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~ Feverish ravings of a middle-aged mind

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Tag Archives: movies

A Meditation on The Terminator

12 Sunday Jul 2015

Posted by dougom in Opinion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

film, Firefly, Joss Whedon, movies, nostalgia, Terminator

terminator
Yes, you read the title right (photo courtesy of themOvieblog)

Today I went to see “Terminator Genisys” with my son.  That’s he’s a teenage boy is all you need to know as to why we went—I probably would have just waited for it to come out on video.  (Indeed, I rate it as “Wait until it’s out on video” in the Doug Movie Rating Scheme.)  Emilia Clarke is much more enjoyable than I ever would have expected her to be having seen her flat acting in “Game of Thrones”, plus she looks significantly better as a brunette.  Ahnuld is Ahnuld, as one might expect.  Kyle Reese is played by some six-pack-sporting block of wood name Jai Courtney, who is quite a contrast to the slender, easily-hurt, somewhat wild-eyed and desperate Michael Behn from the original film.  He’s not as bad as Hayden Christensen [but then, who is?] in “Jumper”; think Sam Worthington from “Avatar”.  Why is it all male action movie stars now have to sport slim waists, ridiculous six-packs, and wooden acting?  When did that become de rigeur?  And why is it they continue to cast slender, small-busted, small-hipped women and try to make them look curvier than they are? I don’t understand Hollywood.

But this isn’t a review of the film.  God knows you can see reviews for this summer blockbuster almost anywhere.  (Next week it’ll be “Ant-man”, a movie I still can’t believe got made.)  It truly is a meditation on thoughts that this film, released 31 years after I saw the first one with a couple of buddies in college, came to me there in the dark, flickering images dancing on my face while I chomped on pretty durn good pizza.  And if you want to know how you can have good pizza while simultaneously watching a film, you need to see if Alamo Drafthouse has opened a facility near you.

Where was I?  Oh, yeah: Meditating.

I wasn’t all that interested in seeing “The Terminator”.  In 1984, hardly anyone had heard of James Cameron, Ahnuld was a hulking “actor” without much acting ability who had played Conan and a few other silly roles (two Conan movies, “Hercules in New York”, that sort of thing), and it was pretty low-budget—$6.4 million, compared to, say, the first Ghostbuster movie out the same year, which cost $32 million.  All in all it sounded like a bad combination, so I was going to give it a miss and wait for it (for years maybe in those days) to come out on video.  But then a good friend of mine on the Ultimate Frisbee team (“Ultimate Kaos”) convinced me to go.  And I was glad I did.  I went expecting explosions and stupid action sequences; what I got was explosions, excellent action sequences, suspense, humor, interesting special f/x, some damn decent acting (and a role Ahnuld was clearly born to play), and most of all . . . a story.  An honsest-to-God interesting story that I never would have expected from a movie with a young directory, a (comparatively) low budget, and a wooden leading man.

There was no way I would have expected the movie to turn its filmmaker into the biggest director on the planet, spawn a TV series, 4 sequels, a long-running career for its star, and two terms of Governor Schwarzenegger.  Not to mention countless catch-phrases, imitations, rip-offs, spin-offs, and God alone knows what else.  Even Exxon-Mobile’s accountants (less scrupulous than the worst Mob accountants any day) would be hard-pressed to calculate how much dough that one movie eventually generated.

What did “Terminator Genisys” do in my case?  It made me feel old, and depressed, and homesick.

Let’s say this up front:  Despite my chronic pain and slowly-breaking-down 52 year-old body, I don’t feel a whole lot different than I did in my 20s (there are those who will insist that I didn’t age emotionally much after age 12; I’ll leave it to others to decide).  I don’t feel as if I’ve aged much past 27,

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aken in front of the Franz Josef glacier, New Zealand, by Tim Miller

despite the hard evidence I see every day in the mirror.  I like to think I have a young spirit to go with my old soul, but I’m probably just fooling myself.  But truth to tell, most of the time I really don’t feel old.

And I love living in Austin, a truly wonderful town much more polite and relaxed, much cheaper, and much less crowded, than the San Francisco Bay Area, or even my beloved Santa Cruz.  And I’m a hard person to get down for long; it takes quite a bit.

But still, that’s how I felt after “Terminator Genisys”: Old, depressed, and homesick.

Ahnuld looks old.  The guy is 70; he has every right to look old.  But when I first saw him in “The Terminator”, he looked significantly older than me.  Looking at his young version in the new film, he looked so very, very young.  So now someone who looked old when I was young now looks young.  MAN that made me feel old.

And thinking how long ago it was—before the Loma Prieta earthquake, Chernobyl, the Indian Ocean Tsunami, 9/11, before even “Back to the Future” came out—made me feel old.  And it wasn’t one of those Baby Boomer “Oh my childhood was so innocent!” type deals; I was remembering an era that had the Soviet Union and Ronald Reagan rattling sabres at each other in the middle of Europe (Germany, to be exact), an era when “The Day After” had just come out, when we really did, no kidding, worry that our President was going to do something cosmically stupid and we were all going to die in a nuclear holocaust.  It was hanging over us all the time, though we usually managed to forget it, but it was there.  Look, kids; I know I sound like G’Grandma talking about the Depression, but I’m telling you, it could be fucking scary.

So yeah, sitting in a spanking new theater with my 17 year-old son, my cell phone in my pocket, a 7th Star Wars movie being previewed up on the screen, thinking just how far away that whole time period seems, and I felt old.

But the film also takes place in San Francisco.  I lived in the Bay Area for 25 years, visited 3-4 times a year for the next 7, then lived there again part-time for the next 3. But in the last year-and-a-half, I’ve been there once; last April, on business.  And I miss it, damn do I miss it.  Don’t want to move back, but I miss my friends, my old haunts (especially in Santa Cruz), my favorite restaurants, and the unbelievably, eye-melting beauty of it.  Lord it’s a beautiful place, and I do miss it.

And finally, it made me depressed.  Partly because I can’t watch this film with the same low expectations (thought I was going to say “innocence”, didn’t ya?) I brought to the first one, partly because it reminded me of things gone, or things changed, and partly because this was probably the first time I’ve taken The Boy to a movie he has been hugely looking forward to that he was . . . disappointed by.  It was “Okay;” it was “not bad”.  But it  also “didn’t make a whole lot of sense”, which for him was a combination of the time travel stuff confusing him, and the plot holes.  (For me there was also, “WTF happened to JK Simmons’ character?”)  I was already pretty bummed, but seeing my boy not excited, in fact seeing him experience his first real movie “let down”, was a massive bummer.  Two weeks in a row we’ve gone to movies that he’s really anticipated (and he loved Chris Pratt in “Jurassic World”; the “Terminator” folks should take a lesson as to what a lively actor can bring to a film) and have fallen short.  You’re stealing my son’s innocence, you movie-making boneheads!

Well, okay, that’s a bit harsh, but you see what I mean.

What’s funny is that in a way, we live in a Golden Age of Sci Fi, only it’s mostly on TV.  “Orphan Black” is a wonderful, wonderful SF show with a complex plot line and (imagine it!) a woman in the lead role.  Ditto the two new shows on SyFy, “Killjoys” (interstellar bounty-hunters, sort of “Cowboy Bebop” in a different solar system with a woman playing Spike) and “Dark Matter”, a kind-of “Farscape” where the whole crew has amnesia.  Very faithful to the whole “Firefly”/”Han shot first!” vibe.  And there’s been “Continuum” (with a female lead!), the more fantasy-esque but still fun “Lost Girl” (with several female leads!), the Halle Berry vehicle “Extant”, and on and on.  And we’ve had “Eureka” and “Marvel’s Agents of Shield” and “Warehouse 13” and even all the comic-book originated one like “The Flash” or “Arrow”—some not so great, sure, but the volume is really incredible.  (And remember Sturgeon’s Law!)

firefly_mmo
Maybe it was just ahead of its time by a decade?
(Photo courtesy of Giles Bowkett)

Really, in this kind of environment I’m surprised that so few folks have the balls of a Wachowski or Nolan to make an original SF movie, and that the sequels rolling our way (“Jurassic World”, say) seem so flat.  Perhaps it’s as some say: That the episodic nature of TV lends itself better to SF.  Or that Hollywood has run out of ideas.  Or the public has become jaded.

I don’t know the answers.  All I know is that it made me feel old, depressed, and homesick.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll have a drink, one  of my morphine tablets, and re-watch “The Terminator”.  Or maybe “Kingsmen”; I hear that’s kind of fun.  Hope springs eternal.

Sexism, Comic Book Movies, and Executive Stupidity

13 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by dougom in News, Opinion, Uncategorized

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

avengers, black widow, comics, film, Marvel, MCU, movies, Scarlett Johansson, sexism

Scarlett Johansson
Scarlett Johansson, prepared to kick ass (Photo courtesy of The Daily Mail)

Despite the fact that right-wingers firmly believe that Hollywood is controlled by socialist/communist gay and lesbian pornographers, the truth is that, like most rich folks, rich Hollywood execs tend to be pretty conservative.  Sure, some directors, actors, etc. are liberal, absolutely; but do you think the (American) folks in charge of Sony or Disney or other big multimedia companies are liberals? Ha, it is to laugh!

I mention this as a prelude to my main theme here:  The fact that these conservative, hide-bound, and almost-certainly sexist media execs refuse to green-light big summer movie projects starring women.  My particular peeve is with the huge increase in comic-book super-hero movies, which are getting the biggest bucks and most attention right now and where the problem is especially acute, but feel free to extend it to basically every other movie genre.

This topic has come up in the media (finally!) in the wake of the release of Joss Whedon’s “Avengers: Age of Ultron”, a huge hit (apparently).  For those who don’t know, Whedon is very vocal about being a feminist, and is widely regarded as a writer of strong female characters, and is generally the go-to person for nerds to point at as an example of a man who is bucking the sexist trend in the nerd (comic books, sci-fi, and the movies based thereon) culture.  While this is perhaps true in broad outline, I think Leah Schnelbach does a great job deconstructing this claim (on the Tor.com site), without being at all unfair or doctrinaire as so many folks can get on this topic.

However, Whedon is taking some flack on this particular film because of his treatment of the character of Black Widow, played by Scarlett Johansson.  For just a quick recap of the arguments:  There have been 11 “Marvel Cinematic Universe” (MCU) comic-book films, of which all have starred men, often multiple men.  These films rarely pass the Bechdel test (if ever); the presentation of the women in group/team posters is significantly different from that for men; women characters are often treated as plot devices or standard tropes (the damsel in distress, for example); and on and on.  It’s pretty ridiculous.

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Gee, what do you think they’re trying to draw your attention to?
(Photo courtesy of Zimbio)

(I will here make a brief nod to the TV end of things, where there are a few more solid characters: Peggy Carter (with remarkably her own show); Karen Page, Claire Temple, and Vanessa Marianna in Daredevil; Skye, May, & Bobby in Agents of SHIELD.  And DC has the wonderful Felicity Smoak in Arrow, a character so awesome they keep having her show up in their other series, The Flash.)

Specifically to the most recent MCU film “Avengers: Age of Ultron”, the one true strong female character is Black Widow, played by Scarlett Johansson.  And as Leah Schnelbach points out in the post referenced above, while Black Widow has now been in four MCU films, hers is the only character who takes time out of a film to lament how she can never be a parent.  Thor doesn’t whine about whether or not to be a daddy, nor does Samuel L. Jackson’s Nick Fury, Tony Stark, or anyone else (though Captain America laments not getting to dance with Peggy Carter during World War II).  She is the only Avenger whose character is defined—and only in this film!—in terms of her sexuality and gender.

Now, if there were as lot of interesting female characters in the MCU, maybe we could give this one a pass.  Or if Black Widow was about to get her own film, as nearly every other Avenger has (hell, Ant Man is getting his own film before he becomes one!).  I mean, geez, Hulk has had, what, two (really bad) films?  Captain America has had two with another one coming.  Thor has had two; Iron Man three.  Black Widow?  None.  With none on the horizon.  And if that isn’t bad enough, there isn’t even a female-starring MCU film planned until 2018 . . . eight more films down the line.  A second film about the Guardians of the Galaxy, a property that hardly anyone gave a damn about, sure (which, to be fair, was a film I enjoyed a lot); another Captain America film, another Avengers film, yet another reboot of the Spider-man franchise, even.  But a film about Black Widow?  Heavens, no; that’s a terrible idea!

marvel_s_spider_man__2017_reboot__by_lunestavideos-d8hh5wp
Do we really need another one? (Photo courtesy of Wibblyspider on DeviantArt)

One could argue, and some do, that female-led super-hero movies don’t make money.  But if you take a gander at the hacked emails by the studio execs, who complain about “Supergirl”, a bomb from 30 years ago, it’s pretty clear we’re dealing with nothing but blatant sexism here.  After all, way more male-centered super-hero movies have bombed than female-centered ones.  That’s sexism, kids.

And not only is it sexist, in the case of Black Widow—a well-established character played by a bankable actress that the public is actually asking for—it’s downright stupid.  Let me just run a few facts by you, here:

  • Black Widow has now been in four MCU movies and has actually established a considerable fan-base; there are fan sites, a twitter hash tag, a Change.org petition, etc. etc.
  • The Motley Fool does a good job pointing out the factual basis for expecting a positive result from a Black Widow film.
  • There have been far more giant flops in big Super Hero films starring men than those starring women.  Seven vs. three, if memory serves.  And it’s important to note that films like “Catwoman” genuinely stunk.
  • Scarlett Johansson is almost ridiculously bankable.

Let me throw you some numbers on that last point.  And this is where it connects to my opening about folks on the right, which is:  The right-wing simply can’t do math.  (I did several posts about this on Salon which I will re-post here at some point but in the meantime, take my word for it.  Two words:  Laffer curve.)

150326-lol-obamacare-costs-5-million-per-enrollee-a-teabagger-does-the-math
They just can’t do math; don’t blame me! (photo courtesy of Democratic Underground)

  • Luc Besson is a director with a lengthy Hollywood career, and whose biggest film up until last year was “The Fifth Element”, starring Bruce Willis, Gary Oldman, Milla Jovovich, and (God save us) Chris Tucker.  On a budget of $93 million it made $263.9 million, or $170.9 million.  His newest biggest film?  “Lucy”, starring Scarlett Johansson; on a budget of $40 million it made $458.9 million, or $418.9 million.
  • Films with Scarlett Johansson have made a total of $2.393 billion dollars domestically, and a brain-melting $5.844 billion world-wide. “Well, okay,” I hear you say; “But she hasn’t starred in all those, some are ensemble films that made tons of money.  How does that compare to male stars?”  I’m glad you asked! Let’s look at the money with regard to those who have been in big budget films themselves.  (Figures from Box Office Mojo)
    • Chris Hemsworth (Thor): $1.622 billion
    • Andrew Garfield (Spider-man):  $587 million
    • Tobey Maguire (also Spider-man): $1.535 billion
    • Chris Pratt (“Star-lord”): $848 million
    • Chris Evans (Captain America): $1.909 billion
    • Paul Rudd: $1.143 billion
    • Ahnuld: $1.794 billion (!)
    • Harrison Ford: $3.925 billion
    • Bruce Willis: $3.186 billion
    • Brad Pitt: $2.610 billion
  • And those comparisons are apples to apples—lifetime totals of all films made by folks who have starred in blockbusters.  (I could do it in dollars adjusted for ticket price inflation but trust me, other than with Ahnuld, it doesn’t make a lot of difference in demonstrating the basic point.)  When you look at those comparisons, also consider this:  Bruce Willis is 60, Schwarzenegger is 67, Harrison Ford is 72, heck even Brad Pitt is 51.  Johansson is 30.  30!  You’ve got to think she’s going to blow those other guys out of the water by the time she gets to 40, let alone 60.
  • Speaking of “well known”; I like Paul Rudd as much as the next guy, but he’s not exactly Bruce Willis or Ahnuld or even Brad Pitt when it comes to big, summer, “tent-pole” action/adventure extravaganzas, is he?  Had anyone heard of Chris Hemsworth before they handed him “Thor”?  Eric Bana before he made “Hulk”?  While Chris Evans was not exactly unknown, he wasn’t a household name either when they made him Captain America.  And what about those total unknowns they handed Superman’s cape to?  On the other hand, Johansson is well know, with a huge built-in fan base.  How is a film starring her as a (now) well-known character more of a risk than “Guardians of the Galaxy” starring Chris Pratt or “Ant-Man” starring Paul Rudd?  I mean, c’mon!

So honestly, given all this, ask yourself two things:  Can the lack of female-starring big-budget movies be anything other than sexism, and can the lack of a big-budget, Johansson-starring Black Widow movie be anything other than profoundly stupid sexism?

I think you all know what my answer is.

the-black-widow
Yeah, you got it (Poster courtesy of LemonPunch on Tumblr)

So there it is, you dim-witted, right-wing, major studio honchos (and you, Kevin Feige, you bonehead):  Women can make you tons of money.  It’s only your backwards attitudes that’re stopping it.  Get a grip and start making those movies!

Elysium Micro-Review, Plus Doug’s Movie Ratings Scheme

25 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by dougom in Opinion

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Elysium, Jodie Foster, Matt Damon, movies, reviews

matt-damon-shaved-head-05
Matt Damon in his “Elysium” bald-headed glory

I don’t do real movie reviews.  For one, I don’t think I’m very good at them, and for another, I’m not getting paid for it.  Instead what I do is tell you what kind of movies I like and, in that context, how I would rate a particular movie.

I am ecumenical in my film enjoyment; I like everything from cartoons to musicals to drama (even Shakespearean drama) to sci-fi to comic book movies to anime.  What do I like?  I thought “The Incredibles” was one of the best movies of the last 15 years.  I think the three “Lord of the Rings” movies are incredible, and hold up really well.  I think everyone should be required to see “Casablanca” and “Singin’ in the Rain”, two of the best movies of all time.  I saw “Citizen Kane” once; I don’t ever need to see it again.  I think “The Godfather” is amazing, but don’t particularly enjoy “The Godfather II”.  I laugh so hard at some scenes in “Sleeper” that I practically wet myself.  So there you have it.

Rankings-wise, I don’t use stars, or anything like that.  My rankings are simple:

  • Go see this in the theater, and buy it when it comes out!
  • Go see this in the theater, but you don’t need the DVD (e.g., “Dangerous Liaisons”, which I’m glad I saw, and never ever want to see again as long as I live.  If need to see a young Uma Thurman’s boobs again, I’ll watch “Baron Munchausen”)
  • Buy the movie when it comes out, but it doesn’t require a theater trip (e.g., you don’t really need to see “The 40 Year Old Virgin” on the big screen)
  • Just rent the damn movie when it comes out
  • Why did I rent this horrible movie?

This is an enjoyment scale, not a quality scale.  For example, “Mad Max” is not a particularly high-quality, Academy Award-winning film, but man do you need to see that sucker on the big screen, you know what I’m saying?  By the opposite token, “Dangerous Liaisons” is a beautifully written, wonderfully acted, well-directed movie that is worth seeing . . . once.  Afterwards, take a shower and rinse out your mouth, and never see it again.  (“The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is similar.  Good movie, but uck!)

That all being a prelude to how I like “Elysium”, the latest film by South African film wunderkind Neill Blomkamp.  And the answer is:  Meh.  Which means, “Just rent the damn movie when it comes out.”

The premise is interesting enough; in the mid 22nd Century, the wealth gap has reached such an epic level that the Rich Folks have left the planet entirely, living on their very own space habitat, Elysium; sort of the ultimate in gated communities.  On Elysium, you can get any sickness cured.  On overpopulated Terra, not so much.  Like many dystopian future science fiction movies, the poor ol’ Earth is a hellhole.  And naturally, most folks want to get on up to Elysium.

There’s a bunch of interesting ideas in this movie–apartheid taken to its logical extreme, ditto the aforementioned wealth gap, ditto stomping on illegal immigrants (the film even calls them “illegals”, just like Romney did during the 2012 election).  But for me it just didn’t hang together.

Don’t blame Matt Damon or Jodie Foster, who both put in excellent performances.  (I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of Damon’s crooked smile that just seems to bust out of him when you least expect it.)  No, it feels more like too many ideas in the stew.  Plus I am sick Sick SICK of shaky-cam, where everything is close up and shaky to simulate urgency, or realism, or some damn thing.  It is the hellspawn of “The Blair Witch Project”, and it seems as if no SF or action movie director is allowed to use steady camera shots.  Enough, already!  And “Elysium” uses it all the damn time.

And while I really appreciate the melange of cultures and accents in the film–middle-American Matt Damon, South Africans, Hispanics, a couple of African Americans, that evil dude from the first “Iron Man” movie (no, not Jeff Bridges; the bad guy from the caves)–between the close-ups, the shaky-cam, and the accents, half the time I couldn’t understand the damn dialog.  Especially when the character Spider was speaking, in his thick L.A. Barrio accent (one presumes).  It’s hard for me to enjoy a movie when I both can’t see and can’t understand the dialog of WTF is going on.

Finally, there’s the “science”.  Which I’m putting in quotes because who the heck would build a space habitat where one side is open to space?  Yes, it’s theoretically possible to spin a giant habitat enough to hold the air in, but it has to be really big, and spinning really fast.  It’s dramatic-looking; it’s also stupid.

And all the other tech in the movie is basically stuff we have right now.  The computers not only looked like current tech, they actually looked like my friend Chris’ 8 year-old Alienware laptop.  In 2154?  Seriously?  And (spoiler warning!) the plot hinges on the ability of someone to just insert any random person as President of this giant, high tech satellite during a hard system reboot and then you’re in charge?  SERIOUSLY?  Even “Live Free or Die Hard” was more realistic about computer security than that.  C’mon, Blomkamp!  I mean, I go to an SF or comic book movie expecting to test my willing suspension of disbelief, but there’s testing it, and there’s spitting in its face.

So to sum up:  “Elysium”, meh.  Rent it when it’s out on DVD or streaming download.

Do the Math, Creative People!

24 Monday Jun 2013

Posted by dougom in Opinion

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

books, fiction, film, movies, television

hogwartsplates
Hogwarts dining hall: This look like 1000 kids to you, or closer to, oh, say, 300?
(Photo courtesy of BeyondHogwarts.com)

Reading and watching fiction always takes a certain amount of willing suspension of disbelief.  You have to believe (temporarily, to a certain extent) powered armor can work and alien/human hybrid clones can be created and controlled through wifi to watch “Avatar” without getting irritated; that Humbert Humbert can obsess over a barely-nubile girl; that Benedick and Claudio can swallow the transparent BS of Hero having a previously unremarked twin sister; etc.  Great or small, you have to go along with a certain amount of nonsense, scientific hand-waving, plot holes, and other problems to enjoy your fiction.  That’s the contract you make with the author/playwright/screenwriter.

Different people are thrown out of this state by different things, obviously.  There are some people who simply can’t watch science fiction at all, for example.  I can understand that.  For me, where I often trip up is on simple arithmetic.

For me, the most blatant example is the Harry Potter books.  J.K. Rowling, when asked, has stated that Hogwarts has “around 1000” students.

Hogwash.  Do the math, Jo!  It ain’t hard!

Each entering class is sorted into 4 houses.  Gryffindor in Harry’s year has 5 boys, 5 girls.  10 total students, then.  If the other houses are similar, that’s a class size of 40.  7 years at Hogwarts, 7×40, is 280 students.  Not 1000.  Not even close.  Rowling isn’t even close, because she didn’t do the math.

Think I’m being unfair to Rowling?  At Hogwarts, incoming students take Potions, Herbology, Defence Against the Dark Arts, Transfiguration, Charms, and Care of Magical Creatures.  It is clear that all these subjects only have a single teacher; you constantly read of Snape being frustrated at not being made “the Defence Against the Dark Arts professor”.  “The”.  i.e., one and only.  And if you have 7 years of students, and only one Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, he or she can’t teach more than about 280 students, anyway.  Each class contains two Houses, which means about 20 students.  If you taught 7 times a day–which from the books it is clear they don’t–that’s only 140 students per day.  Even if you alternate them–Gryffindor & Slytherin on Monday and Wednesday, Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw on Tuesday and Thursday–you still can’t get anywhere near 1000 students, not with only a single teacher each for Potions, Herbology, and whatnot.  Mathematically impossible.

Hell, it’s probably not even as high as 280, since some kids bail after their fifth year.  Rowling didn’t do her math.

(By the way, I’ve read a number of Harry Potter readers’ defenses of Rowling’s count, and they all boil down to, “Well, she must have planned it out, so I’m sure she’s right, right?”  They’re not doing the math, either!)

Or take “The Hunger Games”.  I don’t have the book in front of me, but in the movie they take a train that is stated to go “200 miles an hour!  And we’ll be there in only 2 days!”  Seriously?  The only way a train going 200 miles an hour can take two days to arrive at The Capital from Appalachia (where District 12 is) would be if The Capital is in Sydney, and someone had dug a tunnel under the Pacific Ocean to get there.  200mph x 48 hours is 9800 miles.  From Miami Beach to Seattle–the longest straight-line distance in the continental U.S.–is only a smidge over 3100 miles; you can make that in less than 16 hours at 200mph.  Two days?  Someone didn’t do their math!

This is how I personally get tossed out of my warm zone of suspended disbelief; these simple, easily-corrected math errors made by people who were either too lazy or simply didn’t care to do simple arithmetic.  I know these are artists we’re talking about here, but jeez, this is multiplication.  I’m not talking about calculus or algebra or even long-friggin’-division here; just simple multiplication.  I know Creative Folks don’t enjoy math–if they did, they’d probably be engineers or something–but c’mon!  Balancing your checkbook is harder than this!

Anyway, that’s my excuse for staring at the page or screen and saying, “Oh, COME ON!”  What’s yours?

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