Monk fight! Monk fight!:

Which reminds me of this great Adam Carroll song, Bubble Gum or Bad Kharma:

This reminds me of the sweat equity arrangement my friend got in on. Basically he and a bunch of other people all worked together to build their houses. Then they got to move in without a down payment and with a reasonable mortgage.

Source: Tradition and teamwork are awe-inspiring in this Amish barn raising time-lapse | Aeon Videos

AMC theaters were toying with the notion of allowing texting in theaters. The response was overwhelmingly negative, and so they ditched the idea pretty quickly.

Which I actually think might be a shame.

To be clear, I completely understand why people don’t want other people texting or fiddling with their phones during movies. I can definitely understand the visceral reaction that a lot of people had. Further, I myself have no particular desire to text in theaters. I wouldn’t mind, however, being able to get on IMDB and finding out who that actress is who looks so familiar. Three minutes on the smartphone can get me undistracted from the rest of the movie!

It’s not that, when I first heard the idea, that I had my heart set on it. I can also pretty easily imagine a constant beeping and buzzing being a distraction from the film. So i’m not entirely sure whether it’s an option that I would take advantage of or not. It is something I might want to try.

The original plan was not to roll it out in every theater, so consumers would have the option of going to a texting showing or a non-texting showing. Enforcement may be a problem, but the theater was willing to take that on. So why not give it a try and see what develops?

A lot of bad publicity is why not, apparently.

Artwork by Zontal

Over There, have a post about complaints about The Whiteness of Westeros. If Hollywood diversity, or Game of Thrones, is your thing, feel free to check it out. You can comment about it here if you prefer. Over here I wanted to talk about something I glide over in that post.

Ross Douthat has a mini-tweetstorm about some of the less “realistic” aspects of Game of Thrones. The whole thing is below, but this is the one that sets the stage for most of what is to follow:

3. The author makes a very fair point: Martin's Westeros is clearly based on the British Isles, but at 100 times their scale.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) April 25, 2016

Ultimately, you just have to ignore the scale. Everything he says about the amazing homogeneity for a place of that scale is true. But that’s only the beginning of the problems that it presents.

Though he goes on to talk about the remarkable political stability of the dynasties on Westeros, that’s only a part of the dynastic problem. The bigger problem is that there is simply no way for one royal family to maintain control over a land more than twice as large as the US (including Alaska) without an army of dragons. As soon as the dragons died off, everything would have crumbled. Since the Targaryens didn’t intermarry much, they wouldn’t have even been able to count on that sort of loyalty. The Barratheons might have had a little more success, but most likely as soon as the Targaryens were gone they’d be looking at a formal confederacy (where the king is trying to stay in the good graces of the regions rather than the other way around) or perpetual war as they tried to hold on to multiple would-be kingdoms breaking off at once.

Many other aspects of the story also wouldn’t have worked, with trips taking days or weeks in Westeros that would have taken years across South America. There are so many things about the story that work with something roughly the size of Great Britain that don’t work with something the size of South America that by far the path of least resistence is to assume that the there was an error in translation.

The size serves next to no purpose story-wise other than feeding into Martin’s sense of gradiosity. The figure itself was derived by calculating the size of The Wall. It’s easier to simply imagine that the size of the wall was a miscalculation.

And here’s Ross’s tweetstorm:
(more…)

In a review of the follow-up to My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2, Ted Trautman talks about love plots in sequels:

Each genre that celebrates romantic love—rom-coms hardly have a monopoly on it—has its own way of abandoning relationships just as they’re getting interesting. Among romantic comedies, the most common solution is to simply not make sequels—to bury Jerry Maguire under Yucca Mountain and let its fiery passion cool into domestic routine far from public view. Which, frankly, is as impressive as it is disappointing: In an industry where intellectual property is increasingly recycled and warmed over, it must take tremendous willpower (or tremendous deference to young audiences’ tastes) not to throw Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in a room together and call it Swipe Left in Seattle.{…}

The first is introducing a new love interest: Call it the “When Harry Met Someone Else” approach. Sometimes an actor is unable or unwilling to return for a sequel; sometimes filmmakers just prefer new blood. In either case, the sequel ditches one lover in favor of the other, setting him or her—usually him—on the path to falling in love with a new character. A recent example of this is Zoolander 2, which kills off the title character’s wife Matilda Jeffries (Christine Taylor) in a tragicomic accident in the film’s first few minutes, clearing the way for a much less compelling postscript of a romance between Derek Zoolander (Ben Stiller) and Valentina Valencia (Penelope Cruz). In a classic, more extreme instance—Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me—Vanessa Kensington (Elizabeth Hurley) literally self-destructs to make room for Powers (Mike Myers) to fall in love again with Heather Graham’s Felicity Shagwell. For other serial monogamists, see: Bond, James; Jones, Indiana; Wayne, Bruce; the Ted movies, the Missions Impossible, and plenty of others.

The second method is artificial estrangement, or when couples who once attained marital or premarital bliss have suffered some falling out between movies—but who maintain enough grudging affection for each other that they spend their sequel falling back in love along more or less the same narrative lines as in the previous film. A relatively recent example is 2013’s Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, which pits Ron Burgundy (Will Ferrell) against his wife Veronica Corningstone (Christina Applegate) in pursuit of a coveted promotion. In no time at all, they’re reenacting the bitter rivalry that was already exhaustively explored in the first film, and round two falls flat. Other movies to follow this pattern include Wayne’s World 2, Spider-Man 3, and my personal favorite, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, which features a characteristically chipper Nicolas Cage breaking and entering into the home of his ex-girlfriend Abigail (Diane Kruger) in order to steal her National Archives ID card—you know, just regular breakup stuff.

The quick jettison tack has often annoyed me. Whether the romantic plot in the first movie was the main plot or a subplot in an action film, it’s annoying to have all of that build-up for a story that’s often scratched almost immediately in the follow-up.

We’ve gotten used to this notion that just about every story needs a romantic plot, and it’s usually one of the two above. Book series tend to be a little better about this if only because the author knows that this can’t be done for every novel. So often, love interests will last several books before being dispatched for one reason or another. In crime series, often in a violent manner, sometimes in a dramatic manner, and sometimes in an oh-by-the-way manner.

One of the things that really impressed me about the Jason Bourne series was Robert Ludlum’s commitment to the relationship and marriage between Jason Bourne and Marie St Jacques. This was especially impressive because St Jacques exhibited many of the problems with first-book love interests. Namely, that first books are often the busiest in a series. You’re introducing the main character, the man character’s world, and the love interest. It’s hard for the last character to get all of the attention she (or he) deserves to be a sufficiently compelling character in subsequent stories. But Ludlum did it! He even managed to make Bourne a family man, which is not easy for an action hero. Meanwhile, in the movies, she was dead in the first ten minutes of the second movie, and a new love interest, Nicky Parsons, was added*. Parsons hung around for more than one film, though, so there’s that.

I found it noteworthy that, after Ludlum died and his books were taken over by Eric Van Lustbader, the very first thing he did (off-screen, in between novels actually) was kill off Marie. Van Lustbader may have replaced her with someone else, but that decision as well as other changes in direction made me less interested in the Bourne novels.

The dispatching of love interests off-screen in between sequels – or in the opening salvo of the sequel – is the ultimate cheap shot. If the last romantic plot was disposed of so easily, why should I invest at all in the new romantic plot? As understandable as the desire may be to have a by-the-numbers characters-meet-and-fall-in-love story, it’s a mark of laziness. Good on those writers who do a better job.

* – I was relatively certain a character named “Nicky Parsons” appeared in the books, but as a relatively minor character allied with the antagonist. Poking around has only dug into a number of assertions that the – or any – character did not exist in the books.

Kyla Brandon poses as a Trump supporter on Tinder to see what kind of responses she would get. With the assistance of an attractive profile photo, she got many responses.

It reminded me of this episode of Rom-Com, which is worth watching in its ten minute entirety. NSFW:

(I will grant that the comparison between a Trump supporter and the woman in the profile in Rom-Com is pretty tenuous. Some of the guys that responded to her also seemed okay. An interesting social experiment either way.)

This is, of course, why Lisby does not like the Fourth of July:

It’s also how I’m going to be spending my Super Tuesday, probably.

I just finished an audiobook by Vince Flynn. I just finished the book, but cannot remember the title, even though I just read it. The title is unimportant, just as with any Vince Flynn book. Or Tom Clancy, or Brad Thor. There seems to me that there must be some master database out there of government and military terms that they choose from at random. This one is no different.

As it happened, I had actually listened to this audiobook before. I was pretty sure that it was the case when I was about an hour in. The weird thing, though, is that I could remember nothing about it. A couple of the characters were familiar. I assumed that Mitch Rapp won in the end and order was restored, but that was about all I could remember from the plot other than one thing: Character A is going to kill Character B, even though they were working together. Apart from the plot, I could remember only one other thing: I liked the book.

How I can remember so little about a book, but that I like it, is kind of bizarre when you think about it. And yet there I was, listening again for the first time waiting for Character A to kill Character B.

It gets even worse, though: The one thing I concretely remembered… I remembered wrong. It was Character B that killed Character A.

I wonder if I’ve heard the next book of his in my queue. And if it matters if I have.

It’s all so very confusing. He wasn’t even an aging rock star. Also tragic, because obviously but also because the person who was running that website is going to have to find another project.

As the X-Files resurfaces, a scandal erupts:

In infuriating news, Gillian Anderson revealed she was initially offered half of David Duchovny’s salary for the upcoming “X-Files” reboot, despite putting in equal star power and screen time.

“I’m surprised that more [interviewers] haven’t brought that up because it’s the truth,” Anderson said in an interview with the Daily Beast. “Especially in this climate of women talking about the reality of [unequal pay] in this business, I think it’s important that it gets heard and voiced. It was shocking to me, given all the work that I had done in the past to get us to be paid fairly. I worked really hard toward that and finally got somewhere with it.”

James Joyner is unimpressed:

My overall perception, though, is that Duchovny is by far the bigger star. He was already a known commodity when the original show aired, having been the lead on “Red Shoe Diaries,” and went on to star in “Californication.” Anderson, by contrast, was a 25-year-old unknown when the show started and, while she’s worked steadily, hasn’t carried anything of note.

The amount of screen time surely isn’t the only factor in who gets paid what in the entertainment industry. I presume Martin Sheen and Rob Lowe got paid more on “The West Wing” than did John Spencer, Bradley Whitford, and Richard Schiff (whose names I actually had to look up just now). I presume Cybil Sheppard made more when “Moonlighting” debuted than did Bruce Willis, given that she was already a star and nobody had ever heard of him.

Similarly, Tom Petty gets a much bigger cut than any of the Heartbreakers and Don Henley and the late Glenn Frey made more than their Eagles bandmates.

There are a lot of examples of the pay discrepancy between male and female actors. A lot of them are pretty bad. Of course Harrison Ford is going to be able to demand a premium for his small role in The Force Awakens, he’s Harrison friggin’ Ford. Further, he was the face of the role, meaning that he had the leverage of being able to relieve them of the fan controversy of a recast. The role of Rey may have been more important to the movie, but it was also open casting. Actress One declines, take Actress Two. (Now, if the actor for Finn made more money, that is more revealing. I haven’t read one way or the other on that, but if there is a disparity – and if there is that in itself may be important – there almost certainly isn’t as large of one. The other comparison, between Ford and Carrie Fisher, is also undone by what Ford has done since and Fisher hasn’t, as well as the importance of the roles that they did play in the movie.

This, though? This is the best exemplar of actor/actress pay inequality I can imagine. When they were first getting started, way back when, there was a good argument for there to be a gap. As the series wore on and Scully’s role because more integral, the gap closed just as it should. But for this project, there is really no reason to believe that they shouldn’t start on at least comparable footing because both Mulder and Scully have necessary roles for an X-Files reboot to work. Duchovny may have had more success after X-Files, but not terribly much more (in fact, I’ve not seen anything he’s done since and I have seen Anderson since). And indeed, when Anderson discovered the disparity and demanded a change, she got it. Indicating that yeah, she is pretty important.

But the fact that they offered her so much less to begin with says… something. Why? Why wasn’t it obvious that they were at least in the same ballpark? Why did they assume that she would take less? The Occam answer is because they expect women to take less by default. Why did Anderson initially take less? Probably at least in part because she is used to being offered less.

So yeah. Raise hell, Scully.