Dangersquirrel Thoughts

Cultural Appropriation I put this first because it’s the most important reason, and because it’s maybe the most “controversial”? I’m not sure why it would be that way but it is. See, dreadlocks are not mine to have. They are undeniably intertwined with Black history and culture. It’s easy to see it as not a big deal, but that’s not the kind of ally I want to be. Hell, even most of the Black folks I know don’t actually mind white people having dreadlocks. But it’s not a personal thing, it’s a systemic thing. Who cares if I have good intentions? What matters to me is the effects, and no amount of intention can change the fact that my hair being this way has few downsides if any, while having dreadlocks can lead to specific microaggressions and other effects of racism for black people. That double standard still exists, which pretty much reinforces the point that culturally, dreadlocks belong to Black people.  For quite some time, I attached myself to ideas like “My hair is really just like locked hair from old Jewish cultures*, not appropriated dreadlocks!” or “I wouldn’t make the same mistake of appropriating a hairstyle today, but I was so young I didn't know any better and now it’s too attached to my identity.” But when people see me, is that what they think? Or do they see a white hippie who uses dreadlocks as a marker of counterculture in total disregard of potential harm? In a time when it’s more important than ever to find solidarity with marginalized communities, I cannot present myself in a way that might make people within those communities uncomfortable. 

Upkeep and hygiene One of the reasons dreads are for Black people is that white hair doesn’t form the same shapes, making it harder to clean sometimes. Mine mats instead of spiraling for the most part, which means dirt gets in, and I have to wash it constantly, and then the water gets in, and then it has to be dried as thoroughly as possible to prevent it from literally rotting. It was pretty easy to keep it dry when I lived in Denver, but in the Pacific Northwest I honestly would not be surprised if I do not want to know what the insides of my locks look like, no matter how long I sit there burning up carbon to run the hair dryer. I have a busy life and I can’t always take care of my hair in the ways it needs.

Quarter-life crisis? I’m gonna have to change my hair at some point. So why now? I’ve spent kind of a long time trying to think of a good, convenient, poetically symmetrical time to change something so fundamental about my identity. But it occurs to me that I don’t want this to mark a change in my identity, I just want to stay the same person but with different hair. So why would I wait for a big change and pile on? Instead I’m just doing it in the middle of regular life. I’ll miss the way it made me stand out, and I’m expecting some dysphoric reactions for awhile, but I’m gonna try and enjoy being able to finally look “presentable” every now and then, and knowing I’m living more in line with the anti-racist principles I believe in.

Anyway, that’s my overly long reasoning. Please follow there links for further reading!

Moonlight I mean, really. Filmed beautifully. Written beautifully. Acted beautifully. An expression of a perspective that is so invisiblized, articulated with unparalleled artistry. Possibly my only complaint would be that the jumping from one era to the next left some things a little bit underexplored both times. I would have liked to see a little bit more evidence of the loss of Mahershala Ali’s character. His acting stood out in a movie that was chock full of stunning performances. I really and truly think that the Oscars should consider whether a movie is important, what its impact is. It doesn’t get much more important than this. 

Hidden Figures Truly delightful. I cannot believe that it took this long to tell this story, because it was made for the big screen. I hope we are finally to the point where this can be a regular occurrence. Every actor in this movie is a damn cinnamon roll and I love them so much. I know some people object to the Kevin Costner character who made some advances on behalf of the main characters that no white man actually did in real life, and I see why that’s problematic. There’s a frustrating dynamic in civil rights movements where usually to get progress you have to both make things happen yourself, and hope that someone on the other side will help. Costner’s character didn’t really do anything that wasn’t motivated by his desire to have NASA function, though, and he did things long after they were made clearly necessary, so I thought it was pretty clear that he wasn’t a white savior, but merely a pragmatist who was less-blatantly racist than, say, Jim Parsons’ character. Anyway, Women of Colour are amazing and good at science and there should me more movies about that. 

Fences The consensus criticism of this movie is actually my favourite thing about it: this is not a movie, it’s a play that someone filmed. There are lots of adaptations of stage plays but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen one that does so little to obscure that it’s a play (Brighton Beach Memoirs is close though.) Here’s the thing, though: People need more plays! What an important play it is! What a deep story, full of thoughtful dialogue and evocative conversations and relationships. A snapshot of a reality that is underrepresented in the most popular media. There’s something about stage acting that gives it more profound potential than screen acting, and two powerhouses in Viola Davis and Denzel Washington maximized that potential. They were truly captivating.  We don’t all live where we can go see these things, and those of us that do often can’t afford it, so please, Hollywood, revive more black stage plays and don’t shy away from keeping them in play form as opposed to adapting them. This was how the story was designed to be told.

Lion What an epic. A dissertation on the positive side of globalism. Fantastically emotional acting by Dev Patel, although at times his depth created problems by making the other characters seem flat, the romance pollen sure had that issue. Amazing work, too, by the kid playing the younger counterpart. Cinematography reminded me of The Social Network. I appreciate the Oscars’ semiannual reminder that India has a lot of people in it and a lot of stories to tell. 

Arrival Oh god, the missed potential. After watching I had to look up the short story, and while I still haven’t read it I was relieved to read that it was much more detailed than the movie. I really really appreciated the cool sci-fi stuff that was included in the film, but it needed so much more science to get me on board than was actually shown onscreen. I loved the aliens and their language, significantly more creative than most alien movies, but the world-building and character-building seriously lacked, and as hard as I tried I could not make myself care as much as I wanted to. I think there was a lot of missed opportunity to create a chemistry between Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner that would have made their eventual romance seem plausible, instead we’re just left to take the movie’s word for it that they developed romantic feelings, despite never seeing much more than a professional relationship between them. A good movie, but that’s frustrating when it could have been so much more.

La La Land Okay, so I didn’t hate it as much as I was prepared to, BUT... Why? Just, why? Okay, I guess I should unpack this, but a lot of my issues with it are the obvious ones that anyone reading this has probably already heard before: - Ryan Gosling cannot sing or dance well enough to star in a musical, and there were times when he dragged Emma Stone down with him. - Emma Stone is a brilliant actor who tapped into some fantastic and wide-ranging emotions in this movie, but it is not lost on me that the character is highly autobiographical. - I spent the majority of the movie wanting to punch Gosling in the face because that character was insufferable. I’m glad that in the end you’re not really supposed to be rooting for them to end up together because the dude has issues. Newsflash: You Do Not Get To Declare Yourself The Defining Authority On Things Just Because You Like Them. - The whole John-Legend-Ruins-Jazz plot really missed the mark. For the most part his blending of hip-hop and EDM elements into jazz seemed innovative and countercultural to me, whereas the argument I think it meant to make was against homogenization of music driven by capitalism. That damn trumpet line from Uptown Funk was an amusing addition though, that shit is everywhere. - Kinda struggled to make its point at the end of the movie, lost me a little by going so meta. - The music was ironically a little too homogenized for me to get into it like the actual vintage movie-musicals it’s based on. Or, to put it in insufferable snob terms, it overshot “referential” and became too derivative. - Costumers: we get it, you know color theory. Essentially, this movie is fun until you take off the rose-colored nostalgia goggles and see the self-indulgence that begins to wear on you. There’s value there, sure, but the flaws are glaring and make it bearable at times in the context of the hype.

Hell or High Water Supernatural with a drawl. Nothing more frustrating than a movie that doesn't know it's a comedy. Somewhere in there is a good movie about two brothers screwing over the bank that screwed them, but at some point it took an errant turn and lost itself in an attempt to be "Best Picture material." Jeff Bridges was just a cross between his character in True Grit and Tommy Lee Jones in No Country for Old Men.

Manchester by the Sea All of the self-impressed, Mass.turbatory New England charm pushing of a Ben Affleck movie, without the benefit of a homoerotic subtext-laden Matt Damon subplot. Ultimately a well-told story ruined by the specter of knowing what a total dick Casey Affleck is. The movie equivalent of Tom Brady choking back tears about how much his dad inspires him at that Super Bowl press conference.

Hacksaw Ridge Eew.  I get the whole concept that graphic violence conveys the brutal reality of war, but A) it’s gross; B) it completely dehumanized the Japanese soldiers; C) not wanting to slog through two hours of nonstop gore doesn’t mean I’m fragile or sheltered, it just means I don’t need Actual Garbage Mel Gibson to mansplain violence to me; and D) any claim to classiness this movie had was lost the minute CGI blood spattered across the camera lens. You have to be trying real hard to be that extra. Other issues include: - The vast majority of the dialogue is actually horsecrap disguised as folksy by a series of campy accents. - Vince Vaugn is Hollywood's fart trail and his character was incoherently cartoonish, despite being based on a real, living and breathing person. - Most basic Daddy Issues story ever, I'm honestly pretty bored by it at this point. Even having Elrond as Spiderman's abusive drunkard father can’t save the tiredness of this trope. - The United States of America and its military are an illegitimate machine of imperialist terrorism throughout history and the globe and the protagonist’s refusal to fire a weapon does not absolve him of his complicity in their atrocities. #ComeAtMeNSA All that said, it could have been way worse. The love interest was a surprisingly legitimate character who I enjoyed even though she seemed to fall in love with him for no reason whatsoever (a problem present in both Braveheart and La La Land as well, I might add.) And while some of the humor was in bad taste some of it added levity in the right ways at the right time. And it had a solid, classic WWII aesthetic and some honest-to-goodness heroism. Andrew Garfield is just precious enough to make the character work instead of just seeming like a dumbass.

And Another Thing, Mr. “Age of Enlightenment”:

Can new stories please step up their game? My top 5, and 6 of the 9 nominees, were based on either previous media or a true real-life story, 8 of the 9 if you count the fact that Manchester is just Casey Affleck's internal monologue come to life and La La Land is essentially a Remake Smoothie of every movie musical between 1950 and 1990. They were all great, but they also all suffered from the hallmark difficulties of translating their respective media to film, some to different degrees than others but even Moonlight had brief moments of "Oh, this was a play first."

I know there are good reasons why it's harder to make original movies now, so this plea isn't directed at the writers, it's at the producers, the studios, the green-lighters. And also at the distributors, the awards organizations, and to an extent the audiences. People write great stories, so can we fund them? Can we make them, show them, watch them, recognize them? Please? Thanks.

This year, I can’t help but find a lot more meaning in it all than I usually do. For anyone who doesn’t know, the story of Hanukkah is that in the second century BCE, the Syrian king Antiochus IV invaded Jerusalem, destroyed the temple, and imposed laws banning the practice of Judaism at risk of death. But a small group of poorly armed resistors, the Maccabees (Hebrew for “Hammers”) who had fled to the hills fought back, and drove Antiochus’ armies out against all odds. Legend has it that when the Jews returned to the temple, they relit the Nir Tamid, the light in the temple that is to remain burning at all times, with just enough oil to last for one day. But the oil burned for an improbable eight days, enough time to produce more oil to keep it going and rebuild the temple. Hence the “festival of lights,” and the eight days with eight candles, and the traditional foods fried in oil.

Hanukkah has always drawn metaphors about finding hope in the dark times, and about fighting battles that seem hopeless, but this is the first year where I have felt that personally useful. The fight for justice and equality in this world has become so grim, and the weight of it is crushing. Tonight, when I light my candles, I will be thinking about every time that the determination of my ancestors carried them through attacks on their way of life, and I will try to find hope in the light, and strength to keep going even when it seems there is not enough left in me. 

I wish to always be a modern Maccabee: a strong-willed resistance fighter, working against violence, injustice, and intolerance, despite the odds.

May we all be surprised by how long our vial of oil will last.

--Dangersquirrel