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Sep. 5th, 2019 06:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkat1. The Most Anticipated Movies of the Fall, with a Calendar of when they are coming out.
Excerpt or highlights...
Parasite (10/11)
The beloved though spotty Korean director Bong Joon-ho (The Host) stole the thunder from Quentin Tarantino at Cannes, where this scabrous comedy about a poor family that insinuates itself into the home of a rich one made off with the top prize. My colleague Bilge Ebiri called it a “nerve-racking masterpiece,” and though my nerves are too well racked these days, I look forward to the prospect of Bong “making us cheer on depraved behavior and then pulling the rug out from under our sick expectations.” Now, that’s an ad quote!
November
The Irishman (11/1)
Martin Scorsese. Robert De Niro. Harvey Keitel. Joe Pesci. Before you say “Holy crap,” there’s another star in the cast who didn’t appear in GoodFellas, Mean Streets, or Taxi Driver: Al Pacino (one hopes on a short leash) as Jimmy Hoffa. Basically, Netflix just threw money at these titans to get them together, which could be a recipe for disaster but not with its who-whacked-Hoffa subject. No, I don’t see De Niro as an Irishman either [Ed.: He played one in GoodFellas] [D.E.: Proves my point] [Ed.: You really want to say that?] [D.E.: Leave it in], but crackerjack screenwriter Steven Zaillian’s script is based on a mind-blowing memoir by Charles Brandt called I Heard You Paint Houses that makes you think Brandt knows not just who really killed Hoffa but John F. Kennedy, Roger Rabbit, and Jeffrey Epstein, too.
Marriage Story (11/6)
The undeniably talented Noah Baumbach has been acclaimed for so many smart but sour, emotionally curdled movies that I take the buzz over his latest drama warily. That said, The Squid and the Whale is an unnervingly incisive portrait of the impact a crumbling marriage has on two kids, and this one features two unpredictable actors, Adam Driver and the perpetually underrated Scarlett Johansson. It also sounds like a close-to-the-bone subject: the grueling demise of the marriage between a stage director and his actress wife. Substitute film for stage and consider Baumbach’s ugly breakup with Jennifer Jason Leigh, and the prospects are sunny indeed.
The Report (11/15)
As in the CIA “Torture Report.” As in George W. Bush saying, “This country doesn’t torture,” while people are being waterboarded, starved, sexually humiliated, and beaten. It’s not a documentary: The committed writer and producer Scott Z. Burns makes his directorial debut, focusing not on what he didn’t see (the ghastly Geneva Conventions violations) but on the Senate investigation and the congressional hearings that dragged the horror into the light. Sound dry? Not with Adam Driver, Corey Stoll, Jon Hamm, and Annette Bening as Senator Dianne Feinstein.
Knives Out (11/27)
Rian Johnson (Brick, Star Wars: The Last Jedi) isn’t a great original, but he has a talent for doing parodic takes on the works that inspired him without drifting into camp or undermining his passion. Here, he plumbs that most gimmicky of gimmick genres — the all-star house-party whodunit — with a delectable cast that includes Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, and Lakeith Stanfield. No, I don’t see how those disparate actors can mesh either, but I hope to be surprised and delighted.
And...
The Laundromat (9/27)
Steven Soderbergh — who, let’s not forget, claimed to have retired from filmmaking some years ago — is back with another movie, this one a star-studded caper but also a politically charged look at the Panama Papers scandal. (When we interviewed Soderbergh earlier this year, he had this one sitting on his laptop, all ready to go, so the fact that it’s being released now, during awards season, is surely a good sign.)
October
Pain and Glory (10/4)
Pedro Almodóvar’s most autobiographical film in decades looks at the many regrets of an aging ilmmaker, played by the great Antonio Banderas (who won the Best Actor award at Cannes in May).
Dolemite Is My Name (10/4)
For decades, people have longed to make a biopic of Rudy Ray Moore — the comic, blaxploitation star, and indie-film pioneer known as the Godfather of Rap. It’s finally here, as Eddie Murphy’s potential comeback vehicle.
November
Terminator: Dark Fate (11/1)
We’ve been burned by Terminator sequels before, but dare we hope that this one — which returns Linda Hamilton to the role of Sarah Connor and boasts James Cameron himself as a producer — might break the curse?
Motherless Brooklyn (11/1)
Writer-director-star Edward Norton has spent well over a decade trying to make this film adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s beloved novel, and he’s assembled a remarkable cast for it (including Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alec Baldwin, Bruce Willis, and Willem Dafoe). But all eyes will be on Norton, one of our finest actors, who hasn’t had a juicy lead role in many years.
Doctor Sleep (11/8)
Stephen King’s 2013 sequel to The Shining was well liked as a novel, but as a film it’ll have to contend with the legacy of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror masterpiece, which the author (who has an executive-producer credit on this one) famously detests.
Last Christmas (11/8)
Can this romantic comedy written by Oscar-winning screenwriter (and Oscar-winning actress) Emma Thompson and set to the music of the late George Michael bring back the rom-com? (And with hints of a dark twist, is it possible it’s not actually a rom-com?)
Ford v. Ferrari (11/15)
I hate the title the filmmakers finally settled on, but this is the sort of process-oriented, ironic-capitalist, go-for-it movie Americans do well. James Mangold’s drama centers on the ingenious car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and the driven driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale), who attempt — underwritten by the oft-despicable Henry Ford (Tracy Letts; did you see him in All My Sons? Holy shit) — to best the Italian wizards of Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966. What makes it tantalizing: They’re none of them angels. —D.E.
Atlantics (11/15)
Earlier this year, Mati Diop became the first black woman to screen a film in competition at Cannes, then she went and won the festival’s Grand Jury Prize for this bewitching supernatural romantic drama set in Senegal.
Cats (12/20)
Sure, the trailer was ridiculous. Sure, digital fur on human actors looks weird. Sure, it’s one of the strangest musicals ever made. Counterpoint: It’s Cats. You’ll still see it out of morbid curiosity.[This one is just weird.]
Star Wars: Episode 9 — The Rise of Skywalker (12/20)
The big question with the final installment of the Skywalker saga isn’t how much it’ll make but whether J. J. Abrams will undo the idiosyncratic narrative revelations of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, the most entertaining Star Wars movie in decades.
Bombshell (12/20)
The Roger Ailes sexual-harassment scandal at Fox News gets the big-screen treatment in a year when we’ve already had the Showtime series The Loudest Voice, also about Ailes. But only this one’s got Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, and Margot Robbie.
They also have remakes of Little Women and Charlies Angels -- why I've no clue. With women directors. Honestly, why anyone bothers to read Little Women any longer, I don't know, you can just rent any number of film versions of it. The only one I liked with the Gillian Armstrong version with Winona Ryder, Kirsten Dunst, Christian Bale, and Gabriel Bern.
2. Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life
More than a decade before Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) became the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded him for work that “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times,” he contemplated the relationship between absurdity and redemption in a 1945 interview by the French journalist Jeanine Delpech, included at the end of his Lyrical and Critical Essays (public library) — the superb posthumous collection that gave us Camus on how to strengthen our character in difficult times and happiness, despair, and the love of life.
Three years before the interview, twenty-eight-year-old Camus had stunned the world with his revolutionary philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, which begins with one of the most powerful opening sentences in all of literature and explores the paradox of the absurd in life. “I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion,” he writes — something that prompted his interviewer to ask whether a philosophy predicated on absurdity might incline people to despair.
Camus — who years earlier had asserted that “there is no love of life without despair of life” — answers:
" All I can do is reply on my own behalf, realizing that what I say is relative. Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful. An analysis of the idea of revolt could help us to discover ideas capable of restoring a relative meaning to existence, although a meaning that would always be in danger.
Speaking at the close of the meaningless brutality of World War II, six years before he formulated his ideas on solidarity and what it really means to be a rebel, Camus considers the only act of courage and rebellion worth undertaking:
In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity. We must achieve this or perish. To do so, certain conditions must be fulfilled: men must be frank (falsehood confuses things), free (communication is impossible with slaves). Finally, they must feel a certain justice around them." [Isn't it interesting how women are either lumped in with men or forgotten entirely? Shame on you fellas, how would you feel if everything said women and left men out of the equation, do that exercise for a minute and get back to me.]
"I have often wondered whether Camus had read W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939,” written in 1940, which includes this searing stanza so kindred to Camus’s sentiment:
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die. "
[I rather like the poem, better than the Camus bits...and it feels oddly relevant now.)
As an aside, something that has slowly been grating on my nerves of late. Why is it that when people talk about humanity, they say "men" only? I do it with guys, but I've added gals. I won't use "girls" except with "boys". But it would be nice if we could find a non-binary term for gender. Right now, human is the closest.
3. Parents home is fine. No flooding. They are going home tomorrow instead of Saturday or Sunday. No damage from trees. Several trees were down but that was it.
It was an odd storm, it hung over areas traveling at 0 miles per hour.
Hurricane Dorian Damage on Hilton Head
Me: And it's not the only storm, there another one behind it, and several tropical depressions.
Co-worker: Why are we having so many hurricanes?
ME: Climate change.
Co-worker gives me a tolerant smile and walks away.
Gotta love climate change and of course the idiotic humans that got us here.
Gabrielle is next. Juliette is out in the Pacific.
4. Fossil DNA Reveals New Twists in Modern Human Origins
(ie. The creation story gets far more complicated as new information arises.)
Genomic studies reveal how convoluted the emergence of modern humans was. We carry genes from our ancestors’ encounters with ancient people like the Neanderthals, but the Neanderthals already carried some modern human genes from even earlier encounters with vanished groups.
Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine
Jordana Cepelewicz
Staff Writer
Humans today are mosaics, our genomes rich tapestries of interwoven ancestries. With every fossil discovered, with every DNA analysis performed, the story gets more complex: We, the sole survivors of the genus Homo, harbor genetic fragments from other closely related but long-extinct lineages. Modern humans are the products of a sprawling history of shifts and dispersals, separations and reunions — a history characterized by far more diversity, movement and mixture than seemed imaginable a mere decade ago.
But it’s one thing to say that Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of modern Europeans, or that the recently discovered Denisovans interbred with some older mystery group, or that they all interbred with each other. It’s another to provide concrete details about when and where those couplings occurred. “We’ve got this picture where these events are happening all over the place,” said Aylwyn Scally, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Cambridge. “But it’s very hard for us to pin down any particular single event and say, yeah, we’re really confident that that one happened — unless we have ancient DNA.”
You think you’re just looking at a Neanderthal, but you’re actually looking at a mixture of Neanderthal and modern human.
The events that do get pinned down therefore tend to be relatively recent, starting with the migration of modern humans out of Africa 60,000 years ago, during which they interacted with hominin relatives (like the Neanderthals and Denisovans) they met along the way. Evidence of interbreeding during any migrations before then, or during events that transpired earlier within Africa, has been elusive.
Now that’s starting to change. In part because of greater computational power, “we’re starting to see the next wave of methods development,” said Joshua Akey, a professor of genomics at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. “And that’s allowing us to start making new inferences from the data … that the previous generation of methods couldn’t make.”
As scientists peer further back in time and uncover evolutionary relationships in unprecedented detail, their findings are complicating the narrative of human history and rescuing some formerly missing chapters from obscurity. Clues are emerging about the unexpected influence of gene flow from ancient hominins on modern human populations before the latter left Africa. Some researchers are even identifying the genetic contributions modern humans might have made to those other lineages, in a complete reversal of the usual scientific focus. Confusing and intertwined as these many effects can be, all of them shaped humanity as we now know it.
When researchers first recovered DNA from Neanderthal bones, the available techniques for making sense of it were powerful but relatively simple. Scientists compared ancient and modern sequences, tallied up shared sites and mutations, and conducted bulk statistical analyses. That’s how they discovered in 2010 that Neanderthal DNA makes up approximately 2% of the genome of people today of non-African descent, a result of interbreeding that occurred throughout Eurasia beginning 50,000-60,000 years ago. That’s also how they discovered that Denisovan DNA makes up approximately 3% of the genome of people in Papua New Guinea and Australia.
“But that kind of very simple approach isn’t very good at sorting out the complexity” of how those lost populations interacted, said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Nor does it allow researchers to test specific hypotheses about how that interbreeding unfolded.
Population geneticists could backtrack through the DNA data to identify common ancestors from hundreds of thousands of years ago, and they could detect recent incidents of gene flow from the past few tens of thousands of years. But discerning interbreeding that occurred between those periods, from events “old enough not to be recent but young enough not to be ancient,” Hawks said, “that actually takes an extra trick.” That’s because the more recent events smear their footprints over the older ones; the DNA sequences left behind from those older events are so fragmented and mutated that they are difficult to recognize, and even more difficult to label with a date and location.
The quantitative biologist Adam Siepel and his team at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory campus searched through contemporary and fossil DNA for signs of gene flow from modern humans into Neanderthals.
Adam Siepel, a quantitative biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, and his colleagues decided to focus on such gaps in the narrative. They were particularly interested in looking for signs of gene flow from modern humans into Neanderthals. That flow of genetic information is harder to study than the reverse, not only because of how long ago it happened, but also because there are fewer genomes to refer to: Think of all the present-day genomes at researchers’ disposal, versus the handful of Neanderthal genomes left intact, or the single genome recovered from Denisovan remains. The challenge again prompted the need for new methods.
Using one such new technique, first in 2016 and then again in a preprint posted earlier this summer, Siepel and his team found that around 3% of Neanderthal DNA — and possibly as much as 6% — came from modern humans who mated with the Neanderthals more than 200,000 years ago. The same group who gave rise to modern humans throughout the world also furnished Neanderthals with (at least a little) more DNA than the Neanderthals would later give them. “You think you’re just looking at a Neanderthal,” Siepel said, “but you’re actually looking at a mixture of Neanderthal and modern human.”
“That’s cool,” Hawks said. Such a high level of genetic admixture, he added, “is like saying 6% of the cars on the road that you see are red, but somehow you never noticed any red cars. You ought to notice that.” And yet the methods in general use had not. To Hawks, the omission suggests that there may be a lot more shared genetic material still to find even if it can’t yet be quantified accurately. More advanced techniques may change that.
More Than a One-Off
The finding also adds to the already compelling body of evidence that there were multiple migrations of modern humans out of Africa, stretching back over hundreds of thousands of years. Modern humans were thought to have evolved in Africa after the departure of Neanderthals and Denisovans, and to have remained on the continent until their well-known out-of-Africa diaspora 60,000 years ago. But recently, fossil evidence has indicated otherwise: A human jawbone in Israel, reported last year to date back to 180,000 years ago, and a skull fragment in Greece that’s even older, indicate earlier human migrations.
In fact, with that piece of skull, archaeologists may have stumbled across a possible member of the long-ago exodus that Siepel and his team inferred in their genomic study. The fossil, which was classified as Neanderthal when it was unearthed in Greece in the 1970s, was analyzed last month by the paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati of the University of Tübingen and her colleagues. Structurally, it looked somewhat like a modern human skull, but it was estimated to be about 210,000 years old — supposedly too old to be modern at that location. (Because the structural similarities to modern skulls show up in reconstructive models of the Greek fossil, the conclusion is controversial and will probably continue to be until DNA can be recovered for a genetic study to confirm it.)
The Apdima 1 skull fossil found in Greece has many modern structural features but is 210,000 years old — too ancient to be from any of the modern humans who left Africa only 60,000 years ago. It may have come from a hypothesized earlier exodus that left no survivors.
Now the DNA evidence seems to back up this revised migration narrative as well. In retrospect, “it seems quite natural,” Scally said, “to say that human populations and evolution were just as messy 200,000 years ago, and just as subdivided and structured … as they are today.”
“It makes it hard to argue that there was ever some … special evolutionary event or genetic event that triggered the evolution of humans as we know them,” he added. Humans have been continuously evolving through the mixing of varied populations for hundreds of thousands of years. (In fact, Scally posits that our species did not originally evolve from a single population in Africa, but rather from many interconnected populations spread out across the continent.)
“This is telling us, ‘Oh, this is not a weird one-off,’” Hawks said. “It’s a continuing interaction.”
Clues are emerging about the unexpected influence of gene flow from ancient hominins on modern human populations before the latter left Africa.
5. On TV You Can Go Home Again -- A Very Brady Renovation and 9210
I found the part on The Brady Brunch Home Renovation humorous. So felt the urge to share.
For his essay “Travels in Hyperreality,” the Italian author Umberto Eco journeyed across America to sample our peculiar national product: facsimiles. He visited a full-scale model of Lyndon Johnson’s Oval Office, wax museums, a “wild river” in Disneyland stocked with animatronic fauna, “instances in which the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake.”
Eco died in 2016, which is a shame, because I feel like he would have watched the hell out of “A Very Brady Renovation.”
The HGTV series, which begins Sept. 9, came about by kismet and a canny read of the current pop-cultural addiction to nostalgia. In 2018, the North Hollywood house that was used for exterior shots of the family home on “The Brady Bunch” went on the market. Executives at HGTV had a brainstorm: buy it and, cameras rolling, restore it to precisely how it looked on the 1969–’74 sitcom.
The hitch: The house you remember — the kitchen where the housekeeper Alice made pork chops, the entry where Carol Brady would greet her husband Mike after work — never existed.
Or rather, it existed the way most houses on sitcoms do, in your mind’s eye. It was a collection of separate sets on a soundstage, edited with exterior footage to synthesize the illusion of a warm, groovy midcentury home. Mike Brady may have been an architect, but TV supplied the home’s modular parts, and your brain completed the assembly.
So like Disney Imagineers or Las Vegas casino designers, HGTV set out to build something realer than real. They would rip up the house’s actual, disappointingly conventional interior, enlarge it (by 2000 square feet, they say) and make a physical manifestation of something that never existed.
“A Very Brady Renovation” feels like the logical progression of, and the perfect metaphor for, the reboot and revival craze that has brought us “Fuller House” and “Twin Peaks: The Return,” that exhumed “Veronica Mars” and “Murphy Brown.” The vast mechanism of TV and streaming has become a “Star Trek” replicator of pop culture. If I want to see Jean-Luc Picard on my TV again: Make it so!
“The Brady Bunch” is the perfect show to reboot this way, because it has made a posthumous art of reproducing itself. Long before “Friends” liberated $100 million from Netflix’s pockets, it was the Patient Zero of TV nostalgia, extending its five-season life through reruns, spinoffs, TV movies, theatrical movies, cartoons, a variety show, memes (“Sure, Jan”) and not a few tell-alls and documentaries. Its memory surpassed its actual existence.
And memory is what HGTV is selling here — well, memory and its own brand. “A Very Brady Renovation” casts the hosts of no less than five of the network’s shows: “Good Bones,” “Restored by the Fords,” “Flea Market Flip,” “Hidden Potential” and, of course, “Property Brothers,” whose charismatic and ubiquitous Jonathan and Drew Scott anchor the 90-minute first episode.
They’re joined by the six original Brady sibs, Christopher Knight (Peter), Mike Lookinland (Bobby), Maureen McCormick (Marcia), Susan Olsen (Cindy), Eve Plumb (Jan) and Barry Williams (Greg). (The older stars Ann B. Davis, Florence Henderson and Robert Reed have all died.)
The show drives eagerly onto Memory Lane and floors the accelerator. The show’s theme song is, of course, a parody of the original show’s. (“That’s the way we remade the Brady house!”)
The rebuild of the entryway stairs is accompanied by clips of Marcia walking down the steps and the family posing on them. A demolition scene is scored with “Sunshine Day.” Re-creating the decorative tchotchkes leads, of course, to footage of the legendary “don’t play ball in the house!” basketball disaster.
For all the milking of memories and stagey-seeming “behind-the-scenes” moments, the opening episode is a treat for TV and set-design nerds, getting deep into the weeds about the art of scouring the internet and secondhand outlets to find the precise piece of turn-of-the-’70s kitsch.
The crew studies photos of the original set posted to boards as if reconstructing a crime scene. For certain hard-to-find pieces, like a chef’s-kiss-perfect set of plastic grapes, the production crowdsources contributions from the HGTV audience. “Thanks, America!” a voice-over tells us. “The Brady house really is your house!”
It really is ours, even if HGTV holds the deed. (HGTV is keeping the house and giving away a six-night stay in an audience contest.) You can imagine a version of America in which the rebuilt-as-it-never-was Brady house becomes a modern-day Monticello, a cultural monument for an era in which phantom memories of TV spaces seem as real and emotionally binding as spaces we encounter every day with our meat bodies. [Insert giggling here.]
6. (As an aside, I keep losing count when I do these posts, and have to proof to ensure I either didn't skip over a number or repeat it twice. I can't count to save my life. I do it on my fingers, and still lose count.) Anyhow, I finished the book about the jewel thief and the bow street runner (who is also a rich lord, because honestly, he can't just be a bow street runner can he -- although it's a series and the others are just bow street runners, but the women aren't nearly as interesting). It was poorly written -- lots and lots of typos. It seemed in every other sentence, a word was missing. I'd be reading along and go...wait, shouldn't there be a word there? Go back and yep, the word that my mind had inserted was not there.
Oh well, it was cheap, what do I expect? Didn't have any sex in it. Which was a nice change of pace. I'd gotten tired of the heavy emphasis on sex scenes.
New book is by Cat Sebastian, who I haven't read yet. Sebastian specializes in Queer romances, and/or off the beaten track, politically progressive ones. This one is a romance between a sedition pamphlet publisher and an engraver, who has epileptic seizures. She enlists his help in providing the illustrations for an illicit publication to make money to aid her brother, who got in trouble for writing and selling the pamphlets. This is a Regency Romance in England. The hero is also a Duke, but he doesn't know he is a Duke, and is currently residing with the heroine and her brother -- after losing his mentor. Sebastian's novels always have an LGBTQ romance in them.
So far, so good. There's no typographical errors. The romance is being built slowly. The characters are long time friends, who are attracted to each other, but have refused to act on it by mutual consent. He's afraid to -- because he believes it will cost them their friendship -- and he's lost everyone he cares about. He has epilepsy, and is not the "alpha" male type, actually she's the more dominant of the two.
I like the two characters so far. So we'll see. It was cheap -- $3.99.
7. I wish Marvel would stop killing off my favorite characters. They did it in Endgame - my favorite characters in the MCU were Black Widow and Iron Man, I liked the rest -- but those two were my favs. Also Gamora, who I think is still alive. And Valkeri. And Loki -- who is sort of dead, and sort of not.) And they did it in this week's issue of House of X #4. Granted, the fact that I know there are comics coming out after this arc that feature the characters they killed in this arc -- does suggest they are bringing them back somehow...it still is aggravating.
Honestly, Marvel. Stop killing my fav's. Over and over and over again. To date they've killed them off six times, and brought them back. The first few times...it was okay, but it's starting to get annoying.
Can't comic book writers come up with an interesting story that doesn't involve killing people and bringing them back to life?
Excerpt or highlights...
Parasite (10/11)
The beloved though spotty Korean director Bong Joon-ho (The Host) stole the thunder from Quentin Tarantino at Cannes, where this scabrous comedy about a poor family that insinuates itself into the home of a rich one made off with the top prize. My colleague Bilge Ebiri called it a “nerve-racking masterpiece,” and though my nerves are too well racked these days, I look forward to the prospect of Bong “making us cheer on depraved behavior and then pulling the rug out from under our sick expectations.” Now, that’s an ad quote!
November
The Irishman (11/1)
Martin Scorsese. Robert De Niro. Harvey Keitel. Joe Pesci. Before you say “Holy crap,” there’s another star in the cast who didn’t appear in GoodFellas, Mean Streets, or Taxi Driver: Al Pacino (one hopes on a short leash) as Jimmy Hoffa. Basically, Netflix just threw money at these titans to get them together, which could be a recipe for disaster but not with its who-whacked-Hoffa subject. No, I don’t see De Niro as an Irishman either [Ed.: He played one in GoodFellas] [D.E.: Proves my point] [Ed.: You really want to say that?] [D.E.: Leave it in], but crackerjack screenwriter Steven Zaillian’s script is based on a mind-blowing memoir by Charles Brandt called I Heard You Paint Houses that makes you think Brandt knows not just who really killed Hoffa but John F. Kennedy, Roger Rabbit, and Jeffrey Epstein, too.
Marriage Story (11/6)
The undeniably talented Noah Baumbach has been acclaimed for so many smart but sour, emotionally curdled movies that I take the buzz over his latest drama warily. That said, The Squid and the Whale is an unnervingly incisive portrait of the impact a crumbling marriage has on two kids, and this one features two unpredictable actors, Adam Driver and the perpetually underrated Scarlett Johansson. It also sounds like a close-to-the-bone subject: the grueling demise of the marriage between a stage director and his actress wife. Substitute film for stage and consider Baumbach’s ugly breakup with Jennifer Jason Leigh, and the prospects are sunny indeed.
The Report (11/15)
As in the CIA “Torture Report.” As in George W. Bush saying, “This country doesn’t torture,” while people are being waterboarded, starved, sexually humiliated, and beaten. It’s not a documentary: The committed writer and producer Scott Z. Burns makes his directorial debut, focusing not on what he didn’t see (the ghastly Geneva Conventions violations) but on the Senate investigation and the congressional hearings that dragged the horror into the light. Sound dry? Not with Adam Driver, Corey Stoll, Jon Hamm, and Annette Bening as Senator Dianne Feinstein.
Knives Out (11/27)
Rian Johnson (Brick, Star Wars: The Last Jedi) isn’t a great original, but he has a talent for doing parodic takes on the works that inspired him without drifting into camp or undermining his passion. Here, he plumbs that most gimmicky of gimmick genres — the all-star house-party whodunit — with a delectable cast that includes Daniel Craig, Christopher Plummer, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Toni Collette, and Lakeith Stanfield. No, I don’t see how those disparate actors can mesh either, but I hope to be surprised and delighted.
And...
The Laundromat (9/27)
Steven Soderbergh — who, let’s not forget, claimed to have retired from filmmaking some years ago — is back with another movie, this one a star-studded caper but also a politically charged look at the Panama Papers scandal. (When we interviewed Soderbergh earlier this year, he had this one sitting on his laptop, all ready to go, so the fact that it’s being released now, during awards season, is surely a good sign.)
October
Pain and Glory (10/4)
Pedro Almodóvar’s most autobiographical film in decades looks at the many regrets of an aging ilmmaker, played by the great Antonio Banderas (who won the Best Actor award at Cannes in May).
Dolemite Is My Name (10/4)
For decades, people have longed to make a biopic of Rudy Ray Moore — the comic, blaxploitation star, and indie-film pioneer known as the Godfather of Rap. It’s finally here, as Eddie Murphy’s potential comeback vehicle.
November
Terminator: Dark Fate (11/1)
We’ve been burned by Terminator sequels before, but dare we hope that this one — which returns Linda Hamilton to the role of Sarah Connor and boasts James Cameron himself as a producer — might break the curse?
Motherless Brooklyn (11/1)
Writer-director-star Edward Norton has spent well over a decade trying to make this film adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s beloved novel, and he’s assembled a remarkable cast for it (including Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Alec Baldwin, Bruce Willis, and Willem Dafoe). But all eyes will be on Norton, one of our finest actors, who hasn’t had a juicy lead role in many years.
Doctor Sleep (11/8)
Stephen King’s 2013 sequel to The Shining was well liked as a novel, but as a film it’ll have to contend with the legacy of Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 horror masterpiece, which the author (who has an executive-producer credit on this one) famously detests.
Last Christmas (11/8)
Can this romantic comedy written by Oscar-winning screenwriter (and Oscar-winning actress) Emma Thompson and set to the music of the late George Michael bring back the rom-com? (And with hints of a dark twist, is it possible it’s not actually a rom-com?)
Ford v. Ferrari (11/15)
I hate the title the filmmakers finally settled on, but this is the sort of process-oriented, ironic-capitalist, go-for-it movie Americans do well. James Mangold’s drama centers on the ingenious car designer Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and the driven driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale), who attempt — underwritten by the oft-despicable Henry Ford (Tracy Letts; did you see him in All My Sons? Holy shit) — to best the Italian wizards of Ferrari at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1966. What makes it tantalizing: They’re none of them angels. —D.E.
Atlantics (11/15)
Earlier this year, Mati Diop became the first black woman to screen a film in competition at Cannes, then she went and won the festival’s Grand Jury Prize for this bewitching supernatural romantic drama set in Senegal.
Cats (12/20)
Sure, the trailer was ridiculous. Sure, digital fur on human actors looks weird. Sure, it’s one of the strangest musicals ever made. Counterpoint: It’s Cats. You’ll still see it out of morbid curiosity.[This one is just weird.]
Star Wars: Episode 9 — The Rise of Skywalker (12/20)
The big question with the final installment of the Skywalker saga isn’t how much it’ll make but whether J. J. Abrams will undo the idiosyncratic narrative revelations of Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, the most entertaining Star Wars movie in decades.
Bombshell (12/20)
The Roger Ailes sexual-harassment scandal at Fox News gets the big-screen treatment in a year when we’ve already had the Showtime series The Loudest Voice, also about Ailes. But only this one’s got Charlize Theron, Nicole Kidman, and Margot Robbie.
They also have remakes of Little Women and Charlies Angels -- why I've no clue. With women directors. Honestly, why anyone bothers to read Little Women any longer, I don't know, you can just rent any number of film versions of it. The only one I liked with the Gillian Armstrong version with Winona Ryder, Kirsten Dunst, Christian Bale, and Gabriel Bern.
2. Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life
More than a decade before Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) became the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded him for work that “with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times,” he contemplated the relationship between absurdity and redemption in a 1945 interview by the French journalist Jeanine Delpech, included at the end of his Lyrical and Critical Essays (public library) — the superb posthumous collection that gave us Camus on how to strengthen our character in difficult times and happiness, despair, and the love of life.
Three years before the interview, twenty-eight-year-old Camus had stunned the world with his revolutionary philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus, which begins with one of the most powerful opening sentences in all of literature and explores the paradox of the absurd in life. “I draw from the absurd three consequences, which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion,” he writes — something that prompted his interviewer to ask whether a philosophy predicated on absurdity might incline people to despair.
Camus — who years earlier had asserted that “there is no love of life without despair of life” — answers:
" All I can do is reply on my own behalf, realizing that what I say is relative. Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful. An analysis of the idea of revolt could help us to discover ideas capable of restoring a relative meaning to existence, although a meaning that would always be in danger.
Speaking at the close of the meaningless brutality of World War II, six years before he formulated his ideas on solidarity and what it really means to be a rebel, Camus considers the only act of courage and rebellion worth undertaking:
In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity. We must achieve this or perish. To do so, certain conditions must be fulfilled: men must be frank (falsehood confuses things), free (communication is impossible with slaves). Finally, they must feel a certain justice around them." [Isn't it interesting how women are either lumped in with men or forgotten entirely? Shame on you fellas, how would you feel if everything said women and left men out of the equation, do that exercise for a minute and get back to me.]
"I have often wondered whether Camus had read W.H. Auden’s poem “September 1, 1939,” written in 1940, which includes this searing stanza so kindred to Camus’s sentiment:
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die. "
[I rather like the poem, better than the Camus bits...and it feels oddly relevant now.)
As an aside, something that has slowly been grating on my nerves of late. Why is it that when people talk about humanity, they say "men" only? I do it with guys, but I've added gals. I won't use "girls" except with "boys". But it would be nice if we could find a non-binary term for gender. Right now, human is the closest.
3. Parents home is fine. No flooding. They are going home tomorrow instead of Saturday or Sunday. No damage from trees. Several trees were down but that was it.
It was an odd storm, it hung over areas traveling at 0 miles per hour.
Hurricane Dorian Damage on Hilton Head
Me: And it's not the only storm, there another one behind it, and several tropical depressions.
Co-worker: Why are we having so many hurricanes?
ME: Climate change.
Co-worker gives me a tolerant smile and walks away.
Gotta love climate change and of course the idiotic humans that got us here.
Gabrielle is next. Juliette is out in the Pacific.
4. Fossil DNA Reveals New Twists in Modern Human Origins
(ie. The creation story gets far more complicated as new information arises.)
Genomic studies reveal how convoluted the emergence of modern humans was. We carry genes from our ancestors’ encounters with ancient people like the Neanderthals, but the Neanderthals already carried some modern human genes from even earlier encounters with vanished groups.
Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine
Jordana Cepelewicz
Staff Writer
Humans today are mosaics, our genomes rich tapestries of interwoven ancestries. With every fossil discovered, with every DNA analysis performed, the story gets more complex: We, the sole survivors of the genus Homo, harbor genetic fragments from other closely related but long-extinct lineages. Modern humans are the products of a sprawling history of shifts and dispersals, separations and reunions — a history characterized by far more diversity, movement and mixture than seemed imaginable a mere decade ago.
But it’s one thing to say that Neanderthals interbred with the ancestors of modern Europeans, or that the recently discovered Denisovans interbred with some older mystery group, or that they all interbred with each other. It’s another to provide concrete details about when and where those couplings occurred. “We’ve got this picture where these events are happening all over the place,” said Aylwyn Scally, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Cambridge. “But it’s very hard for us to pin down any particular single event and say, yeah, we’re really confident that that one happened — unless we have ancient DNA.”
You think you’re just looking at a Neanderthal, but you’re actually looking at a mixture of Neanderthal and modern human.
The events that do get pinned down therefore tend to be relatively recent, starting with the migration of modern humans out of Africa 60,000 years ago, during which they interacted with hominin relatives (like the Neanderthals and Denisovans) they met along the way. Evidence of interbreeding during any migrations before then, or during events that transpired earlier within Africa, has been elusive.
Now that’s starting to change. In part because of greater computational power, “we’re starting to see the next wave of methods development,” said Joshua Akey, a professor of genomics at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton University. “And that’s allowing us to start making new inferences from the data … that the previous generation of methods couldn’t make.”
As scientists peer further back in time and uncover evolutionary relationships in unprecedented detail, their findings are complicating the narrative of human history and rescuing some formerly missing chapters from obscurity. Clues are emerging about the unexpected influence of gene flow from ancient hominins on modern human populations before the latter left Africa. Some researchers are even identifying the genetic contributions modern humans might have made to those other lineages, in a complete reversal of the usual scientific focus. Confusing and intertwined as these many effects can be, all of them shaped humanity as we now know it.
When researchers first recovered DNA from Neanderthal bones, the available techniques for making sense of it were powerful but relatively simple. Scientists compared ancient and modern sequences, tallied up shared sites and mutations, and conducted bulk statistical analyses. That’s how they discovered in 2010 that Neanderthal DNA makes up approximately 2% of the genome of people today of non-African descent, a result of interbreeding that occurred throughout Eurasia beginning 50,000-60,000 years ago. That’s also how they discovered that Denisovan DNA makes up approximately 3% of the genome of people in Papua New Guinea and Australia.
“But that kind of very simple approach isn’t very good at sorting out the complexity” of how those lost populations interacted, said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Nor does it allow researchers to test specific hypotheses about how that interbreeding unfolded.
Population geneticists could backtrack through the DNA data to identify common ancestors from hundreds of thousands of years ago, and they could detect recent incidents of gene flow from the past few tens of thousands of years. But discerning interbreeding that occurred between those periods, from events “old enough not to be recent but young enough not to be ancient,” Hawks said, “that actually takes an extra trick.” That’s because the more recent events smear their footprints over the older ones; the DNA sequences left behind from those older events are so fragmented and mutated that they are difficult to recognize, and even more difficult to label with a date and location.
The quantitative biologist Adam Siepel and his team at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory campus searched through contemporary and fossil DNA for signs of gene flow from modern humans into Neanderthals.
Adam Siepel, a quantitative biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, and his colleagues decided to focus on such gaps in the narrative. They were particularly interested in looking for signs of gene flow from modern humans into Neanderthals. That flow of genetic information is harder to study than the reverse, not only because of how long ago it happened, but also because there are fewer genomes to refer to: Think of all the present-day genomes at researchers’ disposal, versus the handful of Neanderthal genomes left intact, or the single genome recovered from Denisovan remains. The challenge again prompted the need for new methods.
Using one such new technique, first in 2016 and then again in a preprint posted earlier this summer, Siepel and his team found that around 3% of Neanderthal DNA — and possibly as much as 6% — came from modern humans who mated with the Neanderthals more than 200,000 years ago. The same group who gave rise to modern humans throughout the world also furnished Neanderthals with (at least a little) more DNA than the Neanderthals would later give them. “You think you’re just looking at a Neanderthal,” Siepel said, “but you’re actually looking at a mixture of Neanderthal and modern human.”
“That’s cool,” Hawks said. Such a high level of genetic admixture, he added, “is like saying 6% of the cars on the road that you see are red, but somehow you never noticed any red cars. You ought to notice that.” And yet the methods in general use had not. To Hawks, the omission suggests that there may be a lot more shared genetic material still to find even if it can’t yet be quantified accurately. More advanced techniques may change that.
More Than a One-Off
The finding also adds to the already compelling body of evidence that there were multiple migrations of modern humans out of Africa, stretching back over hundreds of thousands of years. Modern humans were thought to have evolved in Africa after the departure of Neanderthals and Denisovans, and to have remained on the continent until their well-known out-of-Africa diaspora 60,000 years ago. But recently, fossil evidence has indicated otherwise: A human jawbone in Israel, reported last year to date back to 180,000 years ago, and a skull fragment in Greece that’s even older, indicate earlier human migrations.
In fact, with that piece of skull, archaeologists may have stumbled across a possible member of the long-ago exodus that Siepel and his team inferred in their genomic study. The fossil, which was classified as Neanderthal when it was unearthed in Greece in the 1970s, was analyzed last month by the paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati of the University of Tübingen and her colleagues. Structurally, it looked somewhat like a modern human skull, but it was estimated to be about 210,000 years old — supposedly too old to be modern at that location. (Because the structural similarities to modern skulls show up in reconstructive models of the Greek fossil, the conclusion is controversial and will probably continue to be until DNA can be recovered for a genetic study to confirm it.)
The Apdima 1 skull fossil found in Greece has many modern structural features but is 210,000 years old — too ancient to be from any of the modern humans who left Africa only 60,000 years ago. It may have come from a hypothesized earlier exodus that left no survivors.
Now the DNA evidence seems to back up this revised migration narrative as well. In retrospect, “it seems quite natural,” Scally said, “to say that human populations and evolution were just as messy 200,000 years ago, and just as subdivided and structured … as they are today.”
“It makes it hard to argue that there was ever some … special evolutionary event or genetic event that triggered the evolution of humans as we know them,” he added. Humans have been continuously evolving through the mixing of varied populations for hundreds of thousands of years. (In fact, Scally posits that our species did not originally evolve from a single population in Africa, but rather from many interconnected populations spread out across the continent.)
“This is telling us, ‘Oh, this is not a weird one-off,’” Hawks said. “It’s a continuing interaction.”
Clues are emerging about the unexpected influence of gene flow from ancient hominins on modern human populations before the latter left Africa.
5. On TV You Can Go Home Again -- A Very Brady Renovation and 9210
I found the part on The Brady Brunch Home Renovation humorous. So felt the urge to share.
For his essay “Travels in Hyperreality,” the Italian author Umberto Eco journeyed across America to sample our peculiar national product: facsimiles. He visited a full-scale model of Lyndon Johnson’s Oval Office, wax museums, a “wild river” in Disneyland stocked with animatronic fauna, “instances in which the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake.”
Eco died in 2016, which is a shame, because I feel like he would have watched the hell out of “A Very Brady Renovation.”
The HGTV series, which begins Sept. 9, came about by kismet and a canny read of the current pop-cultural addiction to nostalgia. In 2018, the North Hollywood house that was used for exterior shots of the family home on “The Brady Bunch” went on the market. Executives at HGTV had a brainstorm: buy it and, cameras rolling, restore it to precisely how it looked on the 1969–’74 sitcom.
The hitch: The house you remember — the kitchen where the housekeeper Alice made pork chops, the entry where Carol Brady would greet her husband Mike after work — never existed.
Or rather, it existed the way most houses on sitcoms do, in your mind’s eye. It was a collection of separate sets on a soundstage, edited with exterior footage to synthesize the illusion of a warm, groovy midcentury home. Mike Brady may have been an architect, but TV supplied the home’s modular parts, and your brain completed the assembly.
So like Disney Imagineers or Las Vegas casino designers, HGTV set out to build something realer than real. They would rip up the house’s actual, disappointingly conventional interior, enlarge it (by 2000 square feet, they say) and make a physical manifestation of something that never existed.
“A Very Brady Renovation” feels like the logical progression of, and the perfect metaphor for, the reboot and revival craze that has brought us “Fuller House” and “Twin Peaks: The Return,” that exhumed “Veronica Mars” and “Murphy Brown.” The vast mechanism of TV and streaming has become a “Star Trek” replicator of pop culture. If I want to see Jean-Luc Picard on my TV again: Make it so!
“The Brady Bunch” is the perfect show to reboot this way, because it has made a posthumous art of reproducing itself. Long before “Friends” liberated $100 million from Netflix’s pockets, it was the Patient Zero of TV nostalgia, extending its five-season life through reruns, spinoffs, TV movies, theatrical movies, cartoons, a variety show, memes (“Sure, Jan”) and not a few tell-alls and documentaries. Its memory surpassed its actual existence.
And memory is what HGTV is selling here — well, memory and its own brand. “A Very Brady Renovation” casts the hosts of no less than five of the network’s shows: “Good Bones,” “Restored by the Fords,” “Flea Market Flip,” “Hidden Potential” and, of course, “Property Brothers,” whose charismatic and ubiquitous Jonathan and Drew Scott anchor the 90-minute first episode.
They’re joined by the six original Brady sibs, Christopher Knight (Peter), Mike Lookinland (Bobby), Maureen McCormick (Marcia), Susan Olsen (Cindy), Eve Plumb (Jan) and Barry Williams (Greg). (The older stars Ann B. Davis, Florence Henderson and Robert Reed have all died.)
The show drives eagerly onto Memory Lane and floors the accelerator. The show’s theme song is, of course, a parody of the original show’s. (“That’s the way we remade the Brady house!”)
The rebuild of the entryway stairs is accompanied by clips of Marcia walking down the steps and the family posing on them. A demolition scene is scored with “Sunshine Day.” Re-creating the decorative tchotchkes leads, of course, to footage of the legendary “don’t play ball in the house!” basketball disaster.
For all the milking of memories and stagey-seeming “behind-the-scenes” moments, the opening episode is a treat for TV and set-design nerds, getting deep into the weeds about the art of scouring the internet and secondhand outlets to find the precise piece of turn-of-the-’70s kitsch.
The crew studies photos of the original set posted to boards as if reconstructing a crime scene. For certain hard-to-find pieces, like a chef’s-kiss-perfect set of plastic grapes, the production crowdsources contributions from the HGTV audience. “Thanks, America!” a voice-over tells us. “The Brady house really is your house!”
It really is ours, even if HGTV holds the deed. (HGTV is keeping the house and giving away a six-night stay in an audience contest.) You can imagine a version of America in which the rebuilt-as-it-never-was Brady house becomes a modern-day Monticello, a cultural monument for an era in which phantom memories of TV spaces seem as real and emotionally binding as spaces we encounter every day with our meat bodies. [Insert giggling here.]
6. (As an aside, I keep losing count when I do these posts, and have to proof to ensure I either didn't skip over a number or repeat it twice. I can't count to save my life. I do it on my fingers, and still lose count.) Anyhow, I finished the book about the jewel thief and the bow street runner (who is also a rich lord, because honestly, he can't just be a bow street runner can he -- although it's a series and the others are just bow street runners, but the women aren't nearly as interesting). It was poorly written -- lots and lots of typos. It seemed in every other sentence, a word was missing. I'd be reading along and go...wait, shouldn't there be a word there? Go back and yep, the word that my mind had inserted was not there.
Oh well, it was cheap, what do I expect? Didn't have any sex in it. Which was a nice change of pace. I'd gotten tired of the heavy emphasis on sex scenes.
New book is by Cat Sebastian, who I haven't read yet. Sebastian specializes in Queer romances, and/or off the beaten track, politically progressive ones. This one is a romance between a sedition pamphlet publisher and an engraver, who has epileptic seizures. She enlists his help in providing the illustrations for an illicit publication to make money to aid her brother, who got in trouble for writing and selling the pamphlets. This is a Regency Romance in England. The hero is also a Duke, but he doesn't know he is a Duke, and is currently residing with the heroine and her brother -- after losing his mentor. Sebastian's novels always have an LGBTQ romance in them.
So far, so good. There's no typographical errors. The romance is being built slowly. The characters are long time friends, who are attracted to each other, but have refused to act on it by mutual consent. He's afraid to -- because he believes it will cost them their friendship -- and he's lost everyone he cares about. He has epilepsy, and is not the "alpha" male type, actually she's the more dominant of the two.
I like the two characters so far. So we'll see. It was cheap -- $3.99.
7. I wish Marvel would stop killing off my favorite characters. They did it in Endgame - my favorite characters in the MCU were Black Widow and Iron Man, I liked the rest -- but those two were my favs. Also Gamora, who I think is still alive. And Valkeri. And Loki -- who is sort of dead, and sort of not.) And they did it in this week's issue of House of X #4. Granted, the fact that I know there are comics coming out after this arc that feature the characters they killed in this arc -- does suggest they are bringing them back somehow...it still is aggravating.
Honestly, Marvel. Stop killing my fav's. Over and over and over again. To date they've killed them off six times, and brought them back. The first few times...it was okay, but it's starting to get annoying.
Can't comic book writers come up with an interesting story that doesn't involve killing people and bringing them back to life?
no subject
Date: 2019-09-06 05:57 pm (UTC)Can't comic book writers come up with an interesting story that doesn't involve killing people and bringing them back to life?
One wonders why only certain things are considered interesting -- why not explore what a character feels because they can't die, for example! This is what I thought they were going to do with Thanos before IW came out. That would have been a better option IMO.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-06 06:23 pm (UTC)Eh, no that's never where they were going with Thanos. He's representative of the Death. (It's either the Greek or Egyptian God of Death is Thanos). I actually liked the exploration of the idea of balancing the universe by killing half of it, randomly. That worked for me. The whole, character who can't die feelings bit has been explored to death in Doctor Who and Buff and Vampire Diaries. And something else...that is escaping me at the moment.
No, I just wish they'd not felt the need to kill characters in Endgame. Infinity War...was sort of interesting and different in a way. Because Thanos' motivation on its face doesn't seem that horrible -- he's trying to balance the universe and make a peaceful world. His world was destroyed by overpopulation and he felt that it would have been saved, if his people had agreed to reduce the population. But, as Doctor Strange and Gamora point out, at what cost? You are creating balance with genocide. And all is good and well, when you get to live, but what if you don't, and what if everyone you care about doesn't? In the end playing god like this -- is just an ego trip, and helps no one. (They showed that in Endgame rather well.)
Characters who can't die are usually shown in fiction as amoral after a certain point. They've stopped caring. If they can't die, life stops having meaning.
no subject
Date: 2019-09-06 11:56 pm (UTC)But alas, they don't often do that. (Endgame did.) And often it feels like " Oh My God, I can't believe they just killed Kenny" -- which South Park made fun of over 15 years ago.
The comics did Thanos differently -- he warped reality and was an impossibly power villain, also we had the X-men involved apparently. I didn't read those comics -- but saw the snyposis. He's still around in the comics by the way -- but no one stays dead in comics.