SPOUSE OF MOUSE

So Disney bought 21st Century Fox this past week, and this... is bad news! I know a lot of Marvel movie fans are probably all "what are you complaining about, now Marvel studios can make X-Men movies that are in-universe with the rest of their movies" and, speaking as someone who loves the Marvel movies unabashedly and goes to see every one of them on opening weekend, the prospect of having Wolverine show up in an Avengers movie is... not nearly enough to counteract the dread I otherwise feel.

(To clarify for those who don't follow media news: as a result of the merger, Disney acquired most of Fox's entertainment assets: the 20th Century Fox movie studio and its associated minor studios, Fox's television production assets, Fox's international media distribution companies and Fox's thirty-percent stake in Hulu. The rest of the assets were spun off into a new company, called "Fox Corporation," which Rupert Murdoch and company retain, and which kept Fox News, Fox Sports, Fox Business Network, and most of the actual television stations which made up the Fox network of stations. So, no, Disney does not own Sean Hannity now.)

What we're talking about here is media consolidation, a thing which has been happening for the past forty years and kicked into major overdrive in the past twenty. Media corporations grow and merge and take one another over until there's only a few left. I mean, in the 1980s, all of these studios still existed as independent entities: Tristar Pictures (bought by Sony in 1989), Miramax (Disney in 1993), PolyGram (Universal in 1999), United Artists (by MGM in 1981), Orion (by MGM in 1988) MGM (bought by Turner Broadcasting in 1986, who liquidated it for the film library; the brand was revived about a decade ago but it only makes movies as a junior partner for bigger producers), Castle Rock (bought by Turner in 1993), New Line (bought by Turner in 1994), and Turner itself (merged with Time Warner in 1996). And now you can add 20th Century Fox to the list. Until this year, Hollywood was down to the "Big Six" of major studios, and now it's the "Big Five," and every single one of them is a media conglomerate that does way more than just make movies.

This is a problem because top-down integration of mass creative culture is... well, bad. The very first news coming out of the merger didn't have anything to do with Marvel and the X-Men, but that Disney was immediately going to shut down Fox 2000, one of the smaller-scale movie brands just purchased by the studio. Fox 2000 mostly made "smaller" movies: Love Simon, The Hate U Give, The Fault In Our Stars, Hidden Figures, that sort of thing. It made good movies and bad movies, just like every studio does, but it was definitely pursuing the middle ground of moviemaking in a way that's disappearing from the movie landscape, where everything is either a blockbuster or an arthouse movie made to preserve credibility and there's less and less in-between every day.

This matters especially, because Disney, as a company, has a particular production philosophy: as a general rule, it avoids producing content that is rated more adult than PG-13 (or the equivalent thereof for TV). Disney avoids entire genres: neither it nor any of its subsidiary studios produces horror, for example, and even its "mature" branding strategies like Touchstone Pictures never released horror films. And you might not like horror (I like it much less than many other people do), but it's important that horror films get made, and the idea that we might have one less outlet for it - and other things, like the sort of movies Fox 2000 was making, or the hard-R-rated action movies Disney has also always avoided - is deeply unfortunate. Maybe the Fox branding will be used to market movies of this sort and give Disney a sort of arms-length brand distancing so nobody gets the idea that a new Predator movie is going to be PG and result in Predators marching around Disneyland holding fake spines as trophies, but this is all wondering about uncertain futures.

What is far more certain is that the merger is going to significantly hurt repertory theatres. Disney has never allowed their works to be shown in rep theatres, and now you can add 20th Century Fox films to that list, which kills off a lot of rep theatre staples: movies that are guaranteed to get an audience because they want to see them on the big screen, like the Die Hard movies, or Aliens, or Planet of the Apes, or even Taken. So that sucks.

Disney's control-freak nature over their intellectual properties doesn't just extend to rep theatres, but everything. You know the concept of "the Disney Vault"? Where Disney explicitly kept large numbers of their movies out of print for years in order to juice sales when they finally sold them so parents (who were desperate to appease their wee monsters) would pay any price for a copy of Aladdin? Get ready for that to come back, because Disney has already signalled to investors that Disney Plus, their upcoming streaming service, will be in the near future the only way to watch at least some of their movies - they're going to stop selling physical copies all together, because the cost/profit model for a streaming service is much better than basically any other form of media business. So the Fox movies - a back catalogue of thousands of films - will probably get folded into the same general enterprise. (Blu-Ray devotees are already starting to talk about getting copies of everything they want immediately before they disappear.) And that's just the films. Don't forget that Disney also got Fox Television, which means they now own The Simpsons and King of the Hill and MASH and NYPD Blue and heaps of other successful TV shows. And also Prison Break, because some people just gotta watch a guy break out of a prison again.

IDAI ANOTHER DAY

For some reason, humanity hasn't really decided to call the world's biggest superstorms the same thing everywhere they are. If you get a giant superstorm in the north Atlantic or the northeast Pacific near North America, it's a hurricane. If it's in the northwest Pacific, it's a typhoon. If it's in the northern Indian ocean, it's a cyclonic storm. And if it's in the southern Indian or Pacific oceans, it's a tropical cyclone. And these, I must point out, are just the English names. Clearly we need to pick one of them and just use it for all the massive devastating storms. I tend to lean towards "cyclone," both because it actually describes how these storms work, but also because it sounds a little bit like "psycho," which describes how nasty they can get.

Anyway, any big-ass storm is going to be bad, and Cyclone Idai is definitely by any yardstick a big-ass storm, but if you want the short version of how it was bad, you probably want to think back to 2017 and Hurricane Harvey. Harvey was at times a very powerful storm, but the real damage it did was when it was a longer-lasting weaker storm which just kept dumping endless amounts of rain onto Houston and the rest of that part of Texas, which caused intense flooding. Idai's damage was much the same, except instead of just rain they also got a hefty storm surge first, and instead of Houston and Texas it was Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe taking the hit.

A lot of non-Africans have this sort of idea that African countries are all wildly underdeveloped, and it's not remotely true. African countries are developing faster than pretty much anywhere else on earth. If you do an image search for "Beira Mozambique skyline" it looks pretty much like any other modern first-world city (at least if you're looking at a pre-cyclone image - and be careful to make sure you're not looking at an image of Beira Mar in the Brazilian city of Fortaleza, which is much fancier-looking). And the downtown core of Beira, with all the modern skyscrapers, is still mostly intact. But most of the people in Beira lived in the African equivalent of the suburbs - perfectly decent housing built low to the ground. Which is the sort of thing a storm like Idai eats for breakfast, particularly when the entire area is flooded and there is no real place for the water to go.

The problem then got compounded because Mozambique is a small, relatively poor country, and what really sets aside the First World from developing nations is, essentially, the ability to take a punch. The storm was violent, but when you have an army engineering corps, you can mitigate some of the damage with sandbagging and draining strategies to try and funnel water away. When you have stockpiles of food and medicine you can alleviate a lot of the day-to-day suffering of the people who have survived the storm. When you have a thousand portable toilets ready to airlift and the planes to airlift them, you don't have to worry nearly as much about floodwater becoming tainted by human waste (because the sewers are all flooded and people still gotta go somewhere). But if your country doesn't have these things, then everything is just worse and harder. (Or, if your country has these things but doesn't care to use them because you're in Puerto Rico, the same truth remains.)

So the result is that Mozambique is taking a nasty blow, because, much like central Texas, this is land that is low and flat and the people all quite understandably live near the water. (Zimbabwe and Malawi are also have trouble because they are also mostly relatively flat country, but they're both more elevated than Mozambique is. The southern half of Mozambique is a fertile place to live because it's basically a giant drainage ditch for that part of Africa.) So they're hurting really bad and there's no easy way to alleviate it, not that we shouldn't be trying to do so anyway. Canada so far has committed $3.5 million in aid and that is a drop in the bucket.

BOEING BOEING BONG

Followup on the Boeing 737 Max story of interest: the New York Times reported this week that Boeing was not only aware of the safety issue with the 737 Max airliner that was responsible for the Ethiopian Air and Lion Air crashes, but that in fact they marketed the fix for that safety issue as an optional extra that airlines could purchase from them. And it further turns out that Boeing does this all the time. Do you want an extra fire extinguisher on your plane? Oxygen masks for the crew in case of emergency? Well, guess what: that's not included in the base price of the plane! This is literally like Ford charging you for seatbelts.

This just spells out further that this story is one of regulatory failure. That extra fire extinguisher is offered because some jurisdictions require it (Japan, for example) and others don't (the United States), and airline companies don't buy the optional safety extras because then the planes would cost a small bit more and why would they do that when most of the time planes don't crash? Capitalism at work, huzzah.

BREXIT AGAIN

Every time I think this saga can't make less sense, it suddenly makes less sense.

So this past week-and-change in Brexit: first, after the "second meaningful vote" to adopt Theresa May's Brexit plan that nobody really likes failed, May said she was going to schedule a third vote, because she has literally no other plan to get through this mess other than to just keep putting up the same plan for a vote until, I suppose, the MPs vote to pass it just so she will stop bothering them. However, the Speaker of the House pointed out that Parliamentary rules state that you can't just keep putting the same goddamn bill up for a vote time after goddamn time and that in fact they probably shouldn't have even had the "second meaningful vote" because once the first meaningful vote was held and the plan lost, that should have been that. Then Parliament voted to request an extension of the March 29 deadline, which they seem

Anyway, in the past week pro-Remain organizers have put together an online petition that now has signatures from more than 8% of the entire population of the UK, and a public protest in London attracted over a million protestors (according to organizers, and as a general rule you should always be a little wary of organizer claims of attendance because it's all more or less an estimate and they tend to fudge upwards for obvious reasons - but looking at overhead camera footage of the protests, which filled streets for at least a couple of kilometers, a million people is probably at least in the ballpark?), and even Richard Branson got off his space plane or whatever he's doing this week to say that the UK should at least have a second referendum about leaving the EU. Under normal circumstances you would expect the country's politicians to at least maybe consider the idea of a second referendum, but as we have discussed here before, the UK's politicians are at a level of uselessness that is honestly kind of staggering at this point, so meet me back here in two months when the UK is panicking again because the Fifteenth Meaningful Vote failed and it's three days away from anarchy in the streets.

THE ENTERTAINMENT SECTION

Movies watched this week:

Free Solo (2018, Jimmy Chin, theatre) - 4.5/5

Fighting With My Family (2019, Stephen Merchant, theatre) - 3/5

The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind (2019, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Netflix) - 4/5

Also finished Prey, in my ongoing quest to Play All The Big Games From Two Years Ago Because Now They Are Cheap. It was good!

See you in a week.