I feel similarly about a woman president, since we came pretty close. Now an Arab-American, that would be futuristic.
1. The Mayan civilization is not "the world's oldest".
2. I loathe Roland Emmerich.
3. It's so cool that all that's going to happen on my birthday!
Fake?
It's fake to have a movie black President now that we have a real black President?
Seems like the other way around to me.
No, now what we need is an angry black President - that's the next level of the glass ceiling.
Or maybe an inarticulate one.
It's entirely appropriate for a black actor to portray the president in 2012, because Obama will still be president, and the end of the world will be all his fault.
Also, I second 3. I'm not morally opposed to these things, but I saw the trailer a few months ago and it just felt kind of gross. I can't get excited about a plane narrowly escaping destruction when the destruction claims the lives of millions of others - like I give a shit about the people on that plane so much. Fuck that.
You know, if we don't get more commenting around here, I'm going to have to go up a ladder in drizzling rain and scrape windows. Help me out here, people.
3, 7: I think the pace at which these disaster films have been released has actually dwindled over the last five years. Go back to the late 90s and it was crazy.
I've said this before, elsewhere, but I think sequels to action movies should be actual sequels, where you deal with the collateral damage and loss of life of inconsequential characters and rebuiding of bridges and tunnels and survivor guilt. Who's going to pay for all those smushed cars?
I think the pace at which these disaster films have been released has actually dwindled over the last five years.
What Criminy Bee is trying to say is that the second derivative of action film releasage is negative.
This trailer is really indistinguishable from parody, isn't it? I guess no parody could have such an effects budget.
13: You mean my students can grasp concepts of how a rate can increase or decrease? AWESOME!
In HS I read a couple of the Niven/Pournelle EOTW* novels. What I recall about them was that the destruction porn was a pretty small portion of the whole - there was always a major thread following those in the loop (the scientists who see it coming, the gov't types who try to handle it) and another one following survivors (this part starts as multiple threads, of course, but they come together, always coalescing around the Mary Sue who was prepared), but the actual "see stuff get smashed" part was incidental (literally). The authors wanted to show off their understanding of the actual effects of a giant rock landing in the middle of the Pacific, but it didn't linger on dogs watching their owners get washed away or whatever the disaster porn guys love to do.
Indeed, "Cloverfield" looked like it might be an interesting take, but instead it was just a different frame for the same narrative.
Moviemakers, if Niven and Pournelle are easting your lunch in terms of class and thoughtfulness, you just might be sucking.
* End of the world. Stop sucking up to Rauchway
14: Oh, Heebie.
Just wait until HP starts to get this stuff, and you go insane because your 10-y.o. is smarter than your college students. You'll be so happy that day. So happy.
Isn't it just the derivative of action film releasage that is negative? I would interpret "action film releasage" as that quantity which, when integrated, gives the total number of films released. But maybe I misunderstand "releasage".
But maybe I misunderstand "releasage".
The fruit, it hangs so low.
Somewhere in this neighborhood there exists a joke about "action film jerk".
The release of derivative action films seems pretty constant.
Releasage would be a quantity function, right? So the first derivative is rate of release, and the second derivative is acceleration or deceleration.
Helpy-chalk means that the first derivative is zero.
Could be. The -age suffix makes it sound to me like a rate, but I'm not sure why. (Is pwnage amount of pwn per unit time? Maybe not. Oh well.)
Also, and I'm sure most people here already know this, the 2012 date is of course not the Maya end of the world in any sense. It's just the end of one particularly long calendrical cycle.
We were having such a nice dinner until the aircraft carrier landed on the house.
I so love that you can hear the tinkling of broken glass in that scene. That's the kind of exquisite attention to detail that makes Emmerich the artist he is.
10: I think sequels to action movies should be actual sequels, where you deal with the collateral damage and loss of life of inconsequential characters and rebuiding of bridges and tunnels and survivor guilt.
I think this has something to do with why I found Romero's Dead series so compelling. You start out in Night with a "OMG WTF" spirit and a focus on a small gobsmacked set of characters just trying to survive. Society seems to be largely intact, and there is still hope that the menace can be quashed. In Dawn, the zombies have been around long enough that discussion of how to deal with them has become a standard part of public life, and protocols for dealing with them have been developed. Human society is still largely intact, but seems rather precarious. Finally, in Day, the humans have been beat back to a tiny (literally) underground resistance, where they've had to develop a new set of rules to deal with their new reality. I found Dawn and Day much creepier than Night in part because of their focus on how society as a whole changed in response to a long-term zombie infestation, as opposed to the immediate reactions of a small group.
||
No more masturbating to William Safire.
|>
OP
Danny Glover is no Morgan Freeman. Forest Whittaker is not President material either.
Having just watched Beyonce in Cadillac Records however...
24: Hey, I'm glad teo said this. Dunno what this 2012 movie is about, but geez, I wish people would cut it out with the 'Maya say the world is going to end in 2012, boy aren't they stupid' thing.
Forest Whittaker is not President material either.
Forest Whitaker (one "t" apparently) is tagged for me forever since his role in The Crying Game, for some reason.
Danny Glover might not ever be president, but he is infinitely huggable.
It's just the end of one particularly long calendrical cycle.
But when everyone has to go and buy new calendars, isn't that a kind of end of the world? It's an end of convenient use of my giant calendar.
isn't that a kind of end of the world?
Yep. Get ready to ditch all your idioms, your euphemisms, your go-to remarks. Slow down and pay attention. That's what it means.
Pay attention? I didn't think I was going to have to do that. Does the Mayan Calendar mean that I have to start remembering people's names in 2012 as well?
It doesn't make any such specific forecasts, so I couldn't say.
geez, I wish people would cut it out with the 'Maya say the world is going to end in 2012, boy aren't they stupid' thing.
The "boy aren't they stupid" sentiment hasn't played a part in any of the 2012ocalypse manifestations I have encountered.
37 - Ha ha ha! Those buffoons conquered most of Central America by the tenth century and had a more sophisticated calendar system than Europeans of the time! But it was based on a 260-day year, and Terrence McKenna wrote a book about it! Those clowns!
It's clear, as in most cases, I don't know anything about this. Are there more general forecasts?
I did read something - on the internet, so it must be true - saying that the Mayans predicted the world will end in 2012, so you better watch out. I believe this is the only reference I've seen anyone make to the Mayan end of the world until today.
Isn't there more that needs to be said about how it would feel to hug Danny Glover in an asexual things-are-going-to-be-ok-in-my-beneficent-embrace kind of way? What would it smell like? pipe-smoke, aspirin, red licorice?
And the world still could end in 2012, so the Maya may get the last laugh.
27 - You might like the excellent comic book Walking Dead, which I hear is being adapted into a t.v. show. It gets deeply into the results of the survivors giving up hope for the cavalry rescuing them from Zombiepocalypse.
Yeah, the 2012 stuff I've seen has mostly been along the lines of 40. Not starting from the assumption that the world won't end in 2012 and thus putting down the Maya, but starting from the assumption that the Maya were Teh Awesome and thus concluding that the world will end in 2012.
And the world still could end in 2012, so the Maya may get the last laugh.
Given the most likely cause of world-ending catastrophe, the inhabitants of low-lying coastal areas like the Yucatan are unlikely to be laughing.
I think you need to familiarize yourself with the idea of "the world ending". Nobody's likely to be laughing then.
Nobody's likely to be laughing then.
Except maybe bob, however briefly.
Anyway, thanks to teo and Walt for making 42 explicit.
I believe this is the only reference I've seen anyone make to the Mayan end of the world until today.
A lot of people at my coffeehouse are preoccupied with 2012, but they are mostly dismissive of the apocalypse stuff ("We're not those sort of 2012-obsessed people!") and concerned instead with a sober assessment of what worldwide changes in human consciousness and behavior will likely result in the new era.
OT: No more masturbating to the losing streak of the Lions.
People thought the world would end at y2k, too. If the world has failed to end at every scheduled calendar shift thus far, doesn't that make each next one all the more likely? It's like flipping a coin and getting a string of heads. Watch out!
49: It's been a few years since I was acquainted with people concerned with 2012, but yeah, that's the way they spoke of it. Pretty damn serious about it, too.
I'm glad to hear that the general message in the mainstream isn't "boy aren't those Mayans stupid."
Why would the general message in the mainstream be "boy aren't those Mayans stupid"? First of all, mainstream people who've heard about this think that the Mayans who made these predictions were a tribe that died out 500, or maybe thousands, of years ago. Like the Hittites or Anasazi.
They didn't even have, like, gameboys or Sega.
If they're so fucking smart, how come they're so fucking dead?
i have zero desire to read lucifer's hammer. how is it niven + pournelle=mote, which was really great. hm, maybe one of the things about early "known space' niven is the liberal technocratic optimism of it.
"Niven was an adviser to Ronald Reagan on the creation of the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars") anti missile policy"
lol@us
55: God, I don't know. I read a dumb post on a list I subscribe to say that those stupid Mayans, etc., like 4 days ago. I actually don't know what the context was, because I have that poster blocked; I just read a response by someone saying, "Um, no."
Anything that sounds apocalyptic is going to receive a "wow, that's idiotic" response from more than a few people, no?
geez, I wish people would cut it out with the 'Maya say the world is going to end in 2012, boy aren't they stupid' thing.
I don't think the Maya are likely to get their feelings hurt, particularly.
I don't think the Maya are likely to get their feelings hurt, particularly.
It's just one in a long list of indignities, to be sure.
Plus, most of them don't even speak English.
And what about the wheel?
To be pedantic, I will point out that Mayans had wheels, they just only put them on toys. (Or so it seems.)
it just seemed...unnecessary? Fake?
Yes, the movie seems both of those things to me.
Plus, most of them don't even speak English.
Well, that is stupid.
65: I know! They can't even plead ignorance.
There were some New Age-types poking around here a year or two ago combining Maya calendar with "three rivers" to identify some alleged cosmic convergence thing. As long as it doesn't involve as much security as the G-20, it's all good.
59: It is extremely weird that Mote in God's Eye is a good book, considering the authors. Let's start a rumor that William Ayers wrote it.
re: 67
POT CALLING THE KETTLE BLACK!
38: Those buffoons conquered most of Central America by the tenth century and had a more sophisticated calendar system than Europeans of the time!
Well, conquering Central America isn't exactly difficult. The Spanish did it in about a week and a half. The US Marines have been doing it on and off for the last two hundred years or so, apparently simply through a lack of imagination (much as a family might go to Dorset on holiday every summer because it's too much effort to think of anywhere else to go).
hey, and if anyone wants to get into a deeply unsatisfying argument about why it's not cool for there to be an assumed norm that professors are macking on their students all the time, then you can have one at crooked timber.
75:
It probably shouldnt be an assumed norm.
But, it is a relatively common situation.
70: I read that! But, as I learned from that erudite and, no doubt, handsome, blogger, it probably shouldn't be called Three Rivers.
Have I ever mentioned that, if the various rivers had been named rigorously, the Mississippi would be the Allegheny? Everyplace the Allegheny meets another river, it has the bigger flow, including at Cairo, IL.
75 may be the least enticing offer alameida has made in this forum.
if anyone wants to get into a deeply unsatisfying argument
75:I wouldn't say it over at CT, but I was taken aback by alameida ending that post* by saying she is "fine now" remembering some of the late night comments on this blog.
Some of the details of the CT post, though necessary to what alameida wanted to say, struck me as ill-timed and prejudicial to the preceding post about Polanski. I would want nothing removed or elided. I just wish the context of the posting had been different.
*I absolutely hate the use of "blog" in referring to a particular posting or article on a blog.
if anyone wants to get into a deeply unsatisfying argument about why it's not cool for there to be an assumed norm that professors are macking on their students all the time, then you can have one at crooked timber.
Whee! On second thought, no, I'd rather not. (Can we all agree that's it's cool to have an assumed norm that people on the internet should not be douchebags? I guess we can't, as I recall. That's too bad.)
Also also: zomg, you totes used the word 'totes' in a CT post!
Some of the details of the CT post, though necessary to what alameida wanted to say, struck me as ill-timed and prejudicial to the preceding post about Polanski. I would want nothing removed or elided. I just wish the context of the posting had been different.
Why, because people might think about the actual damage he did, instead of Lynch Mobs Always Hate Great Souls?
Who's going to pay for all those smushed cars?
In the late '90s there was an afternoon Superman cartoon on the WB network. (It was actually quite good and by the end was basically all about the question of whether humanity was ready to trust a fallible Kal-El. They did the whole Darkseid thing and took it interesting places.) Anyway, because it was Superman and thus punches are basically air kisses, an oft-seen tactic was to throw a car or seven at Superman during the course of any fight. Villain after villain would do this, trashing boxy sedans left and right, until one day I finally turned to a roommate of mine and said, "Can you imagine what car insurance premiums must be like in Metropolis?"
The first time I encountered the interpretation of 2012 as a Mayan end-of-the-world belief was in a random half-hour show in that basic cable mysteries-of-the-universe genre. Its chosen interpretation was that the ancient-and-inscrutable Mayans believed that humanity's tools would rise up against them. (Heh: "tools".) They illustrated this by having a standard-issue family of cracker suburbanites get mauled during their daily routines. My favorites were the person holding an open waffle iron to their own face and slow-motion pantomiming being face-waffled, presumably to death, and the office drone who gets his tie caught in the shredder. Think Maximum Overdrive on a dinner theatre budget. I loved it. If I could find a copy on DVD today I'd buy it in a flash.
All that said, my limited and utterly amateur understanding is that any interpretation is at best cherry-picked and at worst made up whole-cloth out of Daniel Pinchbeck's someone's libidinous fever-dreams imagination. Different cities and regions clearly had different calenders and different beliefs at different times and in different places at the same time. The apocalypse itself isn't what interests me about it, anyway. I used to lurk on the message boards used by some of the Y2K crazies out of horrified fascination and the fact that such people simply went fishing for another holiday to mark on their doomsday calendars is what I find most engaging. That there are people so convinced of their rightness that they are eager for the world to end so they can prove it to anyone is horrifying and mesmerizing.
Kevin Smith's hilarious recounting of his adventures in drafting and redrafting a Superman script. (From ComicCon, I think.)
Why, because people might think about the actual damage he did, instead of Lynch Mobs Always Hate Great Souls?
What damage did he do? I haven't seen anyone mention that.
85:Apparently damage to every woman everywhere ever, since 82 considers alameida's post relevant and material to the Polanski story.
humanity's tools would rise up against them. (Heh: "tools".)
If I said you had a beautiful tool, would you make it rise up against me?
Hey, on a different note, what's the verdict under the new Generation Awesome rules: does it even count as having sex with a cow if you only got oral?
85: You're the one who felt that proximity created a link, McManus.
and excuse me, Cryptic Ned, I should have said "the damage he may have done".
Apparently damage to every woman everywhere ever,
Yes, because no woman would care in the slightest about Roman Polanski being brought to justice if he had done the same thing to a thirteen year old boy. It's just about female solidarity.
That was an excellent post by the poster at CT.
61
Anything that sounds apocalyptic is going to receive a "wow, that's idiotic" response from more than a few people, no?
Too few people, unfortunately.
Now that Barack Obama's been elected, I think we can retire the convention of disaster movies always having black presidents.I didn't know that was a disaster movie convention. Deep Impact had Morgan Freeman, but what other disaster movies had black presidents?
Re: the end of the world in 2012, I've seen a Palin for President slogan: we are all Mayans now.
I doubt the premise of the original post. Most disaster movies don't have black presidents.
Deep Impact did, of course - Morgan Freeman. And 2012 will.
But Armageddon didn't. Nor did Independence Day, nor Mars Attacks!, nor The Day After Tomorrow. Sunshine and The Core didn't have visible presidents...
...in fact, I can't think of a single disaster film that's actually been released which had a black president, except Deep Impact.
Hey, could we have at least one active, non-RP thread?
That there are people so convinced of their rightness that they are eager for the world to end so they can prove it to anyone is horrifying and mesmerizing.
I actually found myself doing this on a much, much smaller scale. A couple months ago I was arguing with people on a Pirates baseball blog about whether or not the team was truly, historically awful. Others kept insisting that it really wasn't that bad, etc. I found myself actually rooting against my team so that I would be proven right (and, indeed, they played a 26-game stretch worse than anything the club has done since 1890, when they had a different name). Since my point was proven, I've gone back to rooting for them to win (not that it actually happens, but it's a healthier position to be in).
ajay is obviously a sock puppet for Cyrus.
Or vice versa.
95: You feel guilty about this don't you, JRoth?
It's a good day to confess and atone!
Hey, could we have at least one active, non-RP thread?
Seriously, this.
If I said you had a beautiful tool, would you make it rise up against me?
I tried that with neb, via email, but he never sent me pics back.
we are all Mayans now
♥
Would a new thread make people talk about something else? Threads are being hijacked willy-nilly.
I do have some posts written already. I'll throw the next one up.
94
Does Idiocracy count?
No. Idiocracy is a sci-fi comedy, like Men in Black and H2G2, which happens to have a historical disaster among the premises of its world. It's no more disaster movie than Waterworld. (OK, bad example, but you know what I mean.)
I enjoyed Idiocracy as a light comedy, but a friend of mine took it annoyingly seriously, not unlike this.
93:24>/i> had a black President
Yeah, but my favorite black movie-president.
Further to 27 and 43, Max Brooks's World War Z also deals very well with the practicalities of the zombie apocalypse and how humans would adapt on a societal and individual level.
In fact, like Otto, I was going to suggest zombie movies/stories as an exemplar of the sort of thing that Heebie was looking for in 10. While there's plenty of braindead (ha!) action going on, they generally seem to make much more of an effort than most disaster flicks to explore what the disaster means for the people it affects. Possibly because it's usually a non-recoverable disaster, which changes the big picture quite dramatically, and possibly simply because of the template Romero set.
Max Brooks's World War Z also deals very well with the practicalities of the zombie apocalypse and how humans would adapt on a societal and individual level.
My main gripe with this book is that there is no way in hell that Valley City, ND could survive the Zombiepocolypse. Not that it has anything to do with your point.
The Fifth Element isn't really a disaster movie, but the President of Earth in it is black.
The Fifth Element isn't really a disaster movie
But it's a disaster of a movie, so that's something.
Count on Slate to answer your Unfogged queries:
http://www.slate.com/id/2202810/
Count on Slate....
You can stop right there. No. Even Dahlia Lithwick has failed us, with her asinine "novel" project.
Dahlia Lithwick is writing a novel? Is she insane?
I'm amused to see Slate making in earnest the same claim to which I referred only to debunk it. Yes, some people are that blithely elitist.
Further on the "life after disaster" topic, there is of course The Day After, but IMO much creepier is Threads, which is probably 3/4 devoted to the aftermath of the disaster. That one haunted me big time.
Miracle Mile is a good movie about what would accompany nuclear disaster. Also features Anthony Edwards playing a saxophone.
re: 111
There's also the terrifying, and much earlier (and banned for 20 years), The War Game.
From wiki:
It was scheduled for transmission on 6 August 1966 (the anniversary of the Hiroshima attack) but was not transmitted until 1985, the corporation publicly stating that "the effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting". It was widely viewed before its BBC debut on video and in art-house cinemas, often using prints provided by Watkins, and the film won the Academy Award for Documentary Feature in 1966.
I watched the 1985 broadcast, and it scared the shit out of me.
'The effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting', also has a macabre 'Mr Cholmondeley-Warner'-esque charm.
On the Beach is another post-nuclear war movie. It's entirely post-nuclear war, too.
If we're talking traumatic, socially realistic post-nuclear apocalypse films made in Britain and released in the 80s, look no further than Threads