Seeing the Unseen
Over at Eject! Eject! Eject!, Bill Whittle writes in with part 2 of his article Seeing the Unseen. He does a great job debunking a lot of the insane conspiracy theories that people have been circulating regularly - everything from the Loch Ness Monster, Kennedy, Man on the Moon fakery, contrails, 9/11 conspiracies and more.
I had a conversation with my Dad recently where I was talking about about depressingly common a lot of these theories are and how difficult it is to reach an agreement on what we should do as a society when people have such a weak grasp of reality.
Bill comes to a conclusion at the end which I a heartily agree with (though I would go further and include all media) - our Hollywood media is so detached from reality that they feed these conspiracy theories under the guise of artistic license.
I would never support any sort of governmental approval of media topics. I really want the media to come to the realization that they are an essential part of our system of government. Without a functional media, we the people don’t get the information we need to determine if our elected officials are doing the job we elected them for, we don’t find out about things in the world that we need our leaders to address, we don’t find out about threats and opportunities in the world that need to be addressed. Right now, our media is a mess: it’s great if you want to know who the father of Anna Nicole Smith’s child is or if you want to know only the information that NPR, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, or John Stewart want to tell you. They are only going to tell you what will support their cause of the day. Anything that hurts the cause is withheld, minimized, or ridiculed.
Look, being impartial is HARD. I mean really HARD. Your philosophy professor from college will tell you that it’s impossible, but for some reason too many media people seem to think that means they shouldn’t even try.
Ultimately I have some hope that the Internet can provide that level of information to replace our currently broken media establishment, but there needs to be huge improvements in the search-ability, validation, and breadth of available information before this can work. Until then, our traditional media needs to work. And the necessary changes can only come from the inside.
Chick Flicks Defined and Discussed
Virginia and I Have had a running argument about whether or not I enjoy “Chick Flicks”. She claims that I simply don’t like them. I argue that I do, but I hold them to the same criteria for quality that I hold any other movie - they don’t get a buy simply because of their genre.
Last night, we were watching All About My Mother which I define as a chick flick (and I loved it) - Virginia disagrees. So perhaps I simply have some misconceptions about what defines a chick flick.
Throwing out a definition, I came up with “a movie describing human relationships (often romantic) from a woman’s perspective.” With this definition in mind, I came up with the following movies immediately:
Virginia disagreed with the entire list - saying that having to read the movie (subtitled) ruins the effect.
Over lunch today, Greg Lange, Edward Mao and I were talking about this. I described the plots of the above movies and they disagreed with my designation of the movies in question as chick flicks also. Stymied, I asked for a definition from Greg. He came up with:
Chick Flicks have a simple plot, and are about a woman and one or two guys.
I’ve seen some movies like this, but I’m not sure most people would describe them as chick flicks.
Just to avoid being called a foreign film snob, I came up with some American or at least English language chick flick movies:
- When Harry Met Sally
- Sleepless in Seattle
- Bridget Jones’s Diary
- My Big Fat Greek Wedding
- Whale Rider
- Four Weddings and a Funeral
- The African Queen
- Bringing Up Baby
- Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet
- Casablanca
- Lost in Translation (from Ed)
I later found a few links about the topic which triggered positive memories about the following:
- The Truth About Cats and Dogs
- Bend It Like Beckham
- Shall We Dansu? (I’m picking the original Japanese version here)
- Romeo + Juliet
- Legally Blonde
- It Could Happen To You
Also, these lists had some seriously weird choices for “chick flicks”. For example:
Hmm.
Greg came up with the following:
- Something to Talk About (Mark: Missed it - adding to Netflix)
- Romeo + Juliet (Mark: yup - I liked it too)
- Chocolat (Mark: which I couldn’t finish watching)
- You’ve Got Mail (Mark: wasn’t this an AOL commercial? Aww)
Edmo came up with:
- Love Actually (Mark: Adding to Netflix)
- Garden State (Edmo adds: “maybe, but it’s very borderline chick flick”)
- Lost In Translation (Mark: Loved it)
And the number one - suggested by Virginia is The Notebook - which I’ve got in my queue already!
So what do y’all think? I declare myself not a chick flick hater!
