March 1, 2016
Hello blog readers, it's Neil again. This week, I'm supposed to share my opinion on the media's coverage of the 2016 presidential election. It's not good. As a self-identifying center-right libertarian, I'm pretty mistrustful and resentful of most people with public political interests, either conservative or liberal, and feel that while it may make you feel like a good person for a little bit to do something good for your party for a little bit, a more political mind is naturally a more cynical one that often views people as statistics and oversimplifies complicated ethical issues down to simple statements of "this is the only way and anyone who thinks differently is a bad person". That being said, I think that by its own standards, the media is covering the election just fine. By standards of common decency, they are covering it in a beyond awful fashion. Let's look at the candidates, shall we?
First we have Ted Cruz, who managed to defy the embarrassment of his filibuster a few years back to become a sometimes-OK-sometimes-abysmal policy advocate. The best thing about Bernie Sanders is also the worst thing- he's a wide-eyed idealist. Donald Trump... more on him later. Ben Carson was a former neurosurgeon who got into politics and, while I find his desire to bring church and state closer to be, for lack of a better term, inappropriate, I find him the easiest to get behind of all of the existing candidates otherwise due to his surprisingly accurate statements on political correctness. John Kasich has managed to win my dad over due to his appearance as a moderate Republican, though his record apparently isn't as moderate as a semi-progressive like my dad (or especially my sister) would like to believe. Hilary Clinton might be someone I'd vote for if she were not, well, a Clinton. And while Marco Rubio's social policies may not be perfect, his relentless string of burns on Donald Trump in the most recent CNN debate was reason enough to vote for him.
Trump was always an obnoxious personality for his infamous legacy as a business mogul, reality television star, and various political "commentary" on various news channels. And yet, no one ever thought he would try to run a campaign. OK, they thought he would, but not that it would be a success. He thinks that he can pressure Mexico into building a giant wall to keep them out, a wall that would probably take at least fifty years to build. The only way he could do that would probably be starting a war with Mexico, which I would honestly not put past him and find pretty hypocritical given his criticism of the Bush administration and the Iraq War (though that's more against the Bush family that he wants to belittle rather than actually about the ethics of the Iraq War, and he wants to step up torture without the pretense of "enhanced interrogation"). He supported multiple Democratic positions in the late 1990s/early 2000s, such as formerly being pro-choice on abortion, but reversed his positions in order to appear more conservative. This has been seen as contradicting himself rather than views evolving over time when receiving new information or having a change of heart due to direct experience. Some say he, for better or worse, tells it like it is, but I think he rather tells it like he would like to pretend it is in order to paint himself as the hero and everyone else as the villains. Through his general attitude, whether intentionally or not, he has managed to offend nearly everyone, such as blacks, Latinos, Asians, Muslims, and women. The only volatile socio-political group he has not offended is LGBTs, because it's clearly not worth his time. And his recent inability to make a definitive yes-or-no answer that, for his benefit, probably should've been a no, on whether or not he accepts the support of David Duke, the current representative of the modern Ku Klux Klan, when sixteen years ago he did criticize the KKK ideology, has once more served to embarrass what he thinks he stands for. Some have even theorized that he was meant as a false flag candidate for Hilary Clinton's campaign due to his previous support of the Clintons in the 1990s, and that Hilary set him up to be a ridiculous exaggeration of Republican candidates that uses populism and sensationalism to "win" the media over, "earn" the Republican nomination, and hand her an easy win. This however is just a conspiracy theory, albeit a strangely plausible one. What has allowed him to succeed as he has? Some say it is because of his attitude centered around winning, even at the cost of actual politics. Some say it is because of his anti-establishment nature that fearlessly criticizes the Obama administration. I feel like that it is a general rise in cynicism among Americans.
It's been said that a cynical culture breeds a cynical audience. The rise of quasi-progressive social politics being forced into nearly every facet of life in the 2010s, such as literature, comics, film, television, and video games, has been a double-edged sword. While it has allowed for more awareness on how we treat others and has even made some of my favorite media works possible, such as The Legend of Korra, Portal, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Steven Universe, and, to a lesser extent, Archer, BoJack Horseman, Disney/Pixar's Brave and Inside Out, F is For Family, Gravity Falls, The Lego Movie, and the most recent installment of Mortal Kombat; it has also allowed for a new form of pretentious culture that ends up legitimizing the very mentality it claims to be against. In order to be a post-racial and post-gender society in which people don't need to come out of the closet, can love whomever or whatever they are most naturally attracted to, and can alter their body to match their brain if need be and use whichever bathroom they prefer, we should stop acknowledging these aspects of people outside of pragmatic purposes, and not even engage in "positive discrimination", which is trying to put non-straight, non-white, non-male, and non-cis people everywhere simply because of such aspects (I suppose this is more commonly referred to as affirmative action) and treating them less like people and more like glass sculptures- fragile, in constant need of everyone's admiration, and put on a pedestal for the whole world to see how amazing it is. Unfortunately, as irrational political correctness becomes more accepted, so does irrational political incorrectness. Plenty of people living in the Bible Belt are tired of Barack Obama ignoring most issues of fiscal and foreign policy (or at least, not doing a particularly admirable job in putting forth sustainable policies in those departments) in favor of pushing for progress in social issues and establishing a good relationship with Hollywood, and are OK with having an apparent unapologetic bigot running the country if it means having a president with his priorities in order. Others have just been so turned off by Obama that they just don't care what happens next to the country and are just throwing in the towel and letting someone with no political experience take over (Chris Christie). The media, as much as they hate to admit it, love Trump, and are pretty close to dependent on him. Some of the more liberal media publications, such as the A. V. Club, The Huffington Post, Salon, and Vox, while claiming to be idealists and against cynicism, political or otherwise, usually write about all of the bad things going on, and while criticizing others who complain without providing solutions, the only solutions they provide are usually extreme, alienating, and while they may not appear necessarily bigoted now and against bigotry, they may definitely appear so fifty years down the line if and/or when straight white men become an oppressed minority. Ironically, most of the people at these publications are privilege central, only hire "the other" through affirmative action, and seem to have self-hatred and white guilt ingrained into their heads.
I don't want to be cynical, but when others are this cynical about the world they live in, it seems that I have little choice but to follow suit, albeit in my own way. I have enjoyed various works that have espoused both idealism and cynicism in varying shades, and feel that in this confusing world, it's best to be a little bit of all four of the mentalities in the four-philosophy ensemble- idealist, cynic, realist, and apathetic. Perhaps be each one twenty-five percent a piece, and be one a little more than the rest depending on the situation. The show I hope to make, "Fanz", will, in a similar manner to shows like BoJack Horseman and Rick and Morty, go pretty far down the rabbit hole of looking at cynical views and show that while some are useful, it is idealism that will truly win out in the end. It will also look at those who, as mentioned earlier, claim to be idealists simply because their politics lean left when they are more cynical than even the most reactionary conservatives could ever be and show just how dangerous that delusional type of thinking can be. Ultimately, the show will provide a message of idealism that promotes seeing people as people first and as skin colors and gender and sexual identities second, how works of fiction can improve how we live, why having other people in your life is so important, and why we can and should try to pave opportunities for those we care about, and even some of those we might not otherwise care about, to lead a better life than we all do now, regardless of politics. As stated by Stephen Colbert once (when out of character), "Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying "yes" begins things. Saying "yes" is how things grow. Saying "yes" leads to knowledge. "Yes" is for young people. So as long as you have the strength to, say "yes". Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next week.
Monday, February 29, 2016
Sunday, February 21, 2016
Neil Rush CMT Blog- February 23, 2016- A "Movie" I Like
February 23, 2016
Hello, blog readers, this is Neil again. This week's assignment was to do something similar to last week's, which was defending a band or musical artist I like from hypothetical haters. This time, it's defending a movie I like from hypothetical haters. The term "movie", however, is somewhat hard to define nowadays. Most people that desire high-quality writing and storytelling in this day and age go for television (the most consistently cited TV channels for high-quality work are AMC, BBC America, FX, HBO, Cinemax, IFC, Showtime, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Instant Video, and many say that Adult Swim, Comedy Central, USA Network, Cartoon Network, Disney XD, and Hulu are beginning to reach similar levels with their programming), and thanks to the advent of binge-watching, TV seasons are often organized like longer movies now. Plenty of my favorite things nowadays (The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit trilogies, The Lego Movie, the Jurassic Park series, the original Back to the Future and Ghostbusters films, The Wizard of Oz, the Disney Animated Canon, Pixar, DreamWorks Animation) are movie franchises, so those could all serve as traditional "movies". The TV shows I like (The WB/CW's Smallville; BBC's Doctor Who; Adult Swim's Moral Orel, Rick and Morty, and The Venture Bros.; Cartoon Network's Ben 10, Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated, Steven Universe, and We Bare Bears; Comedy Central's South Park; Disney Television Animation's Gravity Falls, Kim Possible, and Star vs. the Forces of Evil; Fox's American Dad, Family Guy, Futurama, and The Simpsons; FX's Archer; Netflix's BoJack Horseman and F is For Family; Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender/The Legend of Korra, Danny Phantom, and Invader Zim; and most of the anime I watch) could all be seen like movies when viewing certain episodes in a certain way at a certain time, and thanks to both people editing clips together on YouTube to make them appear to be movies and the popularity of Let's Play videos, the video game franchises that I like (Portal, Mortal Kombat, Okami, games in the Super Mario Bros. franchise in which his brother Luigi has a major role) can be consumed in a similar manner to movies. I remember in one of last year's assignments, the one in which I had to describe the five movies I would want on a deserted island with me, I decided to make one of them a 10-hour Let's Play, which is not a movie in the slightest and would need to be on a computer with internet access to work at all, something that is unlikely to be available on a deserted island, and justified it by a fellow classmate playing fast and loose with the assignment by turning it into a very odd story before describing the films, and none of the movies were even movies she liked; she only included all of them because they all had character actor Adrien Brody in them and it added to the paper's "humor". Now I realize just how ridiculous I was being and shall choose a genuine movie for the subject of this blog post. Perhaps, rather than do a blog post on one of the films or film-like products above, I shall write about a film I saw recently and liked a lot- Deadpool.
Deadpool is my favorite Marvel Comics character, and a movie for the character has been desired by many fans for a very long time now. The first time didn't end very well, with a bizarre in-name-only character appearing in X-Men Origins: Wolverine played by Ryan Reynolds. He was a fan of the character and knew that this take on him wasn't very good, so he set out to make a more faithful adaptation of the character, which finally came to fruition a little over a week ago. The movie was, for the most part, critically acclaimed due to Reynolds' performance and the meta-humor, though a handful of critics criticized the film for the exact same reasons. People's opinions varied, with the most common negative one being that some felt that the movie was over-reliant on juvenile humor that would only be found funny by teenage boys too young to see the movie, and some even going so far as to say that it is disgustingly bad, uses terms it doesn't truly understand to feel narcissistically smart and self-serving, and will set up a wave of other bad films trying to emulate its style. Something that often happens to movie critics is that they believe that their opinion is the only one that matters, and that they are the end-all-be-all of consumer media quality and the ethical, intellectual, logical, and philosophical ideas that come with it. Maybe I'm wrong in how I view movies. Maybe I am wrong for not seeing what these people see as problems as such. And yet, I suppose that the only people who truly know whether it's "correct" to find humor in lowbrow jokes are all dead. I didn't find the film to rely too much on them, and think it had a perfect balance between Deadpool's man-child behaviors, meta-jokes about the superhero film genre, gun-and-sword slapstick violence, and a surprise sense of heart buried under all of the rest, but maybe that's because I'm not as enlightened as those who go into journalism. Is a critic's job to simply provide opinions or to protect the public from poor-quality media and ensure that they see the high-quality media?
Regardless, the point is simple- Deadpool is awesome and expressing dislike of it on grounds of juvenile humor while acting like all educated people that hear you say that will agree with you is digging yourself in a very deep hole of pretentiousness. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next week.
Hello, blog readers, this is Neil again. This week's assignment was to do something similar to last week's, which was defending a band or musical artist I like from hypothetical haters. This time, it's defending a movie I like from hypothetical haters. The term "movie", however, is somewhat hard to define nowadays. Most people that desire high-quality writing and storytelling in this day and age go for television (the most consistently cited TV channels for high-quality work are AMC, BBC America, FX, HBO, Cinemax, IFC, Showtime, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Instant Video, and many say that Adult Swim, Comedy Central, USA Network, Cartoon Network, Disney XD, and Hulu are beginning to reach similar levels with their programming), and thanks to the advent of binge-watching, TV seasons are often organized like longer movies now. Plenty of my favorite things nowadays (The Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit trilogies, The Lego Movie, the Jurassic Park series, the original Back to the Future and Ghostbusters films, The Wizard of Oz, the Disney Animated Canon, Pixar, DreamWorks Animation) are movie franchises, so those could all serve as traditional "movies". The TV shows I like (The WB/CW's Smallville; BBC's Doctor Who; Adult Swim's Moral Orel, Rick and Morty, and The Venture Bros.; Cartoon Network's Ben 10, Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated, Steven Universe, and We Bare Bears; Comedy Central's South Park; Disney Television Animation's Gravity Falls, Kim Possible, and Star vs. the Forces of Evil; Fox's American Dad, Family Guy, Futurama, and The Simpsons; FX's Archer; Netflix's BoJack Horseman and F is For Family; Nickelodeon's Avatar: The Last Airbender/The Legend of Korra, Danny Phantom, and Invader Zim; and most of the anime I watch) could all be seen like movies when viewing certain episodes in a certain way at a certain time, and thanks to both people editing clips together on YouTube to make them appear to be movies and the popularity of Let's Play videos, the video game franchises that I like (Portal, Mortal Kombat, Okami, games in the Super Mario Bros. franchise in which his brother Luigi has a major role) can be consumed in a similar manner to movies. I remember in one of last year's assignments, the one in which I had to describe the five movies I would want on a deserted island with me, I decided to make one of them a 10-hour Let's Play, which is not a movie in the slightest and would need to be on a computer with internet access to work at all, something that is unlikely to be available on a deserted island, and justified it by a fellow classmate playing fast and loose with the assignment by turning it into a very odd story before describing the films, and none of the movies were even movies she liked; she only included all of them because they all had character actor Adrien Brody in them and it added to the paper's "humor". Now I realize just how ridiculous I was being and shall choose a genuine movie for the subject of this blog post. Perhaps, rather than do a blog post on one of the films or film-like products above, I shall write about a film I saw recently and liked a lot- Deadpool.
Deadpool is my favorite Marvel Comics character, and a movie for the character has been desired by many fans for a very long time now. The first time didn't end very well, with a bizarre in-name-only character appearing in X-Men Origins: Wolverine played by Ryan Reynolds. He was a fan of the character and knew that this take on him wasn't very good, so he set out to make a more faithful adaptation of the character, which finally came to fruition a little over a week ago. The movie was, for the most part, critically acclaimed due to Reynolds' performance and the meta-humor, though a handful of critics criticized the film for the exact same reasons. People's opinions varied, with the most common negative one being that some felt that the movie was over-reliant on juvenile humor that would only be found funny by teenage boys too young to see the movie, and some even going so far as to say that it is disgustingly bad, uses terms it doesn't truly understand to feel narcissistically smart and self-serving, and will set up a wave of other bad films trying to emulate its style. Something that often happens to movie critics is that they believe that their opinion is the only one that matters, and that they are the end-all-be-all of consumer media quality and the ethical, intellectual, logical, and philosophical ideas that come with it. Maybe I'm wrong in how I view movies. Maybe I am wrong for not seeing what these people see as problems as such. And yet, I suppose that the only people who truly know whether it's "correct" to find humor in lowbrow jokes are all dead. I didn't find the film to rely too much on them, and think it had a perfect balance between Deadpool's man-child behaviors, meta-jokes about the superhero film genre, gun-and-sword slapstick violence, and a surprise sense of heart buried under all of the rest, but maybe that's because I'm not as enlightened as those who go into journalism. Is a critic's job to simply provide opinions or to protect the public from poor-quality media and ensure that they see the high-quality media?
Regardless, the point is simple- Deadpool is awesome and expressing dislike of it on grounds of juvenile humor while acting like all educated people that hear you say that will agree with you is digging yourself in a very deep hole of pretentiousness. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next week.
Monday, February 15, 2016
Neil Rush CMT Blog- February 16, 2016- A Musician I Like
February 16, 2016
Hello, blog readers, this is Neil again. This week's assignment is to defend a musician or band I like from hypothetical haters, or just talk about a musician or band that I like and why I like them. Someone that I've recently become interested in is an internet comedy musician named Allie Goertz. Her music is usually quiet and understated acoustic rock, which actually compliments the humorous nature of her lyrics surprisingly well. The YouTube channel that all of her videos are on is called Cosbysweater (it first started a few years before October 2014, so this was just an innocent mistake). Some of the subjects of her songs have included the infamous so-bad-it's-good cult classic romantic drama that was later re-billed as a black comedy made by Tommy Wiseau called The Room, Milhouse from The Simpsons, and Dungeons and Dragons.
What really drew me to her was how she made a five-track EP of songs all about my favorite TV show, Rick and Morty. On the EP, called Sad Dance Songs, she mixes up her usual style of music to work with, in addition to acoustic and alternative rock sounds, both electronic dance music and rap. The lyrics, while usually humorous, all reflect some of the deeper dramatic and even existentialist themes that Rick and Morty has, unlike most other adult animated comedies before it. Some of the songs include "Look At Me", a song about the bizarre race of characters named Mr. Meeseeks and how they only exist to fulfill specific tasks, are immune to all forms of bodily harm and can only die once their task is completed, are driven insane by their very narrow reason for existing, and will become more dangerous and psychotic the longer they are left alive without their assigned task being completed; "Jeez Rick", a song sung from Morty's perspective about his frequent frustration with Rick taking him on all of the adventures through space and the multiverse that he does and constantly putting him in deadly situations throughout them; and my personal favorite on the album "All I Wanted", a song that could be interpreted as being about any of the five members of the Sanchez-Smith family- Rick, Morty, Jerry, Summer, or Beth- and how they feel about any other members of the family- specifically how even though they are unhappy with each other, they would most likely be more unhappy without each other, and how it's best to just live with what you do have rather than dwell on what you don't.
Goertz's musical style has been compared to comedy musician Bo Burnham, though it's rarely as dark as Burnham's music. This prompt is about defending your choice musician from haters, which is made fairly ironic by the fact that one of her songs is about haters. The song is called "An Open Letter To Myself", which is about not being elitist with your tastes, a problem she admits to having. Whether it's people liking something she doesn't like or not liking something she does, Allie has often tried to overcome her instinctive behavior of taking entertainment tastes personally. Of course, she ends the song on a deliberately and facetiously hypocritical note, saying that if someone doesn't laugh when watching Seinfeld, then "say something hurtful and never take it back". Occasionally, she does go into more serious songs, such as in her song called "To Mom", which is about how she still cares about her mother despite the fact that she bore the brunt of Allie's bad attitude as a teenager, a song I'm sure many people can relate to.
So will Allie Goertz gain more success from here? Sad Dance Songs seems to suggest yes, though only time will tell. Bo Burnham has had multiple stand-up comedy specials/concerts and briefly starred on his own MTV show called Zach Stone Is Gonna Be Famous, a mockumentary comedy-drama starring Burnham as the title character, a recent high school graduate who spends the series chasing internet fame. Despite only lasting one season, it was critically acclaimed by most news sources for deconstructing the formulas of similar shows on MTV and showing how the blind pursuit of fame is often just a cover for strong emotional insecurity. Could Allie end up doing something like this? Maybe somewhere down the line, if she got a few Netflix comedy specials first. I expect a guest appearance on Rick and Morty Season 3 as a personal thank-you from series creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon for paying tribute to their show with the album before anything else, however. Go look her up on YouTube to hear some of her songs, or buy them for yourself on iTunes or Google Play Music. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next week.
Hello, blog readers, this is Neil again. This week's assignment is to defend a musician or band I like from hypothetical haters, or just talk about a musician or band that I like and why I like them. Someone that I've recently become interested in is an internet comedy musician named Allie Goertz. Her music is usually quiet and understated acoustic rock, which actually compliments the humorous nature of her lyrics surprisingly well. The YouTube channel that all of her videos are on is called Cosbysweater (it first started a few years before October 2014, so this was just an innocent mistake). Some of the subjects of her songs have included the infamous so-bad-it's-good cult classic romantic drama that was later re-billed as a black comedy made by Tommy Wiseau called The Room, Milhouse from The Simpsons, and Dungeons and Dragons.
What really drew me to her was how she made a five-track EP of songs all about my favorite TV show, Rick and Morty. On the EP, called Sad Dance Songs, she mixes up her usual style of music to work with, in addition to acoustic and alternative rock sounds, both electronic dance music and rap. The lyrics, while usually humorous, all reflect some of the deeper dramatic and even existentialist themes that Rick and Morty has, unlike most other adult animated comedies before it. Some of the songs include "Look At Me", a song about the bizarre race of characters named Mr. Meeseeks and how they only exist to fulfill specific tasks, are immune to all forms of bodily harm and can only die once their task is completed, are driven insane by their very narrow reason for existing, and will become more dangerous and psychotic the longer they are left alive without their assigned task being completed; "Jeez Rick", a song sung from Morty's perspective about his frequent frustration with Rick taking him on all of the adventures through space and the multiverse that he does and constantly putting him in deadly situations throughout them; and my personal favorite on the album "All I Wanted", a song that could be interpreted as being about any of the five members of the Sanchez-Smith family- Rick, Morty, Jerry, Summer, or Beth- and how they feel about any other members of the family- specifically how even though they are unhappy with each other, they would most likely be more unhappy without each other, and how it's best to just live with what you do have rather than dwell on what you don't.
Goertz's musical style has been compared to comedy musician Bo Burnham, though it's rarely as dark as Burnham's music. This prompt is about defending your choice musician from haters, which is made fairly ironic by the fact that one of her songs is about haters. The song is called "An Open Letter To Myself", which is about not being elitist with your tastes, a problem she admits to having. Whether it's people liking something she doesn't like or not liking something she does, Allie has often tried to overcome her instinctive behavior of taking entertainment tastes personally. Of course, she ends the song on a deliberately and facetiously hypocritical note, saying that if someone doesn't laugh when watching Seinfeld, then "say something hurtful and never take it back". Occasionally, she does go into more serious songs, such as in her song called "To Mom", which is about how she still cares about her mother despite the fact that she bore the brunt of Allie's bad attitude as a teenager, a song I'm sure many people can relate to.
So will Allie Goertz gain more success from here? Sad Dance Songs seems to suggest yes, though only time will tell. Bo Burnham has had multiple stand-up comedy specials/concerts and briefly starred on his own MTV show called Zach Stone Is Gonna Be Famous, a mockumentary comedy-drama starring Burnham as the title character, a recent high school graduate who spends the series chasing internet fame. Despite only lasting one season, it was critically acclaimed by most news sources for deconstructing the formulas of similar shows on MTV and showing how the blind pursuit of fame is often just a cover for strong emotional insecurity. Could Allie end up doing something like this? Maybe somewhere down the line, if she got a few Netflix comedy specials first. I expect a guest appearance on Rick and Morty Season 3 as a personal thank-you from series creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon for paying tribute to their show with the album before anything else, however. Go look her up on YouTube to hear some of her songs, or buy them for yourself on iTunes or Google Play Music. Thank you for reading, and I'll see you next week.
Monday, February 8, 2016
Neil Rush CMT Blog- February 9, 2016- Liking Something The Media Does
February 9, 2016
Hey blog, it's Neil. This week, I'm supposed to write about something that I think the media does well. I don't think that they do much well, to be honest. This is the media we're talking about here, known for doing things that sensationalize and humiliate. And yet, if I had to find anything that they do well, I guess it giving something that deserves it a chance every once in a while. Do studio heads count as a subcategory of "the media"? They sure act like it- we always hear stories of them doing controversial things that keep people from seeing the movies that the American people want to see in favor of the international markets. This is why sequels keep getting pumped out- movie-going Americans may be sick of colorful-costumed white-man superheroes, but plenty of international markets, particularly China, still flock to them, and create both licensing deals and alternate versions of movies for these markets. Some movies, such as the 2013 R-rated college comedy "21 And Over", even have their entire premises altered for Chinese releases. While the American version is about an Asian-American college student who celebrates his 21st birthday the night before a medical school interview, the Chinese version is apparently about a young Chinese man who briefly goes to an American college, is temporarily corrupted by hedonistic Western society, and goes back to China a better person. It's amazing how editing and dubbing can make a movie appear entirely different when released in another country. This is usually done for image reasons. If a non-Asian person were seen engaging in wild partying in a Hollywood movie in China, they wouldn't care and would probably enjoy it. Because of the high regard superheroes are held in in China, the new super-anti-hero soft science fiction action black comedy Deadpool, an highly irreverent, over-the-top, and adult-oriented parody of superhero movies, has even been banned from China, despite plenty of similar violent movies already being allowed and often made in China as well. Deadpool is particularly what I wanted to talk about.
Co-created by comic writer Fabian Nicieza and comic artist Rob Liefeld, Deadpool was initially a side character in the Marvel Comics series The New Mutants and became something of a comedic partner to the antihero Cable. He was a parody of the DC Comics villain Deathstroke, with all of the same abilities and then some- near-immortal regenerative abilities, skill with guns and swords, processing information at thirty times the rate of the average human (once believed to be able to use up to thirty percent of their brains at a time before the ten percent brain myth was disproved), and various others. Their personalities are greatly different, however. While Deathstroke is usually cruel, cold, and calculating rarely involved in humor, Deadpool is almost always talking, completely filterless, and acts like a mixture of a hyperactive child and cartoon character given too much weaponry. His origin takes a potentially tragic story and turns it on its head by allowing it to happen to someone with his personality. As a pun on the real name of Deathstroke, Slade Wilson, Deadpool's real name is Wade Wilson. He was a man diagnosed with terminal cancer who volunteered for the Weapon X program in order to be cured of it, but the things they injected him with there, rather than cure it, simply froze it, giving him immortality allowing him to regenerate limbs from essentially any injury, but also giving him always-wrinkly skin. Being experimented on also drove him insane, giving him the ability to break the fourth wall and be aware of his status as a fictional comic book character, talk to the reader, and reference past issues in a way that no other characters can understand. Other mental issues he has had have included having him constantly talk with two other yellow and white thought boxes meant to represent the rest of his brain, though I don't think that these are meant to be his conscience and anti-conscience, because they both, at different times, try to convince Deadpool to do or not do the bad and/or dumb things he really wants to do. Deadpool thinks he's a superhero and often tries to be friends with other superheroes but is prevented by his own psychotic nature from being a true superhero admired by the in-universe public or respected by his idols.
A botched attempt at getting him into a movie happened in 2009. Ryan Reynolds played him as a supporting character in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, but he didn't have Deadpool's iconic costume and, at the movie's climax, appeared as a bald man with his mouth sewn shut (as a response to an earlier line said by the founder of Weapon X, William Stryker, "If you didn't have that mouth of yours, Wilson, you'd be the perfect soldier."), with the powers of other mutants, such as laser vision, teleportation, and swords coming out of his hands like Wolverine's claws, "pooled" into him. While the real Deadpool does have a remote for teleportation in the comics, it's not an actual power of his, and the rest of the powers are just ridiculous. No one thought that Deadpool could manage his own solo film, especially if it were as an R-rated, hyper-violent, and highly crass superhero movie. Sometimes, however, the studio takes a risk and pulls through. After noticing his popularity in video games such as the 2010 installment of Marvel vs. Capcom and the 2013 Deadpool video game, along with his appearances on various internet memes, people could tell that it was time for Deadpool to have his movie. Ryan Reynolds wanted to play the character again, but actually do him justice, and seems to have delivered. I guess that the media deserves props for taking a chance on Deadpool, and I think that their risk will pay off. Thank you for reading, and see you next week.
Monday, February 1, 2016
Neil Rush CMT Blog- February 2, 2016- Something To Upset Me
February 2, 2016
Hello, blog, it's Neil. I was assigned to write about something that angers me this week. The thing that angers me the most, I guess, is something that many others would probably be angry with me for being angry about- and many other others would probably be proud of me for being angry with in a way that would make me a different kind of angry. It is something that is most commonly known as "political correctness". The overuse of this phrase by various parties has caused it to lose its meaning, as is what happens when buzzwords are used widely enough or in a potentially contentious context, so I wish there was another term I could use that still depicted it as more bad than good, unlike all of the other terms for it, but I suppose I'm stuck using a hollow term.
Look, I do believe that all people deserve equal human rights and opportunity in every facet of life that it is beneficial. What I don't believe in is using it as another form of oppression, which is basically what is happening, or if it isn't, it's on its way to. The way many people, particularly on internet magazines on news, politics, and culture; on blog websites such as Tumblr, and in college safe space culture, treat these issues oftentimes betrays the overall intended purpose of social justice activism. They have a tendency to talk about issues in such a way that they express the belief that those without power are fundamentally, morally, and logically better than those with it. This is one of the most counter-productive ways of going about the issues, and seems to express the belief that they would be happy if the tables were turned and straight white men became the oppressed ones. The issue at the heart of it all isn't that people of color are oppressed, or that women are oppressed, or that LGBTETC (the etc. meant ecetera, because of all of the possible sexual and gender identities that are being acknowledged nowadays) people are being oppressed, but rather that people overall are being oppressed. I feel that political correctness only creates more cultural barriers rather than tearing them down, as it wants people to take an alleged moral standard in seeing differences in people and use those to treat them not like people, but like expensive glass sculptures- fragile in constant need of praise and admiration, and held up on a pedestal for the world to see that it exists and that you need to find it just as good as those who put it there. That last aspect, of course, is referencing politically correct casting.
While I do believe that nothing as arbitrary as race, gender, sexuality, gender identity, body ability, political belief, or religious belief should affect casting or hiring for writing or directing in a media work, I do not believe in affirmative action or anything that says that there "needs" to be a certain amount of people of color or women employed on a work in order to be seen as a properly progressive creative workspace. This turns those people into statistics to be met rather than creative voices to be valued. Take what happened with some of the people on my favorite TV show and the TV show I have lofty, if not questionable, goals to work on if it is still airing in the 2020s, Adult Swim's Rick and Morty. At some of the conventions that the series co-creators, showrunners, occasional writers and directors (the creators of TV shows rarely become writers), and stars of the show, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, have gone to, the two of them tried to field questions about the fact that, at least for the first two seasons, all of the show's writers were men. This might not be as big of an issue if it weren't for the fact that, being a generally politically incorrect animated series on Adult Swim, it has a handful of scenes that could be seen as sexist, particularly plenty of comments made by Rick (which I find justified in that he's openly cruel to everyone more often than not) and the manner in which Morty fantasizes about his crush, a girl at his high school named Jessica (which I also find justified in that Morty is a fourteen-year-old boy, and nearly every heterosexual fourteen-year-old boy is going to have at least one inappropriate thought about a girl). Also, despite its target demographic of men ages 18-34, it has gained sizable attention from other audiences, particularly teenagers due to its teenaged-life-centric plots involving Morty and his older sister Summer and its slightly-more-mainstream-friendly nature than most of Adult Swim's other programming; women ages 15-45 due to its strong characterization of Beth, Morty's mom and Rick's daughter, and Summer, and the rise of geek girls in general (underground comedy musician Allie Goertz recorded a five-track digital-distribution-exclusive concept album called Sad Dance Songs, an EP with songs all relating to Rick and Morty); and older people due to its darkly realistic portrayal of getting older and more melancholic mood than any other comedy on Adult Swim (its fan slogan is the line from the show "Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's going to die. Come watch TV?"). All of those unexpected audiences would make it seem like it might be a good idea to have more women on the writing team, right? Except it's not that simple. Roiland and Harmon have hired a few females to the writing staff for Season 3, which is expected to air in spring 2017 due to the very long production process of the show, but when this was first announced, Roiland stressed that all of the women that were hired were hired on merit because they had wrote good scripts and were not just hired as tokens, and Harmon, who was slightly less cynical about the whole ordeal, but not much, stressed that he wants the ratio of men and women writing to be 50:50 and not any more in favor of the women, as much as some more radical feminists might like. In an ideal world, they wouldn't even have to say this. No one would care, positively or negatively, about girls writing a TV show. And even with its unexpected demographics, Roiland and Harmon know that Rick and Morty is still a boys' show at heart. This leads into a greater social issue.
I honestly believe that, contrary to what the media presents, progressives have won America since 2012. There will always be bigotry, but aside from a few voices, people have generally accepted that racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and ableism are bad things. While most of the productions showing minorities and once-marginalized groups doing things once done by only straights, whites, and males will not be released for another few years, the fact that there is strong market demand for these things I find to be proof enough that this is a truly idealistic and progressive age and that things are always getting better... as long as you know how to suck up to the left. Discrimination is in human nature, and even without thinking, people try to provide more for those that match their biases than those who don't. Some even use political correctness as a backhanded way to mention someone's flaws to their face. I think that fifty years down the line, the patriarchal society will become a matriarchal society, and nearly every story of oppressed minorities and white saviors will be retold somewhere along the line in real-life but with the roles switched. A man in a position of law enforcement who is of color will shoot an unarmed white teenager and the same fallout as all of the white-man-black-kid shootings will happen, and "progressive" internet journalists will disregard all of the potential gray areas involved in the incident in order to make the white teenager look like nothing but a victim of an institutionalized racist society. And then, some time later, they'll realize that they're just restarting a cycle they thought had ended years ago. And without thinking, after "justified" discrimination against straight white males ends, people will find a new arbitrary reason to discriminate against other people, say, the shape of someone's nose, and the issue of accepting people with pointy noses will become as harrowing as the issues of race, gender, and sexuality have been for years. The faces may change, but the situation stays the same- people will always think of a reason to keep those different from themselves down. This is one of the central themes of one of the things I want to make.
"Fanz", the TV series I want to make, will be set in a progressive-utopia version of my hometown of Wyomissing. In this fictionalized version of the town, people of every race, gender identity, and sexual identity are out and proud across the whole town, and they are all in strong and respectful roles. And yet, it is clearly starting to become a dystopia. Plenty of people are using their "victim" status to get away with bullying and worse, and some kids are even being driven to suicide because it is being set in their mind that, since you can't say "all lives matter" as an all-inclusive alternative to "black lives matter", they genuinely believe that "white lives don't matter." This is what happens to the childhood best friend of the protagonist, Nelly Rushberg. She is a Samoan-American Jewish fourteen-year-old trans girl who underwent intensive hormone exposure and gender reassignment surgery at age six after a neurological study that resulted in the young boy turning out to have the instincts of a girl. Due to what happened to her friend and much of what she has experienced, she takes more right-leaning views on issues most directly affecting African-Americans, Jews, and transgendered people, and more left-leaning views on everything else. She is largely disgusted by politically correct culture, even when it wants to help her, and doesn't want to be defined by anything other than her love of anime and anime-influenced animation and how she treats other people. Her love interest for the first half of the series, a girl named Tahvah Bakaar, a bisexual Lebanese-American girl, likewise takes more right-leaning views on issues affecting bisexuals, females, and Muslim-Americans, and herself is even an atheist, though she doesn't outright detest religion, she just doesn't want political correctness to give cover for either Islamic terrorism nor the less-than-admirable aspects of Islamic and Middle Eastern culture. All of the six main youth characters, for a bit of ironic satire, take right-leaning views on the issues that most directly affect them and left-leaning views on those that don't. Nelly's best friend, Giles Bolton, is a half-Caucasian, half-Japanese trans boy; Carrie Christela, Giles' love interest, is a half-Puerto Rican, half-New Jersey Italian pansexual girl raised by a member of the San Francisco Bear Brotherhood; Jin Waz, Nelly's friend and surrogate older brother, is a Korean-American inter-sexual young man with first stage palsy; and Alex Pekin, Nelly's younger cousin, is a Samoan-American gender-fluid female that seems to identify heavily with Middle Eastern culture. And yet, this is all supposed to be unimportant compared to their respective fandoms of anime, auto racing, trading card games, iPhone gaming, Broadway musicals, and documentary filmmaking. Their direct mentors, who are the main administrative staff of the school and all based on myself and some of my childhood friends, try to teach them to follow their own path and not just support what liberal media outlet supports simply because they tout their moral superiority. They take their jobs the least seriously of any staff members at the school district, and will even criticize the politically correct and pseudo-idealist beliefs of many of their students other than the main six to their faces if it is clear that they're ignorant about various societal factors and are clearly making it more about themselves than the core issues at hand. With any luck, if my show manages to get out in the manner I want it to, it will make people think that whatever point of view people may take about both fandom and social justice issues, they're wrong.
Thank you for reading this, and I hope you might think about how this applies to your life in America and the world today.
Hello, blog, it's Neil. I was assigned to write about something that angers me this week. The thing that angers me the most, I guess, is something that many others would probably be angry with me for being angry about- and many other others would probably be proud of me for being angry with in a way that would make me a different kind of angry. It is something that is most commonly known as "political correctness". The overuse of this phrase by various parties has caused it to lose its meaning, as is what happens when buzzwords are used widely enough or in a potentially contentious context, so I wish there was another term I could use that still depicted it as more bad than good, unlike all of the other terms for it, but I suppose I'm stuck using a hollow term.
Look, I do believe that all people deserve equal human rights and opportunity in every facet of life that it is beneficial. What I don't believe in is using it as another form of oppression, which is basically what is happening, or if it isn't, it's on its way to. The way many people, particularly on internet magazines on news, politics, and culture; on blog websites such as Tumblr, and in college safe space culture, treat these issues oftentimes betrays the overall intended purpose of social justice activism. They have a tendency to talk about issues in such a way that they express the belief that those without power are fundamentally, morally, and logically better than those with it. This is one of the most counter-productive ways of going about the issues, and seems to express the belief that they would be happy if the tables were turned and straight white men became the oppressed ones. The issue at the heart of it all isn't that people of color are oppressed, or that women are oppressed, or that LGBTETC (the etc. meant ecetera, because of all of the possible sexual and gender identities that are being acknowledged nowadays) people are being oppressed, but rather that people overall are being oppressed. I feel that political correctness only creates more cultural barriers rather than tearing them down, as it wants people to take an alleged moral standard in seeing differences in people and use those to treat them not like people, but like expensive glass sculptures- fragile in constant need of praise and admiration, and held up on a pedestal for the world to see that it exists and that you need to find it just as good as those who put it there. That last aspect, of course, is referencing politically correct casting.
While I do believe that nothing as arbitrary as race, gender, sexuality, gender identity, body ability, political belief, or religious belief should affect casting or hiring for writing or directing in a media work, I do not believe in affirmative action or anything that says that there "needs" to be a certain amount of people of color or women employed on a work in order to be seen as a properly progressive creative workspace. This turns those people into statistics to be met rather than creative voices to be valued. Take what happened with some of the people on my favorite TV show and the TV show I have lofty, if not questionable, goals to work on if it is still airing in the 2020s, Adult Swim's Rick and Morty. At some of the conventions that the series co-creators, showrunners, occasional writers and directors (the creators of TV shows rarely become writers), and stars of the show, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon, have gone to, the two of them tried to field questions about the fact that, at least for the first two seasons, all of the show's writers were men. This might not be as big of an issue if it weren't for the fact that, being a generally politically incorrect animated series on Adult Swim, it has a handful of scenes that could be seen as sexist, particularly plenty of comments made by Rick (which I find justified in that he's openly cruel to everyone more often than not) and the manner in which Morty fantasizes about his crush, a girl at his high school named Jessica (which I also find justified in that Morty is a fourteen-year-old boy, and nearly every heterosexual fourteen-year-old boy is going to have at least one inappropriate thought about a girl). Also, despite its target demographic of men ages 18-34, it has gained sizable attention from other audiences, particularly teenagers due to its teenaged-life-centric plots involving Morty and his older sister Summer and its slightly-more-mainstream-friendly nature than most of Adult Swim's other programming; women ages 15-45 due to its strong characterization of Beth, Morty's mom and Rick's daughter, and Summer, and the rise of geek girls in general (underground comedy musician Allie Goertz recorded a five-track digital-distribution-exclusive concept album called Sad Dance Songs, an EP with songs all relating to Rick and Morty); and older people due to its darkly realistic portrayal of getting older and more melancholic mood than any other comedy on Adult Swim (its fan slogan is the line from the show "Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's going to die. Come watch TV?"). All of those unexpected audiences would make it seem like it might be a good idea to have more women on the writing team, right? Except it's not that simple. Roiland and Harmon have hired a few females to the writing staff for Season 3, which is expected to air in spring 2017 due to the very long production process of the show, but when this was first announced, Roiland stressed that all of the women that were hired were hired on merit because they had wrote good scripts and were not just hired as tokens, and Harmon, who was slightly less cynical about the whole ordeal, but not much, stressed that he wants the ratio of men and women writing to be 50:50 and not any more in favor of the women, as much as some more radical feminists might like. In an ideal world, they wouldn't even have to say this. No one would care, positively or negatively, about girls writing a TV show. And even with its unexpected demographics, Roiland and Harmon know that Rick and Morty is still a boys' show at heart. This leads into a greater social issue.
I honestly believe that, contrary to what the media presents, progressives have won America since 2012. There will always be bigotry, but aside from a few voices, people have generally accepted that racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, and ableism are bad things. While most of the productions showing minorities and once-marginalized groups doing things once done by only straights, whites, and males will not be released for another few years, the fact that there is strong market demand for these things I find to be proof enough that this is a truly idealistic and progressive age and that things are always getting better... as long as you know how to suck up to the left. Discrimination is in human nature, and even without thinking, people try to provide more for those that match their biases than those who don't. Some even use political correctness as a backhanded way to mention someone's flaws to their face. I think that fifty years down the line, the patriarchal society will become a matriarchal society, and nearly every story of oppressed minorities and white saviors will be retold somewhere along the line in real-life but with the roles switched. A man in a position of law enforcement who is of color will shoot an unarmed white teenager and the same fallout as all of the white-man-black-kid shootings will happen, and "progressive" internet journalists will disregard all of the potential gray areas involved in the incident in order to make the white teenager look like nothing but a victim of an institutionalized racist society. And then, some time later, they'll realize that they're just restarting a cycle they thought had ended years ago. And without thinking, after "justified" discrimination against straight white males ends, people will find a new arbitrary reason to discriminate against other people, say, the shape of someone's nose, and the issue of accepting people with pointy noses will become as harrowing as the issues of race, gender, and sexuality have been for years. The faces may change, but the situation stays the same- people will always think of a reason to keep those different from themselves down. This is one of the central themes of one of the things I want to make.
"Fanz", the TV series I want to make, will be set in a progressive-utopia version of my hometown of Wyomissing. In this fictionalized version of the town, people of every race, gender identity, and sexual identity are out and proud across the whole town, and they are all in strong and respectful roles. And yet, it is clearly starting to become a dystopia. Plenty of people are using their "victim" status to get away with bullying and worse, and some kids are even being driven to suicide because it is being set in their mind that, since you can't say "all lives matter" as an all-inclusive alternative to "black lives matter", they genuinely believe that "white lives don't matter." This is what happens to the childhood best friend of the protagonist, Nelly Rushberg. She is a Samoan-American Jewish fourteen-year-old trans girl who underwent intensive hormone exposure and gender reassignment surgery at age six after a neurological study that resulted in the young boy turning out to have the instincts of a girl. Due to what happened to her friend and much of what she has experienced, she takes more right-leaning views on issues most directly affecting African-Americans, Jews, and transgendered people, and more left-leaning views on everything else. She is largely disgusted by politically correct culture, even when it wants to help her, and doesn't want to be defined by anything other than her love of anime and anime-influenced animation and how she treats other people. Her love interest for the first half of the series, a girl named Tahvah Bakaar, a bisexual Lebanese-American girl, likewise takes more right-leaning views on issues affecting bisexuals, females, and Muslim-Americans, and herself is even an atheist, though she doesn't outright detest religion, she just doesn't want political correctness to give cover for either Islamic terrorism nor the less-than-admirable aspects of Islamic and Middle Eastern culture. All of the six main youth characters, for a bit of ironic satire, take right-leaning views on the issues that most directly affect them and left-leaning views on those that don't. Nelly's best friend, Giles Bolton, is a half-Caucasian, half-Japanese trans boy; Carrie Christela, Giles' love interest, is a half-Puerto Rican, half-New Jersey Italian pansexual girl raised by a member of the San Francisco Bear Brotherhood; Jin Waz, Nelly's friend and surrogate older brother, is a Korean-American inter-sexual young man with first stage palsy; and Alex Pekin, Nelly's younger cousin, is a Samoan-American gender-fluid female that seems to identify heavily with Middle Eastern culture. And yet, this is all supposed to be unimportant compared to their respective fandoms of anime, auto racing, trading card games, iPhone gaming, Broadway musicals, and documentary filmmaking. Their direct mentors, who are the main administrative staff of the school and all based on myself and some of my childhood friends, try to teach them to follow their own path and not just support what liberal media outlet supports simply because they tout their moral superiority. They take their jobs the least seriously of any staff members at the school district, and will even criticize the politically correct and pseudo-idealist beliefs of many of their students other than the main six to their faces if it is clear that they're ignorant about various societal factors and are clearly making it more about themselves than the core issues at hand. With any luck, if my show manages to get out in the manner I want it to, it will make people think that whatever point of view people may take about both fandom and social justice issues, they're wrong.
Thank you for reading this, and I hope you might think about how this applies to your life in America and the world today.
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