Odds and Ends

Hat tip to the Lonely Conservative for info on a new movie:  2016.  The trailer begins with a dramatization of Dreams From My Father, and it looks to be most interesting, indeed:

 

The producer’s name, Gerald R. Molen, looked familiar to me.  Sure enough, here is his recent missive over at Big Hollywood:  “Oscar-winning Producer of ‘Schindler’s List’ Slams Obama, Salutes Breitbart.”

Ah.

I wonder if it will be widely released, or more limited like Atlas Shrugged?

Speaking of the Lonely Conservative, both she and Political Junkie Mom have been nominated for a place in the “Top 25 Political Moms” contest, over at a new-to-me website called Circle of Moms.

Please, do go and vote for them, as well as Jenny Erikson, Michelle Malkin, or any others you fancy.  You can vote for as many as you like, once every day.

The contest features bloggers from both sides of the political spectrum, and frankly . . . the right side could use a little help at the minute.  Perhaps us right-wing-extremist-mommy types are too busy with shootin’ practice and doomsday-prepping to frequent the Circle of Moms.  I dunno.

Oh, and it’s not too late to nominate additional blogs, although they will of course be handicapped with fewer days to garner votes.  Hmm, I’ve got somebody in mind.  Time to go!

UPDATE:  Well shoot.  Missy S, Zilla, and AHLondon: I fully intended to nominate you guys, but the site wants emails, first names, and some other info.  I wasn’t sure if you’d approve, or (in some cases) what your first name is.  So please get over there and add yourself to the list.  Add yourself right this minute!

Ohhhhhhh . . . Who Lives In A Pineapple Under The Sea?

SpongeBob SquarePants!

Absorbent and yellow and porous is he . . .

SpongeBob SquarePants!

If nautical nonsense be something you wish . . .

SpongeBob SquarePants!

Then drop on the deck and flop like a fish!

Or . . . maybe not.  Study:  SpongeBob Causes Attention Problem in Kids.

Tartar sauce!  If that’s true, we’re in trouble in this house.  My kids weren’t just raised on SpongeBob, they were steeped in it:

The younger at 18 months.

Must so many people insist on conducting studies of dubious utility? Holy fish paste, I bet we can just skip the scientific studies and stipulate that TV is not generally not good for human grey matter.  We could probably even agree that the more “frenzied” fare is worse than calmer stuff.

But why, pray tell, does the study target SpongeBob specifically, while the contrasted educational show is generic: “a truncated episode of a realistic Public Broadcasting Service cartoon about a typical US preschool-aged boy?”

Furthermore, why is PBS featured as the purveyor of highbrow, educational stuff?  Don’t they know that PBS is responsible for introducing poor, helpless, innocent preschool children to . . . Boohbah?!?  (I dare the uninitiated to click the YouTube link and watch.  The whole.  Thing.  Triple dog dare.)

Are Squidward’s tenticle-prints all over this so-called study? Or is a larger evil behind the libel . . .

Uh, I mean a smaller evil.

But seriously now.  Like most shows, SpongeBob has lived past its expiration date.  The new stuff is sadly unfunny.  Yet, who can deny the comedic genius of episodes like Shanghaied, Frankendoodle, and Idiot Box?  How about Hooky, Life of Crime, or No Free Rides?

What about the creme de la creme:  SpongeBob ScaredyPants?

 

If you aren’t familiar with any of this, well, barnacles.  You should be.  And for the record, SpongeBob is neither rude nor crass.  Annoying, maybe, but that’s just part of the charm of this sweet and terribly naive guy, uh, invertebrate.

 

Anyway, I hope the study’s authors are not typical academics.  If they are, they really shouldn’t complain about cartoons causing attention deficits.  After all, if you’re paying attention, you’re probably not voting Democrat . . .

My First Movie Review

We don’t see many Grown-Up Movies in the theater anymore, mostly because most of them stink.  You end up wishing you had skipped the movie and gone home after dinner.

Our kind hostess here in Memphis offered to mind the boys, though, and you can’t look that gift horse in the mouth.  You pick a movie and go.

We picked Super 8.  It was awesome.  Go see it.

If you want a proper movie review, go here or here.  Unfortunately, a Google search reveals that I am not first with the following description, but oh well.  Here it is anyway:

Super 8 is about a very angry E.T.

Think original Alien, in which folks get picked off by The Very Scary Thing, combined with E.T., in which kids help a poor alien find his way home.

scary

plus cute

This combo works.  Best movie I’ve seen in years.  Impeccable thriller pacing meets in-depth character development, falls in love, and has a baby.  The baby is Super 8.

Plus, comic relief is sprinkled throughout, which means that folks who don’t like the intensity of thrillers can catch their breath.  So even if sci-fi thrillers aren’t normally your thing, go see it.

Requisite objective criticism:  Yeah, yeah, an Air Force guy is The Bad Guy.  You won’t like this movie if that offends you.

See you fine folks in Kansas.

China

The People’s Republic of China.  I don’t give ’em much thought.  But China keeps popping up lately, so I’m gonna share this stuff in a really shoddy, stream-of-consciousness-style post.

China Item #1:  My older is building a model of The Great Wall for Multicultural Day at school.  Someone Who Shall Remain Nameless had this to say:  “Well, who’s making the model of the forced labor camps?”

Yeah, yeah, I know.  But I mean, you know.  The Great Wall is one of the wonders of the world, so there’s no harm in learning about it.  Actually, more’s the harm in the way a school will micromanage your time by dictating that your child accomplish time-intensive, yet mostly-useless projects which cannot be completed without serious parental intervention.

I could write a book on the harm in that.

Turns out that The Great Wall was mostly accomplished through forced labor anyway, so . . . our son is making the model of a forced labor camp.

China Item #2:  Via Pileus comes news that the Chinese government recently restricted the use of time travel on TV shows.  I guess they won’t be showing Back to the Future on Chinese TV anytime soon . . .

Although this type of “guideline” might have prevented some of the worst Star Trek plots from surfacing, you gotta wonder what the Orwellian Chinese State Administration for Radio, Film & Television was thinking on this one.

Obviously, they were thinking about how much they hate that weird time loop thing that inevitably occurs in a time travel plot–you know, the past ends up as contingent on the future as the future is on the past, and your linear-minded brain just has to deal with it.

China Item #3:  Via Insty comes news that the Chinese real estate bubble may be popping.  After watching this video at By Design’s place a couple of weeks ago, I am hardly surprised:

The experts and the central planners will sort out an economy quite nicely, will they not?

Blogroll Mashup

This may be a pointless exercise, for the simple reason that if you are reading this post, you have probably already read the posts I’m about to link.  Heck, there is a significant statistical chance that you authored of one of ‘em.

Ah well, nevermind.  I’ll go ahead anyway.

Fleecy has knocked one out of the park.  Before I send you over to read it, here’s a quick quote:

“are we, because of the overtly politically correct nature of our society, blindly sticking our heads in the sand hoping our leaders will get rid of the icky terrorists?”

Well, yes.  But this is what happens when a culture backs away from its moral high ground.  Read the rest here.

Now.  If you have time after Fleecy’s post, go to Puma By Design and watch a video debate between Pakistani-Muslim-turned-Bollywood-actress Veena Malik and some god-awful mufti.  My heart ached as I listened to Ms. Malik.  It must be terribly hard to reconcile an instinctually kind, soft heart with the religion upon which you were raised, when that religion is Islam.

These two posts, when taken together, add a real depth to the wisdom they both have to offer.  Kind of like when you combine jelly belly bean flavors.

Finally, if you haven’t seen Missy’s latest shopping adventure, please do.  Very entertaining.

I Want To Be A Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Mom recently reminded me of a time long past, when youthful Linda was sure she would never want children.  (It’s funny, how one gets amnesia regarding opinions long discarded.)  That same day, I read Lynn’s latest post, which happens to be about feminism.

The combination of these two things awoke the memory of what a feminist I used to be.

That got me thinking: what are the feminists up to, now that we are all equal and stuff?  (The ones that aren’t regretting their liberated past, at any rate.)  So I googled, and randomly chose among the results.

In a sea of search engine results, marketing is key.  And who can pass up a charmingly named website?

Not me.  Thus, onto Bitch Magazine I clicked to discover a video about Tropes v. Women.

Admittedly, the website and video are much less, well, bitchy than the name implies.  Still, the video is astonishingly serious about a very silly topic:  “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl.”

The what?  Apparently, this is a coined term for a common trope:  a “bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life.”

Oh, okay:  Who’s That Girl.

So?

Well.  That is offensive. 

“Women are not here for your inspiration, celebration, or to coax you out of your troubles.  You might not know this, but we are full and complete human beings with our own troubles, interests, and creative endeavors.”

Uh, okay.  The idea that us LAY-dees have our own troubles and interests is fair enough.  Why we cannot also inspire men is beyond me, though.

“The Manic Pixie perpetuates the myth of women as caregivers at our very core:  that we can go fix these lonely sad men so that they can go fix the world.”

I dunno.  Sounds like a pretty good arrangement, if you ask me.  I devote myself to a man, and he does all the hard sh*t.  Sign me up!

Wait a minute, I already signed up.

It might not be such a myth, this notion of women as caregivers at their core.  Not that it matters.  The whole “feminism” subject is irrelevant.  These films are not targeted toward the male audience.  They are chick flicks.  Emotional porn.  For women. 

The female character is shallow because the movie is aimed toward female viewers.  The “Manic Pixie” is nothing more than a bare framework that the female viewer can use to insert herself into the fantasy of Saving The Hot and Muscular Tortured Soul. 

I shouldn’t need to point out this fact:  tortured souls are awesome.  Gals love danger, but need security.  The tortured soul provides both!

So . . . it’s comical, really, to watch a feminist complain about a subset of the chick flick genre, because of its shallow portrayal of women.  The women are shallow because they aren’t the reason you’re watching, Ms. Silly.

And if you aren’t interested in watching, then welcome to my club:  Chicks Who Hate Chick Flicks.

Personally, I blame Steven Spielberg for this aversion.  When your first crush, at the tender age of ten, is a guy with a whip, how can these wimpy chick flick heroes compete?

Conservative Documentary List

 In February 2011, I noticed a surge in page views for ”A List of Conservative Documentaries and Fiction Films,” and this surge has not yet subsided.

It’s interesting, the way this September 2010 post has stayed on the top of my “top posts” list, week after week.  My cash page-view cow, if you will.

Weirdly, the internet has a distinct shortage of conservative documentary lists.  Google for such a thing, and I’m number two on the list.  And I haven’t even seen most of these movies.

Dunno why I bring this up.  Now that I think about it, don’t go creating your own list or anything.  Wink.

Any particular post of yours that is a “page-view cow?”  Do share.

The Good Wife

Little did I realize when I wrote “The Virtuous Wife,” that I would be posting next on a show called ”The Good Wife.”

I have never seen this TV show.  Apparently, the ER nurse chick has a starring role, as a once-lawyer-turned-stay-at-home-mom-turning-lawyer once again after her husband cheats, or something like that.

So, another lawyer show.

One of my regular reads, Diary of a Mad Conservative, posted about the fact this TV show features a Tea Party character named . . . Kurt McVeigh.

Yeah.  Nice.

No, really, we mean it in a very nice way, says co-creator and writer Robert King:

“I haven’t commented everywhere because virus-like this story has spread everywhere, and it’s very hard to chase down a viral confusion. It really lends some truth to the epigram: ‘a lie runs halfway around the world before the truth can get its shoes on.’Having said that, I wish people would watch the episode in question. I know it seems like a lame justification, but the episode really is strangely a defense of Tea Party adherents. Most of the criticism of the episode has been taking the words of the obvious villain to be the meaning of the episode– when it’s actually the opposite.”

 Oh, kay.  I’ve not seen the show, so maybe.  Mr. King continued:

“It’s very hard to argue that now without seeming like an apologist. But look at the episode ‘Bang’ from last year (you can find it on line) and then look at the episode ‘Silver Bullet’ from this year. They are a defense of these character’s conservative values.

But anyway this has been an education for me– how the internet becomes a funhouse mirror of agendas and political opinions. It’s very dispiriting.

I hope you’ll give the show a chance. It’s not what you expect. Thank you”

In case you are thinking what I was thinking when I first read Mr. King’s words, I’ll share my initial response:

“I don’t feel sorry for assuming that ‘McVeigh’ was a slam. I mean, Mr. King feels dispirited?  The internet is a fun house mirror of agendas?

I wonder, does he really understand what it’s like to have been a libertarian-oriented Christian and conservative the last coupla decades. Almost every teacher and then college professor you have looks down on your beliefs. They tell you things like, “Republicans hate women,” and “conservatives are stingy.”

Virtually all of the popular culture that you enjoy, from movies to TV to major news networks to popular music, has a way of sneaking in insults, lies, and anti-right/Christian/etc messages in their products. You can’t even enjoy a live concert without the star shrieking some brainless anti-Bush or anti-Palin or whatevs to the audience.

It doesn’t feel good, does it? When people assume the worst outta you, just because of your particular label?  H’wood and the rest have been doing it to us conservatives for a long time. Frankly, the assumption that McVeigh was an insult is perfectly reasonable.

Mr. King, we conservative bloggers have lived our whole lives in a fun house of left-oriented agendas. The internet has finally given us a little side exit so we can have a little info sharing and fellowship with one another.”

Even after saying my part, the whole thing has continued to nag at me.  I resolved to watch the first episode in question, “Bang.”  But, I could not find it immediately available on the ‘net.  Netflix does not offer it as an instant watch, and neither does Amazon.  So, I’ve made do with a little Google research.

First, let us deal with the claim that “virus-like this story has spread everywhere, and it’s very hard to chase down a viral confusion.”

Perhaps this is the first time that Mr. King has felt personally contradicted on the internet.  If so, then it’s understandable that it felt like a “viral confusion.”  Yet, my Google search of “robert king the good wife” unearthed precious little confusion.  Once narrowed down to the category “blogs,” this search basically resulted in three objectionable opinions:  Roxy’s, NewsBusters, and theblogprof.

It would appear that Mr. King responded to Roxy and NewsBusters, but got overwhelmed before he could respond to the blog prof. 

How late would I have to stay up in order to log in all the internet stuff against the Tea Party?  Plus the things I have heard with my own ears.

Second, what do we conclude about the assertion that this episode is meant to be pro-Tea Party, rather than anti-?  Check out the info at NewsBusters yourself.  Perhaps Mr. McVeigh is written as a positive character, but it seems that other Tea Partiers in some photo evidence are not so positive.  Looks a bit debatable to me.  

And check out one of Mr. King’s comments there:

“I have no affection for conservatism.  I have no affection for liberalism.  I just hate cliches.  I hate watching a TV show and knowing that if a priest is introduced in the first act he will molest a child in the fourth act.  I hate the predictability and the dishonesty.  Conversely, I like being surprised by a show.  I like when a show has a 2nd Amendment-protecting, Palin-loving ballistics expert named McVeigh become the hero.  It’s unexpected and therefore fun.”

Someone who loves Palin and protects the 2nd Amendment is an unexpected hero.  Yep.

Here’s the rest of the stuff I found.  Draw your own conclusions, folks.

1)  According to Mr. King at the BBC News Blog:

“The Kurt McVeigh character was released mid-season our very first yr, and at that time, he was offered a identify which was supposed to play in to the anti-conservative prejudices with the additional liberal companion, Diane,” King informed Pop Tarts. “So no red flags had been elevated for the reason that the level was to satirize Diane’s prejudice in opposition to his title. The position with the McVeigh character was that he was one of the most truthful and forthright character within the display, and but he just occurred to become a robust conservative.”

2)  According to Entertainment Weekly.com, co-creator Michelle King has stated: “We can pretty much do it all except say f—. And s—.”  So they’ve got that going for them.

3)  Finally, I’ve learned that The Good Wife has a “sexed-up future“:

“So far on this season of The Good Wife, Peter Florrick performed oral sex on his wife Alicia in the bathroom, and Kalinda and Blake’s charged relationship developed a sexual undercurrent after she took a baseball bat to his car and then cupped him off-screen.”

Okey-dokey then.  If you want to learn more, then here is Robert and Michelle themselves, discussing their creation.

Meh.

I’m not interested in a binocular view from their Tea Party safari.  Are you?

Geek Chick Bonding

Via Instapundit, a post by a woman bolstered by the same heroines as me.  She’s wordier than me, but yeah.

I like Buffy and River.

But Ripley.

Ripley.

I saw Aliens at the local 99 cent movie theater when I was seventeen, because they weren’t too careful about making sure you were eighteen.

Aliens 2 was as close to a life-changing experience as one can get without actually experiencing a real life-changing event.

I may love Hudson as much as Ripley.  He is the worrier in me, and she is the woman I hope that I would be, if compelled.

The pace of action is flawless.  The character building is stong.  The mix of suspense, drama and humor is unparalleled.

You just stay away from me Bishop, you got that straight?

To this day, when I am feeling beat down by the circumstances of life, I watch this movie.

It is motivation, perfected.

UPDATE:   I was inconsistent in my movie title reference.  Aliens is the sequel to Alien, and it was incorrect to say “Aliens 2.”

Runaway Slave

I really like the teasers for this documentary.  This trailer isn’t quite as good as the last one, but it’s still pretty dang good.  The progressives ain’t too sure what to make of a black conservative. 

They don’t understand.  The color of your skin doesn’t matter a whit.  Only thing that matters is the color of your politics, and I sure don’t like blue.  Or red.  Or pink.  Hmm.  What color do I like? 

What color is truth?  What color is accountability?