John Scalzi parses the history to determine whether The Dark Knight will earn itself an Oscar nomination. The short answer: yes.
It’s only been 30 years since the ‘78 Superman graduated superheroes out of serials and B-movies; the Academy, notoriously conservative, might still not be ready.
But I think it will be. Here’s my prediction: Yes, The Dark Knight will be nominated for Best Picture, and I suspect Nolan and Ledger will also get Oscar nods and the film will also snatch tons of technical nominations.
Read the whole thing to get the full analysis. I’m pretty much in agreement with him.
In most professions, if you completely screw up your job so badly that you end up almost killing someone, that is grounds for termination. But not in the world of law enforcement. No, in the world of law enforcement, screwing up and almost killing innocent people is grounds for a medal. The indispensible Radley Balko has the scoop:
Last December, I posted about a botched SWAT raid on an innocent Minnesota family. Acting on bad information from an informant, the police threw flash grenades though the family’s windows, then exchanged gunfire with Vang Khang, who mistook the police for criminal intruders. Seven months later, no one in the police department has been held accountable for the mistakes leading up to the raid.
However, this week Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan and Mayor R.T. Rybak did give the raiding officers medals and commendations for their bravery in nearly killing Vang Khang, his wife, and their six children.
Read the whole thing for more, especially the part about how this is not the first time this has happened.
This is, plain and simple, an outrage. Not only should the officers have been investigated for this incident (which they haven’t been), the idea that they should be commended for it shows a profound disconnect between police and their communities. What’s worse is that it provides perverse incentives. What’s the point in being an honest, decent cop if it’s botching the job horribly that gets you the medal?
Police officers have a rough job, and the vast majority of them do their jobs while still trying to be decent human beings. But they’re not gods. When the system is set up so that mistakes are rewarded, and the idea that cops are somehow above or better than the communities they police is promulgated from the top, it takes a lot of strength to buck the trend and do the right thing. We’re better off reforming law enforcement institutions. From the top.
Recently, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull star Shia LeBeouf was in the news because of his involvement in a car accident. He had sustained minor physical injury and minor reputational injury when he was charged of DUI, even though he was found not at fault for the wreck. There was another incident, of course, when a Fail to Appear warrant was issued stemming from a smoking violation and yet another run-in when he was arrested for trespassing.
All of this is relatively minor and with the exception of the DUI, has been taken care of. But this begs to question if all fast-rising stars are doomed to controversey greater than your average person? LeBeouf, aside from these minor indescretions, has seemed to handle the pressure of his status rather well. That is to say, I haven’t noticed him much in the news. My standard is reasonable too, I think, because I don’t subscribe to any tabloids or other exploitative material. Namely, he’s no Lindsay Lohan. And I give him a little more leeway than her because he is a bigger star. I think scandal should be proportional to status. He is low on the scandal meter while relatively middle to middle-high in status. Whereas Lohan has achieved greater status due in part to her scandals.
Yet it makes me wonder, do celebrities act out our expectations of them? It’s an interesting question. Likewise, today, Yahoo! posted the indictment of Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens. Do politicians also perform as expected of their constituency? Are we, the public, partially to blame for this? ‘Cause it seems to me that there is a dark desire for these things to happen. Anyone who overhears the watercooler gossip and witness just how joyful people seem in the plight of others knows that this is at least partially true. Either public tabloid gossip, or more intimate, personal gossip, their seems to come some sort of pleasure from the pain of others.
Now, it could be that the spotlight merely attracts those susceptible to corruption. Stereotypes sometimes have grains of truth. I just wonder what would happen if we had greater expectations. What if we took a little more responsibility for each other?
File this under the burgeoning pile of evidence that life is not a romantic comedy. If it was, this plot would not have ended in jail time, but rather a comical series of escapades in which the girl finally came to her senses and got back together with her ex.
Scientific American has a terrific interview with associate professor of kinesiology and neuroscience E. Paul Zehr as to whether Batman is a plausible hero. Here’s some tidbits:
What’s most plausible about portrayals of Batman’s skills?
You could train somebody to be a tremendous athlete and to have a significant martial arts background, and also to use some of the gear that he has, which requires a lot of physical prowess. Most of what you see there is feasible to the extent that somebody could be trained to that extreme. We’re seeing that kind of thing in less than a month in the Olympics.
[...]
How long would Bruce Wayne have to train to become Batman?
In some of the timelines you see in the comics, the backstory is he goes away for five years—some it’s three to five years, or eight years, or 12 years. In terms of the physical changes (strength and conditioning), that’s happening fairly quickly. We’re talking three to five years. In terms of the physical skills to be able to defend himself against all these opponents all the time, I would benchmark that at 10 to 12 years. Probably the most reality-based representation of Batman and his training was in Batman Begins.
Here’s an interesting tidbit–apparently there has been an increasing trend of parents putting off their children’s schooling by a year so they can enter Kindergarten as six-year-olds. The idea is that this will give them a leg up on their peers, because they are older and therefore better able to handle the material. As it turns out, though, this appears to actually hinder educational development.
Forty years ago, 96% of six-year-old children were enrolled in first grade or above. As of 2005, the figure was just 84%. The school attendance rate of six-year-olds has not decreased; rather, they are increasingly likely to be enrolled in kindergarten rather than first grade. This paper documents this historical shift. We show that only about a quarter of the change can be proximately explained by changes in school entry laws; the rest reflects “academic redshirting,” the practice of enrolling a child in a grade lower than the one for which he is eligible. We show that the decreased grade attainment of six-year-olds reverberates well beyond the kindergarten classroom. Recent stagnation in the high school and college completion rates of young people is partly explained by their later start in primary school. The relatively late start of boys in primary school explains a small but significant portion of the rising gender gaps in high school graduation and college completion. Increases in the age of legal school entry intensify socioeconomic differences in educational attainment, since lower-income children are at greater risk of dropping out of school when they reach the legal age of school exit.
Apollo 14 Astronaut Edgar Mitchell is making headlines for claiming that the United States government has been covering up evidence of encounters with extraterrestrials:
Of course, lots of people have been claiming this same thing for years, but none of those people ever walked on the moon. But while Mitchell’s work in NASA might give him a bit more credibility than your average UFO nut, you have to wonder why he’s coming forward now? And, given his connections, why hasn’t he actually provided any evidence for his assertion?
My theory? It’s all just viral marketing for the DVD release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Why else would he claim that aliens really did crash at Roswell?
If, like me, you were floored by the Watchmen trailer which played before The Dark Knight, then do yourself a favor and check out io9’s coverage of the Watchmen panel at the San Diego Comicon. Here’s a tidbit:
[PATRICK] WILSON:
On Dan Dreiberg:
I love Dan. I miss Dan. You always pull for Dan. You want him to pull through. He’s flabby. He’s morose. He’s down on his luck. He’s lost. He’s all these really negative words, when you look at the first few panels, especially.
When Rorschach and I go down to the Owl Chamber (in the graphic novel), there’s a shot of him saying, “You don’t think that’ s a little paranoid?” And there’s a little smile on his face. That’s a whole different level when you get to see the artwork [than just reading a script]. It’s not like I try do the same poses, but that helped me so such to see that the guy who’s so down… still has a light. You see this sense of smile, these shots in the graphic novel that he’s smiling and you see him fighting for it. That’s something that keyed me into Dan. The relationship he has with Hollis, trying to find out how he adjusted to the post-superhero life, you pull for the guy the entire time. And once you got on board, those first few scenes was a rollercoaster. Every time you put on the suit, you look like a badass and you feel like a badass. And that must be how Dan feels. Obviously you feel like a man, for obvious reasons. It gives him an identity. It’s just awesome.
It really sounds like the cast and crew have “got it” when it comes to Watchmen. Read the whole thing.
Sometimes I think I am living in a nightmare. All about me, standards are collapsing, manners are evaporating, people show no respect for themselves. I am not a moralistic nut. I’m proud of the X-rated movie I once wrote. I like vulgarity if it’s funny or serves a purpose. But what is going on here?
I have a similar response to a lot of movies. Too many modern comedies are, for my taste, way too mean to be funny. I prefer comedies in the traditional sense of the term–movies with happy endings that make you feel good about the world we live in. One brilliant example of the subversion of mean-spirited comedy is actually found in the re-make of Get Smart (read our review here). There is a scene where Agent 99 is engaged in a highly sensual dance with a suspected KAOS agent. In response to the dance, Maxwell Smart decides to get out on the floor, too. He chooses as his dance partner a large woman (played with aplomb by the wonderful Lindsay Hollister). Now, a lesser comedy would have made this a clumsy, embarrassing event filled with tasteless fat jokes. Instead, the filmmakers here showed that both Max and his partner danced with grace and subtlety, and in so doing they won over the crowd by outdancing the “hot” couple. Now that’s comedy. It was funny, not because it mocked the big girl, but because it subverted our expectations–who knew she could dance? That’s not only entertaining, but it also forces use to laugh at ourselves and our own prejudices. (see also Blazing Saddles)
Just in case your were wondering, the FBI would like to assure everybody that they don’t have Tesla’s Death Ray.
Myth #10) The FBI has Nikola Tesla’s plans for a “death ray.”
If you don’t know the name, Nikola Tesla was a prolific inventor and gifted physicist and engineer—most known for developing the basis for AC power—who was born in Croatia in 1856 and settled in the U.S. in 1884. When Tesla died in New York in January 1943, his papers—which were thought to include plans for a particle beam weapon, dubbed a “death ray” by the press—were temporarily seized by the Department of Justice Alien Property Custodian Office (“alien” in this case means “foreigner,” although Tesla was a U.S. citizen). Despite longstanding reports and rumors, the FBI was not involved in searching Tesla’s effects, and it never had possession of his papers or any microfilm that may have been made of those papers. Since 1943, we have told a consistent story to all who have asked. Reports to the contrary appear to be based on an initial confusion of FBI agents with other government officials—especially Alien Property Office personnel. These rumors have long been repeated in biographies and articles on Tesla without double-checking the facts as reported in our files.
