Pinterest. What is it you ask? Well, it’s a virtual bulletin board where you can find interesting pictures and articles and “pin them” for later. It’s essentially virtual hoarding, but not just hoarding of stuff, but also craft ideas, photography, tattoos, cool houses and much, much more.
Some people seem to think Pinterest is limited to women who are focused on one thing.
I’m pretty sure this only shows the men who are openly on Pinterest, ’cause John pinterests from my account all the time.
Posted in advertisement, advertising, feminism, health, internet
Tagged Culture, Dieting, dove, Ernestine Shepherd, feminism, health, Hollywood, Jennifer Lawrence, media, memes, pinterest, Real Beauty, Roni Davis, society, thin
I and TV often find ourselves at odds. More often than not, what you get on television is hours upon hours of sensationalist news, vile game shows, and talk shows that swing between glorified bum-fights and thinly veiled infomercials. Sure, every once in a while you can find quality along the lines of Arrested Development or Ugly Americans or Scrubs or whatever wildly popular and inventive new show that NBC will cancel because **** you, but for the most part there are plenty more weeds out there than roses.
However, one such exception to the norm is- believe it or not- Court TV.
That’s right, Court TV. Judge Judy, Judge Mathis, Judge Milian, and so on.
Now you might be trying to wrap your heads around why on earth these shows are any good, but that’s probably because of the general skepticism you have about daytime TV (and not without just cause). Think about it. Really think about it. What do we see on this show? Glamorization? Perhaps, but for all the strange cases that show up, the majority of them seem nevertheless perfectly plausible. And that brings us to the second point: sympathy. Who among us can say we haven’t had a situation, or haven’t known someone who had a situation, which would constitute a conflict without going so far as to be criminal? Who hasn’t had some petty yet long-running dispute with a neighbor? Who hasn’t had some tiff about splitting up a dead relative’s possessions? Again, Court TV has it all, and what’s more, shows the real-life consequences of all this (usual) pettiness and greed. We actually get to see some positive arbitration, and get educated on not only our explicit laws, but our social contract, our culture, and our state as human beings in general. However hyped up it might be played, the “hollywoodization” of the shows still can’t rob them of their core essence, which is genuinely interesting and relatable conflicts and the ways we resolve ’em.
I’m not saying you don’t have better things you could be doing with your time, but if you’re gonna be watching TV, there’s plenty worse to watch than this.
And just one last note. I understand that “Court TV” also used to be the title of the TV channel now called “TruTV”. Obviously what I’m talking about and that are two unrelated things. Just a heads up.
Posted in Fame Day, media, television
Tagged Arrested Development, Court TV, day time tv, drama, Fox, fx, game shows, glamorization, Hollywood, hollywoodization, infomericals, judge judy, judge mathis, judge milian, justice, NBC, scrubs, talk shows, television, The People's Court, TruTv, TV, ugly americans
I don’t normally get that angry about things. Disappointed, sure. Upset, often enough. But really, truly angry? That emotion is normally reserved for pure, undistilled racism.
Yesterday I wrote about the production history of Red Dawn, and mostly talked about how the plot was immensely improbable and how the film industry is all about money, et cetera. What I did not at all dwell on was the potential of the film to bring out racism in people, similar [but not at all comparable] to the abuse of Middle Eastern Americans after what happened on 9/11.
On Facebook Racebending.com directed me to Tumblr user manilaryce, who compiled a number or racist tweets by people who had just watched Red Dawn. I have embedded the image below and on the right.
The following are a few of the tweets that particularly stood out to me:
Kinda wanna kill some Asians right now and defend the homeland, thank you Red Dawn for sparking some patriotism in me
The only reason Im going to see red dawn is cause there’s sexy ass guys running around with guns killing Asians my type of movie;)!
I now hate all Chinese, Japanese, Asian, Korean people. Thanks. #reddawn #amazingmoviedoe
Red dawn was sickkk..just another reason why to hate asians.
This is like when racist Hunger Games fans tweeted about how the casting of a character as Black ruined the movie for them. The difference between that situation and this one is that I feel directly targeted.
One of the tweets, by @elysse223, reads “I usually love Asians, but in Red Dawn I found them terrifying.” After reading that I almost immediately felt worse, like both me and everyone else like me had been transformed into inhuman movie monsters.
The only consolation I can take in all this is that the film is being almost universally panned. Liam Lacey, reviewing the film for The Globe and Mail, says “Red Dawn panders to the worst kind of racist and jingoist impulses, though the movie is so preposterously insincere, it feels like those adjectives should be in air quotes.” Over at Indiewire Gabe Toro describes the film as “stitched together with scotch tape and falling apart at the seams, letting casual racism and misanthropy to spill out the sides.”
I honestly don’t have a lot to say except that I’m angry, hurt, and somewhat unsurprised that this is what audience members all over America are choosing to take away from this movie. I am Asian and I am not evil. I do not want to take over America. I do not want to ever feel like this:
Posted in America, Asia, film, race
Tagged @elysse223, America, Americans, asian, Asians, audience, casting, Charlie Sheen, China, Chinese, evil, film, Gabe Toro, Global Times, Hollywood, Homefront, Hunger Games, Indiewire, invaders, invasion, Japanese, Korean, Liam Lacey, Military, military forces, North Korean, Peeta, race, Racebending, racism, racists, Red Dawn, remake, The Globe and Mail, tweets, Twitter, USA
I’ve begun seeing trailers on TV, and apparently it hit theatres two days ago, so I figure now’s as good a time to talk about Red Dawn as any.
For those of you who don’t know, Red Dawn is a remake of the 1984 film of the same name. In the original the United States is invaded by both the Soviet Union and its Cuban allies. A group of plucky high schoolers bands together to form a guerrilla fighting force, named the Wolverines after their high school mascot.
In remaking the film the studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), realized that they needed to modernize the invaders in light of the current political climate, and chose China. Keep in mind that in the original film that country was apparently America’s only ally, with the following exchange taking place:
“…Well, who is on our side?”
“Six hundred million screaming Chinamen.”
“Last I heard, there were a billion screaming Chinamen.”
“There were.”
Production was going smoothly until the summer of 2010 when the Global Times, a Chinese state-run newspaper, got a hold of leaked excerpts of the script. This prompted such headlines as “U.S. reshoots Cold War movie to demonize China” and “American movie plants hostile seeds against China.” In early 2011 the LA Times reported that the film’s villains were changed from Chinese to North Korean to “[maintain] access to the Asian superpower’s lucrative box office.” Continue reading
Posted in America, Asia, bizarreness, Economy, film, race, video games
Tagged audience, box office, Captain Cho, casting, Charlie Sheen, China, Chinese, film, General Lo, Global Times, Hollywood, Homefront, invaders, invasion, Josh, Korean, Mandarin, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, MGM, Military, military forces, money, North Korean, Peeta, race, racism, Red Dawn, remake, Soviet Union, Thor, troops, USA, USSR, video games, Wolverines
When I was watching the bad acid trip that the Brits were passing off as the opening ceremonies of the Olympics, I saw an ad for an upcoming NBC reality show called Stars Earn Stripes.
For those of you too lazy to watch the YouTube video, Stars Earn Stripes is essentially a collection of B and C level celebrities (and Terry Crews) who are put through elements of basic military training and then tasked with carrying out “missions” (i.e. blow stuff up).
Naturally, the reaction of both myself and everyone I was watching with went a little something like this:
Ironically, this is one of the “missions”…
Despite the ad touting that “In the end, it’s all about understanding one thing… true bravery… It’s about honoring our veterans and our law enforcement officers…”.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that a show where a bunch of people are given a couple months of watered down military training in an environment more or less free from danger and label it as comparable to the pain, sacrifices, stress, and general hardship of the actual military is about as far as you can get from honoring them. One of the guys I saw the commercial with had been in the military himself, stationed in Afghanistan, and he asserted that the idea of the show was offensive (as did everyone else in the room). Indeed, restoring some faith in humanity, the reaction of pretty much everyone to Stars Earn Stripes has been more or less this:
Marking the first time comments on a YouTube Video have been mostly intelligent and well-reasoned…
Let’s break it down here. Stars Earn Stripes is presenting:
First, let’s address the sanitizing or “white-washing”, as some critics are calling it. Stars Earn Stripes still has ten days to air, however, I think it’s safe to say that the actual decisions and consequences on the show are nothing like what they are in reality. The ad boasts that they will use “Real Explosions” and “Live Ammo”, as if this somehow adds weight or danger to the show. You what other shows have been using live ammo and real explosions for years?
Mythbusters
Deadliest Warrior (Sorry I couldn’t find a Gif for this)
…Or pretty much any show having anything to do with guns and explosions…
See, the celebrities might be in some danger- but hardly anything that you can’t find on other shows, and nothing on the level of what combat soldiers have to deal with. On top of this, I’m guessing that the celebrities aren’t going to actually kill anyone, or have to grapple with the moral and psychological ramifications of doing so. In fact, the celebrities will never have to worry about any of the basic aspects of military service that soldiers are expected to deal with- constant danger, the possibility of being disabled (if not killed or captured or tortured) for life, the possibility of killing and innocent civilian by accident, or (for the female contestants) the rampant problem of rape. Terry Crews is a tough guy, I’m sure, but I have my doubts as to how he’d react actually witnessing someone (on any side of the conflict) killed. Let’s face the facts, Stars Earn Stripes is not going to show you bodies in all their gory reality. This isn’t war- this is Hollywood.
Second, let’s talk about the glamorization we’re sure to see hear. Of course Stars Earn Stripes will present the celebrities having little breakdowns, or getting dusty or bruised, but even John McClane got pretty trashed in Die Hard.
But the military isn’t just concussion grenades and contusions- there’s plenty of… well- boredom to it. I’m not saying this to put down the armed forces, I’m just trying to offer an accurate picture here. There are toilets to be scrubbed, mess halls to be cleaned, uniformed to be creased and beds to be made. There’s paperwork and basic maintenance. Are we gonna see the Stars Earn Stripes celebrities get chewed out for not having left six inches between their blankets and their sheets? I doubt it.
Thirdly, the combination of the previously mentioned points creates a completely and wholly inaccurate picture of the conditions the men and women of the military find themselves in. Stars Earn Stripes isn’t about the military, it’s about a highly fetishized aspect of war. And make no mistake- we’re not talking about just the military here- we’re talking about war. Without the past decade or so of nonstop conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, it’s highly doubtful that Stars Earn Stripes would even exist, after all, what’s the point of doing a show about the military if you can’t jam it full of explosions? An almost assured side-effect of this lousy and poorly thought-out attempt to “honor” the troops (i.e. make money off of them and their hardships) is the glorification of war. It doesn’t matter if you’re the most dogged pacifist or hard-line advocate of “just cause”- we all know that war itself is not something that should be portrayed this way. Maybe you think war is wrong, maybe you think war is right- you never think war is pretty. As William Tecumseh Sherman, perhaps the most brutal general of the Civil War, put it “There is many a boy here today who looks on war as all glory, but, boys, it is all Hell.”
The guy who burned Atlanta to the ground just by glaring at it would know….
It cheapens war. In the off chance that you want to hear my full rant about this, here’s the link. The simple version is that this drastic level of ignorance when it comes to the bloodshed- you know, the actual war is not only an insult to the military, but to any and all victims of war, and a direct attack upon the basic decency and dignity of humanity at large.
I’d say that NBC’s heart is in the right place, only I don’t think that’s true. I think this show is a calculated plan to manipulate emotions and capitalize off of human suffering. This has nothing to do with honoring anyone- this is about lining wallets.
Again, to NBC I submit this as my closing remark:
Posted in advertisement, America, media, money, news, politics, television
Tagged afghanistan, Afghanistan War, Army, Atlanta burning, basic military training, Deadliest Warrior, Diehard, explosions, Hollywood, honoring our veterans, Iraq, Iraq War, live ammo, Military, Mythbusters, NBC, Olympics, Professional Russian, rape, Reality Show, Stars Earn Stripes, Terry Crews, war, War is Hell, William T. Sherman, www youtube
So, back in 2008 Universal Studios and Hasbro announced a movie deal that would center around Hasbro games like Battleship, Ouija, Clue (wait, don’t we already have a Clue movie? How can anything without Tim Curry be any better?), Candy Land, and Magic the Gathering. Most normal people promptly forgot this fact because our attention spans don’t last the length of a movie production with no news. But on August 3rd we found out that Universal was dropping Clue (though Gore Verbinski will still be making it), Monopoly, and Magic, leaving them with Battleship, Candy Land (CANDY LAND??), Ouija, and Stretch Armstrong. Personally, the potential of 7 board game movies being released in the next decade makes me want to buy stock in foreign companies.
And so Battleship is going to be the first lovechild of this unholy coupling of basically plotless board games and film; the trailer was released in late July:
It stands to reason that battleships might be the worst things with which to fight aliens – aliens that, bizarrely, don’t seem to want to attack a city or government or mine for Unobtanium or whatever, but just want to trap some Earth ships, which are defending nothing, in a semisphere of their intense technology, instead of just flying over them or dropping some huge alien bomb on them, which one assumes they could do.
Rihanna will appear in Battleship, inexplicably, dressed in something suprisingly unsexy; requisite hot-daughter-of-authority-figure-and-romantic-interest-of-authority-challenging-protagonist1 is played by generically-hot Brooklyn Decker (the trailer opens with a “There will be sexiness as well as battleships!” shot of her in denim shorts and a white bikini straddling the authority-challenging-protagonist on the beach).
Liam Neeson, Oscar and Golden Globe nominee, known best for his iconic role in Schindler’s List (and less fondly for his hideous hair in Star Wars I), will be delivering lines like “I don’t know what my daughter sees in you.”2
The only connection to the actual game of Battleship seems to be that there are ships and, presumably, a battle – but I guess that’s really all they had to go on anyways, short of making the ships have giant pegs on the bottoms of them.
And yes, everyone thought Pirates of the Caribbean was going to be terrible, and yes, Pirates of the Caribbean was awesome, but the justification of similar hopes for Battleship becomes extremely weak when the last, super-duper-intense-and-awesome lines of the trailer are:
Liam Neeson: Prepare to fire.
Man In Charge of Firing: Sir, which weapons?
Liam Neeson: All of them.
I mean, seriously, I know this isn’t where art films come from, but is this all our big movie businesses can do? Slam out as many potential fad-ish movies as fast as they can and hope something has that Pirates magic? A sad day for the movie industry, I think, but what makes this sadder than the release of Spy Kids XVII is that they’ve sucked real actors into it this time.
1is that a trope? I feel like it is. This is basically like half of all leading females ever (Elizabeth Swann in Pirates, Neytiri in Avatar, Lucilla in Gladiator, Jasmine in Aladdin….
2Okay, okay, or “What my daughter sees in you is a mystery to me”; they didn’t fool me by using crappy verbs and putting it in passive tense. [Also, did you know that “Liam” was short for “William”? His name just got a lot less cool and foreign, sadly (sad for him and also a sad indication of what my standards are for coolness). This is like when I found out that “Topher” wasn’t some cool nonWASP name but in fact just an abbreviation of one of the WASPiest names out there. Sigh.]
Posted in film
Tagged Battleship Movie, Brooklyn Decker, film, Hasbro, Hollywood, Liam Neeson, Rihanna, Universal
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