Blog Archives
You may be aware of the Disney movie Frozen. Lain hasn’t seen it yet, though she has an Ilsa doll that she got as a gift. But there was another movie by the name that came out a few years before.
It’s a very, very different movie.
The acting was okay. I only recognized one of the actors as the kid partner from The Following.
Not Disney’s Frozen is about three friends who get stuck on a sky lift. Nobody is going to be back for five days and if they don’t do something about it, they’re going to freeze to death. It’s an independent filmmaker’s dream of a plot, because for filming all you need to do is rent out a ski area when it’s not being used and that’s all you have to do for location expenses! All of the drama takes place right there.
The downside to that plot is that it’s hard to fill 90 minutes with it. They aren’t stuck until they’re about 30 minutes in. Some of the stretches of the movie are pretty slow. It’s one of those movies to watch while you’re doing something else.
Don’t watch it right before bed, though, because it is really really dark. I will share with you only one spoiler to give you an idea of how dark. One of the characters, after breaking his legs jumping off the ski lift, is eaten alive by wolves while the others look away. And the kicker? His fate isn’t the worst of the three.
The jumping character made the mistake of holding his legs out straight. Anyone who has ever watched movies knows that’s not what you do. It turns out that I was wrong about what you do do, though. I thought you’d be best just jumping in a ball, but you’re supposed to have bent legs that take some of the pressure as you fall. Lesson learned!
Anyway, I neither recommend the movie nor tell you to stay away from it. You can watch it for free (with ads) on TubiTV. It’s a good background movie, but only if you’re in the mood for something dark.
There are a lot of criticisms of modern country music. Much of it comes from people who don’t actually listen to it. Bo Burnham very, very obviously does.
A new CDC report could reignite the debate over Hollywood’s influence on teen tobacco use
The drop in the percentage of youth-oriented films featuring tobacco use, as well as the dramatic decline in tobacco occurrences in G and PG films, is positive. Still, tobacco impressions within films geared toward teens and young adults hasn’t improved since 2010. If it had, the CDC reports that all youth-rated films would have been completely smoke-free by 2015. Instead, “the average number of tobacco incidents increased 55 percent in youth-rated movies with any tobacco depiction,” a result of five of Hollywood’s six major movie companies — all of which have corporate tobacco depiction policies — featuring more tobacco use.
The answer to the issue lies with where, how much, and what type of tobacco is being used in cinema. In short, fewer movies are featuring not just more smoking but more kinds of tobacco use. That concentrated increase is once again raising concerns about the relationship between tobacco’s presence in media and an increased likelihood of picking up the habit.
To clarify: Smoking in youth-oriented movies is down, it’s especially down in movies aimed at younger audiences where people are most impressionable, and of course smoking rates among the young are down. They really, really need something to be alarmed about.
Smoking rates are down and have been doing down a while. Smokers are going broke paying ever-increasing taxes on cigarettes. Most people hate smoking, and smokers. More smokers than not hate smoking and themselves for their havit. Can public health at some point just declare victory and go home?
Before getting to the substance it is worth noting that this is really the first bit of genuine regulation proposed by the FDA Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) in its eight years. Despite CTP reportedly approaching $4 billion in cumulative expenditures, it has only implemented a few inconsequential rules that were specifically required by the enabling legislation, and has never actually created a standard or specific requirement like a real regulator. Instead, everything it has done has been what I have dubbed weaponized kafkaism. The variation on the word “kafkaesque” refers, of course, to Kafka’s horror stories of bureaucratic (in the pejorative sense) rules that create injustice via impossible procedural burdens. “Weaponized” refers to turning something that is harmful but not malign into a tool for intentionally inflicting harm. CTP has turned filing and paperwork hurdles into a weapon.
It is bad enough when sloppiness, laziness, and incompetence create cost, inefficiency, opaque or even impossible requirements, and uncertainty. But in this case, those results — throwing sand in the gears of the regulated industry, making whatever they and their customers want to do difficult and uncertain — are the goals of the agency. Sloppiness, laziness, and incompetence tend to cause kafkaesque burdens to pile up if no effort is made to push back. They also perfectly camouflage the malevolence of intentionally created burdens.
The march toward a near-ban of e-cigarettes is an example of this. Products will not be banned because they violate some standard or other substantive requirement. CTP is simply taking advantage of the administrative rules that any products that were not on the market in 2007 (i.e., all e-cigarettes) must receive approval as a new product. Requiring new product approvals is not itself particularly unusual or problematic regulation until you observe that CTP has no rules about what makes a new product approvable. It is not even clear what an application should contain. Any application can, and probably will, be arbitrarily disapproved. This is even worse than the oft-noted fact that the new product application process is prohibitively expensive for anything other than a very promising mass-production product, which >99% of e-cigarette products are not, though that also is a kafkaesque burden.
— Just L (@JustLittleOldL) July 1, 2017
But part of the disastrous campaign for the Lib Dems was the fact that its leader was constantly interrogated for his religious beliefs, beliefs that had little to do with his public leadership. Farron had a long record of supporting gay rights and access to abortion. But the media wanted to know whether he thought they were sins. Farron would get on television wanting to talk up a second referendum to be held upon the results of Brexit negotiations. His media inquisitors wanted to talk about personal morality.
Guardian columnist Rafael Behr explains that Farron’s “problem was that the culture of contemporary liberalism is avowedly secular.” That tells part of the story. The entire elite culture and much of the popular culture is secular in a quite specific way. It is not a secularism that encourages public neutrality while maintaining a generous social pluralism. It’s a secularism that demands the humiliation of religion, specifically Christianity. And in Britain it has a decidedly classist flavor, one that holds it impossible for an Evangelical like Farron — one of those people — to represent the better sort of person.
When Will Wonder Woman Be a Fat, Femme Woman of Color? (Ms Magazine)
Why couldn’t Wonder Woman be a woman of color? When it was announced that Gadot would play Wonder Woman, audiences went wild body shaming her for not having large enough breasts. One can only imagine the white supremacy that would have emerged had the announcement said instead that she would be played by a Black woman. On Paradise Island, there are Black warriors in addition to white ones, which is a good start, but other women of color are missing. Also, while the female warriors are strong and ass-kicking, they all have tall, thin body types and they all could be models on a runway. In fact, in a pivotal battle scene, Wonder Woman struts across the battlefield as if on a catwalk. As a result, their physical strength plays second fiddle to their beauty, upholding the notion that in order to access power women must be beautiful in a traditional way. Especially with the body positivity movement gaining steam, the film could have spotlighted female warriors with fat, thick and short body types. While people have said that warriors can’t be fat, some of our best paid male athletes are, particularly linebackers on the football field, and no one doubts their physical strength.
Another problem is that the story’s overt queerness gets sublimated by heteronormativity. Diana comes from a separatist commune of women who have intentionally chosen to live without men. In one of the first scenes between Diana and Steve, she explains that she read 12 volumes of a series on sex that concluded that while men are required for reproduction, when it comes to female pleasure, they’re unnecessary. While a love story develops between them, a requirement in superhero stories, Diana thankfully doesn’t compromise her integrity for him.
The Sham Psychology of Wonder Woman The beauties of the soul and body do not correspond. (American Conservative)
It doesn’t help that Diana is a beautiful woman. The film never shows the realism of what great beauty can inflict on a person: the deathblows to maturity that are attention, flattery, and unearned affection, and the self-complacency and mistrust of others that can follow. Just as she is unaware of her superpowers, Diana is unaware of her womanly powers. She attempts to undress in public, oblivious to the effect it might have on those watching. She doesn’t understand the concept of partner dancing, complaining that it’s “just swaying.” When she tries it for herself she remarks, with the sterility of a doctor, that the bodies of men and women are very close in this kind of dance.
Not that I can say too much. I have myself complained about female cop characters (and some males) looking more like underwear models than police officers. In Batman vs Superman, Gadot doesn’t really fall into that category, though. And while I do wish Hollywood would be less myopic when it comes to standards of beauty, Wonder Woman is Wonder Woman, and the Amazonians are Amazonians, and it’s built in to the concept that I would not choose to die on that particular hill.
I’ve heard more than once that the studies that say paid work and housework tend to be flawed (including things like lawnmowing and car maintenance as “recreation”), but it’s good to have an actual source:
AEI/Brookings re-kills the talking point that moms work more than dads when you include paid work + home work. pic.twitter.com/IOogLqczeB
— Robert VerBruggen (@RAVerBruggen) June 8, 2017
It’s from a report advocating paid family and medical leave (PDF), lest you think it’s some MRA outlet.
This October piece by Michael Brendan Dougherty seems kind of prescient. There’s a degree to which people who a few weeks ago were bragging about how the Deep State was going to obstruct Trump’s agenda are now freaking out that Trump is going after the Deep State.
And from November, Ed Krayewski argued that if you don’t understand how anyone could have voted for Trump, you’re why Trump won.
Never mind whether it’s fair to conservatives, Musa al-Gharbi argues that the lack of ideological diversity is hurting social research. I don’t know what you do about a feedback loop this far in, though. {More}
As Uncle Steve alludes to, it’s easier to be a sanctuary city where nobody unrich can afford to live.
Jason Richwine notes that the children of immigrants are learning English, but fears they are not sufficiently forgetting Spanish. Yeah, not too worried about that.
DishGirl writes of abortion regret and the sorry it can leave behind.
How you imagine a thing.
🚨GIF ALERT🚨 #MisfitMischief
Goat gifs…don't question it, just do it! pic.twitter.com/jhvO1aMCA7
— MisfitPolitics (@MisfitsPolitics) June 10, 2017
How a thing actually goes.
— Mo Mo (@molratty) June 10, 2017