Sorry guys. I accidentally deleted the disabled women athletes’ post twice tonight and I am so frustrated and angry at myself right now that its probably best for me to step away from the computer, before I lose my temper and throw the contraption outside.
So while I’m recovering my equilibrium, PBS has got a series called The National Parks: America’s Best Idea Their history is absolutely fascinating.
And I’d like to congratulate Rio on winning the bid for the 2018 Olympics. May they not be saddled with cost overuns, boondoggles and debt.
…
Um. On the subject of media? Did anyone watch Surrogates? What did you think about it?
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National Parks: America’s Best Idea.
I have also been enjoying the National Parks series. I actually have yet to go to a National Park, although I’ve been to a National Lakeshore (in Michigan). One of our better ideas.
You have yet to go to a National Park????!!!!!! Not on any of your Boy Scout trips or anything? I have to admit you are the last commenter here that I would expect to say that.
Ron’s in the midwest. There aren’t many national parks in the midwest.
I know that – that he’s in the Midwest and that there aren’t a lot of national parks there. But I thought there were some. I think I thought some of those boundary waters areas were national parks. Apparently not.
Also, people go on vacation. Though I’m one to talk. Four years in Arizona and I never made it to the Grand Canyon.
Re: Surrogates-
Strong acting (from everyone- back ground actors included. I was particularily fond of how when they were in surrogates they were just the SLIGHTEST bit fake- they didn’t hold the arms right, they didn’t blink often enough, little things). Of course, that made the BIG REVEAL kind of obvious from the get-go SPOILER****vis-a-vis the Prophet actually being a surrogate END SPOILER******
Awesome make-up, not bad use of CGI
Writing was a little weak. I think it suffered from a few pacing problems.
HATED the soundtrack. Too loud, cliche, forgettable.
Not great directing. Not bad, not Oscar-worthy. They did SHAKY CAM in places which I will always consider to be the laziest thing a director can do.
As for the ideas, I think they just sort of glanced over a lot of things. How, precisely, did having surrogates get rid of sexism, racism, and most violent crime? Yeah, you don’t know the sex and race of whoever’s controlling the surrogate. So? Surrogates would lead to a lot of paranoia about who was what, and people would be all about who you REALLY were. Additionally, they demonstrate that you can find where the surrogate lives and kill them in person if that who you’re wiping out.
I realize that it was not the story, but I find it interesting that they didn’t examine the class angle very much. The “basic model” only had sight and sound- that would mean that lower class people would literally not be experiencing the world as much as richer people. Weird.
I don’t think I agree, necessarily, with the over-all message that having surrogates would be a bad thing. True, I would not wish to have one- I’d be walking out and about as a normal person. But as a cop? As a firefighter? Soldier (though I found it extremely chilling that they basically made war into a video game)? I’d definitely want the surrogate. Plus, it sure would make vacations cheaper.
Final thought, and a not very deep one- was I the only one who at the end where *******GIANT SPOILER ALERT******* all of the surrogates shut down at once I thought “Every insurance company in the world just went bankrupt!”
Also, no recollection of it passing the Bencheal test.
I haven’t seen the film treatment yet, but I read the comic on which it’s based, and…hmm.
The concept is brilliant and has a lot of places to run, but I felt that the writer didn’t manage to make it as far as he could’ve with it, and let it down in places. There’s lots of details–sexism hasn’t gone away, it’s just that woman will use male surrogates to get pilot and CEO jobs, for instance, for “customer comfort”–but in a world where everyone’s sex is optional and there have supposedly been sweeping social changes, the two cop characters still go off at length at how disgusted they are with a male-assigned person who lives as a female surrogate, and laugh about how “he” is really big and would never pass or be able to go to her job sans surrogate, and how the person was sobbing over not getting to be a woman after the surrie is wrecked.
Similarly, the idea that race is just a tickybox supposedly has made sweeping social changes, but the writer supports this by recounting an instance where a white man used a black surrogate to win elected office in Detroit, saying he did so publicly in order to inspire confidence that he was willing to see through his constituents’ eyes–when I think in real life the offended backlash against that would be extreme.
Similarly, the comic doesn’t really hit on the class aspect at all–that the rich can afford these incredible lifelike surries that are perfect, and everyone else, how could they–except for a few remarks about people who’re still making payments on their surries, like cars, and couldn’t afford to replace them. There are a couple of homeless characters without surrogates in the prequel. There’s also brief, brief mention of a construction worker whose boss has opted for an all-surrie workforce–equipment is easier to insure than personnel–and union backlash against this, as workers feel forced out if they can’t afford nice surries and can be replaced by younger, less-skilled workers who can–but as for people who can’t afford a surrie at all, 8% of the population according to the book, what happens to them? How is this tech made affordable to even that many? Does this apply to the whole world, or just the US? How does it affect geopolitics when one country can send an all-surrie army into another, to fight a flesh-and-blood army who will just die? How does it affect government if you don’t know who’s operating your politician at any given time–literally? What about police actions where your police are literally invincible and up against flesh-and-blood people?
There are also other questions that bugged me a lot. They say the trauma of rape has gone away because women just switch off the sensory input of the surrogate until it’s over, and aren’t traumatized, but wouldn’t they still feel violated? This is the body they live through. I just don’t buy it. Also, there are no visible queer relationships and there is expressed homophobia and transphobia (I guess even in utopia those don’t go away)–do people engage in queer relationships with straight-looking surrie pairs, or have they just vanished? It’s not addressed at all.
On top of that, the only characters of color in the entire book are, roughly anyway, cast as villains. The only. I’m serious, not even surrogates of color show up, in a book that claims as a premise that in its setting racism has disappeared.
All of these oppressions supposedly gone, but the author still can’t imagine a world where a woman isn’t more insecure about aging than a man, where straight people aren’t still disgusted by queer people, and where people of color are only visible as homeless criminals and half-naked religious fanatics with honest-to-god spears.
Maybe this is all just clumsy and the real intent was to show the hypocrisy of all these claims, that none of these problems have been solved and no character is a reliable narrator, but…well…I’d like for that to be the explanation.
I thought the book was very engaging and, at surface, well written with a lot of potential, but it basically completely flubbed anything that wasn’t all about straight cissexual white American men, is what I’m saying. But for that, it made for an interesting sci-fi police procedural, and I thought the tragedy of the lead’s marriage was a potent thing. It’s just–there’s so much potential in the idea that just doesn’t get executed.
he’s in the Midwest and that there aren’t a lot of national parks there. But I thought there were some
There are units of the National Park Service in every state but one – Delaware (not all of these are strictly “parks” – some are monuments, seashores, historic sites, etc.). But, yeah, there are fewer big natural parks in the midwest.
I saw a 2-hour preview of the PBS film last year with a bunch of park service folks . . . and when we complained loudly to the filmmakers that too many of the historians and subjects in the film are white men, the filmmakers hemed and hawed and then finally said that of course , because the history of the parks is a history of white men. Arrrrgh!
(it’s not that I think they should try to manipulate history to fit a modern PC ideal, it’s that the history of the park service actually has non-white-men types of people . . . yes maybe the white men were in disproportionate leadership roles, but they didn’t do it by themselves. And the historians/commentators in the clip were overwhelmingly white men, some of whom were never identified why their opinions mattered).
But maybe it was just the clips we saw. And that was a year ago, so maybe they improved it in the editing room. And I understand that the series is really beautiful . . . I’ll see it someday.
marmalade, they didn’t improve it — at least not by much. The show could have just as easily been called “The doings and desires of rich and powerful white men”. Yes it had gorgeous visuals but you learned almost nothing about what was behind those visuals — it was, in fact, strangely like what you might learn about parks if you drove your car to a visitor center, walked around it, and then drove out. Well actually less because then at least you’d learn some geology and ecology and even something about the history of the land and the people who lived on it.
However, there was a black ranger named Shelton Johnson who was wonderful at expressing what experiencing the parks can mean to people. If the show had been built around trying to document all the complexity that goes into building such strong and beautiful words, it could have been an amazing program. Instead it was a modestly interesting history of which rich white men bought what and when and which rich white men tried to stop them.
ETA: there were brief segments on displaced Native Americans, the CCC and its participants, the inholders of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the internment camps at Manzanar and Tula Lake (including the artist Chiura Obata), and two non-white men, George Masa and George Melendez Wright), who made great contributions.
Also, at least in my day, state parks tended to be better for Scout-style camping than the national parks.
Thanks for the update AndiF. I love your unofficial subtitle! Sounds like its a mixed bag. Shelton was my neighbor for a few years . . . he is an amazing storyteller with a truly rare gift. I’m glad they featured him so prominently. He’s getting a lot of national recognition in the park service because of his work in this film.
When I was a girl scout we hiked and packed in both National and State Parks here in California
where the state parks are really well kept and are the pride of the state(oh, wait, scratch that).Consider this a dis-recomendation of the series on National Parks.
So my rec was based on watching one episode of the miniseries. Which situation has boomeranged on me. Cause I started watching others over the weekend. And as my commenters over at ABW and here have pointed out, it is a VERY whitewashed series. Its all about the doings of rich white people. Not [much] of a word about Native American land, a lot of which was expropriated for the parks. Not a word about any agreements which may have been made between the US gov’t and the tribes. It is not surprising, therefore that a certain Christian-centric tone to the documentary. This is gods country, a miracle of god, these vistas are like cathedrals etc etc. And, well I just found this:Indian Country, God’s Country :Native Americans And The National Parks
And little on Japanese internment camps and and POC on a whole being involved at all. *sigh* Yeah. So therefore, take that as a dis-recomendation of Ken Burn’s whitewashed series.
@antigone: I agree with your review pretty much 100% especially this part:
I have met that kind of logicfail! so many times during various internet fails, and it is so annoying to see it being perpetuated in the movies!
@littlelight: Oh dear. With that much fail in the source material, I suppose we should be glad that teh movie was somewhat less head-explodey?