I watched the last 2 episodes of Smallville season 8, and holy macaroni! if you don't like spoilers look way now..
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They killed Jimmy? Jimmy Olsen? Central figure to the Superman mythos? He didn't even have a signal watch! Did they take the Countdown ad campaign seriously? I liked this Jimmy. Sure, him and Chloe has fuck all chemistry, but Mr Olsen himself was quite charming. I guess it made sense with the storyline, and it certainly was very tragic. I was convinced Chloe was gonna bring him back with her magic tears.
Apart from that, the rest of the final 2 episodes were good. I can cope with Ollie being all dark and vengeful. It doesn't suit him, but it doesn't suit him in the comics either. I am not convinced about Smallville's Bart being in agreement, it seems somewhat out of character. Or maybe I just want him to be the regular DCU's Bart. I don't know enough about this universe's Dinah to comment on her.
While we're talking about Bart , head on over to Crimson Lightning and check out this adorable kid dressed up as Bart. He's perfect!
Back on Smallville, the Doomsday defeat was quite good, even if we didn't see much of it.
It looks like Lois has been transported to the Legion in the 31st century. This should make for all sorts of interesting shenanigans. Even with the use of magic time travelling Legion rings. Which is ridiculous.
I am very excited about season 9. I haven't had a chance to watch any yet and probably won't for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, I will just go giddy over the inclusion of the JSA (with a winged, maced and hairy chested [i hope] Hawkman!) .
I also saw another episode of BSG, from season 2. Starbuck is shot on Caprica, taken to the hospital, tended by Cylons and discovers the farms. A well done episode.
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So, way back when, I decided to try and make an effort and seriously cut down on the amoount of stuff I bought. If you click on the consumerism tag you'll see my other posts on this matter.
Well, I think I lasted til August and then somehow it all went to pot. The net result is, I haven't stuck to my resolution, but I'm not buying random crap either. I have bought new clothes - dresses (some new, some second hand), socks, pants, etc, I have bought quite a few books, I have continued buying gifts for people and I have bought some utterly useless crap. Well, it's useless only if you consider memorabilia from the first Christoper Reeve Superman movie to be crap. I say if it makes your heart sing then it's not crap. But more on that later, because there's a post in there somewhere. I still consider my main spendings to be on lunches, dinners out, and beer.
What have I learnt from all this?
1) If you want to monitor your spending and keep track of it, you have to write down absolutely everything you buy. Including newspapers and 10pence fortune cookies.
2) I have a pretty low attention span and not much resolve.
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Consider the movie 'Taken'. It's got Liam Neeson in it, fucking shit up. By action movie standards it's a pretty good watch, and like most action movies, the actual plot is somewhat incidental. But nonetheless go and read a synopsis here. Unless you've already seen it.
Ready? OK.
First of all, the one line plot summary on the IMDB says Neeson's daughter has been sold into the slave trade. Actually, she's been kidnapped and sold to a prostitution ring. She is shipped around various places while Neeson is trying to catch up with her. She doesn't get raped but that's because she's a virgin. Her sexually active friend dies of a drug overdose - the drugs are forcibly given to her in order to break her in.
The movie makes a fairly good attempt at not glamourising or sexualising Neeson's daughter's plight, but it's not so good at race stuff.
As she's getting shipped around we see lots of asian women being pimped out. The movie does nothing for these women, Neeson completley ignores them and we see nothing put in place to save them. The end message seems to be that if you're a young, pretty and white virgin you deserve to be saved. If you're anyone else you can rot in your hell. The movie does portray the other victims situation as vile and desperate. It demonstrates how horrific it is.
Towards the end of the movie Neeson's daughter is finally sold to her new owner. Guess who he is? A rich. fat, oil dealing Arab man. Not that they're trading in stereotypes at all here. No siree.
The point at which this surprised me was that they'd tried to deal with the women's issues, the horribleness of the forced sex trade etc, which is impressive for Hollywood, but they'd failed so hard at the race stuff. Especially as it wouldn't have needed much to rectify this.
Clouds Moving In also has a review of the film. She focuses on the sexism but doesn't touch the race issues,
Okay I see myself as a rather understanding guy so I let most ignorance slide but this one was too much for me. I am not trying to be offensive just going to state some facts for you. First off the fact that he ignored the asian women and went after as you called her "The white virgin who is the only one deserving to be rescued". The fact of the matter was he was going after his daughter and he knew the situation there, as opposed to the other women where he knew nothing of their situation so was not able to help them out really not to mention the search for his daughter. Second if you know much about the whole criminal sex slavery ring, asians have the highest abduction rate due to the fact that in japan and china there is a huge populace it is easy for kidnappers to just abduct anyone with out causing much of a rucus. It is such a big deal that part of annual training for American armed forces stationed in Asian pacific locations to sit through classes learning how to identify and report potential slave workers, slave dealers, and abducters. So in all actuallity the movie was fairly realistic.
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