Monthly Archives: May 2023

Tribal Regalia in Oklahoma

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Tribal Regalia

I just read an interesting story about Native Americans being allowed to wear traditional garb during school graduations. The Oklahoma legislature handily overrode Governor Kevin Stitt’s veto on the matter.

The reason I think it’s an interesting topic is the facts of the legislation and veto are largely misrepresented in the article and in public discourse. The legislature is largely being hailed for allowing the wearing of tribal regalia while Governor Stitt is being attacked for wanting to forbid such displays at graduation. This is largely false.

Neither Allowed or Forbidden

It’s important to understand the Oklahoma legislature didn’t simply allow students to wear tribal regalia, they made it illegal for schools to prevent them from doing so. Likewise, it’s useful to understand Governor Stitt isn’t forbidding students from wearing tribal regalia, his veto simply allows local schools to decide for themselves if such adornments to the traditional cap and gown are forbidden.

Libertarian View

It is my opinion Governor Stitt has the right of it. It’s not in the purview of the state of Oklahoma to dictate graduation garb. It’s not a problem for state government and by intruding on this local decision they extend an authoritarian control to the state which it should not have.

As I often say, if you agree with the state unilaterally giving something then you tacitly condone the state taking the same thing away. If the state of Oklahoma can tell a school district they must allow people to wear native regalia at graduation you are granting the state the authority to command students cannot wear such native regalia. This is the problem with government overreach in general.

The Slippery Slope

There is also the slippery slope argument if the state commands Native Americans cannot be stopped from wearing tribal regalia, other organizations will demand the same right. Can a Christian student carry a giant cross as they receive their diploma? Can a Satanist student wear a huge pentagram? Can a devotee of the Flying Spaghetti Monster wear a colander on her or his head? Can a student from France wear the French flag and sing La Marseillaise as they walk?

I’m not a believer in the slippery slope argument. If students of particular organizations want the right to wear such regalia, then each school district should decide on their own if it is allowed. This is the entire point of Governor Stitt in regards to tribal regalia. It must be up to the local school district or college to make that decision, not the state.

Conclusion

States’ Rights should not trump local rights although the judicial system in the United States seems to have taken another view on that subject. We have swung too much toward States’ Rights in this country. States now seem to have an almost totalitarian right to dictate to communities about anything they want, including whether or not a community is allowed to ban declawing cats. The state should not have the right to dictate to local communities any more than the Federal Government has the right to dictate to the states.

Tom Liberman

Raiders of the Lost Ark or Indiana Jones?

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Indiana Jones

The latest entry in the Raider of the Lost Ark movie series; I mean the latest entry in the Indiana Jones movie series just released and I want to talk about it. Not the movie, the title of the movie. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny follows the pattern of every movie in the series since the original.

The question I’d like to examine today is if the movies suffer from focusing on Indiana Jones as opposed to the story in which he finds himself embroiled. Why is every movie except the first prefaced with the name Indiana Jones?

A Treasured Memory

Raiders of the Lost Ark is considered a classic by most reviewers. It is a valued memory for me and I suspect quite a few others of my age who were around in 1981 when it first released. I was seventeen and, in my little circle of friends, Raiders was everything. The boulder, we’d say to one another. The boulder.

Focus of the Story

While I do think there are plenty of people who enjoyed the subsequent movies, the general consensus is they never quite captured the magic of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think the main reason for this is the sequels focused on Indiana Jones. We learned more about more about the protagonist and the story suffered.

I can say quite unequivocally that I found Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to be rather lazy. Trying too hard to repeat the action sequences and largely failing. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was a nostalgic movie that focused largely on the relationship of Indiana Jones with his father and again, the main story suffered badly.

Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull found a more receptive critical audience but I found it more of an attempt to brand Shia LaBeouf as a new hero to the franchise. Lots of actions but not much more. No interesting story to propel the characters, to make me care.

The new movie is receiving rather tepid reviews so far but I can’t speak to it as I have not seen it.

Why Raiders is Better than Indiana Jones

Raiders of the Lost Ark is by far the best of the series and I think the reason is rather simple. Indiana Jones is marketable. The character is interesting and sells tickets. Focus on Indiana Jones, not the story. The audience wants to learn more about him and doesn’t care as much about an interesting story.

One of the things I suggest to people who come to me for writing advice is coming up with a story is easy. There are a million plot ideas. The stories behind all the Indiana Jones movies are just fine. It’s the implementations, driven by the name recognition of the title character, that fail.

I think the people who made the sequels to Raiders of the Lost Ark, like those who approach me about how to write a book, had a good idea. I’ve got a great idea for a novel; they say with eager eyes. Now what? That’s fantastic, that’s a great starting point. You can’t write the novel or the screenplay without the idea. Now, implement it. Five act play. Hero’s journey. Character arc. Voice. Theme. Inciting incident. Conflict. Have at it.

Conclusion

I somehow think if it was just The Temple of Doom, The Last Crusade, The Crystal Skull, The Dial of Destiny they might have been better movies. I’m probably wrong. Marketing is marketing. Making movies that make money is more important than making good movies. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference.

Still, I feel cheated out of some better movies.

Tom Liberman

California Pork Supreme Court Ruling is good for Small Farmers

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California Pork

The Supreme Court recently ruled California pork rules for items sold within the state are constitutional. The ruling itself came from an unusual 5-4 split decision but that’s not really what I want to discuss today.

The ruling is roiling politicians from pork producing states like Iowa and the leaders of factory farm proponents. Scott Hays of the National Pork Producers Council and Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst of Iowa all lambaste the ruling as working against small farmers. They are lying. Those three and others like them are not the friend of small farmers. Let’s get into it.

The Rise of the CAFO

Small farmers are being decimated by Concentrated Animal Feed Organizations. I wrote about them recently in a ruling that went in their favor in Missouri. The rule upheld by the Supreme Court for California hurts not the small farmer but the CAFOs.

Small farmers are under tremendous pressure from CAFOs. We’re losing small farmers at a tremendous rate to these enormous operations. Bankruptcy, suicide, and the selling of the family farm to bankers. That’s the reality of being a small farmer today.

Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst aren’t on your Side

Small farmers are largely not affected by the California rule or, at the worst, can fairly easily comply. That’s why a number of organizations that support small farmers filed briefs in favor of the California rule. The organizations that are badly hurt are CAFOs. They cannot easily change their operations to treat animals in a more humane fashion.

When Grassley, Ernst, and Clark begin their wailing and weeping they show their true colors. They are all for the destruction of the traditional family farm. They hate the family farm. They want the big CAFO and the big campaign contribution. This is largely the state of the Republican Party. People in rural communities are voting for politicians that actively work to destroy the family farm all the while lying and telling the farmers the exact opposite. It’s vile.

Your Vote Matters

If the rural community continue to support politicians like Grassley and Ernst then it gets exactly what it wants and exactly what it deserves.

Conclusion

I’m not telling you for whom to vote but I am saying there are alternatives. It’s easy to get into a mindset where one party is the cause of all your ills and you vote the opposite. Remember, there are third- and fourth-party choices who offer a different vision.

Tom Liberman

The Ark a Story of Beautiful people in Crisis

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The Ark

The Ark on the SyFy channel. Wow, is it bad. Stunningly bad. Dialog? Bad. Acting? Bad. Science? Nonsensical. Sets? Boring. Music? Blah. Bad and worse. It’s terrible.

That being said, there’s no reason you shouldn’t like it. It’s very simple entertainment. Good looking people face and defeat one crisis after the next. It doesn’t demand much from the audience and a lot of people simply enjoy the scenery.

But, I’m here to do a review and that’s what I’m going to do.

Eastern Europe Production

A number of commenters point out The Ark was created principally in Serbia and many of the people associated with the show are thus from Eastern Europe rather than Hollywood or London. This is all true but it doesn’t excuse the bad acting and writing.

You cannot tell me there aren’t better actors in theater houses all over Belgrade? That you can’t find writers who understand basic science in Eastern Europe? That great writers don’t ply their trade in Serbia? It’s not an excuse.

Beautiful People

The actors are one good looking bunch but it’s clear to me they were chosen for the roles based on appearance, not acting ability. That’s a real shame because I’m certain fine actors from Serbia and the surrounding regions auditioned for the roles. I largely didn’t even learn character names.

Bad Science

I can’t even begin to go over how bad is the science on this show. I wrote a couple of blogs after each of the first two episodes, and you can look there for some of the glaring mistakes. If you spotted any one of the dozens of scientific inaccuracies, please feel free to note them down in a comment.

The point here is I find it impossible to enjoy a show when I see scientific errors a fifth-grade student wouldn’t make. It completely takes me out of immersion. I can’t like the show when one scientific blunder follows the next.

Crisis after Crisis

The biggest problem with this show is the formulaic crisis scenes. It starts with the opening scene and doesn’t stop until the finale. They all follow the same pattern. Everything is fine. A crisis emerges suddenly without warning. Crisis music plays. Commercial break. The crisis is solved with some crazy idea from one of the characters. It’s not the crisis du jour it’s crisis du commercial break.

Who solves the problem? Let’s go over it.

Maybe it’s overly tan girl whose main acting trait is opening her eyes wider to indicate crisis. It might be captain curly hair whose acting skill is saying her lines louder. Otherwise, its beefcake boy whose main acting method is to thicken his accent. Usually, it’s super-annoying girl who happened to study that exact thing back when she was in third grade because her mother had one of those thingy bobs. Maybe its stammering lad coming up with a brilliant plan.

The cause of the crisis is usually something stupid like doctor dope fiend didn’t properly read the instructions on the manual.

I will never do that!

The number of times a character absolutely refuses to do something but is convinced two seconds later to do exactly that is incalculable. It happens with almost every single conversation. I won’t! You should! Ok! That’s fifty percent of the dialog in this show.

Fighting Skills

Oh my flying spaghetti monster but this is annoying. Someone can’t fight until suddenly they can. Whine and complain boy is useless until he needs to beat up three heavily armed guards and escape. Mind you, he couldn’t beat up pouty-lipped, bi-polar girl who looks like she might weigh ninety pounds. When she hits someone, I’m afraid her boney little arms will break.

The Sets

My eyes roll every time I see some stupid antique chair on Ark 15. It’s obviously exactly the same set as Ark 1. I pity the crew that had to nail up tacky paintings and then take them back down. The Ark has far too much open space. The engine room from the outside is massive. Inside it’s tiny. No attention to detail. Bland and boring.

The Good

This show is so bad I could probably continue railing for another thousand words but I do want to take a moment to give credit where it’s due. Pavle Jerinic is the only character I believe in his role. He’s Felix, chief of security and he’s good.

The sound editing is great. Despite the fact English isn’t the first language of a lot of these characters I understand them clearly. The music doesn’t drown them out. They don’t mumble and speak with such heavy accents I can’t figure out what they’re saying. You’ll say this is damning with faint praise but I’ve seen shows with a much bigger budget and productions values do far worse. The Nevers, I’m talking to you.

The Evil Plan

The ultimate villain has a stupid plan. They’ve got 500 people between two ships which is the entirety of the human race. She doesn’t want to share an entire planet with half of them? It’s madness. Fly up, get the necessary ingredient, sing kumbaya. Done.

Conclusion

I’m really sad this show is so awful. I love science fiction and the premise here is good, as I discuss in my other reviews. With good actors and competent writers this might have been an entertaining show. As it stands, it’s just plain bad.

Tom Liberman

Cormoran Strike the Mumbling Detective

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Cormoran Strike

I just finished watching Series Five of Strike which features the J. K. Rowling detective Cormoran Strike and now it’s time for a review. Mostly mediocre. I could probably stop there and be done with it but I will elaborate.

The show features Tom Burke as detective Cormoran Strike and Holliday Grainger as his entirely unlikable sidekick Robin Ellacott. Not that she’s written to be unlikable, she just is. The show is based on the novels by Rowling and a sixth was published in 2022 so one imagines we’ll have another series along shortly.

All the Mumbling

I’m not going to blame Burke for his mumbling portrayal of Cormoran Strike because I’m guessing that’s the way the director told him to play it. Apparently, someone besides me complained because in the fifth series he is actually understandable a good 75 percent of the time, a marked improvement.

It really takes away from my ability to enjoy the series when I can’t understand the lead character most of the time. I’m sure the English accent probably has something to do with it but it was mainly his unwillingness to open his mouth when speaking that caused the issues.

Convoluted Mysteries

I’ve spoken before that too often a writer makes the mystery entirely impossible to solve through a series of baffling events. This is done so that the audience doesn’t figure out the solution too easily. I think it’s a mistake to make things too convoluted. You lose the audience.

The second, third, and fourth series in particular became so confusing with so many different things going on that I largely lost the thread and my interest. The fifth series was much better and presented a far more straight-forward mystery.

Speaking of the fifth series, I thought it was largely the best of the entire show except for one glaring misstep. The serial killer Cormoran interviews during the case might as well have been named Hannibal Lector with a Fan Fiction label placed on the scenes. Not that I’ve got anything against fan fiction.

The blatant derivative nature of the character really turned me off to what was otherwise the best series of the show.

Too Much Personal Life and not Enough Mystery

Another thing I’ve complained about before in mysteries is the loss of focus on the crime and solution and too much attention to the detectives and their personal lives. Strike suffers from this throughout all five seasons.

There’s nothing wrong with getting to know the detective team outside their professional lives but the scenes so doing should further the story. In the case of Strike, the details about Cormoran and Robin didn’t do anything for the mystery. Robin’s failed marriage in particular just annoyed me, but more about annoying Robin next.

Robin is not a Likeable Character

You don’t have to be a good person to be a likeable character. See Tony Soprano. Robin is just unpleasant. She’s a snotty, holier-than-thou, know-it-all, insufferable master of disguise. Cormoran has moments of being unpleasant but overall, he’s likeable and it’s his portrayal that makes the show watchable. Robin, not so much.

I did not find her panic attacks endearing, just annoying. Annoying. I don’t mind hating a character. That’s usually the sign of an interesting character. But an annoying character is just unpleasant to watch and there is a lot of Robin.

The Other Stuff

The acting is largely good to excellent. The sets are very nice. The music is subtle and doesn’t dominate scenes as too often happens. I believed the characters and the locations.

Conclusion

Not good. Not bad. Mediocre detective work. My main issues are the confusing story, the annoying Robin, and the mumbling Cormoran.

Tom Liberman

The Deuce Lost its Story

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The Deuce

I just wrapped up season three of The Deuce and I’m ready to write my review. The executive producer of The Deuce is David Simon from The Wire fame and the show aired on HBO between 2017 and 2019. It’s a raw show that tackles the emerging sex and pornography industry in New York during the 1970s and 1980s.

When it worked, it worked quite well although it’s not a show for the easily offended. When it failed, it fell terribly flat. This being the case, it’s not particularly easy to write a simple review. Is it good? Is it bad? It’s both.

The Story is the Thing

The first season of The Deuce is the best and I think this is because it committed to telling a story. Multiple stories. There is an ensemble cast including James Franco in dual roles as Vincent and Frankie Martino, Maggie Gyllenhaal as Candy/Eileen, and a host of others.

The story of that first season revolved around Vincent as a business owner and Candy as a prostitute. They are surrounded by a colorful cast of pimps, police officers, and prostitutes. It’s basically telling three stories through a variety of characters. That of police corruption, organized criminal presence in business ownership, and prostitution.

What makes the first season good is the intersection of these three stories with the lives of all the characters. It’s raw, very raw. I found the sexual content over the top but, considering the nature of the story, I understand why they went in that direction.

We get to know corrupt police officers and those officers fighting the good fight with integrity. We meet mobsters who care and those who do not. We learn about the lives of pimps and whores and prostitutes who choose to work without a pimp.

It all comes together nicely. The first season, if you can get past all the lurid content, is fantastic.

The Lost Story

Starting in the second season The Deuce loses track of the underlying story that brought it all together and starts to focus on the characters. There’s nothing wrong with deep character development and watching as them change over time. The drug culture, VCRs making pornography available privately in the home, organized crime, the city of New York’s attempt to clean up the region, and the deadly AIDS epidemic.

The problem is the plethora of characters means we mainly just get one vignette after the next. First, we’re with Vincent for a one-minute scene and then Eileen for another. We jump from scene to scene between the many characters rapidly and meanwhile the underlying story gets lost in the minutia. It’s just too much and the story grinds to a halt while we learn more and more about the lives of each of the characters.

There just isn’t enough time to tell all the stories. There are plenty of good moments and the acting is outstanding. The sets are amazing. The passion is evident. There’s just not a good story to hold it together anymore.

The Tragic Lives

The third season focuses even more intensely on individual characters but some of the most intriguing old characters are gone. Larry Brown and his burgeoning acting career. Darlene’s transition into the life of a nurse. Gone.

New characters arrive and their stories take up a large amount of screen time but don’t really advance anything. It’s all character studies and no story. Nothing affects anything else. When Lori kills herself there isn’t time to show how others deal with the tragedy. It’s never mentioned again by anyone. Well, that’s that, let’s move on to someone else.

Abby’s wealthy family ties? Not enough time. The newspaper stories? Nope, too much else going on. Eileen’s son?

I’m not opposed to all the unhappy endings. I don’t think everything needs to be tied up in a neat little bow to make the audience happy. There’s nothing wrong with leaving things ambiguous. I do think the story needs to end with something though, anything satisfactory, whether good or bad. Here it all just fades away.

Conclusion

The first season is absolutely outstanding. I really enjoyed it and perhaps that’s why I found myself so disappointed in the second and third season. The Deuce just lost track of telling a story and instead focused on the lives of the characters too much.

You may disagree.

Tom Liberman

Ding Liren is World Chess Champion get over it

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Ding Liren

Ding Liren of China defeated Ian Nepomniachtchi in the 2023 World Chess Championship to become the World Chess Champion, to the displeasure of a vocal many. The reason for the unhappiness is that Ding is merely the third ranked chess player in the world behind Magnus Carlsen. Nepomniachtchi is the second ranked player.

Ding Liren and Nepomniachtchi finished up the most exciting chess championship in recent years with Ding Liren winning the fourth tie-break game. This after their fourteen round match ended with them tied at three victories each.

Carlsen decided not to defend the title he held for the last ten years and this is the crux of the issues against Ding, although anti-Chinese sentiment plays a role as well. What do I think about all this? Let me tell you.

Carlsen Refuses to Defend

Magnus Carlsen is one of those rare champions who truly dominates an individual sport. He is a Roger Federer or Tiger Woods like player. He won the World Chess Championship back in 2013 and defended it four times. He earned the title as the top-ranked player in the world in 2010 at the age of nineteen.

After ten years of holding the title, Carlsen decided not to defend it for a fifth time. He is widely considered the best chess player of all time.

The Championship Format

The world chess champion is decided in a peculiar way and I think that is the cause of much of the angst about Ding Liren. Unlike many team sports, there is not a championship tournament every year. Unlike many individual sports, the champion is not determined by a point rating system at the end of the season.

In chess, the champion remains champion for two years and then defends the title against a challenger who wins a tournament called Candidates. Magnus decided not to defend so it was decided the first and second place finishers in the Candidates tournament would play for the championship.

Nepomniachtchi won Candidates with Ding Liren finishing second. In a normal year this would result in a match between Nepomniachtchi and Carlsen, a rematch from the event two years ago when Carlsen thoroughly dismantled the challenger winning three games and losing none.

There are many people who, quite vocally, proclaim Ding Liren is not a valid champion. That the real champion is still Magnus Carlsen.

Ding Liren is the Champion

Poppycock! Ding Liren is the World Chess Champion for the simple reason he won the title. The Boston Bruins recently completed the best regular season in the history of the NHL. They lost in the first round of the playoffs. No one is going to claim the Bruins are the real Stanley Cup Champions.

If Magnus chose to defend, it’s likely he would have won but we will never know. What doesn’t happen, doesn’t happen. Any speculation on what might have happened is just that, speculation. There is no way to know. What we do know is they played under the rules and Ding Liren won.

Conclusion

Is Magnus Carlsen the best chess player in the world? Yes. He’s the number one ranked player and he will remain so until some future date. Is he the World Chess Champion? Nope, not anymore. He chose not to defend. It’s really that simple.

Ding Liren is the champion and to the victor go the spoils.

Tom Liberman