Weekly Post #1: First Post, North Korea, Cinema, and Buicks
Greetings
I am the Running Commentator, and this is the Running Commentary. This is not a commentary on running, mind you (see subtitle). Rather, it is a commentary on things worth comment, given weekly over the course of our run. Shall we begin?
Issue #1: North Korea, et cetera
So, Sony decided to make a movie about modern-day Caligula Kim Jong Un being killed by two idiots. Then North Korea decided to forbid it, on grounds of denying the immortality of their third-generation immortal leader. They threatened to blow up all theaters which showed the movie. Sony decided to just keep the release quiet. Debate ensues.
In a perfect world, Sony would be able to release whatever they want. North Korea obviously can’t blow up every cinema in America. However, when a premier of The Dark Knight Rises provided a venue for a mass shooting, some saw fit to sue the theater, so there’s the possibility that Sony could truly suffer if they released The Interview and a multitude died.
Sony has released the movie on YouTube. I don’t know if they’ll make their money back. I don’t plan to watch it, but I’m glad it wasn’t censored. Google (who runs YouTube, if you didn’t know) should be able to handle any further cyber threats.
Issue #2: Other happenings in Cinema
By all appearances, there are a lot of great movies in the near future. Yearly helpings of Star Wars, DC Comics, and Marvel Studios works have been announced, starting with The Force Awakens, Batman vs. Superman, and Avengers: Age of Ultron respectively. That’s just really good news.
Conversely, Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth movies are done. If you want a review, I thought The Battle of the Five Armies was the best of the six, largely because in this one everyone is at the mountain already. We viewers got a nice sequence of events without a visible end, as opposed to all the others where the overarching narrative of going to the mountain left us impatient.
(It should be noted that as bad as Jackson can seem at editing for brevity, Tolkien was worse. That’s a tip for aspiring young novelists who tend to leave unrelated storylines in their drafts: Tolkien made it, and you might too.)
Issue #3: The EU is dead, by all reports
Disney has erased the works of the Expanded Universe from official continuity, and it’s just been real fun ever since. People have been mourning the loss of Mara Jade, Thrawn, and Darth Revan with a greater fervor than I’ve seen displayed for actual deceased people.
One problem: the characters are not out of the continuity. Heir to the Empire and Knights of the Old Republic are out of the continuity, sure, but their characters are just in limbo. Which was what the EU was: a limbo full of stuff which was published with Lucasfilm’s knowledge but which held no sway over the “official Star Wars” given in the movies. That’s where the Mandalorians, Imperial Security Bureau, Aayla Secura, Black Sun, and countless other things languished until someone decided to bring them into the canon. I’m not worried. Leland Chee isn’t going to throw millennia of good, beloved storyline into the garbage and come up with something else.
Issue #4: New Buick
So Buicks have been totally revamped, to the point of being totally unrecognizable, huh?
No. No, they haven’t. Same logo, big as life on the front of the thing. Same target customers. Same selection of sedans and SUVs. Same general look they’ve had for the past few model years.
Jeep making a sportscar would warrant this kind of commercial. This (and the others Buick has out) is just really stupid. It’s also really reminiscent of Oldsmobile’s final ad campaign.
Issue #5: Iconic characters are black now
So, 2014 has been a year in which a lot of characters that have usually been thought of/portrayed as white people have been made/portrayed by/planned to be portrayed by black people. These totally innocuous decisions have, of course, broken half the internet.
1. Idris Elba might be the next James Bond
James Bond has been portrayed by more people than Anakin Skywalker (5: David Prowse, James Earl Jones, Sebastian Shaw, Jake Lloyd, Hayden Christensen) The seventh might be a black guy. That’s about it.
So, Rush Limbaugh thinks this is odd, Sony thinks it’s a good idea (though they didn’t mean for you to know) and I don’t care one way or another, as I’m not a Bond fan. NEXT!
2. Steve Rogers is replaced by Sam Wilson as Captain America
So, Captain America, being a WWII vet and all that, is old and has retired. His modern-day sidekick, the Falcon, is the new Captain America.
This is good, because now Captain America can fly. That’s pretty well the only difference between the two characters.
People are mad because A) comic fans dearly, dearly hate change and B) Marvel admitted the decision was made to arbitrarily increase diversity among their heroes.
I can sort of see B, but not really. All the classic superheroes were devised before minorities were quite…in the club, shall we say. Newer heroes haven’t really picked up steam. And it doesn’t make sense for all superheroes to be white. (Statistically, the majority of superheroes should be Han Chinese twentysomething guys.) So Marvel’s story changes might be the only way to make comic books more real.
Wait…make comic books more real? That doesn’t make… NEXT!
3. John Boyega is a stormtrooper
Third on our list is an interesting study in non-racism seeming exactly like racism. The appearance of John Boyega as a stormtrooper in the Ep. VII teaser has made Star Wars fans mad because “stormtroopers aren’t black because they’re clones of Jango Fett and Jango Fett was played by Temura Morrison and he’s a Maori so the stormtroopers are Pacific Islanders not Africans.” Such fans have been called racists because. (sentence ended without cause given after because because there is not cause in most modern accusations of racism.)
The fans have responded by saying that they’re not racists, they’re nerds. Yes, they’re not racists, because their concerns aren’t coming from a hatred of black people. No, they’re not nerds because they don’t know stormtroopers from clone troopers.
Clone troopers were clones of Jango Fett. They served as the Republic and Early Imperial army.
Stormtroopers were the legacy of the Clone Troopers: white armored specialist troops with their own military branch, similar to the U.S. Marine Corps. They were conscripted into service from the general population.
So it’s fine that John Boyega is playing one.
Originally published at runningcommentator.wordpress.com on December 27, 2014.
