Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

John Carter: the review

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Much has been made in the past week or two about how huge of a bomb the movie John Carter is for Disney. Like anyone here should care except Disney’s accountants. (Seriously: why do people pay so much attention to a company’s financials if they themselves don’t have a horse in the race? I can understand wanting to find out if your favorite company’s going out of business but…if that’s going to happen, a)there will be new companies to enjoy and b)they’ll send a memo around, honest.)

Forget the stupid financials. As many people pointed out, John Carter bombed because it had an amazingly sucky ad campaign. This is one of the few times that I think having the wrong ad campaign really strangled a movie in the cradle, because John Carter is a fun, goofy flick that you can take the whole family to. I’m actually really sorry that Darin and I saw it without the kids, because now one of us in two or three weeks is going to have to go see it again (if, of course, any theaters still have it).

John Carter is the story of a guy in the American Old West (whose name is…wait for it…John Carter) who finds a portal to Mars. There he discovers all manner of strange and crazy creatures, and he gets involved in the middle of a planet-wide civil war, where he promptly falls in love with Princess Dejah, who has to marry someone else. Huge epic battles! Crazy non-terrestrial machines! Mark Strong as the bad guy! (I know, right? Like that came as a huge surprise — I think he’s contractually obligated to be the bad guy in every picture these days.)

The movie isn’t deep. It’s not educational. It was a lot of fun, however. The movie rarely stops to explain anything, figuring the audience will just pick it up as we go along, and since it’s not especially layered or confusing, we do. I really liked Taylor Kitsch as John Carter — he seems like he’s having a great deal of fun, even if he does have to spend most of the movie half-undressed. (Ladies.) The female lead is nothing to write home about, but they so rarely are these days, and that’s a topic for a rant another time.

There is a lot of fighting, but all of the blood spilled is a turquoise blue, not red (which doesn’t explain why everyone is clearly red-tinted, not…oh forget about it), so I don’t think kids would be especially grossed out. There are cute alien babies and giant machines and people wearing crazy costumes. It’s a fun weekend serial.

I’m just sorry it had such a sucky trailer.

Mike Daisey and why theater is important

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I watched the unfolding of the Mike Daisey story yesterday with some amusement and some shaking of my head and some outright complete bemusement.

In case you don’t know what happened with Mike Daisey, you can read the story here (or here, or here, or…). Basically, it comes down to this: Mike Daisey has a show he calls The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, in which he gives a monologue about how he went to China and discovering the conditions in which Chinese factory workers operate under subhuman conditions and never use the products they make.

Daisey

You can read the monologue here. The popularity of his monologue was one of the factors in increasing questions about and investigations into how Chinese factories make electronic devices. And he was interviewed for a number of pieces on the subject — by the New York Times, and by This American Life on PRI. It turned out that Daisey had not interviewed the workers he said he did, he hadn’t experienced the things he said he had, and sometimes he relied on other journalists’ work and sometimes he just made shit up.

Given how many times I’ve seen people quote things Daisey said as gospel truth, this is somewhat problematic.

As Theater

Fuck you, naysayers. You can do anything in theater. Rock on with your monologue, Mike Daisey.

You want to present a theater piece saying the Trilateral Commission is behind everything that happens on the planet? Awesome. Make it thrilling and entertaining and I am there. Want to present a dramatic recreation of how George W. Bush instigated the Iraq War in order to steal the budget surplus and hand out billions to his supporters? Do it do it do it. An eighteen-hour multi-play cycle depicting what life is going to be like after we run out of oil? If you keep down the costs of stage effects and keep speaking roles to a minimum, some theater somewhere will stage that puppy.

If audience members turn out to be getting all of their facts about the world at large from the theater, that’s not the theater’s problem. That’s your problem, for being an ill-informed moron.

As News

Unfortunately, because Daisey presented his monologue as his real-life experiences and he never hedged on that line — he told everyone, “This is what I did” — he set himself up as an authority. And when it turned out that he lied, his reputation — as a truth teller, where it should have, and as a theatrical monologuist, where it should not have — became the story. When in fact the story is our journalists suck.

The biggest problem here is how many reputed journalists took Daisey’s stories at face value without apparently doing their own legwork. Reporters said, “Hey, I’ve stood outside of Foxconn and never run into workers saying crap like this…oh well, guess I just talked to the wrong workers. He must be right!”

According to Bloomberg, the reporter for Marketplace, Rob Schmitz, who discovered that yeah, Daisey overstepped (or outright lied) on a number of issues found the translator Daisey worked with by typing “Cathy translator Shenzhen” into Google. Which no one else had done. There’s some real investigative journalism right there, people.

I could go off on a rant about this whole topic (Quick! Name all the electronics manufacturers who have revealed not only their supply chain but specifically what they’re doing to improve conditions! Okay, I’ll make it easier! You only have to name more than one!) but I won’t. I’ve enjoyed making fun of Daisey over the past day only because he got so much attention for being an authority on a subject he wasn’t.

But his theatrical monologue? He isn’t the evening news, people. We don’t want to hear endless stories of “Well, I heard…” or “I read in a paper…” or “You know what it might be?” No, we want to hear what people have done. And that is how Daisey presented it.

Jason Grote, a playwright whose work I’ve never seen but whose Twitter feed I enjoy (and whose blog I enjoyed, before he discontinued it), had four really cogent tweets on the subject yesterday:

Grote theater

There are different levels to truth crimes:

Grote cheney

And most especially, let’s keep a little perspective:

Grote trayvon

In case you don’t know who Trayvon Martin is, you can read about his death (and the racism that clearly caused it and lets his murderer go free) here.

I’m still of two minds. Anything that gets people thinking and connects with them emotionally (as Daisey clearly did, and as 97% of our entertainment so clearly doesn’t) is awesome. People clearly want what he said to be the gospel truth.

A good question is: WHY?

Keeping a diary, 2012 edition

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Remember back a million years ago when I was all about keeping a journal? I had pages about journals, I wrote Why Web Journals Suck, I maintained the Going and Going page?

(In case you don’t remember Going and Going…for a few years I actually maintained by hand via BBEdit a list of people who kept an online journal going for a year. There were no blogs yet. I know, right? And I checked every single entrant by hand…until I came to my senses said, I am so not doing this any more. I’m sure there are automated ways of doing that now, but I wasn’t aware of any of those then, and doing that kind of thing now….muahahahaha, no.)

My journal keeping over the past decade has been…spotty, let’s say. At a time when I probably should have been keeping a much more detailed diary (my kids growing up), I’ve had a blank book here, a book there… My handwriting, which used to be so gorgeous, has gone to pot. It’s hard to write by hand when you haven’t been. I actually still prefer writing a journal by hand, because I think using your hand to move across a page physically produces a different relationship with your brain than typing does. Yes, typing goes faster, but faster isn’t always better. Sometimes faster gets you stuck on “Oh, let me rewrite this over and over again” or retype this or whatever. Sometimes faster is just more shoveling of bullshit.

But keeping a diary on the computer can be useful, because I can type faster — much faster — than I can write by hand these days. Also useful: a diary on my phone. I kept a diary of all of the hair products I was using, in what combinations and in what amounts, to see what kind of hair day I got out of them. I’ll be out somewhere and want to write about something that’s definitely journal-like, and what do I have on me? I have my iPhone.

So, the three types of journals I keep at the moment: Paper, Computer, and iPhone.

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