Reality is a Fraud

Only the truly self-delusional ever believed that most things billed as reality television were true slices of life.  The crazy antics and unlikely situations of “Duck Dynasty” are as spontaneous and genuine as the outcomes of every WWE match.   I guess it is just too much to hope that there are Tiffany Lamps and antique musket rifles dating back to the Revolutionary War buried in every abandoned storage locker.  Yet, it still hit me pretty hard when I learned that one of my favorite 30 minute time wasters had has much integrity as Honey Boo Boo.  “House Hunters” seemed like a format that didn’t really need to be “enhanced”.  There wasn’t staged conflict or outsized personalities.  Someone was buying a house and we got to see a couple of the houses they looked at.  Simple enough.  But I guess not.  It was all a fraud.  A charade.  There was a wizard behind the curtain.  How did I not see it?  All the signs were there.  Just look at this old episode of “House Hunters International”.  Two of the houses they looked at are owned by incredibly famous people who were obviously never going to sell.  As the blogs reported, they were obviously just friends of this episode’s subject who allowed their homes to be filmed.  I bet that wasn't even a real princess.  I guess from now on I will just stick to the TV shows that I know are staged, scripted, and full of lies. Like Presidential Debates.

Battle of the Snow Whites

Mirror, Mirror


Snow White and the Huntsman

I have already stated my clear and strong support for the repurposing of Disney Princesses.  Therefore, it is likely not surprising that I have no problem what so ever with two, that's right two, live-action reimaginings of the Snow White fairy tale.  At least in principle.  But now that the trailers for both of these endeavors have surfaced, I can resoundly say two additional takes on the costs of extreme female vanity is one too many.  

The two Snow White  movies could not have taken more different approaches to the source material.  Snow White and the Huntsman did the en vogue thing and took the whole thing to a dark place while transforming the heroine into a fully empowered warrior princess.  The whole thing looks like a high concept actioner where the princess stops wishing for the one to love and becomes the latest iteration of Buffy, the wicked witch slayer.  The only glaring negative with this version is the actress charged with bringing Snow White into the flesh.  Somehow, someone in Hollywood decided it was a good idea to give our nation's worst living actress a career outside of the Twilight series.  Just superficially, Kristen Stewart fails to live up to the standards of a beauty greater than all others in the kingdom.  A beauty worth killing for.  And that is before she opens her mouth and makes everyone in the audience wish you can have a Snow White movie without Snow White.

But the other option, Mirror, Mirror, is trying exceeding hard with its trailer to guarantee there is no audience even in the theater to question why they spent good money to see it.  This thing looks absolutely awful.  It is fine that they decided to go light hearted in this one.  It differentiates it nicely from the Batman Begins-version of Snow White the competition is selling.  But maybe if it is going to be a comedic version of the story, maybe some of it should be actually funny.  This Grantland piece does a nice job of pointing out many of the ways this trailer went horribly wrong.  Let me just add a couple more nails to the glass coffin.  The production value of this looks low rent by the standards of high school musicals.  The casting is down-right dreadful.  This Snow White not only makes Kristen Stewart look like the fairest in the land, she makes miss Stewart seem like someone two super-powered, immortal beings would fight over.  And Prince Charming is just as bad.  The Winklevoss smarm still oozes off of old Arm and Hammer.  He was born to play bad guy from the rich, snooty frat house in a college set comedy.  Not the man of virginal girls dream.  Julia Roberts, you are better than this.

Solitaire Update - Things picked up a bit after my involuntary shut out a couple of days past, included a personal best of 3 wins in a day.  I still have resisted applying any real strategy yet.  That is still to come.  But in the meantime I was also think that there needs to be some cool lingo to go along with certain events in solitaire.  This will be a critical step in setting it up the mainstream competitive sport it was always meant to be.  Just like in bowling, three consecutive strikes is called a turkey and four strikes is a hambone.  Solitaire needs its own hambone.  What do you call it when you lay out a hand and you can't make a single move.  No cards can be brought down from the stack and none of the cards below can be flipped.  This phenomenon seems like it should have a name.  For that matter, the different areas of the solitaire playing field need names. How is any one going to be able to follow all of my great insights into the practice of solitaire if they don't know if I am referring to the stacks or the triplets (my first attempt at some names)?  So, top of my list of things to do in my solitaire sojourn - develop some cool jargon.

Day 4 - 2 out of 13
Day 5 - 3 out of 12
Overall Success Rate - 7 out of 56 (12.5%)

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My Hindsight is Impeccable

The problem with taking months off between writing blog entries, is that all those absolutely brilliant predictions you make never get recorded so that when you are inevitably proven correct there is a lack of a record to prove your brilliance.  Luckily, I included my feelings about the Green Lantern movie in my last blog posting spree well before Ryan Reynolds proved me one hundred percent right.  I was able to successfully call both the miscasting and awful look and feel of the movie from the trailer.  I particularly enjoyed the io9 review of the movie that referred to GL as the floating of head of Ryan Reynolds.  The movie looked silly and amateurish by direct-to-DVD standards and only succeeded in killing off a franchise that the studio was willing to keep alive even in the face of losing over 100 million dollars on the original.  My childhood installed in me a deep fandom for Green Lantern and G.I. Joe and I was thrilled when it was announced that both of those properties would be turned into movies.  And then Hollywood went and destroyed both of them (we won’t even get into Transformers 2 because at least the original Transformers is a pretty entertaining movie if you edit out all the parts with John Turturro and Sam Witwicky’s parents).  At least G.I. Joe is getting the Rock.  And the Rock does not disappoint.

But one prediction that I didn’t get down on silicon in time was my the strong feeling from the trailer that Cars 2 was going to be the big letdown that breaks Pixar’s streak of instant classics (Personally I consider Ratatouille to be the first blemish on their reputation but I will go with the critics here and pretend that it was a classic).  It didn’t play like a Pixar movie.  It felt like a Dreamsworks’ movie.  A shameless grab for the easy money that comes with a quicky sequel and a built-in merchandising franchise.  And the full length thing just proved all of those concerns to be on target.  The wafer thin plot and a nonsensical twist ending (it made absolutely no sense in retrospect or in immediate inspection) had the stench of Disney’s fine tradition of sequels like Aladdin: The Return of Jafar or Cinderella II - Dreams Come True.  This movie clearly existed only to get their branded toys back on the shelves and drilled into kids’ cerebrum’s.  The Toy Story sequels had made us think Pixar was different.  They weren’t wearing the Katzenberg albatross that gave us Lilo and Stitch 2: Stitch as a Glitch.  But it is clear now.  The only 2 Pixar movies to get sequels to date (Monsters Inc. 2 will soon make this statement out dated) were the ones that spawned successful toy lines.  The announcement of a fourth Toy Story movie, despite the artistic crescendo of Toy Story 3 (should have won the best picture Oscar last year but an animated movie will never win) that provided one of the best trilogy conclusions ever only, only underlines, bolds, and italicizes the swallowing up of the Pixar vision by the Disney marketing monster.  Oh well, we will always have WALL-E.  

Oh and here is one more of my outdated predictions for the road.  3D movies are an overpriced fad that tries to convince people to pay premium pricing for a diminished movie going experience.  It will soon pass.  Also, we will one day fly like the birds, walk on the moon, ride around in horseless carriages, and tame the mighty power of the open flame.  Man, my ability to predict the past is amazing.

This blog poster is sponsored by the Four-Five-Six Laundry.

We Will Live Forever Through our Cartoons

One (of the many) great thing about pop culture is that it gives us a common language. Something that we can bring up at your local church, school, gin joint, malt shop, or disco and everyone immediately recognizes, identifies with, or at least as an opinion on. And it sure beats talking about the weather again. But pop culture has always carried the black eye of being the snack food of society. Eat it up your Ho-Ho but ten minutes later your hungry again and go in search of some deep-fried Oreos. That just isn't the case anymore. Pop culture has transcended it mortal confines and now lives eternal within our greater cultural gestalt. We no longer sit around the fireplace listening to grandfathers tales of his days of ducking the draft or hear about how our grandmother's grandmother ventured out on the Oregon Trail, got dysentery, and died. Now, instead of handing down stories of Paul Bunyan and John Henry, we revel in the chance to expose our kids to the Transformers, Strawberry Shortcake, and Scooby Doo. This is our new oral tradition. These our generational touchstones that will be referred back to again and again. As a result our media and art are changing to reflect the entrainment of these characters on our permanent consciousness. Where art used to center on religious imagery because it was a nearly universal reference point. But our pop culture heroes are now replacing the Madonna inside the gilded frame. We decorate our walls with pictures of them. They cover our children's bedrooms. And mark the cubicles of every IT worker. Take for instance the Disney Princesses I discussed yesterday. Because everyone, young and old, knows these characters, knows their history, their backstory, one can give new significance to their visages by layering on top of it any popular trope. Or one can attempt to engage in societal commentary by placing the Princesses into modern environs. Luckily enough I have examples of both. One giving the Princesses a nice zombie make-over and another giving the Princesses a less than happily ever after.

This blog post is sponsored by Mario Brothers Plumbing Services.

Every Girls Wants to be a Princess (trademarked)

Royalty as viewed in modern culture is not based in reality. With the faux-excitement of the commemorative plate buying set for the William/Kate pairing excepted, the monarchy has lost all romanticism and exist only as a useless burden on the European tax payers. Instead, in today's world, there is only one royal title that has any real value and it is branded. Unless you wear the crown of a Disney Princess, your run of the mill king or queen can expect about the same level of respect from the general populace as guy who tries to predict the college basketball teams that will make the NCAA tournament for a living. But if you happened to spring from the loins of the Lord of Atlantis or utilize rodents as your clothing designers, you will have a good portion of the XX individuals in this country spending the first 10 years of their life ready to sacrifice their brother for the chance to be you. That's were the cache is. Forget Princess Grace. The only princesses that most generations from here on out will know by name are Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Cinderella, and Rapunzel. Most times I have a complete detachment from reality in favor of world view shaped by primary colored animations. Yet are these really the role models our daughters should have. Airheaded nymphs that believe what ever they are told. 16 year-olds ready to run off and marry the first man they meet in the woods. Disney does many things well but providing positive role models for young girls. Maybe not.

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