Film

While I’m not nearly as much of a movie buff as many, I do like ’em and watch ’em when I can.

Linkdump for January 27th through October 30th

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Sometime between January 27th and October 30th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Love Death + Robots

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I watched all of Love Death + Robots on Saturday, and while much of the animation was impressive and parts of it were interesting, and I enjoyed a few of the episodes, as a whole, it was rather “meh”. They definitely weren’t kidding about the NSFW warnings, though: bloody, gory violence, language, and lots of nudity with a definite “male gaze” issue throughout many of the entries.

Speaking about the Netflix animated anthology series in a press release, Miller made it clear that viewers should expect mature content.

“I’m so f**king excited that the creative landscape has finally changed enough for adult-themed animation to become part of a larger cultural conversation,” he said.

While some of that excitement is justified – the vast majority of LDR looks great and many of its 18 short episodes are amusing, clever and shocking in the best possible way – gratuitous female nudity once again sticks the male and female characters on an entirely unbalanced playing field. Nudity on screen is fine – we’re all for it, in fact. But this is something different.

My personal rough rankings of the various pieces, from most to least enjoyable (if you’re cherry-picking episodes, for me, 1-8 are worth watching, 9-12 are not terribly objectionable, 13-18 are the most skippable):

  1. Three Robots: One of three entries adapted from short works by John Scalzi, all of which ended up in my top picks. Amusing story of three robots touring the ruins of Earth.
  2. Fish Night: I liked this one because it’s pretty and weird, though I’m not surprised to see it’s one of the lower-rated episodes on IMDB.
  3. Zima Blue: Neat animation style, and an interesting story with a fun ending.
  4. When the Yogurt Took Over: Hyper-intelligent yogurt saving humanity. Just silly.
  5. Helping Hand: When an EVA goes wrong, an astronaut has to figure out if she can save herself. Made me cringe, but because of what was happening, not because of how it was presented.
  6. Ice Age: Another short and silly entry. Remember to clean out your freezer!
  7. Alternate Histories: Goofball explorations of possible timelines prompted by killing Hitler in various ways.
  8. Good Hunting: I really liked the overall arc of the story of this one, though it’s also the first (in this ranking, not in presentation order) to use sexualized violence as part of the plot.
  9. Blind Spot: An average high-speed heist story, with a rather unsurprising final resolution.
  10. Suits: Farmers in mech suits defend their fields from an invading horde of aliens. Shrug.
  11. Lucky 13: I’m generally not big on military SF; most impressive for digitizing actress Samira Wiley so well that I actually recognized her character as the actress (and checked to see if it was really her, or if they’d just designed a character who strongly resembled her).
  12. Sucker of Souls: Archaeologists and mercenaries against vampires. With cats.
  13. Beyond the Aquila Rift: Not an entirely uninteresting story, but spent a little too much time on the sex scene (and sure, there was arguably a shock payoff for that at the end, but still…). It felt more like a “look what we can render/get away with” scene.
  14. The Dump: Relied too much on hick stereotypes and male-nudity-as-(unfunny) humor.
  15. The Secret War: WWI Russian soldiers battling an unstoppable enemy. Similar reaction as with Suits, only that one was was slightly more interesting due to the mechs.
  16. Shape-Shifters: Werewolves, lots of gore, and hoo-rah! militarism.
  17. The Witness: While the story itself wasn’t bad, and the animation style was neat, it ends up being primarily watching a terrified naked woman run away from a male pursuer.
  18. Sonnie’s Edge: Mentally controlling giant beasties to fight each other is rather cliché, but using off-screen gang rape as a motivating factor and more “look, they’re letting us animate naked women (at least until we kill them)!” scenes failed to impress me.

A Digression on Gilliam

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My Gilliam Film Collection
My Gilliam Film Collection

A collection I’ve wanted for a long time, and finally completed: All of Terry Gilliam’s films (except for The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which isn’t out yet) are on my Plex server in HD. He’s just the sort of gloriously weird that works well for me.

It’s funny, though, thinking about it. I tend to think of myself as not being a big fan of dystopian fiction*, and yet that’s a large part of his work. But even in his darker films that don’t always end on happy notes, there’s often a definite line of optimism, hope, and the characters fighting against that dystopia — I think there’s a good argument to be made that there’s a hopepunk element to much of his work, which is why it resonates with me.

* I’m certainly less so now than I was in my youth when I first discovered Gilliam. Something about being aware of the dystopia we live in makes it a lot less escapist, doesn’t it? And, unfortunately, there’s definitely evidence that Gilliam doesn’t always recognize his own racial and sexual privilege, with his unfortunate comments about the #metoo movement and diversity in media programming, which could also partially explain his draw towards dystopian fiction: He can view it from what he perceives to be a “safe” distance, just as I did when I first discovered it. Meanwhile, there are lots of people (who, as I think about it, I really don’t think I can remember much representation of in his films) who are far more intimately, immediately familiar with the realities of living in dystopian worlds.

Huh. Well, that went astray from my original intention of “hey, I’ve got all the movies I can from one of my favorite directors!”

Linkdump for November 14th through November 29th

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Sometime between November 14th and November 29th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Linkdump for September 3rd through September 23rd

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Sometime between September 3rd and September 23rd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Linkdump for September 1st through September 3rd

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Sometime between September 1st and September 3rd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Linkdump for August 1st through September 1st

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Sometime between August 1st and September 1st, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • The P-I error that changed Seattle history: "Occasionally, newspapers report factual errors. A well-intentioned interview subject gives bad information, a name is spelled wrong, a breaking news story is inadvertently peppered with grammatical errors. But no incorrect newspaper story has had a bigger impact on Seattle history than one published June 7, 1889."
  • 98.6 degrees is a normal body temperature, right? Not quite: “Forget everything you know about normal body temperature and fever, starting with 98.6. That’s an antiquated number based on a flawed study from 1868 (yes, 150 years ago). The facts about fever are a lot more complicated.”
  • The “I Am Steve Rogers” Joke in ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ Is the Definitive Captain America Moment: That’s who Captain America is, a man who listens to and believes in people when they tell him who they are. That’s a lesson we all should take away from that moment.
  • The Bullshit Web: “An honest web is one in which the overwhelming majority of the code and assets downloaded to a user’s computer are used in a page’s visual presentation, with nearly all the remainder used to define the semantic structure and associated metadata on the page. Bullshit — in the form of CPU-sucking surveillance, unnecessarily-interruptive elements, and behaviours that nobody responsible for a website would themselves find appealing as a visitor — is unwelcome and intolerable.”
  • Ignorant Hysteria Over 3D Printed Guns Leads To Courts Ignoring The First Amendment: "…in the last few days the hysteria [over 3D-printed guns] has returned… and much of it is misleading and wrong, and while most people probably want to talk about the 2nd Amendment implications of all of this, it's the 1st Amendment implications that are a bigger deal." Interesting. I'm not at all comfortable with wide availability of 3D-printed guns, but this analysis of the issues is worth reading.

Linkdump for July 16th through July 30th

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Sometime between July 16th and July 30th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Linkdump for May 26th through July 11th

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Sometime between May 26th and July 11th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

Linkdump for April 19th through April 30th

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Sometime between April 19th and April 30th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • John Scalzi: Thoughts on Avengers: Infinity War (and Yes, There are Spoilers): "As impressively well put together as it is, and as enjoyable and exciting as the film is in the moment, the film suffers and for me is ultimately unsatisfying. Not for anything the film itself does or doesn’t do; it suffers not because of what it does, but because of what I know."
  • Avengers: Infinity War ending: Incredibly bold — and a little cheap: SPOILERS: “…as I talked over the ending with friends, the less it sat well with me. I certainly admired the gutsiness of it, the big swing it took, but I also struggled to feel as emotionally invested in it as I was supposed to. For lack of a better word, none of it felt real.” I might not go quite so far as this analysis does, but I don’t argue with its core idea, and was having similar thoughts.
  • “When people say ‘spinster’, they are trying to conjure up an image of a little old lady who is lonely and bitter.”: “What I HEAR are the smiles and laughter of a million women as they earned their own money in their own homes and controlled their own fortunes and lived life on their own terms, and damn what society expected of them.”
  • When Toronto Suspect Said ‘Kill Me,’ an Officer Put Away His Gun: Look, I know that there are going to be situations where the use of deadly force is a necessary step. But it should be a last step, not a first step — something that seems all too mysterious to far too many people, not least many police here in the United States. De-escalation should be the default approach, rather than the "shoot first, ask questions later" approach seemingly favored by far too many people (both law enforcement officers and armchair analysts).
  • What Does Invoking The 25th Amendment Actually Look Like?: "Let’s take a deeper look at the 25th Amendment and think about what each section of it has meant in the past — and what it might mean for Trump-era politics." I'm rather fascinated (and disappointed) that we're in a situation where this is even being seriously discussed. But it is, admittedly, and interesting discussion.