Saw Devil last night. It was an okay film. Both wifey and I detest everything Shyamalan has done, but in this case, he simply came up with the story and let somebody else (I liked Hard Candy) do the screenplay. Good move. He has a producer credit on it, so I gather he put up some of the money for the film, too. Maybe this shows that he's got some good ideas, but he's really just a bad writer (or an inexperienced writer; his films are getting incrementally more complex) and he needs an editor with a strong will to keep him on track.
As an aside, the theatre we saw it in had the absolute worst crowd I have been in since the horrid theatre that used to reside at Union Station in DC. It was screen seventeen at AMC Hoffman in Alexandria. The screen was small and damaged. The sound was not working properly; there were no rear channels and it seemed to need an amplifier or something–the mids got muddied by everything else. There were a half dozen kids who wouldn't stop laughing and using their phones in the front of the theatre. There was a couple directly to our right who would not stop talking–not whispering, talking. The people behind us kicked our chairs constantly. The person in front of me and their friends came and went a number of times. Everyone in the theatre seemed to be "rooting for" Ben for no apparent reason other than he was black (I say this not because I am invoking a stereotype here; I am stating that in a full theatre, by my count, there were fewer than five people who weren't black; I have no idea how this happened), and thus there were "appropriate" cheers and jeers with respect to his character when the film would highlight his ethnicity (which was really unnecessary to begin with).
I am just real disappointed. We've been to that theatre before and never had a problem with any of their patrons of any flavor. Sometimes the crowd is rowdy but they're usually moderately polite for the film. Never have they made it so bad I wanted to leave.
We will seriously be considering another theatre next time we go to a movie, and we like Hoffman.
In other news, we had pupusas and tacos (she had a skirt steak) at Los Tios (and) before hand, and it was great. What could have been a nice night out for the two of us wound up being more of a mixed bag, and we really needed a nice night out. Maybe we can make up on Sunday; I start work Monday.
16 October, 2010
15 October, 2010
A nation of warriors
Like a lot of people, I'm waiting for the November 9 release of Call of Duty: Black Ops. The game is your average first person shooter, and is only the next in a long series of games in the franchise. What makes it appealing is the very high standard of graphics, the diverse network gameplay, and a further – I may be wrong here – thirteen single-player missions.
But who is playing these games? I was watching a review of the gameplay and features last night, and as the reviewer went on to describe the hostile forces encountered in the game, he mentioned the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong. He added hastily, "whatever that means." Are people who are spending hundreds of hours playing these games about war so completely illiterate that they don't actually understand who the Viet Cong were?
What does that really say about our knowledge of war? If we have so quickly forgotten the specifics of what made the Viet Nam war the conflict it was, how can we continue to revisit it in combat games and use it as a reference to how bad the situation in Iraq and/or Afghanistan is? To have forgotten the Viet Cong in specific is so egregious in light of our current conflict, I have fresh doubts about people in the demographic who play these games, and their ability to understand war in a larger scope.
Particularly unsettling is the fact that this demographic shares much overlap with those who are currently joining the military or currently in the military. Is it possible that people derisively using the term haji in Afghanistan today don't actually know what a Viet Cong irregular was? If that is really the case, or even partially true, it seems to me that we are doing little more than putting guns into the hands of adrenaline junkies – or worse, those who simply need a career or a way out of a small town – and sending them blind into conflict. Could they actually believe that an irregular insurgency is new to warfare? Would that not make them woefully unprepared for war itself, and unprepared to comprehend the greater nature of the conflict they're embroiled in?
And what of the civilian children and young adults playing the games replicating the conditions in Afghanistan or Viet Nam? These same people, frighteningly, are often of voting age. Is war so simple to them that it is comprised of simple objectives where one must secure a suitcase in an abandoned building to call in an air strike and end the battle, winning the conflict for "their team"? Do they take these same beliefs to the polls? When they grow older, will they retain the same illusion that war is a simple matter, a single battle to prosecute; the side with the most kills wins? Are we not then doomed to be surprised by irregular forces? Surprised when a one-hundred-to-one kill ratio is not enough to turn the tide of the war? Surprised when a decimated country doesn't just "reset" after the battle and resume being a country again?
Understand that these concerns of mine have nothing to do with gun ownership and the right to bear arms. Rather, I am concerned that as a nation we have become so intellectually crippled that war is a symptom of our ignorance, rather than the very last tool available in a nation's foreign policy.
There are a huge number of men and women out there who do understand war on a fundamental level, and know their history, and indeed substantially outnumber the ignorant. But there is a tide turning. As these people grow older and rotate out of the service and into civilian positions or indeed die, who is making sure that knowledge flows down to subsequent generations who would go to war again?
But who is playing these games? I was watching a review of the gameplay and features last night, and as the reviewer went on to describe the hostile forces encountered in the game, he mentioned the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong. He added hastily, "whatever that means." Are people who are spending hundreds of hours playing these games about war so completely illiterate that they don't actually understand who the Viet Cong were?
What does that really say about our knowledge of war? If we have so quickly forgotten the specifics of what made the Viet Nam war the conflict it was, how can we continue to revisit it in combat games and use it as a reference to how bad the situation in Iraq and/or Afghanistan is? To have forgotten the Viet Cong in specific is so egregious in light of our current conflict, I have fresh doubts about people in the demographic who play these games, and their ability to understand war in a larger scope.
Particularly unsettling is the fact that this demographic shares much overlap with those who are currently joining the military or currently in the military. Is it possible that people derisively using the term haji in Afghanistan today don't actually know what a Viet Cong irregular was? If that is really the case, or even partially true, it seems to me that we are doing little more than putting guns into the hands of adrenaline junkies – or worse, those who simply need a career or a way out of a small town – and sending them blind into conflict. Could they actually believe that an irregular insurgency is new to warfare? Would that not make them woefully unprepared for war itself, and unprepared to comprehend the greater nature of the conflict they're embroiled in?
And what of the civilian children and young adults playing the games replicating the conditions in Afghanistan or Viet Nam? These same people, frighteningly, are often of voting age. Is war so simple to them that it is comprised of simple objectives where one must secure a suitcase in an abandoned building to call in an air strike and end the battle, winning the conflict for "their team"? Do they take these same beliefs to the polls? When they grow older, will they retain the same illusion that war is a simple matter, a single battle to prosecute; the side with the most kills wins? Are we not then doomed to be surprised by irregular forces? Surprised when a one-hundred-to-one kill ratio is not enough to turn the tide of the war? Surprised when a decimated country doesn't just "reset" after the battle and resume being a country again?
Understand that these concerns of mine have nothing to do with gun ownership and the right to bear arms. Rather, I am concerned that as a nation we have become so intellectually crippled that war is a symptom of our ignorance, rather than the very last tool available in a nation's foreign policy.
There are a huge number of men and women out there who do understand war on a fundamental level, and know their history, and indeed substantially outnumber the ignorant. But there is a tide turning. As these people grow older and rotate out of the service and into civilian positions or indeed die, who is making sure that knowledge flows down to subsequent generations who would go to war again?