Throwback Thursday: Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

We’re going a little deeper into the archives of science fiction this week, to pull out the 1964 Stanley Kubrick film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The black-and-white visuals and Cold War imagery give the movie a dated effect, but I’m realizing how distressingly relevant the underlying message still is.

At the top level, the movie is a satire of mutually assured destruction and nuclear war. A rogue American general named Jack D. Ripper, consumed with paranoia, orders an unprovoked nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, and a fleet of bombers take to the air.

When news of the strike reaches President Merkin Muffley, he descends to the underground War Room, joined by the maniacal General Buck Turgidson, the Soviet ambassador Alexei de Sadeski, and the title character, a nuclear scientist from Nazi Germany now serving the United States. De Sadeski reveals the existence of a Soviet Doomsday Device, which will automatically destroy all life on Earth with a cloud of radioactive gas if an atomic strike on the USSR is detected. The Americans and the Russians work together to recall the bombers, but one, piloted by Major T.J. “King” Kong, has been damaged and cannot receive the radio signal, and prepares to deliver its payload.

Earth’s last hope is the failure of Kong’s bomb, spray-painted with the name “Hi There!”—which jams in the bay. But the dedicated pilot climbs on top of it, and jumps up and down on it until it deploys. Kong rides the bomb to the end of the world, gleefully whooping and waving a cowboy hat in the film’s most famous scene.

Anonymous submission to MakeAGIF.com

The Americans pause for a moment of silence, before planning to resume the Cold War after the apocalypse when they emerge from their bunkers. The credits roll with a montage of mushroom clouds set to Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again”.

Top 20 Romantic Couples in Geekdom (10 Canon/10 Fanon): 2015 Edition

Usually everyone here at LGG&F gets along really well. We bond over our mutual love of justice and all things geek! But once in a while, chaos comes to our serene nerd community. When all of the good we try to do is abandoned and our writer’s room deteriorates into madness…

Actual depiction of our writer’s room.
(gif via imgarcade)

I am, of course, speaking about Valentine’s Day, that heinous holiday that sends us all into a shipping frenzy as our authors nominate and then vote on ships for our Top 20 Romantic Couples in Geekdom (10 Canon/10 Fanon) list. It is now my duty as Empress of LGG&F to present to you this year’s bloodstained list. So put on your shipping goggles and prepare yourself for the 2015 Top 20 Romantic Couples in Geekdom!

(gif via gillianeberry)

How Meta is Too Meta?

On some level, we want our fictional universes to be real. We want our Hogwarts letters; we want the TARDIS to show up on our doorstep; we want to be chosen as the hero by a talking cat or to find faeries in our backyards. And creators have noticed. Many franchises have tried to play into our desire for our fantasy worlds to be real by adding a layer of meta into their creations, inextricably linking the real world and the fictional one. The key to this sort of real world tie-in is subtlety and a firm grasp on the message of the original work.

Did you know you can check out the TARDIS on Google Street View?

Sexualized Saturdays: If the Bechdel Test Isn’t Feminist, What Is?

Recently a group of cinemas in Sweden decided to institute a ratings system based on the Bechdel test. As moviegoers enter one of these cinemas, they would see a rating by each advertised movie, telling them whether or not the movie had passed the test. Controversy ensued, with the Telegraph calling the test “damaging to the way we think about film” and the Guardian almost immediately rebutting by saying it was “a provocation that works”. Both sides of the argument have some merit to them, but it’s clear that the Bechdel test now has enough cultural clout to propel a more in-depth discussion on feminism and gender in the film industry. The test has long been held up as a measure of how feminist a movie is, but does it really fulfill this purpose? Or is it time for this test to make way for newer tests like Kelly Sue DeConnick’s Sexy Lamp test or the Mako Mori test?

Sexualized Saturdays: The Double Standard of the Friend Zone

There’s this idea that if a guy is nice to a girl, he deserves something in return. A thank you? Sure. Some… other form of appreciation? Would be more appreciated. What if a guy was nice to a girl over a much longer period of time? Then they’re friends, right? Sure. But what if the guy wants to be more than friends, but for all his niceness, the girl still won’t go out with him?

Well, then the guy’s stuck in the dreaded “friend zone”. And what is the friend zone? It’s where girls relegate guys who are just nice enough to not make it into that erogenous zone where they actually get to have sex. Or, in other words, it’s a stupid social construct that implies both that a guy can’t be nice to a girl out of sheer altruism or friendship, and that if a guy is nice to a girl, she must reciprocate by sleeping with him. And whether or not it’s the girl doing the friendzoning, somehow, the pressure is always on the girl’s romantic interests.

Let’s take a look at some examples from pop culture so you can see what I mean. Slight spoilers for The Hunger Games and Les Misérables below.

Trailer Tuesdays: Divergent

Look, they’re making a movie of another wildly popular YA series! Yes, following the path of successes like The Hunger Games and not-really-successes like The Mortal Instruments, Veronica Roth’s Divergent series is also hitting the big screen.

Slight spoilers for Divergent after the jump.

Industry InJustice

You know what was great? Teen Titans. While I don’t need to make a list of reasons why Teen Titans was great, I could throw a couple at you. Starfire wasn’t a walking sex toy. A skilled writing staff managed to write jokes that made me laugh without wanting to put my head into a desk. Cyborg was clearly Black, but not an Erkel or a thug. Then there was Terra, who presented complicated notions of heroism, loyalty, and betrayal for a young audience. There was also the Puffy Am—shut up!—Puffy Amiyumi theme song. All of these things and others made for a great show. But it went the way of the dinosaur. If you ask Wil Wheaton, that was because the season 6 pitch didn’t go over favorably with the execs.

That’s the way it is with television shows. Many great shows are here today, gone tomorrow. Despite the efforts of many a Kickstarter or online petition, it takes much more than a vocal and obsessive fanbase to convince a company to reverse the decision to terminate a show. See: Firefly (which, by the way, was a decade ago, so maybe we should just let that wound heal). So many different things go into the cancellation of a show because it takes the cooperation of actors, animators if a show is animated, the owners of the creative property, production companies, etc., and I recognize that these things happen, but the cancellation of Young Justice genuinely broke my heart. There aren’t that many DC properties that I’ve ever really been into, so it was sad to see a critically acclaimed, Emmy-winning, mature, and compelling show disappear. That’s all right; I will learn to love again.

But the other day I was listening to Kevin Smith’s Fat Man on Batman podcast, which is a goldmine, and he was interviewing Paul Dini. Dini is a writer with a long career and a longer resume, and he has written for a show you like, no question. Dini gave a rather troubling answer as to why Young Justice was cancelled, along with other shows like Tower Prep. Apparently, those shows are too mature. They appeal to audiences that prefer complexity, and apparently those audiences don’t buy toys. Now, I acknowledge that televisions often live and die on advertising and merchandising. But there’s something much more disturbing in his answer. There’s a transcript here, and if you read far enough down you’ll encounter this comment about studio executives:

Something People Need to Remember About The Hunger Games

With the new trailer for the second installment of The Hunger Games trilogy (well, quartet, if we’re counting movies), Catching Fire, released at San Diego Comic Con, a renewed flurry of excitement has arisen for the series, bigger than that which accompanied the first trailer. But with the excitement I’ve noticed that people have forgotten something important about the story. Maybe they never quite realized it to begin with. And needless to say, spoilers for the last book are contained herein.

All that nail polish…

Some people probably remember when the marketing first started for the movie series, how at first it seemed clever that they were taking a leaf from the Capitol’s book. Nothing wrong with using a ready-made, glitz and glamor theme already present in the series, right? But then the grumbles started. Are they glorifying the Capitol’s decadence too much? Are people going to forget that the Capitol are the bad guys? With the new Catching Fire trailer, it’s clear that no one will forget it. Fandom crisis averted.

You’d think Tumblr would be more into Team Peele (or is it Gata?)

And everyone probably knows about the people who love to remind everyone that The Hunger Games isn’t a love story. “It’s not another Twilight!” they scream, even if it is the same production company trying to make bank off of another popular young adult series. Sure, there’s a love story, but that takes a far back seat to the political drama of the revolution. Heck, the love story is part of the revolution, isn’t it? No more Team Peeta or Team Gale. Katniss cares much more about the revolution than choosing which boy to be with. Another fandom crisis averted.

Actually… no. Katniss doesn’t care about the revolution. Yes, you read that right. Katniss is most certainly the symbol of the revolution. Her single act of desperation and defiance, refusing to “play the Hunger Games” by the Capitol’s rules, spark a fire of political turmoil. Katniss is wonderful! She refuses to be a pawn in the Capitol’s game! But from that moment on, Katniss merely becomes a pawn in the revolution’s game. No one truly considers her needs, her desires, or even what’s best for her. People simply care about how they can best use Katniss for their purposes. Every move she makes, whether in the Quarter Quell or in District 13 or on rescue missions, is tailored to fit someone else’s narrative plan. Does she get treatment for her obvious PTSD? Not until the revolution is over.

After making the decision to eat the poisonous berries with Peeta in her first Games, the only free decision Katniss makes is to kill President Coin. Katniss doesn’t care about the revolution. All she wants is to go home and have enough to eat for her and her family. That’s what we have to remember about The Hunger Games trilogy. The beauty of Katniss’s character isn’t that she is the figurehead for a huge revolution; it’s that despite being cast in such a role, her desires are simple. She just wants to survive.

Trailer Tuesdays: Catching Fire Comic-Con Trailer

While the first official trailer for Catching Fire focuses entirely on the events leading up to the 75^th Hunger Games and not the Hunger Games themselves, this one focuses on both. I’ve already talked about the earlier trailer here, and my excitement hasn’t decreased in the slightest.

I’ve always had some grievances with the first movie, but all in all, I thought it was relatively close to the source material, and it’s hard to ask for a better book-to-movie adaptation. So far, it looks like Catching Fire will be just as faithful. However, I am a little disappointed that we barely see the transformation of Katniss’s wedding dress in this trailer, which I’m really looking forward to see as soon as the movie comes out.

For the last trailer, I lamented that we didn’t get to see any of the other tributes, but not this time around. We get glimpses of a whole bunch of them: Finnick, Johanna, Enobaria—whose teeth look amazing, by the way—and a few others. We also get to see some of the arena, as well. This trailer reminds me a lot of the one trailer for the first movie.

They both begin with some dialogue, followed by the reaping, time spent training in the capitol, before ending with a quick shot of the contestants right after entering the arena. It’s not entirely similar, as both books do have differences in their plots, but it’s still the same basic formula, and hey, it’s a formula that works. However, I do have to admit that in some ways I was disappointed with the second book, because occasionally it felt as though I was just reading the first book all over again, except with different characters and stakier stakes. In other ways it didn’t, so I have always been a little torn on how I feel about Catching Fire. I fear that I may have this same issue with the movie. My biggest grievance with both books is that they introduced characters that I instantly fell in love with before killing them—Rue and Mags—but I’d hardly call that bad writing. The audience should care when a character dies. It should mean something.

Unfortunately, November is still a long ways off, and this movie cannot be released soon enough.

Trailer Tuesdays: Catching Fire

It’s finally here, the long-awaited trailer to the long-awaited movie Catching Fire. I think I watched this trailer four times before I finally stopped being giddy enough to read the release date, which is still so many months away. It’s going to be a while until November rolls around, and I suppose we’ll just have to find something else to watch in the meantime.

This trailer, oh man. This trailer is epic. It doesn’t focus on the 75^th annual Hunger Games at all, and instead pays attention to the time leading up to that in the first part of the book. This means that the only victors we see in this trailer are Katniss, Peeta, and Haymitch. (Unfortunate, because I would have really liked to see Johanna, Finnick, or even Mags.) Katniss herself, however, is still a badass, and I don’t know of many people willing to stare down a man holding a gun and tell him to go ahead and still look like she’s in charge of this situation, even if she doesn’t feel in charge. Katniss now has to come to terms with the fact that, by surviving the Hunger Games, the Capitol pretty much owns her and Peeta. This is not something she accepts.

President Snow doesn’t like that Katniss managed to show up the Capitol during the previous installment and now she has become a “beacon of hope” to the districts, who are rallying behind her in rebellion. This is a problem that Snow now has to deal with.

I think what really captured my attention is what Snow says at the end of the trailer. He says that “her entire species must be eradicated” in reference to Katniss and the other victors. The people of the Capitol don’t view the people of districts as being the same as them. The districts are little more than slaves to the Capitol, and because slaves don’t matter, no one cares that their children are forced to murder each other year after year. Snow takes it a step further and actually thinks of the victors as an entirely separate species from human beings. In some ways, this is probably what the Capitol thinks of them as well.

This is certainly one movie I’ll be waiting impatiently for.