Ever since the infamous Supreme Court “Citizens United” decision, Stephen Colbert has been engaged in a piece of long-running, high-concept political theater – creating his own flagrantly-corrupt “SuperPAC” to raise money for his own not-at-all-directly-coordinated political career – to point out the absurd possibilities of the new campaign laws.

As of last week, the performance has entered a new act: Colbert will run for president in the South Carolina Republican primary, while an “unaffiliated” party – Jon Stewart – will take over Colbert SuperPAC, making it “legal” for the SuperPAC’s funds to be spent on Colbert’s campaign… a legal manuver that required only ONE document to be signed. The point, of course, is to point out how simple it would be for a REAL campaign to pull the same basic shennanigans.

In any case, “Colbert SuperPAC” has released it’s first ad, targeted at Colbert’s “opponent” Mitt Romney, that joins in the chorus continuing to slap Romeny around for the “corporations are people” line: If Mitt thinks corporations are people, argues the ad, his time as a Venture Capitalist (read: corporate raider) makes him a serial killer:

Another exceptionally busy – but extremely rewarding – day down at Arisia. MANY thanks to fans who turned up to say “hi” at the Gender in Gaming, PC Gaming panels. More details, naturally, when I get settled back home on Monday night (or Tuesday morning.)

Anyway! Proving once again that the BEST kind of politician is a politician facing a “base versus base” re-election fight, the Obama Administration has come out against the SOPA bill… and was subsequently dissed for doing so by Rupert Murdoch. Like I said, Election 2012 is reliable-base versus reliable-base (neither party has a record worth running on, so the strategy on both sides will be to fight so dirty that the only people who’ll show up to vote will be the pre-decided base) so big, sweeping “stuff that’s popular with my likely supporters” moves are the name of the game. Score one for the good guys.

Since I know someone is already prepping the “b-b-b-but the NDAA!!!!” response, here’s my take on that: It sucks, it’s scary, I hate it… but I also recognize that ANY electable U.S. politician would’ve signed it at this point in time regardless of party. Speaking only for myself, MY calculation goes like this: Right now, the NDAA would be unlikely to survive a challenge at the Supreme Court, and will get even LESS likely to survive with each new “liberal” justice that could potentially be appointed in Obama’s second term… BUT, should the Republicans re-take the Presidency, the judges they’d be likely to appoint could easily swing the Court toward UPHOLDING the NDAA.

For me, this is the ultimate “politics for grownups” realization: You don’t elect presidents as “leaders,” you elect them as MASCOTS – vanguards of a broad party/political-philosophy. NOTHING is more important in modern (and forseeable-future) American law than the makeup of the Supreme Court and Federal Bench, and only Presidents can appoint judges. That’s why it doesn’t matter what Obama (or Romney, or whoever else) “says” they believe about abortion, gay-marriage, etc – they WILL appoint Judges who’ll side either with the broad-liberal or broad-conservative narrative, and THAT will decide the course of countless future laws.

George W. Bush replaced two right-wing Supremes with two more right-wing Supremes. If ANY liberal/democrat/progressive politician had been President instead, we’d have an UNSTOPPABLY-progressive, secular, pro-science, pro-reason, anti-tradition-for-tradition’s-sake Supreme Court and would be living in (IMHO) a vastly better America as a result. THAT – above all else – decides who I support and how I vote. Not men. Not character. Not even speeches or promises. Judges, judges, judges.

Day one at Arisia went swimmingly. Now to breakfast and trying NOT to make an ass of myself at the Gender & Gaming panel.

Anyway, here’s a trailer for Peter Jackson’s “West Memphis Three” doc:

There’s a minor controversy surrounding this one, of course, as it’s seen in some quarters as taking away from the OTHER recent doc on the same subject by the filmmakers whose earlier two pieces on the subject more-or-less turned the case into an international cause; but Jackson and company are no mere latecoming interlopers: Upon the recent release of the three men, it was revealed that they (Jackson, Fran Walsh and their partners) had been putting up a BIG chunk of the money that went into the new legal push that finally put things right.

Hey all!

As mentioned before, I am now checked in at ARISIA 2012 and am prepping for my first panel as we speak. Here’s a quick rundown of panels/events where I’m schedule to appear (whole schedule available HERE) and any fans/viewers in attendance are welcome to say “hi!”

Friday 5:30 PM – “E.T. at 30.”
Friday 7:00 PM – “The Future of Bioethics as Portrayed in Film”
Friday 8:30 PM – “Batman Through the Ages”
Friday 10:00 PM – “More Terrible SF/F Movies We Love”

Saturday 10:00 AM – “Gender and Video Games”
Saturday 1:00 PM – “Monsters in Motion: Harryhausen at Work”
Saturday 4:00 PM – “If You Liked Part 1…”
Saturday 10:00 PM – “The Death of PC Gaming May Be Greatly Exaggerated”

Sunday 1:00 PM – “Wonder Woman”
Sunday 10:00 PM – “Marvel Movies”

Monday 10:00 AM – “Star Wars at 35”
Monday 11:30 AM – “MST3K: The Panel”
Monday 1:00 PM – “The Alien as Metaphor”

Review is found HERE.

“Intermission” finishes-up the anticipation game.

The only thing more irritating, in the 21st century, than people overly-fixated on their own historical victimhood are people overly-fixated on their own imagined historical victimhood.

“Men’s Rights Activism” (MRA) has probably always existed in one form or another, but it got supercharged by The Internet because – shocker! – there’s a lot of undersexed, pathologically-aggrieved men in the anyonymous realm of web forums. The “public face” of MRA is, of course, typically presented in the context of legal arguments about fathers disenfranchised by custody hearings or the ever-dreaded boogeyman of Affirmative Action; but a short amount of web-digging exposes just how sinister the movement’s thriving “base” actually is – a toxic stew of half-baked evolutionary-psych jargon, beta-male sexual-frustration and right-wing backlash against “the feminization of the culture”… the white-hot rage of a middle-aged child-support dodger filtered through the sophistication of a cootie-phobic six year-old.

My colleague Jim Sterling highlights a particularly horrifying-yet-hillarious exchange currently going down on an MRA forum involving video-games. Give it a read.

Money quote, sampled from the larger rant of the MRA forum’s original poster:

“I think I have the right to ask steam and other gaming companes: WTF with the subliminal brainwashing? What now when I buy or play a game women will be doing all the ass kicking? I seen some similiar patterns on the game advertisements on television and the internet recently and want to know if anyone else is seeing the pattern?


I call bullshit on this subject. Video games are the last place for guys to hang out and now women are taking over. Why not just save us the trouble and instead of eliminating our fantasy world just throw us in work camp to provide for thier bastard children (literally speaking) while they shit all over us…wait they already do that.”

That last part with the “work camps” is a pretty good primer on where the “bottom” of the MRA rabbit hole is – it’s an article of faith with these folks that “feminism” is actually a conspiracy of power-hungry women to trick/seduce “real man” (read: men who buy into MRA doctrine) into impregnating them and paying child support while they and their “feminized men” (read: men who have sex more often than MRA believers) go about their mission of stealing men’s high-paying jobs and “taking over” the culture; with the logical extreme being some kind of matriarchal men-as-cattle dystopia.

For me, an extra dollop of hillarity is to be found in the fact that the ENTIRETY of “Men’s Rights Activism” was both predicted and parodied by, of all things, “Married With Children” over a DECADE ago. What, have we already forgotten about “NO MA’AM?”

Another take was offered by my friend and editor Susan Arendt, here.

The trailer for Wes Anderson’s latest – in which the twee, quirky residents of a twee, quirky seaside town awkwardly pursue a twee, quirky 12 year-old couple who’ve run off together in advance of a coming storm – looks kind of like a cross between an NPR dramatization and a live-action/period version of “Peanuts.”

Oh, calm down. I kid because I love. I’m interested to see how Anderson’s signature style works with the kids-who-seem-like-adults angle rather than the adult-children routine he more-typically operates from.

Film geeks who haven’t seen “Room 666” should definitely put it on their must-watch list. It’s a documentary, shot at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982, wherein filmmaker Wim Wenders asks a laundry-list of prominent filmmakers in attendance (including Jean Luc Goddard, Steven Spielberg, Werner Herzog, Fassbinder, Antonioni, etc) to briefly opine of the future of movies. The responses range from hopeful to depressing to to strange (first thing out of Herzog’s mouth: “I think I’ll start by taking off my shoes. You can’t answer a question like that with your shoes on.”) but surprisingly the guy who really seems to “call it” is the (relative) youngster Spielberg.

For context, at the time of this interview “E.T.” had been filmmed but not yet widely-released…

I can’t decide if it’s more spooky or LESS spooky that this prediction is coming to us courtesy the executive producer of “Transformers.”

“South Park” witticism aside, I’ve always thought that the “George Clooney is soooo smug!” thing is a little overstated and probably has less to do with his “attitude” and more to do with his actual accomplishments – he really is that good an actor, he really is also a damn good director, he really does have that good an eye for screenplays and he really is aging more gracefully than you probably will. Damn him.

In any case, he’s setting up his next writer/director/star project; and it’s one I’ve been waiting for: an adaptation of Robert M. Edsel’s “The Monuments Men.”

The so-called “Monuments Men” remain one of the great unsung stories of World War II heroism, and it’s easy to see how their story appeals to Clooney’s well-established aesthetic, topical and even socio-political sensibilities – it’s period drama with a (potential) dash of action/adventure about the importance of preserving art and culture, whose heroes were primarily educators and intellectuals as opposed to “regular joe” men-of-action.

Officially formed in 1943 on the orders of General Eisenhower himself, the Monuments, Fine Arts & Archives Program of the Allied armies were set up on the premise that restoring (and preventing further destruction of) Europe’s artistic and cultural heritage during the war was a vital component of the Allied efforts. Select groups of art historians, professors and other experts were dispatched to areas of conflict (often behind enemy lines and ahead of ground-troops) with orders to help hunt down and properly catalogue/return art-treasures stolen by the Nazis AND to ensure that priceless statues and architectural works were not seriously damaged in bombing raids. It’s hard to imagine such an effort being mounted today – the outcry from both the culture-hating Tea Party (“wasteful spending!! only ELITES care about art!!!”) and likely also a good deal of the Left (“Save people, not paintings!!!”) would be defening.

Clooney’s film will apparently focus on the hunt for stolen/looted artworks in Nazi strongholds following D-Day, but I’d hope they squeeze in some of the combat-period scenarios: One of the MFAA’s most dramatic successes was the re-taking of Florence – where precision-mapmaking by Monuments Men experts allowed Allied planes to bomb the Nazi occupation-forces into submission while avoiding damage to a remarkable number of priceless buildings, statues, frescos, etc. This was actually a subtle plot-point in “Inglorious Basterds” – we learn, during the Nazi propaganda movie about his actions, that Frederick Zoeller (the seemingly-sympathetic German sniper) was able to maintain his position because the American general had been ordered not to destroy the famous tower which he (Zoeller) was using as a sniper’s-nest.