District 9 movie marketing- will the political/ cultural allegories resonate?*

I have many (mostly) male friends, nerdboys of the highest order.  Like me, they collect action figures, watch Star Wars on a regular basis, debating the merits of the chapters, characters, arc and colors of the light-sabres and generally revel in the outright fantasy without guilt or embarrassment.

And rightly so.  They are some of the smartest, most successful people I interact with and I’m proud to stand in line with them for hours to get in to see Iron Man’s first showing.  However, they tend not to know too much about international politics, or at least don’t discuss it.

So when one of them, JET, came to me and insisted I watch a preview for District 9, I was struck by the plot and setting.  Aliens have landed, neither to hurt nor to help, they are refugees and are being kept away from humans in tin roofed shacks in a contained area in Johannesburg.  I didn’t need to wait to see the credits, hear the accents or even the remaining 90 seconds of the trailer to know that I was looking at Soweto.  It kind of hit me in the stomach- I wasn’t expecting this from what is clearly a sci-fi/ action film aimed at young men.  But the setting was striking.

It’s not a coincidence, the title refers to the District 6 township in Cape Town.  I wonder if the “9″ is a nod to the ward in New Orleans.  The director is South African and the set design, terminology and visuals are striking to anyone who has even set foot in South Africa- during or after apartheid.  The psychic sucker punch were nearly identical images broadcast from the  Soweto riots of a year ago, where frustrated, unemployed black South Africans, afraid for what little they’ve been able to gain in the 13 years since Apartheid ended, began attacking the refugees from Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Nigeria… anyone who might take their potential jobs, or recognition they’d so long been denied.

I’m still unsure as to why this unsettles me so much or surprises me.  Comic books and science fiction have always been social and cultural mirrors disguised in fantastic situations and characters, but mainstream studios making the connections more obvious (think Iron Man, Stark Industries and Afghanistan) is intriguing.

I suppose there are several questions which I will chew over before and after seeing this film (I’ve never been accused of under-analyzing anything, including action movies).  The question I am mainly interested in opening for discussion is this:  are the studio execs putting their money where their mouths are in making some aspect of more mainstream movies politically relevant, are they not thinking about it, or do they think their audience won’t notice, or worse, won’t care?

Click here to see trailer.

*or am I imagining all of this?

who do we call at the OED to get “adult” updated?

For numerous reasons over numerous years, I have often stopped and thought:

“whoa.  i’m an adult.” 

Clearly anyone meeting me would wonder what it is causing me to wonder.  I’ve got a serious job and a serious title, have been taking care of myself since I was 15 (and had the honors of watching out for a few others over the years), pay my bills, wear suits to work….

here are the things I have taken care of- planning and execution, without consulting a single other human being for advice:

so many questions, and ones to which i actually DON’T want answers.

Read in this week’s The Week:

A Tasmanian man has avoided jail after being caught with hard-core octopus pornography.

Rodney McLagan, 48, had a collection of some 31,000 images and video clips, most of which depicted humans engaging in sex acts with snakes, tigers, and octopi. The judge suspended his sentence, citing a psychologist’s finding that McLagan suffers from clinically low self-esteem and that “you are particularly self-conscious about your teeth.”

So many questions, none of which I really want answered:

What is the attraction?  Is the slimy, fleshy consistency of octopi (precisely why I can’t eat them) and ew, I’m already making this worse than it is.

The suckers?  (stop it, now).

The blurb mentions hard-core octopus porn.  Does that mean there is soft-core octopus porn?  Doesn’t the fact that you’re looking at invertebrate smut qualify you as hard-core, just, right there?

Is hard-core snake and tiger porn so mundane it barely merits mention?  Those seem inherently more newsworthy, if only because these animals can actually kill you?  Maybe they went with the octopus angle to catch the halo effect of shark week buzz?

and the obligatory (bad) teeth joke:

Does this mean that millions of Englishmen are hiding illustrated Jules Verne novels under their mattresses?

ba-dum-dum!

 

Postscript:

I cannot wait to see how many new hits this blog gets from people searching for “invertebrate smut.”

 

So juicy.

thank god for espn.com

just a little shout out for espn360.com.

with all the storms and freaky weather, cable here in NYC has been spotty at best- pixelated, intermittent, especially on HD channels.

they had the spain- italy quarter final streaming online for free.

thank you sports gods for saving me from missing even a second of the game.

oh, and vaya espana!!! ole ole ole ole… ole… ole…

the back-handed compliment vs. the behind-the-back insult

i got my first writing assignment this weekend when a friend of mine, genghis khannie, a fellow blogger, put up an entry on the butterface phenomenon.  she and i discussed the situation that caused her to write this post, and the fact that she had gone quite some time on this earth without ever hearing the term.  i believe her introduction to it (the term, not the manifestation) was this summer. 

after getting over her shock that a) this idea existed and b) that everyone else knows about it, we discussed the seeming preference for the “butterface” vs. the “shehassuchapretty face.” 

genghis and i are nice, fun, interesting gals.  we’re funny, we kick back and know how to drink, discuss the virtues of doc gooden’s curve ball and barry sanders agility, cook, are independent, but not cold, and, as she so eloquently put, “have lovely visages.”  it must also be noted that neither she nor i are heifers.  far from it.  we’ve got a few extra pounds on us, to be sure, but there are no rolls or extra chins nor cankles to be found.  in fact, if we’re being honest (and we’re always honest with each other, aren’t we, internet?) i could give an hourglass some lessons on curves.*

this led me to think about the pretty face vs. the pretty body and how the latter is definitely the more popular, at least amongst the male members of our vast urban tribes.

this is not going to be a post bemoaning the lack of gentleman callers we have (though, for reals, we should be beating them off).  rather, i want to talk about the back-handed compliment that i’ve been getting for years, and why, it is, that people feel no compunction about paying it.

would you, whilst discussing some one’s physical attributes, tell them that they have a lovely personality?  no?  i didn’t think so.  not even crazy great aunts do that.  then why would you say “oh, you have such a pretty face?”  saying “you’re pretty” in our culture implies that you are discussing the person’s face, and, possibly, hair.  “you’re hot” implies the whole package.  “you have a pretty face” implies exclusion.  by inserting that one word -face- you are implying that the rest of her is not.

now, now, i am not being unreasonable.  think of someone saying “you look nice today.”  nearly everyone i know backpedals immediately after saying that, insisting, in fact, that it’s not that you don’t look nice every day, you just look especially nice this 24 hour period. 

there is no need for the addition of ‘today’ or ‘face’ or whatever other qualifying word you want to add to a compliment.  why do it?  if you want to issue a compliment, do so only when you are sincere.  and if you sincere, there is no need to mitigate it.  let’s spread the love, people, the pure love.

all that being said, i’d rather have the back-handed compliment than have people use a positive-tinged-insult (is that the opposite?) behind my back.

* please know that i am not as conceited as this post implies.  by necessity, the subject matter dictate that i put aside my normal humility (which annoys us all anyway, doesn’t it?) and be as truthful as possible. 

post script: i wanted a visual to accompany this post, and i started thinking of famous icons of women with pretty faces, but possibly not the greatest bodies.  i went to botticelli first, but then called my sister, herself an artist, and asked her for a good renaissance artist that painted women as i described above.  she asked why i wanted renaissance- that was about painting women as they are- real faces, real bodies.  even better, said i, because that’s what i was getting at.  she directed me to michelangelo.  his works are things of beauty, but there is an underlying reality there- boobs, curves, muscles, bones, the whole shebang- and the opposite of our airbrushed rib-less, plastic doll model culture.  so, i bring you the delphic sybil.  the perfect embodiment of an archetype- the woman with “a pretty face.”

* incidentally, while searching google images for an icon of a “butterface,” fergie came up quite often (the singer, not the duchess.  i mean not the english royal family duchess).  i’m just the messenger, people.

the original post

i can say i knew her when

maybe i’m a total doofus, but i just got really excited because one of my best friend’s improv groups is referenced in the NYTimes today.  And called nonsensical (the name, not the improv)!!!!

sileva is famous

also, when i got to my brand new office today and my brand new job, there was a ringwraith riding a fellbeast figure hanging from my ceiling.

home at last.

yippee ki-YAY

i will add more, my friends, when i have time to do so.  but, the moral of this story is this: don’t believe it when people tell you it’s too hard, or you’re too old, or it’s normal to be unhappy. 

go out and get whatever it is that makes you smile when getting up in the morning.  or grin the afternoon. 

it’s worth the work.

nyc hs kids should get smartass credits

from one of my two saintly teaching fellow friends, tackling nyc teens with tough love and a sense of humor:

 The other day, one of my favorite hooligans shared with me his plan to get back at security officers on the last day of school.

Here is genius at work…

“Miss- You have to hear my plan.
On the last day of school I’m gonna smuggle in three live chickens.
I will label them 1, 2 and 4.
Security will spend the whole fu^&ing day looking for chicken number 3.”

Now if only this mastermind would attend class every now and again, we’d all have cause to be hopeful for the future.

how do you mourn the man who taught you to silence a gun with a potato?

oh no, you guys!  mr. wizard died today.  i’m so sad; he was awesome.  he’s probably the reason i love science so much. 

i do not want to hear from you kids who don’t remember when a cable box resembled a blender, except the buttons brought you to hbo, espn, cnn, a fuzzy porn channel and nickelodeon instead of puree, blend, mix and chop.  the man used to do things in his kitchen set that were so awesome and fun.  and when you made a rocket out of the cardboard roll inside of a paper towel roll and some baking soda and set it off in your kitchen, your mom couldn’t even really get mad because it was science.

i remember learning how to make so many fun and interesting things on that show.  damn.  he was like a mashup between captain kangaroo and macguyver- it doesn’t get better than that when you’re a kid. 

RIP, Don Herbert. 

YES, I am totally one of those nerds (LOST theories)

I’m having yet another one of those HOLY SHIT moments about LOST, this one specifically relating to last night’s season finale.  So, if you’re not caught up, be warned, spoilers and ridiculous theories abound.

 1.  I think Jacob is in the coffin at the Haffs/ Drawlor* Funeral Home.  Jack would care because his life sucks after leaving the island, but Kate does not because her life has obviously improved. 

2.  Thanks to the bigger nerds out there, we know that the obit that so messes Jack up is for J…. antham of New York (for sure ruling out Sawyer) and the date of the obit is April 5, 2007.  How do we know this?  Because of the blessed geeks with HDTV out there who recognized the headline in the paper as belonging to an actual LA Times article:

april 5th story

obit closeup

Scratch that, I’m back to thinking it’s Locke- maybe as an amputee (that’s why the coffin seems small).  There’s no confirmation that Locke doesn’t have a last name that he doesn’t use.  After all, the real “Sawyer” wasn’t much of a father, and admitted he went by many names, so Locke might be the name of one of his foster parents.  But if it IS Locke, why didn’t Helen (Katy Segal) at least come?  You know what, it’s definitely Locke. 

Back to Jacob, we know that the creators have a serious thing for English philosophers, especially proponents of utlitarianism (which I totally studied my sophmore year in college and promptly forgot).  The icon of which is Jeremy Bentham.  Why can’t Jacob’s last name be Bentham?  He doesn’t have to be the Jacob on the Hanso board of directors- if he was, why would he allow Ben to kill all of his staff? 

Bentham’s biggest influences were John Locke, David (Desmond?) Hume, Jean-Jacques (Danielle?) Rousseau- see a pattern here?  All the people with whom the Island has an extra special connection.  Also, John (Kate) Austin-  a philosopher with ideas about moral and written law.

But the Bentham kicker is this thing called the Panopticon.  You gotta look this thing up.  I’m sure the similarities to the island and it’s different stations are no coincidence.

panopticon for dummies

or for those of you with even more free time than me:

panopticon for philosophy majors and/or masochists

Oh!  Also, since Patchy (Mikhail) seems to be immortal (surviving harpooning, brain aneurysm, etc.), as does Richard (mr. eyeliner), maybe they were born there OR came to the island aboard The Black Rock?  Richard was wearing pirate-y like clothes in Ben’s flashback to his youth and Mikhail’s got that eye patch.  Visual clues?  Normally, I don’t love all things pirate (in fact I now hate them, thank you Disney), but there IS a galleon on the island.

I know tomorrow I’ll have changed my mind again and found tons of new evidence to back up my new cockamamie theory, but I’m sticking with this for now.

Good thing we only have till February 09 to expound these theories.  As long as ABC and co. keep us going with the fake ads and websites and guerilla marketing…

we’ll all have forgotten about it until the DVD comes out.

* an anagram of Flash Forward

other goodies:

ben’s diary

jacob