Sam Wilkinson
According to a faithful reader, I'm Ordinary Times's "least thoughtful writer." So I've got that going for me, which is nice.
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on From Vox: How Democrats should respond to Trump’s war on DEIWell, now here we are. Complaining about bad DEI instead of CRT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criti…
on From Vox: How Democrats should respond to Trump’s war on DEICRT is an obscure legal theory. From Richard Delgado himself: Unlike traditional civil rights, which…
on Beware: Promises Being KeptYep. I stand corrected. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2024-01-25/clinton-y…
on From Vox: How Democrats should respond to Trump’s war on DEIWe hammered out that everybody who was complaining about CRT was not, in fact, complaining about wha…
on Beware: Promises Being KeptMy understanding is that the launch codes were always in Moscow and that while the weapons were stat…
on Saturday Morning Gaming: SizeableYeah, there are a lot of things I like about it... appreciate that the systems are simplified into b…
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February 15, 2025
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Kelly Pool — The Suspicious One
February 13, 2025
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February 12, 2025
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on Beware: Promises Being Kept
on Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025
on Open Mic for the week of 2/10/2025
on Beware: Promises Being Kept
Does it strike anybody that the music in the first click is very like Montage from Team America: World Police?Report
Tony acknowledged how “dirty” the life he was engaged in was, & didn’t want Gina to end up deep in it. Bankrolling her salon was one thing, but being with Manolo put her too far in. Manolo corrupted her in his eyes.
Not saying there absolutely wasn’t the above mentioned ick factor, just that it ain’t necessarily reason #1 for that ending.Report
BTW: I always found his comment about capitalism interesting in context.Report
There are people in the world who are attracted to members of their own family through no fault of their own. It’s one thing to discourage them from acting on it due to the elevated risk from recessive genetic disorders, but there’s no need to be gratuitously mean about it. They have it tough enough as it is. You wouldn’t say that homosexuality makes a character especially gross, because that’s offensive to real homosexuals. Same deal here.Report
Brandon,
There are those people in the real world. This was in a movie. There’s no particular reason for Tony’s sexual attraction to his sister; it’s just oddly there, never specifically address, but just hinted at throughout until that final moment of exposure. That the film’s fans rarely comment upon its obvious presence only makes it all the stranger.Report
Remember that Scarface was a remake.
The dynamic you spoke of came from the 1932 movie, but was made a little more explicit, for its era. If you want to blame anyone, blame Howard Hawks.Report
There’s a similar dynamic in Sweet Smell of Success, where most of the dirty tricks the Walter Winchell character (played by Burt Lancaster) orders Tony Curtis to perform have the aim of getting his sister away from her boyfriend (Martin Milner as a jazz musician. Seriously.)Report
So, I guess we’re supposed to then see this as some attempt to reference earlier historical works in which family members sleep with one another? Was it something specific to these individual characters or the individuals they were based on?Report
Apparently the 1932 one is based on a book, has anyone read it? Maybe it’s originally from there.Report
This has turned from a Friday afternoon snark off into a genuine interest: does anybody know the answer to Glyph’s question?Report
The sister romance angle first appears in the ’32 film. It’s not in the book.Report
For the record, Hawks and Ben Hecht, the writer, sought to tell the story of the Borgias in a Warner Brothers “modern,” “urban” context. Reportedly the orginal (1932) script was considerably more explicit in this them than the resulting movie, but Hawks was rather uncomfortable with how it all played out–all explicit references were removed.Report