At The Movies

My spouse and I seem to be settling into an approximately weekly routine is going to a movie at Tinseltown. This is a theatre in a truly weird mall on the edge of Chinatown. We like it because it's close enough, easy parking, and we usually go to the food fair before. Despite the food at that, and basically all food fairs, being horrific. I don't know why I keep expecting this to change. I also don't know why all food fairs are incapable of producing food that isn't awful. Is there not a market for good food fairs?

Anyway, here are the two most recent movies:


I quite like Miles Teller (well, I liked Whiplash), and this movie wasn't awful, but it was kind of a boring love-triangle-in-heaven premise and I nodded off more than normal. 4/10.

Yesterday's:


This was a fairly typical James Brooks light comedy that was not awful but extremely forgettable. On the bright side, JLC was, as always, quite good, and the title character, on the right, I don't know the actress, but she was absolutely adorable. The story is basically about her life culminating in becoming, and immediately being forced to resign, as governor of her state. A couple of very tedious scenes with her weird brother, that added nothing to the story. Anyways: 5.5/10.

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This storyline got me thinking about the power of movies and TV to shift cultural norms. It always makes me think of Glee, which is possibly one of the worst TV series ever made except for the 5-ish minutes per episode in which they sing, which are almost without exception 10/10 excellent (one of my favorite guilty pleasures is to watch Glee's cover of Edge of Glory; Paradise by the Dashboard Light; I Will Survive, Raise Your Glass).

Anyway, Glee had a hugely pro-gay storyline, and obviously, there is tons of pro-gay media out there, but I posit that Glee alone probably shifted the debate a statistically measurable percentage in favour of gay positivity, and certainly, Hollywood's pro-gay stance must have shifted it by several points.

So, getting back to Ella McCay, how about more movies that portray politicians sympathetically? Not as venal, corrupt monsters, but instead as overwhelmingly people just trying to do the best they can while doing the impossible job of balancing priorities and competing interests,

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