can we take a moment to just think about how incredibly scary magical healing is in-context?
You get your insides ripped open but your friend waves his hands and your flesh just pulls back together, agony and evisceration pulling back to a ‘kinda hurts’ level of pain and you’re physically whole, with the 100% expectation that you’ll get back up and keep fighting whatever it was that struck you down the first time.
You break your arm after falling somewhere and after you’re healed instead of looking for ‘another way around’ everybody just looks at you and goes “okay try again”.
You’ve been fighting for hours, you’re hungry, thirsty, bleeding, crying from exhaustion, and a hand-wave happens and only two of those things go away. you’re still hungry, you’re still weak from thirst, but the handwave means you have ‘no excuse’ to stop.
You act out aggressively maybe punch a wall or gnash your teeth or hit your head on something and it’s hand-waved because it’s ‘such a small injury you probably can’t even feel it anymore’ but the point was that you felt it at all?
Your pain literally means nothing because as long as you’re not bleeding you’re not injured, right? Here drink this potion and who cares about the emotional exhaustion of that butchered village, why are you so reserved in camp don’t you think it’s fun retelling that time you fell through a burning building and with a hand-wave you got back up again and ran out with those two kids and their dog?
Older warriors who get a shiver around magic-users not because of the whole ‘fireball’ thing but the ‘I don’t know what a normal pain tolerance is anymore’ effect of too much healing. Permanent paralysis and loss of sensation in limbs is pretty much a given in the later years of any fighter’s life. Did I have a stroke or did the mage just heal too hard and now this side of my face doesn’t work? No i’m not dead from the dragon’s claws but I can’t even bend my torso anymore because of how the scar tissue grew out of me like a vine.
Magical healing is great and keeps casualties down.
J.lo meets Oh! Adam Rex drew the two meeting :D. I wonder what kind of conversations they would have?
I found this on Adam Rex’s twitter page and had to share it on tumblr because everyone needs to know how awesome the author of The True Meaning of Smekday is. If you liked Home, you’ll love this book. If you hated Home, you’ll still love this book. Seriously. I don’t care if you are 5 or 95 you’ll love it. GO READ IT.
ay-ay-ay/ai-yi-yi/ei, yei, yei – an exclamation of exasperation (very similar exclamation originates in mexico)
bupkes – colloquially used to mean “nothing” (as in “after all my hard work, what did i get? bupkes!”) but actually means “goat droppings” or “horse droppings”
chutzpah – arrogance, nerve
feh! – a sound of contempt, disgust, or disapproval.
futz – fool around (not sexually)
glitch – you know how it’s used in english. but it actually means “slip,” or a minor malfunction
hock – bother, pester
kitsch – gaudy trash
klutz – literally means “a block of wood,” refers to a dense or clumsy individual
nudge – to push gently
schmooze – to converse informally
schmuck – a foolish/obnoxious person
schmutz – dirt
schnoz – nose
shlep – to drag or haul
schtick – a gimmick used in a performance
spiel – a long, involved rant. usually a sales pitch
In which I get way too serious about a children’s movie!!!
Hoo boy. I’m going to be comparing the movie to the book (The True Meaning of Smekday) that it’s based on, a lot in this post. I know I keep harping on and on about THE BOOK and it seems like no one really cares, but I swear, there are reasons I keep bringing it up. I promise I’m not just being a book snob. Actually, after seeing “Home,” I feel an even greater need to talk about it— the adaptation was even worse than I’d anticipated.
Okay. Spoilers ahead. Please read the book. Thoughts, in no particular order:
Let’s just get this out of the way: the Boov are a pretty blaringly obvious metaphor for settler colonialists. Like, all alien invasion stories can be, but it’s pretty intentional here— literally near the very beginning, we see the Boov in their ships getting ready to invade Earth, and a voice on the intercom says something like “settlers, get ready to land” (can’t remember the exact line).
Also, before landing, the Boov captain distributes a pamphlet telling everyone that humans are primitive and animal-like, and are lucky to have the Boovs come in and help. Sound familiar?
However. The book handles this, and other issues, SO MUCH BETTER than the movie does.
YOU WILL SEE WHY. SO MANY REASONS WHY.
Look, in both the film and novel, the aliens suck all the humans out of their homes and essentially stick them in a huge concentration camp. But in “Home,” it’s called “Happy Humans Town,” and it’s not just a name— when Tip gets there, it’s genuinely a picture-perfect, beautiful, candy-colored utopia.
Not only does this make no sense, because the Boov obviously DON’T know the first thing about how humans work (so how can they construct such a perfect environment for them?)— it also erases the suffering caused by real colonialism??? The only problem in the movie seems to be that people might miss their old homes or be confused, and the real impact is lost. This is a huge problem in itself, and also because— as I will argue later in more detail— “Home” is by white people, for white people, and intended to be sympathetic to white people.
OK, now I want you to look at how Adam Rex handles the camp:
LOOK AT THAT.
All right. The writers drastically changed the overall plot of the book, and pretty much all the changes were for the worse. In “Smekday,” Tip and JLo/Oh’s road trip is confined to the United States, and they also meet a bunch of different characters on their way. In “Home,” the side characters are all gone— understandable— and they swing around Australia and Paris and lots of other landmarks all over the world.
But the fact that “Smekday” takes place in America is for a reason. The story is basically ABOUT white people invading and colonizing and creating what is now the US. Rex even addresses this (or heavily implies this) in a section of the book where Tip meets a Native American dude on her roadtrip. You lose all of that when “Home” takes them swinging around cool landmarks for no apparent reason besides, i dunno, providing visually pleasing backdrops to the car chases?
In “Smekday,” Tip is a Black girl and her mom is Italian— and these things actually matter in the story. For example, when Tip gets to the camp to find her mom, the people in charge mess it up because they assume her mom is Black. There are other points that I can’t specifically find right now, but I think Rex handles it pretty well, and with intention. In “Home”, I don’t recall that there’s any reason that Tip is black or that her mom is……….. I don’t even know. They don’t say, but she kinda looks like they modeled her after JLo???
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Tip had green eyes in “Smekday.” Or at least I don’t remember the color being specified, and they look pretty dark in the illustrations. Why did they make Tip’s eyes so specifically green, and even have her mom say “She has beautiful green eyes, did I mention they were green??? Her eyes, they’re green!!!”
It doesn’t seem so bad if you haven’t read the book, but why, oh why, would they do this?
Hmm!!!!!
I just realized how long this post was getting, and I haven’t even gotten to the worst parts yet. I’m going to continue this with a Part 2 of Part II.
3. He is not a princess. He does not identify as a princess.
4. Calling him a princess because he doesn’t adhere to the white western interpretation of masculinity and because he’s “sassy” is sexist, racist, and reinforces the gender binary.
5. It’s really crappy.
6. Your sense of humor is tired and it sucks.
Ancient moon priestesses were called virgins. ‘Virgin’ meant not married, not belonging to a man – a woman who was ‘one-in-herself’. The very word derives from a Latin root meaning strength, force, skill; and was later applied to men: virle. Ishtar, Diana, Astarte, Isis were all all called virgin, which did not refer to sexual chastity, but sexual independence. And all great culture heroes of the past, mythic or historic, were said to be born of virgin mothers: Marduk, Gilgamesh, Buddha, Osiris, Dionysus, Genghis Khan, Jesus – they were all affirmed as sons of the Great Mother, of the Original One, their worldly power deriving from her. When the Hebrews used the word, and in the original Aramaic, it meant ‘maiden’ or ‘young woman’, with no connotations to sexual chastity. But later Christian translators could not conceive of the ‘Virgin Mary’ as a woman of independent sexuality, needless to say; they distorted the meaning into sexually pure, chaste, never touched.
Monica Sjoo, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (via thewaking)
Literally the most important thing you will read today.
The best comedy about North Korea, far better than The Interview, was made six years ago.
It’s called The Red Chapel, and it’s a documentary about two Danish-Korean comedians (and their director/manager) who go to North Korea to perform for Kim Jong Il. The idea they had was that they would do subversive comedy, they would come up with a sketch that looked like goofy slapstick but slyly mocked the North Korean government, and it would be a hilarious slap in the face to do it right in front of Kim Jong Il. That big silly wouldn’t even know they were making fun of him! Ha!
Over the course of their stay in North Korea, the idea falls apart. It becomes clear during rehearsals that their government minders are very aware of anything that could be the slightest bit subversive (or even really funny), and if any of that makes it into the final performance, the consequences will be very bad. Anything remotely satirical gets cut from the routine very early on.
Things go from demoralizing to horrific when the government minders take them on outings to see life in North Korea. Of course everyone they see looks totally fine and claims everything is wonderful. But one of the comedians has cerebral palsy, and he starts asking: why don’t I see any people like me? We’ve been here for weeks, and seen thousands of people; how is it that not one of them is visibly disabled?
He doesn’t get an answer. He breaks down emotionally and refuses to keep going along with the charade, but because his voice is hard for the North Korean minders to understand, the director “translates” his protests into praise for the regime. He’s trying to protect his friend but it’s awful and cruel and gut-wrenchingly hard to watch the scenes where the comedian is screaming “that’s not what I said!” and the director is frantically whispering “just play along!” at him.
In the end, they go out in front of a heavily coached audience and do a completely harmless show with kazoos and spring snakes and silly costumes. All hope for satire breaks down and they give exactly the show the government minders wanted, because it’s the only thing they can do. Subversiveness wouldn’t be clever; it might be fatal. Instead of getting away with something, they end up hating themselves and violating their own principles. They came to mess around with a silly weird country that doesn’t know how ridiculous it is, and instead they found themselves surrounded by very serious and real and terrifying oppression.
The Red Chapel isn’t funny, and totally fails to satirize or expose or change anything, and that’s why it’s the only good comedy about North Korea.
This Is a Backup Blog 