Thoughts on things I’ve experienced over the past week: 2 Movies, 1 Book, & 1 Finale of a 5-Part Video Essay Series

DodgeBall: a TRUE underdog story (Rawson Thurber, 2004)
I watched Dodgeball on a hotel TV at the end of an extremely draining day where my flight back to New York made it halfway across the country before turning right the heck around, and then I spent hours in line waiting to get seats but the only direct flight back to the East Coast before today still arrived like two hours ago as of this being sent out… in Boston.

If I was going to watch anything, I needed to watch something overwhelmingly stupid, and ya know what this movie fucking delivered on that. 

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie’s central conceit is revealed to its characters by pointing out just how poorly mid-aughts comedy has aged, and there are many ways in which DodgeBall is, uh, “of its era”... but in between that cringe – e.g. Fran Stalinovskovichdaviddivichski being a stereotypical uggo but one of the losers is like super into that – were some genuine out-loud guffaws – the cut back to the guy Fran Stalinovskovichdaviddivichski hit/maybe-killed with a dodgeball immediately after being introduced.

So yeah, I dunno if I would really say it holds up, but when you have to stay awake so you can check into your red-eye flight right as it goes up, you could do worse.

Speaking of wanting to get out of the Pacific Northwest:

Dante's Peak (Roger Donaldson, 1997)
Alongside trying to learn about I PNW culture via Twin Peaks, I thought it might be worth looking into their safety concerns. I've read The Really Big One and was looking for some tips in case the Earth decided to didn't want people to live here anymore.

Fortunately nothing happened, both because ya know obviously but also because Dante's Peak did not prepare me at all. This is an absolute mess of a script full of barely coherent characters doing incoherent things. But even if that is, like, objectively true… I still had a pretty good time. It moves quickly enough that you don't get too bogged down in the nonsense, and if you're a fan of miniatures getting destroyed, have I got some great news for you. Dante's Peak has some amazing miniature work that has been featured on VFX Artist’s React before, but there was so much more: watching those little buildings and bridges and cars and etc get exploded and drowned and melted was an utter delight.

Speaking of officials ignoring experts resulting in horrific violence being enacted on innocent citizens:

Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong (Louisa Lim, 2022)
In the weeks leading up to my visit to Hong Kong last fall, I read Karen Cheung's The Impossible City: A Hong Kong Memoir, published in early 2022. It is one woman's story of the city's cultural decline in the years that followed The Handover from one colonizer (Britain) to another (China), and by the time I got to the Acknowledgements, my excitement for that leg of the trip had been largely sapped. And even in my brief time there, I felt it. On a walking tour of movie locations, my guide lamented that most of the iconic buildings she would have shown me have been replaced by luxury retail… and the fact that there was no film production at all happening on the island.

Even if the Hong Kong seen in the Girls with Guns classics or Wong Kar Wai’s catalog never truly existed, there was a place being captured, and it is now gone.

Context comes from another early 2022 non-fiction book with an unfortunately similar name. Louisa Lim, who I can only imagine was furious that The Impossible City released two months before her, is a journalist who officially injects her story into a broader history of Hong Kong. And gosh that history sucks. 

I'll admit that I've never actually dug much into the experience of colonization: I understand the whole “Is bad!” thing and have basically left it there. And Hong Kong has a whole lot of that: I mean… it was originally taken by the British basically as a way to keep the opium trade going after China outlawed it (which is so many horrors in one). But there is no modern equivalent to The Handover, and the way that Hong Kongers were shut out at every step of the process makes for a truly infuriating read. The story of Hong Kong is one of people who have never been given the chance to be themselves for themselves. There’s always been some other power trying to enforce their will.

Yet the people of Hong Kong tried so hard to fight it… until China made even the idea of fighting a treasonous act, charging people with e.g. “incitement to incite public nuisance.”

I’m glad that I didn’t read Indelible City before my trip, because it would have made the whole thing feel even bleaker. But I’m glad I read it since. I only feel bad because even over the two weeks that I spent with it, I started to feel my memory combining Lim’s story with Cheung’s: a year from now, I probably won’t be able to tell you whose experience was whose. But such is the way of things. And in any case, you would read both. 

Speaking of futilely speaking out against an overwhelming power:

We Need to Talk About Louis (Comedy Without Errors, 2026) 
The feature-length fifth (and final) part of Comedy Without Errors’ interrogation of Louis CK – which brings the full thing to ~6 hours of discussion – is an effective wrap-up that I found most interesting for its reflection on the state of comedy criticism (and the channel) itself: most well-known comedians are cishet white guys, and his archive and the consistent output of all of his peers reflect that… and it's clear that he's come out the other end of this project unhappy with that, promising to discuss a broader array of voices in the future, which I'm quite looking forward to!  

This, perhaps inevitably, comes down to the conversation on “separating art from artist.” My own feelings on that are well-documented (and I rewatched that video to confirm I still agree with it… and I sure do! If only my dang hair wasn't so floppy the whole time 😭), and CK was one of my final examples – included because one particular viewer took issue with my characterization of his actions as abuse; I wonder if she would still feel the way she did then after watching We Need to Talk About Louis, because it turns out that the details are indeed worse than most people know… and his responses even more calculated than you remember.

One point both of us make is that it's not enough to refuse to give powerful predators money: torrenting the latest Netflix special does not hurt the wallet of a guy who already got paid a whole heckuva lot of money. We need to deprive them of oxygen. We do not, in fact, have to hand it to them. 

Of course, the final episode comes as the man's return to the mainstream is full steam ahead. A YouTube series from a mid-sized channel was never going to stop a tidal wave… but that doesn't mean it wasn't worth doing, and I think it makes it even more worth watching.

Speaking of watching:

Seeing that everyone loves The Odyssey but I haven't seen it yet
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Looking at my tickets for The Odyssey for tomorrow afternoon 
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