…which is probably less frightening than a Mother's Day card for Mrs Trump. Any Mrs Trump. Which leads to a further, horrifying thought: The way that Baron Trump will treat his first date, given the stellar examples of honesty, integrity, compassion, empathy, and communication surrounding him.
- If you need any proof — any proof whatsoever — that the film-critic community is dominated by know-nothings, consider this piece of garbage put forth by one of its putative "leaders." The payola shot:
Big-budget original science fiction needs a win, and hopefully Gemini Man can recapture the spirit of the '90s where a big-name director, producer and actor were an event unto themselves, regardless of preexisting material.
He says that like it's a good thing. Not only are most of his exemplars of what was "good" about 1990s sci-fi blockbusters — he cites "original sci-fi films like Stargate (1994), Contact (1997), Armageddon (1997) and The Matrix (1999)" — mediocre at best, they're all "original" films under only the cramped definition of "original" unique to the film industry. The one that treats both Alien and The Terminator as H'wood "originals." The intellectual dishonesty of this position in the context of the unique-to-the-film-industry Desny claim (PDF) can be explained by most of the overwhelmingly male critics having swallowed the blue pill — repeatedly — without regard to the sequels (which struggled, and failed, to achieve mediocrity).
Of course, much the same goes for the flops and low/mid-budget films on his list. Maybe — just maybe — the problem is that H'wood has so often demonstrated its hostility to the kind of writing that produces speculative fiction films that are high-budget, high-profit, and relatively high quality that only dilletantes are left there, resulting in… the expected crap. Or maybe it's just the impulse to say "we 'originated' it so we own it" coming out of the studio (and, of late, agency) side…
OK, I take it back: It's not intellectual dishonesty; it's in support of outright fraud. And the title reference of this sausage platter isn't "original," either.
- I'm not sure whether the H'wood concept of an "original work" is better explained by the misrepresented origin of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs or the dubious depiction of "the commons" in that scientifically unfounded essay half a century ago. Both "models" epitomize ignorance of the "original position" problem, because both presume fundamental rightness of the existing order of things (and the refutation occurs during the first three weeks of a course in chemical thermodynamics, among many other places in the mathematical science curricula with which neither Maslow nor Hardin, nor their respective acolytes, encountered or acknowledge — even at equilibrium, a state in which the world has never been and human society actively avoids).
- But it's actually all about patronage (Patreonage? peonage?) anyway. Economic theory, and especially the oft-misbegotten "law and economics" offshoot, spends a great deal of time and effort on "transaction costs" and how they should be minimized to enhance efficiency. (Frequently ignoring that efficiency is itself a value judgment with unstated value-judgment boundary conditions.) Economic theory on translation costs — the cost of translating capital from one form to another, independent of particular transactions and without regard to intermediate labor — is… wanting. It is necessary, however, when one realizes that authors and other creators inherently do so, on a schedule incompatible with the constant-velocity presumptions of the remainder of the economy.
Here's an obvious example of the latter. Let's consider the author who has built up a tax debt over the years; not a big one, but just never had the money to pay and/or couldn't get (good) advice on how to even file. All deferred tax payment systems available without individual negotiation by counsel (which, itself, is not cheap) require monthly payments. Authors of books, however, get paid twice a year… which, itself, may well have led to the tax problems in the first place. (The class-entwined assumptions of putting royalty payments on the same schedule as nineteenth-century corporate bonds bears examination at another time.) Now extend to silly things like utility bills, rent/mortgage payments, etc., etc., etc. — all of the presumptions of modern life founded on the idea of relatively equal monthly/weekly salaries for the hoi polloi. Worse yet, figure out how the concept of "compound interest" fits in.
Hmm. I wonder if Hallmark makes a card that Norman would find appropriate?