Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.
—Phil Connors
Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.
—Phil Connors
I believe virtually everything I read, and I think that is what makes me more of a selective human than someone who doesn’t believe anything.
—David St. Hubbins
I don’t know what they have to say.
It makes no difference anyway.
Whatever it is, I’m against it.
—Quincy Adams Wagstaff
Fezzik: Why are you wearing a mask? Were you burned by acid or something like that?
Man in Black: Oh, no, it’s just they’re terribly comfortable. I think everyone will be wearing them in the future.
—The Princess Bride
Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.
—Phil Connors
The movie industry’s projections of the future are not always accurate. Space travel in 2001 wasn’t up to the standards of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the Los Angeles of 2019 wasn’t quite as grim as foreseen by Blade Runner.
Let’s hope that film makers were equally inaccurate in their projections of life in 2020 (Annihilation Earth), 2022 (Soylent Green), and 2026 (Metropolis).
I wonder what this does?
—Mayor Phlegmming
I don’t mind a parasite. I object to a cut-rate one.
—Rick Blaine
Hmmm… yousa point is well seen.
—Jar-Jar Benks
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
—Darth Vader
Inconceivable!
—Vizzini
The movie Blade Runner is set in Los Angles in November, 2019. While the city has made significant progress turning itself into the landscape of the movie, it still has a way to go. Give the Progressives a few more years.
Inconceivable!
What is truth?
There’s a new movie coming out called First Man. It purports to be the story of Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11. It omits Armstrong’s planting of the American flag on the Moon.
There’s a guest post over at Hollywood in Toto titled The Fatal Flaw in Today’s Woke Comedy that’s worth reading. Its thesis is that woke comedy tries to be didactic but fails because it has nothing to teach. Good comedy often succeeds because it does teach us something about ourselves. The Marx Brother’s Duck Soup, made during the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, teaches about the problems of authoritarian government. Mel Brook’s Blazing Saddles teaches about the underlying absurdity of racism. And both are very funny movies.
I often hear that it would be impossible to make a movie like Blazing Saddles or The Life of Brian in today’s Hollywood. Instead, we are seeing woke attempts at humor, but wokeness has no firm principles to stand on. This often results in the comedy missing its intended target and becoming self-mockery. While conservatives can still slip on banana peels, their often a harder target for comedy.
Real conservatives have principles, and these principles are based in reality. This frees us to be able to laugh at almost anything that is genuinely funny, including ourselves. Having principles frees the ego from inflexibility. But the woke person is constantly evaluating whether something is “didactic” in the correct way. They have to pull out their intersectional checklist before allowing themselves to laugh.
In “Life of Brian,” the Pythons did not mock Jesus. When he appears, it’s in the background, he only speaks scripture, and his portrayal is markedly respectful. Nothing else in the film is respectful—everything else is treated like a huge hilarity.
John Cleese said the reason they didn’t try to make Jesus funny is that they didn’t think he would have been funny. According to Cleese, he didn’t have an ego to bruise or be inflexible.
Yet Jesus was a complete and humble person. If he slipped on a banana peel and fell, he would have found it just as funny as anyone else. That’s because Jesus was self-forgetful. You can’t mock someone who gets the joke. So you can’t turn Jesus into a joke, because he’s not threatened by jokes.
Conservatives are similar in the sense that our principles actually help us see what is and isn’t funny. We don’t have to worry about the fluctuating woke checklist. So it isn’t didactic comedy that is really at issue, it’s the insane politics of leftism that are ruining comedy.
Read the whole thing.
While I was reading the post, I was reminded of a point that Jordan Peterson has made about another difference between the Left and the Right. As a society, we know when the Right goes too far. There’s a reasonably well defined limit associated with racism. (Which is interesting because a form racism now seems to be popping up on the Left.) Peterson notes that society does understand that the Left can go too far (i.e., the Killing Fields in Cambodia), but there doesn’t seem to be an understanding of what a corresponding limit on the Left should be.
There’s a joke about Progressives having to have double standards in order to have any at all. It’s funny because it teaches us something about human nature, but its lesson is incomplete. Wokeness has many more standards that only two, and they’re in competition with one another. And the upshot of that is often not really funny at all.
If it was inappropriate to cast Scarlett Johansson as a trans character, why would it be a good idea to cast Idris Elba as a character of Scottish/Swiss heritage?
There’s a post over at Cat Rotator’s Quarterly about finding a rubber duckie modeled on Charlemagne for sale at an Autohof. (H/T, Sarah Hoyt)
A rubber duckie version of Karl der Große from a painting by Dürer. And I recognized it at first glance, which probably means I have spent far too much time in the very early Middle Ages this past year or so.
I may have spent too much time contemplating England of the Middle Ages because when I read the post, my first reaction was, “Well, if it weighs the same as a duck, …”
Talk Like Yoda Day today is … yes …. mmmmm.
2001: A Space Odyssey was released 50 years ago, and we haven’t been back to the Moon for over 40 years.OTOH, social media companies are developing AI systems to watch over us.
Thursday! It can’t be! It’s too gruesome!
—Holly Golightly
I have devoted my lifetime to the study of many strange things, little-known facts which the world is perhaps better off for not knowing.
—Abraham Van Helsing
Humiliation and indifference, these are conditions every one of us finds unbearable–this is why the Coyote when falling is more concerned with the audience’s opinion of him than he is with the inevitable result of too much gravity.
—Chuck Jones
The actors and director who created This Is Spinal Tap are suing the film’s distributor for back royalties they claim are due to them.
The complaint alleges that between 1989 and 2006, Vivendi reported that the total income from soundtrack music sales was just $98.
It also claims that Vivendi reported that the four creators’ share of total worldwide merchandising income between 1984 and 2006 was $81, despite music and merchandise linked to the film racking up “tens of millions of dollars” in revenue.
None of the band’s drummers were available for comment.
Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today.
—Phil Connors