Something/Someone Old

I am, more and more, turning to old movies as a refuge from the kinds of movies Hollywood is putting out these days. I'm reminded, when I watch contemporary movies, of something a professor of English said to me in my freshman year: "Well, I looked at your paper and thought `That's a C+.' But then I read the rest of the papers in the class, and thought `Now it looks like an A-.'" Movies like Wonder Woman and the French science fiction movie Arrival, which ordinarily I'd give a solid 3 stars, are celebrated to the heavens as unbelievable masterpieces, probably because the scale is set, at the bottom, to Angry Birds, a movie made about a cellphone game app.

The Alien franchise has staggered to its feet like it just went on a twenty-year bender and would love some strong coffee, the Lord of the Rings franchise, after a great deal to be proud of, tripped over its Academy Awards and fell into a garbage can, getting a pie in the face en route, the Terminator franchise apparently got lost in Mall of America looking for a nice business suit for a job interview, and the Star Wars franchise cleared its throat nervously like a professional musician in the recording studio who's messed up the same line four times in a row, and said "Um. Can we start again?"

Not all of that is bad; Alien: Covenant was a moderately good movie, disappointing yet again as every Alien movie has been since 1986, but impressive in that Ridley Scott and his people managed to pull together an actual story that isn't completely stupid out of the pile of garbage that was left after Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection, and Prometheus. The Force Awakens was, not great, but good enough that I'm cautiously optimistic about future movies, even though it basically retold the story of the first Star Wars and didn't give any information about how we got from Luke and Leia and the gang re-establishing The Republic in Return of the Jedi to Leia on the run again with another Rebellion.

And Star Trek, my beloved Star Trek, has stayed strong--although the reboot doesn't precisely feel necessary to me, it's a worthy addition (though it looks like Star Trek may be headed for a fall, as you'll see in Something New).

With all that in mind, may I recommend Earth Girls Are Easy?

Starring Geena Davis, Jeff Goldblum, and Julie Brown, this 1986 movie is a combination of a very loving send-up of 1950s science-fiction movies and a Hollywood musical (including a salute to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). Since Goldblum, Damon Wayans, and Jim Carrey are aliens who land in Geena Davis' Southern California pool, there is ample opportunity for Wayans and Carrey to be hilarious, and they basically are.

It's basically a flawless movie for me, with the possible exception of the odd intrusion of a dance-off between Damon Wayans and a Black actor who apparently comes into the movie just to have the dance-off. That's always made me a little uncomfortable, for some reason--but both actors dance so damned well that I always end up willing to roll with it.

It's fun fluff with engaging characters and a caustic satire on L.A. culture that doesn't take itself too seriously, so never risks getting preachy. And I find it's just what the doctor ordered in times like these.

Something New

Star Trek: Discovery is my Something New.

I found out only recently that there was going to be a new Star Trek series, because for some reason I never find out these things until very late (it's been in the works since 2015, apparently). This is what Wikipedia has to say about it:

Set roughly a decade before the events of the original Star Trek series, separate from the timeline of the concurrent feature films, Discovery explores the Federation-Klingon cold war while following the crew of the USS Discovery.

I am not sanguine about this new series, because featured prominently in the trailer I saw at the movies was an interaction that went like this:

Impassioned crew member #1: "The Federation can't fire first! The Federation never fires first!"

Possibly the captain: "This time we have to!"

For the past ten years or so at least, the message has been pushed through multiple movies and TV shows that we just can't afford the moral principles we've held in the past, because we are confronted with such an enormous totalitarian evil that we must use all possible means to defeat it. Zero Dark Thirty and "24" are obvious examples of this message, but it occurs in a wide range of media. The most surprising example, for me, was the science fiction series "Fringe." It was surprising because, in "Fringe," there isn't even any discussion of whether the protagonists should use every horror they've acquired from various aliens and monsters over the years to horribly destroy their enemies. It's just assumed that, of course, it's all right.

Most of the time, however, a moral wrangle has to break out which, of course, the moral person must lose. It's like a Hannity and Colmes of moral philosophy. This wrangle in which, at long last, the moral person admits that yes, we must waterboard people 300 times in order to survive, is so prevalent in movies that it has gotten a name--the "shoot-and-cry."

This excellent article talks about the relationship between the "shoot-and-cry" film and the transformation of evil into so-called "moral ambiguity:"

As is always the case with these American shoot-and-cries and “morally ambiguous” torture films, most of the discussion from paid critics and middle-brow aesthetes on twitter gets some fundamentals wrong. First, the prime point of comparison for Sicario shouldn’t be Apocalypse Now, although that film is important. More accurately, Sicario has the DNA of Zero Dark Thirty cross-pollinated with the earlier spook thriller The Recruit. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is, of course, loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s 1898 novella Heart of Darkness. According to film professor Neda Atanasoski, Heart of Darkness is “the touchstone of post-Vietnam US historical fiction.” Heart of Darkness is about a descent into a moral void, resuscitated by ethical feeling and ultimately, redemption. According to the narrative, only by having one’s naïve assumptions revoked by an ugly reality can someone incorporate that reality and progress morally. Obviously, this doesn’t lead to a critique of imperialism, since Conrad was a big fan of the transformative power of the British empire. And just like Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness while waving the Butcher’s Apron, these “morally ambiguous” films are about re-writing evil as a gray area.

(The full article is well worth reading here: https://lorenzoae.wordpress.com/2015/10/16/sicario-americas-dark-new-fro...)

The military-industrial complex, in this case, seems very much like a drunk at a bar that you just can't shake. He insists on following you around from table to table explaining how his wife just doesn't understand him. Nothing is ever his fault. It's his wife's fault, or his co-worker's fault, and he insists on talking about how unfairly he's being judged until you depart the bar in frustration in favor of drinking at home alone.

It's amazing how often in movies and tv of the past decade evil isn't evil, but is just misunderstood good, or else--the sophisticated version--there really isn't any good or evil at all, and aren't you the stupid childish idiot for thinking there was? An entire mystery series, "The Killing," was ruined for me by this philosophy being interjected into the last episode, in reference to a man who had spent over a decade kidnapping, torturing, raping, and killing girls between 14 and 18, and subsequently sinking their bodies into a peat bog. I'm sorry. Peat-bogging young girls does not seem gray to me, and I don't particularly have a problem calling it evil.

Star Trek has never had a problem knowing good from evil, although it has often been stupid, in its long history, about sexism, and occasionally has even fallen over its feet about racism, although it has a much better level of consciousness about race, and even class, than about gender.

So I get really worried when the trailer for Star Trek: Discovery prominently figures the patented shoot-and-cry moral wrangle (tm). It is just possible that Star Trek will hold true to its mostly good history of being anti-authoritarian, (mostly) anti-racist, and anti-classist. (It has also been, for the most part, dedicated to the idea of sacrificing for the greater good, and even the personal good of a friend). So maybe Star Trek will jump this hurdle. But I'm afraid that my beloved Star Trek is about to become a mouthpiece for the muttering drunk, and that would make me sad.

Something Borrowed

Apparently American folk music borrowed the banjo from Africa:

Since early settlers of America were European, American folk music was heavily influenced by folk music in the British Isles, specifically England , Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. However, as slaves were imported from Africa and became a major part of the “folk” in America, African music also started influencing folk music in America. The popular musical instrument commonly used in folk music, the banjo, was originally an African instrument called the banjar, which was a hollowed out gourd with a neck attached to it in order to support four or five strings.

http://ianslabreport.blogspot.com/2011/03/foreign-influence-on-music-in-...

This is a picture of the banjar:

Actually, I'm not sure whether we can say this is an instance of borrowing, since Africans were basically kidnapped from one continent and brought over here in chains, and their culture goes with them. But I'm not sure whether I should describe the interaction of folk music from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales with the African folk music of the kidnapped people of Africa, to be theft. Their freedom was stolen, for sure, but I don't know if I think some European folk musician going "hmm. that looks interesting" and working up a version of the instrument for himself is theft or not. The argument for it being theft is that the banjar shouldn't have been here in the first place, because the people should have been left alone to live their lives where they were born.

Something Blue

Pretty damned good!

It's not the blues, but I just have to include one more, because Belafonte combined with Miriam Makeba is just too damned good to pass up: