Posts by giovanni tiso
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No. Really, no. The faces of the military-industrial complex (Giovanni Ribisi and a so-hammy-its-CAMP Stephen Lang respectively) don't bite the head off an adorable Pandoran puppy-analogue while cackling manically as they urinate in the bleeding stump, but pretty damn close.
Seriously, if James Cameron has managed to get a huge corporation to spend 500 million dollars to produce a film against corporations, I'm going to love to see it. But hey, perhaps he's the new Matt Groening. I'll talk to you in a week.
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Alien Lizard (anag)
Is R your middle initial then?
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And hohohohomophobia...
Are you trying to out Santa or something?
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Although as many have shown - most lately Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism - generally in Hollywood cinema when corporations are the bad guys if you scratch a bit you find the message is just the opposite. I haven't seen Avatar yet (I never had to buy tickets for a movie ONE WEEK IN ADVANCE in my life before) but I wouldn't be surprised if it confirmed that.
(Plus, hard to disagree with Tim Poynton in the last comment on that Times article.)
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The obvious solution is to make our health scheme just as good.
In related news, the saga of my son Joseph and his orthopaedics appointments at Wellington Hospital continues. We are at the fifth reschedule, now due some time in Feb but we're not holding our breath. It used to be October. At one point he was rescheduled twice on the same day, with two separate letters so dated - I'm keeping them in case somebody ever suggests there isn't an issue with basic incompetence at our DHB.
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Apart from the woman who got AIDS via a transfusion in Philadelphia, helpfully inserted in the film to show what a guiltless person with AIDS looks like.
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To sell the pastime of binge drinking to young people in general, and women in particular and try to make the very excesses and the expensive problems that ensue part of the identity of young people themselves is nothing short of insane.
I'm all for banning advertising of alcohol, but can I just say that binge drinking predates advertising by a couple of millennia, give or take, and that maybe - just maybe - in its current incarnation it's actually the byproduct of something healthy and positive, from a societal standpoint? Smoking and drinking used to be less acceptable in women than men, because being deputised to protect the morality of the whole of society was part of the place that women had to be kept in. Now young women are increasingly being told that they have the same options as their penis-endowed counterparts, and guess what, that includes getting hammered. It's part of the price that society pays for equality, and also for its near-pathological desire for orderliness. You may wish for every citizen to be well-adjusted, productive and health-conscious, but it's just not how it works I'm afraid. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want it that way, either.
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that my own culture is so repressed that men touching is jarring.
Not giving hugs to Kiwi male friends is something I had to learn in an awful hurry when I got here. I just couldn't stand the discomfort and the mock-homophobic jokes used to disguise the discomfort. Christ.
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But you could say the same thing about any person who is listed as having made 'services to business'.
Oh, I don't know. In our economic system we need enterprise to foster employment and not everything that is sold harms or kills you. This coming from an old and rather inveterate commie.
I wouldn't give Peter Jackson a silver tea spoon on the basis of the miserably over-rated (but massively successful) LoTR trilogy, but obviously someone begs to differ.
I didn't like the films any more than you did, but it would take a small minded approach indeed not to see what an achievement it was. And - case in the point above - it created an industry from little more than scratch.
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The country has said all these things are OK.
OK, sure... but honour-worthy?