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Archive | June, 2019

By the Time I Get to Phoenix

By on June 10, 2019 0

The X-Men movie series has too many continuity failures to count here, but one claimed failure I don’t think is actually one.

I’ve seen people online complaining that it’s inconsistent for Jean Grey’s powers to have manifested in the shape of a phoenix back in Age of Apocalypse when she didn’t get infected with the Phoenix Force until Dark Phoenix.

But I think this complaint comes from viewing the films through the lens of the comics. In Dark Phoenix, the force that infects Jean is never called the Phoenix Force, nor is it shown taking the shape of a phoenix prior to its encounter with Jean. So the phoenix aspect, in the films, seems to come entirely from Jean, and is something awakened or triggered by, rather than contributed by, the force that infects her. FWIW, that’s also more or less consistent with Last Stand, where the Phoenix Force was something innate in Jean all along and only triggered by the events of X2.

Addendum:

Just wanted to add this pic:

Pale Phoenix

By on June 9, 2019 0

“Why did you make me do that?”

“When I lose control, bad things happen … but it feels good.”

“Are you threatening me? Because that would be a bad idea.”

Those are Jean Grey’s three most memorable lines from the advance trailers for Dark Phoenix:

But none of those lines appears in the actual movie. The scenes for which they were originally intended are recognisable, but the lines are weirdly absent.

That strikes me as a serious mistake. Not just because in themselves they’re good lines, well delivered – though they are that – but because they illustrate Jean’s arc from rejecting her new powers, to being tempted by them, to reveling in them. Removing them undercuts both Jean’s character and Sophie Turner’s performance – especially since the latter two lines are the closest we get to seeing the Cool Evil Dark Phoenix most of us were probably hoping to see a great deal of in the movie.

A lot of viewers are already complaining, with some justice, that Dark Phoenix treats its title character as though she were merely a supporting character for other characters’ angst. Cutting those three lines simply compounds that problem.

I Never Had a Secret Chart

By on June 8, 2019 0

In 1965, Murray Rothbard described socialism (or at least state socialism) as a “confused, middle-of-the road movement” that “tries to achieve Liberal ends,” such as “freedom, reason, mobility, progress, higher living standards for the masses, and an end to theocracy and war,” but does so “by the use of incompatible, Conservative means,” such as “statism, central planning, communitarianism, etc.”

If that’s right, and I think it broadly is, it suggests a somewhat different grid from the usual Nolan Chart:

An incompatibility between means and ends suggests, further, that the two quadrants I’ve marked in grey are unstable. Attempts to implement the program of the traditional left politically end up sliding in practice into the political right (as is evidenced by the general recognition that Kremlin hardliners were appropriately called “conservatives”); that’s why Marxist ideology can be preferable to Nazi ideology, even if there’s not much daylight between Stalin and Hitler. The Marxist vision of universal cooperation and solidarity is more congenial than the Nazi vision of superior races crushing inferior ones; but implementing the former vision through the centralised, authoritarian state tends to yield something looking more like the latter vision.

Similarly, right-libertarian attempts to uphold conservative, authoritarian goals (such as heteropatriarchy, white privilege, closed borders, hierarchical workplaces, the capitalist wage system, etc.) via free-market means are doomed to fail for the same reasons. Hence we see the breakdown of libertarian-conservative “fusionism,” the transformation of right-libertarians into alt-righters, etc. At the end of the day, as William Gillis says, “everything is philosophically unstable besides fascism and anarchism.”

Leonard Cohen Month, Songs 13-16

By on June 8, 2019 0

And now we’re caught up:

June 7:

Why Don’t You Try (1974):

Anthem (1992):

June 8:

So Long Marianne (1967) [with photos of Leonard Cohen and Marianne Ihlen on Hydra]:

Light As the Breeze (1992):

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