Complex Numbers

Movie Knight

And now for something else from "Journalistic Intentions"  [18+] -- with a movie review at the bottom, coincidentally, because I finally made it back to the theater:

"Remember what the MPAA says; Horrific, Deplorable violence is okay, as long as people don't say any naughty woids! That's what this war is all about!"

Of all the quotes in this month's list, this is the only one that's the least bit familiar to me, but I can't for any price recall where it's from.

Doesn't matter.

People freak out over the weirdest shit. Like the word "shit," for example. And for a long time I haven't understood why it's perfectly okay to have violence in a movie, but not sex. Like, unless it's an R rated movie, you can depict someone sticking a sword into someone else, but not a penis. When, generally, the former is about violence and the latter is about love.

Of course, it isn't, always, I know. Sometimes it's about sexual assault. And that's still more okay to show in a movie than mutually pleasurable sex.

Which can only lead me to the conclusion that our society is fundamentally backwards. But we already knew that, didn't we?

As far as I can tell, other countries don't have this perversion. French movies, for example. All the ones I've ever heard of have involved someone trying to doink someone else and eventually succeeding. As far as I've been able to tell, that's the actual purpose of French cinema; everything else is extraneous. Whereas the purpose of American cinema is to have one side beat the hell out of the other side, usually the "good guys" and the "bad guys" respectively.

Anyone following along here already knows that one of my favorite shows is Star Trek. Has been for as long as I can remember, from way back when there was only one series and it only lasted three seasons. Since then, of course it's had its ups and downs, and certain gatekeepers love to bitch about some of the new series, going "That's not Trek!"

Well, whatever, they're entitled to their opinion of course, but not everything is going to follow the formula from the Original Series, and not everything can be as awesome as Deep Space Nine was. Point is, though, Star Trek has never been about violence. Sure, it's sometimes depicted, but the philosophy of the show has always put diplomacy and other means of conflict resolution first.

So when the series Discovery came out, I watched it with great interest, and for the most part I liked it. But one of the things that stuck out for me with Disco, as I like to call it, is that in (I think) the first season, one of the characters actually said "fuck" out loud.

I cheered.

Words are just words. If you're horrified by that word being uttered on a TV show, there's something wrong with you, not with the TV show. "But kids watch that stuff!" So what? Better they hear people cussing, or even see them boning, than watching them dismembering each other.

Let's get our priorities straight, okay?

One-Sentence Movie Review: Uncharted:

Spoiler: the good guys beat the hell out of the bad guys (as noted above); this is a fun movie, the cinematic equivalent of a frozen pizza: filling, but without much in the way of substance, and that's okay -- I never played the video games it was based on, so it's likely I missed a lot of in-jokes, but it's enough to watch Tom Holland be something other than Spider-Man and go haring off on a classic stunt-heavy, scenery-chewing treasure hunt quest.

Rating: 3/5