A Whirlwind Of Wedding Plans

 
"The chief difference between a war party and a wedding party is that the former can legitimately claim to take no real pleasure in the vicious fighting that they will almost inevitably become embroiled in."

This week it's all about tying the knot in Game of Thrones.  More to the point, it's about the uses of marriage in politics and warfare, and a reminder of how women in the medieval world far more often represent power than wield it.  Daenerys' absence this week is perhaps no coincidence. Today we'll be talking about how women can be used as weapons against men.

This isn't exactly thrilling news to those fans of the show with a feminist bent.  Of course, there's representing patriarchal views, and there's dabbling in them. My opinion of which way the show has gone on this issue of late are well-known, so my consideration of "The Climb" will dip a little into what the show has done to redeem itself after last episode's problems.

(TV spoilers below)

Cheerfully Oblivious

"For the Greater Good!  Er, I mean, for the giant space tetrahedron!
Yeah, that's it..."

I wasn't sure about Oblivion when I first saw the trailers; it seemed to me too clear an example of a film based around a central mystery the trailer was all too happy to give away.  Still, my curiosity was kindled, so The Other Half and I blew our Orange Wednesday on it, hoping to be surprised by its quality, if not its actual, y'know, surprises.

And actually, it's pretty good.  The design ethic is wonderful, a mixture of the kind of sleek functionality of, say, Minority Report and the strange mixture of curves and lines employed by of all things the Tau Empire from Warhammer 40 000.  Indeed, with all the drones and pulse rifles in evidence, the similarity might not be totally coincidental.  You could go further, actually, and point out that much of the film's storyline - without going into details for anyone not already spoiled by the trailer, there's a strong sense of people dedicating their lives to working for a Greater Good defined by others who may have their own agenda - is somewhat reminiscent of the Tau as well.  Really, though, that's just to note both the Tau and Oblivion focus on the obvious problem of attempting to work for the benefit of all when you're entirely reliant on others to tell you your actions are helpful.

That's not a new idea, but it's often interesting to explore, and Oblivion presents it well.  The central problem really is that damn trailer, though.  It's not so much that it completely gives the game away - there's far too much going on for that - so much that enough is given away that you have enough time to figure the remaining twists out for yourself. The film seems obviously designed to throw so many twists and turns at the viewer that they have no time to catch their breath and figure out what's coming next.  By slowing the pace of revelations, the trailer undermines that strategy significantly.  It by no means ruins the film, but it does lessen it.

The opening narrative is another problem, an exceptionally tedious infodump (Cruise isn't really suited to exposition, to be honest) that explains things that almost without exception are reiterated throughout the film. Indeed, there's even a scene an hour or so in where a new character has the entirety of the status quo explained to them.  The intent strikes me as clear; make the viewer spend the first half of the film playing catch up, so that they've only just found their feet when the rug is utterly pulled from under them.  A drawn-out description of the status quo completely works against that.

Really, this all reminds me of Dark City; a truly phenomenal work of mystery and misplaced expectations significantly hampered by overly revealing trailers and an initial voice-over that explains much of what the film wanted you to discover.  In the case of Dark City, said introduction was studio mandated by those terrified that the audience might be confused - this being the entire fucking point of the film - and I wonder if the same is true of Oblivion.  There is admittedly (small spoiler) another voice-over at the end of the film, so there is at least a cyclic benefit to starting the film off that way, but what's said could certainly be massively pared down.

If you haven't seen this, wait until it comes out on video, and fast-forward through the first few minutes.  The film will make far less sense that way, in the best possible way imaginable.  That way, there's only one problem with the film, which is... (SPOILERS!)

A Hurricane Of Hot Tubs

"I am called Grey Worm, after the current state of my genitals"

It's time to analyse another episode of When Gorgeous Redheads Go Topless, and what an episode it was!  Ever since the show decided to actually employ Esme Bianco's talents as an actress, I've been worried things might actually get respectable around here.  No chance of that, apparently.

Once we get past the sudden appearance of jacuzzis in Westeros - reappearance, I should say, because if you can't use mighty dragons to cook you up a decent bath, then what good could they have been - there's a deeper concern lurking within this episode: the reasons people give for doing the horrible things they do.

(TV spoilers follow)

My Yearly Inaccuracy

This time I think I'm going to plump for Ronnie O'Sullivan (obviously) by, erm, seven frames, I reckon.

Friday 40K: Meet The New Boss

My Dark Angels have themselves a new Company Master.  Unfortunately, that means the previous warlord has had to be demoted to Company Champion, but frankly he's had something like this coming for a long time.  As I recall, my Dark Angels have won a grand total of two battles in the last thirteen years, and I wasn't playing with them either time.  Maybe the new guy - and his snazzy Monster-Slayer of Caliban blade - might finally see a change in fortune.

Good News And Bad

Two pieces of news this week involving the continuing dissolving of what seems like half the USA over the fact that some men like to sleep with other men.

The good news first: Jason Collins has become the first major male American athlete to come out as gay:

I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I'm happy to start the conversation. I wish I wasn't the kid in the classroom raising his hand and saying, "I'm different." If I had my way, someone else would have already done this. Nobody has, which is why I'm raising my hand.

There are a couple of things to say about this.  The first one is to echo what several people (including Glenn Greenwald, who doesn't get all that much praise around these parts) have noted, which is that this is only a genuine, honest-to-Gods absolute first if you pretend women athletes don't exist.  First high-profile male athlete will have to do.

Secondly, as I've said before, I would advise my allies to avoid responding to this news with some variation of "who cares", mistakenly believing they are demonstrating their acceptance of gays by suggesting this is not big news.  It is big news.  It is big news for any young gay man searching for role models in the world of professional sports.  It is big - and bad - news for those wanting to pretend physical aptitude and the world of sport exists entirely separately from those people and their love of small dogs and wallpaper samples.  If nothing else, given the reverence sportspeople hold for so many, news that one of them is uncommonly brave and looking to improve the lives of others through making himself a target should be sensibly considered as news.  I outsource further comments to SEK of Lawyers, Guns, and Money, who's been killing on this.

On the other hand, fuck all these guys. 

A group of conservatives in the Iowa state House have filed a measure that would cut the pay of state Supreme Court Justices by around 80 percent — but only for the ones who voted to legalize same sex marriage in 2009.

But Republican state Reps. Tom Shaw and Dwayne Alons insisted to The Gazette on Tuesday that the reduction in pay was not a punishment.

“It’s our responsibility to maintain the balance of power,” Shaw explained. “We’re just holding them responsible for their decision, for going beyond their bounds.”

C'mon, you cowards.  Just confess it's a punishment and be done.  Hell, punishment is a better motive for pulling this crap than the one you're hanging on.  Once you start arguing that the balance of power can only be maintained by structural imbalances generated by political calculation, you're on the mother of all slippery slopes, and the place it finally bottoms out in is not somewhere anyone wants to be except those people who dream of their faces painted onto the sides of tanks. 

The people who voted these judges in were themselves voted in by the people of Iowa.  The people made their decision, then the politicians made their decision, and then the judges made their decision, and all of those decisions pissed you off.  That is not imbalance.  That is democracy. 

There is nothing in the Republican mindset - not the laughing at scientists, not the dismissal of the world beyond their borders, not even the insistence that the three people killed by the Tsarnaev's bomb were victims of some existential threat to the American people but the person killed by the Tsarnaev's gun was simply a sacrifice to freedom - that convinces me more than this that the GOP exists not as party but as plague than this.  Than the constant argument, in words and in actions, that the worst thing that can happen to America is the entirety of its citizen body gaining free access to its mechanisms of selection, and the entirety of its political body getting equal access to its mechanisms of power.  The cult of the filibuster has joined the cult of "voter fraud", and the cult of "judicial activism", and in the welding together of this coalition of the paranoid and the petty, some well-known villains have resurfaced wearing shiny new hats that look a lot like hoods if you catch a glimpse of them at just the right angle.

The Democrats do some terrible things with democracy.  The Republicans do their terrible things to it.  This, above all, should not be forgotten.

Providing A Solid

So Phil Sandifer was all "help me Squid!  Help get the word out about my new blog as it continues my ongoing project to take over the internet", and I'm all "What's in it for me, blud?" and he's "We never actually had this conversation" and I'm like "But I'll do it anyway, so who's laughing now?"

It's him.  It's obviously him.

But then I don't really mind.  The TARDIS Eruditorum Project isn't always on the money, but when it isn't being utterly awesome, it's busy being wrong in the most fascinating and intelligent ways.  I can't recommend it highly enough.