Water ice on Mars, shot by the ESA!

The crater you see is 82 kilometers - 50.95 miles big pic.twitter.com/SsT34imy0Z

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) July 18, 2024

I'm assuming this isn't satire:

But if you’re watching with empathy, you’ll mourn the children about to die under Rico’s command. You’ll notice the flat intonations and empty stare of Neil Patrick Harris’ Jenkins, signifying the loss of his humanity. You’ll feel for the fearful bug, despite its ugly features. Watching with empathy, with a mind toward the evils of suffering, is the only thing that offsets the potential fascist tendencies of cinematic spectacle.

As satire, of course, the film of Starship Troopers is a delicious failure. It has no "truth" that it can "speak to power", and its attitude to its source material is flippant and dismissive. 

As it happens, Heinlein wasn't a fascist, and he didn't write fascist books. But even if he had, some sort of analysis and take down of (for example) nationalism and/or syndicalism and/or Hegelian idealism might have been in order, rather that merely a smugly derisory depiction of "militarism". 

And so the assumption of the film's director that anyone who isn't a libertarian socialist must be irrelevant and contemptible speaks very poorly for him as a human being.

And it's genuinely amusing that despite his best (or worst) intentions he turned out a genuinely entertaining and enjoyable movie.

NEW: Trump says he will compromise with Democrats on abortion so that they’re nice to him: “Both sides are going to like me.”

Then he says it’s “a terrible thing” babies with heartbeats are protected in Iowa, Florida, and South Carolina.@RonDeSantis will NEVER sell out… pic.twitter.com/8c5zpGhVjW

— DeSantis War Room 🐊 (@DeSantisWarRoom) September 17, 2023

🔺 EXCLUSIVE: In her first full interview, a woman who alleges that the comedian raped her tells The Times why she is making these claims now https://t.co/nko6imKBV2

— The Times and The Sunday Times (@thetimes) September 17, 2023

Oh dear!

Today marks the 10th anniversary of the election of Pope Francis, we give thanks for Pope Francis' service and guidance over the past decade.

We would love to hear your favourite memories of Pope Francis over the past 10 years in our comments. pic.twitter.com/3e3vkvepgv

— Archdiocese of Liverpool (@lpoolcatholic) March 13, 2023

If they didn't put this up as a joke, one can only assume the comments weren't quite what they were hoping for.

Starting again (again, again!)

My problems with "Big Tech" are of course inconsequentially marginal compared with those of current American politics. (See Niall Ferguson in The Spectator for a reasonably balanced albeit somewhat narcissistic overview of the issues.) They're also on quite a different level.

Suffice it to say though that Tumblr did decide that despite my ongoing efforts to avoid posting anything pornographic my "instant blogging" version of The Man on the Grassy Knoll was getting a bit too cheeky. (For anyone who's curious, the sorts of things that got flagged when I tried to post them are here, here, here, and here - though arguably this one was fair enough.*) So I've taken the decision (as of a couple of days after Easter) to start over with a "clean" clean slate.

(Bear in mind of course that even at their worst Google are still nowhere near so jumpy as Tumblr, so maybe watch this space...)

Daddy Issues

The good news is that the two big streaming services' flagship shows both seem to have weathered their recent brushes with the Great Awokening. Stranger Things remains the gold standard for online drama, and the Drinker for one sums up its bounce-back from a tonally uneven Season 4 reasonably well. It still has too many characters and it's become less and less imaginative as it's gone along. But what there is is now pretty good, and it's as watchable as ever. And The Boys too has turned a corner, has ditched the anti-"Far-Right" nonsense of Season 2, and is once again at its most enjoyably fucked-up. And for what it's worth even The Umbrella Academy, albeit very much in third place, finally feels as if its sailing on an even keel.

Interestingly enough all three series have taken as their theme for the year the relationships between their protagonists and their father figures. Brenner in Stranger Things and Hargreeves in The Umbrella Academy have both been resurrected and, to a certain extent, rehabilitated as "interesting", morally complex characters in their own right, and in The Boys the relationship between Homelander, his own son, and (spoiler alert!) his newly discovered biological father, has become the dramatic crux of the series. (One can predict that the struggle for the soul of the kid will be foundation for the plot of Season 4.)*

Let's face it, MBB was the standout find of ST. So having Papa take a moral stand against Eleven is surely a career-defining performance for Matthew Modine. Alas though that Eleven's abandoning her "Papa" after he tried to save her life feels like a simple, straightforward dramatic and moral failure! One can only presume there'll be an eventual reckoning between them in the show's fifth and final season.

More regrettably, what has bogged down all three series though has indeed been each's extraordinarily tedious "messy bitches" subplot. Winona Ryder is largely wasted in ST, as is Starlight in The Boys. But the standout collapse of a character into a racist sexist stereotype is Allison in UA. Whatever one may say of their treatment of straight white old guys, Hollywood's treatment of women of colour (or is it Silicon Valley?) still has a long way to go.

*Obviously though, this shift in interest hasn't pleased everyone... 

Notes on The Umbrella Academy 'Season 3'

 So... 

• The Sparrows are like the Umbrella Academy only more diverse, more boring, and more obnoxious? So much for likeability and shades of grey! (And imagine if the black boy had also been called Luther. Ah well!)
• We don't get the title until 20 minutes into the first episode. Starting to feel Pythonesque! (Deliberately?) How stupid exactly is the Rumour supposed to be? (Black chicks never watched Back to the Future? Are girls generally too up themselves to notice when things have changed? I'm not saying this is grossly racist and sexist*, but...)
• Doesn't the gay one like men's underpants? Why does he freak out just because they belong to a man that he has lived with all his life?
• Crimefighters who have their faces on billboards can get away with shoplifting? Are we going to find out how that works?
• Hmmm! Violent Amish? Didn't you guys see Witness? (C'mon! It got a shoutout in the first Stranger Things.)
• And Luther gets off with a girl. I mean, I'm pretty puritanical about such things. But for the first time in the entire series one sort of feels good for the guy. He's big, he's dumb, and now that that's finally "priced in" he's starting to feel like a proper character in his own right - rather than just the token white jock dude. (In Episode 5 Luther even gets to be sassy, which is a nice change-up for the character.)
• It's actually a recurrent problem that the female characters stand about worrying about their feelings when there are mysteries and universe-threatening problems to be solved. (And oddly enough it's Ben who comes up trumps when he's the first person actually to put the appalling "messy bitches" officially in their place.)
• Black females, on the other hand, are of course allowed to murder people now. That's a thing. Apparently! (And tranny "boys" are allowed to hit them? Whatever!)
• On the plus side, the relationship between Klaus and Hargreeves is absolutely boss. And we've moved on from Doctor Who to Torchwood - except that Captain Jack's reanimation powers were never played for laughs.† (When obviously, if you think about it, they should have been.)
• When the actress who plays the mom-bot with one eye blinks she blinks completely naturally but with just one eye. That's good acting. And it's good sci-fi. Every now and again one comes across artists who are masters of their craft, and in genre this is what it takes.

*And Ellen Page is still playing a female - for some reason. (But then of course she gets a haircut and changes her name to 'Victor'. Because apparently that's all it takes.)

†Or maybe they were. After all, most of Torchwood was unwatchable, brainless filth - which I didn't watch.

Craig Hunter

Photographed (apparently) by Simon Barnes