A Year from Today?

You think it's funny today but in the not too distant future it might be a hate crime to specify mother or father.

Early Man

It is the Stone Age and a meteor comes down in sight of a band of cavemen.  The meteor smashes a dueling T-Rex and triceratops, placing this in a highly-fictionalized version of the Stone Age.  Clearly, this is a call back to One Million Years B.C., especially since the dinosaurs are credited as Ray and Harry (Ray Harryhausen).  The cavemen recover the meteor at the bottom of a huge crater and find it is hot.  Hot potato!  After tossing it around, they soon start to kick it back and forth.  Moments later, football (American Soccer) is invented.

Generations later, cavemen still live in the crater that is now a lush valley home for a band of rabbit hunters.  Hmm, call back to Curse of the Were-Rabbit?  Dug (Eddie Redmayne) is an ambitious youth who hopes to convert the tribe to hunting woolly mammoths.  Life is placid in the valley until Lord Nooth (Tom Hiddleston) arrives on his bronze-armored mammoths.  He and his Bronze Age goons evict the cavemen from the valley.  Through convoluted plotting and chance encounters, the cavemen are given the opportunity to reclaim their valley if they defeat the football champions of the Bronze Age city.  They have two weeks to train.

 

Having recently read a book on the Bronze Age collapse, I was annoyed by much of this movie.  Yes, it's for kids but ahistorical nonsense always grates.  Toilet paper, coin money, domesticated woolly mammoths, books, and a giant mallard duck with shark-teeth all detracted from the setting.  Mostly, this is a film for football fans, with in-jokes and football silliness.  It is far beneath the genius of Wallace and Gromit.  Even Chicken Run was more entertaining.  The weakest Aardman Animation by far.  Maybe football (Soccer) fans will enjoy it.

Hereditary

Hereditary opens with a family heading to a funeral for Annie's mother.  Annie (Toni Collette) gives a eulogy that outlines her very difficult relationship with her secretive mother.  It is a eulogy that makes you wonder why she even bothered.  Annie is an artist.  She makes miniature houses complete with furniture and people.  She has a bad habit of creating scenes from her life in miniature, which adds a creepy vibe to the movie and gives an insight to Annie's mental state.

 

Steve (Gabriel Byrne) is Annie's husband.  He's a solid fellow who is somehow coping with an increasingly unstable wife and grief-stricken family.  Peter (Alex Wolf) is the older child, a pot-smoking flake who is lost and directionless.  Charlie (Milly Shapiro) is the younger child and she is obviously not quite right.  She makes dark art, thinks nothing of dismembering a dead bird, and is hardest hit by her grandmother's death.

 

There are some scary moments but mostly it is predictable drivel.  The characters are too often blind to the obvious and march straight to their well-deserved doom.  There are parts that make no sense.  What hospital would send an unconscious youth home with his parents who then proceed to carry them between them like a sack of potatoes?  Why is Peter constantly on his cell phone early in the movie but, when things go sideways, he has no phone?  All cell phones just vanish in the later half of the film because that would be too easy.  The ending is reminiscent of The Witch, where the forces of evil triumph and the last member of the family numbly accepts it.  And that is weird too.  If the end was the goal, some of the scares and incidents of the middle become counter-productive.

Skip this one.

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

The Day the Earth Stood Still opens with an unidentified aircraft flying at supersonic speed around the world.  It finally lands on a baseball field in Washington DC.  The military is soon on hand and circles the flying saucer and awaits developments.  After a couple of hours, Klaatu (Michael Rennie) emerges and declares that he comes in peace.  As he tries to deliver a gift, a soldier panics and shoots him.  Gort (Lock Martin), a mute robot, emerged and commenced to disintegrate weapons - rifles, tanks, artillery (why are artillery pieces here?) - but not the soldiers.  Klaatu calls the robot off and the military transports Klaatu to Walter Reed Hospital.

 

Klaatu has come to Earth to warn against aggression.  He declares that the galaxy has been indifferent to Earth's internal squabbles but that the advent of atomic weapons has the galaxy troubled.  Earth needs to embrace the peace-loving ways of Klaatu's people or risk extermination.  That was a rather peculiar formulation.  Be peaceful like us or we will commit genocide to protect ourselves from your violent ways.  Huh?  Amazingly, despite the obvious superiority of Klaatu's technology, the government decides to keep him locked in a hospital room while denying him the opportunity to deliver the riot act to Earth.

 

Klaatu escapes and decides he needs to learn more about humans.  Under the assumed name of Mr. Carpenter, he rents a room where he meets Helen (Patricia Neal) and her son, Bobby (Billy Gray).  One of the funniest scenes in the movie was when Tom (Hugh Marlowe), Helen's boyfriend, eagerly accepts Mr. Carpenter's offer to babysit.  Klaatu's day out with Bobby is done amazingly well.  The visits to the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery show great affect on Klaatu; maybe humans aren't so bad.

 

There are a couple of oddities that are hard to accept.  The willingness to kill an alien from a vastly superior civilization is truly short-sighted.  Imprisoning or killing an ambassador is typically viewed as an act of war.  This was particularly reckless after the power of Gort was demonstrated.  Then there is the strangeness that Klaatu's people are worried about Earthly nukes.  At this time, we hadn't even gotten a satellite into orbit but they seem to think an atomic bomb might find its way to another solar system in the near future?  Talk about an abundance of caution.

 

A very enjoyable movie that stands up surprisingly well even 67 years later.  Thumbs up.

Right to Refuse Business

The Supreme Court has ruled (7 to 2) in favor of the baker who refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding.  Those who are pleased by the ruling proclaim a victory for religious liberty.  Those against the ruling liken it to blacks not being seated in restaurants.  Though I like the result, I don't much care for the religious liberty reasoning.  I'm more of an extremist.

 

All transactions between private people must be consensual.  If Nazi Nick doesn't want to service Jews in his business, the government should not force him to do so.  If Klansman Keith doesn't want African American patrons in his business, then he should have the right to refuse service.  Of course, this works both ways.  Jews and African American business owners can refuse service to Nazis and Klansmen.  Government is a different matter.  The State of Alabama or the City of New York must treat all people equally.  As such, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, Votes for Women, and so forth were absolutely required.  Government is disallowed from being a racist or a bigot but it cannot criminalize that in its citizens.  The correct way to purge racism, bigotry, sexism, and other prejudices is through private ostracism.  That is a long and slow process.  It is so much quicker to pummel the racist and sexist bigots with the coercive government.  Barry Goldwater voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act because it criminalized the right of private individuals to choose to do business or not do business with whomever they chose.  People should be free to be miserable human beings.  Forced virtue is no virtue at all.  That's a hard argument to sell and is partly why Goldwater was obliterated in the 1964 election.

 

As Ron Paul said in his farewell address to the House of Representatives, freedom is a hard sell:

 

I have thought a lot about why those of us who believe in liberty, as a solution, have done so poorly in convincing others of its benefits. If liberty is what we claim it is- the principle that protects all personal, social and economic decisions necessary for maximum prosperity and the best chance for peace- it should be an easy sell. Yet, history has shown that the masses have been quite receptive to the promises of authoritarians which are rarely if ever fulfilled.

 

As Jefferson may have said (it has often been attributed to him), "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance."  Vigilance is hard work.  The promises of politicians to do all the hard work for the citizens is enticing.  It is laborious and time consuming to debate the racists and the sexists and the bigots while it is comparatively easy to pass a law and sic the cops on them.  Sure, that punishes the bad think, but it doesn't reform them but rather hardens their prejudices.

 

With our current technology, such laws are mostly unneeded.  No law was required to cudgel Starbucks in the wake of apparent racism.  The company folded almost immediately.  Ditto for a bakery in Portland that refused to service a black women who arrived after the store was closed; employees were fired here.  Though I think the businesses were justified in both cases, private citizen outrage resulted in immediate action by those businesses.  In this atmosphere, just try to be a racist business owner.

 

The baker may have won the ruling but I highly doubt he will have great success in his future baking endeavors.  Everyone knows who he is and he will most likely lose more business from those who think he's a bigot than he will get from those who think he's a hero.  And that is how you change society.

George Will Puts Humble Pie in the Oven

A recent article by George Will celebrates the long game of Mitch McConnell.  McConnell is now the longest serving Republican Senate Majority Leader, surpassing Bob Dole.  Though many criticize McConnell for being a milquetoast, he is reshaping the judiciary.  Will lists several of McConnell's recent accomplishments:

 

1. Largest tax reduction in 31 years

2. Increased defense spending

3. Repeal of many Dodd-Frank banking rules

4. Drilling allowed in ANWR after 38 years of being blocked

5. Reshaping NLRB, which had been a source of mischief during the Obama years

6. Extensive use of the Congressional Review Act to repeal regulations

 

Wow, Mitch McConnell is really amazing!  However, I notice that all of his great accomplishments seem to have come in the last 16 months.  What changed in the last 16 months that allowed Mitch to play his 'long game' so well?  Oddly, President Trump is not mentioned once in the article.

Will cannot fail to notice that much of his preferred conservative policy has been implemented during the administration of a man he vociferously denounced.  He left the Republican Party because Speaker Ryan endorsed the man who won the party's nomination.  Gee, George, I left the party when George W Bush dramatically expanded government in his first term, abandoning any pretense of conservatism.  Where were you?  If Trump continues to implement conservative policies and nominate conservative judges that allow Mitch to reshape the judiciary (I do love how Will gives McConnell all the credit for approving and ignores Trump's more important role of nominating), Will will take his humble pie out of the oven and eat it.

Incompetence, Not Fatigue

Though I have yet to see the movie, Solo: A Star Wars Story is underperforming.  A Variety story describes it as a "rare misstep."  There is talk of Star Wars fatigue.  Here we have the 4th Star Wars film in the latest run and we've already hit fatigue but Marvel will - with Ant-Man and The Wasp - pump out its 20th film in the last 10 years and suffers no fatigue?  That does not include X-Men, Deadpool, and Fantastic Four movies.  Then you have all the Netflix and TV series.  There have been hits and misses - mostly hits - but no fatigue.  The problem with Star Wars isn't oversaturation but bad storytelling.

 

The Last Jedi flushed Luke Skywalker down the toilet.  The man who surrendered himself to the Empire and the Emperor in a likely futile attempt to save his dark side father is also the man who decided it might be a good idea to murder Han Solo and Princess Leia's son - his nephew! - because he sensed that he was leaning toward the dark side.  Yeah, sounds like the same guy.  He is a completely different character and whatever journey that took him from selfless hero to pathetic hermit is completely absent.  There is no arc.  He just sucks now.  Deal with it.  Love, Rian Johnson.

 

By contrast, Rey is a goddess for no apparent reason.  Let's consider Luke in A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back.   Luke got his butt kicked by Sand People (saved by Obi-Wan), nearly thrashed at the Mos Eisley Cantina (saved again by Obi-Wan), nearly killed by Darth Vader (saved by Han Solo and Chewie), stomped by a Wampa (saved himself for a change), nearly frozen to death (saved by Han Solo), crashed on Dagobah, lost his hand in his first lightsaber duel, and nearly fell to his death from Bespin (saved by Leia).  At the end, his powers in the Force are still very basic.  In The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, Rey stomps two goons who try to steal BB-8, pilots the Millenium Falcon like an old pro, fixes the Falcon in a way that surprises Han, senses Luke's lightsaber in Maz Kanata's bar, resists Kylo Ren's efforts to interrogate her with the Force and even turns the tables on him, uses the Jedi mind trick to have a storm trooper release her (Luke's first use of the mind trick was in his 3rd movie), seriously wounds Kylo Ren in her first lightsaber duel (Luke did not fight this well until the 3rd movie), knocks Jedi Master Luke Skywalker to the ground when they have a disagreement, kills half the Imperial Guards in her second lightsaber duel, defeats Kylo Ren again, and lifts TONS of rocks to allow the remnants of the Rebel Fleet to escape.  Truly, Luke should have been the Padawan and Rey the Master.

 

Toss in some unsubtle political preaching with a dash of illogical and/or stupid decisions and a large dollop of bad writing and who needs fatigue?  The Force Awakens was so-so but not bad.  Rogue One was a fun blast to the past, a nice prequel to A New Hope.  The Last Jedi was bad from start to finish.  Disney, who owns both Marvel and Lucasfilm, needs to shake up Lucasfilm and put someone as competent as Kevin Feige in charge.  It might also be a good idea to hire George Lucas to rescue a galaxy far, far away.