You know how when you repeat a word so many times in a row it fails to make sense? That's what I'm feeling now after doing a little research on movies with the word 'Red' in the title. And all because my wife confused the classic American Russian Paranoia movie Red Dawn with the classic American Russian Paranoia movie Red October.
Perhaps if Republicans were a bit more forward-thinking (they'd be Democrats- buh duh dum) they would not have chosen a color that represents their core values and the Communist threat since WW2. So deeply ingrained is the idea of Red = Enemy State they even once made a movie called Enemy State, which if I remember right was actually the American government chasing Will Smith in a case of high-stakes paint ball for his cell phone or something. I digress.
So despite my recent hate-on for making list type articles, I've decided to give it another shot, maybe because everyone who likes lists is proof-reading their own 'Valentine's' themed List. Instead, I'm remembering some classic and not-so-classic movies that had Red in the title. Here's my order of preference.
I also learned I could piss in the radiator if
my truck was overheating
1) Red Dawn (1984) - If you are going to only ever see one movie with the word Red in the title (good luck on that) it would be this classic from the pinnacle of the Cold War, the year 1984. It was a crazy, wonderful time; Ronald Reagan was destroying the very foundations America professed to espouse. Apple Computers changed the images of George Orwell's shocking dystopian book 1984 into an iconic commercial for selling computers pre-Internet. There was a growing crop of young Hollywood talent that was able to share screen time with each other for a brief time before setting out on their own to achieve top (and sometimes only) billing. But before all that ego-politics, there was Red Dawn. The ultimate camping male-bonding movie and the reason I shout Wolverines when I go camping.
Ogie's 2013 Top 10 List of Things That Happened for Better or Worse in 2013
10 List-based Articles
My kids can't remember to flush the toilet, never mind 70 other things...
2013 seems to be the year that 'list-based' articles really went viral. Who am I to complain? I accomplished a giant step in my writing by having over 20 articles published by a webzine that specializes in the fan-based list format without the high bar of objective opinions or relative current subject matter.
Despite my success and their low standards, I have grown to hate List-Based Articles. It is a sneaky way to drive website traffic to make said website more attractive to the hated pop-up advertisers (which this website is becoming increasingly annoying for). Every time a reader clicks 'next' or 'continue' on a webpage that counts as another hit for that website. So although you are one person reading a list of 20, the web traffic control thingy reads it more as 20 people reading one list.
Lists tend to be highly subjective and really pointless (says a guy with about a dozen published lists). Lists tend to dumb down a thought-provoking subject into a basic subjective opinion-orientated argument. Do I really care that #3 on Miley's worst fashion mistakes is not #1? According to the comments, some people actually care enough to argue why TDKR is a good movie, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Yet, list-based articles are here to stay. They are mind-entertainment for your eyeballs. Giving a set limit to your subject creates a count-down of such, where readers are more than likely to finish off a list of 10 if they are already on #7 than if it was just a long, well-researched article on why The Dark Knight Rises sucked donkey balls. Lists state automatically that there is a limited commitment involved, depending on how high you wish to count.
Let's face the selfish facts. Only you know what you truly want for your birthday. Perhaps you are tired of getting another new 'collectable action figure' from a series you never really cared for but someone thought you did because that certain someone was into The Avengers and so thought you were too (thanks, sis).
All you want is something that rings of your unique personality, maybe something more than just a six pack of craft-brewed beer. And that special football jersey you got last year? The one of that team that you don't really care that much about? The one with the name of that player that now plays somewhere else? Let's not talk about that.
Instead, why not just give them this list of some awesome gifts inspired by pop culture which are not actually useless? I'm not talking about all the cheap toys made in China, labelled 'collector's item' and then marked up 1000%. I'm writing about those products that have broken the fifth wall of realism, props that were made real in a fictional universe then thanks to a ripple in space-time, became meta in this universe, products that could be used in everyday life that non-fans might not glance twice at but those in the know will bow at your presence when you appear sporting one of these fine bits of retro pop culture history.
TL;DR; The Ultimate Guy Birthday Wish List for gifts that are practical, somewhat subtle and unique. Nothing made of plastic or wasn't originally at first a prop on a movie/TV show before it was moved into mass productions because someone found out someone like you would buy it.
2012, the year 2012 is based on, which came out in 2009. If you remember, John Cusack basically starred as the lovable smuck who does a Planes, Trains and Automobiles disaster flick with _____ as his lovable sidekick. The movie was an attempt to cash in early on the Mayan End-of-Days concept which you probably never heard anything about in December.
The Most Disappointing Movie of The Year; The Dark Knight Rises
At least one of these characters dies in a completely non-memorable way.
Instead of a year of disaster flicks, there was really only one large disaster flick that appeared onscreen The Dark Knight Rises, the amazingly bad ending of the Batman trilogy directed or rather mailed in by Hollywood's newest A-Director; Christopher Nolan. TDKR, or as I like to call it WTF was one of the two most anticipated Big Budget Superhero movies of the summer (I'll get to the other one in a minute). WTF had everything going for it; an amazing, proven cast and director, a story-line taken from the comic book and Anne Hathaway's eyebrows, and all the gimmicks from the last two movies. We all knew what we wanted from WTF and instead we got...WTF.
From the opening James Bond scene where (spoiler alert) the most illogical kidnapping takes place in cinematic history (hold on...if they already had the scientist, why did they even bother to put him on the plane?) to everybody but Commissioner Gordon apparently knowing Batman's true identity within minutes of actually meeting him, to the motivations of basically everybody involved in any scene of the script to the friggin' Batwing that had been sitting undiscovered on the top of a skyscraper because it HAD A CAMOUFLAGE TARP OVER IT? SERIOUSLY, WTF NOLAN!!!
ok- so that scene apparently didn't piss off the internet as much as it did me, so instead here's a strange video that actually is pretty funny. Eyewitness video of the fabled 3000-cops-missing-for-three-months-underground charge past machine guns and tanks to get in a fistfight with 3000 bad guys. See if you can spot the Batman along with a large group of pedestrians just watching...
WTF felt like an actual swarm of bats had dropped bat guano all over the script and someone let Nolan's dog write the thing, blindfolded. One or two mistakes in a movie are (unless monumental) are easy to forgive, dozens, not so much. I can't even remember how Bane was defeated, which should have been the high point of the movie when instead it was this;
Here, kitty, kitty, kitty
Instead of creating a novella of all the things that were lacking in WTF, someone else already did it so here is just a partial list of mistakes that I agree with. If there is to be a movie-saving Director's Cut edition much like Ridley Scott's Bladerunner it would still take some serious thought if i would want to subject my brain to that quality of punishment again.
The real natural disaster of the movie was that it was trying to follow up on the amazingly well-crafted artistic and conceptually imagining of a world rife with moral ambiguity in the previous installments of the trilogy, The Dark Knight aka The Joker and Batman Begins starring the other guy that unfortunately has to also get dragged back into WTF;.
Seriously? This isn't another Star Wars prequel?
The Least Disappointing Movie of The Year; The Avengers
Despite the Across-The-Board generic marketing poster
Thankfully, the King of the Geeks, Joss Whedon, took the Superhero movie into the stratosphere with Marvel's the Avengers. It was all that WTF wasn't; a strong story, an assortment of comic tried and true fallible mortal heros (and an immortal Thor) fighting an infallible and baby brother annoying Norse God. And aliens too, but those were just as a bonus because that's what i want in good movies; bonuses!
The Avengers was also years in the making; the final conglomeration of at least 4 different individual super hero prequels and 3 different Hulks into one whole, fighting other world forces in order to save humanity.
It's just a rule of the game that the better something is, the less there is to write about. So instead of me just wasting everyone's time kissing ass, let's just watch this symbolic scene between the summer's superhero movies, where DC comics is played by Loki and Marvel Comics is played by The Hulk.
That pretty much sums up what Marvel did to DC's movie franchise universe in 2012.
Most Surprising Movie of the Year; The Cabin In the Woods
Bonus Trivia; Joss Whedon also co-wrote The Cabin In The Woods, the Scream-esque horror movie of the year as well, starring a quite mortal Thor. If you haven't seen it and don't mind the genre, check it out. It's worth it.
Subjectively first, there was the Golden Age, where nobody had the internet and there were no news anchors. That was why it was referred to as the Golden Age. But for every Golden Age there is the Shit Age, changed to the more popular Dark Ages, because everybody minded their own business and all blogs were written in mud.
As the centuries continued the pendulum swung back the other way; along came the Age of Discovery (where the seeds of Wikipedia were sown into the social fabric) and the Age of Reason and Enlightenment (who couldn't agree on naming rights so were forced to create separate business cards). And for the last fifty years with a brief detour into the fatalistic Atomic Age, found to be too nerdy and science-based in focus groups, we have lived in the Information Age, thanks to the finally discovered internet. Yet the Internet Age has a twin sister, the Disinformation Age and together they breeded their own incestuous bastard child, our own King Joffrey (GoT represent) aka The Age of Manipulation. And he's a prick.
If we were to spend some time to think about this, which most
likely we won't as 2013 will bring in it's own set of problems and distractions
to help us forget that 2012 was a pretty
crappy year for civilization as we know it as a whole. Hopefully in the years to
come social historians will look back on 2012 as the year when the Age of
Manipulation peaked. From the US election to
the Mayan apocalypse to Facebook's IPO to the continually mass media ignored OWS-themed protests, this
was the year that we were all manipulated into believing in something that we knew was inherently false, yet we chose to listen to it and comment on it and make stupid jokes about it and perpetuate these myths.
It was hard for anybody with average intelligence to not feel like they were drowning in Orwellian Ministry of Truth propaganda. The usual two-bit coverage of wars in cultures we can't even begin to understand with arguments that it would all be better if only Russia and China had no say in the United Nations. Yet somehow, in all these discussions there is no talk of who is supplying who their weapons. This isn't a war on culture this is Starbucks vs Tim Horton's, the military weapons edition.
It has become harder and
harder for one to not be manipulated to some extent in anything but 2012 ... wow ... what a crap year. From it's beginnings in arguments about if North America should care about either Syrian civil war, Greece's bankruptcy or the legion of film critics that attacked the American embassy in Libya to it's end with yet another American massacre and lots of Americans up in arms over crazy pacifists equating gun culture with gun violence.
Here are my Three Ghosts of Manipulation for 2012; three
people that created news events that reflected where we were as a society until we got bored and somebody told us to pay attention to something else. They made headlines in the past tense, present tense and will most likely do so in the future. And by reading
this, yes i am manipulating you to consider the big events/stories/people
in 2012 that manipulated your emotions as these three did mine. Feel free to justify your own picks in the comments.
Ghost of Manipulation Past;
Amanda Todd.
This is my no means
meant as a disrespect. This is meant to
show how manipulation can come and go so effectively in today's society of the less-than-15-minute news cycle. Amanda Todd, 15 year old Vancouver girl who committed suicide, is one of
dozens of teen suicides that happen in Canada every year, one of hundreds
of young teens that are exploited on the internet, and one of thousands of kids
that get bullied every year by their peers.
She finally got our attention post-partum, when her cry for help was discovered on Youtube. Basic black and white
index cards detailing her life that had led her to the suicidal thoughts which she
eventually succumbed to. We all fretted
and frowned, wondered how kids could do this to each other. Politicians called for 'action plans' to
combat bullying in schools and then...that was it. Perhaps because Vice.com ran thesearticles, it revealed an even uglier truth behind just simple school
bullying; an anonymous creepy internet group that thrived and bragged about the manipulating of young teen girls. Anonymous outed one of these cyber bullies who claimed innocence, despite the evidence. Apparently the RCMP said he was not a 'person of interest' because you know, suicide. And that was the last
I've heard of Amanda Todd because of this guy;
The Ghost of Manipulation Present; Scooter Braun
He's the one on the left beside that grinning mannequin thing.
I admit, i never even heard of this guy until the start of December when i read about him here, but trust me unless you are living in a concrete bunker
underground or possibly some crappy suburb of Rwanda, you all have been exposed
to what he has brought forth, not unlike other star-shitters before him; Simon Cowell, Maurice Starr, Quincy Jones. But this guy manages the teen girl fan orgy that are the Beliebers, the Zooey Dechanel-lite Carly Rae Jepsen and the pony-riding Psy singing Gangham
Style. Who as most have heard is Youtube's current all-time hit leader at over 1 billion views. So technically nearly 1 in 8 people have seen that video. Or over 4 billion minutes has been wasted watching a grown Korean man prance around in ill-fitting tuxedos or to put it another way, nearly 8000 years of wasted human potential, watching this. And that's just as of the end of 2012.
Scooter Braun has created the biggest 3 stars in music entertainment of 2012 through good ol'fashioned social media manipulation. Legend is that they were all
discovered via Youtube, although it is said Braun produced the
'basement videos' where Beiber was 'discovered'. Or all those 'Call Me Maybe' parodies that we are to believe happened 'organically'. It was a marketing strategy that worked and Scooter was the giant light
bulb that distracted most of North America from itself. And he forces other grown ups to call him Scooter.
There is nothing of substance to these people, yet they had grown newscasters feigning interest in these people's momentary stardom to keep our minds off of our personal out-of-control debt to living ratios and bigger societal ills. If
past experience is any indication, we know where these kids and asians sensation
are going; nowhere but down until it's time to have that twenty year reunion tour to try and fill up the royalty coffers once again.
Not one of the aforementioned have done anything of value to
society, other than manipulate society to forget about Amanda Todd, those mass
shootin- hey, he looks like he's riding a
horse in a tuxedo! friggin' hilarious!!
The Ghost of Manipulation Future; Nate Silver
Man, this could be me circa 30 yrs old but for my time at smoking weed.
2012 was all about US politics and what the
Obama had or had not done to get the US to pay up for those Bush years. What most of the ignorant general public missed but you can
bet the parties didn't was this guy; NateSilver.
While still leading the way in the world-wide recession, the
US
put all other interests on hold for nearly a year while the two leading parties spent hundreds of
millions of public relation dollars in an effort to either reclaim or retain
the presidency. There was no such truth
as an unbiased media, especially when the only two trusted news sources were
Fox News and The Daily Show, for their obvious biases. The two candidates traveled throughout the
country, delivered speeches, bought ad space (again in the hundreds of
millions), and talked about peripheral issues that really had no bearing on
why the country and world appeared to be going to hell in a shit-basket. The republican candidate Romney apparently ran
on a platform with no plan, and he still garnered 47% of the vote - nearly 1/2 of all American voters were backing a guy that had no plan, they just liked what he represented. The whole OWS movement never happened in the political sphere. This came as a great surprise to the thousands of Americans who had been arrested and tear gassed in the name of American capitalism.
But this Nate Silver guy. He was everywhere after the
election. Because he picked the winner of all 50 states using, now get this, math and graphs and stuff. It was just as relevant and boring as the movie Moneyball, where this same 'math stuff' was
introduced to Brad Pitt and the Oakland
A's, thereby changing the way fantasy baseball teams were picked forever. Nate Silver created a system where he correctly guessed the outcome of the
election before voting day. Before the election was even held.
In the next election, both political parties will be
spending vast amounts of money on statisticians emulating Silver's theories for
their respective political war rooms. Then they will explain their findings to the public relations teams on which states they should be spending money. The future of the world's greatest superpower will rest on media battles in Battleground States; manipulating Ohio rednecks and Southern Carolina tobacco-munchers. What Nate Silver has done is create a near perfect formula that points
out what states needed to better manipulated to win in a pure democracy. Silver proved that math can win elections. And the world's powerful 1% just got a little more geekier to the infinite power.
