I may not be able to see this movie

This sounds like a fascinating, factual documentary.

Oscar-winner Alex Gibney’s 4-hour documentary about Elon Musk may be the most important film of the year. After the first two hours, audiences will learn that he is better at engineering everything around him to suit his ego and his bank account than he is at engineering his many products. We see the damage he has inflicted, including horrific dash-cam footage of fatal accidents involving self-driving cars. Many who watch it will be rattled but consider it as remote if they don’t buy a Tesla or have stock in SpaceX.

The second two hours are when it gets really scary, because that is when audiences learn how he affects every one of our lives, in the United States and throughout the world. Gibney asks, “How could Musk assume so much power and why had we given it to him?”

Musk hates it. What’s really scary, though, and demonstrates the chilling effect billionaires have on our lives, is that it’s already being censored.

The documentary is facing more than a war of words from Musk, however. The film’s distributor, Bleecker Street, has not been able to run paid advertisements on several major social media platforms. As of Sept. 25, YouTube, Meta, TikTok and X had all refused. YouTube, where the trailer had been available through regular channels, and Meta have since reversed course, saying that it had been flagged for “political content.”

There are also concerns about whether “Musk” will eventually land on HBO as originally planned in the aftermath of the Skydance merger, the new entertainment giant created by Paramount’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. CEO David Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, is friendly with Musk.

WOoooOOOOOooooo! Who needs Hallowe’en when the ghouls have taken over?

If that’s just too depressing for you, here’s a comic to cheer you up.

Oh, what a happy fantasy!

(There’s a whole series of anti-billionaire comics at that site. Expect the creator to be censored soon.)

Who is the real criminal who deserves federal investigation?

Trump has been raging against Ilhan Omar for years, and now he has had her home raided…on suspicion of what? It’s not at all clear. There was no reason to think a sitting congressperson was somehow involved in any kind of criminal activity, and no evidence of such has been presented. It’s nothing but targeted harassment driven by a fat old pig’s bigotry.

And Ohio crowd chanted “deport” as President Donald Trump blasted Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., during a campaign rally speech on Monday night.

Trump held the rally in Youngstown, Ohio, just hours after federal agents executed a search warrant on Omar’s home in relation to a criminal investigation.

Trump took aim at Omar and the wider Somali community in Minnesota.

“She’s a disaster. She comes in from a country without laws, without police, without military. All they do is shoot each other, and she comes into our country and she says, ‘I have a constitutional right,'” Trump joked. “She’s got a constitutional right. She’s telling us about the Constitution and she’s coming from one of the worst countries anywhere on the planet.”

That’s the real reason for the raid: he just hates all people from a country in Africa. This is criminal prejudice and an abuse of federal law enforcement for a partisan purpose. Arrest Trump, not Omar.

I’m not in her district, but if I were, after this I’d be even more committed to voting for her, and I’m also more committed to seeing Trump impeached. It’s too bad congress is stacked with corrupt and stupid Republicans so that won’t happen.

He should have been gone after this blatant criminality.

I can’t believe that they found boxes of stolen classified documents in Ilhan Omar’s bathroom?
Oh wait, that was Trump’s public bathrooms in Mar-a-lago.
Just in case you were wondering what the difference between fascism and investigating actual crimes looks like.

This is why I’m not a romantic

I was trying to think of romantic dates to go on with my wife, and I came up with a brilliant idea: I should take her out to Shakey’s Pizza. That was our standard destination back in the 1970s, go out to Shakey’s, sit in a booth with a pineapple pizza and a diet coke, and talk for hours. Yeah, that’s the ticket, an evening of nostalgia and sentiment and good memories.

One problem, though. When we weren’t looking, the entire chain shriveled up and died. There’s a cluster of them still alive in Southern California, and apparently they’re thriving in the Philippines, but none in Minnesota, and only one left in Washington state, in Pasco. Near as I can tell even the old location in Kent, WA has been replaced with a Chuck E. Cheese. I guess I’ll just sit at home, looking dour. See, this is why old people have a reputation for crankiness.

What do the teenagers do nowadays on a Saturday night? What did you do, once upon a time?

Second thoughts on Verity

Last night, I did another shift as theater projectionist, and sat through the movie Verity a second time. We had another evening of light duty, as only 4 people showed up, and two of them had free passes, so I sat through the whole thing.

It was so much worse than I thought. This was an incompetent piece of film making.

I was criticized in my original review for saying that Dakota Johnson can’t act, and that she spent “the entire movie looking vaguely stunned,” but that was a plot point that was mentioned multiple times! The opening (and entirely superfluous and irrelevant to the plot) scene was Johnson getting splashed with blood from an auto accident in front of her, to which she responded with complete equanimity. She later tells Josh Hartnett that she’s been told she has “resting bored face”. She responds to every horrific thing in the movie with utter passivity.

But the worst is the plot, and I’ll have to give away spoilers here, so it’s below the fold.

[Read more…]

Nokoomis Nibii Equay

This is a statue that graces our central campus mall.

Commissioned by Puncky ’73 and Mary Soehren Heppner ’76, this statue, an older woman with two young children at her sides, was created by Duane “Dewey” Goodwin, Anishinaabe, on the campus mall site during the summer of 2018. The Heppner’s intention for the statue is to honor the past, present, and future of the Native American people whose ancestors attended the boarding school that once stood on the land of the University of Minnesota Morris campus. In an artist statement, Goodin writes, “The sculpture symbolizes the [journey] of the Native American, from a traditional people to an assimilated, but still proud, people. We have endured colonization, retaining our most valued traditions—our identity, language, ceremonies, and arts.”

I mention it since today is Indigenous People’s Day. We aren’t getting the day off, though, so we’ll all have to celebrate it privately.

Should fraternities be shut down?

The Guardian asks, “Fraternities are the most likely place for US campus rapes. Should they be shut down?“

What a stupid question. YES.

It’s a lengthy article that goes through all the problems with the fraternity system — the alcoholism, the hazing deaths (two annually!), the rapes. I kept reading for the positive reasons, and they give a few. One is the threats.

“All the Greek alumni would have pitchforks, and it would be a whole debacle rather than kind of letting this play out in the press and then just going back to business,” said Lucy Taylor, a University of Maryland graduate and the creator of the podcast Snapped about the sordid history of fraternities and sororities.

Another is a variant of that threat.

“When you get rid of Greek life, you get rid of some of the most passionate people that cared about the school, right? And so why would someone like that donate to the school if the school is eliminating something that was a key part of their time at Cornell?” he said.

This is similar to the argument in favor of college sports, and ultimately it’s all about money. Fraternities and sports are orthogonal to the function of universities and education, and they should only be tolerated as long as they don’t interfere with the education students are supposed to be there for.

No good reasons for frats are given other than platitudes from North American Interfraternity Conference, a trade association of fraternities.

Hillary Brewer, the organization’s chief communications officer, did not respond to a question about whether sexual misconduct is pervasive at fraternities but stated in an email that they “are an accelerator for success in college and beyond. They create lifelong connections to the campus, community and friends.”

You don’t need frats to make connections and friends, especially not since the connections are with the kind of people who favor elitism, abuse, and misbehavior.

Shut them all down.

A dismal season for movies

As usual, I’ve been running the projector for the local theater

Last night was the dull horror of Verity, a movie based on a potboiler by Colleen Hoover. It’s had a low level of attendance for the past week, but it does tap into an unusual audience: women’s book clubs. It’s fair that that audience should be served, and Hoover is apparently an extremely successful author, but it’s unfortunate that they are so poorly represented. The movie has a dark and twisty plot that bored me far too quickly, but it’s greatest flaw that its star is…Dakota Johnson. The woman cannot act. She spends the entire movie looking vaguely stunned, just as she does in every movie I’ve ever seen featuring her. Anne Hathaway is also in it, but she spends the first half imitating Johnson by playing a brain-damaged paralyzed accident victim.

We had two ticket-paying attendees last night.

The other movie playing last night was Heart of the Beast. It’s a dog movie. It also features Brad Pitt and an unbelievable plot. Brad is flying a private plane over the Alaskan wilderness with his loyal and brave military dog, when he has a massive heart attack and crashes his plane into a lake, 60 miles from civilization.

He has to dive deep into the frigid lake to salvage his camping supplies. He and the dog then have to hike through rugged terrain, fighting of the occasional grizzly bear and wolf pack, falling into a whitewater stream, breaking his arm, getting gnawed on by wolves, and, like Dakota Johnson, never changing his expression. Did I mention that the inciting incident was a massive heart attack? Rather than going into intensive care, he instead must stoically battle against a savage wilderness with his dog pal. It was a long slog for both Brad Pitt and the audience.

Attendance: 0.

I blame the movie studios. These are dull, formulaic movies that are also poorly marketed. I knew nothing about either before pushing the button to put them on the screen: Verity was dependent on the popularity of a book in a niche market, and Heart of the Beast was a movie about a dog, and that’s all you need to know (not that there was much deeper in it than that).

I think the one bright spot this time of year is the free Saturday matinees, when we show old, familiar spooky movies and make all our profit on popcorn and candy sales — and we also get an audience of appreciative families. Digging up old hits is a more productive use of the theater than showing the poor fare the studios are dumping on us.

And look! Today you can get firetruck rides!