While listening to the Rachel Maddow show tonight, I noted that she casually referenced Earth 2 as the place where Donald Trump is still president. It was an amusing bit of Science Fiction trivia to bring back to the front of mind for a few minutes while contemplating the looming destruction of democracy as we know it at the hands of the Republican’s favorite tyrant. The idea of a mirror Earth is one of the tropes that you hear repeatedly over and over again wandering around in and out of fandom. Pramila Jayapal can be forgiven for not knowing the reference later in the show. I doubt very many people do know it, or they might even be confused as to which Scifi/fantasy experience is the one being referenced.
I mean, there are multiple references that will come up if you go looking for the phrase Earth Two on Google. There was a recent television show and even a 2011 movie that run along the same vein. I had to go looking for the title of the movie that I was pretty sure Rachel was referencing myself because I hadn’t seen it since I moved out of that garish Abilene apartment that I shared with a friend back in 1984.
My roommate had one of the first VCR’s on the market, and he had compiled a pretty impressive catalog of movies including an off-air copy of Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, the film by Gerry Anderson’s production company that was released in 1969. That is where the phrase Earth 2 comes from. The uneducated rube that I was at the time made fun of the cheezie effects in the film, even though I had been a serious fan of the Thunderbirds series produced by the same company back in 1966.
The movie was named Doppelgänger in Europe. Americans had to have a more explanatory title. Mystery isn’t a thing that the mundane American viewer can appreciate, I guess. here’s the trailer:
This is where the idea of a mirror Earth came from. While Star Trek’s Mirror, Mirror episode aired earlier than this movie it wasn’t in production before Doppelgänger was and doesn’t feature a mirror Earth suspended in space in the same universe as our own.
The fascination with evil twins predates this film, true. That goes back to the beginning of recorded history; and if you wanted to, you could say that Earth 2 is a reference to the duality of existence that has been a part of philosophy for a very long time. I don’t know how that could be seen as anything other than a hasty generalization, though. Give credit where credit is due, Doppelgänger is where the idea of a mirror Earth comes from today, no matter how widely spread the fear of the evil twin is in the media we consume.
I can’t find the movie anywhere that I can watch it without paying for it at the moment. I’ll have to keep looking because I really would like to sit down and watch it all the way through at least once without mocking it again. It’s the least I can do.
I have a lot of nostalgia for those old marionette shows, and not just the Thunderbirds series. I doubt that I would still find them edge-of-the-seat suspenseful like I did as a six year old child. There have been multiple attempts to restart Thunderbirds with modern digital effects and new stories:
…and I have resisted the urge to watch any of it as an adult, even the old shows themselves. They were so cool back in the sixties when they came on right after school. I would run home just to watch them with Major Astro and they were probably why I wanted to watch Star Trek when it debuted. I can’t imagine how they could be anything other than embarrassing to watch as an adult. Like the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift, the adult experience can’t hold a candle to the memories of a child.
Postscript
The featured image is a screenshot I took of a pivotal scene in the movie. I discovered a version of it streaming online and watched it through for completions’ sake. It was much better than I remembered it being, and yet just as flawed as I thought it would be on watching it again. It was both memorable and flawed in fundamental ways. If you can find it to watch somewhere, you should give it a chance and let me know what you think.
We only made it about 15 minutes into the movie before she says “I’m bored. Next film.” I know why she said it because she said as much when we watched the trailer. “I get a real Vanilla Sky feel from this one. I doubt I’ll like it.” So we stopped watching the movie and we turned instead to watching another movie we’d skipped over a dozen times or more by this point.
What that movie was really isn’t relevant to this article. This article is about the journey I went on when she got up and went to bed, and I turned back to Bliss in order to see if it really was anything like Vanilla Sky. When I finished the movie I was pretty sure that “like Vanilla Sky” wasn’t far off the mark as far as judgment calls go. But I had to be sure, and that started the real journey.
This article contains detailed spoilers. You have been warned.
Discover the incredible true story of Star Trek’s Nichelle Nichols and the US space program. Stream the documentary, Woman In Motion, exclusively on Paramount+ in the US on June 3.
I love that this documentary exists. I need to say that first. I love the fact that one of my favorite actors had such a prominent role in diversifying NASA. Nichelle Nichols was the daughter’s idol as a child. She has a version of every Uhura doll that has been released since they first started making Star Trek toys back in 1974. The vendor who sold her that doll cried when she ripped it out of the package and started playing with it right there in front of him back in 1996. She is a fan and the daughter of true fans of Star Trek, the only series.
Got that? Good. I love the fact that this documentary exists, but I won’t be subscribing to Paramount+ just to see it. This documentary should be available streaming everywhere. Why won’t I subscribe to Paramount+ just to see it?
I won’t subscribe because we are forgetting the very lesson that Nichelle Nichols is promoting in the documentary.
Where are my people?
They aren’t visible because they were denied information. They were not just denied access, but they were denied even the information that would allow them to do jobs at NASA. This was done as part of the pursuit of insuring that the majority of the benefits created by technology landed in white men’s hands. They weren’t told that this was something they could do, and so consequently there were few who even asked if they might do it.
You would never have seen this movie made by a Hollywood studio at any point prior to 2016. Barack Obama’s election made Hidden Figures possible, because the popularity of Obama made movie investors sit up and take notice, be willing to hazard real money on a movie about the black women who were the pioneers of diversity in American government.
These women had to overcome obstacles that the average person has no way to understand. Not only the fact that they were women and they were black in the United States of the 60’s, but that the information that they needed to be who they were was reserved for people who could pay to access that information.
Information is for everybody who wants it, everyone who needs it, not just the people who can afford it. Information is not just for the people who subscribe to the correct entertainment channels and pay the right amounts to the right people. Information is for everybody, and we are allowing profit motives to re-segregate us into smaller and smaller groups. We are allowing copyright to Trump the best interests of our nation and our world.
This has to stop. We have to stop allowing copyright holders to refuse access to their products unless you are willing to pay them for it. This is the basis for the creation of libraries, the understanding that information should be available to everyone. The library should be a thing that you can access by computer or cellphone. You shouldn’t have to get in a car and go find a building somewhere in your city in order to borrow something from your library.
I look forward to seeing Woman in Motion and Hidden Figures played to children in schools, to adults who don’t think women and blacks should be allowed to do the same things as white men. They are the people who need this experience, and it should be made available to them, not just to the people willing to pay Paramount or Disney or any other copyright holder directly for their jealously hoarded intellectual property.
I was blindsided at about six in the morning with a reference to the Snyder Cut on some Reddit thread somewhere, and I had to go look up what the fuck a Snyder cut was so I could understand what it was people were arguing about. Ah. the Justice League movie that a bunch of digital people seem to think would have been better the way Zack Snyder shot it. Before Joss Whedon got his accused sexual harasser fingers all over it. That movie came out when?
2017? Why are we still talking about this? Oh, right. The Wonder Woman movie I didn’t see this year. I’ll watch it when it gets to a streaming service I already pay for. The first one was good, we’ll see what that one is like eventually. When I see it. As far as Justice League goes, I’d be willing to bet that either version will end up feeling about the same in the end, and Snyder’s version would have been far too long to be successful in theaters.
I wandered over to Facebook this afternoon, and they are bitching about Justice League there too. Now I’m thinking what the actual fuck is going on? Because this smacks of some serious evidence that we have too much time on our hands these days. It’s either than or an orchestrated campaign to get people to talk up the Snyder cut of Justice League right before the revised version of the movie drops.
You like a film you like a film…you don’t you don’t. Seriously, so what? Life is a lot less stressful saying ”so what?”
I think we have forgotten how to say “I don’t know” which is far more important than just ignoring the things that piss us off. You don’t have to say “so what” to just keep scrolling on.
For most people it is safe to say “Don’t like it? Don’t watch it and don’t dwell on it.” I myself will frequently queue a movie I like when some other movie I’ve just watched for the first time leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Bad images behind my eyes. But if you aspire to be a storyteller yourself, it is important to understand how the story doesn’t work and how it might be fixed. There is also a use for criticism when you are trying to describe to others what the film was about and why it did or didn’t work for you.
Criticism is at the same time all too easy and way harder than most people give it credit for being. How to talk about a thing without spoiling it? How to offer pointers that are constructive for the next person to pick up that script? I mean, if all you have to say is “it sucked” you probably shouldn’t bother to say anything. Scroll on. If you have more to say than that, then sharpen your pencils and get to work on it. Don’t expect to be thanked for your efforts, though.
As far as Justice League goes, I didn’t talk about it on the blog when it aired and I watched it, and I didn’t talk about it because it made no real impression on me. I’d rate the movie with a solid three stars. It was popcorn and it was enjoyable while it was on. I was never emotionally moved by DC characters in comic books, although Batman was a comic I would occasionally read. His movies have been hit and miss over the years, more misses than hits.
I never cared for Superman because there is no real story to be told when you have an invulnerable protagonist, which is why the writers had to invent so much Kryptonite to affect him that there is enough kryptonite in the DC universe to make a neutron star out of the stuff. Maybe that explains his strength? I watched his movies because they were on, and I liked the first two largely because I had a thing for Christopher Reeve whether I cared for the character of Superman or not. I’ve seen the later movies as well, and as someone who was not emotionally invested in the character, I have to say I liked the extended version of Batman vs. Superman. It had just the right amount of grim reality to it to make the story interesting to me. Aside from which, the ending sets us all up for the beginning of the Justice League movie. If you haven’t seen the extended version of Batman vs. Superman you won’t understand why there is no Superman at the beginning of Justice League, and that is going to throw anyone off the story right from the start.
Why are people bitching about Justice League anway? They should try watching Super Friends like I did with my sibs back in the 70’s. That show will stop anyone from ever taking those characters too seriously. I’ll happily watch the Snyder cut if it ever shows up somewhere I can watch it without having to expend too much effort, but I’m not so interested in seeing it that I’d start talking about it on social media everywhere, all the time. That smacks of obsession. If you are the one doing that, turn the screen off and go outside to breath for a few hours. Try some meditation. Come back when you’ve found your equilibrium again.
Each minute bursts in the burning room, The great globe reels in the solar fire, Spinning the trivial and unique away. (How all things flash! How all things flare!) What am I now that I was then? May memory restore again and again The smallest color of the smallest day: Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn.
I felt that Trump was a vigarista, that’s a portuguese word that loosely translated means conman. You know, my initial posts on instagram showing pictures from the Obama administration contrasted with somewhat subtle and humorous captions caught a lot of attention. And then as the months and years went by my commentary became even more pointed as I could see the disrespect and the lack of dignity that he was showing to the office. And I was really offended by it.
His Tweets would have meant little to me since I had blocked Donald Trump’s Twitter feed early in his presidency, and never followed Trump in the first place. I only blocked Trump because everyone else on Twitter made me read his daily idiocy (his morning Trump dump, as more than one commenter described them) just so they could mock him. I’d like to see the documentary though.
I’d like to meet him and shake his hand. I’d like to thank him for giving me another word to add to my vocabulary of labels that can be applied to the soon to be former president, and hopefully future convicted felon, one Donald John Trump. Thank you, Mr. Souza. Your photography is excellent.
Featured image: Dick Dastardly (Richard Milhous Dastardly) and Muttley in their racing car The Mean Machine from the Wacky Races. He is also apparently known as Dick Vigarista where Portuguese is the spoken language. The character’s name should be changed to Don Dastardly now, because Tricky Dick has been Trumped. Richard Milhous Nixon can sleep peacefully now knowing that he is no longer the most hated president in American history.
…and of course he was also James Bond (James Bond in The Rock?) But those are not the memories of him that I cherish. He will always be Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez to me, astride his horse or dunking the Highlander in the drink just to teach him that he couldn’t drown, because he was an immortal. You believed they were all immortal because Sean Connery sold us on that idea at the beginning of the movie.
Without him Highlander would never have made the impact it made on the 1980’s. Never mind the bad spinoff films, even though they all ended up making money and employing thousands of people for years. Think of the series and the novels and all the other things that came into existence just because Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez rode onto the screen in that movie the way he did and presented us with that craggy, loveable old face. That was Sean Connery, in my book.
I think making it to 90 the way he did is a fine aspiration for someone whose parents died before they turned 80. All of us should aspire to as long a life as he lived, with the kind of acclaim that he earned. It is a sad and joyous day today, because of his passing. Let us all toast to him in our warm thoughts about what he meant to us, and let our grief be leavened with the knowledge that he will never really be gone so long as we remember him.
This was her dying wish, expressed to her granddaughter. She hadn’t been dead ten minutes before Senate leader McConnell was assuring everyone around him that the thing he argued for under Barack Obama’s presidency did not apply to the vacancy left by the death of the Notorious RBG (Tumblr) Trump intends to nominate someone to the court as early as Monday or Tuesday, even though it can be easily argued that he is president right now because of Mitch McConnell’s refusal to do the very thing that they are both planning on doing, replacing a deceased jurist on the Supreme Court when a presidential election is impending.
The hypocrisy and demonstrable dereliction of duty that is shown on both Leader McConnell’s and Donald Trump’s part when it comes to stuffing conservative judges into the federal courts as fast as they possibly can is beside the point I want to make here today. They have both been bought and paid for by the oligarchs who run this country, have run this country almost from the time of its founding. Their entirely predictable intentions are irrelevant here.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was only the second woman to serve on the SCOTUS when she was appointed, the first being Sandra Day O’Connor. When she started practicing as an attorney, she had a hard time finding and keeping a job because the law at the time was a practice for men, not for women.
The notion until the ’70s was that the differentials based on gender riddling the law books operated benignly in women’s favor. So women were excused from jury duty—well, that was a favor. Who would want to serve if they didn’t have to? Michigan’s law saying women couldn’t be bartenders—that was a favor, because bars could be pretty raunchy places. Laws like that were rationalized as operating to favor or protect women. The challenge for me was to get the judges to see that, far from operating benignly in women’s favor, these laws, as Justice Brennan said so well in Frontiero, put women not on a pedestal, but in a cage.
Nina Totenberg, the voice of the narrator in that nine minute NPR piece, has covered the United States Supreme Court since she was hired by NPR back in 1975. Nina Totenberg herself has fought many of the battles that the Notorious RBG had to fight. The canned nine-minute segment prepared by NPR in the event of RBG’s death covers the basics of her history on the SCOTUS. It is not enough information if what you want to know is “Who was Ruth Bader Ginsburg?” like I do. To further that quest I next queued up this episode of Radiolab, a rebroadcast of one of their spinoff More Perfect episodes about RBG and her impact on the court.
In that episode Jad Abumrad mentions that there were two movies made about Justice Ginsburg. I didn’t know about a second movie, so I had to go look it up and watch both of them.
I had always intended to watch this movie. I love documentaries and I have a fascination with the how and the why of a Supreme Court justice becoming a rock star. Becoming so famous that she inspired young women and men around the world to wear clothing and accessories (and even tattoos) with her face on it.
I watched the documentary on Hulu.com. It is also available from Amazon Prime (title link above) it is a proper documentary of a person, touching on all the parts of RBG’s life from childhood to 2018 when the documentary was made. Her time working for the ACLU is mentioned in passing, but they don’t appear to identify the attorney that worked with RGB to start the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU (Brenda Feigen) the movie also goes through several of the cases that she was notorious for winning or writing an opinion about.
Bush v. Gore (Ginsburg dissent) “…the Court’s conclusion that a constitutionally adequate recount is impractical is a prophecy the Court’s own judgment will not allow to be tested. Such an untested prophecy should not decide the Presidency of the United States.” (hear, hear)
…the movie opens with statements of loathing from famous conservative figures. The fact that they hate her so much is a tribute to her dedicated liberal views, which she defended to her dying day. In my opinion, the documentary is the better of the two films.
I can’t imagine what this place would be — I can’t imagine what the country would be — with Donald Trump as our president … For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be — I don’t even want to contemplate that.
a faker
He has no consistency about him. He says whatever comes into his head at the moment.
On the Basis of Sex starts with a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg in college and follows her up through her first argument of a case before a court as an attorney. Being an attorney was the job she wanted to do but was denied a chance of doing because she was a married woman with children. There is considerable deviation from the reality of her history in this film. The fictional plotline works to drive the narrative, so it is forgivable. However, it is also two hours long and feels like a two hour film when you are done watching it. The ending is satisfying, so I would give the film a positive review if I were to sit down and try to write a full review, which this paragraph isn’t.
She fought, and she won, battles that put women on equal footing with men before the law, right in the face of an overwhelming majority of contrary opinion. Again and again, she staked out the battlegrounds that legal arguments would be fought over, and she succeeded in making women largely equal to men even without the Equal Rights Amendment to the constitution.
To this day women’s rights in this country are provisional, based on legal precedents won in court and not on constitutional law, and this is because of the actions of the Christianists of the Religious Right. It was through them and their leaders like Phyllis Schlafly that the Equal Rights Amendment failed to be adopted by the deadline in 1979. That women’s rights exist at all from a legal perspective is largely because of RBG; and make no mistake, this is the reason that conservatives and Republicans hate RBG and will ignore her dying wish that the next president be the one to pick her replacement.
This is the important fact, the fact that inspired me to spend a considerable amount of time reading, watching and listening to the history of Ruth Bader Ginsburg over this past weekend. Republicans hate RBG because she is a woman and she has the temerity to speak her mind in the face of legal male privilege. Remember this fact when it comes time to vote in November, not whether or not Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell succeed in making the SCOTUS an organ of conservative dogma. Conservatives and Republicans do not think women and their opinions are worthy of note. Women should be in the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant. They certainly shouldn’t be on the Supreme Court. If Trump nominates a woman, and McConnell hypocritically gets the nomination approved by the Senate, that woman will agree with this sentiment, just as Justice Thomas thinks black people should be forced into second class status. What he doesn’t say is that he believes this because that injustice will inspire the re-creation of the United States as a black nation.
Conservative/Republican women in politics believe themselves subservient to men and yet attempt to lead anyway. Contemplate this fact until you understand what it means.
Over a long career on both sides of the bench — as a relentless litigator and an incisive jurist — Justice Ginsburg helped us see that discrimination on the basis of sex isn’t about an abstract ideal of equality; that it doesn’t only harm women; that it has real consequences for all of us. It’s about who we are — and who we can be.
An acquaintance on Pluspora attributed the Howling to John Carpenter the other day. It is not a Carpenter film. I’ve made a point to watch every film that John Carpenter makes as they become available. Carpenter single-handedly created the slasher genre with Halloween. He started James Cameron on his path to greatness by utilizing him on Escape from New York. His best films (to my mind) are Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness both of which I’ve watched numerous times. He’s best known for the unforgettable line from They Live where Rowdy Roddy Piper uses his signature wrestling tagline as the intro to one of the bloodiest scenes in They Live. I know my Carpenter films. The man is a movie genius and really should be better respected in movie circles than he is.
Ennio Morricone created the soundtrack to the second or third most recognizable of the Carpenter film library, The Thing. It stands out among the ranks of Carpenter’s oeuvre because of its haunting musical score. Ennio Morricone created the soundtracks for over 400 films. All of them that I have watched and listened to have been distinctively marked as his work. They could only be his work. While John Carpenter is a movie genius in my mind, capable of creating fantasy worlds for next to nothing budget-wise, Ennio Morricone was a master of the soundtrack. No one does it like he did. He will be missed.
