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Monthly Archives: June 2016
What The Supreme Court and The Jedi Council Have in Common
Adam Gopnik recently wrote about “Lessons for the Supreme Court from the Jedi Council.” In that article, he puts forward the idea that just as the denizens of the Star Wars universe “seem[] to have an undue cultural investment in the wisdom of the Jedi Council, even in the face of its ineptitude,” so to do Americans unduly venerate a Supreme Court whose inner workings appear “more like the manufacture of after-the-fact rationales designed to give the appearance of footnoted legalism to what are, in truth, the same ideological passions that have the rest of the country in their grip.” Gopnik disclaims the concept of textual interpretation, maintaining that our nation’s highest judicial body resembles its intergalactic counterpart in how it “seems to be functioning on guesswork and mutual hypnosis more than actual expertise.” Accordingly, he concludes that neither the Jedi Council nor the Supreme Court should be afforded nearly so much deference or respect.
The question becomes whether these two august bodies are enough alike to justify such a comparison or conclusion. There are certainly similarities between the two. In The Phantom Menace, the Jedi Council decides, after much deliberation, that Anakin Skywalker should not be trained in the ways of The Force. But Qui Gon Jin (and later Obi Wan Kenobi in his stead) defy that order and decide to teach the boy anyway. In the real world, after the Supreme Court held that same-sex marriage was a right under the Constitution, Texas’s Attorney General soon thereafter announced that despite that decision, under his interpretation Texas officials did not have to abide by the ruling. In both the Star Wars universe and our own, prominent officials have taken Gopnik’s advice to heart and feel free to ignore the high court’s decisions.
Posted in Movies, Sci-Fi Movies
Tagged George Lucas, Law, Star Wars, The Jedi Council, The Supreme Court
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Game of Thrones: The Great and Terrible “Battle of the Bastards”
Game of Thrones is a show that thrives on violence. Its past installments featuring that sort of visceral thrill — from Ned Stark’s beheading to the various battles that have made up the series’ “special event” episodes — certainly tell complete stories, but they don’t skimp on the swords and sangre to help fill them out. Westeros is a world founded on violence, one where those in power gained it and kept it by waging war, killing, and trafficking in the kind of brutality that wins kingdoms and helps break ratings records.
So when Dany mounts Drogon and leads her tripartite crew of dragons off to destroy the slavers’ fleet, it initially feels new and different, since the winged-beast confrontations in the show so far have largely been limited in scope. It is, however, part and parcel with the show’s standard M.O. when it comes to death and destruction. The dragons’ attack on the fleet works well as a fist-pump moment, not only because it’s the first time the show’s depicted all three of them engage in this type of badassery (give or take a Qarth), but because the audience largely believes in Dany and her cause. Flames raining down from the sky, dispatched to guarantee that Meereen never again becomes a land of slavers, feels righteous.
But then there’s that little voice in the back of your head, the one that says the people on those ships are probably slaves too, not devoted perpetrators of evil. The attack may be a necessary evil. It is a show of force to ensure that the other masters of Slaver’s Bay don’t get any ideas and meant to guarantee that they think twice before challenging Dany’s regime.
Game of Thrones Explores the Symmetry of Westeros and its People in “No One”
For a several years now, Game of Thrones had a fairly reliable format for the structure of its episodes. We spend ten minutes in one location advancing one character’s story, ten minutes in another, and so forth and so on with little repetition beyond the possibility of some sort of coda for one of the stories at the end of the episode. But the show has been playing around with that format this season (with cold opens, longer segments, and other differences) and that trend continues in “No One.”
Instead of a semi-linear progression from place to place, there’s something approaching symmetry to the order in which we visit our heroes across Westeros and beyond. The episode begins with trips to Braavos, The Riverlands, and Meereen, and finishes by returning to these same places and stories in reverse order. The middle portion of the episode comes close to doing the same thing with stops in King’s Landing and Riverrun.
So why the symmetry?
Posted in Game of Thrones, Television
Tagged Arya Stark, Brienne of Tarth, Cersei Lannister, Edmure Tully, Episode Reviews, Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones S06E08, Game of Thrones Season 6, Greyworm, Jamie Lannister, Missandrei, Symmetry, The Brotherhood Without Banners, The Faceless Men, The Hound, Tyrion Lannister
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Ranking: Every Pixar Movie From Worst to Best
With the release of Finding Dory, Andrew Bloom joins Dominick Suzanne-Mayer, Allison Shoemaker, and Derrick Rossignol to rank all of Pixar’s feature films.
Posted in Animated Films, Movies
Tagged Cars, Cars 2, Inside Out, Pixar, Ratatouille, Toy Story, Toy Story 3
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Game of Thrones: The Broken People, Places, and Things in “Broken Man”
We don’t know who’s pulling the strings that tie the different corners of Westeros together. It may be the Old Gods; it may be The Seven; it may be the Drowned God; or it may be the Lord of Light. Septon Ray suggests they may all be different names for the same thing. But whoever has that power has left any number of those in Westeros and beyond in some sort of weakened state. They’ve taken away people’s strength, sapped them of their power and position, and left them, in a word, “broken.”
How Daredevil’s Season 2 Finale Dragged the Whole Season Down
What is it, to be a cheesy voiceover montage in the last moments of a season finale? Do you have to try to sum up an entire season’s worth of themes using vague doublespeak and an army of cliches? Will you narrate over clips of our heroes looking vaguely sad or frustrated in the vain hope of wringing some pathos out of this big hunk of corn pone? Must you include strange or cryptic teases for future seasons or series? Or can you just speak in platitudes about heroism and strength and hope that somewhere in that stew of hokum you stumble onto some mild profundity?
Game of Thrones: The Familial Bonds that Bolster and Break Us in “Blood of My Blood”
“Blood of My Blood.” The title gives it away. Though Game of Thrones is frequently centered on the idea of familial legacy, this episode in particular focuses on the bonds of family, the connections between parents and children and the other ties of kinship that can both pull us into place and break our hearts. These are the people who can save us, help us, make us stronger, but who also have a unique capacity to wound us, to frustrate us, and to unravel us.
Nowhere does “Blood of My Blood” explore the different sides of this idea more than in Sam’s return to his childhood home. Despite the smaller stakes and lack of major reveals as compared with the rest of the episode, Sam’s homecoming proved to be the best part “Blood of My Blood.” Game of Thrones spends most of its of time focused on the larger machinations of the plot in one form or another. Even when it’s not devoting time to the dragons or magic or other fantastical elements of Westeros, the show anchors itself around the titular game of thrones, as different players vie for power and an the existential threat comes from the north.
Despite this, Sam’s visit home has the feeling of something apart from the major story arc that drives the series. There’s no magic at play in Horn Hill. And while this brief stop is intended as a respite for Sam, Gilly, and Sam Jr. on the way to the Citadel, where Sam intends to earn his maester’s chain and ostensibly help Jon, there’s also little larger relevance to the detour when it comes to the show’s overarching plots. Instead, these scenes with Sam’s family offer a quiet character study, one whose chief purpose is to tell us more about who Sam is, where he came from, and what he’s become since he left home.
