Tag: media

Review: Rogue One

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story strikes me as being an example of fan fiction that just happens to have been produced by the owners of the intellectual property. I say this as the highest form of compliment.

Fan fiction started off with the Star Trek community, as authors (mostly female) distributed “slash” stories (like Kirk/Spock) detailing gay relationships between principal characters, and other salacious ideas that would never have been approved by producers or censors. But as fandom became more popular (and respectable), fanfic evolved to a more professional quality, and fans even got to making their own video productions, like James Cawley’s Phase II (creating new adventures for the original Star Trek characters years before J.J. Abrams’ 2009 film).  But the main thing these productions had in common is that they were creating original stories for established characters (or an established setting) that the owners of the property didn’t want to produce themselves. But Paramount Pictures, the owners of Star Trek, seem to have reversed their tolerance for such things, quashing the recent fan project Star Trek: Axanar with a lawsuit.

Which from a fan perspective is too bad, because these ideas help expand the concept of what is possible in a fictional setting and ask questions not answered in official “canon.”

For example: What happened in the nearly 20 years between Star Wars Episodes III and IV?

The Star Wars prequels established that Palpatine had been planning to build his Death Star years before he became Emperor, and before Luke Skywalker was born. Rogue One is the story of how the new Rebel Alliance plotted to gain the plans to the space station, hoping to learn its structural flaws. (‘Spoiler alert- they found one.’ -Jimmy Kimmel) It centers on former Rebel Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) who, like Rey in Episode VII, is a strong, likable heroine who is at the center of the action rather than being a support character or damsel in distress. She is recruited by Rebel intelligence officer Cassian Andor (Diego Luna), who wants her to find her father, an Imperial scientist, but doesn’t tell her exactly why. Their mission goes south but they learn that the Empire has just completed its “planet killer” space station, and when the Rebel Alliance refuses to organize, Jyn resolves to find the plans to the base herself. As such, the movie takes cues from those old World War II movies where commandos have to perform a secret mission in occupied Europe, and you know someone is getting killed, you just aren’t sure who and how.

This greater realism (relative to Star Wars) is increased by the fact that apart from Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones!), there are no Jedi in the piece, although martial arts star Donnie Yen plays a variant of the Blind Master archetype, who was a monk at one of the last temples of the Force. This shift in emphasis is important in at least a minor way, given that while you did have a vast universe to explore with the Star Wars setting, the stories so far have mainly been about the journey of a prospective Jedi into mastery – while Luke (and Rey) had a large group around them with their own stories, once they developed their powers, they started spending more time away from the team. The prequels, meanwhile, were almost entirely about the Jedi Order.

So that in itself makes Rogue One, as launching point for Lucasfilm’s “anthology” concept, very valuable.  It ISN’T really stand-alone, given that the story ends almost exactly at the point where Star Wars (Episode IV: A New Hope) begins. And again, we know how that worked out, and it isn’t too hard to guess what happens to these characters. But they are given a certain level of depth that the main series (especially the prequels) were not known for. Put another way, if you have an acquaintance who for some reason can’t stand Star Wars, you might ask them to see Rogue One with you. It works as a Star Wars story, and it works outside of being a Star Wars story. I hope it is a sign of things to come.

Fuck You, CNN

So in the course of everybody Monday-morning quarterbacking The Election, I saw this one thing on Facebook from CNN titled “How Gary Johnson and Jill Stein helped elect Donald Trump.”

Let me just print out the link, cause it took almost 20 minutes to find this article on CNN’s CRAPPY search engine.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/10/politics/gary-johnson-jill-stein-spoiler/index.html

This is basically another review of the point that “if all of Jill Stein’s voters and half of Gary Johnson’s voters had gone to Clinton” she would have won Florida, and Michigan, AND Pennsylvania.

Which does of course assume that it violates the laws of God and Reality to vote for someone to vote for someone other than a Republican or Democrat. Which assumes that Hillary Clinton actually earned the votes of the public. Which she did not.  Which assumes that it was not more critical that 44.4% of the voting age population did not turn out AT ALL.  Which assumes it didn’t make a little bit of difference that 42% of white women voted for TRUMP.  White women. Isn’t that Hillary’s demographic? Isn’t that like 42% of the turkeys voting for Thanksgiving? I think liberals will agree with me when I look at that New York Times graphic and say “WHAT THE FUCK???”

And while we’re at it, all you liberals who wanna guilt-trip me over voting for Gary Johnson: Would it make you cry more if I accepted your premise that NOT voting for Dolores Umbridge is the same as choosing Voldemort? Fine then. I voted for Trump. (I voted for Johnson.) I ELECTED TRUMP. (Y’know, even though Clinton won my state anyway.) In fact, I killed the Lindbergh Baby. AND Ned Stark. You happy now?

Just the other day, a hardcore conservative Christian friend on Facebook posted that “Nevada would have went to Trump if he had received the votes that Gary Johnson received. Colorado would have went to Trump if he had received the votes that Gary Johnson received. New Mexico ditto. Minnesota ditto. Maine ditto. Popular vote total ditto.” And then he went, “I am glad that your (Libertarian) votes didn’t allow Hillary to win, but that last entry would at least have kept some of her supporters from being so disruptive.”

And I wrote: “Thank you so SO much. I am going to bring up this point EVERY SINGLE TIME some liberal wants to read me the riot act cause I voted for Gary Johnson. Because we all know that if Hillary had won the Electoral College, your side would be calling me an Antichrist and their side would be buying me a beer.”

But of all the statistics, there’s one we haven’t gone over: According to their Wikipedia entry, as of 2015, CNN was available in over 96 million households in the United States. Officially, as of April 2016, CNN is no longer a news network.  CNN was simply one of the most prominent media outlets to start covering Donald Trump’s campaign as an actual political decision and not a cheesy publicity stunt, a decision that many people have cause to regret, possibly including Donald Trump. They were of course, not alone. Les Moonves, CEO of CBS was famously quoted during this campaign as saying that Trump’s presence in the campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

CNN, as opposed to the more openly liberal MSNBC or the openly conservative Fox, hired the Trump sycophant Jeffrey Lord as a regular discussion panelist, basically as the house organ of the Trump campaign. In an profile from Vanity Fair,  Lord said he had gotten the job after Trump taped an interview with Anderson Cooper in July 2015. “According to Lord, “Trump says something to the effect that, ‘Every time you have me on, you have someone following me, one of those Bush guys, who hate me. Why don’t you put on one of those guys who likes me?’” (CNN declined to comment when asked to confirm the story.) Soon after, Lord was on air. And within months, he was the only Trump supporter on regularly with people like David Axelrod, James Carville, and Ana Navarro—people whom Trump himself called “killers,” always trying to bury Jeff. “Those panels, those are horrible panels. I feel so sorry for Jeffrey Lord,” he once told a rally in Davenport, Iowa.” The article later mentions an episode caught on camera: “One recent evening, as Lord and his CNN colleagues were on air discussing the Republican convention, his cell phone rang behind his desk. As Cooper gave him a strange look and tried to keep the cameras on the other panelists, Lord says that he listened to an irate Trump, fuming that the rest of the panel was criticizing his convention. “You tell Anderson Cooper,” Lord recalled Trump saying. Seconds after, Trump hung up and the cameras panned back to Lord, who grinned at Cooper: “Well, Anderson, as a matter of fact, I’ve just spoken to Donald Trump, and he has a message for you!”

CNN more famously hired as panelist Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, whom Trump let go after being charged with simple battery against a Breitbart campaign reporter.  Lewandowski was still under the non-disclosure agreement he’d signed as part of Trump’s team, and as a CNN commentator was still receiving severance pay from the Trump campaign.

But according to one of your staff, CNN, it was Jill Stein and Gary Johnson that put the republic in danger.

WE did this? Not YOU??

You did make certain ideologies unacceptable. Followers of right-wing classical liberalism might as well be the last believers in a hokey old religion. Democratic socialists are just kooks. But Trump calling Mexicans rapists and drug smugglers? Saying that we need to ban immigrants on the basis of religion or national origin? “Great for ratings.”

But WE did this?

After all the free publicity you gave that tailored orangutan and all you have done (over the years) to make third-party candidates unpersons?

How many more people watch CNN than voted for Johnson and Stein? How many CNN viewers even know who Jill Stein is? They certainly wouldn’t have found out watching CNN campaign coverage.

Suck my big Mwamba, CNN. I am never watching you again.

There is now a greater-than-zero chance that Donald Trump will start World War III – most likely cause the dictator of North Korea hit his hands – and just as Nazi Germany started World War II and ended up losing, we will lose, because while we, like Nazi Germany, have military and technical superiority, we, like Nazi Germany will end up pissing off almost the entire rest of the planet. And once it’s over and the allied coalition occupies our nation, they will have to find the least radioactive city in North America to stage the next Nuremberg Trials. And when they do they are going to round up every surviving member of the Trump Administration along with every surviving executive of the mainstream media, and put them on trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, just as the Allies ended up doing with publisher Julius Streicher.

Because while free speech is as close to an absolute as we have in America- and that DOES include what the Left calls “hate speech”- there is no requirement or obligation on the part of a news outlet or other corporation to give free publicity to a race-baiter who has been credibly accused of sexual misconduct, and there is no obligation on the part of a broadcaster to legitimize such a demagogue by treating his opinions as though they deserved a public hearing, as though we had not already rejected such opinions long ago as toxic to a humane society, as if we had not already fought wars to put such philosophies into the ground, and as if they deserved more credence than the opinions of libertarians and democratic socialists, simply because the wannabe fascist in question is an entertaining buffoon who’s good for ratings. And when you actively promote and endorse such positions, you have abrogated your responsibility as a news medium (to the extent that you are one) and you are complicit in whatever comes to pass.

Fuck you, CNN.