TV/Movies Megathread

[Neil]

Superman and Batman?  It's going to be bad.

[Syt]

Not gonna be complete without Wonder Woman.

Of course, no one was ever able to properly bring WW to the screen. The recent TV pilot was so bad it didn't even go on air (check on SF Debris - he reviewed it a while back and it's really awful).

[Viking]

Not gonna be complete without Wonder Woman.

Of course, no one was ever able to properly bring WW to the screen. The recent TV pilot was so bad it didn't even go on air (check on SF Debris - he reviewed it a while back and it's really awful).

Live action you mean..

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1186373/

was actually pretty good.

Getting it right live action should be really really hard. She both has to demonstrate all the masculine and feminine virtues at the same time while not conforming to either. She is (unlike virtually all other superheroes) a character type which is completely novel in literature. You can make Batman the Count of Monte Cristo, Green Lantern Othello, Superman Galahad, Green Arrow Hamlet but you can't slot Wonder Woman into any story from history. If there is any literature which can be used as a basis it is newer than Wonder Woman herself and infused with tropes she started or partially inspired by her. Virtually every single female character in literature is defined by her relationships with other people (daughter, sister, wife, mother etc.) as opposed to being defined by a task or mission like typical protagonists.

If you take away her female-ness and make her a generic hero then she loses much of her point. She is in effect saying to girls, hey, you too can be a pro-active heroic character in your own life and to boys, here is a heroic person you can admire (or if you are 14.. well...).

[Admiral Yi]

It was pretty terrible.

It was a massive let-down after the hype and expectations.

It was not an unwatchable bore of a D movie.

It was a mediocrity, with some little interesting bits.  C+

[11B4V]

No way Prometheus was a D dude.

It was pretty terrible.

No it wasnt.

[Ideologue]

Compliance (2012).

Difficult to grade.  This is the movie based on the incident at the Mt. Washington, KY, McDonald's where a manager and others, at the behest of a man on the phone who identified himself a police officer, falsely imprisoned and sexually assaulted an employee.

Aside from being the least hot DS movie I've ever seen, it's also a movie that strongly behooves you to research the entire story ahead of time, because everything everyone does in the movie is so preposterously stupid and ignorant, that you can not watch it with your belief suspended unless you also know, for a fact, that everything everyone does is substantially based on the true events.

I'd give it an A, but while maybe the real people involved were this stupid, the people being filmed are too smart; you can see intelligence in their eyes.  And when they try to take that bridge too far, specifically when Becky (Dreama Walker), modeled explicitly on real life victim Louise Osborn, gives the Michael McKeane looking guy oral sex because a voice on the phone told her he was a cop, what Compliance needed was for Michael Bay to blunder into post and slap a "STILL BASED ON A TRUE STORY" subtitle onto the frame.

Because if you watch it cold, or even knowing that it really happened, you ain't gonna buy it.  An opening legend declaring this was "INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS" is not sufficient, nor is the decision to decline to show exactly what someone could possibly say to make anyone involved in the rape scene think what they were doing was even permitted, let alone required, by the law.  The real life villain, David Stewart (allegedly, that is, despite strong evidence), clearly said something--but it probably wasn't very believable.

B

[Malthus]

Compliance (2012).

Difficult to grade.  This is the movie based on the incident at the Mt. Washington, KY, McDonald's where a manager and others, at the behest of a man on the phone who identified himself a police officer, falsely imprisoned and sexually assaulted an employee.

Aside from being the least hot DS movie I've ever seen, it's also a movie that strongly behooves you to research the entire story ahead of time, because everything everyone does in the movie is so preposterously stupid and ignorant, that you can not watch it with your belief suspended unless you also know, for a fact, that everything everyone does is substantially based on the true events.

I'd give it an A, but while maybe the real people involved were this stupid, the people being filmed are too smart; you can see intelligence in their eyes.  And when they try to take that bridge too far, specifically when Becky (Dreama Walker), modeled explicitly on real life victim Louise Osborn, gives the Michael McKeane looking guy oral sex because a voice on the phone told her he was a cop, what Compliance needed was for Michael Bay to blunder into post and slap a "STILL BASED ON A TRUE STORY" subtitle onto the frame.

Because if you watch it cold, or even knowing that it really happened, you ain't gonna buy it.  An opening legend declaring this was "INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS" is not sufficient, nor is the decision to decline to show exactly what someone could possibly say to make anyone involved in the rape scene think what they were doing was even permitted, let alone required, by the law.  The real life villain, David Stewart (allegedly, that is, despite strong evidence), clearly said something--but it probably wasn't very believable.

B

USA! USA! USA!

The civil trial began September 10, 2007 and ended October 5, 2007 when a jury awarded to the victim $5 million in punitive damages and $1.1 million in compensatory damages and expenses. Summers was awarded $1 million in punitive damages and $100,000 in compensatory damages.[11] The jury decided that McDonald's and the unnamed caller were each 50 percent at fault for the abuse to which the victim was subjected.[12] McDonald's and its attorneys were sanctioned for withholding evidence pertinent to the outcome of the trial.[13]

In November 2008, McDonald's was also ordered to pay $2.4 million in legal fees to plaintiffs' lawyers.[14] On November 20, 2009, the Kentucky court of appeals upheld the jury's verdict, but reduced the punitive damages award to Summers to $400,000.[15] McDonald's appealed to the Kentucky Supreme Court; while the petition was pending in 2010, the victim settled with McDonald's for $1.1 million, dropping her claim for punitive damages.[16]

Not only does the person strip searched and assaulted get awarded cash - so does the manager who facilitated it. 

It is literally incredible to me that a jury could find the corporation at fault here, let alone 50% at fault with the nut who pulled the prank. What about "contributory stupidity" on the part of the victims here?

[Neil]

Yeah, but you know who's even stupider than everyone involved in that little stunt?  People who are on a jury.

[garbon]

What evidence did McD's withhold? That could be why they got smacked?

[Malthus]

What evidence did McD's withhold? That could be why they got smacked?

Unless it was a personal order from the Chairman of McDonalds to pump stupid gas into their restaurants, I can't see what relevant information they could have that would make them 50% liable. 

From the links, they withheld the fact that there were prior incidents.

A judge has sanctioned McDonald's Corp. for withholding evidence in a lawsuit by a former employee who was the victim of a strip-search hoax at its Mount Washington store in 2004.

Senior Judge Tom McDonald [ILB - apparently no relation] said Wednesday that the company either engaged in "plausible deniability" or deliberately "hid the ball from the court, opposing counsel and its own lawyers" when it failed to disclose at least four prior hoaxes at other McDonald's restaurants around the country.

Noting that the company had been sued in three of the incidents, McDonald said: "it is inconceivable to the court how somebody could not know of cases in which they were sued."

Judge McDonald ordered the company to pay discovery costs for plaintiff Louise Ogborn, whose suit is scheduled to go to trial Monday in Bullitt Circuit Court. He also gave McDonald's 48 hours to disclose all information about 44 previous hoaxes at its restaurants before the incident at the Mount Washington store in April 2004.

As part of the sanction, McDonald ordered the company to also surrender material that would normally be protected by attorney-client privilege. He said he could have imposed more severe penalties, including striking the company's answer to Ogborn's lawsuit, which would allow her to win by default. * * *

Issuing the sanction from the bench, McDonald noted that in May he ordered the restaurant company to make an exhaustive search of its records and to check with its franchise stores. He said it wasn't until last month that McDonald's acknowledged the four additional hoaxes.

Ogborn, was 18 and working at the Mount Washington restaurant when she was detained and directed to remove her clothes by managers after a caller pretending to be a police officer accused her of stealing a purse from a customer. A man called in by an assistant manager to watch her forced her to do calisthenics in the nude and to perform oral sex on him, at the behest of the caller.

The incident finally came to an end 3½ hours later when a maintenance man realized the call was a hoax.

Edit: as an aside, the company was as stupid as those involved in the hoax to think it could get away with failing to make proper discovery. Particularly as none of this was exactly a secret. 

[garbon]

They let this happen 45 times without even warning employees?

[Ideologue]

It is literally incredible to me that a jury could find the corporation at fault here, let alone 50% at fault with the nut who pulled the prank. What about "contributory stupidity" on the part of the victims here?

The recovery was based also upon intentionally tortious behavior.  It's not just negligence that was alleged, but false imprisonment, IIED, and sexual harassment.  I'm surprised slander and trespass to property were not alleged as well.

The negligence of McDonald's was their failure to train employees to, you know, not sexually assault people based on prank phone calls--and as a matter of record they were aware of the issue.

What amazes me is that McD's didn't settle immediately.  This isn't a pharma cancer case where 100,000 people may be affected.  This is a rare if not singular event, that they presumably rapidly corrected in terms of training their managers.  It's extremely bad press, an extremely sympathetic plaintiff, and their only options were legal technicalities that would cost them millions on appeal anyway.

Anyway, I've softened a bit on Ogborn's (not Ogden, my bad) idiocy.  I still think she was dumb to stay, but a verdict for false imprisonment, above all, was 100% justified.  It may not've been FI at the point before she was strip-searched, but afterward under KY law it was, and I think it's pretty clear under any reasonably standard that it was by the time a non-employee male was put in charge of "guarding" her, and instructed not to let her leave the room.  A reasonable person at that point, if not before, would definitely feel restrained by threat of force, and that fully satisfies the elements of FI (and respondeat superior, voila).

I do I want to point out what seems like a difference between "Van" (the manager's fiancee in the film) and Nix, the real life guy.  A cognitively normal 19 year old girl may be both overwhelmed into staying in a store room for a few hours by color of authority (the fake police officer's and her real manager's), but probably not into rape, without anything else; or maybe she could be, but at that point, I hope, for her brain's sake, that what she was restrained by was threat of physical force.  And in fact he did hit her (spank her, yeah, but if a guy is willing to do that, that's probably enough for a woman to be properly terrified).  In that regard, it's way, waaay more explicable.

In the movie, Van is played as less-than-complicit, almost stupid enough to be a victim in his own right, and so hesistant that just a modicum of coherent verbal resistance or attempt at reason would've broken the spell; but my hypothesis is that Nix almost certainly knew he had a choice and exploited Ogborn's fear more than her stupidity.

[Darth Wagtaros]

I don't know Ide. How do you train employees to not kidnap and sexually assault people because a voice on a phone told them to? Because if society and their parents didn't I don't think there are any corporate training videos that could have done the job.

[Ideologue]

Well, I dunno, because they do train store personnel (maybe not at McD's, but elsewhere) how to handle thefts through detention.  In many places, SC included, there is a statutory defense to a claim of false imprisonment based on a "shopkeeper exception."  There has to be probable cause, and there are some other provisos, including iirc reasonableness of the detention.

The point is that the training required is not totally a black and white ban on ever doing it--though it could be, in practice, because shoplifting is thousands of times more prevalent than these prank calls, it isn't likely to be, even in a McD's setting.

Now, I'll grant that "don't rape" isn't an issue that can be dealt with through better training, but "don't let a male employee detain a female suspect alone" and "never do cavity searches" are pretty good guideline to avoid liability issues.  And a non-employee?  That's negligent as fuck (though ironically the jury found Summers and the other manager to be non-negligent ).

And ultimately it is a matter of respondeat superior, and of recovery.  The legitimate recovery in this case is at least tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, and ultimately iirc did settle at $1.1m.  That's maybe somewhat excessive, but not out of bounds for an FI that involved IIED, specifically a rape.  Respondeat superior is important because organizations have to be held to account in order to minimize shit like this (not just FIs but all sorts of bad behavior); otherwise they'll hide behind their (almost always judgment-proof) agents and will have every incentive to push their agents to unlawful extremes if it's cheaper, stops shrinkage, etc.

And this is why tort reform is such a double-edged sword.  Yes, it's okay in my book for pharmaceutical company to market a drug that may kill thousands if it helps millions--there's a utility to that--but it's not okay for a pharmacy to not give a shit about ice on their steps because they can't be held liable, because that's purely damaging to the society that winds up subsidizing their bad behavior.

***

Anyway, Godzilla vs. Mothra (1964).  A Mothra egg washes up on shore near Nagoya and Godzilla attacks.  This movie features one of the most unique pair of kaiju fights you're likely to see.

The first involves the adult Mothra against Godzilla in a battle to save her egg and incidentally (though you wouldn't know it from the dialogue) Japan.  It's wonderful to behold the heroism of the completely outmatched giant moth as she battles with the spare weapons at her disposal, disorienting Godzilla with her mighty wind, picking him up with her comparatively puny legs, and dousing him with yellow poison ( ) that has basically zero effect, before she is burned to death by a mere two blasts of the King of Monsters' radioactive breath.

She survives, however, long enough for the humans to marshal their forces, distracting Godzilla from the egg, and to be with her children, after a fashion.  In a sad scene, she pulls her burnt body along the ground to shelter her future children beneath her one functioning wing.

The unique aspect to this fight is that the imago Mothra is the most in-humanoid of the great kaiju: far from bipedal, she is almost always airborne, portrayed not by a man in a suit but by a giant puppet suspended on wires with radio-controlled moving parts.  Mothra herself is even more unique than that, being also one of the only, if not the only Toho monster with human-level intelligence (even if her intelligence is nonetheless profoundly alien).  She is also the only kaiju I can think of with a religion centered around her, as represented by the two tiny girls that sing her prayers.  Finally, and not for nothing, even though they incorrectly (imo) say "he" about twenty times in my dubbed version, Mothra is generally regarded as female--perhaps the first female action star of them all (although God knows that's condescending).  Mothra has always been my favorite of Toho's good guys, with only King Ghidorah displacing her as my favorite kaiju of all time.  I hope Godzilla 2014 is as massive a success as it needs to be to get the $250mm Mothra movie greenlit; only then can we truly say that life is worth living.

The second kaiju battle involves the imago's now-hatched twin children, two pupal mothrae, continuing the fight their mother started.  As babies, ironically, they are better equipped to handle a threat like Godzilla, since they can spit silk capable of flash-hardening and immobilizing even a monster as powerful as Godzilla.  In short order they flank the beast and bukkake him until he falls into the ocean.  This is not something you see every day, although we will see this trick pulled again in Ghidorah.  For some reason, even though Godzilla can breathe underwater, presumably he will eventually break free of his chrysalis prison, and he'll still be right there next to Nagoya, the movie considers him fully neutralized and the Mothras return home to take their place as their loyal people's gods.

There's some human stuff that is also reasonably entertaining, if it does only serve to pad the movie to feature length.

B

[CountDeMoney]

Godzilla vs. Mothra.  But no French Connection.  Ide's continual slide into Timmayism is almost complete.