Children of Men, I feel, hews closest to the dystopia we are most headed towards... Even more than Wall-E or something like Brave New World... Also Momo by Michael Ende (who wrote Neverending Story) - that's pretty prescient, too...
But yeah, somewhat unexpectedly, I think Children of Men is where we are headed. Although I don't think even the filmmakers (was it Cuaron?) predicted that we would deliberately stop having children, even before the unintentional fertility crisis kicked in...
Hits all the points, that movie does.
I'm not sure it would be possible to do a sequel to Wall-E, because the story is effectively... Finished. Unless perhaps there were still other colony/refugee ships floating out there, somewhere, yet to be discovered..?
But also given how far we've slid towards the society of AI-dependent blob people, as portrayed in the movie (even in those 16 years), I just cannot imagine one of the companies which has so heavily contributed to creating that situation (i.e. Disney) remaking something so... Pointed, lol.
I mean, I would argue that Wall-E himself is more "human" in many of his behaviours than, say, Buzz Lightyear (gasp, controversial, I know) or indeed most of the characters in Cars 2...
So is Eva, at times.
Because this is Pixar, and Pixar specialises in anthropomorphizing various non-human critters, objects, etc.
Versus Dreamworks, which kind of does this successfully with Kung Fu Panda, but, for example, Toothless is very clearly an animal. Just a very intelligent one.
HTTYD is still my favourite 3D animated movie of all time, however. Followed by Wall-E, followed by UP (the first 20 minutes or so of which is... Probably the most successful "human" thing Pixar ever made). I grew up with Toy Story 2 and Cars, but for some reason neither resonated with me quite as much (though Bug's Life, El Dorado and Tarzan did, so... Take that as you will)...
If it was just “I’m a Scottish adventurer” or something, with a random mix of people, I would just go “Meh, immigrants”.
But this is very clearly intentionally not that.
It’s meant to be “othering”, and to reinforce the “us vs them”, “we’re taking over your lands” idea. That is the whole point of it.
Therefore yes, I agree that it is… Iffy at best.
Just decided to read up on a bit of Discovery’s “lore”, because I remembered that they also fucked with the androids of Trek (Airiam, in the Discovery-verse, who also runs counter to established Trek lore)…
Man, that show was an absolute shitfest. Like, we’re they going for the wokest show on TV, that had as little as possible in common with its source material, or what??!
Discovery Klingons are not in my head canon, even if they are “official”, at this point…
Ironic, really, since the last two Trek series (Discovery and the other one) seem to go against all the previous established lore to that point…
But yeah, much like how the 2007 movie Romulans bear almost no resemblance to that “race” in any prior media, I guess we can say the same for the recent Klingon “experiment”…
Lol, what was that he was distracted by over there - a paratrooper or something..?
Based Meloni, not for the first time this week.
That’s my favourite piece of Trek, that movie (although the second-last episode of TOS is also very good). It’s excellent, even considering the purple Klingon blood floating around the room, lol.
Voyage Home is also good, but that was more spoof, than “true” Trek, imho.
I do also enjoy me some Voyager, but man, The Undiscovered Country is just… The most I enjoy Trek, personally.
Also arguably Kim Catrall’s best acting performance. Certainly during the height of her career, anyway!
Glad you enjoyed it!
Would also recommend both Galaxy Quest and Red Dwarf, on the humour front, if you haven’t seen those yet!
Ah, but you see, that wouldn’t be the “right” kind of tourists… taps head
Perth and Sydney both do exactly as you say. And you’re not wrong. Perth’s Christmas light’s in particular are awesome (though Stockholm was better).
But unfortunately the erm… “Powers that be” here aren’t chasing after the dollars of that type of tourist.
Nah, they want pretentious hipster wankers, you see. The type who wear their white guilt on their sleeve, and would literally pay money to bathe in the blood of a dead bull (yes, that really happened, a few years ago)…
Actually, I think the lowlight may be when they successfully solicited donations of blood from (part-)Aboriginals to then soak a colonial-era Australian flag in (literally). That’s about as sick as it gets…
So yeah, that kind of “tourist”. That’s who they are trying to market to.
Not so much “wide appeal” as appealing to the kind of hipster who works for Vice (or whatever replaces it), lives in Manhattan or Mayfair, and, erm, hates their own race… And is probably a trust fund baby. Like the wife of the guy who runs and funds this whole thing literally is.
Yep.
Shit is absolutely bizarre.
I kind of already adhere to the latter principle, for the most part…
Certainly when it comes to shit like dating and friendships, I try to keep that as majority face-to-face as possible (and indeed, when dealing with bureaucracy, I prefer to do that face to face instead of online or over the phone, where possible, too)…
Which led Covid to completely and utterly break me.
No offense to you all.
But yeah, I learned the hardware that offline is… Generally best.
If you’re surprised by this occurrence…
I have a bridge to sell you. A very nice, shiny, modern one, too! With all the very-latest tech!
Somewhere, Judy Garland is (not for the first time) rolling in her grave that this is what rainbows are known for now, smh…
Not that they even contain the same colours (technically), but it’s a bit like how even in West Side Story (which I believe came out in 1963 or so) “gay” did not mean homosexual…
It’s wild how quickly they co-opted both the language and the symbols…
Is that true? Huh, I was always told the opposite…
Didn’t at least one die of AIDS..?? Not that it would preclude him from being straight, but nonetheless…
Or was that just an urban myth?
In my nearest city, a few years ago, the local woke arts festival (quite literally a celebration of debauchery and death, but anyway) managed to get municipal funding to put up giant glowing red upside-down crosses…
When local Christian groups complained, they were told to shut up, and that it “brings in the right kind of tourists”…
They would never be even allowed to put up their own crosses off that size, in the right size and colour, let alone getting funding to do so…
But because it’s sex-and-death fest (which started again yesterday), it’s all fine and dandy…
Meanwhile in Melbourne even the trams (streetcars) are now plastered in hideous woke “contemporary First Nations art”, some of which includes photos of mutilated plastic dolls in various skin colours…
“Public art”, also for a so-called “arts festival”…
My country has gone mad.
The butchering and Frankenstein-like deconstruction of the English language continues apace, I see…
Man, even a decade ago, I would not have predicted we would be here by now…
There is, however, also a movie out where the Coldplay lead singer’s current wife apes as a “late bloomer” lesbian, which is, quite literally, just wish fulfillment for the writer and her “wife”, who directed it…
Called “Am I Ok?”, I believe.
So Hollywood is still doing the “pretty straight woman plays a lesbian” thing, at the same time. With view to normalizing the whole idea of “If you’re questioning your sexuality, you must be queer”, of course…
To be extra cynical about that, though… She wouldn’t be the first woman in history to claim that as an easy hand wave (in order to avoid tricky questions), lol…
Do I think Lucas probably meant it sincerely? Sure. But in the real world, women do say that sort of thing not uncommonly…
Yeah, we’re determined to follow Blue State USA on this path, and, as we often tend to do, to even “out-woke” them along the way…
That’s good about the bank! Maybe the local community feedback had been so negative that they decided they couldn’t get away with it this year, lol…
Actually, on the topic of Sweden, I really do miss it there.
I knew I was happier the last few months there than I had been in a long time (and I only left because my visa was no longer valid, after I left my study program, or so I assumed), but I didn’t realize quite how shit it would be to be back in Aus…
If I had known, I probably would have put up with the situation I was in there that I hated (the study program), or put more desperation into my search for another way to stay, because I just… Haven’t been the same, since.
Which perhaps has less to do with Sweden, and more to do with the lifestyle I was living over there, the fact that I couldn’t necessarily understand the news, etc.
Now I’m back to “old” me, in my “old” environment, and it sucks arse, lol.
But oh well. I built up a lot of debt during that six months. Unfortunately I don’t really have any choice but to pay that back…
The grass is always greener, I suppose.
Oh yeah, you’re right. I massively overestimated the size of “Ile-de-France”, and assumed the three surrounding blue départements were Seine-et-Marne, etc, rather than the orange bits, as you point out…
Can’t actually see that without zooming in significantly…
But still, as you say, those places voted for NF, as did Lyon and Marseille, both of which have banlieues as well (and Calis, where most of the refugees end up eventually, for that matter), so…
It’s pretty significant.
Though as someone else said, if history shows anything, it’s that the Ile-de-France doesn’t really care what the rest of France thinks, politically. Seemingly they haven’t for roughly 200 years…
This is similar in Aus with the Australian vs Aboriginal flag…
I’ve been told off (in public, not at work) for wearing the Aus flag before. Even on a wristband…
My local council tore down the Aus flag to put up a tranny one. They even took down the state flag off the Sydney Harbour Bridge to replace it with the Abo one. And all of that happened under supposed “conservative” governments…
Same shit different continent.
Lol, even the banlieues (Parisian ghetto suburbs) rejected the left and centre...
According to that map, literally every departement outside of the Paris city walls voted for National Rally, lololol...
No wonder the media here (i.e. the other side of the world) was finding every "queer leftist" they could, within Paris, to disparage the result and paint it as the second coming of Petainism...
Sorry I took a while to read all this, but I’m intrigued by your story of the bomber and the PA system…
Any chance of a follow-up on that?
This is similar to where I grew up. The town it is part of has more than quadrupled in population in 20 years, and the specific "side" of town has grown so much that it now has a locality name, whereas before, if you called it that, people would have just gone, "Huh, isn't that the name of the road?"
It's pretty bizarre. Especially when 90%+ of the growth has come from interstate and third-world (mostly the latter) immigration, lol...
Yeah, I didn't come across any on the Stan Sport/Nine Network official broadcast either...
Which is despite one of the hosts being a woke idiot. So that's something.
Though I didn't see the halftime discussion, or the pre-Lenny Kravitz pre-game, so... I may just have missed it.
But nah, it was mostly just same as it ever was, at least here.
Kravitz was pretty good, too!
I guess it's emblematic of how tone deaf and corporate much of the DC Cinematic Universe was/is, that they didn't even bother looking into the history and meaning of the song, or the controversy of this cover version in Australia (it was used to advertise a bank, specifically Westpac, which subsequently got into significant strife for ripping off and screwing over consumers)...
Ah, Hollywood. When will they ever learn.
Damn good song, but yeah...