Blackmoor Vituperative

30 minutes into the RiffTrax of “The Last Jedi”. This is the second time I’ve seen the movie. It is even worse than I remember. It’s like a badly written satire of a Star Wars movie (and by that I mean the movie, not the RiffTrax commentary).

How could this have happened? “The Force Awakens” was SO GOOD. So they KNOW how to make a good Star Wars movie, yet they deliberately chose NOT to.

Ye gods. So very bad. And it just. Keeps. Getting. Worse. Holy crap.

Two hours in. Wow. It’s like they went into this saying, “Let’s make a movie that mocks everything Star Wars fans love.” And then someone else said, “Yes, good. But let’s do it so ineptly that people will be making fun of this movie’s obvious flaws long after we are all dead.” And the first person says, “Right, right. Not just bad writing, but the kind of overtly, impossibly bad writing that even high school students will be wondering what kind of idiots we are.” And the second person says, “Brilliant! But we need to make sure we piss on everything that makes Star Wars fun. We need to ruin it utterly. This will be a movie that only people who hate Star Wars will like, and then only in that hateful, ‘My ex-boyfriend lost his job’ kind of way.” And the first person was all laughing and saying, “Perfect!”

And then a third person comes in, overhears that, and says, “OMG, that is HILARIOUS. And I have an idea. Some time toward the end, we should have the Slowest Starship Chase In The Universe ®.” And then an old white guy in an expensive suit comes out of his office, and says, “I heard all of that, and I have only one thing to say…” And the three writers are all afraid they are going to be fired. But then the suit says, “The Slowest Starship Chase In The Universe ® … is the ENTIRE MOVIE.” And they all crack up laughing, because they all hate Star Wars SO MUCH.

P.S.

I just watched “How Star Wars The Last Jedi Should Have Ended” again, after recently seeing Last Jedi again (which is still just awful). The folks at How It Should Have Ended GET IT. They understand what was wrong with this movie, and how it could have been a worthy follow-up to “Force Awakens” (which was fantastic). It vexes me that the bigots and misogynists get all the attention for criticizing “Last Jedi”, because their reasons for hating it are STUPID. Rey is AWESOME. Finn is AWESOME. But “Last Jedi” wasted both characters, and it dumped hot wet garbage all over what makes Star Wars wonderful. If only the people who made “Last Jedi” loved Star Wars and understood what makes a movie great, the way the folks at How It Should Have Ended clearly do.

Wait, what are you talking about, WE decided!? MY best interest?! How can you know what’s MY best interest is? How can you say what MY best interest is? What are you trying to say, I’M crazy? When I went to YOUR schools, I went to YOUR churches, I went to YOUR institutional learning facilities?! So how can you say I’M crazy?

This week’s “Brain Pickings” features a 1910 speech by Theodore Roosevelt, admonishing people to do something, rather than merely criticize what others do.

“The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt.”

Fun fact! (And somewhat relevant due to yesterday being Cinco de Mayo, celebrating when Mexico helped the United States win the American Civil War). When Roosevelt gave this speech in 1910, there were no border controls between the USA and Mexico. There was no such thing as a Mexican “illegal immigrant” in the USA until the 1920s, when white supremacists in the USA starting imposing quotas on immigrants based on their country of origin. (There were earlier laws regarding immigration, but these did not actually prevent anyone from Mexico from coming to the USA freely. Earlier laws mainly focused on Chinese immigrants, and on preventing the importation of “contract labor”, which is to say, slaves in all but name.)

Fun fact! Increased “security” at the USA-Mexico border in the early 1900s had the perverse effect of increasing the number of permanent Mexican residents in the USA, because it made it more difficult for them to go back home once they got here.

Happy Cinco de Mayo, or as it’s known in Mexico, May 5. This is a day when we Americans celebrate the day that Mexican troops defeated French troops which were on their way to Mexico City. By doing so, they helped the United States win against the Confederacy in the American Civil War. Just one example in a long history of Mexicans and the descendants of Mexicans contributing to make the USA a better place.

¡Viva México!

This afternoon’s movie watching entertainment was “The Pink Jungle” (1968). I first saw this movie when I was staying at my grandparents in Virginia Beach, approximately 1975. The room I stayed in had a small color TV (12 inch, maybe a bit more). I watched a lot of movies on that TV, including all of the “Planet Of The Apes” movies. Those, of course, are easy to find now, but this one isn’t. As far as I can tell, it was only released on VHS, and only in pan-and-scan.

The version we watched was clearly digitized from a VHS source, but it was pretty entertaining despite the pan-and-scan. The film was originally released in Techniscope, which was an Italian cheapo widescreen process used in the 1960s. It may not be CinemaScope, but I’d still rather see the whole picture than a pan-and-scan version. Maybe some day.

“The Pink Jungle” (1968) features George Kennedy, who was already pretty well known by this time, James Garner, who at this point was best known for playing Maverick (Rockford Files was still a few years away), and Eva Renzi, who was still making movies until the 1990s, but who is probably best known for this and “Bird With The Crystal Plumage” (1970).

This is a fun film. I hope someone rediscovers it and gives it the widescreen DVD or Blu-ray release it deserves.

But what the hell is up with that poster?

Psychologist Valerie Tarico has written a very interesting article, “Political Narrative II: Why Some Progressives Are Tearing Each Other Apart“. I have said, many times (and sadly, I think I will have many opportunities to say it again), clinging to past grievances — no matter how valid they are — is not the way to make a better future. At some point, you must put the past behind you, if you want to move beyond it. We need to focus on making tomorrow better than today. Not perfect: perfection is not an option, and we will never make any progress if we insist on that. Just make tomorrow better than today.

As an aside, this also provides me with an insight into some of my more conservative friends. I see them making comments (often defensive comments, as though they’ve been attacked) about “liberals”, but those comments seem to come out of nowhere. It’s because those defensive comments aren’t aimed at me, or people like me — they are aimed at what this article calls the Structural Oppression group.

I look forward to the day when one’s skin colour, facial features, and sex are as easily changed as hair length and hair colour are now — and are finally treated as the superficial traits they are.

Pondering “pleasant” places to retire, and stumbled across Kelly Norton’s “most ‘pleasant’ days in a year” post. Rather surprised that southern Louisiana rates as highly as it does, by this criteria. Saddened, but not surprised, that New Hampshire rates so low. I wish I could enter my own criteria. I don’t mind precipitation, for example.

Southern Louisiana does look pretty good, except during the summer, when it’s uninhabitable. And of course southern California is a climatological paradise, but I don’t want to move back to California. Portland, OR is in the ballpark of Charlottesville, VA, but their “pleasant days” are spread evenly from May to October, while ours peak pretty sharply in May and September.

Susan suggested we might become migratory, traveling between North and South as the season change. Maintaining two residences seems like such a massive waste of resources, though.

Cuenca, Ecuador keeps looking attractive. Real estate and the cost of living are both affordable. … Or maybe not. Realistically, it’s unlikely we will move away from the USA.

Watching a documentary about sugar, called “Sugar Coated” (2015). Briefly, obesity has doubled in the past 30 years, and diabetes has tripled, and it’s because sugar is in literally everything and we eat way too much of it. We eat twice as much processed food, and at least twice as much sugar, as we did 30 years ago. And make no mistake: our sugar consumption 30 years ago was enormous, compared to 30 years before that. It was already far too much sugar.

The people who made the video keep saying that this is a controversial issue.

How is this controversial? It’s obvious. Look at the ingredients in spaghetti sauce, hot dogs, barbecue sauce, ketchup, cereal, pizza sauce, even bread. Bread! Have you seen the cereal aisle at the grocery store? It’s literally boxes of candy. Grocery stores have become candy stores — and that’s not even touching on actual candy and cakes, of which we consume vast quantities.

We are a stupid, stupid species.

This is worth watching, too.

“Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack” (2001) is a strange movie. Like all of the Godzilla reboots up to that point, it’s a direct sequel to the original Godzilla, ignoring everything in between. However, it goes in some new directions for a Godzilla movie.

First of all, Godzilla’s look is different, in one small but very visible way: he has solid white zombie eyes. In previous Godzilla movies, Godzilla’s eyes always looked like, well, eyes. Giving Godzilla solid white eyes makes it clear that this is a monster, not a defender of the Earth.

Godzilla has gone back and forth from being a villain or a hero, and in this one he’s the villain. That by itself is not strange. What is strange is that King Ghidorah is the hero of this movie (with some help from a sacrifice play by Mothra). Making Ghidorah (formerly “the space monster”) into a defender of the Earth is a 180 degree about-face.

Thirdly, prior to the power-up of Ghidorah into King Ghidorah, none of the three monsters facing up against Godzilla are as large or as powerful as Godzilla. They are at best about three-quarters of Godzilla’s size. That’s different. In the only previous movie where Godzilla fought smaller monsters, it was a swarm of them, and they eventually merged into a giant monster as big or bigger than Godzilla.

And the ending is the most bizarre of any Godzilla movie ever made, in my opinion.

It’s a good movie, though. I enjoyed it, anyway.

I have always been interested in criminology and criminal justice. I actually minored in Criminology when I got my degree (I’ve considered going back to get a B.S. in Criminology, but I’ll never work in that field, so it would just be an expensive piece of paper).

For many years, it has been a source of great distress to me that our criminal “justice” system is staffed by prosecutors who care only about convictions (guilt or innocence is irrelevant), police who are unabashedly and overtly corrupt, and politicians whose only concerns are being “tough on crime” and friendly to private-prison lobbyists. Our society is paying the price for this systemic corruption of what ought to be a bulwark to protect us.

I’d never heard of Larry Krasner before today, but the facts that he exists, and that the people of Philadelphia elected him, gives me some hope that our future may not be as dark as it currently seems.

Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner Promised a Criminal Justice Revolution. He’s Exceeding Expectations.