The "protagonist" of a story, the way the Greeks used the term anyway, was the guy who set events into motion. Thanos wants The Tesseract, The Other sends Loki [the "ally"] and The Chitauri to get the Tesseract, and it falls to Nick Fury to stop those guys from doing that. This, technically, makes Nick Fury the antagonist of The Avengers. To make this distinction seems picayune, but, in fact, this protagonist problem is why so many superhero movies suck — it is inherent in the genre that the protagonist of the narrative is the bad guy. The moment you have a main character whose job it is to run around stopping things from happening, you have a reactive protagonist, which means a weaker narrative. When you have a weaker narrative, you end up throwing all kinds of nonsense at the screen, hoping that no one will notice that you have a reactive protagonist.

This is, incidentally, why Batman barely even shows up in Christopher Nolan's Batman movies — he understood that the protagonist of his Batman movies had to be Bruce Wayne, not Batman, and that, for his narratives to succeed, the bad guys had to be reacting to the actions of Bruce Wayne, not Batman reacting to the actions of the bad guys.

Originally: toddalcott.com (Superhero stuff is complete bullshit, but Chris Nolan's films are interesting, so read this)

Local Hero

Charming, but tame. Essentially a children's film from a story point of view. It's odd that until quite recently they were making almost only those… maybe cinema used to be more of a "family experience" back then?

Barbarians at the Gate

James Garner is incredibly charming. So much so that he makes you forget what a type that "Simple Newspaper Boy from Winnipeg" really was. That 80s infatuation with all things "business" really hasn't aged well either. Go watch Support your local Sheriff instead.

The Guilty (Den skyldige)

Broken dirty cop with a heart of gold. Nice execution, I liked the limited space idea. The twist toward the end is great. Be careful with the dub, since the movie hangs on the voice actors.

Todos lo saben

On its own, a great movie. If you're familiar with the Farhadi formula, you wish he did try something different sometimes. But still, riveting.

Wackersdorf

Homeland cinema: Better than I expected. Not very educational, kinda small-minded.

2001: A Space Odyssey

Masterpiece.

BlacKkKlansman

I have the feeling it could have been more cohesive without studio influence. Mediocre. If you're not plugged into current Yankee politics, it will be even less interesting.

Hostiles

Meh

make effort sexy again

(Quote source: jamie loftus)

…the irony of my as of late low-effort reposting of twitter quotes is not lost on me

It's incredible that one of the best things you can do in America, which is speed along Mulholland Drive late at night, is free

from Dan O'Sullivan

Blockchain tech is the intersecting black hole in the Venn diagram of everything wrong with the tech industry. Delusional anti-govt rhetoric, utter bullshit alternating with fraud, solutions in search of problems, environmental waste—a vast domain of vicious uselessness.

Itamar Turner-Trauring on the blockchain hype

Dystopia used to be a fiction of resistance; it’s become a fiction of submission, the fiction of an untrusting, lonely, and sullen twenty-first century, the fiction of [mass media manipulation], the fiction of helplessness and hopelessness. It cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn’t call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more. It appeals to both the left and the right, because, in the end, it requires so little by way of literary, political, or moral imagination, asking only that you enjoy the company of people whose fear of the future aligns comfortably with your own. Left or right, the radical pessimism of an unremitting dystopianism has itself contributed to the unravelling of the liberal state and the weakening of a commitment to political pluralism.

From A Golden Age for Dystopian Fiction by Jill Lepore.

In a broader sense, there's nothing to be gained by despairing at the current situation, assigning blame, reacting instead of acting. Create, don’t disparage. Don’t get tangled up in petty debates, have a vision and convince people by laying the groundwork.

Neoliberalism is a kind of statecraft. It means organizing state policies by making them appear as if they are the consequences of depoliticized financial markets. It involves moving power from public institutions to private institutions, and allowing governance to happen through concentrated financial power. Actual open markets for goods and services tend to disappear in neoliberal societies. Financial markets flourish, real markets morph into mass distribution middlemen like Walmart or Amazon.

[…] [Greta Krippner’s] thesis is that the liberal democratic system was dismantled because it was too explicit about who was making choices. People would get mad at politicians when they didn't have, say, mortgage credit, or when the price of milk went up too high. The answer came to be neoliberalism, or creating a veil of financial markets to make all those decisions seem apolitical. […]

Neoliberalism is not faith in free markets. Neoliberalism is not free market capitalism. Neoliberalism is a specific form of statecraft that uses financial markets as a veil to disguise governing policies.

Matt Stoller trying to define the word everyone tends to project their hate onto.

[Some dipshit] quits working and writes spammy blog shit for a living. Hackernews decides people don't like to work because all work is either meaningless or evil, but it's definitely everyone else's fault. Also the entire monetary system is worthless, we should envy the impoverished, capitalism will kill us all, and they all quit jobs they loved because someone was mean to them. The unanimous consensus: take a couple years off and just fuck around.

n-gate on 'cutting ties with the evil corporate world and pursuing your passion' types

Traveling, writing, photographing, ESL teaching etc. is just, to borrow the phrase, ‘fucking around’ and will not make a positive impact on the world. Do what makes you happy in your spare time and start shouldering some responsibility.

Noam Chomsky about the powerful’s infatuation with Niebuhr:

The inescapable “taint of sin on all historical achievements,” the necessity to make “conscious choices of evil for the sake of good”—these are soothing doctrines for those preparing to “face the responsibilities of power,” or in plain English, to set forth on a life of crime, to “play hardball” in their efforts to “maintain this position of disparity” between our overwhelming wealth and the poverty of others, in George Kennan’s trenchant phrase as he urged in a secret document of 1948 that we put aside “idealistic slogans” and prepare “to deal in straight power concepts.” Herein lies the secret of Niebuhr’s enormous influence and success.

From Jeet Heer’s article on Niebuhr ideology