Original: Braeburn Prospect (2012)

A brief drabble.

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Braeburn Prospect

Its skin is like a sheer cliff face

Made of autumn-dappled plastic,

And no one has marred its immaculate surface

With succulent attempts to climb.

And yet, a solitary flag

Has been planted in its summit.

It arches out from that sudden slope in the apex,

As if to say, “There’s no such thing as unscalable.”

But the flag crawled up from within;

You won’t reach the top that way.

Find a tooth-hold,

And the taste of a summer shower

Saving you from the indignity of August sweat

Will trickle down your chin as you rise.

Good Night, Nurse! (1918)

This Fatty Arbuckle short is so-so to me.  It has a few standout bits, but it’s pretty meandering and for the most part doesn’t take advantage of the comic interplay between Fatty and Buster.

After what is evidently a fairly typical night on the town, Fatty is sent to a sanitarium by his wife, who’s been promised that a doctor there can perform an operation to cure Fatty of the Evils of Drink.  As you can imagine, Fatty’s not down with this, but he softens up considerably when he meets a comely young woman of undetermined sanity (Alice Lake.)  Alice begs Fatty to help her escape the hospital, and, evading the doctor and his assistant – played by Buster and Al St. John – Fatty tries to get them both out.

Even though the plot is more defined than the usual “place Fatty, Buster, and Al in a [insert setting here], let hijinks ensure” storytelling, the short as a whole still feels less cohesive than some of the better “play around and get into trouble” shorts like Coney Island or The Bell Boy.  A lot of the gags and comic sequences aren’t as sharp as usual, although there are still some good bits – I enjoy Fatty’s clever work-around for lighting a cigarette in the pouring rain, and it’s fun to see Fatty dance.

As the doctor, Buster is an opposing force for Fatty, and it seems the best of their collaborations always put them on the same side.  They can still play off of each other this way, but it creates a different comedic sensibility that, in my opinion, isn’t as funny as watching Fatty and Buster against the world.  However, that’s not to say Buster isn’t funny.  I love the sight gag of his first appearance – entering the hospital lobby in a blood-spattered coat and sharpening a cleaver – he has an amusing scene with Alice Lake, and he and Al St. John work well together here.

The short’s most memorable scene is a fun bit in which Fatty, dressed as a nurse to facilitate his escape, attracts the attentions of a smitten Buster.  It amuses me that whenever Fatty gets himself into these situations when he’s in drag, it never bothers him.  If anything, he’s the one who starts the flirting, making eyes at Buster (part of his cover?  Trying to throw Buster off his guard?  Practical joke?  Who knows why?)  At any rate, they both flirt with the adorable bashfulness of lovestruck 4-year-olds until Fatty gets a little too emphatic with the playful shoving. 

On a side note, Buster has a second role early in the short playing a bit part.  In the midst of gusting rain storm, he appears as a woman with an umbrella struggling against the wind.  I enjoy this bit because it’s so unlike all the drag humor in the Fatty Arbuckle shorts.  Although it’s a funny scene, what with the woman falling down all over the place and her skirts blowing everywhere, the fact that it’s Buster in the role isn’t played for laughs.  In fact, you’re not supposed to notice that it’s him – his face is pretty well obscured by a wig, a kerchief, and the umbrella.  Instead it’s just a bit of silent comedy ingenuity.  Hard time finding an actress to do some decently rough stunts?  No problem!  Slap a skirt and a wig on your comic partner, and you’re good to go!

Warnings

Slapstick violence and one shot of cartoony gore.

A Few Thoughts on the “Hybrid”

I’ve already talked a bit about Doctor Who’s fabled “Hybrid,” which was part of the big series 9 arc, and I’ve already made it clear that I’m not much of a fan of the plot.  However, beyond the (IMO) sloppy execution of the mystery and my general aversion to the existence of prophecy in a frickin’ time travel show (didn’t like it in “The Stolen Earth” / “Journey’s End,” still don’t like it now,) there are other reasons the plot bugs me (Hybrid-related spoilers for series 9.)

Now, obviously, the meta reason that we never heard of this super-important, potentially-world-destroying(?) Hybrid prophecy before season 9 is because that’s when Moffat dreamed it up.  I get that, and there’s nothing he can do about it.  But when he establishes this prophecy as going so far back that it may in fact constitute the reason the First Doctor left Gallifrey (more on that in a minute,) it feels really conspicuous that it’s never come up before.  The show tells us that this prophecy is both very old and An Enormous Deal.  It’s so important, it seems, that the newly-returned-to-our-universe Time Lords bribe Me to lure the Doctor onto her street with a mystery and a threat of death to one of his acquaintances so he can be taken captive and what he knows about the Hybrid can be discovered (why is it that the Doctor is their only option for Hybrid intel, by the way?  He got his info from the Matrix on Gallifrey, right?  Why can’t they just look at it like he did?)  It’s so important that they then trap him inside his confession dial, killing him over and over again and looping him through the same time cycle with aim of getting him to reveal his secret (and yet they’re cool with him evidently stalling on this for four billion years?  Is the situation so urgent that they need to torture him to get their information or isn’t it?  And how does the four billion years work?  Is that just within the confession dial itself, from the Doctor’s perspective, or do the Time Lords honestly sit around that long waiting for him?)  In light of all this massive direness, why did they never once broach the subject at any of the many times the Doctor was on Gallifrey willingly (if not generally eagerly) over the in-show centuries of the classic series?  If they need to know so badly, why did they apparently not care until now?

Again, I get that this whole Hybrid business only entered the canon last season, so there’s no real-world way the Time Lords could have asked the Doctor about it before now, but this makes the fictional-world logic completely frakked up.  There either needs to be an explanation for why it wasn’t so vital for them to know then as it is now, or else they can’t be so obsessively, psychotically desperate to know it.  Without either qualifier, none of it makes a lick of sense.

Getting back to One possibly leaving Gallifrey because he was afraid of what he knew… I really, really don’t want that.  Unless I get empirical evidence to the contrary, I’m going to believe that was a lie (and even with empirical evidence, I might need further convincing.)  Messing with the Doctor’s origins is so dicey, and Moffat doesn’t exactly have a careful hand on this front.  The idea that the Doctor fled Gallifrey in fear over this super-important prophecy that has never before come up in the 50+ year history of the show feels so stupid, so small, so simplistic.  I really dislike that.  I prefer to keep the Doctor’s beginning mysterious.  Hints are okay – the suggestion that the Doctor was diverging from the typical Time Lord mindset, the idea that he wanted more than a sterile life on Gallifrey, vague references to running but not why or from what.  But I don’t want to get clear, cut-and-dry “this is why this happened,” and even if I did, this flimsy, half-formed “Hybrid” idea is nowhere near good enough to serve as an impetus for why The Doctor’s story even happened in the first place.

Dear Hollywood Whitewashers: Ewan McGregor (The Impossible)

This is going back a few years now – The Impossible came out in 2012 – but seeing Tom Holland as the new Spider-Man in Captain America:  Civil War, reminded me of this film, where he played the teenage son of the central family in the film about the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in Thailand.  Now obviously, Tom Holland isn’t Thai, and neither are the actors playing the rest of the family, including Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor.  However, while it’s fair to acknowledge that the film is specifically about a family of tourists vacationing in Thailand when the tsunami hits, it’s based on the true story of a Spanish family’s experiences.  The film casts white UK actors in the roles, anglicizes the characters’ names, and gives them English accents.

There’s a lot going on here.  The fact that the movie is about a major natural disaster in Asia and doesn’t provide any Asian perspective is a clear issue, and even once the film moved Asian people out of the foreground, focusing instead on tourists, the nationality and complexions of the actual tourist family they were talking about weren’t considered “universal” enough and so we wound up with a white English family instead.  I’ll be looking mainly at the first issue in this post, since that’s the issue Ewan McGregor regrettably tries to discount in this quote: 

“The truth is, it’s a story about this family, this western family, who are on holiday there.  And that story is many, many people’s story.  But to say that it doesn’t tell the Thai people’s stories…  Naomi’s character is saved by a Thai man, and taken to safety in a Thai village where the Thai women dress her.  It’s one of the most moving scenes in the film, really.  In the hospital they’re all Thai nurses and Thai doctors – you see nothing but Thai people saving lives and helping.”

Sigh… I get that actors don’t want to burn any bridges against their studios, and really, when white actors agree to take roles like this, they’re at the very least complicit in what’s going on.  Still, it saddens me when people I like say these sorts of things.  It never, never makes them look anything resembling good.

So, Ewan, I’ll grant you that the story is “many, many people’s story,” in that there were many tourists in Thailand when the tsunami hit.  However, that large number of tourists still pales in comparison to the number of Thai people with their own stories to tell (who probably didn’t get the same priority medical treatment as the injured white tourist.)  It’d be a bit like making a Holocaust film about a Jehovah’s Witness in a concentration camp; yes, some people in concentration camps were Jehovah’s Witnesses there, but the vast majority were not, a fact very widely accepted in Hollywood.  Although, even that story would be preferable to this one, since many films have been made about Jewish people during the Holocaust and so the occasional story about non-Jewish people wouldn’t constitute erasure.  However, there isn’t a wide body of films about the Indian Ocean tsunami that tell the stories of the people principally affected by it, and so, a high-profile movie that tells an outlier story is going to be much more conspicuous.

Because all those Thai people in your movie are serving the white characters’ story.  They’re there for storytelling utility, not as real characters.  None of them have names or fears/struggles of their own that are more than backdrop.  That’s what people mean when they say the film “doesn’t tell the Thai people’s stories,” and to argue otherwise is disingenuous at best.

News Satire Roundup: May 22nd-May 26th

Sunday, May 22 – Amid protests and a severe economic crisis in Venezuela, President Maduro would be hard-pressed to be less helpful.  In contrast, PM Trudeau in Canada has apparently spent the week apologizing for “Elbowgate,"” in which he elbowed a government representative while trying to help another squeeze through; this might be one of the most stereotypically Canadian things ever.  The main story was on the absolute free-for-all that is the US primary/caucus system.  I knew it was messed up, inconsistent, and not very democratic, but as usual, John handily demonstrated just how far the insanity goes.  I particularly liked his point that many Americans think they have a basic understanding of how the system works but they really don't, and why that's an obvious problem.  Finally, there was a story about Chechnyan leader Kadyrov, who took to social media to deputize the people to find his missing cat – wow.

Monday, May 23 – Opening bit on the leader of the Taliban being killed in a drone strike; I liked the joke that ISIS has been a decoy all this time to make the Taliban think the US forgot about them.  The story on Trump’s appearance at a fundraiser for paying off Chris Christie's campaign debt was amusing.  I loved the bit about children in Africa deciding Christie needs the money more, and Trump shrugging off the threat of a trade war with China is insane but, sadly, not unexpected.  The story on TSA shortages was a bit fluff but fine.  I enjoyed Trevor's horror at adding clowns to a stressful situation, and he had a great riff on a reporter’s “humble bragging” about his reward membership.  The interview with Rose Byrne was a little ho-hum.  I was surprised to realize she was Australian (I’d always assumed British,) and Trevor’s revelation that the Australian soap Neighbours is apparently huge in South Africa made me smile.

Tuesday, May 24 – I liked having single thematic through line for the episode, doing a whole show on the NRA and gun safety regulation.  We started with the new union between Trump and the NRA, which seemed uneasy despite the similar MOs of furthering their aims by exploiting people’s fears; I loved Trevor’s crack about “the smell of demagoguery in the morning.”  The show also looked at the history of the NRA, which originally prioritized gun safety.  Desi had an interesting field piece reporting outside an NRA convention.  The angle, that the Constitution-obsessed group wouldn’t let her exercise her 1st-Amendment right to freedom of the press, was great, and I liked the observation that most NRA are opposed to the words “gun control” but not actual common-sense safety laws.  The guest, Katie Couric, talked about her new documentary Under the Gun.  It was an informative interview that flowed nicely from what came before.

Wednesday, May 25 – The first story looked at Brazil’s assorted crises as the Olympics approach, from political upheaval to horrific pollution to the Zika virus.  I loved the comment that the US wouldn’t skip the Olympics because Americans love winning and going on vacation so much, and Trevor’s gobsmacked reaction to Congress wanting to use Ebola money for Zika was cathartic.  Next came Trump’s latest conspiracy theory (latching onto an old outlandish theory about the Clintons murdering a guy) and revisited others he’s touted – Obama’s birth certificate, connecting Ted Cruz’s dad to Lee Harvey Oswald, vaccines causing autism – with the general thesis of, “And this guy should be trusted with the US military?”  The guest was Cory Pegues, a reformed gang member who became a police officer.  He discussed systemic problems in policing and the importance of not deciding someone’s entire future based on their past.

Thursday, May 26 – Some good jokes on Obama’s visit to Vietnam.  I liked the passive-aggressive technique of only selling weapons to Vietnam when China is watching, and Trevor had an amusing tangent about what Obama does/doesn’t need to carry on him.  The latest on Clinton’s emails was depressing, especially her approval rating dipping below Trump’s for the first time.  Trevor’s right – how on earth did we get here?  Michelle had some advice on how Clinton can get back on top, suggesting that America needs a boss more than a buddy.  Another tale from the Trump archives, this time a chauvinist “women in the kitchen” quote, once again demonstrating why his approval with women is so low.  Reporter Mike Allen was the guest, talking about – what else? – the insane election.  He discussed the GOP’s resignation to Trump, Clinton’s poll numbers, and pointless but highly entertaining idea of a Trump-Sanders debate.