I am just writing this post to inform all my readers that I won’t be posting for a few weeks. Check your emails at the end of the month for more material, but for now I’m on a hiatus.
Hey, everyone needs a break.
Until then–Natasha
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Wins vs Sins–2
So continuing from part one…
You all know the last thing I would be telling anyone to do is not question their entertainment. So, when I mentioned being receptive, that’s not what I mean.
Let’s look at the hard facts.
The love of money is the root of all evil…in the movie industry. Every time you see a bad movie, just remember, they made it to make money.
I really hope there are some screenwriters left who are in it for the good of mankind. But I wonder if there are any studios left of that sort.
Even assuming there are, it can’t be denied most of them just want to compete with blockbuster successes, and movies are only grossing more and more millions or even billions of dollars as time and inflation take effect.
That being said, it’s not a stretch to think that a lot of bad messages in entertainment are being shoved down our throats because they sell. Because dumb or immoral people will care a lot less about content. Making it easier to make movies and shows that are successes for no apparent reason, therefore making more money. So the cycle goes.
It’s not really paranoid to think this, it’s getting all too blatant.
And often the whole diversity and culture representation thing is thrown in just to get cheap points from certain demographics. (And I don’t mean the ethnicity themselves, but movie watcher demographics.)
Like Disney is criticized for having predominantly white protagonists.
The people who make those criticisms are ignoring the fact that Disney started off as a vehicle for retelling and bringing to life all the old fairy tales and stories people already loved. Which were, like it or not, mostly from European cultures. Because that’s what America started as, a land with European settlers. Complain all you like about the poor Native American representation in Peter Pan. But it is based off a book that literally has Indians in it just because kids liked imagining them. It’s not supposed to be accurate. (Also Walt Disney started making films at a time when certain ethnicity weren’t in movie entertainment all that much, so it’s not like he had much talent of that sort to choose from.)
This is one example of nitpicking that is harmful. What child really cares all that much about their culture being accurately represented?
I mean, let’s explore that: I am of mostly European descent. Should I get mad that my people are represented as singing with birds, living in the woods with no apparent contact with the outside world, and falling for the tricks of wicked witches every single time? (Come to think of it, two out of three of those sounds a lot like homeschooling.)
It’s not like old Disney films really make Europeans look smart, or even brave. A lot of them make us look silly for comic relief.
It would be like taking the court scene in Alice in Wonderland as meant to seriously represent the Law in the real world. No one would do that.
Or the tea party as meant to be actual tea etiquette.
Where’s the outrage here?
Another good reason black or Hispanic characters don’t appear in these movies is because they do not appear in the stories. The reason is, these stories, like Peter Pan or Alice’s, were written by Englishmen for English children. Children who would relate to English culture.
It’s not the story’s fault that its been brought to America with its melting pot of ethnicity.
And as far as more recent films go, the same rule applies to Tangled (German) and Frozen (Danish/Norwegian.) To realistically put black characters in there would be to make them servants. Who wants that message?
Okay, okay, so I’m over-defending Disney. But I could say the same about other franchises too. The poor writers who want to stick to the comic book, or historical, accuracy have a hard time because history is what it is; and comics were, again, written to promote American ideals.
(It would be a whole other discussion to wonder if that’s why people are coming down on them so much.)
To sum all that up, including a black or Latino character is not a virtue and omitting them is not a sin, unless it is ignoring a historical reality.
Before I end this, let’s talk about plots.
Even if you make it through the larbrithn of political correctness and good editing, people will be brutal to your plot.
There are three types of people where plot is concerned.
- Those who miss the point of it entirely.
- Those who hate the point completely.
- Those who try to make the point fit whatever their worldview is and ignore the goal of the story.
Most of us are one of these three at any given time. Even I fall into the third category a lot.
Missing the point can just be a fluke, people can just not comprehend the artistic style.
Often though it’s because they weren’t looking for a point at all. And I question if some popular franchise are even trying that hard to make one anymore.
But the second category is probably the most rare, but it’s also important.
When folks hate what you are doing, you are either right, or you are very wrong. There’s not really a middle ground.
The trouble is, when we are picking apart a plot because it wasn’t well paced, or it wasn’t progressive enough, or it was too cliche, we are missing the real point of storytelling.
Which is to show us stuff we can’t normally see.
Yes, an old tale retold is monotonous after awhile. But it is still important.
There are only so many good messages out there. That’s why in the effort to be new and different, books and movies have gone off into the dark, gritty, and uncertain territory.
Because picking a moral right or a moral wrong leaves you with only a few options.
The purpose of new stories is to reiterate the truth in a different way that will make sense to different people.
Truth however, doesn’t change.
Lies change, that is, they morph over time to disguise themselves so that we will keep being taken in.
Truth doesn’t need to do that. It stands on its own.
That’s why a movie like Frozen will break the glass ceiling, even though it falls into a lot of what we would call cliches. It has truth.
And it’s why a movie like Age of Ultron will never be that kind of success, though it had good actors, amazing special effects, and a new-ish plot. There’s no truth in it.
As much as people will argue now that truth is irrelevant to movies; the statistics will speak for themselves. The human mind is attracted to truth, to absolutes, to real meaning.
That’s all for now, until next time–Natasha.
Bear the pain without breaking.
Let me return to the past post today so that you may read it in the future.
Too much?
Sorry.
Anyway, I want to write about an interesting part of the X-men movie I mentioned in my previous post.
It’s when Old Charles tells Young Charles that “It is the greatest gift we have, to bear their (humanity’s) pain without breaking.”
I got to thinking about this idea. I’ve been rereading another old favorite book of mine, Rilla of Ingleside (the final Anne of Green Gables book.) Montgomery knew how to get emotion out of her readers. This book is one exhausting trip through WWI, but worth reading.
The people in this story perhaps feel the pain of the world too much. I get that the wars were terrible and people had a lot of strain, but I find it hard to believe it was quite as constant and terrorizing as this story portrays.
Not to disrespect what they suffered, I just think humanity naturally adapts and pushes away grim realities in order not to go insane.
But anyway, this book will make you feel the terrible things of war, and the grief and endurance also.
Also it draws together all the many types of people in that world. The imaginative and the dull; the clever and the simple; the devout and the reprobate; all of them are raised to a new level of importance. And the barriers between some of them are broken down.
Shared suffering can do more to make peace between individuals than any amount of good events would. Because people are stubborn, and pain tends to be the only thing that breaks us down.
How does this tie in to X-men of all things?
I mentioned before that Magneto is selfish, whereas Charles is selfless. And I also mentioned that Magneto’s selfishness lies in his ignorance of other people’s suffering.
Somewhere along the line, Charles decided to feel other people’s pain, and Erik decided to bar himself from it.
My question is, how many of us do the same thing?
It’s not hard for me to imagine how other people feel, I can put myself in their place. What is hard is wanting to, especially when it affects me personally.
We never want to be wrong after all.
Then again, some of us would rather be constantly apologizing for no clear wrongdoing than standing up for ourselves or others.
So maybe there’s no cut and dried human way of dealing with blame. But there are pretty basic ways of dealing with pain.
There is so much suffering out there now, one really couldn’t feel all of it deeply. At least, that’s what I’ve thought.
It doesn’t do to dwell on it.
Besides I know too many people who have broken under it, or if not broken, at least bent.
Bearing pain without breaking takes more strength than I have. The only way I can handle it it to lean on God.
I know there are some who might find that a cliche, easy way out sort of answer.
Or even wimpy. Like I’m not tough enough to bear pain like other people so I need to imagine someone out there who can help me.
My personal opinion is that nayone who thinks they can bear the wieght of the world without breaking is deluded.
To me it would be far worse to think that pain and sin are just things we have to live with, and there is no escaping it.
There had better be an escape. Otherwise, why are we living at all?
Isn’t that what Charles concludes? destruction isn’t the course humanity has to take, only the course it tends to take because of the cruel acts people do against each other.
And Magneto’s selfishness feeds those acts. While the selflessness of the X-men is what finally turns the tide.
That’s all for now,until next time–Natasha.
P. S. (my rule is no posting on Sunday’s but I’m making an exception because this was mostly written days ago and I kept getting interrupted before I published it, so here it is.)
Redeeming the time: X-men style.
When I did my X-men review, I wanted to go more into Days of Future Past, but I ran out of time. So, here we go.
Honestly, this one was my favorite.
I’m going to jump right in by bringing up the principle theme, split into two different plot lines, of the film.
The theme is Redemption.
First off we learn that in the future mutants are hunted down (so much for the efforts of the X-men in all the previous movies) and so are any humans who side with them or who harbor some early form of the mutant x-gene.
The reason all this happened is not because of Magneto’s heinous acts against humanity, as one might expect, but because of one murder of Mystique’s. Her first ( not her last.)
Mystique was always a pretty rough and seemingly merciless and conscience-less character in the first three films, in the fourth we learn she wasn’t always that way, in the fifth they finally get around to asking “What if she could have been different?”
If they could stop her from murdering the man, Trask, they could stop the war that is killing off all of them.
What if?
There are a couple things that come to my mind when I think about the idea of traveling back in time to save people.
There’s my favorite book, Till We Have Faces, in which the main character thinks that the gods can change the past. At first thinking they do so to make us seem guilty, and later realizing they do so by changing us ourselves into different people.
Then there is that verse in the Bible that says we redeem the time because the days are evil.
That certainly fits this movie’s whole premise.
I don’t believe time travel is strictly possible. But if it were, I would think it was like any other gift, meant to be used to help and to heal, but able to be used to do damage.
There’s plenty of fiction that covers the latter, but this film interestingly enough shows how, even with the best of intentions, someone could still make the future worse than ever by going back. There’s a delicate moment when Future Charles warns the team not to wake Logan up, or there will be a worse darkness than there is now. By which he means that thanks to Erik, the mutants will have exterminated humans.
Now if Logan had not gone back and busted Erik out, that could not have happened.
Actually Erik was mostly useless in the film. He didn’t help convince Raven not to shoot the guy, he didn’t try to change the people’s minds about mutants, he almost sealed their fate.
But I guess it was better for him.
Raven was the most intriguing character to me from the beginning, since I had heard she turned good eventually, but I was constantly frustrated by her poor choices.
What I liked about this film was its disdain of the idea that Raven was meant to kill Trask, and that the War was meant to happen. Of course those terrible things weren’t meant to happen.
The movie admits, through Younger Charles, that Raven needs to have a choice, but it never leaves any doubt that there is only one right choice for her to make.
That’s the thing abut knowing the future, it’s pretty hard to argue with it.
The reason Raven refuses to listen at first seems to be pure stubbornness and resentment of Charles’es attempt to control her; but I think it’s also human nature to deny consequences to our bad choices…why else do we make them?
The theme of redeeming the time comes in strongly in another way, through Logan’s wake up call to Charles himself. We know that before Logan came back, Charles wasted a good portion of those years, and was not there for Raven or for other mutants, as Erik spitefully (and unjustly considering his many betrayals) points out.
But Charles changes that, and redeems his own time as well as Raven’s.
Raven always chose Erik before, he was more intriguing, he had a sort of magnetic personality, even Charles felt its pull though he knew better than to listen to him.
What makes Raven in the end choose Charles is a number of factors.
Partly it’s that she realizes a lot sooner that Erik is not loyal to her, and does not care about her in any recognizable way; as she had thought he did. (By the way, trying to kill someone and then flirting with them when it is too late is sick and only seems charismatic in movies.)
Partly it’s that she is told the future depends basically on her actions. (Which is one thing that does not change oddly enough. People are positioned, they don’t get to choose that, they only get to choose how they use that position.)
But the most important thing that changes her mind is Charles’es persistence, and finally his releasing of her to be who she truly is.
And who she was, he believes, was never the person Erik saw her as, Older Erik admits he set her on a dark path; who she was was not even exactly what Charles himself thought, she was more than that.
When released from those negative expectations, Raven realizes what she really wants, and she drops the gun.
That moment was every bit as epic as it was intended to be, because we know how hard they worked for it.
Raven sees an opportunity to be seen as a hero instead of a villain, and she chooses it. And I personally thought the look on her face when she turns to Charles and Hank afterwards was pure relief.
Raven actually saves her own life by doing this, though no one ever actually told her (in the cut version I saw) that she died as a result of shooting Trask.
Much like another fictional character named Raven (Ever After High), she changes the whole course of history in one moment.
And who knows when any one of us might do the same thing?
Until next time–Natasha.
The Good Doctor.
I don’t know if any of you have heard of the person Temple Grandin. She was a high functioning autistic woman, (actually I believe she’s still around,) she thought in pictorials.
I think we owe her some of our modern understanding of the condition, and also of how people who have it cope with things and overcome their disability.
Unlike with deafness or blindness, no one can really argue that Autism is not a disability. It causes a lot of frustration for the people who have it. I’m sure thy often wish they didn’t. But it’s the way they are and they have to deal with it.
I want to say upfront I don’t see these people as weird, or less then human, as some have in the past. I see them rather as people who have involuntarily been put behind these glass walls of communication. They can look out, but it’s much harder to get out. And much harder for us to get in.
I want to give a cautious endorsement today to one of abs’s newest shows.
First off, I don’t like abc at all. So this is a big thing for me, but for once I like what they are doing.
The new show is barely a month old. It’s The Good Doctor.
Anyway, the main character of the Good Doctor, Shawn Murphy, is autistic. He is amazingly high functioning, but still very much autistic. He talks with the odd monotone they use, and has to have things a certain way.
Shawn is a doctor (duh) at as hospital in San Jose, California. They were reluctant to take him on because he has a hard time with communication. Which they really stress as important for the patients.
Back when I first started seeing commercials for this show, I was skeptical that the writers would do anything imaginative with it, though I thought it was a good idea.
I don’t know about you, but thanks to the relatives I have who like medical drama shows, I’ve seen quite a bit of Grey’s Anatomy, Bones (not exactly medical, but similar,) and NCIS.
And not one of them stressed communication and patient comfort that I could see. So, yay for San Jose!
Though the hospital has plenty of issues in its inner workings, which I’d like to think are exaggerated for dramatic effect, and not what real hospitals are focusing on, but I have no real knowledge of it.
But even though the authority figures there are concerned with image and increasing their numbers; the live-ins, Shawn, Clair, and Jared, are a tad more concerned with helping people. Especially Clair, who is actually getting in trouble quite a bit for being too nice and not honest enough with the patients.
Shawn has no filter when he speaks, so after he’s hired he steps on people’s toes without realizing why they would have a problem with what he’s saying. He has the gift of thinking in pictures and patterns (like the real life Temple Grandin) so when he looks at the human body, he intuitively understands it far better than the average doctor. He can figure out things in his mind that machine scans can’t pick up on.
A bit like Superman, who can see better with his own X-ray vision, than any X-ray machine can. Because the human capacity is always more flexible and can be improved and honed in time, while a machine can’t correct or stretch itself.
Shawn may have no social skills whatsoever, but his heart is in the right place. He is always striving to make sure the patient is completely healthy.
What I would say this shows gift is is that it understands what you, the audience, are felling watching it. Clair wants to understand Shawn better but knows nothing about how to handle him, so she starts from the ground up. And we feel the same way, trying to comprehend this person, and even though we often get glimpses into what’s going on in his mind, we still struggle with really understanding him.
It makes me wonder if the writers themselves are figuring it out as they go and hoping to better understand Autism because of their efforts.
Actually, I feel like I have almost a unique perspective on this type of thing. At least a different one than anyone else I know has.
Because, whether you have Autism, or whether you just don’t fit into the social mold society has established; it’s your decision whether you will withdraw further than ever and become even more locked into your own mind, or whether you will push the barriers.
Temple Grandin was a real life example of what Shawn Murphy is fictitiously demonstrating. Someone who realized she was different form other people, but knew that didn’t have to stop her from doing something with her life, and also realized that if her needs should be met and understood, then she should understand other peoples.
For example, Temple didn’t like being hugged. (I used to dislike that also.) But overtime she realized what a hug meant to people and she grew to offer them as a way to comfort others.
The more I learn about people with disabilities, the more I’m convinced the actual disability is the one we choose to have.
The introvert only becomes a total recluse when they accept that they can’t function with other people at all.
The person with dyslexia only becomes illiterate when they accept that they can never find a way around their problem with printed text.
You get the idea.
In conclusion, I like this show’s progress so far, I think it might actually accomplish what you would hope its goal is. To help people better understand those who have this condition, and know how to respond to them.
That’s worth making a show for.
Until next time–Natasha.
X-Men –2
Picking up where I left off…
Aside from the core theme of right vs wrong and forgiveness vs revenge, the movies cover whether people should be able to choose whatever way they want to solve things.
It comes down always to Erik vs Charles. One determined to overthrow humanity, the other determined to co-exist with it peacefully.
If one ignores the evolutionary basis for the whole concept of useful mutation (totally unfounded in real science) I would find the difference between Christ and the Devil in these two points of view.
It doesn’t seem that way at first, but when, inevitable, the question about whether mutants just deserve by birthright to be in charge and to be over all regular humans, is raised. And Magneto declares that mutants are gods among ants. Which he tells Phyro, one easily swayed mutant who joins him. He repeats the idea at other moments, no one ever contradicts him.
But Charles actions are a kind of contradiction. He chooses to protect people. Even if he is more powerful than them, he does not consider himself better than them.
We find out in the fifth film that this was because he could feel their pain. Every single person’s he read the mind of, he could experience their pain, yet without breaking. And once you have done that, it is pretty much impossible to despise them.
Nothing unites human beings more than love and pain. Ideally, it would only need to be love. But now that we all suffer, sometimes what clears away the walls is the realization that other people have suffered the same way.
What amazed me aobut Erik is that in the whole course of the films that covered his backstory and his terrible experiences in the prison camp, he never once seemed to consider that most of the Jews there with him were “ordinary’ people.
Maybe his powers made for a unique kind of torture, but other people were tortured, other people watched their families die, other people were experimented on. Other people lost everything.
Humans are just as terrible to each other as they are to other kinds of creatures.
What’s more, some of the people in prison camps were there for risking their lives for Jews. People who willingly risked their lives for the outcasts. They died for that.
Humanity may be cruel, but it can also be more kind than we have any right to expect in this cynical world we often find ourselves in.
For almost every story of some crazy person taking life there’s another of some noble person laying their life down for others.
How Erik could be so selfish, yes selfish, as to be blind to all that is astounding to me.
How he could feel the injustice of bigotry toward mutants, but not of every bigotry, is just hypocritical.
What would we say of the people who followed him?
Did it make them better? More loyal? More noble?
No, those who follow a bad leader become like him.
Mystique became a cold blooded and vengeful killer who never seemed to think for herself. Phyro turned on the people who were his friends and who risked their lives for him and on Professor X, and he despised them. Angel, ( First Class,) turned on the first real friends she ever had because of the Mutant in that film, and then stuck with Erik’s way at the end of it.
What further amazed me is that none of these people turned back even when they had to fight those they once cared about. They were so willing to give into the darkness.
It was darkness. Erik turned Raven against Charles by suggesting that Charles wanted to control her. Maybe it was true, but Erik controlled her far more than Charles ever did, and she let him do it. Charles at least loved her, Erik was incapable of loving anyone.
(In the end Charles lets Raven choose what she will do. But only because at that point forcing her to do anything would be futile. Giving her her choice was the only way to make things right, but it was not so for Erik. He had chosen already, force had to be used on him, which we see immediately; in contrast to Charles releasing Raven.)
Phyro turned to pride. To thinking he was above mere mortals. The classic struggle that separates superheroes from super villains is whether they see their strength as for service, or for power.
The list goes on, but you get the idea.
What of the actual bigotry exhibited by the humans?
Well, it’s important to remember that a lot of the mutants are afraid of their own powers until they get used to them, because things that are different are often frightening. No one likes what they can’t understand until they learn to do without understanding.
But beyond that we are never given an example of humans who are open minded until the fourth and fifth films. There we see the secret agent who seemed fascinated by mutants and not at all disgusted; later we see a mom who seems to put up with her son’s mutation though she is irritated by it. We also learn that some humans defended the mutants in the War.
Even in the first film we see a man going from hating mutants to realizing they weren’t all bad, and that they did not choose to be born this way. The president is even left with deciding to be more lenient with them.
We see other humans who don’t seem to be trying to fight the mutants exactly, but they see their powers as a medical condition. Mutants like Rogue almost agree. (I can’t blame her.)
Strictly speaking the mutants are still human, and Charles, who has felt mutant pain and human pain alike, knows that the only difference is really in our minds.
That’s a two sided coin by the way. Storm admits that she hates humans sometimes because she is scared of them, and we know that is why humans hate mutants.
What someone ought to have told Erik long ago is that you can’t judge a people by what some of them do.
In the Bible, God often rules in favor of the minority. Eight people survive the flood, three people survive the destruction of two cities, a remnant is left of the Hebrews. The reason is, the parts of humanity that make it worth preserving are often int he minority. But they are still important.
In fact, the good of humanity is more important than the evil. The good in us is the reason we exist, it’s what we have left of what we were meant to be; the evil in us is the sign of our decay.
And mutant or not, that decay is present in all of us, and all of us choose whether we’re going to fight it, or give way to it.
That’s all for now, until next time–Natasha.
drybonestruth 