It really cannot be overstated what a trash movie "Ava" is
Like, did they improvise the entire movie after the scriptwriter forgot to show up
all the action in the movie is motivated by a crisis of conscience or something which you have to intuit because it started before the movie started and in the last scene the big bad guy has her at an advantage and then just... walks away, allowing her to easily kill him
in between those fatal flaws, everything that happens is stupid and pointless, including casting John Malkovich to play an avuncular, even-tempered guy who doesn't do anything
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I'm sort of fascinated by how The Discourse on Lovers Rock doesn't exactly know what to do with [the incident sexual violence that occurs in it]; it's hard to incorporate into a celebratory story about community, which I suspect is exactly why McQueen included it
A lot of the talk about LR--in many ways following SM's lead--emphasizes the *safety* of the community formed by the blues party, but the most interesting thing about LR, I think, is that it doesn't sit comfortably in that celebration of celebration
"Safe" is such an interesting word to use about a 70 minute movie that includes an act of sexual assault!
I wish the discourse on why America got steamrolled by this virus was a little less "people going out and having fun" and a little more "this country has no paid sick leave, our health care is a disaster, and the GOP isn't the only party prioritizing the economy"
Obviously this country has way too many politically-motivated vigilantes and folks who are just lazy, uniformed, or confused, but, like, super-spreading events at jails, workplaces, and nursing homes aren't about people's refusal to defer pleasure
It's worth framing this as the lure of the Jeremiad: instead of describing the structural arrangement which effectively pre-determined how things would play out, the jeremiad form frames the problem as a matter of *choice.* (You COULD have, but you denied God, etc)
fun fact! The 2006 "Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act" that permanently wrecks the Postal Services budget was co-sponsored by two Democrats and passed by a voice vote
This is not actually a fun fact, this is just yet another example of how centrist "reforms" lay the groundwork for far right sabotage
tfw all you wanted to do was screw the unions, smash labor, and force the postal service to do the dirty work for Amazon, UPS, and FedEx, but then Trump came along and used your neoliberalism to smash democracy. #whoops
Conservatives are always scandalized to find themselves not well-represented in the parts of academia that conservatives have spent the last 50 years trying to destroy
the hustle is to reverse the causality and pretend to have been excluded from academia first, rather than having built an ideological movement since the 60s on the premise that colleges and professors and eggheads are bad, but let's not be rubes
It's always the same playbook as Ronald Reagan in the 60s, running for governor against "that mess at Berkeley" and claiming "I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The party left me."
the funny thing about "The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away" is that it's one of the most faith-based, unargued and unsupported, wish-fulfillment zombie ideas you're ever likely to see
Which is not to say "exposure, argument, and persuasion" can never accomplish anything. But there's a "your prayer wasn't answered? I guess you need to pray more" quality about this endless invocation of the efficacy of debating by people who enjoy debating and want to do debates
An important pillar of LL's argument here is that pundits insisting that More Debate Will Fix it require (and legitimize) a kind of denial and naiveté about what has changed since The Trolls Took Over: slate.com/news-and-polit…