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"Back to the Future Part II" Makes No Sense

by CierraSummerfiel Posted on October 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today is October 21st, 2015, the day that Marty McFly travels to in the future in Back to the Future Part II. It’s #BacktotheFutureDay. To celebrate, I woke up my brother Harry in Los Angeles and forced him to talk about the film with me.

This conversation has been edited slightly for clarity.

Ben Dreyfuss: Today is October 21st, 2015. Happy Back to the Future Day, Harry.

Harry Dreyfuss: Mazel tov.

BD: The internet is going nuts right now with listicles about us not having hoverboards.

HD: We do have hoverboards! They just need huge floors of magnets.

BD: We have “hoverboards,” but they aren’t real hoverboards! They have wheels!

HD: No. They really hover! They just need huge floors of magnets. LOOK IT UP—TONY HAWK DID IT.

BD: OKAY, OKAY, MAYBE AT NASA. But the hoverboards all the teens say they are using have wheels.

HD: Oh yeah, you mean those Segway rip-offs without the handle that everyone drove at Burning Man this year?

BD: OF COURSE THEY WERE AT BURNING MAN.

HD: They looked nuts on acid.

BD: My real problem with Back to the Future 2 is that it really makes no sense.

HD: No movie about time travel makes perfect sense. But this movie has bigger problems as well. Like when they just dump Marty’s girlfriend in an alley.

BD: That is just a questionable thing for a caring boyfriend to do.

HD: Yeah, and not only did he not check the crime rate in 2015, but he also dumped her body right next to a mountain of asbestos.

BD: Hahahaha. Okay, but wait.

HD: I’m serious, look it up.

BD: I haven’t seen this movie in a while. When was the last time you saw it?

HD: It’s been a while, but I have strong memories of it because it was my first favorite franchise after you guys made me feel that it wasn’t okay for me to like Ace Ventura anymore.

BD: We were right then. We are right now. But let’s quickly recap what happens in Back to the Future 2. So, okay, in the beginning of the film Doc comes to Marty and Jennifer in 1985 and tells them that they need to go to 2015 to stop their son from ruining his life.

HD: Yeah. Because he’s a coward? I can’t remember the first plot point.

BD: Their kid is going to be bullied by a 2015 Biff descendant into doing some criminal thing and then he’s going to end up in jail.

HD: They got a lot of stuff right about the future in that movie, and one of them was bullying.

BD: A timeless tradition. But here, right off the bat, there is already a problem. Simply telling Marty and Jennifer about their son’s future mistakes should be enough to change the future. They don’t need to go into the future. Marty and Jennifer can just decide to be better parents.

HD: That’s a humdinger, Ben. I have no argument.

BD: Okay, so then they go into the future and a bunch of things happen, blah blah, including that they spy on their old 2015 selves. But why are their old selves even there? In 2015, the McFly family would be celebrating the 30th anniversary of Marty’s mysterious disappearance.

HD: I mean…celebrating?

BD: Remembering? Lighting a candle?

HD: Wait, let’s get something clear. Marty came BACK. So he didn’t disappear.

BD: So you’re saying that the future takes into account the presumption of Marty’s return to 1985?

HD: Yes. Detective Ben is going too far here.

BD: BUT THEN WHY DOESN’T THE FUTURE TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE FACT THAT THEY FIXED THEIR SON’S LIFE?

HD: Ah well that’s another humdinger.

BD: But wait, wait, this isn’t even my biggest problem.

HD: Lay it on me.

BD: In 2015, Old Biff steals the time machine when Marty and Doc aren’t looking, and he travels to 1955 to give the gambling almanac to young Biff. He then returns to 2015 and puts the time machine back, and Marty and Doc retrieve Jennifer from the asbestos pile and go back to 1985.

HD: Go on.

BD: But when Old Biff goes back to 1955 and gives young Biff the almanac, he should then return to a different 2015. One in which he is a Casino tycoon.

HD: Do you hate movies?

BD: I love movies, but Doc and Marty and Jennifer should be stranded in their 2015!

HD: Look, if we all took issue with these kind of things, none of us would ever be able to like a Christopher Nolan movie.

BD: Christopher Nolan movies also make no sense.

HD: It’s called a fantasy, Ben. Movies are DREAMS. DREAM WITH ME.

BD: But they still have to abide by their own internal logic.

HD: “Have to” would mean that Back to the Future wouldn’t go on to become the beloved franchise that it has. But it did, and you are in your own world of high-horse complaints.

BD: Okay, sure, yes, like the movies are still good and enjoyable. “Have to” was too strong. This is America. People don’t “have to” do anything. This isn’t North Korea.

HD: Exactly. Back to the Future would not fly in North Korea.

BD: But the first Back to the Future actually doesn’t have all these problems, I don’t think. It’s fairly straightforward.

HD: Boy goes back in time. Boy’s mother gets not-okay feelings for son. Son has to redirect feelings toward his utter-loser father played by “Willard.”

BD: Exactly. A story as old as time! It makes perfect sense.

HD: It does. But it’s frankly not as good. Back to the Future Part II even goes BACK to Back to the Future Part I, when Marty goes to 1955 to sneak around his first-part counterpart. It’s so cool!

BD: Okay, okay, okay. So let’s talk about that because I have a problem with that too.

HD: Of course you do.

BD: One of the rules that Doc makes clear from the beginning of this film series is that if one version of a person interacts with another version of themselves from another time, either the universal will implode or they’ll pass out from shock. This happens in Back to the Future 2 when Jennifer sees herself in their 2015 house and they both immediately pass out.

HD: I see your rule. So you’re saying that Marty in Part II should pass out when he sees Marty in Part I?

BD: Probably, but Biff definitely should! Like Old Biff has a whole talk with Young Biff about the future and the gambling almanac!

HD: Yeah, but old biff wouldn’t pass out because he was expecting to see himself. It was his plan.

BD: But young Biff would!

HD: Young Biff is an idiot.

BD: But But but but but but but but but but but but…

HD: Look, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t react well, but then Old Biff does his old curmudgeon act of like, “Shut up, you young idiot, and listen to me,” and it breaks through the space-time continuum rule. Ben, just enjoy the goddamn movie.

BD: BUT YOU JUST HELPED MY POINT. Like when Young Biff first meets Old Biff, he doesn’t believe the old man is really him from the future. Like, maybe the fact that he doesn’t believe him is why he doesn’t immediately pass out. But then Old Biff convinces him! He predicts the sports score! Why doesn’t Young Biff at least pass out then?

HD: Maybe it isn’t a rule that they pass out when they see each other, but Jennifer and her future self are just weak, perhaps due to exposure to asbestos?

BD: HAHAHAHA. Okay, fair point.

HD: But I’ll grant you that you raise some good points, Detective Ben, about the rules of time travel. But I’m going to go ahead and reiterate that no movie about time travel does not raise these issues.

BD: I think I have more than raised questions. I have pointed out undeniable logical flaws.

HD: Yes, indeed, you have. Mostly you’re saying, “Why doesn’t what they eventually do at the end of the film already take effect at the beginning of the film?” But in that case, how could what happens at the end of the film even take place? The beginnings just wouldn’t happen anymore! Then you get stuck in a loop that nobody gets out of!

BD: No! No! My biggest problems are (1) that old Marty and Jennifer are even in the future, since they disappeared in 1985. There is even a shot of loser 1985 Biff running outside of the house and seeing that they’ve disappeared.

HD: They didn’t disappear! They came back, you schmuck.

BD: But remember in the first film? When Doc demos the time machine the first time with Einstein the dog in it? Einstein is gone for a few seconds, and in that time he really is gone. They acknowledge that he is gone. They are making a rule for the universe of the film that when you are gone in time, you are gone.

HD: You are gone until you return and you can set the return time for any time! If you return to “one second after you left,” then that is when you’d come back.

BD: So you’re the person now who is saying that whatever happens in the other times just is inevitable and forgives the temporary displacement.

HD: If I went into the future right now and stayed there for a week, but then came back to the past and set my return for one minute from now, I would only be gone for one minute, Ben.

BD: Sure, but what if in that future week someone stole your time machine and went back to 1990 and convinced our parents not to have you? Then that person took the time machine and traveled back to 2015. They would arrive in a 2015 in which you were never born and you would be stuck in an alternate 2015 with no time machine to get home.

HD: I mean, I don’t think I would even be stuck in an alternate universe. I think I probably would have just disappeared into the abyss we exist in before we’re born.

BD: But the movie makes clear that there are alternate timelines! It’s like the main theory of the film! He draws it on a chalkboard!

HD: Detective, Detective, it’s true that this movie does not follow its own rules okay?! But in order to explore the very serious other points this movie succeeds at making, you have to look past the glaring time travel issues that you just can’t seem to look past.

BD: “Serious points it succeeds at making”??????????? Like WHAT? That bullying hasn’t been totally defeated as a phenomenon?

HD: Like…hoverboards, and the fact that in the future we don’t have waiters, we have robots, and that the 80s are coming back in style, and that if you let one asshole make all the money then the future is going to be all goth and awful.

BD: We still have waiters.

HD: At Chili’s we don’t. We have touch screens.

BD: Chili’s is not the future. Chili’s is an alternate future we need to escape.

HD: I’m not sure I’ve ever been to a Chili’s. But I read that Chili’s has no waiters, and the point of that article was that Back to the Future is coming true.

BD: I was at a sushi restaurant in Canada where you use iPads to order, but there were still waiters to bring you the food, and also the iPads kept screwing up, and to be honest it was terrible.

HD: CVS has you checking out yourself and airports do it too, but right now we’re in a hybrid state of having real people mixed in with robots because the robots are too stupid about HR. But it will get better and then those people will be out on the street.

BD: Okay, okay, I’ll grant you much of that.

HD: AND APPLE STORES JUST LET YOU DO IT WITH AN APP, AND APPLE IS THE FUTURE. ARGUE WITH THAT.

BD: There are Apple Geniuses! The people in the shirts!

HD: Not for long.

BD: We need to talk about a few minor things before we wrap this up. At least one thing that hasn’t come true: Jaws 19.

HD: I told a person yesterday that my dad was in Jaws, which I swear I don’t do very often, and he said, “Is that the one with the shark?” And then I thought the future looks pretty bleak for me if that trump card is going to stop working.

BD: In the Back to the Future Part II version of 2015, no one would have to ask that because they’d still be making more Jaws films.

HD: That sounds like heaven to me.

BD: But, yeah, dear reader, just in case, it is the one with the shark.

HD: And Richard Dreyfuss is the one with the beard who kills the shark and saves the movie.

BD: Jesus Christ, no. Dad doesn’t kill the shark. Roy Schieder kills the shark. I swear to god this whole family hasn’t even seen that movie.

HD: Ben, have you ever considered that you are just the black sheep of the family and that there are good reasons for that? Re: not having love in your heart for Dad and his movies or any movie? He killed the shark.

BD: I hate you.

HD: He. Killed. The. Shark.

BD: Okay, okay, he killed the shark. But let’s get back to Back to the Future Part II. There is no Jaws 19 in the real world. And, like, outside the theater the shark hologram eats Marty McFly, and we don’t really have that sort of thing at theaters now and days either.

HD: I guess in Japan they have whole concerts with just holograms because the cartoon people are so popular that they don’t need performers anymore, and Japan, like Apple, is the future.

BD: “Japan Is the Future Back to the Future 2 Promised”

HD: That resonates with me.

BD: Minus the flying cars and actual hoverboards and Jaws 19 and dehydrated food and shoes that lace themselves and jackets that dry themselves.

HD: Yeah, but they do have gum that makes your sweat smell like roses—I’m considering have some shipped over.

BD: “Japan Is the World of Pure Imagination Willy Wonka Promised”

HD: Hahahaha. I want to move there now.

BD: Okay, this seems like a good place to wrap this up.

HD: I think we settled this. You just hate movies and Back to the Future is the best.

BD: And you’re moving to Japan.

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"Back to the Future Part II" Makes No Sense

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Leo DiCaprio is already turning the Volkswagen emissions scandal into a movie

by NatishaConnah Posted on October 13, 2015

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio speaks on stage during the Global Citizen Festival. John Taggart/Reuters

Leo DiCaprio is already turning the Volkswagen emissions scandal into a movie

By on 13 Oct 2015commentsShare

Americans may not be very good at avoiding environmental devastation, but we are phenomenal at profiting from it.

Remember that Volkswagen scandal? The one where every nostalgic flower child’s favorite car company betrayed the world by cheating on emissions tests, dumping hundreds of thousands of secret pollutants into an already toxic atmosphere, and causing millions in healthcare damages? I’m guessing you do, because it literally just happened. And yet, Hollywood is already all over it.

Paramount just acquired the rights to a book about the scandal that has yet to be written, Variety reports. And, of course, our good friend and noted Earth lover Leo DiCaprio is already on board to produce, along with Jennifer Davisson Killoran. No other big names are attached to the film yet, but one can only hope that wood nymph Shailene Woodley shows up as a duped Volkswagen owner ready to let her inner rage monster out, and Werner Herzog flexes his acting muscles as a heartless Volkswagen executive. Throw in a little Rosario Dawson as a badass environmental activist, and you’ve got yourself a blockbuster hit.

Teasing aside, it’s actually pretty cool that Hollywood wants to immortalize this travesty. When Grist spoke with veritable film buff and environmental activist Narayana Angulo earlier this summer, he bemoaned the lack of narrative films about environmental issues. There are plenty of documentaries out there, he said, but not much in the way of feature films.

So good for you, Paramount. Way to recognize that it doesn’t make sense to just make sequels, prequels, and remakes until our eyes fall out and the world ends, while the actual end of the world is providing SO MUCH free material. And hey — most people will eventually just be going to the movies for the hopped up A/C, anyway. Perhaps by that point, they’ll find comfort in watching more attractive people conquer what, in their own lives, have become insurmountable problems.

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Leonardo DiCaprio to Produce Movie on Volkswagen Scandal

, Variety.

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Labor Shortage? Have You Tried Paying More?

by HuldaC56ykc Posted on August 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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The Washington Post informs us today of yet another looming labor shortage:

There’s a growing problem that chefs and restaurateurs are talking about more these days.

Good cooks are getting harder to come by. Not the head kitchen honchos, depicted in Food Network reality shows, who fine-tune menus, and orchestrate the dinner rush, but the men and women who are fresh out of culinary school and eager to earn their chops. The shortage of able kitchen hands is affecting chefs in Chicago….It’s an issue in New York as well….And it extends to restaurants out West, where a similar pinch is being felt. Seattle is coping with the same dilemma. San Francisco, too.

….One of the clearest obstacles to hiring a good cook, let alone someone willing to work the kitchen these days, is that living in this country’s biggest cities is increasingly unaffordable. In New York, for instance, where an average cook can expect to make somewhere between $10 and $12 per hour….

Let’s just stop right there. We’ve seen this movie before. What’s really happening, apparently, is that there’s a shortage of skilled people willing to work lousy hours and face long commutes in return for $10 to $12 per hour.

Offer them, say, $15 per hour, and who knows? Maybe there are plenty of good entry-level cooks available. This would raise your total cost of running the restaurant by, oh, 2 percent or so,1 but it’s not like restaurants are competing with China. They’re competing with other restaurants nearby that have the same problem. If the price of a good cook is going up, it’s going to affect everyone.

I tire of reading stories like this. Tell me what happens when employers offer more money. If they still can’t find qualified workers, then maybe there’s a real problem. If they haven’t even tried it, then maybe the problem isn’t quite as dire as they’re making it out to be.

1Back-of-envelope guess based on kitchen labor cost of 15 percent and entry-level cooks making up maybe a third of that. If 5 percent of your cost base gets a 30-40 percent raise, that’s about a 2 percent total increase.

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Labor Shortage? Have You Tried Paying More?

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These Stunning Photos Show the Urban Sky Like You’ve Never Seen It Before

by EulaMcneil816 Posted on June 13, 2015

Mother Jones

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Light pollution makes it nearly impossible for Los Angeles residents to see the stars. So a few years ago, two timelapse artists set out to show people what they’ve been missing.

As part of a book and video project called Skyglow, Harun Mehmedinovic and Gavin Heffernan photographed the night sky over places like the Grand Canyon and superimposed those images over the smoggy city lights of LA. The results are stunning, at times appearing more like paintings than photographs.

Mehmedinovic, who grew up in Bosnia, and LA-based Heffernan, originally from Canada, also captured some of the darkest places in the country, mostly national parks in the southwest. They used long exposures to let more light flood in, allowing them to show “galaxies you can’t normally see,” Heffernan says. In some cases they camped out overnight, keeping their cameras rolling for hours at a time to get enough shots for timelapse videos that depict star trails, the apparent movement of stars in the sky due to the earth’s natural rotation. In the photographs, these star trails look like streaks of light. “If you see a big circle, that means they the cameras are pointing directly north,” Heffernan explains.

The two photographs above capture a sandstone rock formation at Coyote Buttes, in Arizona. “Once upon a time, this area, like all of California, was underwater. It used to be sand, and then it all petrified, turning into rocks and stone,” says Mehmedinovic. “For millions of years, there has been wind sweeping right through that area—what you’re seeing are tooth marks of the wind.” The photograph below shows dawn over the horizon in White Pocket, also in Arizona.

The next photograph was captured in the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes of Death Valley National Park in California. “I set a camera and just happened to catch a meteorite in the back during the shoot,” says Mehmedinovic, of the vertical flash of light behind the tree. In the shot after that, a tiny sliver of the moon sets in White Pocket. The third photograph, in Socorro County, New Mexico, shows radio telescopes in the distance along the horizon. “If you’ve ever watched the movie Contact, you will have seen them, because that movie takes place in the same location,” Mehmedinovic says.

Mehmedinovic’s and Heffernan’s surreal images come to life in a series of timelapse videos. The one below, which the pair created before the Skyglow project, shows off the Vermillion Cliffs National Monument and White Pocket in Arizona. “We had a lot of storms during that shoot, so there was a lot of drama, getting stuck in the sand, trying not to get struck by lightning,” Heffernan says.

He and Mehmedinovic have already met their fundraising goal of $70,000 for the project on Kickstarter. Now, Heffernan says they’re trying to raise an additional $100,000 so they can donate 2,000 of their photobooks, which they hope to publish sometime next year, to inner-city schools and underprivileged kids, “so they can see what’s worth fighting for.”

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These Stunning Photos Show the Urban Sky Like You’ve Never Seen It Before

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Michael B. Jordan Just Slammed People Who Can’t Deal With One of The Fantastic Four Being Black—And It’s Great

by MaddisoLachance Posted on May 24, 2015

Mother Jones

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These days, when the fate of the world hangs in the balance, the superheroes that end up saving the day are normally straight, white men—at least on the big screen.

While Marvel’s comics have become increasingly more diverse over the years with a half-black, half-Hispanic Spiderman and a female version of Thor, its cinematic universe remains largely male and whitewashed. This is why the backlash to Michael B. Jordan being cast in the highly-anticipated reboot of Fantastic Fouris so disheartening. When the actor was originally confirmed to play Johnny Storm a.k.a the Human Torch, naysayers took to social media to complain about the black actor would be playing a traditionally white character. (When TMZ asked what he thought of the criticism, Jordan quipped: “They’re still going to see the movie anyway.”)

Attention, trolls and comic book purists: The idea that Jordan shouldn’t be Johnny Storm because he’s black is misguided, because, you know, comic books are fictional and so are the movies. Anyone can fill these roles and do a great job (see Idris Elba as a Norse god in Thor).

In an essay published Friday in Entertainment Weekly, Jordan slammed people who are having a hard time accepting that in the new movie only three of the fantastic four are white.

This is a family movie about four friends—two of whom are myself and Kate Mara as my adopted sister—who are brought together by a series of unfortunate events to create unity and a team. That’s the message of the movie, if people can just allow themselves to see it.

Sometimes you have to be the person who stands up and says, “I’ll be the one to shoulder all this hate. I’ll take the brunt for the next couple of generations.” I put that responsibility on myself. People are always going to see each other in terms of race, but maybe in the future we won’t talk about it as much. Maybe, if I set an example, Hollywood will start considering more people of color in other prominent roles, and maybe we can reach the people who are stuck in the mindset that “it has to be true to the comic book.” Or maybe we have to reach past them.

To the trolls on the Internet, I want to say: Get your head out of the computer. Go outside and walk around. Look at the people walking next to you. Look at your friends’ friends and who they’re interacting with. And just understand this is the world we live in. It’s okay to like it.

Let’s sum up Jordan’s smackdown in one line: The Human Torch is whatever Marvel says it is. You can see how Jordan does in theaters on August 7.

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Michael B. Jordan Just Slammed People Who Can’t Deal With One of The Fantastic Four Being Black—And It’s Great

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Religous Zealot Would Like to Talk to You For a Minute About the Drought

by TiaJobsonzedf Posted on May 10, 2015

Mother Jones

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As you may know, there is a drought in California. The water? It’s gone! The state? It’s dry! The consequences? Very bad, indeed.

Where did the water go? I have no idea. I’m not a private detective who specializes in missing water.

Why did the water leave? No clue. Maybe it’s climate change or almonds or squirrels or people or agricultural blah blah blah. Maybe the water saw Thelma & Louise and got inspired. Again: If you’re looking for answers, you’re reading the wrong writer. But you know who else has no idea why the drought happened? This idiot.

Conservative journalist Bill Koenig suggested that the drought in California is a result of the state’s support for same-sex marriage and abortion rights: “We’ve got a state that over and over again will go against the word of God, that will continually take positions on marriage and abortion and on a lot of things that are just completely opposed to the scriptures and unfortunately a lot of times when it starts in California it spreads to the rest of the country and even spreads to the rest of the world. So there very likely could be a drought component to this judgment.”

The end-times crowd always does this whenever there is a natural disaster or terror attack or anything. They always finger the same suspect. Gay people. 9/11? Gays. Katrina? Gays. Drought? Gays.

Social conservatives are the guy in the movie theater who keeps whispering to his friends, “I KNOW WHO DID IT.”

Pundit blames California’s catastrophic drought on the gays. http://t.co/Xt101dJfKz

— HuffPost Green (@HuffPostGreen)

The thing is, the lunatic premise that God is punishing California for being less inhospitable to gays than Bill Koenig would like wouldn’t even lead to the conclusion that the drought is the fault of gays and LGBT allies in California. The conclusion it would lead to is: it’s God’s fault.

If someone stole some fruit and the store manager caught them and punished them by murdering their entire family and everyone they’d ever met, the headline would not be, “Millions Dead, Fruit Thief Blamed,” it would be, “Maniac Murders Millions.” The fruit thief wouldn’t even be mentioned until the fifth paragraph.

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Religous Zealot Would Like to Talk to You For a Minute About the Drought

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Watch: Maggie Gyllenhaal Just Gave a Perfect Golden Globes Speech

by PenelopO37 Posted on January 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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Maggie Gyllenhaal is great. She just won the Best Actress in a Miniseries or TV Movie Golden Globe for “The Honourable Woman.” Her speech was perfect.

“I’ve noticed a lot of people talking about the wealth of roles for powerful women in television lately. And when I look around the room at the women who are here and I think about the performances that I’ve watched this year what I see actually are women who are sometimes powerful and sometimes not, sometimes sexy, sometimes not, sometimes honorable, sometimes not, and what I think is new is the wealth of roles for actual women in television and in film. That’s what I think is revolutionary and evolutionary and it’s what’s turning me on.”

Watch, watch, watch:

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Watch: Maggie Gyllenhaal Just Gave a Perfect Golden Globes Speech

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Jessica Chastain Hits Back at Russell Crowe’s Denial of Hollywood’s Ageism Problem

by Sheeritwern Posted on January 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Jessica Chastain is firing back at comments made by actor Russell Crowe, after he attempted to explain why there aren’t enough roles for women over the age of 40 by blaming unrealistic, female desires to only play the hot young thing.

Crowe’s controversial comments came during a recent interview with Australian Women’s Weekly:

The best thing about the industry I’m in – movies – is that there are roles for people in all different stages of life. To be honest, I think you’ll find that the woman who is saying that (the roles have dried up) is the woman who at 40, 45, 48, still wants to play the ingénue and can’t understand why she’s not being cast as the 21 year old.

In response to Crowe’s victim-blaming away Hollywood’s well-documented ageism problem, Chastain told reporters, “Russell keeps getting his foot stuck in his mouth!”

“There are some incredible actresses in their 50s and 60s that are not getting opportunities in film, and for someone to say there are plenty of roles for women that age, that is not someone who’s going to the movie theater,” she added.

Riding to Crowe’s defense, however, is 18-time Academy Award nominee Meryl Streep:

I read what he said — all of what he said. It’s been misappropriated, what he was talking about. He was talking about himself. The journalist asked him, ‘Why don’t you do another ‘Gladiator,’ you know, everybody loved that.’ He said, ‘I’m too old. I can’t be the gladiator anymore. I’m playing parts that are appropriate to my age. Then the conversation went on to actresses. So that was proving a point, that he was talking about himself, as most actors do. That aside, I agree with him. It’s good to live in the place where you are. You can put old age on; it’s a lot harder to take it off.

But as Jezebel points out, Streep is not dismissing the charge that Hollywood lacks roles for older women—she has spoken out against both sexism and ageism in the film industry on numerous occasions. Streep is suggesting actors in general play their own age. Chastain is saying that many great actresses aren’t given that opportunity.

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Jessica Chastain Hits Back at Russell Crowe’s Denial of Hollywood’s Ageism Problem

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Hollywood Backstabbing Over "The Interview" Now in Full Swing

by AthenaRucker Posted on December 24, 2014

Mother Jones

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We all heard yesterday that Sony Pictures made a last-minute decision to release The Interview on Christmas after all, thanks to pleas from a couple hundred independent theaters that agreed at the last minute to defy Kim Jong-un and show it. So the honor of Western civilization is saved and everyone is happy. Right?

The film’s limited release drives a further wedge between Sony and the nation’s largest theater owners, who blame the studio for yanking away a potential hit. It was supposed to open on 3,000 screens before Sony and theater chains shelved the movie.

Theater owners are also upset that Sony is negotiating to release the movie simultaneously on a video-on-demand platform….“They could have a full theatrical release. Instead they have a token,” said one theater executive who asked not to be identified because it could harm his relationship with the studio.

Wait. What? I thought this whole fiasco had been driven in the first place by the refusal of big theater chains to show the movie amid fears of terrorist retaliation. So what are they all griping about?

The disagreement over a digital release played into larger tensions between Sony and theater owners after hackers last week threatened physical harm on moviegoers who saw “The Interview.”….Worried about a potential threat, Sony said it canceled the movie after large chains backed away from the film.

But theater owners have been pointing the finger at the studio for originally giving them the OK to not run the film amid the threats. Then Sony blamed the nation’s four big theater chains for forcing the studio to cancel the original release….Representatives of Regal, AMC, Cinemark and Carmike declined to comment on the matter.

OK, I guess I’m officially confused. Did Sony cancel the Christmas release date of The Interview because malls and theater chains were desperate to back out of showing it? Or did malls and theater chains back out because Sony had implicitly urged them to do so when it gave the chains permission to break their contractual commitments to show the movie? Or are both sides now just furiously trying to shift blame after being called out for cowardice by everyone from George Clooney to President Obama?

The latter, I suppose. In any case, now I know what I want for Christmas: A country that doesn’t spin into a damn tizzy over every little thing. From Ebola to ISIS to the Sony hack, you’d think we were all at risk of losing our lives to outside forces every time we step off our front porches. In the immortal words of Aaron Rodgers, can we all please R-E-L-A-X?

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Hollywood Backstabbing Over "The Interview" Now in Full Swing

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Lucy and the Great 10% Myth

by KelleePulido Posted on July 30, 2014

Mother Jones

Andrew Sullivan reminds me of something I was curious about the other day. He quotes Jeffrey Kluger, who writes in Time that he’s annoyed with the movie Lucy because it perpetuates the ridiculous myth that we only use 10 percent of our brains. I sympathize. I was sort of annoyed just by seeing that in the trailer. But it did make me wonder: where did this urban legend come from, anyway? Wikipedia to the rescue:

One possible origin is the reserve energy theories by Harvard psychologists William James and Boris Sidis…William James told audiences that people only meet a fraction of their full mental potential….In 1936, American writer Lowell Thomas summarized this idea….”Professor William James of Harvard used to say that the average man develops only ten percent of his latent mental ability.”

In the 1970s, psychologist and educator Georgi Lozanov, proposed the teaching method of suggestopedia believing “that we might be using only five to ten percent of our mental capacity.”….According to a related origin story, the 10% myth most likely arose from a misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of neurological research in the late 19th century or early 20th century. For example, the functions of many brain regions (especially in the cerebral cortex) are complex enough that the effects of damage are subtle, leading early neurologists to wonder what these regions did.

Huh. So we don’t really know for sure. That’s disappointing but not surprising. It’s remarkable how often we don’t know where stuff like this comes from.

As for its continuing popular resonance, I have a theory of my own. There are an awful lot of people out there with remarkable—and apparently innate—mental abilities. They can multiply enormous numbers in their heads. They can remember every day of their lives. That kind of thing. And yet, they operate normally in other regards. The fact that they’ve stored, say, distinct memories of the past 15,000 days of their lives doesn’t seem to take up any cerebral space or energy that they needed for anything else. So surely all that storage and retrieval capacity is just sitting around unused in the rest of us?

No, it’s not. But the idea resonates because freakish mental skills seem to be so much further out on the bell curve than freakish physical skills. It makes the whole 10 percent thing seem pretty plausible. And that’s why it sticks around.

POSTSCRIPT: Or does it? I mean, has anyone tried to find out how many people still believe this myth? For all I know, everyone has long been aware that it’s not true. We need a poll!

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Lucy and the Great 10% Myth

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