Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Children of a Lesser God passed all three. And my bonus rule.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Sacha,
4) They don't have a redeeming superpower, but are still interesting.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Never bothered with the commentary tracks on the film itself, because I’d rather get lost in the film without Ridley Scott, (or the producers or the writers or a good chunk of the FX crew) yapping away in my ear.
Heh. It's not like I don't know the dialog in A New Hope backwards, so I thought there could be something interesting in his words, describing the directing of probably the most famous Sci Fi movie ever made. But no, he sounded bored, like he wasn't even watching, possibly sipping his coffee and working on something else at the time. Quite incredible. Yes, there's an art in it, but OMFG, that's no excuse to put what sounded like no effort at all into it. Eliot Goblet had more animation in his voice.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Jeanette King,
BTW, passing or failing this test doesn't make any judgement on whether the movie is 'good' or not, just how well rounded and complete the female roles in the movie are.
Indeed, it's neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a good film, but it does measure something about any film claiming to give female roles as much credit as male ones. There are awful films that pass the test, and plenty of films that could be good without passing it. Lord of the Flies would not be a story about what it is about if it had any female roles in it at all. Phantom Menace would not have been improved, nor made less tokenist, if there had been a scene in it with Queen Amidala talking to Mommy Skywalker about needlework while they washed the Jedi's dishes.
But it's still a pretty amazing test, as you say, purely on account of how few films pass it. If you swap woman for man and man for woman in the test description, most films would pass it.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Kracklite,
The Bechdel Test and Ursula LeGuin's much-reprinted essay, Science Fiction and Mrs Brown.
Great link to LeGuin, thanks for that one Krackster. As I read it I applied the memory test, with some interesting results. The Dispossessed scores well. Unfortunately, so does the work of David Eddings, which also passes the Bechdel test, unlike LOTR. Shows that if a weak writer like Eddings (and most likely his wife is a big part of this) can get it right, the bar isn't that high.
I think her point about discovering characters is pretty important, though. Characters forced through the plot are boring. Characters that make the plot happen aren't, so much, and that's very hard if you plan the plot out and stick to it.
On George Lucas, I have to say he made the very worst director's commentary I've ever heard for A New Hope , when it was finally released for DVD. I had to stop watching it, he was boring me so badly. It was almost like he hadn't actually directed the film, and was just giving a hackneyed interpretation of it by some old and not particularly bright fanboi who hadn't watched it for 10 years. No wonder the prequels sucked, if he had turned into such a boring person.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Kracklite,
That is what George Lucas thinks constitutes characterisation.
That is a very funny slamdown of Plinkett's. On the money at almost every point.
Without saying that the original Star Wars trilogy is the best thing in the world, he does manage to put a strong case that it's way better on almost every level than Episode 1.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Kracklite,
Ooo can I try? Guess the following:
1. Effeminate and klutzy, he is...
2. Angry at times, saccharine cute, he is...
3. Seems wise and kind, but isn't, he is...
4. She is....
5. Loyal, useful, but mute, it is...
6. Bold, abrasive, but kind, he is...
7. Idealistic, brave but cautious, he is...
8. Angry and violent, he is...
9. Pathetically stupid and weak, they are...
10. Cowardly and devious, he is...
11. Wise and sad, she is...
12. Too wise for their own good, they are...
13. Speaks backwards, he does, ... he isI could go on, but I'm getting the point. Did I need more than 3 descriptive terms for any of them? Could I produce more? Not without putting more thought into it than I ever have for that movie.
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Up Front: A Real Character, in reply to Chris Waugh,
My own feeling was that the portrayal was a little bit hindering to my own little special needs boy, when I had only very sketchy knowledge of the condition, and received the on-the-spectrum diagnosis. I think it caused me to push him to develop superpowers, when I saw him behind on other things. Thankfully, therapists patiently kept bringing me back to the things that he needs which are most fundamental, and just take hard work to make happen, which he will probably always be un-exceptional at. But basic stuff for a functional life. While I appreciate that this is what Booth is meant to be doing with Bones, I simply disagree that he actually is. What he's doing is killing her spirit.
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I'm totally conflicted about Bones. I can see that they're trying to make her a strong character, but the main dynamic of the show is her relationship with Booth, her immediate seduction of him, and his gradual seduction of her. I've slowly given up on it - she was much more interesting in the first season as a person of logic with the strangely powerful and penetrating insights into human nature that sometimes come from the adult autistic. The selling of why Booth would fall in love with her was well done, she was essentially a beautiful human. But the counter sell frustrates me - that Booth is humanizing her (as a plot device) really annoys me, because he is an arch-conservative. He really doesn't have an open mind about anything, and practically every episode is about schooling Bones about how to be feminized towards what Booth wants. She's becoming a weaker and weaker character, and the acting is getting worse and worse.
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Hard News: Staying Alive, in reply to James Butler,
I don't know either, but a rural environment with no vehicles that were capable of the kind of raw power output for lengthy periods in remote locations, that currently only ICEs can provide, yet produces modern levels of output, is futuristic beyond prediction. There was a reason that even before ICEs farming was being mechanized, using such primitive technologies as wood and coal burning steam engines. The reason is because a poor old horse dragging a plough around for days on end can't do as much work as those things could do in half an hour. And the horse needs to be fed too, it needs some acres of grass to keep it alive. It needs tending, it can get sick. It has to spend years growing up to be useful. And it can only really output one horsepower, which just isn't sufficient for a lot of tasks.
I don't doubt that technology will improve, that people will adapt; but it will be harder, and it's going to look different.
Very hard to predict. Fuel costs will rise, but they must be bounded above by biofuel production costs? I don't know this for certain. Perhaps that will be the extent of the change, that a certain amount of land will be dedicated to providing the energy for the kind of farming for which alternative equipment has not been invented or the invented infrastructure has not reached. So maybe farms won't look much different at all. If cities reform dramatically so that they're not fuel guzzlers any more, something that we know how to do, then perhaps the cost of fuel might stabilize, or even come down.
Note: I'm using the word "fuel" to mean "Petrol or alternatives, including but not limited to biofuel".
I'm tilting towards windmills,
Yeah, I'd expect there will be a lot more of those.
Looking forward to seeing @farmgeek again at Foo today. His vision of sustainable farming is very different and most admirable, since he's also living it. Permaculture does look different to highly industrial farming, but there's still a lot that's the same too.
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