It’s a remarkable instance of convergent evolution. We’re going to have to reinterpret some phylogenies, and the human genome project is going to have to be completely redone with a sample that includes a representative collection of yokels.
At least we won’t have to feel guilty about chuckin’ ’em in a blender.
No ghastly snowmen in Morris this Christmas — the snow on the ground is patchy and thin, and we don’t expect more until the end of the week.
No, really, I just want to contribute to the advancement of science.
Everyone was raving about this movie, so I walked into it with elevated expectations, which is usually the kiss of death. But it wasn’t! Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse was excellent! It has an interesting, complex story without relying on the “Villains aiming to destroy the world!” trope — even the primary bad guy, the Kingpin, had a believable motive.
But best of all was the artwork. This was a comic book movie that was not afraid to be a comic book movie, stealing comic book styles and comic book art and comic book plots, and then reveling in the freedom of computer-assisted animation. It just flies along playing visual games in a way that highlighted the story. It’s also damned optimistic, and lately we really need that occasional taste of escapism.
I went alone to the theater, because when I told my wife it was a super-hero movie, she was turned off and uninterested. It’s too bad, because she missed out, and I think she probably would have enjoyed it, too. Maybe when it comes to Netflix…
It’s good, but…shouldn’t it be a bit more mushroomish?
Waylon & Willie had something to say about this.
Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys
Don’t let ’em pick guitars or drive them old trucks
Let ’em be doctors and lawyers and such
Mamas don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys
‘Cause they’ll never stay home and they’re always alone
Even with someone they love
Well, also, doctors and lawyers have a strong economic advantage over cowboys, who don’t get paid much. It’s not a wise career decision.
But it does have one advantage, the image. Cowboys are the personification of American manliness.
And the girls are going to take that away, too. Felice House is repainting iconic cowboy images with women in them. Shocking, I know. But they look amazing.
Quick! Someone inform them that if there is one job that would pay worse than women’s work, it’s gotta be cowgirl.
Lots of people have been horrified to learn that our tasteless president has hung this kitschy, cheesy, tacky, hagiographic painting in the White House. Some of them have gone about fixing it. This is my favorite version so far.
Yeah, John, I know.
As he points out, this is probably more a difference of timing than Nobelist vs. pop science communicator. A modern university education has had to pare away so much to meet the demands of a population that just wants to get to the point and get a degree and get out and get a job, that a biologist, for instance, can complete a four year program and never once take a philosophy course, take almost no history or language or arts course (we do demand that our students take ONE course in those disciplines), and so you can be a competent scientist with almost no awareness of the breadth of human knowledge.
And then there are right-wing hacks like Jordan Peterson who want to completely abolish the humanities and to worsen the situation even more.
Last week, I didn’t write up my impressions of The Meg because it was just too depressing. I was first dismayed at the opening sequence and set up because it postulates that there is a whole new, ancient, isolated biome at the bottom of a deep ocean trench, over 10 thousand meters down, and nothing makes sense. There are giant sharks prowling around this lightless, constricted deep? Why? How? They explore it with a surprisingly roomy manned submersible, which is almost plausible — people have gone down almost 11,000 meters in a bathyscaphe — but why, in this modern day, wouldn’t the preliminary observations have been made with an ROV? There’s also a scene where a submarine is damaged by a monster shark at this depth, and…
…it explodes in a giant fireball.
If you don’t get why that was incredibly stupid, then maybe this is the movie for you. I just couldn’t get past the absence of any acknowledgment of pressure in a movie that has subs shuttling like yo-yos between the bottom of the ocean and the surface, and that has a giant shark found in a marginal habitat that can survive being squirted straight up to terrorize coastal waters.
I guess there were supposed to be some jump scares in there, but I was unable to recover any ability to suspend disbelief after the first 5 minutes. Also, I just didn’t care about any of the characters, except to hope they got eaten. I was mostly disappointed there, too. It made me so cranky I even wanted the stupid little dog to get inhaled, and once again, no joy.
This week, I saw Operation Finale, which wasn’t bad at all. It’s basically a vehicle for the two stars, Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley, to reverberate off each other, and they were both good. It’s the tale of the Israeli operation to extract Adolph Eichmann from Argentina in the early 1960s so that he could face justice for his role in engineering the Holocaust, so it’s very much a good vs. evil story…but it’s a complex difficult good vs. a deceitful, slimy evil, so it isn’t at all cartoonish.
It helps that I hate Nazis. I didn’t have much trouble believing this story.
Also playing this week: The Predator. I just said no. It’s getting easier to avoid some bad movies now that we have a two screen theater and have more choices.
Usually more choices, that is. Next week we’re getting Unbroken: Path to Redemption, some treacly Christian movie directed by Harold Cronk, of the God’s Not Dead series. That’s a fuck no from me. The other choice is The Nun, a supernatural horror movie, which makes for an interesting combination. I’m just hoping some devout Christian fanatic attends both on the basis of the titles, and ends up running screaming from the theater. As for me, though, it looks like I’ll be sitting out the next week.
