Tag Archives: Noah

Utilitarian Review 3/19/16

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News

Robert Stanley Martin has decided to move his posts off the site. His chronicle of on sale dates for comics will continue at his new location. (Hopefully we’ll be able to link you there.)
 
On HU

Featured Archive Post: Andrea Tang on recent films and the yellow peril.

Eleanor Lockhart on trans themes in the work of the Wachowski sisters.

Lindsay George on Watchmen, The Handmaid’s Tale, and anti-dystopia.

Osvaldo Oyola on the Thing, Yancy Street, and superhero ethnic identity.

Me on Old Goats and buddy movies after 65.

Roy T. Cook on Hawkeye and what ASL tells us about the definition of comics.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Establishment I wrote about the film Creative Control and how the male gaze is about staring at men.

At Playboy I wrote about Anita Alvarez’s defeat and scaring US prosecutors straight.

In my first piece for Alternet I wrote about how the police kill disabled people.

At Quartz I wrote about

—how protestors in Chicago were working against Anita Alvarez as well as against Trump.

—Trump, the nadir and how racial progress can be undone.

At the Week I wrote about why Obama’s approval ratings are high.

At the Reader I wrote about a lovely exhibit of paintings on wood panels.

At Splice I wrote about how the protests against Trump got Chait and Yglesias off the fence.
 
Other Links

Eva Gantz on sex workers at tech conferences, and on why stigmatizing them is bad.

Jos Truitt on the damage caused by the transphobia in Silence of the Lambs.

Yasmin Nair with a great piece on the limits of feminist utopias that exclude women over 40.
 

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Old Goats

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This first ran at the Dissolve (which seems to be down at the moment, or quite possibly forever.)
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Taylor Guterson’s Old Goats is a basic male bonding flick. All the hallmarks are there. There’s the lothario, Bob. There’s the guy who’s scared of women, Brit. There’s the boring, point of identification, fellow in the middle with a perhaps-too-comfortable long-term commitment, Dave.

The movie does have a couple of gimmicks to liven up the old formula, though. First of all, the protagonists are all themselves. Bob Burkholder, Britton Crosley, and David Vander Wal all play a version of who they are in real-life, so that the film is supposed to be a semi-documentary. And the second twist is that the protagonists are all 65+. It’s Animal House post- retirement.

Animal House post retirement is different than Animal House in college in a number of ways. Rather than broad physical humor for a mainstream audience, it features quirky, low-key humor for indie-film goers. The non-professional acting adds a pleasantly scrappy amateurish feel to the proceedings. Dave in particular has a natural, awkward ease — it’s hard to resist the low-fi grace with which he grins and asserts, “I’ll be darned.” Brit’s almost blank distress as he burns his toast, or Bob’s irascible reaction to almost everything, are also charming in a way that it would be hard for professional actors to duplicate.

The film, then, gets a lot of mileage out of its protagonists’ clunky charisma. Perhaps too much. At times, the foregrounding of the old guys’ ineffable cuteness moves past endearing and towards something that feels disturbingly like condescension. In one scene, for example, a delivery-person comes to Bob’s room, where he’s preparing to have celebratory sex with his girlfriend. The delivery guy is decisively young, and he waggles his eyebrows and looks generally non-plussed to see the senior-age girlfriend in bed and Bob walking around shirtless. It’s as if director Guterson felt the viewers needed a perspective to identify with, a normative gaze from which to confirm that, yep, old people’s sexuality is adorable and amusing.

If the male characters are sometimes portrayed as specimens, the problem is only exacerbated with the women. The male buddy dynamic, here as elsewhere, is built on the incessant privileging of male-male relationships over male-female ones, so that the women end up as prizes, or obstacles, or rewards, rather than as people. This is perhaps most clear in Dave’s relationship with his wife Crystal (Gail Shackel), whom he neglects to spend time with Brit and Bob. At one point he leaves a dinner party in order to print out dating profiles for Brit. His wife comes upstairs to ask him, reasonably enough, what the hell he’s doing; he lies to her, and then starts scrolling through the profiles. His preference for the guys is then presented as infidelity — and infidelity which the viewer is encouraged to participate in, to a large extent. Brit and Bob are fun, after all; Crystal is an uptight shrew with hardly any screen time. It’s clear where one’s sympathies are supposed to lie.

Similarly, Bob’s girlfriend just about never speaks. Brit’s sweetie (Benita Staadecker) has a bit more to do, but even as the two fall in love, she’s figured in large part as a kind of uncomfortable inconvenience, pushing him first for sex, and then to move out of the junk-pit of a boat where he lives. Certainly, there’s never much of a sense of who she is, or even of why she’s particularly taken with Brit. Her story is not the one viewers are meant to care about, and that not caring is tied directly to the fact that she’s a woman, rather than one of the buddies.

The semi-documentary format and the age of the cast could have been used to undermine or think about the ways that male-bonding in films is used to erase or denigrate women. Instead, the twists are simply used to excuse the usual tropes. Crystal’s complaints about the way Dave has started frequenting an all-male club seem like they could be applied to the film as a whole. Even post-retirement, the film seems to say, guys will be guys, and women should go sit somewhere else.

Utilitarian Review 1/12/16

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On HU

Things were a bit livelier this week, which was good to see.

Featured Archive Post: Adrielle Mitchell on comics creators talking about their own projects.

mouse on Disney’s horny Zootopia.

Sarah Shoker on Antonin Scalia and the politics of grief.

Jennifer Heibit on The Handmaid’s Tale, Watchmen, and the differeing evils of dystopia.

I fix everything wrong with the Supreme Court.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At the Guardian I wrote about:

—Ghostbusters, sex, and gender swapping.

—the Matrix’s crappy gender politics, MRAs, and the Wachowski sisters.

At Quartz I wrote about Shira Tarrant’s new book The Pornography Industry and why we need more porn.

At the Week I explained why we should get rid of early voting.

At Random Nerds I interviewed André Carrington about his new book on race and science fiction.

At Pacific Standard I wrote about Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies and how single women will change the world.

At the LA Times I rounded up all the theories about who is to blame for Donald Trump.

At Splice Today I argued that the Democratic candidates should endorse Kim Foxx for Cook County prosecutor.
 
Other Links

The Chicago Reader on Kim Foxx’s vision for changing the Cook County prosecutor’s office.

Nicole Brinkley on the YA novel Inexcusable and rape.

Parker Molloy on the Wachowskis coming out as trans and the disappointment of redpill MRAs.

Solving the Supreme Court

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I had this brilliant idea about how to fix the Supreme Court, but no one wanted to pay me for it. But the country needs to know! So here it is.

So what is the problem with the Supreme Court anyway? I would say there are 2.

(1) Judge’s have life tenures and life forever now because of pesky improving diet and healthcare. That means that your grandpappy’s electoral preferences determine who gets to marry and have abortions and have labor unions. Nothing against your grandpappy, but people shouldn’t have their lives mangled and stretched by elections that happened before they were born. The court needs to be more accountable to the current electorate. Or, in short, the court isn’t politicized enough.

(2) Partisan polarization means that battles over judges have become completely intractable. At the moment, it’s not entirely clear that we can ever get a judge approved again if the President and the Senate aren’t of the same party. Justices are also forced to try to time their retirement so they’re replaced by a President of the right party. The whole thing is undignified, distracting, and generally pitiful, as well as potentially interfering with the smooth functioning of the court. In short, the court is too politicized.

So, how do you fix the too much politicization and the too little politicization? It seems impossible…but I have the one perfect awesome solution that you can tell is awesome because no one would pay me for it.

Prepare for said solution…now.

Have each President appoint one and only one judge per term. Appointments should happen right after the President is elected; it can be one of the first things the President does.

This of course means that the number of judges on the court will change. But the number of judges isn’t set in stone, or even in the Constitution. It’s been as low as 7 and as high as 10. There’s no reason it can’t vary every four years (or more often if a judge retires or dies mid-term).

Let’s list the advantages of the Berlatsky plan:

1. Every Presidential election will be represented on the court. Voters will know that a vote for President is a vote for one (1) Supreme Court pick.

2. Since everyone knows there is a pick coming, the election will be a mandate for a Supreme Court selection. This will undermine the partisan “wait till the next election” nonsense. To prevent stalling and stonewalling, a bill could also provide that if there is no vote on a nominee within 6 months, the judge is automatically seated. Since everyone knows each president will get a judge, the stakes will be reduced; each party will hope that their own judge will affect the balance of the court in four short years.

3. Retirements would be divorced from Supreme Court nominations. Justices would have much less incentive to time their retirements, since every President would always get one pick, no matter when the sitting justices step down. Presumably, justices would often retire at the beginning of a presidential term, when the new judge would be selected…but if they didn’t, it wouldn’t make no nevermind.

4. At least in theory, this shouldn’t be a difficult reform to pass. It doesn’t give a clear advantage to either Democrats or Republicans; instead, it ensures that each President, from whichever party, has a chance to select a judge with much lower stakes and much less partisan squabbling. It also mean that Presidents, of whatever party, will be able immediately to somewhat reduce the chance that the court will interfere with their policy preferences. Democrats and Republicans alike should like that, since Democrats and Republicans alike always think they’re going to win the next election.

So there you have it. I could see various tweaks—maybe it should be two justices for each President rather than one? But overall, I think it’s a remarkably elegant solution if I do say so myself. Since all the policymakers read the Hooded Utilitarian religiously, I expect it to be adopted any minute now.
 

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I John Marshall, old white dude, and I endorse this plan.

Utilitarian Review 3/5/16

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On HU

Featured Archive Post: Kinukitty on Neil Gaiman and the death of dream.

A storify about telling people they’re privileged.

Chris Gavaler presents a superhero performance.

I reviewed the film Bethelehem about the Israeli spies and how they suck.

I reviewed the doc Next Year In Jerusalem about elderly American touring Israel.

Robert Stanley Martin with on sale dates of comics from the end of ’52.
 
Utilitarians Everywhere

At Playboy I interviewed David Barash about how humans are naturally polygamous and harem forming.

At the Kernel I wrote about my failed Patreon campaign.

For my first piece at The Week I wrote that this isn’t the year of the political outsider.

At the Establishment I wrote about the fascist fantasies of “London Has Fallen” and Trump.

At Splice Today I wrote

—about some great future past electronica: Chema64, Gqom, and Kraftwerk reprised.

—that Sanders should quit when it’s clear he’s going to lose.

A couple of Shmoop guides I worked on were posted.

—One on Karel Capek’s R.U.R.

—One on 2001: A Space Odyssey.
 
Other Links

Jeff Spross on how we should give welfare to everyone.

C.T. May on shitty prose on the Internet.

Suzy Khimm on the movement after Sanders.
 

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Israel for Tourists

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This first ran at the Dissolve.
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In a scene toward the end of the documentary Next Year Jerusalem, a nursing-home attendant tells Helen, one of the residents, how much she admires her, and hopes she’ll be just like her when she’s her age. Helen is clearly flattered and touched; it’s a sweet moment. But in the context of the film, it isn’t explained or justified. Viewers are told that Helen is wonderful, but the film never conveys why that is, or what about her, precisely, her caregiver is responding to.

That’s emblematic of the documentary as a whole. Next Year Jerusalem is about eight nursing-home residents who travel with the home’s staff to Israel. The obvious touchstone is Barbara Myerhoff’s famous book and documentary Number Our Days, which is also set in a Jewish home, and which movingly examines the persistence of ritual, life, and meaning at the end of the line. But director David Gaynes lacks Myerhoff’s anthropological perspective, intellectual rigor, and imagination. There’s little depth to his presentation. The residents and staff don’t come across as individual characters, so much as a series of endearing tics. One 90-plus man makes jokes about how he’s no longer a ladies’ man. (He quips that his “thing” doesn’t work anymore.) Helen and her attendant are shown declaring their affection for each other. One severely handicapped woman named Selma jokes about how much food she gets on her coat. The nursing-home president gets weepy as he stands with his travelers, looking down on Jerusalem. Much of this is amusing, even tear-jerking; the president’s emotion is obviously real, and the care he feels for his residents and his community is affecting. But that affect is presented primarily as spectacle, rather than as a narrative that the viewer is invited to understand or participate in.

That’s true not just for the residents, but for Israel as well. The subjects went to Israel as tourists, so it’s no surprise that the film presents a tourist’s-eye-view of the country: There’s the river Jordan; there’s the Western Wall, with the Hasidim acting self-consciously as tour guides; there’s Masada. It’s the Holy Land as amusement park, and while it’s impossible to begrudge the residents their trip of a lifetime, it’s hard not to feel like the filmmakers do just about everyone a disservice by ignoring the painful realities undergirding the sightseeing. A film about Israel that completely ignores the Palestinians’ existence in the interest of focusing on Americans’ self-actualization is a film that really needs to reconsider its priorities.

Perhaps Gaynes would have been better served by eschewing the trip to Israel, and concentrating instead on getting to know the residents over a longer period of time. As it is, Next Year Jerusalem offers little insight into its putative protagonists, and even less into Israel. The residents are impressive in their willingness to get outside of their comfort zone. The film, unfortunately, demonstrates little of that courage.