick's memories as well, so it really is "black culture being absorbed into white mainstream society and being altered and taken over as belonging there". White culture is vampiric on the culture of the minorities (black, Hispanic, what have you) and depends on 'fresh blood' to rejuvenate and perpetuate itself.
But why an Irish vampire, specifically? I really do want to know now what the hell the director and/or writer was getting at. You can be a victim yourself and still victimise others? He was frightened at a young age by Michael Flatley? Remmick's Southern accent is a commentary on how the Irish assimilated into American society by imitating those around them and becoming racist and prejudiced in their turn? An ancestor of his was beaten by some Mick in a dance-off and now he's getting revenge?
American jig dancing was a creole form. The word jig refers to a competitive dance in 6/8 time with Irish origins, but in early America “jig dancing” and “Negro dancing” were synonymous terms, used interchangeably to describe the dance step, a style of dancing, the “set dance” format (which combines several different tune changes and steps), and competitive dancing (regardless of the tune or step being performed). Black people who performed jigs, reels, and hornpipes in an African style were called “Negro dancers and musicians” as were white people who adopted the African-American style (or performed their jigs in blackface). The Negro dancer I’m researching is an Irish American named John Diamond, who is known for a series of challenges he danced in the 1840s against an African American jig dancer called Master Juba. These rivals danced the same dance to the same tunes.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I get the strong impression this is not a movie made for black people, it's a movie made for white people who like to think about racism and all the rest of that stuff. Which is fair enough, I think specifically black movies for a black audience would be way different and have much less broad appeal, which means they'd do poorly at the box office (I think Moonlight, for instance, was absolutely a 'black movie made for white liberals').
The vampire element could be fascinating if done well; vampirism as a metaphor for conversion is one of the readings on the topic. Here comes an outside entity totally different to everything you know that takes over your life and changes you completely by force and without your will, and if you are willing that is in fact even worse. Applying that to "white vampires against black descendants of slaves" is going to dig up a lot of interpretation.
But I don't know if they do that, or if the movie can handle that. I haven't seen it, I'm only going by reviews, and it does seem to be a bit too pick'n'mix about the Oppressed Minorities on one side and the - well, the who? The KKK? The vampires? - on the other side. The Chinese couple and Choctaw vampire hunters? That's taking the BIPOC acronym a little too literally.
And why Irish? I don't know enough about this Remmick to know what flavour of Irish he is meant to be (the Scots-Irish of the South, who I presume would be the whites living beside and racist to the black population? Southern Irish as per "the rocky road to Dublin"? Protestant? Catholic? Neither?) Something odd going on there. Why Irish, as against the Anglo-philic culture of the plantation owners? Or is it meant to be a subtle reference to "Gone With the Wind" (the O'Haras and "Tara" being southern Irish by descent) - a sort of 'this is how the glamorous figures in Southern-set movies really are' notion?
HereAndGone
1mo ago
which implicitly means that there is some amount of premature violent death of children we are collectively willing to tolerate as the price of doing business
I hope it is with you in your social circle as with the anarchist in "The Man Who Was Thursday" 😁
"I preached blood and murder to those women day and night, and—by God!—they would let me wheel their perambulators.”
Though it would be a unique selling point for a creche or daycare: "Some small number of premature violent death may occur on these premises, kindly remember that, should it happen to your children, you are helping preserve our liberties".
HereAndGone
1mo ago
My view was that con artists prey on greed and stupidity, and in a low-trust society there's plenty of people who are greedy and willing to bend the rules, so a shady proposition isn't an immediate turn-off so long as you set it up right: let's you and me profit off this dumb government initiative to give free money to people with curly hair; here's a secret deal that only a few insiders know which will make them hugely rich and you can get in on the ground floor; shoplifting isn't theft, insurance covers it, the big stores expect it and price it in, and besides we're striking back against the big fatcats of capitalism. It's a lot easier to sell "I got this hot tip from my inside contact in the government department" when everyone knows bribery and corruption are what makes the world go round and it's expected that you have to grease palms and give presents to the right people to get anything done.
Then the sucker ends up losing the shirt on his back, because he might have been venal enough to be willing to do something dishonest but he wasn't smart enough to work out some things are too good to be true.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
because most people in the community were trustworthy, this gamble paid off most of the time
That's the point I'm trying to make. If you tolerate fraud, or even promulgate "well the chance of fraud is better than a world with no fraud" (which is different from "there will always be a risk of fraud"), then what is tolerated becomes commonplace. Once the water changes, the fish change too. Once the bedrock assumptions of "be honest not criminal" are weakened by lack of social reinforcement and no longer passed down, you'll get more and more people willing to be scammers, which in turns mean fewer people opting to put their trust in others, and the costs of protecting yourself against fraud rise because now you have to either spend time and effort on not being scammed, or risk being scammed and losing very badly what you can't afford to lose.
"There's always going to be fraud out there, just be careful and be aware" is not the same as "we need a certain amount of fraud to happen, otherwise it's the Panopticon and economic stagnation". That second message is an encouragement to be fraudulent - after all, everyone else would do it too if they could, and you are just filling your role in the ecosystem!
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I'm going to assume that alongside whatever native honesty you have in your nature, you were raised not to do something like that: that stealing is wrong, that you pay for the goods, and the rest of it.
That's how we get high-trust societies.
Some people, though, weren't raised like that and/or aren't basically honest. We've all seen the videos, and that's how you get toothpaste has to be locked away and retailers close down because the professional shoplifters aren't afraid of the law since the law won't go after them.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
That's one way, and the less desirable way, of doing it.
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Oh, were I Dictator of Earth, I'd happily go "ban 'em all, the stupidity level is too high".
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Something utterly bizzare, like making every kindergartener a girl so that they all play peacefully, then transitioning people to man or woman based off which educational track they used, combined with making people gay during their early teens so they don't have accidental pregnancies, but making them EXTREMELY straight going into adulthood to make sure their parents get grandchildren.
That level of messing around with basic biology means that you're going to do better creating android bodies to implant the brains in. Plus, why would you get grandkids for the parents who let their kids be switched around from male to female to female to male to gay to straight? The confusion about "am I going to have babies or make someone else have babies" will be enormous, if you're mucking about with "biological female but interested in 'male' subjects during education so transitioned to be trans man, but now we want them to be straight to have babies"? Pregnant (trans) man if you left the original plumbing intact, but after all the hormone dosing and surgeries there may not be too much functional plumbing left. Even worse if you want to have your trans man now be able to father babies with their neo-penis, where's the viable sperm coming from?
And even after all that has been sorted out, there's the stubborn problem remaining of "people like having lots of sex but don't like having lots of babies to try and raise, they will dodge having kids if at all possible". Maybe your EXTREMELY straight men and women will all be having anal sex because that's more fun than boring old penis-in-vagina sex, especially after "between the ages of ten and twenty-two I was gay as an entire Pride parade and fucked all the guys/gals", trying to rewire psychology may be a lot tougher than "chop off the breasts, now put the breasts back with fake plastic tits".
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Yes, but then we have to explain how a high-trust world has that many fraudsters. Maybe they don't, maybe it just takes one. But in our conditions, you get a high-trust society by cracking down on fraud, teaching kids that fraud and stealing is bad and that honesty is the best policy (yes, all the old saws), punishing fraudsters when you catch them, instructing people to be vigilant about scams, and the likes.
You don't get a high-trust society by shrugging off "well some people are gonna steal, that's just how it goes". Even less with an attitude that "we need some people to be scammers, else we don't get vigorous economic development!" That's simply asking for systemic African nation levels of corruption, bribery, and stealing from the public purse when you're in power. After all, if I, General Warlord Tsombé, don't rob the treasury blind, then my people will not be reduced to abject enough levels of poverty to trigger Western aid, and that means in turns the NGOs and USAID-type bodies can't employ all the college-degree activists to deliver said aid!
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I guess the planes /decks / towing equipment aren't designed to not slide when at maximum tilt.
Given the reports of terrible procurement policies in various armed forces and how bloat, cost over-runs, and inability to deliver a working product are endemic, it might just be exactly this: "well you never said you wanted us to factor in that a ship, at sea, will be rolling and heaving and tossing and turning when we were designing for 'dead level still as a millpond nobody's shooting at us' conditions!"
I have a hard time imagining Obama saying "I will not have this day of triumph be overshadowed by some fucking technical failure. Make the bodies go away, I don't care how."
Not to get all conspiracy theory but it needn't be a decision Obama made, or was even aware of. Besides, Obama etc. were quite happy to set up the whole photoshoot in the Situation Room like this was some Aaron Sorkin scripted movie about The West Wing: Independence Day.
The bin Laden raid was every bit as much about propaganda as anything else, and "some of our elite force were killed by these miserable stumblebums" is not the image the originators want portrayed. "We dropped on them like the wrathful hammer of Thor, obliterated them, and came away without even a scratch" is the message of power, influence, superiority, and 'we can get you wherever you are and not even break a sweat' to be publicised. See the nonsense about what happened bin Laden's body or who exactly shot him:
After the raid, reports at the time stated that U.S. forces had taken Bin Laden's body to Afghanistan for positive identification, then buried it at sea, in accordance with Islamic law, within 24 hours of his death. Subsequent reporting has called this account into question—citing, for example, the absence of evidence that there was an imam on board the USS Carl Vinson, where the burial was said to have taken place. On 15 June 2011, U.S. federal prosecutors officially dropped all criminal charges against Bin Laden.
Dropping the charges is another symbolic piece of theatre, whatever the legal requirements; there are all kinds of objectives to be fulfilled in an incident like this beyond the merely literal.
It was widely reported by the press that Bin Laden was fatally wounded by Robert J. O'Neill; however, it has also been widely discredited by witnesses, who claim that Bin Laden was possibly already dead by the time O'Neill arrived, having been injured by an anonymous SEAL Team Six member referred to under the pseudonym "Red". According to Navy SEAL Matt Bissonnette, Bin Laden was struck by two suppressed shots to the side of the head from around ten feet away after leaning out of his bedroom doorway to survey Bissonnette and a point man. Once the Navy SEALs entered the bedroom, his body began convulsing and Bissonnette along with another SEAL responded by firing multiple shots into his chest.
"Yes, they killed our leader but we took vengeance by killing some of them" is not the comfort you want your enemies to take away, you want to make sure that there isn't anything that can be used to build up the mythos:
Pakistani authorities later demolished the compound in February 2012 to prevent it from becoming a neo-Islamist shrine.
Pakistani civilians in Abottobad reported that several Navy SEALS were killed during the Bin Laden raid when their Blackhawk crashed, and that they saw bodies and body parts being loaded onto another helicopter for evacuation. A few weeks later, a helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, killing about half of the exact same SEAL team that were on the Bin Laden raid.
Even worse would be "Yeah, they killed themselves by a screw-up". But yes, the parsimonious explanation is that "if you're a soldier, your chances of dying are higher, especially if you're flying around on different high-level dangerous missions".
HereAndGone
1mo ago
Yeah, that's Tree of Life symbolism. They probably took it because of the Viking associations, but it's not a swastika.
Of course not - you'd assume they were a scam artist trying to rip you off.
If a total stranger walked up to me and offered me this amazing chance to get in on the ground floor, but I have to take it up now or the opportunity will be gone, of course I'd assume they were a scammer and I don't live in a country that is particularly corrupt.
the only place a scam artist would attempt it is in an environment in which most people are assumed to be trustworthy
Or greedy. This is how con artists work, after all: appealing to the greed and cupidity and stupidity of the mark, who thinks they are too smart to be easily fooled and who is just venal enough that they won't look a gift horse in the mouth when the prospect of easy riches is dangled before them.
None of this even seems counterintuitive to me, it just seems like basic economics.
Yeah, that's common sense. But (at least by this example) the book seems to be trying to sell itself by dressing up common-sense observations in 'counter-intuitive' ways in order to seem edgy and new and worth buying for its insights.
Old boring way of putting this: A fool and his money are soon parted Fancy new pop-business book way of putting this: Did you know the best amount of fraud is "some"? Bet ya didn't!
EDIT: Reading the reviews on the Amazon site, it seems to be less that this author has a deep economic theory and more that he's concluding "since fraud of some sort always happens, and has always happened throughout human history, then it must have some sort of purpose":
"It is highly unlikely that the optimal level of fraud is zero." (Pg. 227.) " ...when something keeps happening in different times and places, it's likely to be an equilibrium phenomenon linked to the deep underlying economic structure." (Pg. 157.) The event described "happens so often and reproduces itself so exactly that it's got to reflect a fairly deep and ubiquitous incentive problem which will be very difficult to remove."
There may be some point there about evolutionary history and why we are wired to take advantage of others, but it is less to do with economics and more to do with "this is how humans are". You could make the same point about "it is highly unlikely the optimal level of murder/rape/beating children to death is zero". Some small fraction of people throughout history have always beaten children to death! This is just the price of living in a high-trust society!
HereAndGone
1mo ago
How much economic development can you have when all the trusting investors hand over money to scam artists who don't produce the goods/services/returns on investment they promised but instead decamp to the Bahamas to live the high life?
I get the point about trust being necessary, but if everyone is so trusting they can be plucked like pigeons, then eventually there won't be any trust. Montreal or other Scam Capitals are going to become notorious, investors won't invest even in legitimate proposals because the risk this is a plausible scammer is too high, and economic development will slow down anyway.
The optimum is to have as little fraud as possible. No fraud at all may be impossible to achieve, given human nature, but surely trying for "as close to zero as possible" is the better option than "eh, shit happens, let the fools who fall for scams be weeded out by natural selection, it's nature's way".
HereAndGone
1mo ago
I think the book presents a convincing case that, impossible utopias excepted, a world with no fraud would be worse than a world with some amount of fraud.
Not having read the book, explain this to me? A world with no fraud would have to be a high-trust society, would it not? People are honest, keep their word, and don't exploit loopholes or take unfair advantage of the vulnerable and uninformed. Aren't low-trust societies the ones riddled with fraud and corruption? I'm taking from how you put this that a world without fraud would be a low-trust society, or one so heavily monitored by Big Brother that other freedoms would all be lost.
Yeah, I've been reading the complaints that the reason "Elio" failed for Pixar was because of all the changes the studio made (apparently in a panic after the first test screening where people allegedly liked the movie but nobody wanted to pay to watch it in a cinema). That sounds reasonable - too many cooks spoil the broth, after all - but the complaints go on about how they reduced the queerness and cut out its queer heart and dropped all the hints that Elio is gay.
The 11 year old lead character has to be explicitly gay, or else the movie fails? I think it failed because of the damn eye patch in the marketing (what little there was of it, I hadn't a clue there was a new Pixar movie out until I started seeing all the pieces about how it bombed) - you stick an eye patch on a kid character, you make it look like your movie is going to be A Moral Lesson And Lecture About The Differently Abled And Inclusion, not a fun sci-fi romp for the kids.
That, and the bean mouth style.
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