News Satire Roundup: August 21st

Sunday, August 21

·        Recap of the Week – Mar-a-Lago raid, primary elections

o   I laughed at John shouting out Dick Cheney’s “last-minute Emperor Palpatine-like endorsement” of his daughter, which didn’t help her win her primary.

o   John was delighted by a video of an Alaskan election official explaining ranked-choice voting with “the offensively-Alaskan choice of candidates” of an elk, a polar bear, a penguin, and an owl – “It’s the equivalent of New Jersey explaining rank-choice voting using Bon Jovi, Tony Soprano, a deer that’s never eaten food intended for a deer, and melanoma.”

o   Oh boy – “Yeah. Sarah fucking Palin’s back, and it’s like it’s 2008 all over again. She’s running for office, the U.S. entered a bear market, and Sex in the City is making spinoffs that it quite frankly doesn’t have the material to back up. Society is going backwards.”

·        And Now This – 60 second of Tucker Carlson being right about stuff

o   Plenty of these were Tucker Carlson sarcastically parroting criticisms such as, “The riot at the Capitol was a white supremacist insurrection,” “I have enjoyed white privilege,” and, “This show is racist!”

o   Toward the end, though, we got a series of clips of him talking about supposed leftwing propaganda, culminating in, “It’s easy to laugh at this, but it’s also horrifying. Think about the brainwashing required to do this with a straight face.”

·        Main Story – Carbon offsets

o   Loved this description of planet Earth – “It’s basically the Oscar Isaac of planets, in that it seems to be getting alarmingly hotter every year.”

o   Oh man, KitKat’s slogan for their carbon-neutral goals is “Let’s Give the Planet a Break.”

o   However, a lot of corporations’ big promises are built on flimsy ground – “One study that looked closely at the net-zero promises of dozens of companies in heavily polluting industries found that 2/3 of them are relying on offsets instead of emissions reductions.”

o   This extends to touring bands as well, and John shared an awkward video from My Chemical Romance explaining their carbon-offset investments – “Cool. Thanks, guys. And I admit it is nice to see them representing their core fan base: middle schoolers who have to give a presentation in front of the class against their will.”

o   It comes down to this – “If the idea that you can simply invest a little money and make your carbon footprint disappear sounds too good to be true, that’s because it absolutely is.”

o   John had a great reaction to a BP executive explaining the concept of carbon offsets using black balloons with “CO₂” printed on them – “I’m not sure he needed to use the decorations from a clown’s funeral to do it, but I guess without them, I’d never have known what it looks like when you add three to something but then take three away. It simply can’t be done.”

o   Also getting on the “too good to be true” train? Airport kiosks that allow passengers to pay to offset their travel – “Now that price is obviously too low. It is pretty suspicious that you could walk into an airport and offset more than 1,000 miles of air travel for just $2, then head over to a Cibo Express where it costs at least five times that to buy a soggy chicken wrap that somehow looks, if I had to pick one descriptor, recently divorced.”

o   Loved this bit – “On some level, you probably know carbon offsets are bullshit. Both because you’re a reasonably intelligent person and because you know exactly what show you are watching right now. I don’t open my beak to squawk out good news. This thing pops open for sad news and porridge, and I’m all out of porridge right now.”

o   Some corporations “offset” their emissions by paying to “protect” trees at places like Hudson Farm Club, a private hunting club owned by a billionaire – “First, it’s not just me. We’re all getting strong Get Out vibes from that place, right? It’s not just me.”

o   Meanwhile, companies like NCX identify existing trees on private farms that corporations can also pay to “protect” – “Basically, they will pay you to leave your trees alone. Which is a pretty good deal, as it should be easy not to cut down trees.”

o   In addition to the lazy shortcuts and loopholes already built into programs that allow corporations to pollute in exchange for vague money for trees, those paltry efforts are themselves at further risk – “Given that forest fires are now on the rise thanks to climate change, offset programs can and have literally gone up in flames.”

o   John said, “The problem with carbon offsets is everyone wants to believe in them” as an easy fix for climate change – However, “When you buy an offset so you can pollute more and that offset is bullshit, you’re now actively making things worse.”

o   Not to mention companies that do plant new trees for corporate offsets can cause other problems, such as a pine tree plantation established in Uganda by a Swedish company, which resulted in thousands of Ugandans being evicted from their land to make way for the planting.

Y tu Luna también: Vampires: Los Muertos (2002, R)

This falls into the category of “not a good movie, but I kind of like it anyway.” This vampire B-movie is fun in a schlocky way—don’t know if I’d ever need to see it again, but I don’t regret watching it.

Derek Bliss is a Hunter. His prey? Vampires, which encroach on the safety of human towns and cities around the world. In Mexico, he gets turned onto a team job that’s more than he bargained for, as every name on a list of potential teammates starts turning up dead. So Derek puts his own team together, an unlikely band of mostly-inexperienced Hunters working to stop a vampire plot that would allow the “suckers” to attack in the daylight.

I’m reminded a little of the aesthetic of the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer—the movie, not the show—along with the low-rent gore of Lair of the White Worm. There’s all types of beheading/immolation going on here, as well as free-flowing blood when vampires are staked through the heart. The female vampires, expectedly, are hypersexualized, and their leader is a hypnotic femme fatale type who’s of course as beautiful as she is deadly.

It's all very cheap, in terms of both budget and entertainment, but if you’re in the right mood for it, you still might have a good time.  I like the angle of an underground world of mercenary vampire hunters, and the lone-wolf expert having to lead a team of amateurs generally makes for a good time. Derek stores his weapons in a surfboard case, which is an entertaining image. I’m intrigue by Zoey, a character who was infected by a vampire but has been able to keep the condition in check with a medication that prevents herself from turning.

Jon Bon Jovi plays Derek, and while he’s not the most compelling actor around, he gets the job done as a stoic leading man you want to root for. Natasha Wagner does nice work as Zoey, although the plot damsels her a little too often. The film also features Cristián de la Fuente as an implausibly jacked priest, Darius McCrary as another skilled Hunter, and Arly Jover as the mysterious vampire leader Una.

And then we have Diego Luna as Sancho, the youngest member of the team. He manages to tag along when Derek is taking out a cluster of vampires early in the film. Sancho doesn’t know what he’s doing—he doesn’t even know what’s going on at that point—but he refuses to be left out. Despite his inexperience, he’s a quick learner and soon proves himself useful. He’s not in it so much for the danger and the heroics, but rather for the money; he likes the idea of collecting vampire bounties to help his mom out.

If Sancho has a hook as a character, it’s that he’s very young (this would’ve been in the Y tu mamá también era for Luna.) He’s 15 years old, and Derek repeatedly tries to cut him loose until he shows up with an actual note from his mother giving him permission to join the hunt. Derek refers to him as “the kid” and all the others look out for him, even though Sancho never asks them to and always pulls his weight.

This is a likable performance, if not a demanding one. I like that Sancho’s interest in hunting is entirely financial, but that doesn’t mean he quails when the situation gets hairy. Luna is able to be the kid on the team without being annoying or a liability.

Recommend?

In General – Eh? If you like dumb B-movies and are in the right mood for it, you might have a good time.

Diego Luna – A soft maybe. There’s nothing revelatory in this character, but it’s enjoyable.

Warnings

Violence/gore, sexual content, and language.

A Little TLC(w): The Duke of Mount Deer: Season 1, Episode 11 (1984)

Apologies on this one: normally I review The Duke of Mount Deer episodes within a few days of watching them, but this time around, I had other stuff going on at the time and focused on doing the write-ups I needed for immediate blog posts. As a result, it took me over a week to swing back around to this review, and my notes are more incomplete than I’d like. I know there are plot elements that I’m forgetting here.

Wai Siu-bo is in a tough position as usual, for more reasons than one. Fong Yee’s lover was captured and thrown into the dungeon after the attack on the palace a few episodes back, and she’s begging Wai Siu-bo to break him free. This is a dangerous task that could potentially land Siu-bo in huge trouble and wreck his relationship with the emperor, not to mention he has feelings for Fong Yee himself and is loathe to help his rival. Elsewhere, the Green Wood Lodge continues to feud with another house of the Heaven and Earth Society.

It’s the non-Wai Siu-bo stuff that I can’t remember as well, so I’ll be very brief here. Other than the general martial-arts society reasons—fights over honor, retaliation for various slights—we discover another reason why these two different groups are at odds. Despite both being Ming loyalists who want to depose the current emperor, they have different ideas about which member of the Ming royal family should be restored to the throne. That adds another wrinkle to their rivalry, even though they’re ostensibly on the same side.

As for the Wai Siu-bo side of things, my clever fool continues to get the job done, even as he constantly seems to hop from one calamity to the other. It’s interesting to see how quick-thinking he is. Especially with other members of the servant class, he has a real talent for manipulating others to the point that he gets them begging to do what he wants them to do. His reluctant plan to help the imprisoned rebels has multiple steps and involves duping an impressive number of people.

We also get more of Wai Siu-bo as the master of the Green Wood Lodge, which always makes for some good scenes. Here, in addition to the usual scramble to figure out how to lead this house of martial-arts adepts who are way more experienced/knowledgeable than him, there’s a really nice scene between him and Helmsman Chan. Some of Siu-bo’s troubles are catching up to him in a major way, and after some calm scolding from the helmsman about shirking his duties, he breaks down. This leads the others to rally around him and the stern but kindly Helmsman Chan to do what he can to help. Some nice interplay between the characters, and even though Siu-bo usually manages to keep his head above water on his own, it’s nice that he has people who’ll have his back when he’s feeling low.