Quick Hits

 

Quick Hits

Is Beyonce's new album cultural appropriation?

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The growth of China’s agricultural subsidies is incredible: now at $300bn per year, according to the OECD. The graph, which as usual I could not paste, is astounding

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Ambitious plans to build a utopian sustainable city at the foot of an active Japanese volcano are well on their way to completion.

First announced in 2021, Toyota has been hard at work constructing their Woven City just miles away from Mount Fuji on the island of Honshū, with the first of 2,000 anticipated residents now expected to move in before the end of the year.

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A criticism of Dune 2 from a Vicky Osterweil, clearly from a recent fiction program:
"..despite all the attempts of the literalists, the movies still contain resonances and ideas beyond their control. ...Stilgar believes in a prophecy that a messiah, the Mahdi, is coming to save the Fremen from the imperium. In this prophecy, that messiah comes from outside of the planet--Paul Atreides is that messiah (yes, it's giving Lawrence of Arabia). Javier Bardem, an incredibly talented actor, spends the entire movie pointing to something Paul has just done and saying "See! This is proof he's the Mahdi!" Once or twice this is comical. But by the film's climax it's so tedious that, when Paul demonstrates his power to a war council of the Fremen leadership and the camera cuts to Bardem yelling "The Mahdi!" someone behind me in the audience said loudly to their friends "this is so stupid."

This kind of audience-condescending premise-forward literalism is not just in the narrative and scripting, it’s in the acting. The actors of Dune 2 almost all speak in that tedious whisper-growl that stands in for profundity, a vocal style also popularized by Nolan, in Christian Bale’s portrayal of the caped crusader in 2005’s Batman Begins. I believe that if a movie features a bunch of good actors and all the performances are flat and dull, as is the case in Dune Part Two, where even Florence Pugh, Lea Seydoux, and Josh Brolin lack all charisma, it is ultimately a reflection on the director (and the script), not the actors."

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And a pro TikTok position:

People keep saying “but they do the same to us.” That’s no excuse. We shouldn’t take a page from the Chinese censorship playbook and basically give them the moral high ground, combined with the ability to point to this move as justification for the shenanigans they’ve pulled in banning US companies from China.

Don’t let the authoritarians set the agenda. We should be better than that.