"New Moon" Weekend

Just a quick post right now about the giant juggernaut that is the Twilight franchise releasing its latest film this weekend. I probably won't see it, as I have little interest in the story on its own, but I just wanted to comment because it is huge, and it's striking to me that it's the first film in recent memory that is aimed specifically at women that is pretty much guaranteed to be a mega-hit at the box office.

I'm sort of ambivalent about this. On the one hand, it's about time that women and female-centric films were seriously considered as viable in Hollywood again, because they haven't been for a long time. There's this sense that women just don't go to the movies the same way men do (gee, I wonder if it might be because most big films released aren't aimed at women or even female-friendly most of the time), and it's about time that that idea got a serious rattling. On the other hand, I have some serious ideological problems with the stories in this series, and find them to be deeply problematic in some ways, so their continuing success and validation are troubling for me. The fact that it is so widely popular might mean that if Hollywood does decide to put more stock in projects aimed at women, they're going to be following this formula. So it's a bit of a double-edged blade.

That was really all I had to say on the subject. I'll have more posts this weekend, I hope, since I have tons of ideas right now.

IDNTTWMWYTIM: "Sinister"

I know, I'm really slacking off in here. I meant to post a lot of things, and still intend to, but personal life events are severely restricting my time right now. As soon as they ease off a little, expect a cavalcade of posting from me.

Sinister

Sure, most people know what the word means now; "bad", "evil", "threatening", etc. But originally, waaaay back in the day, it actually referred to the left, or the left side of something. If a person was left-handed, they were "sinister". It's interesting to consider why the word has evolved into its current meaning, especially in light of what's happened to its opposite, "dexterous", meaning skillful, or clever (or right-handed). Its root, "dexter" has dropped out of usage, but it also meant "favorable" as well as 'on the right-hand side'. Interesting to see how we assign meaning in such ways, and how these two terms have become even more removed from each other. I don't know about anyone else, but on the association part of the SATs, I wouldn't have picked "night is to day, as evil is to skillful". Man, language is weird.