August 19, 2010

"Eat, Pray, Expend"

C. Van Carter of Across Difficult Country responds in the comments to my querulous jibe at Eat, Pray, Love:
"Will Liz hold out for a sequel in which she’s courted by Pitt and DiCaprio?"

How about a sequel where she's courted by the cast of The Expendables?

25 comments:

  1. Steve, as much as you outwardly sneer at these kinds of films and tv shows, I wouldn't be surprised if you like nothing better than to curl up on the sofa with a sleeping gown, a glass of wine, a box of chocolates and watch some good old fashioned chick flicks.

    A surprising number of men on here have directly quoted incidents in Sex and the City episodes(meaning they must watch it), while also knowing who Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte are, and are able to explain the personalities of those characters.

    Sigh...

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  2. The Expendables would burn her house down.

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  3. I don't get it...

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  4. Speaking of movie reviews, what are your thoughts on the new movie Freakonomics? You published a refutation of the book, I believe, a while back.

    Maybe you will need to make a documentary of your own.

    Albertosaurus

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  5. Sylvia:

    I really make an effort to avoid celebrity gossip, but it still seeps in. The msn page after you log out of hotmail is particularly bad for celebrity-fact raping me. It just jumps out at you, even if you don't read the articles. Same with all the celebrity magazines at the checkout counter at the grocery store. One evening, I was even Shanghai'd by a few friends into watching a bunch of Sex and the Cities on dvd.

    It happens to the best of us, even those who hate celebrity gossip.

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  6. Sylvia said..."Steve, as much as you outwardly sneer at these kinds of films and tv shows, I wouldn't be surprised if you like nothing better than to curl up on the sofa with a sleeping gown, a glass of wine, a box of chocolates and watch some good old fashioned chick flicks."

    Steve apparently stimulates your imagination in really unpalatable, not to mention unhealthy, ways. The image above is, in its own way, as distasteful as your contribution from the other day:

    "Steve sees some untouchable hot young babes at the beach getting their pictures taken. They, of course, didn't even acknowledge that he exists, seeing as they only had eyes for the camera.

    -Whiskey style, he has to turn the miffed feeling he experienced into some sort of pithy observation about social change."

    And I know you're not finished. Since you've again made a right ass of yourself, with dreary predictability you can again be expected to comment "imaginatively" on who or what you think Steve is.

    You're really creepy.

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  7. >I was even Shanghai'd by a few friends into watching a bunch of Sex and the Cities on dvd.<

    What kind of cord did your friends use to tie you down?

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  8. Kylie said

    "You're really creepy."

    Seconded. Sylvia, a little less creep and a little more funny.

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  9. Sylvia,

    The Steveosphere and the Roissysphere/MRAs are not one and the same. In fact, I would go so far as to say they don't overlap that much. For example, pro-game bloggers like OneSTDV might comment here, but I don't usually see his readers here and so on. So there is some overlap, but there is also overlap with the Traditionalists headed by Lawrence Auster. Auster took the Head Gamester behind the proverbial woodshed last year and gave him a thrashing:

    http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/014099.html

    Also, Steve has written many articles on men and women that you can check out at his archives at isteve.com. I think a perusal would disabuse you of the notion that Steve is some kind of misogynist.

    I loved his article discussing nerdy men (from Vdare) and has some of my favorite lines he's ever written:

    "Paradoxically, this is typically because of how little these nerds appreciate women. They don't like females the way they are. They want a vast societal effort to remold women into liking the same nerdy things they like.

    That way, maybe, nerds can finally get dates."

    From
    "Why (Some) Men Don’t Support Summers"
    http://www.vdare.com/sailer/050306_summers.htm

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  10. That was a monster burn on Whiskey, though, who seems to have taken universal generalization rather far.

    Like, one girl rejected him, so now all girls hate all guys like him. Well, no, they don't. Go to college. Girls don't hate anything there.

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  11. I probably did far *better* than I should have, regarding women. Particularly when I was obnoxious and arrogant. [Chicks dig jerks.] Not that it should matter. Ad-hominen "shaming" language from women ("you're not hot enough to do X or pull Y") speaks merely to status. A person is either right or wrong, typically women care most about STATUS. See any of the magazines at the check-out counter.

    And since I have not seen a single episode of Sex and the City, nor either of the movies, but have read constant stuff about it over and over again (like the Twilight junk) that invalidates your argument (that only guys who really like that stuff know about it). Kultursmog makes escaping from it impossible.

    Auster? A pedestal-izing social conservative who thinks it's always the 90's. The 1890's. Roissy tore him apart, because GAME WORKS and Auster's stuff leads to ... more lonely nerds.

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  12. The biggest thing about the Eat, Pray, Love movie is that it marked the first "adult" movie, oriented towards older women, that went the tie-in and merchandising route. The Hollywood Reporter notes that you can buy the official prayer beads, organic tee shirt, the "true love" necklace, and heck wine. All from the HSN or various partners.

    Heck HSN had an entire evening devoted to the merchandise of the movie. And with all that tie-in, it still did only $23 million opening weekend. A few years ago, "the Grudge" starring former Buffy actress Sarah Michelle Gellar did about $40 million opening week-end.

    Hollywood is getting desperate. Audiences are not showing up anymore (by that metric Expendables is also a failure). DVD revenues collapsing. Hence merchandising as the holy grail.

    But that only works in movies aimed at kids.

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  13. "What kind of cord did your friends use to tie you down?"

    I was a guest in their home, and it would have been kind of ridiculous to storm out, so I treated it as a social experiment. Watching it made me alternately sad and angry at their general worthlessness/sluttiness, as well as the fact that the 20-something girl whose place I was at was eating it up.

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  14. "Steve, as much as you outwardly sneer at these kinds of films and tv shows, I wouldn't be surprised if you like nothing better than to curl up on the sofa with a sleeping gown, a glass of wine, a box of chocolates and watch some good old fashioned chick flicks."

    He probably prefers interracial porn.

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  15. The cast of The Expendables is for the most part, fossilized and ancient. I doubt if Julia Roberts would be interested in any of them as she's married to a cute, fit guy who's two years younger than she is, whom she appears to adore.

    It was embarassing to see 64-year-old face-lifted Stallone, the 'roid and human growth hormone king, fake all his stunts while 38-year-old Jason Statham looked like he was doing his own stunts for real. Statham really stood out as the only guy who had a spark of life to him amongst all the Botoxed elderly fossils (Bruce, Arnie, Dolph, Mickey.)

    It's kinda sad how some men are so desperate to prove that they remain alpha sex gods well into their Medicare years.

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  16. The Steveosphere and the Roissysphere/MRAs are not one and the same. In fact, I would go so far as to say they don't overlap that much. For example, pro-game bloggers like OneSTDV might comment here, but I don't usually see his readers here and so on.
    ---
    No, that's not correct. Everybody who comments here is over at OneSTDV's blog too. The woman-hating Game weirdos have taken over most of these formerly interesting sites and they have really declined in quality since then.

    I still read occasionally for the insights on immigration and affirmative action, but that's it.

    --Non-trendy, Non-Lefty Anonymous

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  17. Whiskey writes -
    Hollywood is getting desperate. Audiences are not showing up anymore (by that metric Expendables is also a failure). DVD revenues collapsing. Hence merchandising as the holy grail.

    No that's not quite right either.

    Read Epstein's Hollywood Economics. Hollywood is doing just fine if you mean the studios. And if by studios you mean those who originate content I would argue that the studios are booming in that many new players are entering the content creation business.

    What is changing are the content delivery channels. Before 1950 everyone went to a movie theater about twice a week. They saw whatever was being shown. These theaters were owned by the studios (MGM, Warner's etc..).

    Then came free television and people went to the theaters less often and the studios had to promote their films. An expensive process. Then the courts split the theater business from the content creation business.

    We got a lot of experimentation from the studios then - 3D, CinemaScope, Smell-O-Vision, etc..

    Today theatrical box office is only about 15% of studio revenues. The importance of box office has been declining for more than half a century. This led to the Lucas, Spielberg, and Cameron conspiracy to reintroduce 3D. It worked at least for now with Avatar.

    After the shock of TV in the fifties when the studios learned that they couldn't "beat 'em" they decided to "join 'em". They went into television in the sixties.

    Today most studio revenues come from DVD sales. But DVDs are dying as a channel. The US has the most Internet infrastructure but certainly not the fastest. South Korea leads the world in high speed Web access. South Koreans had had a robust DVD market but it suddenly died in the last few years. Koreans still watch movies but they do so using streaming services not physical silvery disks.

    NetFlix - a company built on the DVD disk - now clearly favors its streaming alternative. The future is clear. Hollywood studios will continue to create content and Hollywood actors will continue to make the big bucks but future blockbusters will be delivered to the home over the web bypassing the few remaining theaters we still have and also bypassing either DVD or Blu-ray disks.

    Many details are yet to be worked out but a former delivery channel like HBO has long been in the movie making business. Starz has recently followed and there are rumors about Comcast.

    George Lucas stumbled into the whole action figure merchandising thing it expanded into children's films and now it seems to have spread to chick flicks. Great, although I doubt if older women playing with dolls will be a major revenue source for the studios.

    Just as with the Internet and microcomputers we got computing away from the highly centralized mainframes, now with the replacement of celluloid film with digital bit streams and the new ability to distribute a feature to the population without making prints or using a physical theater, making movies is becoming decentralized too. Some of these stories are packaged as TV shows as was discussed on this blog recently, but whatever the format Hollywood in the sense of the story telling content creators has never been better placed.

    Albertosaurus

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  18. Game is the organizing principle of the HBD blogosphere (organizing principle in the sense of that which you must not denigrate, if you want to be accepted). You can be kinda open borders and slightly socialist (like FredOnEverything, a paleo doofus that HBDnerds all seem to like/respect) but if you’ve got the right attitude on females (and to a lesser extent, on HBD-disfavored ethnic groups) then you’re cool.

    But if you’re actually serious about border enforcement and fiscal conservatism, yet make fun of PUA Gameboys (and don’t do the ethnonasty rants thing), you are _most_ unacceptable.

    By the way, I've got a current post on a libertarian/fiscally-conservative solution for the Social Security/Entitlements/Medicare mess. Can any of you genetically superior beings match or exceed it?

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  19. Sexy Pterodactyl’s Guide to How to be a Good Female on HBD Blogs:

    1) Agree with your place as ordained by HBD/Game/evopsych, thus confirming that while you are subject to the hamster headed female silliness that is your lot, you are wiser than Those Other Bitches


    2) Observe that the disfavored ethnic group (which is the current post’s subject of complaint) has messed up the schools/neighborhood for your kids

    3) Mention housework

    P.S. I've got a new post, with a real-time Game demonstration from Roissy

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  20. To the Many Non-Trendy, Non-Lefty Anons8/21/10, 7:51 PM

    Game is the organizing principle of the HBD blogosphere (organizing principle in the sense of that which you must not denigrate, if you want to be accepted).

    You're not from round these parts are ya? Game is hardly the "sacred cow" you mistakenly define as an "organizing principle".

    Whiskey (EvilNeocon, Testing99, etc) is widely and frequently criticized for his distracting and turret's blame the vagina rants (along with his repeated lies, obfuscations and continued repetitions thereof).

    Game is only related to HBD in that it is theoretically based on the fact that there are fundamental differences between male and female thought and behavior based upon biology.

    Modern PC liberalism vociferously denies these differences creating both frustration and anger by both sexes. Because males usually have to initiate social contact and compete for females Game is focused on them. Game also highlights opportunities for the aware to exploit the illusions of the unenlightened for better or worse.

    The HBD link with Game goes no deeper than this. HBD does not advocate seeking out lawyer harridans and playing on disconnect between their inborn mating drives and their empowered feminist pantsuit for sport just as HBD does not advocate the gifted going out and ruthlessly exploiting those not gifted.

    Some PUA use Game to further their nihilistic hedonism just as some use HBD to reassure their low self-esteem by attacking "proles" or unjustly outgroup minorities to no constructive end. However, the HBD aspect is simply a fact which other people like Sailer use to try to expose bad public policy and encourage better one.

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  21. >Everybody who comments here is over at OneSTDV's blog too.<

    Untrue.

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  22. Game is the organizing pricinple of the HBD blogosphere in that if you make fun of Game/MRA-PUA philosophy, you are automatically Not Our Sort. Can you name one specifically anti-MRA-PUA/anti-Game/makes fun of Game prominently linked HBDer?

    More broadly, when it comes to being accepted amongst your League of Edginess, certain views about the vileness of HBD-despised demographics (NAMs, women etc) are far more important than being for serious borders or fiscal conservativism. Fred Reed is just one example of an open-borders slightly-socialist type that is considered One of You.

    If Steve/HBD is not all about Game, how about considering/showing some more varied views on it?

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  23. To The Mangina Escapist8/23/10, 9:10 PM

    Escapist

    Again, you are confusing "sacred cows" with "organizing principles". A sacred cow is a belief, sometimes wrong, that is held beyond criticism. This is exactly what you are describing when you falsely claim Game/PUA is beyond reproach in the HBD sphere (depends what you mean by Game/PUA).

    An organizing principle is a fundamental philosophy off which all other related ideas are premised upon and depend.

    In this sense Game/PUA (based upon biological differences between the sexes) is a subset of HBD which is based upon measurable, consistent and meaningful biological differences between different genetically meaningful groups (eg race, ethnicity, sex, etc).

    This "measurable, consistent and meaningful biological differences between genetically meaningful groups" is the organizing principle of both HBD and it's subset Game/PUA. It makes no sense to claim Game/PUA is an organizing principle of HBD.

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  24. To The Mangina Escapist8/23/10, 9:11 PM

    Both HBD and Game/PUA share a root common belief in biological-based differences between genetically distinct groups. This in the face of an almost totalitarian PC popularism today that vehemently denies any human evolution in the past 70,000yrs, denies a growing body of genetics research and over 100yrs of social science data in favor of a manifestly erroneous radical universal blank slatism.

    So naturally HBD will dismiss Game/PUA critics who claim that sex is entirely a social construct. Similarly, Game/PUA will dismiss HBD critics who claim that race is entirely a social construct.

    This does not mean that all prominent HBD will support Game/PUA who feel their nihilistic mission in life is to wreak hedonistic revenge on hard ass DC lawyer chicks without being trapped by marriage or children. Many prominent HBDer advocate having many children within the confines of a traditional Western family unit.

    Nor does this mean that all Game/PUA will be support HBD who are white nationalists. Many vocal Game/PUA appear to be black.

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  25. WoMangina? Escapist8/23/10, 10:04 PM

    To more specifically answer your question, the Game/PUA blogger Roissy has been in serious arguments with some prominent Christian HBD blogger. Roissy has his fights with HBD women posters on his site.

    Prominent HBD bloggers like Steve are fat, happy and married with children. They haven't been on the dating marking for decades. Steve appears passionate about getting his kids in a good college with zero interest in college hookup culture today (if he only had a daughter).

    Many prominent HBD are also probably so concerned with family and mortgages that, even if they knew the 20-30 dating scene, it would be tedious to comment on how horny young men and women use and abuse each other in eternally pedestrian ways. Horny kids using Game/PUA on each other to do with young people have always done is not a pressing HBD issues harming this country.

    The reason why you only get young horny men and angry feminist narrowly writing about Game/PUA is that it is fascinating to them while it is close to irrelevant to the rest of humanity.

    Why do you call some HBD groups like women and NAMs are vile? If you can find a single entire post (not selective quote) by Steve that reflects that sentiment I'll not pass your comment off as some misplaced insecurity or insignificance searching for meaning in a trumped up cause.

    Also, your fallacious guilt by association was equally lame (who if Fred Reed?) Hitler was an dog-loving anti-smoking vegetarian socialist, therefore every dog-lover, anti-smoker, vegetarian and socialist is a mini-Hitler. QED.

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