Jay was having a rough day. First laundry day post-breakup, and the hot water wash had been half gym tees and half Kim's unmentionables. Burying his head in the dryer to mop up tears was perhaps his lowest point. "I'm a man, dammit," he said out loud, voice obscured by Egyptian cotton and Victoria Secret-brand lace.
Bad to worse: busting out with "Yo it's 2014, man, give a brother a break," to a cop was maybe the worst idea he'd had in months. Driving while black? Driving while sad? Why was he even bothering to drive Kim's clothes back to her?
Insult to injury: 10:00 am on a Saturday morning and Kim was at the spa getting her nails did. Her new Harvard boyfriend answered the door and graciously accepted her underthings, giving Jay a firm handshake only a whiteboy could have taught him.
Arriving at the court for ball should have made him feel better, but the weight on his heart only grew when his boys asked him how he was doing, pity evident on their faces. They knew about Harvard, then.
"Yo, I got problems, son," he said, in a show of bravado, trying a layup. It hit the rim and bounced unenthusiastically back toward him. "But I ain't got to worry about no bitches."
WTF did I just read?
Wednesday 28 May 2014
Sunday 25 May 2014
Movie Reviews-Godzilla
Hawk and I watched the original Godzilla last year and I was touched by its sensitivity. Breaking into Japan's burgeoning film industry post-WWII, it speaks about nuclear war, nuclear power, environmentalism, and the place of government and military.
Based on the poster, I was not expecting 2014's Godzilla to have any of the original's elegance and grace. I refused to watch any trailers so that, if I did watch the movie, I would go in with as little bias as I could. Hawk was already peeved enough at me for declaring, "This poster says NOTHING about what Godzilla means!"
Today we went in for the matinee. I enjoyed the movie very much. But the movie was terrible.
Spoiler Time
The movie starts out with promise, as did the original: we have a natural mystery on our hands. The scientists need to solve it.
Promisingly, the movie breaks away from the original: we find out (ha! I won't tell you how in case you are reading these spoilers before watching) that a nuclear disaster in Japan was not a nuclear disaster, it was a giant cover-up of a monster, but a monster that was NOT GODZILLA!
Yo, that's crazy talk, the movie is called Godzilla. But it's okay. Godzilla shows up later.
Anyway, one of the characters died and redeemed himself as all this was going on, and his son was fated to continue his work. That's the first time my internal eyes rolled. But it was still fun and well-filmed, so I rolled with it.
The problems, however, began piling up on monstrous scale. For example, the new creature can release an electro-magnetic pulse that knocks out electronic devices. I was aware of this, so I'm pretty sure the scientists and military knew this. They sent jet planes after it anyway. What happened? Well, the monster sent out a pulse and all the planes fell out of the air and a bunch of people died.
That part made me really sad. I knew from there that this movie was going to switch into blockbuster territory and leave the realm of solid social commentary--and it had started out with some good commentary. I'll let the viewers discuss that for themselves; I'm not here to preach, and neither was the film.
Our hero, a young Dad, gets swept up in things as he just wants to get home. Unfortunately, he's a Lieutenant in the navy so he has to help out. His poor wife and son really just want him home, and that's their entire purpose in the movie. Cut them out and you make the movie shorter and more fulfilling. From a feminist perspective, the only thing worse in a movie than no women is a useless twat of a woman who does nothing but sit around wishing her men would show up. Plus, she sends her son off with someone else, so we don't even get a scene of her being badass or motherly protecting him.
They do this for a reason: it's so they can shoot the most heroic scene in the movie. Still, she could have been a good mother and gone with him, and they still could have shot the scene where the bus driver saves them all by driving over police cars and through tanks to get them off the Golden Gate Bridge before Godzilla tears it in half. Or, these useless characters could have not been in the movie, and you still could have had this scene in with just some randos. Best scene in the movie BY FAR.
As the military plans out their insane plan of blowing up three animals (oh yes, now there are three because we have the first monster, its mate who appeared in Nevada, and Godzilla, who hates these guys) with a nuclear bomb 20 miles off the coast of San Francisco, our hero scientist (played by Ken Watanabe who channels the scientist in the original Godzilla perfectly) keeps insisting that no action is needed; Godzilla will kill the two electro-monsters and balance will be restored.
I'm actually down with this, because like Watanabe's character, I'm dubious about hitting three animals who feed off radiation with a bomb that creates radiation.
But in the end, it doesn't matter because Electro-Monster #1 steals the bomb and our hero is the only one who can disarm it (all the other bomb specialists died, they say. But in the whole military?!)
Naturally this doesn't work as planned and Godzilla kills the electro-monsters, proving science right. Man is humbled in a stunning moment of warning that is out of character with the rest of the movie's reckless shooting and the military's possibly false talk about saving lives (as a map of fallout from their bomb wipes out all of central California, even though that wasn't the plan and wasn't mentioned).
I loved watching this movie.
But this movie could have been great and they dropped the ball in a few places.
First: Our very first hero is our main hero's mother. She's downstairs in a nuclear facility and forces her husband to seal her and many others in with the core as it breaches in order to save the lives of everyone else in the city. She's a lady scientist, a mother, and she stops to help a fallen comrade. When she's told to run, she doesn't try to go fix the breach. She yells at everyone to get out and she fucking runs. This is the sort of rad lady I was expecting to see throughout the rest of the movie. LET DOWN!!
Second: Bryan Cranston and his adult son (main hero) are good together. Main son resists his father's kookery because he believes that's what's best, then comes around: maybe if he can give his father what he wants, his father will give up, and because his son trusted him, he'll trust his son. His son goes from angry and frustrated to kind, if annoyed; and when proven wrong, accepts the evidence and changes his mind. This is an admirable and believable characteristic.
Third: Super-heroic busdriver from above is black. There was a fair bit of diversity in this film, actually: Japanese, Black, Latino, Hawaiian, white, white, white, two lady scientists, I may even have seen a female soldier, too, once.
Fourth: Great effects, decent logic on the monster science ...
UNTIL
Watanbe is so convinced that Godzilla will take care of the electro-monsters. But all his research on Godzilla, as far as the film lets on, is archaeological at best and speculative at worst. His reasoning that Godzilla will attack the noobs is that Godzilla is an apex predator. However, it's also stated that all these monsters feed on nuclear radiation. Then, at the end of the movie, when Godzilla has a chance to eat up (they're prey, right? Prey = dinner), he turns around, roars majestically, and heads out to sea.
Which means that Godzilla is instead some sort of sentient being with a deeply-rooted and possibly irrational hatred for these other beings (I mean, he came from god-knows-where in the ocean to Japan and followed them to America. That's extreme.)
Which means I just finished a film where the racist wins.
Based on the poster, I was not expecting 2014's Godzilla to have any of the original's elegance and grace. I refused to watch any trailers so that, if I did watch the movie, I would go in with as little bias as I could. Hawk was already peeved enough at me for declaring, "This poster says NOTHING about what Godzilla means!"
 |
| Nom |
Today we went in for the matinee. I enjoyed the movie very much. But the movie was terrible.
Spoiler Time
The movie starts out with promise, as did the original: we have a natural mystery on our hands. The scientists need to solve it.
Promisingly, the movie breaks away from the original: we find out (ha! I won't tell you how in case you are reading these spoilers before watching) that a nuclear disaster in Japan was not a nuclear disaster, it was a giant cover-up of a monster, but a monster that was NOT GODZILLA!
 |
| I did not see that coming! |
Yo, that's crazy talk, the movie is called Godzilla. But it's okay. Godzilla shows up later.
Anyway, one of the characters died and redeemed himself as all this was going on, and his son was fated to continue his work. That's the first time my internal eyes rolled. But it was still fun and well-filmed, so I rolled with it.
The problems, however, began piling up on monstrous scale. For example, the new creature can release an electro-magnetic pulse that knocks out electronic devices. I was aware of this, so I'm pretty sure the scientists and military knew this. They sent jet planes after it anyway. What happened? Well, the monster sent out a pulse and all the planes fell out of the air and a bunch of people died.
That part made me really sad. I knew from there that this movie was going to switch into blockbuster territory and leave the realm of solid social commentary--and it had started out with some good commentary. I'll let the viewers discuss that for themselves; I'm not here to preach, and neither was the film.
Our hero, a young Dad, gets swept up in things as he just wants to get home. Unfortunately, he's a Lieutenant in the navy so he has to help out. His poor wife and son really just want him home, and that's their entire purpose in the movie. Cut them out and you make the movie shorter and more fulfilling. From a feminist perspective, the only thing worse in a movie than no women is a useless twat of a woman who does nothing but sit around wishing her men would show up. Plus, she sends her son off with someone else, so we don't even get a scene of her being badass or motherly protecting him.
They do this for a reason: it's so they can shoot the most heroic scene in the movie. Still, she could have been a good mother and gone with him, and they still could have shot the scene where the bus driver saves them all by driving over police cars and through tanks to get them off the Golden Gate Bridge before Godzilla tears it in half. Or, these useless characters could have not been in the movie, and you still could have had this scene in with just some randos. Best scene in the movie BY FAR.
As the military plans out their insane plan of blowing up three animals (oh yes, now there are three because we have the first monster, its mate who appeared in Nevada, and Godzilla, who hates these guys) with a nuclear bomb 20 miles off the coast of San Francisco, our hero scientist (played by Ken Watanabe who channels the scientist in the original Godzilla perfectly) keeps insisting that no action is needed; Godzilla will kill the two electro-monsters and balance will be restored.
I'm actually down with this, because like Watanabe's character, I'm dubious about hitting three animals who feed off radiation with a bomb that creates radiation.
But in the end, it doesn't matter because Electro-Monster #1 steals the bomb and our hero is the only one who can disarm it (all the other bomb specialists died, they say. But in the whole military?!)
Naturally this doesn't work as planned and Godzilla kills the electro-monsters, proving science right. Man is humbled in a stunning moment of warning that is out of character with the rest of the movie's reckless shooting and the military's possibly false talk about saving lives (as a map of fallout from their bomb wipes out all of central California, even though that wasn't the plan and wasn't mentioned).
I loved watching this movie.
But this movie could have been great and they dropped the ball in a few places.
First: Our very first hero is our main hero's mother. She's downstairs in a nuclear facility and forces her husband to seal her and many others in with the core as it breaches in order to save the lives of everyone else in the city. She's a lady scientist, a mother, and she stops to help a fallen comrade. When she's told to run, she doesn't try to go fix the breach. She yells at everyone to get out and she fucking runs. This is the sort of rad lady I was expecting to see throughout the rest of the movie. LET DOWN!!
Second: Bryan Cranston and his adult son (main hero) are good together. Main son resists his father's kookery because he believes that's what's best, then comes around: maybe if he can give his father what he wants, his father will give up, and because his son trusted him, he'll trust his son. His son goes from angry and frustrated to kind, if annoyed; and when proven wrong, accepts the evidence and changes his mind. This is an admirable and believable characteristic.
Third: Super-heroic busdriver from above is black. There was a fair bit of diversity in this film, actually: Japanese, Black, Latino, Hawaiian, white, white, white, two lady scientists, I may even have seen a female soldier, too, once.
Fourth: Great effects, decent logic on the monster science ...
UNTIL
Watanbe is so convinced that Godzilla will take care of the electro-monsters. But all his research on Godzilla, as far as the film lets on, is archaeological at best and speculative at worst. His reasoning that Godzilla will attack the noobs is that Godzilla is an apex predator. However, it's also stated that all these monsters feed on nuclear radiation. Then, at the end of the movie, when Godzilla has a chance to eat up (they're prey, right? Prey = dinner), he turns around, roars majestically, and heads out to sea.
Which means that Godzilla is instead some sort of sentient being with a deeply-rooted and possibly irrational hatred for these other beings (I mean, he came from god-knows-where in the ocean to Japan and followed them to America. That's extreme.)
Which means I just finished a film where the racist wins.
Wednesday 26 February 2014
Beautiful Paintings
This is Meghan Doughery's submission for the Matthew Good Fan Art competition.
http://www.matthewgood.org/blog/2014/2/26/fan-art-page
http://www.matthewgood.org/blog/2014/2/26/fan-art-page
Wednesday 29 January 2014
Little Intimacies
Hawk was washing his face when he noticed he didn’t have a
towel hanging on the back of the bathroom door as he usually does. It’s the
curse of doing laundry at our place.
“Red Panda, can I dry my face on your towel?” he asked
politely. I acquiesced. But I did so with an evil plan in mind.
I waited until he was done washing his face. I waited until he
crossed the bathroom to the other door where my towels hung. I waited until he
stroked his face with my towel once.
“Hawk! What are you doing!?” I shouted.
“You said—” he interrupted, which wasn’t part of my evil
plan.
I took it in stride.
“That’s the part I use to dry my butt!”
“What?” and he switched to the other towel.
“Hawk, I’m joking, how would I know which side I use on my
butt?” I asked.
The best part, though, is he’d started using my hair towel,
nice and squeaky clean, then switched to my body towel. So he very well might
have been drying his face on the very part of the towel that I’d vigorously
rubbed on my butt.
That’s intimacy for you.
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