Merry Christmas, if you’re into that sort of thing!

Shadowplay:

Someone made an appropriate response to yon idiot’s version of the Last Jedi with all the women taken out: Saving Private Ryan with no men.

Surely the menchildren will just say that this demonstrates how only men can be heroes?

But surely the real Nazis would mostly have been edited out of history too? What with the vast majority being men?

Uhmmmm, how exactly does doing a fan edit on Saving Private Ryan taking out all the men result in erasing actual Nazis from actual history? There’s a jillion other movies, tv shows, comics, and assorted games still in existence that feature them; why/how would editing SPR affect those?

Though to be honest, if the whole ‘take all the women out of The Last Jedi’ re-edit was done by, say, a film student or movie critic, it would have made a much more interesting point about most modern movies. Taking out all the women in TLJ reduced the film’s running time to 1/4 of its original length; how many other popular films would be similarly reduced if all the women were taken out of them? And would their plots be noticeably affected by that erasure at all? I rather suspect TLJ is an outlier on that point. 🙁

This movie exercise can also be done with any other people group to show an impact too. Like, take all the PoC characters out of a movie that has some in it; does that erasure significantly affect the run time and/or plot cohesiveness of what’s left? And so on.

@RedSilkPhoenix

Though to be honest, if the whole ‘take all the women out of The Last Jedi’ re-edit was done by, say, a film student or movie critic, it would have made a much more interesting point about most modern movies.

Aye – it would have been an interesting idea. Wonder if anyone has done/will do so.

An interesting article on why the Woman’s Marches this year didn’t get much coverage – the executive summary is that the media get bored easily and are fairly lazy. 😛

@Shadowplay
I find that hard to believe given the media is still talking about Clinton’s emails and doing fluff pieces about the working class Trump supporters with economic anxiety.

@Kupo

Were it anyone else, I’d write the entire article off as justification for “women aren’t worth covering” (and not bother posting it – life’s too short).

But Shafer has always (in the past) been a very keen and unblinking recorder of the way the media works – his Slate columns from 2003 til he left in 2011 were pretty much required reading if you were even thinking of journalism.

People do change, I know. It’s one of the joys of getting older 😛 Be sad if he has.

Catching up on the comments. Thank you all for being here! Aaarggh! Even without new articles, the subjects change so quickly that I always find myself a day too late to join a conversation of interest! Cat names…cultural appropriation…drunken hookups…terfs at the marches…etc…LOL! Not that I believe I have any amazing insights on these, or other, subjects. Ah, well, keep it up, everyone!

Saving Private Ryan seems like American war propaganda to me anyway. there are much better film’s with more women and more complex ideas. For example Fury. which is horrible and awful but at least it is something more than ‘we must to rescue our American Boy and take him home so he can eat Mama’s apple pie’.

it is not really about killing nazis. it is propaganda. and I dont know about Americans. but hero’s of ww2 are not what we told. Stalin take old occupied counties of Russian empire and sends Soviet prisoners of war (Soviet cidizens!) to the Gulag when they return – punishment because they captured. Churchill use it to take control in Greece and punish rebel groups who actually chase nazis out!

@Shadowplay

*sigh* Of course, of course… can’t have too recent a driver installed, might muck up the most basic of OS functions! Man, gotta love race-to-the-bottom lowest-bidder mentality, don’tcha? Although I don’t think a Radeon chipset driver was my issue… my machine has an NVIDIA graphics card (acquired after my first overheated and died right out of the box). Having pored over tech forums trying to determine the cause of the problem, I came to realize that damn-near everything resulted in this same issue, because once the update hits 75%, it conducts the second reboot, which from what I understand is where the applications get imported. Being the old games enthusiast that I am (not all of which are available on Good Old Games or Steam), some where jury-rigged into functionality and if there was any conflict, it would have resulted in the same failure.

Ah well, at least my C drive is no longer junked up by a zillion games I haven’t played in years.

I also saw that story about the bozo who threatened CNN. I think I’m just going to copy and paste the comment I left at Wonkette in response to this take on the story: https://heavy.com/news/2018/01/brandon-griesemer-michigan-cnn-threat-shooting-arrested/

Two things I love about the article. The first is starting with any variation of “A 19-year-old man”–when I was 19, the guys I was at engineer school with who hadn’t turned 19 yet were still trying to grow beards that didn’t resemble pubic hair so they wouldn’t be carded at the pub. Yes, technically they had reached the age of majority, but if you’re still struggling to look older than you are, then I wouldn’t consider you an unqualified “man.” A young man maybe.

The second is just how emblematic this is of modern family dynamics. The son who has never known a world without the internet so ensconced within it that the real world of consequence never occurs to him. The parent so woefully detached from the goings-on of his child that he fumbles around for some explanation of why his kid isn’t the obvious 4chan troll he is.

As a society, we really do need to come to grips with the notion that the internet is quite real and what you say and do matters. There’s a reason I’m so deliberate in the sentences I construct and I tend not to use problematic words; I have no idea who could be reading this paragraph and take the wrong thing away from it. All of us have a responsibility for each other and that doesn’t stop just because you’re isolated to an electronic device.

@kupo

I find that hard to believe given the media is still talking about Clinton’s emails and doing fluff pieces about the working class Trump supporters with economic anxiety

You know, every time a new interview or puff piece on those 25-30% of Trump regime dead-enders (the same ones who supported Bush to the end), I’m reminded of that bit from “The Secret War of Lisa Simpson” where the Commandant of the military academy is reacting to Lisa’s desire to sign up:

Commandant: (to Lisa) Let’s go over this one more time just to make sure I understand the situation. (Clears Throat) You’re a girl.
Lisa: Yes.
Commandant: Oh, gosh darn it, I just don’t understand the situation. (Clears Throat) You’re a girl!?

Whoever it is that’s pursuing these columns clearly seems astonished that these people exist and continue to exist despite Trump’s ever-growing list of terrible behaviour. Yes, media, these are the people who listen to Rush Limbaugh day-in, day-out in their pick-up truck or their commute to work and live in the alternate universe Fox News has carefully fashioned for them. They will vote against their own economic and environmental best interests with a big shit-eating grin on their faces because their candidate has promised to “pwn the libs”. They’ve been so thoroughly conditioned (I’d say brainwashed) by their echo chambers that their politics has been literally reduced to “that which will hurt those I hate.”

These people are not new. Plenty of Bush-era blogs were documenting the phenomenon while you were cheerleading the Iraq War, media. Glad you’re catching up, but you need to get past the bewilderment phase and get to the doing something about them phase.

Y’think these two things are related? *rolls eyes*

Nope.

Superhero movies don’t get Oscar nominations – other than for visual effects and makeup.
The Academy can’t hold it’s self regarding wankfest over a movie that has no purpose other than to entertain, no matter how well it does it.

@Valentin

Most of it’s noms were for makeup, effects and music.

Heath Ledger did win Best Supporting Actor though – dying tends to give that to a person.

(And Wonder Woman wasn’t just the best movie of last year – it is the best movie of the last decade, so far as I’m concerned 😉 )

the bozo who threatened CNN

Actually, it’s about ethics in blaming journalism.