The Avengers… The Avengers smashed some box office records.  But why?

I can't get over how ridiculous those outfits look. This is the number one movie of all time? Jeremy Renner looks like a suburban dad who just came out of the closet (by the looks of it he has mixed feelings). ScarJo has a constant expression of annoyance and/or gas indigestion. Captain America is in a world all his own, where gay, dorky, and weird have fused together much like the thousand discrete pieces of fabric and padding that seem to have gone into making his plush outfit. Are those zippers?
 
Thor, with that novelty-sized styrofoam hammer, looks like a cosplayer who won big playing carnival games. I understand that in the stupid movie version of this character, he's an alien, not a Norse god, which makes his getup all the more bizarre. Only Iron Man, basically a robot, looks like he belongs in a battle to save the world--unfortunately it's a world not worth saving. And we've already seen that movie anyway.
 
I keep thinking I'm going to see this movie at some point--I feel like I've been drafted by box office returns--but when it comes down to the wire I think, "Why?" and do something else.
 
I have stronger feelings about seeing the Spider-Man remake, which at least appears to have some heart. Avengers just looks like a massive geek-out.   

Sweet Smell of Success: Paranoia in the 50s, part 2… Where Kiss Me Deadly hinted at the hangover from McCarthyism, Sweet Smell of Success openly addresses the culture of paranoia and excess of which McCarthyism was an exponent. Released two years after Kiss Me Deadly and Senator McCarthy's own self-destructive spiral, Success presents a thinly veiled attack on Walter Winchell, a powerful gossip columnist who became strongly anti-communist after WWII and supported McCarthy's Red hunts.
 
By the 50s Winchell's power and reach were on a downslope as television began to replace the radio and print world that Winchell was part of. Winchell, who was Jewish, underwent a familiar evolution from FDR supporter, interventionist, and civil rights advocate to a quasi-reactionary who waged battles for both political and petty reasons. One of Winchell's clashes of this period was with Josephine Baker, whom he labeled a communist after Baker complained of racist service at the Stork Club, Winchell's base of operations. His quips were examples of epigrammatic form: "Hollywood's a place where they shoot too many pictures and not enough actors."
 

More at My Posting Career.   

The Dystopian Kitsch of Hunger Games… The hallmark of the fake dystopia is that it wants to let its audience eat cake. It wants to indulge them with fake feelings and manipulated pity (and piety), feed them melodramatic moments that reassure them of their own correctness. The aim is to produce a rich surge of sentiment, to leave the rational mind disengaged and therefore untroubled when the sugary characters and story dissolve on their tongues as they exit unnourished.

More at My Posting Career.   

The JQ… The list of things we can say about anything is getting smaller and smaller. That's the result of our experiment in equality and diversity, which force us into stiffer, more regulated expressions because equality is really about conflict.  When you hear equality your first thought should be who has control of its definition, who gets to be more equal than everyone else using emotion or threat or violence.  Blacks talk about racial equality while ignoring their violence and racism, gays talk about marriage equality while ignoring their social pathologies, women talk about sexual equality while ignoring their social advantages, and Jews manage to be the sum of all these.  Equality is the ultimate fighting word, it's a demand and an accusation and an immunity all at once. It's axiomatic. You only say equality when you want something from someone.

Jews have had something to do with this aggressive, self-seeking equality, or if you prefer "social justice". It is advanced as an inarguable good by secular Jews and defended by religious Jews as falling under tikkun olam, "repairing the world". The Jewish question is how diversity and equality and social justice seem to bring the most advantages to Jews themselves, even though they run an apartheid state, openly complain about intermarriage, control an outsized percentage of wealth, and dominate media and political life. Were this any other group they would be subject to open scrutiny, even moreso by the group they've taken power from. But the silence around the Jewish question is the most compelling evidence of its salience.

More at My Posting Career.