About DBreitenbeck

David Breitenbeck is a professional freelance writer currently living in Southeast Michigan.

If You’re Looking for Reasons to Go Back to the Theaters…

Posted on August 10, 2021 by DBreitenbeck

I just learned that certain services are ramping up their theatrical showings of classic films. Most people already know about Fathom Events, but they seem to be showing even more lately. Their upcoming schedule includes Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Star Trek IV, the Voyage Home (the whales one that is widely considered one of the best), Coraline, and Stripes. Then September includes Labyrinth, Citizen Kane(!) and The Transformers: the Movie (so, book-ending Orson Welles’s film career, I guess), followed by Spirited Away.

In particular, I had never heard of Flashback Cinema, but apparently this is the focus of their business model. Currently, they’re screening The Iron Giant at select theaters on August 11th. After that it’s the 1989 Batman on August 15 and 18, then Back to the Future on the 22nd and 25th. Then in September, it’s the special editions of The Lord of the Rings films one after another.

Remember, just because films today are mostly junk made by mentally ill psychopaths who hate you doesn’t mean you have to lack for quality cinematic storytelling. There are decades and decades worth of classic films to explore, and thankfully it seems some people are offering the chance to enjoy them on the big screen, the way they were meant to be seen.

Flotsam: Fitting Final Lines

Posted on August 7, 2021 by DBreitenbeck

To every actor there comes a final performance.

Most of the time, for such is the nature of the beast, they’re pretty prosaic affairs, often obscure, coming and going with little fanfare.

But sometimes it happens that a prominent performer gets to end his film career on a high note, ending his final performance with a line that feels like a fitting capstone to his career: a send off worthy of the actor who delivers it. Here are presented a few notable examples:

1. Pedro Armendariz in From Russia With Love

Pedro Armendáriz in From Russia with Love (1963)

“I have had a particularly fascinating life, would you like to hear about it?…You would?!”

The great character actor Pedro Armendariz only lived to be 51 years old, but he has well over a hundred credits on IMDb. He was a regular with John Ford, as well as one of Mexico’s most prestigious performers, and a frequent collaborator with John Wayne.

Alas, it was the latter that resulted in his death. He was one of the many actors in The Conqueror who ended up contracting cancer from the radioactive set (the location in Utah where the film was shot had previously been used as a nuclear test site. Not only did the film shoot at the site, but truckloads of contaminated sand was shipped back to Hollywood for studio shooting).

Armendariz’s final role turned out to be the second James Bond film, From Russia With Love, where he plays Bond’s Turkish contact, Kerim Bey, a former circus strongman turned businessman with a small army of sons (all roughly the same age). Bey is still one of the most memorable of Bond’s many allies, largely thanks to Armendariz’s effortlessly masterful performance.

Near the climax of the film, aboard the Orient Express, Kerim and Bond capture an enemy agent and Kerim volunteers to stand watch over him. The scene ends with him sitting down with the above line, promising to spend the rest of the voyage detailing his ‘particularly fascinating life’. Unfortunately, both men are subsequently eliminated by Robert Shaw’s Red Grant.

In any case, Mr. Armendariz certainly had a ‘particularly fascinating life’.

2. Sir Sean Connery in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Sean Connery in The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003)

“May this new century be yours, son, as the old one was mine.”

Sir Sean Connery, of course, needs no introduction as one of the premier actors of his generation. His final live action performance (he also did some voice work before his death, including reprising the role of James Bond one last time in the video game adaptation of From Russia with Love) was in the unfortunately pretty poor The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Despite the film’s poor script, the actors are mostly first-rate, and Sir Sean gives a suitably strong final performance in a role with more than a touch of an autobiographical tone as H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain, now grown old and weary, his adventuring days long behind him. In the end, Quatermain is mortally wounded in battle with Professor Moriarty and dies giving the above blessing to Tom Sawyer, who has become a surrogate son to him.

Whatever else might be said of the film, Sir Sean’s final line is surely a suitable farewell from one of the master actors of his time as he gives his final bow on the screen.

3. Raul Julia in Street Fighter

“You still refuse to accept my God-hood? Keep your own God! In fact, this might be a good time to pray to Him! For I beheld Satan as he fell from Heaven! LIKE LIGHTNING!!”

I spoke about Mr. Julia’s final performance at length in my Street Fighter review, so there’s not much more to add, except to note how fitting his final proclamation is for a great actor ending his career in a blaze of hamtastic glory.

4. Spencer Tracy in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

Spencer Tracy in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)

“Well, Tillie, when the hell are we gonna get some dinner?”

Spencer Tracy was one of those golden age actors whose talent goes without saying. He exuded warmth, intelligence, and fatherly command on screen, and he was equally capable of being wildly funny in an easy-going, eye-of-the-storm kind of way.

His last film, done while he was terminally ill, was Stanley Kramer’s race-based dramedy Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, where Tracy stars alongside frequently leading lady (and off-screen romantic partner) Katherine Hepburn as two racially tolerant parents who are nevertheless a little blindsided upon learning that their daughter is engaged to Sydney Poitier.

I haven’t seen the film recently enough to comment on its quality, but with such a director and three such performers (not to mention the great Cecil Kellaway as their priest), I think it’s safe to say it can’t be too bad. But in any case, Tracy’s final line, closing out a long speech giving his full support to the young people, is remarkably fitting for a man who so excelled as the American paterfamilias.

5. Orson Welles in The Transformers: The Movie

'Transformers 5' May Feature Unicron - Nerd & Tie Podcast ...

“Destiny…You cannot destroy…my destiny!”

What a remarkable figure was Orson Welles. He was an absolute master at radio, film, and stage, as both an actor and a director. He created what is widely regarded as one of the best American films ever made as a passion project before he was thirty, and ever after found his career endlessly hampered by studio interference, so that despite giving some of the best performances of the American movie screen, he never was able to make what he might have of his vast artistic talent.

For his final role, he, in his own words “played a big toy who attacks a bunch of smaller toys”. Whatever he thought of the role of Unicron, the planet-sized, planet-eating dark god of the Transformer universe (and whatever else could be said of the film), he certainly gave a performance worthy of the name of Orson Welles, speaking with all the command that an all-powerful evil being can be expected to posses. Every line that comes out of Unicron feels impactful, like a god speaking, yet with a touch of careless humor that makes him feel all the more commanding (“Your bargaining posture is highly dubious”).

In the end, Unicron is destroyed by the power of the Autobot Matrix of Leadership, and as he’s torn apart from the inside out, he delivers that final, defiant line. In a way, it rather feels like Welles himself casting his final gauntlet at the Hollywood that hounded and tore at him all his life: at the end of the day, no matter what, they still couldn’t take away what he had achieved.

6. John Wayne in The Shootist

“Mister, this is my birthday. Gimme the best in the house.”

In his swanswong, The Shootist, John Wayne (who had recently been through treatment for cancer and would soon be claimed by the disease) plays John Bernard Brooks, an aging gunfighter dying of prostrate cancer. Rather than suffer a long, lingering death pestered by glory seekers who will not let his rest in peace, he decides to go out in a final blaze of glory by challenging three of his enemies to a final fight in a saloon. As he sits down at the bar, he gives the above order and enjoys one final drink before the fight begins.

For perhaps the greatest movie star of all time, a man whose name is practically synonymous with the western, there surely can be no more fitting line than to go into a saloon and order the best in the house. Nothing less than the best for the Duke.

7. James Stewart in An American Tail: Fivel Goes West

James Stewart and Phillip Glasser in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991)

“Just remember, Fivel; one man’s sunset is another man’s dawn. I don’t know what’s out there, beyond those hills. But if you ride yonder – head up, eyes steady, heart open – I think one day you’ll find that you’re the hero you’ve been looking for.”

You know, there’s something rather tragic about the fact that what may be the single finest American film actor of all time ended his career playing ‘Wylie Burp’ in the sequel to An American Tale. But regardless, the final scene where he looks out at the sunset and gives the above speech to little Fivel is a remarkably fitting curtain call for the legendary Jimmy Stewart.

Friday Flotsam: Mostly Alice

Posted on July 30, 2021 by DBreitenbeck

1. This week, as a much-needed relaxation (and to help with a ‘Batman’ fan-fiction I was writing), I revisited the Alice books. I’d almost forgotten how delightful they are. Just a wonderful romp of satirical nonsense, done in that delightful Victorian way. They’re also one of the best examples of capturing the feel of a dream that I’ve encountered: everything is linked through a kind of illogical logic, the environment and the people change depending on what the protagonist is thinking about, seemingly simple tasks simply will not come off, there’s a lot of repetition, and so on.

And ultimately, they’re just wonderfully charming, light fare. Alice doesn’t have a grand plan or goal she’s working towards, there’s no plot to speak of, and the characters for the most part just come and go as the story wants them. The story is just a means to go to weird places and talk to strange people and hear ridiculous things. They’re a creative writing teacher’s worst nightmare.

2. Reading them, I remembered what I’d heard and seen of Tim Burton’s…ah, versions of them from a few years back (I don’t think I can call them ‘adaptations’). Full disclosure; I haven’t seen the films, but I have seen clips and ‘run-throughs’ of them, so I have a pretty good idea of at least the plot. Burton’s Alice re-imagines it as a Narnia-like epic fantasy, where the now-adult Alice gets cast as a hero of legend destined to slay the Jabberwock(y) and defeat the Red Queen to free Wonderland from tyranny, with lots of feminist talking points and ‘oh, weren’t the Victorians just horrible to women?’ stuff (it then ends with Alice becoming a ship captain or something).

So you have things like the Mad Hatter nobly advocating a cause, the Dormouse swinging a sword around, Tweedledee and Tweedledum going to war, the Chesire Cat getting a big heroic moment, and so on, all in world with politics and magic rules and armies and battles and stuff. Gag.

Honestly, that all just makes me rather sad. One of the crowning examples of pure imagination in the English canon and all these morons can think to do with it is ‘epic fantasy, prophecies, girl power’. What a pathetic bore! You call it Alice in Wonderland, but you’ve made it ‘generic fantasy plot no. 2’.

This is the same thing I noticed re-watching 101 Dalmations: movies today feel much more ‘samey’ than movies of the past did. There’s a lot more formula, a lot more of forcing things into familiar plot beats and an ever-decreasing cycle of themes (“Be yourself.” “Girl power”. “Prejudice is bad.” “Our ancestors sucked”, Etc.). I doubt whether any studio today – least of all Disney – would be capable of adapting a story like Alice in Wonderland in any recognizable way.

Trouble is, I think this trickles down even into independent writers, where we’re nervous about creating things that don’t fit the ‘rules’. At least, I know I catch myself feeling like that. Because, of course, we want people to read what we write and like it, and so we get nervous about ‘well, will they read it if it doesn’t do this, that, and the other?’

It’s important to keep the free-breeze of ages flowing through our minds by frequently reading old books and watching old movies, just to remind ourselves of what we can become and how many more ‘options’ there are than we’re usually told.

3. There’s a song by the band Cruxshadows (whom I highly recommend, by the way) called Eye of the Storm that touches on this in the lyrics:

               “The pages of our history
               Are written by the hand
               With eyes and ears and prejudice
               Too far removed to understand.”

               “And so the heroes of the ages
               Are stripped of honesty and love
               To make them seem less noble
               And hide what we can become.”

4. Uncle Walt didn’t need to force a cliché plot onto things to make a classic adaptation. That film was, like the book, just a whimsical journey, where the point was going from place to place meeting crazy and weird characters and enjoying the ride (though to be fair, he wanted to have more of a plot than they ended up with, e.g. including the knight from Looking Glass as a heroic companion to Alice, and he didn’t really like the movie very much. But he at least had the sense not to force the issue in that case).

5. I think my favorite thing about the Disney adaptation, by the way, is just Alice herself. She’s trying to be sensible and polite, but is surrounded by lunatics and sometimes reacts accordingly (I love the bit at the trial when the Hatter and the March Hare start singing again and she just buries her face in her hands in exasperation). See, when you have one character who is more sensible, intelligent, and mature than everyone else, the thing to do is to make sure no one takes her seriously or pays the least attention to her, because that’s funny.

I also like how, well, uncomfortable Wonderland is; the backgrounds are mostly dead black, everything is kind of shadowy, even with the bright colors, and the characters are all a little threatening and unpredictable. It’s fun to watch, but not really the kind of place you’d want to visit, which keeps you invested in Alice’s adventures. She’s a very likable character, and just about anything might happen to her at any time.

“There goes Bill!”
“Poor Bill…”

Flotsam: Mostly More About Liberalism

Posted on July 24, 2021 by DBreitenbeck

1. Revolutionaries / Liberals are the most intolerant people in the world. They like to pretend to tolerance, and believe themselves to be tolerant, but this is an illusion based in the fact that they don’t value the same things as their opponents. Anything they actually value, they are utterly implacable on. They don’t care what religion you profess because they think all religions more or less equally false. But deny the value of public education or question the tenets of feminism and you’ll see just how ‘tolerant’ they are.

It’s not different with Modernists in the Church: adherence to certain doctrines or moral laws is ‘rigidity’ because they don’t care about these things. But don’t you dare question the ‘reforms’ of Vatican II (especially not the ones that don’t actually come from the documents).

This, really, is only what we should expect. Remember, Liberals think of themselves as setting free the oppressed. Therefore, anyone who disagrees with them on something they consider substantive is arguing for oppression and hence cannot be allowed any kind of influence since they ‘want to put y’all back in chains’, to quote the criminal in the White House.

2. This is also why Liberals of different stripes tend to be extremely hostile to one another. In the early US government the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans were accusing one another of treason and monarchism over the least provocations. Because the central doctrine of all kinds of liberalism is that mankind has been held in unjust oppression up until now (or from a certain Edenic period in the past, e.g. the Roman Republic) and are now being set free. Thus, anything that deviates from the particular branch of liberalism being proposed is a compromise or holdover with the tyranny of the past that must be stamped out if we are ever to get to our free-and-equal society.

The upside is that this allows for the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy to be played indefinitely. If you point out that a given form of liberalism has failed or hasn’t produced what it promised, they can say “well, that’s not real socialism / freedom / democracy / republic”. It may even be true.

The trouble is that a system that only delivers on its promises when we’re constantly balancing an entire nation on a razor’s edge that requires constant vigilance and involvement by at least a majority of the population is, for that very reason, an unworkable system.

“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” is an elegant way of saying “we have an inherently unstable system of government.”

3. The good news is that, as I’ve said before, the form of government generally matters less than most people think, provided the structure of society as a whole retains its integrity. That is, as long as individuals understand their particular place in society, as long as they believe in and adhere to the particular values and traditions of their culture, as long as the forms of family, religion, and community remain intact, and so on, pretty much any kind of governmental structure can bump along tolerably well.

The really dividing element of societal / governmental structures is how well they can maintain these things. So…yeah.

4. The fact is, most people don’t want to have to be constantly standing guard over their governmental structure. Most people don’t have the time, interest, or frankly the capacity for such vigilance. What people want is chiefly to feel that they can understand the rules of their community and their own place within it, that it isn’t going to change or fall apart tomorrow, and that it’ll still be there for their children.

In other words, what most people want is order and stability. Because freedom, in any meaningful sense, can only exist amidst relative order. If you go out to the frontier, you’ll have ‘freedom’ in the sense that you can settle wherever you like, but your scope for living is extremely limited; you can subsistence farm and hope not to be killed by Indians or rival farmers that’s about it. That’s why the great story of the west is the taming of the west; the bringing of order to it. The point of the frontier was that it would not remain a frontier forever, and that the pioneers would create a world in which their children would have a greater scope for living than they had.

To put it another way: if ‘freedom’ means anything, it means the capacity to direct your life to an end of your own choosing according to your own capacity and interests. But the demands of survival mean that this is only possible when you can more or less assume those demands will be met: a society composed entirely of subsistence farmers cannot build a cathedral. The more specifically human endeavors – art, philosophy, commerce, architecture, etc. – only become possible once some people are able to be spared from the business of making food or fighting off invaders, and for the most part it only becomes worthwhile when you feel fairly confident that whatever you create will still be there when it comes time for your children to inherit it.

Community and a degree of order are necessary prerequisites for human flourishing and thus for anything that could reasonably be called ‘freedom’. Continually having to stand guard lest someone swoop in and turn your society into an oppressive state that no longer considers you as worthy of having a place in it is detrimental to liberty.

5. This is really the thing that I find most painful about our own society and stands in greatest contrast to the experience of most past generations for about the last thousand years or so: the fact that I don’t necessarily feel confident it will still be there when it comes time for my own children to inherit it.

6. That was a gloomier one than I intended. I take some comfort in the fact that I know that I’m naturally pessimistic and so things may very well be less disastrous than they appear. I’m actually fairly hopeful that we might at least settle back into a semi-functional society in the near future, as the backlash against the actions of the boomer generation gains momentum.

7. I just discovered this fellow on YouTube and he’s quite good, I think he hits the nail on the head with this video regarding a). why many Traditional Catholics seem harsh and aggressive and b). why so many of us are reluctant to actually say what we think these days.

Another element of why many Trads are unpleasant people is probably simply frustration and anger at being repeatedly abused, insulted, and kicked around for sixty-plus years. I remember Charles Coloumbe compared Traditionalists of an older generation to abused children. I mean, seriously: what do you expect? “Oh, these Trads are such rigid, devisive, and intolerant fools who can’t accept the world has moved on. Now why are they so rude to me?”

(Again, I notice that Progressives are often so certain of their own views that they’re actually surprised and confused and even offended when someone gets upset that they just mocked and belittled something he holds sacred).

That, and the simple fact that, thanks to the hostile attitudes of so many in the Church, most of these people are on their own when it comes to discipline and doctrine. It’s supposed to be that the priest or bishops or what have you are out there defending the faith and laying down rules and an example of what to insist upon and how to behave. But now they’re mostly attacking and rebuking those who try to stand up for the faith, which means the individual Catholic (and I’m speaking not just of Trads but of anyone who genuinely believes and wants to live their faith) has to make these calls for himself.

Remember that when authority abdicates, the need for that authority doesn’t go away.

Thought of the Day

Posted on July 21, 2021 by DBreitenbeck

“Who, thinkest thou, is a faithful and wise servant, whom his lord hath appointed over his family, to give them meat in season.

Blessed is that servant, whom when his lord shall come he shall find so doing. Amen I say to you, he shall place him over all his goods. But if that evil servant shall say in his heart: My lord is long a coming: And shall begin to strike his fellow servants, and shall eat and drink with drunkards: The lord of that servant shall come in a day that he hopeth not, and at an hour that he knoweth not:

And shall separate him, and appoint his portion with the hypocrites. There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
-Matt. 24: 45-51

Of course, when it comes to the under-servants in that parable, the great thing was for them to remain in the house and dutifully at their posts for the Master’s sake, despite the beatings and mistreatment of the steward.

Flotsam: Miscellaneous

Posted on July 17, 2021 by DBreitenbeck

1. My cold of two weeks ago came back with a vengeance this week. Never quite bad enough to keep me away from work (certainly not while I’m still on probation time before my PTO becomes available), but more than bad enough to make the experience quite miserable. Hence why this is a non-specific Flotsam. So, for today I’m just going to toss off some miscellaneous thoughts that I’m too tired to flesh out much.

2. It is sometimes said that you shouldn’t trust primary sources in historical inquiry since they will be biased. Instead, you should trust the professional historian, who is trained to sift through these biases. Indeed, the primary sources are biased. So is the professional historian.

The difference is that the historical bias of the primary source is itself a part of that same history. The bias of the historian is not.

3. Do you notice that there is what you might call an ‘assumed culture’ at work in today’s world? Anything made for general public consumption that doesn’t originate from a source with an otherwise strongly marked character makes the same references and presumes the same values: you’ve seen Star Wars and Game of Thrones. You vote democrat. You’re non-religious. You’re into, or at least familiar with certain pop stars, and so on. It’s like there’s a giant mutual-aid society, in which a web of entertainers, politicians, businessmen, and so on give each other shout-outs and kudos.

I find this kind of boring, even when they reference things I like. It also begins to give that kind of ‘unman’ feel, like there’s no actual personality behind the references, but something trying to ape a personality.

(See, that’s an example: when was the last time you heard a Space Trilogy reference in anything made for the general public?)

4. There’s also the thing where people will cheer when someone mentions an officially protected demographic. Basically a way of signalling “I’m a good person!” or “I am offering the right obeisance!”

5. Oh, speaking of which, I remember during the (mercifully brief) ‘Diversity, Inclusion, Equity’ portion of the onboarding process, they talked about how ‘we’ve found that diversity isn’t just race, religion, sex, and so on, but things like what school you went to, what neighborhood you grew up it, what your experiences are.’

In other words, diversity is supposedly the startling insight that companies employ individuals. This amazing fact requires an entire department and continual training to understand, and we presume that you, the employees, will need to be constantly reminded of this.

I also love that ‘we’ve found’ (or it might have even been ‘experts have discovered’, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt): apparently, the idea that people can be distinguished by things apart from officially designated categories came as a blinding insight.

6. I notice that a lot of moderns have an idea about nature that goes something like this: that the ideal of nature is balance, of all things working together in harmony to allow all to thrive.

If you want to see how much nature values ‘balance’, try introducing a species into a new environment and see how nature deals with it. Nine times out of ten, what happens is either a). the new species gets quickly wiped out by the existing species or b). the new species utterly dominates the ecosystem and wipes out many of the existing species (rats are especially gifted at doing this).

See, nature isn’t about balance: nature is about every species and almost every individual trying to get as much as it possibly can. In other words, nature isn’t harmony: it’s warfare. The ‘balance’ is an illusion created by the fact that the species withing a given ecosystem have all reached a point of more or less stalemate. The moment any species has a real advantage, it rides it as far as it can, happily wiping out everything else around it even if this means dooming itself in the long term.

(Someone might say that introducing rats to isolated islands isn’t natural because humans do it. Well, one, that doesn’t change the fact that rats still act according to nature, and two, the result would be the same whether the rats got there on ships or floating on driftwood).

Nature doesn’t care about balance: nature cares about survival, and not even long-term survival.

7. “Your counterexamples don’t really prove your point so much as they prove you don’t understand mine.”

One of those things that passes through the mind a lot, but which takes a while to catch and articulate.

Some Old Gimp Pics

Posted on July 11, 2021 by DBreitenbeck

I spent part of today sorting through the bloated image folders on my computer, and in the process rediscovered some old photo manips I did. I now pass a selection on to you:

First we have some scenes from the highly-anticipated live action ‘Super Smash Brothers’ film:

Gannondorf (played by Sean Bean) cuts a deal with the sinister Master Hand

Donkey Kong enjoys a relaxing morning before trouble starts

Samus Aran (Emily VanCamp) makes a new friend while infiltrating the Space Pirates’ ship

Or a Live Action Kim Possible movie (er, a good one, I mean):

Dr. Drakken (Jeffery Donovan) and Shego (Morena Baccarin) oversee their evil plot

And unrelated, but bonus points for whoever gets this one:

Flotsam: Mostly Batman

Posted on July 10, 2021 by DBreitenbeck

1. I’ve been re-watching some of Batman: The Animated Series lately, reminding myself of just how good it really was. Those gorgeous black-paper backgrounds, that wonderful Fleischer-style animation (the creators said they wanted it to look as though it had been made in the 1940s. I think they succeeded both in look and feel), those striking musical scores (I want to say they made a new one for each episode, certainly a new motif for each character), and of course the wonderful stories and stellar voice acting: Kevin Conroy at Batman. Mark Hamill as the Joker (I’ll admit, I almost associate him more with that role than with that sci-fi movie). Efrem Zimbalist Jr. as Alfred. Bob Hastings as Commissioner Gordon. Roddy McDowall as the Mad Hatter. Adrienne Barbeau as Catwoman. Michael Ansara as Mr. Freeze. Paul Williams as the Penguin. Ron Perlman as Clayface. David Warner as Ra’s Al Ghul. John Glover as the Riddler. Arleen Sorkin as Harley Quinn. Not to mention one-shot roles from the likes of Tim Curry (who was originally slated to play the Joker, but was considered ‘too scary’, which…given Hamill’s performance makes one wonder), Thomas F. Wilson, Dick Miller, Bill Mumy, John Rhys-Davies, Harry Hamlin, and of course Adam West. As the saying goes, I’d watch a cast like that read a phone book (at one point, that’s pretty close to what happens).

2. Watching the episodes, though, I was struck by how different this is from what has become the usual Batman fare, and even from the subsequent direction the character took in future shows ostensibly set in the same universe (New Batman Adventures, Justice League, etc). The stories here tend to be much more subdued and down-to-earth: ordinary crime stories and dramas (e.g. one episode has a ruthless tycoon planning to stage a gas explosion to clear out a neighborhood he wants to develop). Batman doesn’t always deal with supervillains, and even when he does the villains are themselves a bit more low-key than in other versions. Like, you’ll see scenes at Arkham where Joker, Poison Ivy, Mad Hatter, and Scarecrow are just hanging out in the lounge playing chess or watching TV while a couple of guards stand watch, occasionally intervening to break up a petty squabble. In other words, they’re…actual mental patients! A more contemporary Batman story would have all four under Hannibal-Lecter-style maximum security restraints and still murdering guards left and right.

3. The show also emphasizes Batman’s status as a detective. He spends most of the episodes following up clues and interrogating suspects (one of my favorite scenes has him interrogating a germaphobic gangster in a hospital storeroom full of viral samples: “Hm, crimson fever. Nasty way to go…”), or else trying to escape a death trap. Nor is he an infallible fighter: he’s skilled and quick, but he has to work at it to take down even normal thugs, and the show emphasizes that he’s always in danger during the action scenes (this despite the fact that most of the bad guys have an aim that would make a Stormtrooper blush).

(He’s also a lot more…well, normal. He’s less relentlessly grim, in and out of costume, than he would become, expressing fear, shock, and even amusement at times, cracking jokes with Alfred, and so on. BTAS Bruce is much more well-adjusted than later DCAU Bruce. And that’s kind of saying a lot).

Frankly, I like this a lot better than the idea that Batman’s the greatest fighter in the world (along with being the greatest everything else). I much prefer him being an extremely skilled, but still limited human being whose abilities are all tailored to his mission in life (very much like Sherlock Holmes), but which inevitably come up short sometimes, forcing him to think outside the box. I really don’t like when Batman simply pulls some obscure new skill out of his utility belt whenever it comes up, or when he’s played as being so supremely cunning that he can defeat anyone with prep time.

The big example of this sort of thing for me came in an episode of Justice League (a show I really like, by the way), where they’re dealing with a plot in some small Eastern European / western Asian nation. Batman confronts a guard, who taunts him that he can’t understand a word he’s saying anyway. Batman answers in the same language, proving himself to be fluent in it. See, that’s the sort of thing that bugs me: he would have had no reason to learn that language, it never would have come up but for this one incident. But he’s Batman, so of course he has any skill he needs because it makes him ‘cool.’

(Ironically enough, this means I have the same problem with some versions of Batman that most other people have with Superman: that’s he’s too infallible and over-stocked with abilities).

Me, I much prefer the ‘Animated Series’ style to the character. It feels to me like BTAS exists in a kind of separate, parallel world to the rest of the DCAU: a world where there isn’t a Superman or Themyscira or Green Lanter Corps, just a city full of broken, twisted human beings, some of whom have, through mad science run amok, gained powers beyond the ordinary, and where there is a hint of the supernatural, but where for the most part it’s simply all-too human heroes and criminals fighting over the lives of the ordinary citizens.

Again, I like the DCAU as a whole, and of course I love Superman, but it has a different flavor, and overall I think I like Batman best when he exists apart from ‘all that’ (it also lets me imagine that there’s a version where things turned out happier for everyone involved than Batman Beyond indicates. Among other things, I want Dick and Barbara to end up together. And no version of Batgirl should have a romance with Batman: that’s just wrong on multiple levels. But now I’m getting on even more of a tangent…).

Short version is that, as I see it, there are two versions: ‘pure’ Batman and ‘Justice League’ Batman. For my money, as far as Batman’s concerned, I prefer the former (simple way to distinguish: in ‘Pure’ version, Dick ends up with Barbara. In ‘Justice League’ version, he ends up with Starfire. Easy!).

4. On another note, still going through training at my new job. It’s much more enjoyable now that it’s getting more relevant to my actual position (still a lot of training to go, though).

That said, the on boarding process at a large corporation these days feels a lot like this to me:

“There’s no escape, but then, who would wanna leave?”

RE-POST: Why I Love ‘Independence Day’

Posted on July 5, 2021 by DBreitenbeck

I missed this 4th of July’s ‘Independence Day’ rewatch due to being sicker than paint, but here’s my yearly post on why it’s among my personal favorites.

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When Independence Day came out, it was a huge hit, but ever since then it’s kind of become the poster-child for the big, dumb, CGI-fueled blockbusters of the late 90s. And, yes, in a way it is, but…well, that’s kind of beside the point.

The Story: On July 2^nd, a massive alien craft appears in orbit around the earth and sends out an armada of city-sized flying saucers that take up position above several of the world’s major cities, including Los Angeles, New York, and Washington D.C. We then see the unfolding war of the worlds through the eyes of four American men and their families: underachieving New York cable company technician David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), Los Angeles-based Marine pilot Steven Hiller (Will Smith), drunken Californian crop duster pilot Russell Casse (Randy Quaid), and the youthful President Whitmore (Bill Pullman).

So, is this movie pretty stupid? Sure. This is light science-fiction pulp, of the kind you might find in Amazing Stories, or in a drive-in theater in the late 1950s, only given a massive budget and an all-star cast. Granted, a lot of those classic films were better than this one (The War of the Worlds in particular does many of the same things while being an overall superior film), but none achieved the same sense of scale and grandeur as this one.

As for me, I’m glad we have it.

This is the movie that Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, or Invasion of the Saucer Men, or those 1940s serials dreamed of being. It’s pulp sci-fi done as an epic: national and world-spanning in scope, drenched in apocalyptic dread and patriotic defiance, with implacably hostile collectivist aliens pitted against scrappy, courageous, freedom-loving humans. It tackles big ideas of freedom, heroism, faith, family, and patriotism in a simple, but solid fashion. This may or may not sound appealing to you, but to the film’s credit is unambiguously knows what it’s trying to be and doesn’t make any apologies for it.

There are a lot of things to like about this movie. In the first place, it’s huge. Four main characters, each one carrying a small cast of supporting characters, a world-spanning plot involving a large-scale alien invasion targeting the major cities of the globe, huge airborne battles…it’s just a grand, glorious spectacle. Yet, amazingly enough, the film still manages to keep the focus largely on the people involved: we see these events through their eyes, and the real story of the film is how it affects them. It’s not done brilliantly, but it works. We very rarely leave the perspective of one of our leads, and then only briefly to illustrate things that they are talking or thinkings about. For instance, late in the film we have a brief glimpse of various armies around the world receiving and responding to the President’s call for a united counter-attack, but we quickly cut back to where the President and his military aids are receiving the answers.

At the same time, though, the four interconnected storylines make the film seem anything but constrained. On the contrary, the multiple-perspective format gives the story an epic feel that few subsequent blockbusters (Armageddon, Transformers, etc.) have successfully imitated. This is in stark contrast with Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, which though in some ways a better film was rendered all-but unbearable by the fact that we spent the whole thing welded to three boring and unpleasant characters.

The leads here, by contrast, are all charismatic and likable (though some might find Jeff Goldblum’s stammering speaking style annoying), as are most of the supporting characters. They’re not especially original, but they all have personality and serve as pleasant enough company. I particularly like Robert Loggia as the President’s right-hand general and Judd Hirsch as Goldblum’s father. It helps that most of them are played by veteran supporting players and character actors (including a pre-Firefly Adam Baldwin as the commander of Area 51 and a very young, pre-Avatar: The Last Airbender Mae Whitman as the President’s daughter). Even the SETI boss who only shows up in the opening scene is invested with life and character, thanks in part to old-pro Eric Avari. This is really one of the most impressive ensemble casts I can remember seeing in a 90s blockbuster.

More than that, though, it’s just a really good story and well-done adventure. It’s grand and epic, but also keeps focused. Appropriate for a film about the Fourth of July, the theme is pitting freedom and the American way of life against the encroaching forces of collectivist aliens backed with all-powerful technology. When, after the opening salvos, we see the Statue of Liberty lying broken in New York harbor we understand what the battle is really about.

The film’s theme plays out in the lives of its characters, who all start off having forgotten what’s really important, which they rediscover throughout the film, even as they have to fight against the implacable hostility of the alien menace. Levinson and his wife have divorced due to their divergent career paths, with her working on the White House staff while he wastes his talents at a dead-end cable job. Whitmore’s caught up in politics and has lost his authority. Hiller dithers about marrying his girlfriend for fear of how it will affect his military career. And Casse is a drunken wreck who can barely take care of his family, while his adult son sees him as an embarrassment. All the characters are then forced to reexamine their lives and ‘re-center’ on what really matters: family, faith, and country.

The four leads provide an interesting cross-section of American society about the mid-nineties: blue collar, white collar, military, politics; Black, White, Jewish; married, single, widowed, divorced. The film is thus about as representative of the American way of life of the time as could be asked for. We see that the characters in the opening don’t appreciate what they have, being lost amid their petty concerns and self-destructive behavior. It’s only when their world is threatened that they begin to re-orientate their lives around the things they’ve neglected for so long, and it is this that gives them the power to strike back.

On the other hand, the aliens prove to be the reverse of American values; they’re a kind of hive-mind, with little or no individual personality, each subject to the collective. They have no home and no land of their own: they simply move from planet to planet taking whatever they need like locusts and moving on when they’re done. When asked if there’s any possibility of the two species co-existing, they bluntly respond that there isn’t: the trademark American skill at integrating different cultures is not going to work here.

In this context, it’s significant that the film explicitly describes the aliens as having bodies ‘just as frail as ours.’ All men, and aliens, are created equal; the aliens just have better technology that allows them to impose their will upon the earth. Once mankind figures out a way around that technology, the fight becomes more even.

The specifics of that method have justly been called out as ridiculous, but, again, that’s not really the point. All they needed was a semi-plausible excuse to bring down the alien shields, and a computer virus works as well as any other (the fact that the aliens were previously established to be using the Earth’s satellites to coordinate their attack lends it just enough pseudo-validity to work in context). The important thing was how the idea was given (amid a heart-to-heart between Levinson and his father about the need to have faith even in the face of disaster) and what it leads to (a last-ditch battle for freedom).

There are so many things that, looking back, the film does really well. The motives and backgrounds of the characters are established very quickly and concisely. For instance, we meet Levinson talking with his father over chess, who urges him to move on after his divorce. The scene establishes at once 1. their respective personalities and close relationship, 2. Levinson’s divorce, 3. his intelligence as he smoothly checkmates his father, 4. his environmentalist principles, 5. his reluctance to move on with his life, suggesting both his continuing attachment to his wife and his unambitious, lethargic personality. All that in one scene that lasts maybe two minutes (these key points are reiterated and expanded on in equally efficient subsequent scenes). A quick moment of Hiller receiving a rejection letter from NASA establishes his dreams of flying in space, which he achieves at the end, as well as establishing the reasons for his inner conflict over marrying his girlfriend. Considering how many characters the film juggles, it’s remarkable that it manages to develop its leads as well as it does.

The film also does a good job of conveying the impact of the events; a minor, but established character dies in the destruction of each city, then more characters die in the subsequent counter attack. At least one character who survives the initial bombardments later dies of her injuries simply because she couldn’t get medical care soon enough. And we see things like the President agonizing over his failure to act more decisively, or Hiller making his way to Area 51 only to learn that he’s the only survivor of his entire Marine base. The film keeps moving, but it does allow the characters to react to the disaster.

I like the humor in the film a lot as well. Many of the jokes turn on the fact that, in the course of the disaster, normal social barriers have been eliminated, leading to unexpected situations, like when Hiller’s girlfriend sheepishly admits to the First Lady that, “I voted for the other guy.” Or when Levinson’s father unexpectedly finds himself about to meet the President…and discovers that his son once punched him in the face.

I’m also impressed at how well the effects have held up, probably because (like many of the best early CG-driven films) the movie actually uses a large amount of model work and practical effects and only supplemented with computers where necessary. The destruction of New York, Los Angeles, and Washington was mostly done with models and real fire effects filmed at low speed (so, the exact same techniques pioneered in the original Godzilla), the fiery clouds surrounding the ships as they enter the atmosphere were done with models in smoke-filled tanks, while the aliens themselves are glorious animatronic costumes. On that note, the sheer fact that the film manages to make flying saucers frightening and otherworldly again after so many decades of parody and over-exposure is impressive in itself. The featureless, almost motionless ships hovering ominously over the cities convey a distinctly alien atmosphere, especially contrasted with the more familiar planes and buildings of our own world.

I could go on about it, but suffice to say, I think it’s a really good movie. Yes, it’s kinda stupid, yes it’s cheesy and overblown, but at the end of the day it succeeds in being exactly what it sets out to be, which is a big-budget, large-scale version of a classic sci-fi b-movie. It has pleasant characters, great visuals, and tells a simple, but solid story. All in all, it’s one of my favorites.

Flotsam: Snobbery, Revolutions, and the Fourth of July

Posted on July 3, 2021 by DBreitenbeck

1. Still in the ‘awkward transition’ phase regarding my new job, where I haven’t even begun to do the actual job I’ve been hired for (which itself is a trainee position), and I’m still getting used to the new schedule and what is and is not an option now. I’m at least keeping regular writing times, though, so that’s making me feel grounded, though I haven’t figured out how to fit blogging in.

2. At work the subject of arbitrary enforcement came up: the thing where people will create completely meaningless standards – e.g. “you take cream in your coffee? What kind of man are you?” – and enforce them for the group. I said (and the conversation moved on) that this is an authority thing: people assuming a position of authority in the social hierarchy. Status means that you are the one who sets the standard (giving nicknames is another way of assuming authority), so when you have an otherwise ‘equal’ group, those of an aggressive temperament will naturally try to seize the highest position they can.

Again, allowing for human wickedness and stupidity, this tends to only occur between ostensible equals as a means of setting the social hierarchy. It occurs between privates in a platoon, not between privates and officers. It occurs between priests in a parish, not between priests and bishops. It occurs among the gentry, not between the gentry and the artisans. Not to say you won’t find a stupid aristocrat who sneers at his tenants for not liking the right music or something, but generally vices directed at inferiors are of a different kind than snobbery: more of officiousness or arbitrary rule or selfishness.

3. Reading a piece at The Orthosphere I had one of those ‘oh, of course,’ moments, where you’re told something and realize that you should have known that all along from the nature of the case.

“highly egalitarian societies… have high homicide rates.”

Well, of course they do. When no one is any better or higher than anyone else, officially, then when there’s a dispute, the principles have to settle the matter themselves. But the only final, ‘authoritative’ way that two equal individuals have of settling matters is violence. The ‘talk it out’ solution advocated in schools only works when both sides are prepared to be reasonable and look at the matter objectively, which will be so in only a tiny minority of cases. How many times do kids on a playground actually ‘talk things out’ to the satisfaction of both? Not saying it never happens, but it would require exceptional kids on both sides.

What actually happens probably ninety-nine cases out of a hundred is that one kid, the one with the more extroverted and aggressive temperament, talks down the other and gets the rest of the group to gang up on him to force him to concede.

Because there’s another factor at play which the Orthosphere author doesn’t bring up: the fact that in the absence of an official hierarchy (or even in the presence of one, but wherever it doesn’t operate), people will create their own, even in something as petty as ‘what kind of shirt do you wear?’ or ‘what kind of car do you drive’? And people will be much more aggressive and quick to enforce these kinds of ‘unofficial’ hierarchies because they don’t rest on anything but the vigilance of the individual. A king doesn’t have to keep pushing arbitrary rules to remind people he is the king, but a ‘free and equal citizen’ does, because it’s the only way he can keep his place.

The more egalitarian you try to make a society, the more socially repressive, mistrustful, and violent it will become as people try to claw out and maintain their position.

Because the fact is that all human societies are hierarchical: that is just part of the form of society as such. If you don’t have a structure, a hierarchy, then you don’t actually have a society, just a collection of individuals, who will operate as individuals (like how if you get the parts of your computer ‘out of form’, you no longer have a computer as such, just a lot of metal and plastic operating as metal and plastic).

And one thing individuals naturally try to do is to form societies and establish social status. So that even if you could create a perfectly egalitarian state, the people living within it would quickly set up their own competing tribes and hierarchies. It would be like trying to keep the sea perfectly flat: that is just not how the thing works.

4. The evil of snobbery lies in the fact that it is someone laying claim to a status that he doesn’t actually deserve and that he misuses in any case. Mrs. Elton in Emma is a snob because she assumes a position she doesn’t actually merit, defends it aggressively by cutting down people who aren’t actually a threat to it, and uses her position bluntly and officiously once she’s in it. Emma herself is also a bit of a snob, but much less so because A). she has a right to her position, and B). she mostly uses it responsibly, except in trying to encourage Harriet to lay claim to a higher position than she’s actually entitled to (so, sort of a snobbery by proxy).

But I don’t think most people really mind class distinctions. The structure would hardly have persisted so long and so universally if they did. The people who object to hierarchies are those who want to move from one level to another and find it more difficult than they think it ought to be (trouble is that these are often the very same kind of ne’er-do-wells who like to write books). The common farmer generally doesn’t mind living under a duke: it is the nouveau-riche industrialist who chafes at aristocratic privilege.

5. And it’s the latter who leads revolutions. We like to think of rebellions as the poor, downtrodden masses rising up against their aristocratic overlords. Actually, from all I can tell, it’s the rich classes who are the revolutionaries: the ones who are powerful, but feel they aren’t as powerful as they deserve to be. That is, the ones who have more practical power than official power.

(There’s another element of the ones who feel ashamed for being rich, but don’t know what to do about it. Those who lack either the training or the stomach to be Saints become Revolutionaries as an easier alternative. And part of me wants to make a ‘Navy – Coast Guard’ joke here).

The impoverished masses tend to be conservative, at least until the propaganda gets to them. Because, of course, it really makes very little difference to the average tenant farmer or artisan or factory hand whether he lives under a republic or a monarchy, except that his sense of cultural identity (and thus tribal belonging) is bound up in whichever one he happens to have been born in. Thus the very same populations who were Loyalist in 1776 tended to be Union in 1861.

So, in summary, Revolutions tend to be rich men convincing poor men that they are being oppressed so that the poor men will go risk death to gain a higher status for the rich men.

6. On that note, happy Fourth of July everyone!

Perhaps it’ll help if I say that however the nation came to be, now that it’s established I would have it continue and improve. I would see it restored to the days of its glory, and I would be thankful even for the optimism of the early-mid twentieth century. Basically, I’d hold my tongue about this whole subject if it meant we could have a functional society again.

This, by the way, is why I’m still a Union proponent in the Late Unpleasantness, even though in many ways I sympathize more with the Confederacy. Revolution is a genie that is very hard to get back into the bottle once it gets out, and I think that if the Confederacy had been established, both it and the Union would only have experienced an endless string of bloody, petty uprisings as one state or another decided it was being oppressed and took up arms against another (heck, it nearly happened between Michigan and Ohio in 1835, and again between Arizona and California in 1934). The real necessity of the war was to firmly establish that we were done with in this country, and the result is that, after the ‘simmering down’ period, we had a more-or-less unified national identity all the way up to a couple decades ago.

7. Just so there’s no misunderstanding (yeah, right), I don’t think slavery would have outlived the 19th century, whatever happened. World opinion (i.e. the British Empire) was too set against it, and I don’t think the Confederacy, or whatever Balkanized collection of states resulted from it could have survived as the lone Western slave-holding nation. Probably would have been better overall if it slavery hadn’t been settled in the war and had simply been allowed to die a natural death, but that’s another issue entirely.

8. Let’s try to end on a high note here (wish the image quality was better, but it was the only one I could find). This is the kind of thing I’d like to see come back, my own disillusionment notwithstanding: