• sara reads the feed

    Crochet, power dynamics, and eavesdropping technology

    Most of my productive work these last couple of low mood days has been crocheting. Has anyone else noticed that crocheting is awesome? No? It’s just me? I literally invented it? Yeah well crochet is awesome.

    I’m tearing through a hex cardigan with amazing patience. I have no idea where this came from. I can say “I’m going so fast on this!” after I’ve spent like, four hours a day working on it for at least five days. And I mean it! I just don’t care that it’s taking so long to put together.

    I did care before I made my Buttons Collection. That’s a group of ten crocheted purses made with prefab fake leather bases, each in increasing complexity. They started out taking a long afternoon to make, then turned into week-long projects by the end. They actually *aren’t* the same stitch repeated endlessly, but in fact pretty complicated! So I don’t know why I gained this new degree of patience from making those, but I have.

    It’s super nice. Maybe I will have time to crochet a couple other smaller presents before Christmas.

    ~

    I reviewed Barbie. It’s one of my longer reviews; the unabridged version is 2000 words. There’s a more focused version on Letterboxd.

    I think that I managed to get across the complexity of thought and emotion that I hoped to impart, but I almost think it’s silly to engage on that level? Because once you do engage on that level, the movie’s a bit of a glass onion. It looks like a very layered movie to sell toys. If you peel through the layers of metaphor and aesthetic, you find…it wants to sell you toys.

    ~

    Mayim Bialik declined to host a Jeopardy event during the SAG-AFTRA strike. Subsequently she will no longer be hosting Jeopardy. (NPR)

    ~

    I’m suddenly seeing articles about how all our devices (Ars Technica) with microphones are eavesdropping (Variety) as if we didn’t know about it already.

    Confirmation does make it feel different, but on a practical level, nothing has changed.

    ~

    AJE talks about Javier Milei’s three-year rise to power as a bad-haired far-right Argentinian president. I was trying to pick a paragraph to pull quote but it’s kinda too big a picture to reduce it in that way.

    He came up in the desperation of COVID-19, but there are a lot of other factors, many of which rhyme with other populist figures.

    ~

    The US decided pandemic aid was good enough and let it run out. Homelessness has hit record highs. (NPR)

    ~

    Oppenheimer 4k Blu-rays are selling out in a time when retailers are trying to offload all their stock of physical media. (Variety)

    ~

    Larian Studios informs us that Baldur’s Gate III will never come to Game Pass. (Engadget) The reasoning is more than fair.

    Vincke says that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a “big game” that’s available for a “fair price.” He also touted the title’s lack of microtransactions and its complete story, saying “you get what you pay for.” To that end, a completionist run in Baldur’s Gate 3 takes more than 140 hours, according to HowLongToBeat. That breaks down to about 40 cents an hour, which seems like a good value to me.

    I agree. It’s a great value. This game is all I ever want from games. I’ve been doing the thing where I restart games about a thousand times before I actually finish it, so I think I’ve cleared 140 hours and I’m not even out of the first act. lol

    ~

    The difficulty we’re having discussing Israel and Palestine in America (NPR) reminds me of McCarthyism a bit, but I wasn’t actually alive for that so I don’t know if it’s a good comparison. Pretty grim though.

    ~

    Just kidding! Keep the nudity off Twitch. (Engadget) I had predicted that the updated policy would benefit pornbots rather than normal folk, but actually, AI-generated porn immediately swamped the system and they got rid of it again.

    ~

    Digby’s Hullaballoo challenges us to put our ferocious feelings into actions. It’s a fair challenge. But it also feels a bit like more finger-wagging from author Anand Giridharadas, a professional pundit. Saying, “You’re not doing the thing” is easy. Saying, “Come do the thing with me!” and following through is a lot harder.

    Most of us don’t have the skills for organization; many of us do not have the capability. A lot of leftists are disabled and, one way or another, stuck in our houses. We organize online, which is meaningful; I have been lucky to be adjacent to rather massive community movements to see it happen. I see how organizers (many of whom are also disabled in another way) bring people together with awe and admiration.

    I can name a few organizers in my community I’m grateful for, since I tend to orbit around romancelandia’s political activism at a distance, and they’re so much more motivational than a dude on Chris Hayes saying “you aren’t doing the thing.” And most of us honestly aren’t organizers, but followers. We wanna follow.

    Do the thing and invite us to join you, please?

    As physically quiet as the anti-Trumpism is, I expect an absolute tidal wave of quietly terrified voters in November. The question to me is whether our extant so-called democratic systems will matter. Reformation on the institutional level hasn’t been happening very quickly, has it?

     

  • movie reviews

    A Christmas Prince 2&3: Royal Wedding to Royal Baby (202X) ***

    I keep forgetting I watched these movies to review them. The fact I’m offering three stars for them to share is a Christmas miracle of true generosity (although all three stars were earned by the third movie). My charitability is a shining North Star.

    I gave the first of the franchise five stars because I really couldn’t think of a reason not to. It artfully dodged evoking emotions, producing the perfectly bland inoffensive Christmas vibe such movies are meant to evoke. Romance has a lot of very problematic tropes that are, in my opinion, most effectively used when you do not try to justify them or ground them in reality.

    I’m so comfortable with the princess fantasy; marrying into socioeconomic security and fancy dresses IS, in fact, an awesome fantasy.

    The problem is when you try to actually talk about the monarchy and get into monarchist fantasies. I mean, who does it really serve to have a fantasy of the “good king”? Is there any utility to the lower classes to fantasize about monarchy without violence? Sounds like a nice way to validate a shitty system.

    Royal Wedding was more of a mystery (I assume driven by the desire to use Rose McIver’s experience and audience from iZombie) and unfortunately not an especially good or memorable one. The second movie barely has King Richard present, which means it’s not really very romantic, and he’s mostly getting up to stuff that shows us how he’s one of the good members of the ruling class. The monarchy was making life heck for Aldovian citizens, and King Richard felt Just So Dreadful about it (frowny face), but luckily it turned out it was a scheming McBadguy and the monarchy is still cool. Phew!

    I thought I had zero patience for “one of the good ruling class” anymore, but I was more patient by the time the third movie came around. Mostly because there was lots of King Richard being romantic! I love baby tropes. Being concerned for his wife (who births a four-month-old baby, which I ALSO LOVE), getting another king’s help building the crib, sitting around trying to figure out The Baby Stuff, interfacing with the doctor.

    Turns out I’m okay just kinda shoving all the gross monarchist stuff behind the curtain if they will be so kind as to push my buttons about cozy family and the ongoing romance of marriage. It’s all I want, and it feels like it’s not that hard.

    Basically if I’m getting All Sara About The Politics, the romance isn’t good enough to distract me. The third movie pulled it off way better. It also gave us a really good amount of Alice Krige. For future Christmases, I might honestly revisit the Aldovia trilogy (70% to thirst over Alice Krige), but just kinda skip over the middle one.

    I would love if they put a pin in this series for now and brought us back to Aldovia in about 10 years to keep going.

    (image credit: Netflix)

  • credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
    movie reviews

    Barbie (2023) ***

    I try to give movies a pass on how enfranchised they are within a system because, well, when I say “a system” I mean “more or less reality,” which is just our society and government and etcetera. Movies are expensive and big-budget flicks only get made when they please the people with the money. People with money like the system, you see, because the system has made sure they have money. That’s just how the whole thing works!

    I will try to give movies a pass on failures of inclusion too. Generally, if a movie isn’t inclusive, you don’t *want* it to be. Not all writers are cut out for writing inclusivity. See: The Proposal including characters of Tlingit descent via Ryan Reynolds and Betty White.

    But when a story directly engages with The System the way Barbie (2023) does, you really have to judge it on that level. You gotta have a paranoid reading about the way that The System influenced its creation, creator, marketing, and the audience.

    If we don’t talk about late-stage capitalism in regards to Barbie, you might as well try to talk about Orange is the New Black without talking about lesbians, or Mona Lisa Smile without talking about lesbians, or U-Haul without talking about lesbians. You’re just missing the whole point. And usually lesbians!

    ~

    Actually let’s talk lesbians for a second.

    Have you ever seen a more sublime portrayal of fated mates on the screen as when Barbie and America Ferrera’s eyes met for the first time?

    Those two are *connected*. Whole ass red thread of fate. Their souls recognize one another.

    Ferrera’s character is also married to a man who is essentially a Ken, but I guess the queerest thing about this movie (besides a mouth-frothingly attractive Ncuti Gatwa) is the acknowledgment that Straight Business Women are allowed to acquire men for sperm reasons and then just kind of let them beach around the house or whatever.

    I’m 100% convinced Barbie and Ferrera’s character end up together, coparenting their daughter, and I’m not interested in any other readings.

    ~

    Since Barbie was one of the most popular movies of the year, I won’t try to sum it up. The plot is not exactly important. Plot here is a scaffold that interconnects thematic vignettes about Barbie, Ken, patriarchy, and/or admittedly great Barbie product jokes. Plot is how we get Barbie on a bench with a beautiful old woman while Ken is trying to perform surgery; the movie is about the beautiful old woman and the surgery more than how the characters arrived in those positions.

    I guess you could say, on a meta level, Plot is the Ken and “vibes about gender from a wealthy white American woman” is the real Barbie.

    Ultimately, we spend a lot of time working on a fairly simple thesis statement.

    This is the thrust of Barbie: Being a woman in a patriarchy is difficult, and if we acknowledge it, it’s way easier to function intelligently.

    Most of the movie sticks to the beginning part of the thesis.

    “Being a woman in a patriarchy is difficult.”

    That’s hard to disagree with, and the stylized story is confident you will agree. Most everyone can sympathize with it.

    The movie falters reaching its conclusion about how this should be handled. Women are brought back into the fold of sisterhood and anti-patriarchy by recognizing the conflict inherent in womanity.

    But like, that’s it?

    My brain started shouting “opiate of the masses” when I realized that the not-so-revolutionary conclusion of this was for basically nothing to change or improve. We’re just supposed to see the problem. And now it’s not better, but I guess it’s good enough?

    Given that Mattel makes plenty of money in The System, there’s no way that it could have been more subversive, which really highlights the conflict at the core of Barbie. The thing is, Barbie also tries to frame this conflict as a feature rather than a bug. Trying to tell a revolutionary story about patriarchy in the constraints of the patriarchy is deeply uncomfortable, so you’re supposed to revel in that, I guess.

    Someone like Greta Gerwig has surely made way more compromises than we’ve seen in Barbie to reach her accomplishments, and of course she wants The System to persist. It’s rewarding her. She just wishes being a woman in America’s high caste wasn’t so annoying sometimes.

    “I see you,” Greta Gerwig says into the mirror. “You’re having a really hard time succeeding in this patriarchy, Greta. You are succeeding, though.” Hashtag girlboss.

    ~

    I wouldn’t even talk about it if Mattel hadn’t already given us Barbie material I prefer.

    The gonzo, almost dadaist humor of Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse is my personal favorite. It’s definitely designed for the YouTube iPad generation of kids. Go check it out on YouTube, sincerely; the jokes flash by at the speed of memes in a show formatted somewhat like an especially silly reality show.

    Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse gave me an outstanding Ken who I just adored. As the only mechanic who seems even willing to engage with the whole shlonpoofa issue, he’s engineered everything cool the Dreamhouse has, and he’s amazing at enabling Barbie.

    Thanks to this Ken, and my own army of gay Kens when I was a kid, Ken was *never* “just Ken” to me, which made me really bounce off of the characterization of Ken by Ryan Gosling. I found his performance near-unwatchable, which I assume is entirely personal preference, possibly because I’m so offended by making Ken a brainless slimeball when we know he’s so good with cars and Barbie’s robot closet.

    Anyway, there wasn’t a page of Barbie (2023) that was half as revolutionary as Barbie as The Princess and the Pauper, which took Mattel’s permission to use Barbie’s likeness and dived head-first into a plot that wasn’t joking around about caste. Literally, Princess Barbie realizes the caste issues in her kingdom and starts changing it by the end. Realistic? Nah. But it’s so much more subversive than anything I spent my time squinting discontentedly at for the last couple hours.

    ~

    The feminism Barbie features is one mostly concerning to a caste of American high enough to actually *buck* traditional gender roles. Binary gender is enforced by violence. If you’re outside that binary, like being a male fashion doll, we already know this isn’t a story about people economically vulnerable to such violence. The idealized men paralleling Barbie are allowed to have feminine qualities, but remain wealthy. That’s the lack of inclusivity in Barbie: a lack of money.

    If you have enough money to buy a Barbie doll, but especially if you have enough money to care about historic Barbie dolls and their clothes, you can be included in this movie too.

    Again, pointing back to earlier in my review, I wouldn’t even mention it if the movie were not about The System (it’s a toy! brand! movie!), and American capitalism predominantly divides its castes by wealth at this point. The problems of the ruling class are not the problems of everyone else. The concerns of Mattel executives are extremely obvious in this toy movie, but they would really prefer if you think it’s about gender, actually. Do you see how revolutionary they are about gender?

    Gender stuff is not radical here. An excessive amount of time is spent on Ken’s personal arc, and my sibling argues that the Kens in general have a far more interesting and more concrete plotline than Barbie herself does. I got a real feeling of “feminism is also worrying about the men <3” and it’s like. You guys. We are *not* far enough in A Feminism where we need to worry about men being marginalized. Not even in a metaphoric sense.

    Ultimately, as we all know, this is a movie meant to sell toys, and here Barbie has done a whole lot of work and spent a lot of money and monologued a lot of words in order to make it look thoughtful enough to sell toys to people who weren’t buying them enough.

    ~

    It kinda raises the question: Why in the world bother engaging with The System if you’re not going to have anything real to say about fixing the pinch points? Why wouldn’t you have the most glancing thought about how gender disparity is always about wealth and who is allowed to have it? What kind of opiate of the masses nonsense is “seeing you”?

    That’s not a rhetorical question meant to make a point! I have an answer.

    There’s nothing capitalism won’t monetize, and that includes criticism of itself. In fact, the media environment means there are more people engaging with media *intelligently* than ever, and folks can’t be assuaged as easily by the same ol, same ol. You gotta get to the next level. If the people love meta material analyzing capitalism, then they will surely love to buy meta material criticizing capitalism. It’s just not allowed to have any real teeth.

    Barbie really had critics *frothing* over its level of self-aware meta, which means Mattel and Gerwig hit the sweet spot perfectly.

    As my sibling said, the snake eats its tail.

    ~

    The conclusion that I arrived at is that Barbie is deeply nihilistic.

    There is nothing better than this, you see. You can live in the toy land and pretend everything is fine, or you can grow old and die. Either way, we see you! We see your struggles. We see you, and that is it. Beginning, middle, end.

    Ideas and brands live forever.

    Barbie’s got blinders on, and it loves it that way. Don’t you? Gosh, I should really pull my old Totally Hair Barbie out of the attic. I’d love to buy a Weird Barbie. I’ll grab one on my way home from the gyno.

    ~

    You’ll note I still gave the movie three stars, even though I’ve written *cough cough* number of words criticizing it. Three stars is pretty warm tbh, considering that the movie is in opposition with my personal values in many ways and I found its pacing uneven.

    It’s got some really funny moments. Ken’s song is genuinely good. I would never complain about the art direction. There are so many performances I adore, like President Barbie. I am smitten with the transition between worlds forever. Can I do it a few times?

    Plus, Alan is my favorite queer inclusion in the movie. A male doll wearing the pink jumpsuit and conspiring with the Barbies?

    There’s real heart to this, even if the heart exists in a bleak wasteland, and that’s kinda relatable.

    Gerwig has stated (to paraphrase her) that she really fully plans on succeeding in The Man’s World, and Barbie not only furthers that goal for her, but also serves as another stepping stone in the Margot Robbie Girlboss Turns Big IP Feminist Journey. Which is…interesting? Deeply unappealing to me but kind of compelling? I guess what I’m saying is, I’d still rather have another Greta Gerwig movie to chew over, frowny-faced, than a Zack Snyder movie. Hashtag girlboss.

    But I find the limitations of Barbie so bleak, it was actively unpleasant to watch sometimes. Like I think they would have made this movie on Ferenginar without feeling bad about anything, you know? (If you don’t know what I mean, it’s a Star Trek reference. I’m sorry.) Realizing that the misery wasn’t really going to go anywhere just made it feel grim. It felt self-conscious more than self-aware. They didn’t even show Barbie and America Ferrera kissing, and there were *so* many opportunities.

    There’s a lotta cheap representation, but at least this one was well-made cheap representation that actually paid marginalized actors to depict their own representation.

    There’s a lot of value in being a movie worth discussing.

    So as a movie-lover, it’s not a movie I want (my takeaway was unpleasant), but I think it holds an interesting place as a mirror reflecting the time-and-place of America in 2023, and it’s interesting to me as a reviewer (I love analyzing!). I appreciate seeing something made with effort and intent. I’m probably never going to watch it again.

    (image credit: Warner Bros. Pictures)

  • sara reads the feed

    Editing my bad mood, remembering I’m clueless, and family stuff

    I made the featured image on this post a stock photo of a panda (thanks Depositphotos) because I’m grumpy and it’s harder to be grumpy around pandas.

    ~

    Yesterday I thought I was calling Dean Phillips stupid on Bluesky, only to realize it was only a mechanical turk shilling for him. Then I felt really bad calling a mechanical turk stupid and I felt especially clueless for forgetting nobody ever stands somewhere they can catch the mud they deserve.

    One thing I hate about Reality is the layers of protection between the people who deserve to get cussed at and me, the person who wants to cuss at them. I have a very narrow strip of humanity that I believe truly, in my soul, deserve to be cussed at, and yet another empty suit running an ego parade to agitate the base against the incumbent (who i don’t. even. like.) is someone who absolutely deserves to be cussed at.

    But he’s not even doing his own dirty work, of course. I always suspect a blowhard like Dean Phillips (I hope he has a google alert on his name) is a bad actor benefiting from outside governments’ funding knowingly or otherwise. Knowingly or otherwise, the man is stupid, and goddammit I want to be standing somewhere I can tell him directly. I want to look that man in the eye (through my phone screen ideally because the outdoors? yikes) and say, “You are wasting everyone’s time and money and you are BAD FOR THE COUNTRY, stupid.”

    Telling the ruling class that they suck is actually a really important civic duty.

    Which is why they hire people to stand around and get told *they* suck instead.

    I always know there’s a reason I keep myself reined in on my natural levels of grumpiness, and it’s because I always regret taking out my grumpiness on anyone. I like being a bit of a grumpy person. I just really don’t think the vast majority of humanity has earned it. Everyone (who isn’t Dean Phillips) is a potential friend and current neighbor.

    ~

    I finally posted my review for Lucy. I had to edit it a few times before posting because I have *really* strong feelings about older men taking advantage of younger women, to the point I wrote entire fiction series about it. I managed to make things less rageful I think? Well, less expletive riddled.

    I once knew an author whose fetish was transparently abuse against women; he often spoke of how much he loved seeing their strength by how they prevailed. How their bodies could be liquefied by the abuse, yet they would keep going.

    This was an author I knew through a professional space. I looked around at his online presence and the fact his fetish was beating women was very obvious. It was in his art, his books, everything. Worse, he tried to involve everyone in his fetish. He always tried to turn forum discussions toward this violence and how hot it is for powerful women to stand through it.

    I made him my personal project. I rallied support on the board and I wouldn’t stop commenting on everything he posted. I made such a public stink about this man fetishizing abuse of women, and trying to abuse women on the internet, that an extremely complacent white dude admin finally banned him.

    And that admin then scolded me publicly because he didn’t like I’d put him in a position where he was forced to act. I told him he should be grateful I forced him to act like a decent human. And then I threw a forum party for the women who were safer *despite* the actions of *extremely whiny and complacent* men who were happy to enable this shit.

    I have zero room in my heart for men like that. No patience. No quarter. They deserve to retreat in shame.

    So I kinda gotta avoid that stuff when I can’t go flaming sword about it? Because I *want* to go flaming sword, but the forum situation was one place where I could actually be effective. I have no power against Hollywood directors. I am just some guy.

    Hence Lucy is simply a bad movie by an uncreative fool who hates women and that’s gotta be where I leave it.

    ~

    A review of Rebel Moon from Variety isn’t exactly enthusiastic. I don’t trust Variety to know genre well enough to tell the difference between a stale trope and an old trope executed in a new way. I’m gonna have to watch it and see what I think.

    Zack Snyder is kind of an odd duck. I don’t think I’ve seen a movie of his I would necessarily call “good,” and I think we have vastly different opinions about humanity that leave us little room for overlap in taste. But his movies are interesting, if nothing else. I usually enjoy trying to figure out wtf he was thinking enough to watch em twice.

    ~

    The Marginalian talks about being thin-skinned as a kind of permeable membrane that means we feel the amount of universe inside of us more. This is my kind of drug logic, I love it. Yesss just call me a walking biphospholipid membrane why don’t you

    ~

    We, culturally, lost our dear parasocial friend Andre Braugher to aggressive lung cancer. Love for the Braugher family. Sooo much love.

    ~

    A noteworthy portion of pandemic relief funding went to the arts. (NPR) I would be interested to know how much of that funding reached the working class.

    ~

    I blogged about alloparents in a previous Sara Reads the Feed, and here NPR shares lots of heartwarming alloparenting stories from people patiently indulging white americans who didn’t know it takes a village.

    ~

    NPR also reports that Prince Harry has won one of his cases against the British media.

    ~

    This Tor dot Com review of A Study in Drowning sounds interesting, so I’m putting the review here to come back around and try the book later. I’m way more interested in books that have a supportive story about the artist and methodology, tbh. I’m way more interested in methodology than hooks.

    That said, doesn’t it kinda suck how many of us have to put lipstick on our trauma and then market it to other people so we can make a living?

    ~

    The Eyewall has the funnest read about blowing up tornadoes.

    ~

    More from Carmack about classic Doom. (Ars Technica) He’s had a lot to say the last couple years, so if these insights are valuable to you beyond nostalgia, definitely do a googlin.

    As for the nostalgia element? Listening to Carmack talk is like sitting down with an old computer guy who was programming using punch cards. If you haven’t had the privilege, I’ll tell you that you can indeed get grains of interesting information out of them, around an overwhelming onslaught of happy old nerd man just kinda…talking. The nostalgia is never enough to get me through it, lol. I say this with *enormous* love for happy old nerd men, several of which alloparented me from 18-24 years old.

    ~

    Federal regulators might crack down on Starbucks’s union busting. (NYT)

    ~

    Articles about an A24 Death Stranding movie keep coming across my timeline. I don’t think I’ve mentioned on Egregious that this is one of my all-time favorite video games against *incredibly* steep competition, like Doom. The cutscenes of Death Stranding alone form an outstanding flick, and they know it, so this will be an original story in the same universe. I’m totally open to it, but apprehensively so, as any elder video game fan approaches movie adaptations of the games we like.

    ~

    Tor dot Com actually has a lotta good reviewers on board. I loved this read about Gene Wilder’s Wonka as one of the fey.

  • movie reviews

    Lucy (2014) *

    Trigger warning for abuse.

    The director of Lucy, Luc Besson, is a disturbing man to google (The Daily Beast). Stories from the shoot of The Professional are potentially triggering in regards to abuse of children, and I won’t recite them here. Suffice it to say, push-back from a young Natalie Portman’s parents and Jean Reno (the actor playing the titular character) prevented Portman from being put into horribly exploitative positions.

    In real life, Besson met a 12-year-old girl and began dating her openly when she was fifteen. They married two years later. Although there are more allegations of abuse toward Besson from several women, a French court dismissed them, and I don’t think we need to open a conversation about those allegations when his grooming, assault, and marriage to a girl so young is fact. I mean, it’s enough. It’s way more than enough.

    In any case, if you look across his filmography, you’ll see a man who often features sexualized young heroines getting beaten to crap. The greater context of his life makes his films seem like visualizations of cruel fantasies.

    Lucy is another iteration of this theme with Scarlett Johansson at the front. She’s a Woody Allen supporter (Fandomwire), and I’m never quite sure what to make of people who seem to gravitate toward the more abusive directors. Here, ScarJo is the model upon which Besson’s love of wounded women is inflicted, and I’m mostly grateful she was almost thirty-years-old shooting the movie.

    To paraphrase the elevator pitch for Lucy, a young woman visiting Taiwan becomes a drug mule and then sorta turns into a superhero when the bag breaks open inside of her.

    From the beginning, Lucy is depicted as a trembling antelope about to be slaughtered by cheetahs. The plot is structured to have her writhing sexily in pain until she’s on enough drugs to simply become bruised and covered in blood and robotic, which is weirdly (from personal experience) also extremely attractive to men who enjoy sexy abused women.

    I once knew an author whose fetish was transparently abuse against women; he often spoke of how much he loved seeing their strength by how they prevailed. How their bodies could be liquefied by the abuse, yet they would keep going. Abusive men enjoy seeing hurt women prevail to keep getting hurt, as with Joss Whedon and his bevy of abused characters and colleagues.

    This kind of man is not good at storytelling. There isn’t enough empathy for whole characters or humility for feedback. And Lucy isn’t a good movie.

    I didn’t understand it when I originally watched it because it was 2014 and I hadn’t done that many drugs yet. I’ve done drugs now. So I can tell you that the fake-science handwavium of this flick is entirely to prop up a story about how awesome drugs are. Yes. The plot of Lucy is, “Oh my God, I feel awesome on drugs. I know everything. I’m so smart. Drugs are great. It’s gonna kill me, but what a way to die!”

    This is drenched in buckets of pseudointellectualism, using the voice of Morgan Freeman (link to overview of abuse allegations on Variety) to narrate stuff about nature and predators and prey. The movie arrives at the most drug-logic conclusion ever: It’s about “time.” None of us would exist if not for “time.” Yeah, okay, Besson.

    Lovers of psychedelics will be familiar with the train of thought surrounding unity with the universe, the smallness of the individual, etc. Whether or not those thoughts have any validity, the contribution of people like Luc Besson to this vision is sort of like this dark, nasty, caustic side. He’s a guy with crappy fantasies having a good (for him) trip and I don’t want him in my vibe zone, you know?

    Possibly he wrote this after a too-large dose of shrooms, and someone would have been doing us all a favor by putting the coke-covered screenplay in the trash with the empty sheet of LSD tabs.

    I genuinely enjoy the part of Lucy where most dialogue is non-English and not subtitled. I feel like I’m a bad reviewer if I don’t call out things someone did well, and Besson’s ability to storytell beyond language barriers is an impressive feat to this monolingual country-locked American. He’s very visual and the confluence of all the drug-visuals and drug-logic (the movie even looks more or less like an acid trip) works on that aesthetic level.

    Besson truly has aesthetic skill in abundance. The Fifth Element coasts primarily on his ability to cast attractive, charismatic actors and draw upon (genuinely brilliant) French retrofuturism, even when the story is sloppy nonsense that also mostly serves to get us to the moments where Milla Jovovich whimpers in a bloodied ball.

    But god, Lucy is kinda embarrassing. Because doing that many drugs isn’t awesome; it only feels awesome because you are a chemical creature and you’re punching the button that gives you the good chemicals. Dying young and sexy like Lucy isn’t cool. You’re not really a genius when you’re drooling on your bathroom floor, talking about how the key is time, and it doesn’t gain any real potency when you put a forty million dollar budget behind it.

    There are so many other drug-related movies I’d prefer watching to this one. Lucy can go in the bin with Requiem for a Dream.

  • sara reads the feed

    The headache persists, the bad mood persists, I’m just Astarion’s boyfriend now

    As I mentioned yesterday, I’m pulling back on visits with my bffs caffeine and weed so my mood is sourer than hag testicles.

    I think I’d been eating food that had gone a little funny. My sense of taste has honestly never been the same since I got covid in 2022 – although it did mostly return – and I’m never sure if food Actually Tastes Bad or if I just Think Food Tastes Bad. So I was eating bad carton eggs for a couple days.

    I’ve discovered my digestion is tied to everything else in my body – basically if my digestion goes bad for any reason, *everything else* will go bad in a dramatic way. I had a *really* bad night two nights ago, and dodgy eggs would account for some of the issues. I am on lowkey gastric rest and reducing digestive stressors (like caffeine) so I will be okay.

    I hope you’re in the mood for me to be grumpy about the news because I sure am.

    ~

    Literally right now I am just kinda playing BGIII because existing is exhausting and I can barely move. Video games are the ideal distraction for a shitty Sara.

    I made one of my book characters as a cleric, and we hooked up with Astarion, and I’m good now. I feel like life is good.

    ~

    I’ve been haunted by this New Yorker article about so-called self-driving cabs ever since I read it. Did you know that those self-driving cabs without anyone visibly behind the wheel may (probably) still have a human worker actually hidden in a compartment inside the car?

    ~

    According to Netflix’s streaming data, JLo’s about as much the star of 2023 as Margo Robbie.

    It’s fun seeing Netflix release these numbers. Amazon would never do it for their book authors, but for…gosh, I was gonna say years, but it’s honestly at least a decade now…self-published and ebook-first titles have been vastly outpacing their traditional publishing brethren in audience. Indies could sprint circles around new releases from major household name authors sometimes, and nobody would ever report on it because those ephemeral numbers simply don’t count.

    Efforts from various publishing forces have kneecapped this to a degree, but there are still indies that the greater world had never heard of making 6+ figures *each month*, completely dominating entertainment in many households, just like JLo.

    And I bet JLo doesn’t compare to the viewerships of some independent youtubers or TikTokers.

    Will there ever be a cultural reconciliation of this media environment, or is the money and power traditional media companies hold total enough to keep this shit second-tier forever?

    I don’t actually have to care anymore, lol. I bounce off of everything popular no matter the distribution lines. The “entertainment media as social bonding” part of my brain is utterly broken. And since I’m only trying to serve my own creations to an audience of roughly 10 reliable buds, I’ve got zero horses in the game. Neigh? Nay.

    ~

    Twitch walked back their thing about nudity a little bit.

    My prediction is that it’s like Tumblr, where they got rid of nudity long enough to drive away all the interesting, disabled, queer adult creators, but they’ll let the porn bots back.

    ~

    Trains in Poland were designed with ransomware and got bricked by the creator. (Ars Technica)

    ~

    Since we learned the government has been spying on Apple’s push notifications without warrants, Apple now has the same policy as Google: law enforcement needs a warrant. (Engadget)

    ~

    Variety asks, where are the major nominations for Ava DuVernay’s movie?

     

  • sara reads the feed

    I’m in a dreadful mood, say grumpy things about movies, and kick rocks

    I’m working on a couple reviews right now that feel a little too big for my normal review format. Plus, they aren’t romcoms, so it doesn’t feel urgent.

    Birds of Prey: The Fabulous Emancipation of Harley Quinn was the last movie I saw in the theaters before the 2020 pandemic shutdowns, and for that reason alone, I hadn’t revisited it in ages. There was just a big flip in my life shortly after it came out. Now I feel like I can’t review it without talking about Suicide Squad, The Suicide Squad, and Barbie, because the four movies are all part of Margo Robbie’s search for a big IP girlboss feminism outlet.

    Lucy (2014) is another movie I saw in theaters. This one comes from the days where I would watch anything in the theater, and I didn’t know Luc Besson married a fucking child, so I thought seeing another action movie from the guy who made The Fifth Element would be interesting. Lucy completely baffled me in 2014. Even knowing I would hate it, I wanted to know what I missed, so I watched again.

    I’ve now taken enough drugs and encountered enough rapist abusers to parse the movie, and I have a *real* angry review to write about it. I just don’t know where to start when I’m this disgusted.

    Anyhoo those reviews will be coming at *some* point.

    ~

    My mood is really negative today because I’m having health problems. I need to take time to reorient myself in love and peace because I’m also deciding to withdraw on Substances (namely mood-boosters cannabis and caffeine) so it’s going to be a lotta feeling real crappy for a minute. Right now, you’re getting the crabbiest read of the news possible.

    ~

    Balloon Juice has a current covid news roundup. The tl;dr is that you should be masking again if you stopped.

    ~

    Variety rounds up tributes to Andre Braugher from Brooklyn 99 cast members. My heart hurts, so I’m glad I got to laugh at this story.

    “Insecure” showrunner Prentice Penny, who also wrote for “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” recalled an on-set memory between himself, Crews and Braugher: “He was so warm with us and then when a white person would walk by, he’d look serious again. He then leaned in and said ‘Gotta keep ‘em on they toes.’”

    ~

    Brian Cox reads a poem by Palestinian teacher Refaat Alareer. Sorry for the twt link.

    ~

    Guttation is one of my favorite things my plants do, and I don’t actually love this art. (Colossal) It feels meant to evoke gross-out feelings with the drippy look of the statues, and the amount of guttation depicted.

    To me, guttation is a graceful thing, a happy thing my plants do when I’m tending them well. I have occasionally reached out my tongue to take a tiny drop of guttation off a philodendron leaf. I don’t poison my plants with pesticides or anything, and a tiny drop has a lot of flavors from something inedible, and it feels precious to be able to taste it. Or I will take the guttation on my finger and see how it streaks like a tear. Guttation feels sweet and intimate to me, but these sculptures feel loud, gross, and visceral–something I’d enjoy, probably, if framed by anything besides guttation.

    ~

    Extremely rich man James Cameron is talking about his jerk-off project to people who just can’t wait to hear what extremely rich man is doing to waste money next. (Variety) Apparently Avatar 3 is going to be more complex. I assume that means he’s going to double down on being racist and tell an even worse story about it.

    If you’d like to hear about how he wasted money in the past, there’s also an article about hiring short people to make his Titanic set look bigger. I feel like there’s a dirty joke waiting to happen here. I’ll get back to you later.

    ~

    This article about ChatGPT getting “lazy” (Ars Technical) is thought-provoking to me, because marketing really, really wants us to attribute humanlike qualities to ChatGPT and it’s succeeding. We talk about large language models hallucinating, we conveniently like to pretend it isn’t stealing from everyone, and people keep acting like these things learn.

    It’s similar to the fallacies that lead us to compare human brains to computers, when they don’t work similarly even a little bit. Psychological pareidolia is natural to us; we humanize everything instinctively. It’s adorable. Marketing is taking advantage of it, and we’re just letting them do it.

    ~

    Variety again: Anne Hathaway is right to say that she couldn’t have done Barbie instead of Margot Robbie, though I think Hathaway does have the look/charm. She’s simply not on the girlboss feminist arc Margot Robbie has been. Literally only Margot Robbie, coming out of her experiences with WB as Harley Quinn, could have made Barbie the way it turned out, and people seem really happy with its level of engagement with gender issues.

    They also note that Hathaway would have been Black Cat in Raimi’s Spider-Man 4, which means there’s no universe where we don’t get subjected to an extremely shallow portrayal of a feline-themed comic book character by extremely flat Hathaway, who is much more Barbie Comics than DC Comics. (No insult.)

    ~

    Chain pharmacies are bootlickers who will give cops anything they want without a warrant. (Engadget)

    ~

    “Ew, animal sacrifice from ancient cultures!” says the title of a blog published within a culture that lives off meaningless mass death. (Ars Technica)

    It’s a good read after the title, though.

    Ancient writings describe equid sacrifices in the Mediterranean, sometimes involving hundreds of animals, but there had previously not been much evidence to back this up. There were far fewer than a hundred at Casas del Turuñuelo, although most were equids. The ages of all sacrifices at their time of death were estimated by signs of wear on their teeth. Most were found to have been male working animals in the prime of life, and eight of them had wear caused by iron bits found in their mouths. This provides further evidence for them having been used for war, transportation, or agricultural work.

    Something that stood out in Phase 1 was that the equids in that phase had evidently been sacrificed in pairs or at least positioned that way postmortem. The archaeologists suggest they might have pulled carts together before death. There was also an instance in Phase 2 where the necks of two skeletons were crossed in the center of what was once a courtyard. Whether this was part of a ritual associated with either a deity or the afterlife of a deceased owner is unknown.

    Why horses, in particular, were sacrificed remains an open question. The researchers think there is a possibility that they were used in a funerary sacrifice so the deceased could enter the afterlife alongside their loyal companions. This has been evidenced in other ancient cultures, such as the Scythians of what is now Russia and Ukraine, who would sacrifice horses at a funeral. Whether this was the case for at least some of the equids at Casas del Turuñuelo is still a mystery.

    ~

    The New Yorker spends more time reviewing Wonka than I would bother, and it sounds like what it looked like in the trailers.

    ~

    My absolute favorite read of the week was this article about a mother helping her local addict community with harm reduction. It’s wonderful, meaningful work, and NPR handled it with great sensitivity.

    Renae occasionally monitors illegal drug use at her home for Christina and a few dozen other people she’s grown close to over the years. It’s an informal, rarely discussed version of the controversial overdose prevention centers, also known as supervised consumption sites, where trained staff supervise people using drugs. Those clinics are endorsed by the American Medical Association and other leading medical groups but condemned by critics who say they sanction, even endorse, drug use.

    Heavy but good read. Very human. Very loving.

    ~

    Fun photos over here on Al Jazeera English: A new kind of quinceañera celebration — for Mexico’s elderly