Smallfoot delivers a few great messages to its audience in its cleverly written screenplay.

I watched Smallfoot with two friends on Wednesday evening. This Warner animation offering had a kind of brilliant screenplay. Warning: Spoilers ahead. It took the whole Bigfoot legend and turned it 180 degrees by telling the story from the sasquatch point of view. In particular, Migo (who is friendly) and lives in a village with other friendly Yeti's, engages in a lot of ridiculous activities at the whim of the "stone keeper," who is a kind of ideological leader. But unbeknownst to the yeti, their "stone keeper" has been keeping the entire population of Yeti purposefully ignorant of the way the world works by having them learn and memorize information on stone tablets while simultaneously encouraging them all to bury any questions they may have.

For one, they believe that a gong needs to be rung by slamming one's head into it in order to get the great glowing snail to march across the sky each day. In another instance, they believe that their mountain is an island riding on the backs of giant yaks that are beneath an ever-present bank of clouds which effectively conceals any view that the Yeti might have of the world at large. And of course, the Yeti's are in complete denial of the existence of humans whom they call "smallfoot." And then one day, Migo runs into an actual "smallfoot" who crashed into the mountain while piloting his plane above the clouds. The smallfoot gets away, and sets off a whole adventure for the race of Yeti who call this mountain home.

There are a lot of themes to unpack in this movie. Yes, it's cleverly written and funny and the animation is top-notch with great performances by Zendaya, Danny DeVito, and even LeBron James (all voice actors for different roles in the show). What I wasn't prepared for going into this, however, was how an entire race of yeti living on a mountain would continue to go on being ignored by the modern people who obviously call this world home. And the movie answers that to great effectiveness by revealing what I wrote above: that there has always been at least one Yeti (the stonekeeper) that knew all the stone tablets were lies, but he kept the lie going in order to keep his people safe. You see, the first encounter between yeti and people didn't go all that well. According to their records, the people thought the yeti were monsters, attacked them, and almost wiped them out. So they fled into a mountain where people couldn't follow, and then created a machine that would spit out moisture every day to keep the fog bank swirling at a certain altitude around the mountain.

The telling of this story suggests many things to me: 1) It's important to question everything that an elder tells you is written in stone and has always "been this way" since anyone can remember. Books, especially those books that dictate rules on how one should live and which questioning of those rules is discouraged, are particularly suspect. I think we can all come up with an example of one such book that does exactly this that millions of people believe in without questioning. 2) Living a lie and hiding in a closet (or cave) and denying the truth about yourself only harms society. Integration and being proud of who you are and looking for allies among those who are different from you is a much healthier approach. It's also a way to build trust with those who are challenged in trusting you to begin with. 3) Sometimes the original intent behind a reason for doing things is forgotten, and it's important to identify when this happens so that people can revisit that intent and see if it is still applicable to modern times.

I really enjoyed Smallfoot; it has great music, good humor, and some really powerful messages about what it means to belong, and how we shouldn't be afraid of people who look different than us. 

Some people choose to have children for the most selfish of reasons and I find it fascinating.

Billy Joel singing "We Didn't Start the Fire."

As I've gotten older, a bubble has popped that insulated me from the myriad reasons of why some people have children. I used to think that two people who loved each other got together, got married, and kids just kind of happened as a natural progression of their relationship. Then this got amended when (at some point) I realized that kids sometimes arose that were unplanned or for that matter, unwanted by certain parents. Fair enough. That's a tragedy but it all made sense. But now I've come to understand an entirely different reason people have kids, and I gotta say, it's really baffling. Here it is: some people are having children because they don't have a good personality for making friends, so they get around this by literally "making friends" and calling them "family."

This is absolutely the oddest thing, and it's striking in that it never works. A person who has a personality that is incredibly toxic (due to narcissism or some kinds of mental illness) is going to drive those children out of their lives when they become adults and have the ability to choose. And I've seen this happen over and over and over. I've seen people who are unloved or feel unwanted figure out a way to have a couple of babies because sex is easy and bam, they've got someone obligated to them that they can exert 100% control over for 18 years (the need for control probably arising from some primal fear of abandonment). When I realized that this was a thing, I literally had a "WTF" moment. Not only is it bad for children in general, but it is a flagrant disregard of a certain message promoted relentlessly by our society.

What is that message? That there is someone for everyone. This simply isn't true. There are a lot of people out there who don't have a "someone" or an "anyone." There are a ton of lonely adults in our modern world...people who no one really wants to be friends with much less partner with...and people who are unwanted. They exist by the millions, and it's not a "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" type of thing that you can solve with just effort. At least that's the way it seems to me. Sad, right? Eh...life isn't fair. But I think (as a society) we do a disservice by ignoring the fact that there is NOT someone for everyone.

Do I offer any solutions to this? Nope. I'm pretty apathetic about people who make selfish choices. As long as they don't infringe upon me, I generally don't care. It's just not the hill I choose to (proverbially) die on, and trying to correct it seems an awful lot like trying to push the tide back with a broom. But what I am interested in is pointing out that I see this phenomenon occurring, and I find it interesting. It's in my nature to gape at something and say aloud, "are you seeing what I'm seeing? That's so messed up!" For example, I know a person that has done this exact thing, and I want to say to her, "Did you have children because you feel alone and just wanted to 'make friends' that were obligated to love you and would never leave you?" But I already know what she'd say, so there's no point to it. I'm pretty sure she'd own up to exactly that, and then she'd just shrug it off as a "Hey...it was an option so I took it. It's a free country, right?" Fair enough, but it's really weird.

And I have so many questions regarding this choice. How does that child ever learn what a healthy relationship is? As the child grows, is the parent going to allow the child to make friends knowing that it will make them jealous? Could domestic abuse arise out of this choice that the parent is making? Will the child have a higher percentage chance of becoming a psychopath? Not that any of this matters because it is what it is, right? There's not anything that anyone can do about it until actual crimes are committed and then prosecuted through the courts of the justice system. Such is life.

As a man that has no children, I'm continuously stricken in the variety of ways that adults seem to weaponize them for their own selfish ends. It's no wonder that our society is a bit messed up regarding this issue. Maybe it's like that song that Billy Joel sang back in the early nineties/late eighties called "We Didn't Start the Fire." The choices that many people make start fires that just burn on and on and on.

King Kelson is a remarkable hero in a bunch of Deryni books written by Katherine Kurtz and his allegory is relevant even today.

This is a drawing of the character Kelson Haldane by artist Jenny Dolfen. It's pretty
good and you can see more of her work at her website HERE. I think my vision of him is
slightly different (as is going to be anyone who reads this series). I'm not a big fan
of the way the nose is drawn, but to each their own. 

I came late to the show with Katherine Kurtz and her remarkable Deryni series, which probably hit its apex following in the late nineties and has declined in popularity ever sense (but who can say for sure as overall book sales have declined for authors on the mid-list of big publishing houses in the last two decades?). The earliest of these books came out around the time Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Jaws were in theaters on first-run releases, so yeah, they've been out quite a while. Her world, which is an almost identical one to our own, even borrows the landscape of Wales for its maps. It does (at least) rename cities and landmarks with fantasy names similar to how Piers Anthony borrowed the map of Florida for his Xanth novels. What I find most remarkable, however, is how she kept pretty much everything from Catholicism (including such things as Judas, Jesus Christ, religious rituals, titles, prayers, saints, and the idea that suicide is an unforgiveable sin). I'd always wondered how this could possibly work and be good? I felt that anchoring a fantasy series too much in actual history would come across as awkward. But it doesn't. It feels natural, and I'm kind of addicted to reading these stories.

The main character in most of the books I've read is the twenty-sixth king of the fictional kingdom of Gwynedd who goes by the name Kelson Cinhil Rhys Anthony Haldane, and he's basically King Arthur, but with a more modern fantasy spin. For one, he's very young (in the books I've read he goes from age 14 to 17), he's the most handsome boy in the kingdom, he's got the biggest heart you could ever want in a person, and he's got a genius-like intelligence to him. Oh and he's also Deryni, which makes it so that he can use the magic system in this world, which is pretty much this: mind-reading for truth including a play-by-play of actual events seen by witnesses downloaded into his brain, the ability to communicate with other people who share his magical bloodline over great distances, and the ability to deflect the occasional arrow or two with great concentration. They aren't spectacular by any means, but it turns out to be awesome for storytelling. These books are about politics, about the struggle of power between religion and monarchy, and about the complicated medieval system of marriage and alliances that joined this house to that house and gave claim of certain lands to heirs (through bloodline). People are killed regularly in these political games in a variety of ways, the worst of which is the fate of being drawn and quartered (which was described in gruesome detail).

The main struggle in these books is also about those who have access to this magic (Deryni heritage) and those who are common and cannot do anything wondrous. Religion of course is at the forefront of the decision-making around this issue, almost in universal condemnation of the magic as a dark influence granted by Satanic powers. It stands in hypocrisy to itself as many of the priests, bishops, and arch-bishops in the church of these books have some kind of Deryni ability. Additionally, a long-dead saint by the name of Saint Camber, was a full Deryni, and he pops up all the time to aid this or that in the visions of his faithful. So its essentially an ongoing allegory of those who are different, being outnumbered by those who are not. And Katherine Kurtz is not unbiased in her representation. Anyone reading these books (if given a choice) would want to be Deryni. The magic just lends itself by granting that "extra edge" that allows the Deryni to continuously win and overcome challenges created by the raving bigots who are dead-set against them. But being in good sport, the Deryni do not abuse the power that they attain. When they rule, peace, tolerance, and goodness are promises kept to those who call the lands of Gwynedd their home.

So what do I find so fascinating about these books? It's a long list. The dialogue is glorious (you can hear the Scottish and Irish-inspired accents), the plots are cunning and intricate, the stakes are always high, and the details can be stomach-churning where the villains of the story are concerned. I love that the protagonist, King Kelson, has such a strong moral compass. He's an incredible hero for being such a young boy, and (though he's in possession of remarkable emotional intelligence) he's also ruthless when he needs to be. In the books I've read so far, he gave each of his enemies a second chance. When they betrayed him a second time, he did not give them a third and executed them without batting an eyelash.

There is also weird romance, and I want to acknowledge that this kind of medieval romance has its kind of rapey undertones that the author doesn't shy away from. I imagine that it must have been like this in the War of the Roses or other eras of history. For example, in a lovely scene in one book, Kelson decides to marry a princess who is his hostage. She's from a land that is in open rebellion (the forced marriage was an attempt to squash that rebellion). He didn't want to marry this person, and she didn't want to marry him either (imagine marrying your family's enemy). But Kelson knew that if he married her and got an heir from her, that it would save countless lives. So the young king tried his best to fall in love with her, and to court her, so that she would fall in love with him. It was romantic in a desperate sort of extremely forced way. And in the end, both of them hoped (idealistically) that the whole marriage wouldn't seem like a prison sentence. In other words, Kelson wanted his bride to give herself willingly to him on their marriage night. It sounds weird but Kelson was after consent (of all things) by getting the princess to either ignore or forget the gun that was literally pointed at the back of the princess's head.

Of course, it all seemed to work in grand literary style. And why shouldn't it? Kelson is the handsomest boy in the kingdom, and he oozes charisma. Plus, he's the king so he's got so much wealth and power that it's blinding. And there's the added bit that he's young and fresh and kind and every maiden who wasn't the princess was madly in love with him. Talk about peer pressure? However, it was not meant to be, because this princess's younger brother (who was also a hostage and meant to give his sister away for marriage) murdered her during the wedding (he drew a dagger and slit her throat as she said her vows). The excuse for doing this was to keep his bloodline pure of the Deryni-tainted Kelson. Kelson was heart-broken and executed the brother (of course), but it was a really touching scene to see both of these teenagers taking steps to thwart an all-out war only to have it ripped away. And inevitably, war did come and it was awful. Thousands died, women were raped by the hundreds, men were killed by the hundreds, children were butchered, there was mass starvation, and so on and so forth. Katherine Kurtz isn't afraid to get her hands dirty in showing how a kingdom comes together (by force if necessary).

Finally, the most intriguing thing about these books is how well they hold up over time. The allegory of the Deryni and the non-Deryni struggling against one another is not lost on me, nor is the idea of keeping one's true nature in the closet to avoid persecution. It seems to be a timeless trope, relied upon not only by Katherine Kurtz, but the X-Men comic books and movies, Harry Potter (muggles and non-muggles anyone?), and dozens of other similar tales. In fact, there are times when I think that the stories that evolve around struggle are the most interesting tales that humanity has to tell.  

This week I learned how stress affects us all and how domestic abuse is more insidious than many people realize.

On Wednesday of this week, I attended our annual meeting at work. It was easily the best annual meeting we've ever had. This year, the venue was great, we had great food catered for breakfast, lunch, and a snack. And the breakout sessions with professional training options was very informative. For example, in the domestic violence seminar, I was fascinated to learn that there's an entire spectrum of abuse (only a small portion of it is physical). A lot of emotional abuse comes from simply "displaying things" without verbal context to create fear in the victim. An abuser might put a shotgun with two shotgun shells on the bed. Nothing is said; it's just lying there in the open. An abuser might use threatening looks or they might control the money/be very controlling with money. There's emotional abuse like gaslighting and isolation...think of a partner saying to another partner, "I don't want you to see or talk with that person anymore." And there's "shaming behaviors" too.

I learned that there are also three stages to domestic abuse: the honeymoon phase, the abuse phase, and the aftermath. A victim can move through all of these stages really quickly, and it's cyclical, meaning if you don't catch a victim in the aftermath period when they are seriously considering making decisions to keep them safe, they can slip right into the honeymoon phase and are then beyond help. As an example of this, the advocate that was teaching us about her career in law enforcement said that she's literally been awakened in the middle of the night and was on her way down to the police station when she's stopped for a cup of coffee. In that twenty minutes--that little extra time that she took--the victim (who was at the police station) went from the aftermath period to the honeymoon period in her own thought processes.

So when the advocate arrived, all she got was, "I don't need your services. I talked this over with my partner, and they admitted that there's been stress at work and with the children and we've decided to go to Disneyland on a vacation and they're going to get treatment. It's wonderful. A family vacation is just what we need. So goodbye." The advocate said that she was shocked by this particular statement, and wanted to say, "This won't work, and you are going to get yourself killed." But she cannot do that, because when someone is in the honeymoon phase, there's no reasoning with them.

Interesting, eh? Another thing I learned about was witness tampering, which is in Law & Order all the time, but is rarely prosecuted in real life. An example of witness tampering is when an abuser shows up at a victim's home (there might be a restraining order that is being violated) and they make an emotional plea. "Hey, I apologize and I know that I did something wrong, but we don't need to involve law enforcement, do we? It's something that we can handle. Let's talk this through, and I assure you I'll get help. Just drop the charges. I love you and would never do anything to hurt you or the children." The advocate says this happens all the time, that it's a felony offense, and it is very rarely used by the prosecutor. They just "let it go" because the paperwork and the legal system is already incredibly labyrinthine. If the victim decides to quit pressing charges, the whole thing collapses on itself like a house of cards.

Another seminar that I went to involves stress and how it affects the body. The speaker talked about how stress used to serve human beings to help keep them safe. For example, if a lion or a bear came out of the woods and started to run you down, the stress response sent all of your blood to your core, boosted your energy output, and thickened your blood so that any wounds you might sustain would clot more easily. It's a fight/flight response, and it's there to try and keep you alive so that you survive the day. With the advent of our modern society, much of these things are no longer threats. However, we are more stressed than ever before, and it's ruining all of our lives.

Stress can come from anyplace. It can come from work, from an argument, from living in poverty, from fear of an intimate partner, or from something as innocuous as an email or working too many hours. When we live with stress that long, our bodies don't know any different. Our bodies think, hey my body has been involved in this epic bear fight for an entire week. So it shuts down systems to focus on survival. How does this affect us? Quite a bit actually. For one, our bodies store fat in our torsos during stress, so we become obese. Second, our immune systems stop functioning. Anyone ever get sick on the first day of a long awaited vacation? It's because your immune system isn't working and you caught a cold because of it. Then it takes your entire vacation (a relaxation time with no stress) to feel better only to be beaten down again by returning to your job. It's the vicious cycle of the modern world. Third, we lose empathy and become selfish.

Think about this for a moment. It is biologically impossible to have empathy with another human being when you are stressed. That part of the brain, the pre-frontal cortex responsible for empathy, gets shut down. Without empathy, we start to lie. If this kind of thing happens over and over and over in our society, then we become a sociopathic society with no empathy that is inherently selfish, i.e., what we are seeing a lot of today. The guy didn't really offer any solutions to the stress problem, but was merely focused on pointing out how stress affects all of us, and for us to be vigilant when we feel stressed so that hopefully we can seek help to deal with it before it becomes a serious problem.

After the day was over, I started to think that I'm glad I have a job that creates very little stress, and maybe there's hope for me to deal with my weight issues by embracing relaxation techniques combined with mindful eating.

I wonder if AMC even realizes that The Walking Dead has jumped the shark?

My interest in The Walking Dead has really declined. The fact that this is Rick's last season also may have something to do with it, but I think franchise fatigue (for many) is starting to set in. For one, the show seems to have run out of ideas. The next villains in line after the Saviors are called The Whisperers, and these are just crazy people who walk around in the skin suits made from zombie flesh so that they can exist simultaneously inside huge herds. Just think of the earlier episodes where people used zombie guts to keep the undead from noticing them, and you've figured it out. Second, the show just experienced its worst ratings, which is telling in and of itself. It's weird that Norman Reedus has been signed to a huge contract with the creators of the show saying that this thing could go on for another ten years and could also transition into movies.

In a way, they seem tone deaf to a quintessential part of The Walking Dead: without Rick to bookend the story, and after killing off Carl last season, the show as a piece of mythology is pointless. It shows that the show isn’t actually about anything. It's essentially "stream of consciousness" where each episode is just a story of someone's life until it isn't about that life anymore because they died. I mean...it's really no better than reality tv only with zombies without its bookends. I may watch the remainder of the episodes in this season, but I seriously don't know how this show is supposed to remain interesting with the only plot points being 1) zombies exist, 2) We can build medieval technology like windmills, and 3) there's always some psychotic asshole that tears everything down making us vulnerable to number 1.

It's also weird that they publicized Andrew Lincoln leaving the show. He's gone as of episode five, so everyone has kind of "checked out" of this thing. I figure he gets killed by either zombies or a villain in a zombie skin-suit (read "Whisperer" above).

We live in a strange time for storytelling. Steven Spielberg has remarked that film makers these days don't seem to want to tell a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The new model appears to be this: make season after season until people are so bored with it that they stop caring.  I prefer the model where you have a story, no filler stuff, and it has a clear beginning and an end.  Then again, I am not entirely sure I’d think the same if I was a TV exec.  Those guys live in a world where money is the one thing that matters, and if it was my job, who’s to say I would be any different?

Money kind of ruins everything that's good. However, as a caveat, I think that it would be hard to let go of something that (not too long ago) was the highest rated show in its time slot. I respect Game of Thrones so much more than The Walking Dead, because it has an actual end, and no amount of money is going to change that. The entertainment industry could use a long moment to reflect on itself and find some integrity like in Game of Thrones. 

Why did Disney choose Guy Ritchie to direct Disney's live-action film of Aladdin?

The first teaser trailer for Aladdin is online now, and I was surprised to learn that the director is Guy Ritchie. When I learned that, it made me cringe. As an influential Hollywood director, Guy Ritchie is a kind of "rags to riches" story, and just to be clear, I don't hate his movies. He worked his way up from the bottom, having dropped out of secondary school and then he went to work in a low-paying job for a film studio (which eventually became his big break). The kinds of films he's done on his IMDB official filmography include Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, Sherlock Holmes, and The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

So how would I categorize his directorial style? That's a complicated question, but I'm going to try and answer that in the paragraph below.

Guy Ritchie puts hard-hitting fast-moving action sequences into his shows. They are typically violent and bloody, hand-to-hand combat...and where guns are concerned you want to think of the phrase, "gun kata," which is best pictured as a kind of martial art only with guns involved. He also uses Quick Jump cut sequences, which Ritchie leans on to show a character performing an action that isn't important to the plot, but is useful for building context for understanding the character. Ritchie also ignores a traditional exposition in storytelling by beginning mid-stride, and it's up to the audience to catch up. He also uses vibrant and memorable characters. Sometimes they are over the top, like Brad Pitt's Mickey O'Neil, who is a hot-headed Irish boxer who is purposefully difficult to understand. Last (but not least) Ritchie tints his films. The Sherlock Holmes movies have a blue color purposefully overlaid on the film stock (it was used in another movie called Man of Steel) and it washes out color and makes things appear cold and hard/unforgiving.

So all of these things work in some instances, but they don't work for me in others. Do I think Guy Ritchie is the right director for a musical like Aladdin? No I do not, and I think it's going to be really weird. Will Smith as the Genie might work (His comedic timing in Men in Black is pretty good). And the fact that I've always loved the ancient story of Aladdin means that I'll still go see it (especially just to see the Cave of Wonders), but my expectations are already low. Why did Disney go with Guy Ritchie? Do they not understand their own intellectual property? If Aladdin features any of Guy Ritchie's signature style, I think it will woefully miss the mark both in the terms of diversity as well as storytelling.

I'm betting that Sarah Paulson's character in Glass is a master villain who controls and manipulates people.

I'm pretty excited to see M. Night Shyamalan's Glass, and when the second trailer dropped, I got even more so. There was a time when I swore I would never give M. Night anymore money. But I'm also a forgive and forget kind of a guy. However, knowing as much as I do about movies, it makes me think that (especially today), it's particularly easy to cut a movie in such a way as to make a super interesting trailer when the movie is anything but. I don't think that's what's going on in this case.

For one, there's a proven track record of excellence. Split was a worthy follow-up to Unbreakable which is a kind of masterpiece, because it dared to be so different in a genre awash with classic superhero movies. So how could Glass not be an equal and worthy capstone to a trilogy that ultimately stars James McAvoy, Bruce Willis, and Samuel L. Jackson. That's some quality casting right there. So having watched the trailer (which I'll link below) here are my thoughts.

Sarah Paulson's psychiatrist character is also a villain, and she's probably the major villain to complete the other two by adding someone to the mix that has the power to manipulate or control others against their will. David Dunn (Willis) is going to be immune to her power, so he'll have to face off against three villains in the climax of the movie. I predict that they'll defeat Sarah Paulson's villain character by teaming up, and that Elijah Glass will open up a computer file of all the doctor's work, showing that she has experimented upon and controlled dozens of people with abilities, and the movie will end with him knowing exactly where all of these people are.

Of course, this is all just an educated guess. This movie is going to be so much fun in January (a month that is usually devoid of anything remotely interesting).