A companion rant to my previous mention (below) of Kick Ass…
…which is based on a comic book by writer Mark Millar and comic book artist royalty John Romita, Jr. and of which…
Monthly Archives: April 2010
What are little girls made of?
Sugar and spice and everything nice. If you’re baking a cake, that is.
Let me first just bring up three movies…
(500) Days Of Summer:
The upcoming Kick Ass:
The (also upcoming) completely unnecessary Let Me In:
I mention these three movies because of their common quality: A young lady by the name of Chloë Moretz who appears in all of them. This actress, who is all of 12, already has three very interesting movies on her resume, as well as a slew of others in her past and most likely upcoming. She’s listed on IMDB as one of the 10 to watch in 2010.
I thought she was excellent in (500) Days Of Summer, far exceeding things we expect from child actresses in her role as the strongest voice of reason/youngest sister of the Joseph Gordon-Levitt character. And while Kick Ass looks kind of dumb to me, she easily looks to be the best part of it.
Easily.
I’m kind of concerned about Let Me In though, directed by Cloverfield’s Matt Reeves, which is a remake of Let The Right One In. Well, not concerned so much, because I honestly don’t care, but someone changing the setting from snowy 1980s Sweden to America just didn’t seem all that exciting to me. Then they cast Moretz as the little vampire girl with a complicated past and I was more interested. I don’t expect her to play the same character as in the original movie but I’m impressed with her and curious what she’ll do with the role, how the role will translate into something new with her performance.
Also, I’m not all that impressed with how the title changed from Let The Right One In to Let Me In, thereby losing all the nuance of the original title in exchange for something that sounds like a pop song. Which is ironic, I know, considering that the original story gets it’s title from a pop song.
You can click here for a description of the new film.
As for Kick Ass… Eh. Whatever. Scott Pilgrim looks more interesting to me, but in part, they seemed design to be specifically baiting the nerds. Or just those creatures of fish and human that latch onto all hype, either as fodder for incessant bitching or joining a bandwagon of… something. Kick Ass may be fun, may be a joke onto itself (and may very well be in on the joke as well), and it may also just be a silly, stupid super hero-y popcorn movie, but something feels insidious about it, completely non-genuine.
Part of that, though, I think falls back onto the writer of the comic it’s based on, Mark Millar. But that is a whole other post right there, isn’t it?
Regardless, I want to talk about young miss Chloë Moretz, a very talented actress at the early age of 13. I remember being really impressed by her in (500) Days Of Summer, because, let’s face it, child actors are usually terrible. Her role in that movie was a pretty simple one: the little sister with the juxtaposed wise knowledge about human relationships that she could give to her heartbroken older brother, as played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I thought she handled it well, with charisma, and that right mix of qualities you want in a child character in stories, a sense of them being wise beyond their years, but still very much a product of their years, a child.
And then I heard she was going to be in Kick Ass and I kind of felt bad for her because I remember the comic being kind of cheesy. But, unshockingly, I think, if any part of this story will be interesting, it’ll be the parts dealing with her. They will also be the most controversial parts as well, of course.
The comparisons between her role and Natalie Portman’s in The Professional, or Leon, fascinates me. I get it, knowing the gist of what goes on in The Professional, even though I’ve not seen it. And neither has Chloe Moretz. And neither will she probably be able to see Kick Ass in theaters either.
But I hear a lot of the people who don’t find the idea of a young girl running around killing people crazily in this movie and cussing talking about how the movie is a satire of stuff like The Professional. Or that it’s empowering. I don’t know that I really learned anything on my journey from being a boy to a man, so I’m not going to pretend I understand the even more complicated path from girlhood to womanhood with it’s myriad of stops in Hollywood at “Not a girl, not yet a woman”-type places.
from here.
And I’m not going to talk about the fear of the youth taking a bad message away from watching Moretz as Hit Girl violently killing and shooting and slicing people up in Kick Ass, because… well, that’s a topic for pundits more likely. And child psychologists. But the that New York Times profile I linked to goes into quite a bit about her family, her growing up, and how it was beat into her head pretty hard over the course of the filming that she was an actress in a movie, doing a performance, and there was a different between reality and fiction. Isn’t that what most modern parenting seems to be lacking anyway?
But I foresee Moretz getting stereotyped as the tough girl, which is okay. To an extent, anyway. I don’t like that word. “Tough.” It’s a bullshit word. I try not to think of Angelina Jolie characters as “tough,” but perhaps women who are just… confident? We talk about empowering roles for women, which can be things where a woman gets to pick up a gun and run around shooting and blowing things up like a man does, which is fine, because women should be allowed to do that too. But I think with a word like “tough,” we have to be careful. If we’re to say that a woman is being tough because a man can be tough, I think we need to take what that quality is within a male character…
And usually it’s compensation. It’s a lack of something and the making up for it. It’s a show. There are no real cowboys, at least, not anymore. Well, maybe, but either way, the harder and the tougher we get, well, that’s just the farther we’re running from something, or reacting to something. We’re faking it til we make it. But I’d like to see a new generation of confident boys and girls growing up in this world and surviving despite the mixed messages we give to the youth.
Just remember that behind every little girl in the guise of a juvenile vampire or hyper assassin, there’s someone’s daughter there or little sister, or big sister. But, more importantly, there’s a person there. A person who sees the world differently than you and perhaps sees it in a way that you haven’t in a long while, or perhaps never will. I don’t know what little girls are made of and I don’t really want to know. But I suspect that it really all depends on your definition of “everything nice.”
Four letter worlds.
Opposites attract. Choices break down into either/or solutions. Family size buckets of chicken (and life long love affairs with such) and hot, raw existentialism. Secrets and lies. Love and dynamite. Ghosts and whispers and murderers and attempted murders. Crazy women and Scottish advice. Good and evil and Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard. Hate turns to love, and then to loneliness. And we go on a mission, we go sideways, and we go underground again…
All that and more on last night’s Lost, a Hurley episode appropriately entitled “Everybody Loves Hugo,” which is a nice callback to a similarly titled episode in season 2.
Man, where to start?
“Hey guys, I’ll be right back…”
How about with the departures and arrivals. The departures: Ilana. I suspected something bad was going to happen to here the moment she reminded Hurley for the nth time that she has been training for this job forever, but I didn’t expect her to go all ka-bloom-y a la Dr. Arzt. Wow. And who says this show doesn’t have some surprises left for us?
And then there was the return of Michael as the latest dead person to stop by and have a chat with Hurley about what should be happening next. An interesting, but paint by numbers guest starring role, and Michael answered one of our questions left from season one: What the fuck are the whispers?
So, one long popular theory about the Island is accurate enough: It is a kind of purgatory for the spirits of those who can’t move on. People like Michael and Jacob. But seemingly others, like Mr. Eko and Charlie, could move on and visit Hurley in the City of Angels?
Back to that in a moment because there’s still an intriguing question hanging over this final season: WTF is the Sideways world?
Because, while I loved the reappearance of Pierre Chang there, narrating another video for us, it recalls my question from the Sawyer episode: When did the Sideways world begin? Does it’s genesis lay with the explosion of Jughead back in 1977 and, if so, how did Pierre Chang escape grand zero and end up back in the real world?
Perhaps the answer lies with Desmond’s mission there in the Sideways world and the real one. And that mission is… to merge the two universes? To bring love into the hearts of the Sideways people? The funny thing is that the Sideways people really have the happily ever after world. Well, except for Charlie, but who gives a shit about Charlie. I mean, he’s alive, Claire’s out there somewhere and not crazy yet, and all you need to make the world bend to your will is just the smallest bit of opportunity and chance…
But again, I’m glad that a large part of the endgame rests with Desmond. He and Hurley have always been the heart of this show, and unfortunately, while Hurley may be the proxy for the fans, he’s also a bit on the boring as shit side. Maybe falling in love with a crazy woman will change that. Sometimes a lunatic really is what you’re looking for. I can’t imagine Desmond’s big role in all of this is just to play transdimensional cupid, but apparently “love” is a big part of the ending of this show. And perhaps that’s what will keep the “cork” in the metaphorical bottle.
But, if you ask me, it seems like a lot of these characters all in desperate need of a different four letter word to make their lives a little better.
Had to love the reference to the Human Fund at the beginning of the episode. Of course they want to honor Hugo Reyes. He’s probably their Man Of The Year.
Oh, hi there. We haven’t had anything to do for a while now.
Oh well. No more spinning of the wheels. Richard and Ben and Miles are off on what smells a lot like a suicide mission. Sideways Desmond is going around, giving things a little nudge (sometimes with the front of his car). Hurley is getting that long overdue picnic date with Libby. Jack has decided to let go and maybe not try to kill himself so much anymore. Island Desmond is going down the rabbit hole and we’ll see what we find there (because he was valuable and therefore a threat to the Man in Black?). Oh, and the mysterious boy is back…
Which, thankfully, means we’re inching closer and closer to that Jacob/Man In Black flashback/origin episode.
And finally all the 815ers, with the exception of Jin, are back together again, facing off. Next week should be interesting as things start to fall into place and everyone ends up where they belong…
When the killer robots come…
“I read that one company is importing all of Wikipedia into it’s artificial-intelligence projects. This means when the killer robots come, you’ll have me to thank. At least they’ll have a fine knowledge of Elizabethan poetry.”
-Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia.
Godless reading material.
from here.
Also, Richard Dawkins wants to arrest the Pope!
Also, this is no joke, this is real, this is really happening:
Search Party 02.
Continuing from the last time we looked at it, here’s just a few more of the things that people have searched for and then found ye old Counterforce through…
The weirdest: “Priceless arse slap.” No idea what post they found with that.
Also weird: “sexyhousewife271@aol.com.”
And, yes, also weird: “men with big dicks always cheat,” which brought up this, which isn’t terribly off, I guess.
And, “60s milkshake machine,” which brought up nothing that I can tell.
“Lost Desmond Toroid Coil.” Sorry, Desmond, but Google Search is not through with you yet!
“Nobody human has anything to say to me today!”
“Amelia Pond, like a name in a fairy tale.” Nice.
And also “Karen Gillan” along with “nightie,” and then there’s always this…
An interesting one: “Lois Chiles in The Great Gatsby.” Also, “Gatsby style.”
“Blair Brown.”
“Cindy Meston.”
“Sylvia Plath vs. Anne Sexton.” Who do you think would win?
Some people are hot for teacher: “Miss Farrell.”
Every possible thing you could tie in with Kim Kardashian…
“Sextape” and “tape” and “video” and “sex video” and “sex” and and “bikini” and “boobs” and “tits” and “ass” and “pussy” and “crazy.” Oh, for the love of Ray J, people! It troubles me that no one wants to google what Kim Kardashian thinks of the Fermi paradox or what happened to the Roanoke colony or even what her favorite color is. But I’ll get over it.
Also, I imagine that, based on the picture above, we might finally start getting hits for Kim Kardashian and “oral.” One can only hope…
At least someone out there searched for “Oak Island.”
And “ghost town and ghost city pics.”
“Amber Tamblyn is hideous.” Ouch.
“The lady in red betrayed him.” Oh man, that’s the story of my life.
“Peanut St. Cosmo is insane.”
Also, every single thing you try to tie in with Tina Fey…
“Sexy” and glasses” and “hot” and “hot pics” and “Sarah Palin” and “butt.” Butt? Really? Of all the things you people are curious about when it comes to the lovely and immensely talented Tina Fey, you want to search for pictures of her ass?
“Fuck Yeah Sayid.” Nice.
“Robert Mapplethorpe” and “black men” together.
“Gene Siskel moustache.”
“Sean Connery on the set.”
“Bartlett” and “War of the roses” together.
“Crazy mad linkage.” Ha ha.
“Crazy juice” and “I saw you and him walking in the rain” together.
“Levi’s campaign go forth.”
“Deep red cover,” which… I don’t what that means. It sounds either dirty or nasty though.
“Sci fi landscapes.”
“Is Megan Fox a fucking robot?”
K-ville.
Don’t forget that tonight is the premiere of David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s Treme on HBO.
Both men are especially famous from The Wire, a show that I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve only seen roughly half of, but have fully drank the kool aid on. I’m hoping and expecting for the same kind of brilliance from Treme, a show about the residents of New Orleans three months after 2005′s Hurricane Katrina. It’s really about how people rebuild their lives and homes and culture after something so devastating and it features some all stars from The Wire, like Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters, as well as excellent actors like John Goodman. I don’t have HBO, so I’ll be looking for tonight’s 80-minute pilot episode out there on the internet in the next few days and I’m severely excited.
And, this is definitely a discussion for another time, but at some point we should really sit down and discuss things like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and what kind of stories are inspired by these cataclysmic events or set within them. Obviously there’s been a lot of bad 9/11 stories, and bad post-Hurricane Katrina stories as well, and lots of preaching down, but can great stories inhabit these landscapes as well? And is that part of our collectively “coming together” after such tragedies?
Open spaces, human traces.
When you live in a city, in a crammed and crowded urban environment, then there’s nothing more shocking then when you get out of it. Go out into the countryside, go into what looks a lot more like nature, and there you’ll find something you don’t find as much in the places where humans cluster and overpopulate: Space. Open space on a sometimes grand scale.
Well, maybe it’s shocking to you. Maybe it’s terrifying. Maybe it’s like hitting the reset button, breathe in some fresh hair, let your self stretch out, psychically trying to fill up that big open everythingness, and then you go and cram yourself back into the human condition, become a part in the machine again and go back to work.
The sad thing is I was reading something once about how cities are actually how humans should be living, at least for the sake of the environment. Sure, they pollute and destroy nature, but that’s because we don’t stop ourselves, and we don’t do better. The constant suburban sprawl is what is eating up our world, getting it closer to inhospitable for all involved, this thing I was reading was telling me. Now, I’m no expert, so take everything I say in this post as fast and loose, but it sounded frighteningly true.
The Crowded City by Kerry Belgrave.
Sometimes you need to go out into nature, find a testament and a monument to the parts of this beautiful planet that were here long before (and hopefully will be here long after us) and just say…
“You rock, rock.” Or something very much like that.
All of this occurred to me this afternoon, I’m sad to report to you, in a Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is easily one of the prime examples of how human begins are so incredibly good and quite ingenious at owning you in all the little, petty ways. We’re good at compassion and community too, but we’re even better when it comes to making those values a part of a corporate mindset that slowly invades your lives, giving you goods and services you can’t live without.
But, really, this isn’t going to be a post about Wal-Mart. I hate the place, obviously. Sadly, though, I live in a part of the world where I have to shop there just because of the level of income I make and the cheapness in every sense of the word of what they can give me. So I guess I can’t complain? Or shouldn’t? Well, of course I can. And should if I want to. But this isn’t going to be that kind of a post. But we all get the gist of Wal-Mart, and other “big box” department stores. They’re not only soul crushing and demeaning, but they’re affordable in those regards.
Anyway. So there I am in this Wal-Mart today, and they’re remodeling there, I guess. I didn’t know this as I walked in. I’ve gone to get my local grocery shopping done here for years and today I noticed that the usual things weren’t in their usual places. And then I turned a corner and saw something shocking…
Great big open space.
It was like looking at an art installation. I was half expecting someone to walk up with silly haircut and a glass of champagne and tell me what it “means.”
by Lori Nix.
Wal-Mart’s a giant warehouse with fluorescent lights and banners for Miley Cyrus/Jonas bros. bullshit all about and constant calls over the intercom for either a manager or a clean up on some aisle or another. People are always crammed in it. Usually the lowest common denominator of people and you can feel like an alien observer amongst your own human race as you go there, but the point is, things are packed in there tight. Someday aliens or future humans will look at the ruins of a Wal-Mart and treat it like the marketplace of Pompeii or an ancient Aztec city. They’re write beautiful dissertations on how it was important in our lives, and they’ll question what things like J. Lo and DVDs are, as young, nubile Indiana Jones-wannabes dust through what used to be the electronics section with little brushes.
They’ll talk about how money was our universal language, and that even things like God are spoken about in dialects of currency, and Wal-Martw will seem like a holy temple to people of the future and/or alien visitors. This is after some cyberpunk-ish dystopia period where corporations rise up as nation states and you have implants with Sam Walton’s face somewhere in your skeletal structure.
Again, I’m rambling. Apologies. But open spaces. It wasn’t shocking to anyone else. Or, at least, it didn’t appear that anyone else stopped to notice it like I did. Maybe it doesn’t matter to anyone other than me. My other shoppers just filled that newly opened space as they crossed over from $5 DVD bins to the grocery section where you can buy Wal-Mart’s store brand of everything you’d ever need to buy, and now they all come in the same white bag, bland and cold, and reminiscent of the products in Repo Man.
Or stuff produced by the DHARMA Initiative.
Look at that. Rambling again and complaining about Wal-Mart again. And I promised I wouldn’t do that, right? So sorry. But, then again, complaining isn’t so terrible as long as it isn’t all you do. And I should add in that a majority of people who shop/work at a Wal-Mart aren’t terrible people. They’re not all white trash or Jerry Springer rejects. They’re just people. Some of them are people like me, and some of them are better than me, and some are worse, not that it matters. They have lives to live, jobs to work at (when work can be found), and places to be, even if those places are nowhere.
It’s not always easy to rise up from complaining to action, but maybe somewhere on that road is where all your anger and frustration and complaining turns into conversation with others and perhaps eventual solution.
Just remember: As you, me, all of us, everyone and anyone, as we all pick our paths and walk through this life and this world, we’re leaving footprints. Are they for the better or for the worse?
from here.
I’m not advocating anyone go chain themselves to a tree or put themselves in front of a bulldozer. I’m not suggesting you go vegan or start picketing things, but just be aware of how your world is changing and decide if that’s a change you’re okay with and then go from there. Of course, as you make that decision, the park closest to you is being turned into a parking lot so more cars can help to cram more people into a mall and a bunch of trees are being turned into another housing development. These things happen.
They don’t have to happen though, but that’s a conversation for another time, maybe. Think, search, learn, grow. Or, do your best at something similar. That’s all I’m saying. It’s okay to be naive and idealistic for a while, but then go turn it into something useful, if that’s your bag. Or, just go find an open space, something still untouched by the hands of man and enjoy it while you can, while it’s still with us…
And try to fill it with your imagination before it gets filled with things and stuff, or trampled all to shit.
I sold you and you sold me.
Three quotes from George Orwell’s 1984:
The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
-from Part 2, Chapter 9.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
-from Part 1, Chapter 3.
“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
-from Part 1, Chapter 2.
“Nobody human has anything to say to me today!”
Like I said before, last week’s episode of Doctor Who felt like it came after waiting an eternity. This week’s episode, “The Beast Below,” certainly didn’t feel like it it took that long to get here, but after how great “The Eleventh Hour” was, the excitement level for “The Beast Below” was just as high.
This week, the Doctor is finally firmly regenerated and takes his new companion, Amy Pond, on her first real journey in the TARDIS. So much of it feels like a classic Russell T. Davies set up, with the second episode in the new series doing a paint by numbers journey to a slightly dystopian human society somewhere out there ins pace in the future and showing the companion exactly what the Doctor’s philosophy of time travel is. This time, the Eleventh Doctor tells Amy that it’s a strictly non-interference policy, unless, that is, a little girl is crying somewhere.
But then again, this is not the RTD era anymore. This is the new age, the age of Steven Moffat, mixing both the cool, the new, and the classic, and Moffat’s going to put his truly creepy, brilliant spin on all the old RTD tropes and formulas (that did work, for the most part). The Doctor can be lost in the wild regions of deep outer space and be exploring the creepy, cave-like bowels of a spaceship. And you get classic Moffat stuff here: Recurring creepy phrases, sad little girls, and terrifying monsters. This episode was certainly a quick one, bit of a throw away episode, though charming, and one for the kids, though the children in the audience are going to spend probably this entire series behind their sofa.
There was a lot going on in this episode as well: Starship UK, sailing through the stars during a point in the future after the Earth has burned and the individual nations have gone to the cosmos in search of a new home. And also Sophie Okonedo as Liz Ten, the future English monarch, Elizabeth X. Also, the eponymous beast at the heart of the great ship, and the Winders and the Smilers, and the voting booth: Once every British citizen on the ship comes of age, the terribly dark truth of what’s going on is revealed to them and they’re given two simple choices, “Protest,” or “Forget.” Pretty much everyone chooses “Forget,” and that allows them to go on with their lives guilt-free. Those who click on “Protest” are promptly fed to a monster. The modern parallels are terrifying.
from here.
I’m trying to stay light on spoilers here and not really recap the episode at all, because, well, we don’t actually like strict recaps here at Counterforce. Why read a recap of a television show when you can go watch the thing?
from here.
I liked how we got into the heart of the relationship between the Doctor and Amy a little more, and it’s almost like they’re already old friends. Matt Smith’s Doctor goes where Moffat wants him to (pickpocketing little girls, for starters), showing that he understands humanity even when he doesn’t, he’s human in the terrible ways that they can be, but his instincts are hardly human. The ending comes in a neat little bow as Amy notices that the Star Whale (that name is my only real gripe with this episode) is incredibly similar to the Doctor: old and kind and can’t help but respond when a little girl is crying.
And then there’s Karen Gillan as Amy Pond, who just can’t stop winning me over. I never disliked Rose, but I disliked the ways in which we were constantly told in the RTD era how great and wonderful Rose was. Not shown, but told. To me Amy Pond has already surpassed Rose, rather easily, I might add, but also carries the flare of all the right elements of companions like Martha Jones and Donna Noble. Donna Noble in particular, possibly, echoing her telling the Doctor, “Sometimes I think you need someone to tell you when to stop.”
I like that Karen Gillan’s companion can do everything that the previous companions can do, and more, and all while still wearing her nightie.
from here.
I liked how the end of this episode tied into next week’s and I wonder if that’ll be something they strive for more of this year. That, and it seems, constant references to Amy’s always needing to be making choices (one episode towards the end of this season is actually entitled “Amy’s Choice”). Also, while there was no mention of the Pandorica or how “Silence will fall,” that mysterious crack in the wall of her childhood room (and the Doctor’s TARDIS console at the end of last week?) has seemingly followed Amy Pond into time and space.
Next up: Back to World War II, Winston Churchill, and the Daleks/”Ironsides” fighting on behalf of the Allies… or are they?
