I Watched 500 Movies in 9 Months

Django Unchained, the movie
that started all this

Two weeks ago I submitted the final revision of a book I wrote about movies, namely the 493 top-grossing movies of 2000 to 2019. In the course of my research for that book, between December 2020 and August 2021, I watched almost every one of those movies. (My research focused on American dialects, so I skipped movies that don’t contain any, like the Harry Potter series and the Lord of the Rings series. I admit I also did a lot of fast-forwarding.)

That project has rewired my brain in ways I’m just beginning to understand, but that’s a topic for another post. In the meantime, here are my lists of the worst of the worst and surprise gems.

No spoilers.

The Worst of the Worst (ordered from least worst to most worst)

The Twilight Series

What can I say about these movies that hasn’t already been said? The filmmaking itself is merely mediocre; the bigger issue is the messaging, and this isn’t alarmism talking. Bella and Edward’s relationship is legitimately bordering on abusive, full of red flags. If young girls grow up believing this is what romance looks like, I am genuinely concerned.

G-Force

Did you know that there’s a movie about genetically modified hyperintelligent guinea pigs working as secret agents, and that the female guinea pig is grossly sexualized by the camera à la Phoebe Cates in Fast Times? And that this movie came out in 2009? Neither did I.

American Wedding

It’s just tedious and unfunny, full of recycled jokes and gross-out humor, populated by unlikable characters and reinforcing extremely stale gender tropes.

The Peanuts Movie

Surprisingly, multiple extended (and I do mean extended) sequences of Snoopy pretending to be in an aerial battle with the Red Baron do not make for riveting film viewing. The Peanuts gang belongs in comic strips and 30-minute holiday specials, not a full-length film.

Nutty Professor II: The Klumps

The moral of this film is that fat people are super gross, and that it’s really funny to watch Eddie Murphy in a variety of fat suits eat, belch, fart, and talk over other versions of himself for an hour and a half.

Into the Woods

I’m not a fan of musicals unless the music is particularly inspiring (Les Mis, for instance, or The Phantom of the Opera). The music of Into the Woods seems to be a single, unmelodious tune that spans the entirety of the film and sounds like the characters are making it up as they go. It is monotony defined.

The Rush Hour Series

Chris Tucker’s Carter is one of the most obnoxious characters put to film. Tucker seems to think that simply talking nonstop is the same as being funny, and his exaggerated high-pitched delivery gets very grating very quickly. The culmination of the grossness happens in a Rush Hour 3 scene in which Carter pretends to be a costume designer so as to get a dressing room full of women naked, after which he lines them up and inspects their nude bodies like a military general.

The Cat in the Hat

This film has a 9% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes. I’ll let those critics speak for me:

“Represents everything corrupt, bloated, and wrong with mainstream Hollywood movies.” —Ty Burr, Boston Globe

“It's so bad that Dr. Seuss should sue from the grave... It is one of longest eighty minutes you'll ever spend in a theater.” —Steve Rhodes, Internet Reviews

“… a shrill, soulless and disturbing void of imagination that murders the spirit of a beloved children's book—which the filmmakers obviously have not read.” —Jonathan R. Perry, Tyler Morning Telegraph (Texas)

“A vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy that Universal has the temerity to call Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat.” —A.O. Scott, New York Times

“82 of the most wretched minutes ever imprinted on celluloid.” —Lawrence Toppman, Charlotte Observer

Surprise Gems in no particular order

(This is not a list of the best of the best—rather, these are the movies that I enjoyed much more than I expected to.)

Men in Black 3

I didn’t hate Men in Black II as much as some, but it was pretty uninspired—basically a remake of the original, complete with recycled jokes. That’s why the third installment surprised me so much. Among its strengths, the film introduces a delightful new character, a time-jumping alien named Griffin. The scenes of time jumps are awesome, and the ending is emotional and poignant.

The How to Train Your Dragon Trilogy

All three films are funny, exciting, touching, and gorgeously animated. The second film in particular contains an incredible, emotional scene in which two long-estranged people are reunited. I cried.

Super 8

I don’t remember this film making much of a splash when it came out in 2011, but it should have. The story is told in black box style, where both the characters and the audience are kept almost completely in the dark about what’s actually happening until nearly the very end—a risky technique, but this film pulls it off. The child actors are also extremely impressive.

Gone Girl

Based on what I knew of this film, I didn’t expect it to be so fun. It has a pervasive but subtle, dark sense of humor, a bit like a heist movie filled with antiheroes.

Panic Room

The number of female film protagonists with strong, non-tropey storylines is still shockingly small, especially in big-budget film (as you can read about in my upcoming book!). Jodie Foster’s Meg is one of them. She and young Kristen Stewart are both excellent, and the movie is as taut as a violin string from start to finish.

The Polar Express

This movie has been criticized for the uncanny valley effect of the animation, but I think it works well with the tone of the film. The main character is constantly encountering creepy and bizarre situations and characters—it’s meant to feel uncanny. It's also been criticized for not having much of a plot, but you can make an interesting film without a strong plot as long as you make up for it with a consistent tone and a strong theme (see Lost in Translation, The Breakfast Club, Adaptation), which The Polar Express manages.

The Planet of the Apes Prequels

I didn’t expect to enjoy these films at all—what little I’d seen of the trailers seemed to over-anthropomorphize the apes, plus I find it difficult to watch scenes of animal abuse. But they surprised me, especially the second in the series, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. They’re not gratuitously violent, and the ape characters have a surprising amount of pathos without being characterized as humans in furry body suits.

Honorable Mention

Daddy Day Care

I can’t quite call this film a gem, but for an early 2000s comedy about three men running a daycare, it did exceed my very low expectations. Early 2000s comedies are mostly a trash fire (see American Wedding and Nutty Professor II), filled with gross-out humor and sexist jokes that were stale by the 1970s, and that’s basically what I expected from Daddy Day Care. Before watching it, I assumed the premise would be something akin to, “Isn’t it hilarious to watch men try to take care of children???” But that isn’t what the film delivers at all. Yes, the men do make some comedic blunders when they first open the daycare, but they learn from their mistakes fast, and they actually demonstrate a lot of insight into the children’s behavior and how to form cooperative relationships by treating the kids with respect. The film rarely goes for the easy jokes and avoids the obnoxious old trope of the bumbling, incompetent father. It also has some surprisingly progressive messages about how childcare isn’t taken seriously as real labor and the discrimination that men can face in traditionally female jobs. I didn’t see that coming. The biggest knock against the movie is that it’s just not very funny, though there are a few decent jokes and funny scenes (including a Star Trek joke at which I actually laughed out loud).

My book, Stigmatized on Screen: How Hollywood Portrays Nonstandard Dialects, will be out later this year. Check back here for the obligatory self-promotion when the time comes.

How Much is a Hundred Billion Dollars?

As of December 10, 2020, according to NPR, there were five people on Earth whose personal wealth exceeded $100 billion. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos topped the list with a personal net worth of $182 billion, followed by Elon Musk at $147 billion, Bill Gates with $129 billion, French businessman Bernard Arnault with $110 billion, and Mark Zuckerberg with only $105 billion. Together their fortunes total more than $673,000,000,000.

Exactly how much is $100,000,000,000? 

Americans—even well-educated Americans who consider themselves literate in other areas—are notoriously innumerate, so let’s put these numbers in some perspective.

How long does it take to earn $100,000,000,000?

If you found a very lucrative job that paid $500 an hour and you worked 50 hours per week, you would make about $1,250,000 per year. At that salary, it would take you 80,000 years to earn a hundred billion dollars.

If you made $100,000 a year—about $40 per hour assuming you worked 50 hours per week—you would have to work for a million years to make a hundred billion dollars.

If you made a more modest $15 per hour—the federal minimum wage proposed by a number of liberal politicians—and worked 50 hours per week, you would make about $37,500 per year. That means you would have to work for about 2.6 million years to earn a hundred billion dollars, and it would take you over 26,000 years just to get to one billion dollars.

In fact, if you had managed to earn $10,000 a day for the last 500 years, you would only have about $1.8 billion. And of course, that’s only the money you’ve earned; it doesn’t factor in the money you would have to spend to survive, so it doesn’t actually represent your net wealth accumulation.

If it’s impossible for a human to earn $100 billion through their labor, how, then, have these men amassed these fortunes?

Their wealth doesn’t come primarily from their salaries; the highest paid people in the world—mainly corporate CEOs and professional athletes—make salaries in the hundreds of millions per year, but even these salaries would take several lifetimes to add up to $100 billion. Instead, their main source of income is investments, such as stock ownership. Bezos made about $90 billion in 2020 during the pandemic due to Amazon sales increasing by 40% over the previous year and Amazon stock prices increasing by 70% from March to December. Tesla stock prices increased eight-fold from January 2020 to January 2021, and Musk’s net worth quadrupled over that period.

Stock prices, of course, increase as a result of labor done by people who make far less than the CEOs in the top salary tiers. Tesla stock prices rise because engineers design Tesla vehicles; factory workers assemble them; marketers advertise them; custodians and electricians keep factories running; IT technicians keep everyone connected. Musk himself has almost nothing to do with the process of building a car, testing it for safety, advertising it to the public, or selling it to a customer.

It’s difficult to obtain exact salary numbers for low-level workers because companies typically discourage or even ban employees from discussing pay rates, but a June 2020 proposal by Tesla to build a manufacturing plant in Travis County, Texas estimated that it would create 5,000 jobs using “approximately 65% unskilled labor” at a “[l]iving wage of $15/hour” for “construction and permanent labor force.” It also claimed an “[a]verage annual salary [of] $47,147,” which, of course, is inflated by six- and seven-figure salaries for administrators and bosses in those top salary tiers.

Even assuming the figure of $47,147 accurately represented the salaries of a majority of those 5,000 employees, those salaries combine for an annual cost of less than $236,000,000. Those 5,000 employees would have to work over 400 years, collectively, to earn $100 billion.

The centibillionaires also pay a lower tax rate than most of their own employees. Long-term capital gains—profits from the sale of an asset like stock that you’ve owned for more than a year—are taxed at a maximum rate of 20% for single filers, whereas anyone making over about $40,000 per year is paying at least a 22% federal income tax rate. In other words, the money you earn with your own labor is taxed at a higher rate than profits that result from someone else’s labor.

It’s certainly valid to argue that Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, and other founders of huge, highly successful businesses such as Tesla, Amazon, and Facebook deserve to be well-compensated for their work, that they deserve to profit from their ingenuity and investment. My purpose here is not to dispute that point. But money is by definition a finite resource; otherwise, it would be valueless. It is also a finite resource that is necessary for survival in the modern world, and our current economic system has enabled a small number of people to hoard a massive amount of that resource. What could we do with that amount of wealth if it were not concentrated in so few hands? What can a hundred billion dollars actually buy?

Housing, for one thing. HUD reports that in their 2019 single night count, 567,715 people in the U.S. experienced homelessness. These include families with children, but even assuming each was a single individual, what would it cost to house them all?

To build a modest $100,000 home for 567,715 people would cost about $57 billion—less than a third of Bezos’s personal net worth. In fact, he could build all of these homes and would still be a centibillionaire and the fourth richest person alive when he was done.

A hundred billion dollars can also buy a lot of food. The International Food Policy Research Institute calculates that to end world hunger and poverty by 2030—not just feed the hungry but eliminate poverty—would cost about $265 billion per year. That adds up to about $3.3 trillion over the next nine years. The wealthiest 1% of Americans collectively own over $36 trillion. We could end hunger and poverty for the entire planet with just 10% of their total wealth.

Money also pays debts, and Americans have about $45 billion in medical debt in collections right now. Bezos could pay it all, and build all those homes, and still have $80 billion left.

Musk could give a $10,000 bonus to every one of Tesla’s 48,000 full-time employees and barely notice a dip in his bank account; it would amount to less than one third of one percent of his net worth, and yet it would be life-changing to the thousands of employees making $15 per hour. A $100,000 bonus would cost him just over 3% of his net worth.

What if the ultra-wealthy wanted to spend these mega-fortunes on themselves? Is it possible to spend $100,000,000,000 in a lifetime?

Imagine the most extravagant lifestyle you can, filled with multi-million-dollar homes, private jets, exotic vacations, and the indulgence of every whim you could conceive, a lifestyle that costs $1 million per day. If you spent $1 million every day of your life and lived to the age of ninety, you would have spent about $33 billion—less than 20% of Bezos’s fortune.

Of course these numbers are an oversimplification. These men don’t actually have $100 billion sitting in a bank account somewhere; the numbers represent their net worth, which includes their property, stock, and other investments. If they suddenly sold all their shares in their own companies’ stocks to buy houses for the houseless and food for the hungry, the effect on the markets and the economy would be incalculable.

The point is that perhaps we should not allow a single individual to attain that much wealth in the first place. I once heard someone compare it to a dragon sitting on his pile of gold. He can’t possibly use it all himself; he hoards it only because he can, because it pleases him, and damn the villagers who need it to live. But because money is a finite resource, the more I have, the less you have, and when five men hoard more of this resource than everyone else put together—not just more than they could spend in a lifetime, but more than they could spend in hundreds of lifetimes—there is far less of that resource in circulation for everyone else to use.

Some will argue that these men already donate millions of dollars of their own wealth to charitable causes—such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which combats poverty and disease all over the world—and invest their wealth in important scientific ventures, such as Musk’s SpaceX. In fact, CNBC reports that in 2018, Jeff Bezos donated about $2 billion to charity, and from 1994 to 2019, Bill and Melinda Gates donated $45.5 billion. Zuckerberg has also donated several billion dollars over the last few years. And yet still—still—these men have fortunes over a hundred billion dollars.

Bezos’s $2 billion donation is just over 1% of his net worth at the end of 2020. For an individual with a net worth of $250,000, it is equivalent to donating about $2,750. For an average American in the bottom 50% of personal wealth ownership, whose net worth is about $14,300, it’s equivalent to donating about $157. More significantly, if that individual donates $157, they will have $14,143 left. When Bezos donates $2 billion, he has $180 billion left and is still the richest man alive by a wide margin. In reality, these charitable donations—which sound massively generous to average people—are simply good P.R. for the mega-wealthy, enabling them to appear beneficent while simultaneously having almost no effect at all on their personal fortunes other than to serve as convenient tax deductions.

There is no good reason to allow these few individuals to hoard this enormous wealth when its redistribution could do so much good. The argument that they earned this money and therefore deserve to keep it is nonsense. It is simply not possible to earn a hundred billion dollars through one’s labor. Rather, these men benefit from being at the top of a system that generates massive profits through the labor of many thousands of people and then filters those profits upward, like an hourglass in reverse, so that those at the bottom are forced to fight over the sparsest remains while those at the top hunch like dragons over their piles of gold.

What is the solution?

The idea of socialism is becoming more palatable particularly among young Americans for exactly this reason, but there is also a lot of daylight between socialism (whatever you think that means) and completely unfettered capitalism. And in that daylight there is room for many small measures, such as higher taxes on capital gains, wealth taxes, and wealth caps. Some argue that these measures would stifle innovation, would discourage these overlords from continuing to grow their empires and “create jobs,” but the evidence indicates that many other factors have a bigger impact on innovation and economic growth than taxes do. When hundreds of thousands of Americans are hungry and sleeping on streets, unable to pay for healthcare, and suffering under crushing burdens of debt, how can we continue to justify the status quo?

Slate is Cherry Picking the Data on Self-Driving Cars

On July 8, 2020, Elon Musk announced that Tesla was “very close” to creating completely autonomous cars and predicted that they would have the “basic functionality” ready by the end of the year. Fully autonomous vehicles aren’t yet available for consumer purchase, but they are being tested on public roads. Waymo (formerly Google’s brand of self-driving cars) is even offering fully driverless taxi service in the Phoenix metro area. But some commentators, such as Slate’s David Zipper, think driverless technology is moving onto public roadways too fast, too soon. They cite YouTube videos of Tesla drivers leaving the driver’s seat while using autopilot and a few high profile crashes to argue that federal regulators should step in and create stricter safety and testing protocols before more lives are lost to the imperfect technology. Others are arguing for an outright ban on the driverless tech. But these critics are wrong; though driverless tech is still in its infancy, it can and will save millions of lives, and the sooner it hits our roadways, the better.

It’s hard to overstate how bad humans are at driving. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) reports that 36,560 people were killed in car accidents in the U.S. in 2018, including over 10,000 deaths involving alcohol-impaired driving. On average, human error causes over 90% of car crashes every year. Motor vehicles also accounted for 43% of law enforcement officer deaths in the line of duty from 2006 to 2019, including both crashes and officers struck by vehicles.

Driverless cars don’t get drunk, drowsy, or distracted; they have infinitely faster reaction times and they can see every side of the vehicle at once. And though many argue against using public roadways as testing labs, the more time that automated vehicles spend on the road, the faster the technology will improve. If these vehicles can be shown to be even 1% safer than human drivers right now, we should get them on the road as quickly as possible.

So how does today’s driverless tech compare to human drivers? There is no single source of data (the NHTSA doesn’t track accidents that specifically involve autonomous vehicles), so direct comparisons are tricky. To estimate crash rates, we must rely on what little state-imposed tracking there is.

California is currently the only state tracking crash data for autonomous vehicles, and Wired reports that in 2019, autonomous vehicles in California logged 2.9 million miles in driverless mode on public roads. The California DMV reports 105 collisions involving these cars during that period, and the vehicle was operating in autonomous mode in 47 of those. Only three of these 47 reports state that police were called; 17 don’t specify. If police were called in all 17 of the unspecified cases, that’s 20 police-reported collisions involving an autonomous vehicle operating in driverless mode.

The reports don’t assign fault, so can we know how many of those 20 collisions were caused by the driverless car? A 2019 analysis of 113 crashes involving autonomous vehicles determined that only 13% were the fault of the autonomous vehicle. Assuming a similar percentage of the 20 autonomous, police-reported collisions in California in 2019 were the fault of the driverless car, that’s about 2.6 collisions blamed on the car, or one per 1.1 million miles driven, making them over twice as safe as human-driven vehicles when compared to NHTSA data.

Rather than stricter regulation as many commentators are demanding, every state should implement California’s requirement of separate, detailed reports for autonomous vehicle-involved collisions. We don’t need stricter laws; we need data to improve these cars’ abilities and monitor their impact on roads and other drivers. Currently data scientists have limited sample sizes to work with, but every driverless car on the road has the potential to be a data point. More data and better tracking of those data are the most effective way to improve safety and speed up innovation—especially since available evidence shows that even the primitive driverless cars on the road today are already safer than human drivers.

Imagine streets where traffic is a thing of the past, where every vehicle can talk directly to every other and cars can move in harmony like a flock of birds. Stoplights would become unnecessary; congestion would disappear; emissions produced by transportation (whether from the cars themselves or from electricity produced to power them) would drop exponentially.

Imagine roadways where every car moves aside immediately and automatically for police and EMS vehicles, then efficiently closes the gap behind them like zipping up a jacket, cutting response times dramatically. Self-driving cars that are incapable of breaking traffic laws would also remove the need for traffic stops, reducing contact between police and Black and brown drivers as well as the risk to cops of being struck by a moving vehicle.

Will driverless cars someday put truck drivers, taxi drivers, Uber and Lyft drivers, and even delivery drivers out of work? Yes. But this concern isn’t unique to self-driving cars; blue collar workers all over the world are already being replaced by machines. A 2019 report estimated that 20 million manufacturing jobs would be lost to automation by 2030. The robot revolution is already happening in our factories and will eventually happen on our roads, and it’s the job of governments not to try to stop it, but to help our societies adapt to it.

Self-driving cars have the potential to save tens of thousands of lives annually in the U.S. alone. Lawmakers and the people who vote for them will help decide how quickly that happens. Let’s not allow a few high profile cases to obscure the reality that they are already far safer than human drivers, and let’s not hold back an industry that can create so much fundamentally positive change. 

Marvel or DC? A Look at the Numbers

A very dear old friend of mine recently watched Aquaman, didn’t like it, and subsequently tweeted a derogatory comment about the overall quality of DC movies. As a long-time DC fan and defender, I couldn’t let this slide—I replied with my skepticism of this oft-repeated narrative that DC isn’t good at movies.

My friend then responded with an impressive 12-tweet thread making the case for Marvel based on Rotten Tomatoes’ critics’ scores, complete with math, gifs, and snark.

This cannot stand.

But my rebuttal is far too long for a Twitter thread, and I just don’t have the patience. So Jaclyn, forgive me for moving this argument to my home court, but you deserve the best I can bring.

Innocent bystanders: I recommend you read the original Twitter conversation before continuing.

Jaclyn, I will begin by arguing that your premise (that Rotten Tomatoes’ critics’ consensus is the best metric for deciding what makes a movie “good”) is flawed.

I will then show that even using the very parameters you established, you’re still wrong.

First, why assume that the critics’ consensus on Rotten Tomatoes is the best way to measure good versus sucky? Why not use the audience scores? After all, it’s audience members that buy tickets, generate studio revenue, and ultimately influence which movies get made and which don’t, not critics. If we average the audience scores rather than critics’ consensus of the movies you counted, we get 79.8% for DC and 82.3% for Marvel—a huge narrowing of the gap. If they were in college, they’d both have a B-.

Did I personally consider Suicide Squad a good movie? Not even a little. But I won’t commit the logical fallacy of the appeal to incredulity: just because I didn’t like it and can’t really imagine why anyone did, that doesn’t mean that audience reactions (which translate to ticket sales, revenue, and sequels, remember) are invalid. Marvel’s Venom shows a similar result, a terrible critical consensus but high audience scores. (You left that one out of your analysis, btw.)

On the other hand, I went into Aquaman expecting not Citizen Kane-level filmmaking, but something big, dumb, loud, and fun, and that’s exactly what I got. I enjoyed it.

You could point out that racist and sexist reviewers sabotaging the audience scores for Black Panther and Captain Marvel tanked them unfairly, and you’d be right. However, if we leave them out of our audience score average, Marvel still gets only an 83.8%; bumped up from a B- to a B. And I would then point out that this just means that Marvel fanboys are more sexist and virulent than DC fans, since Wonder Woman didn’t suffer a similar tanking.

But let’s forget Rotten Tomatoes for awhile. After all, how much can it really tell us about the true quality or long-term impact of a film?

I would argue that DC has had a more significant impact on film-making in general and superhero films in particular, and that ultimately DC’s legacy will be considered more important.

Considering only the films you mentioned, many would say that Marvel has made the same movie 22 times. With an occasional exception such as Ragnarok, which could be deemed a straight comedy, MCU movies are remarkably consistent in theme, tone, and production value. Consistently good? Maybe. But other words for “consistent” are “boring” and “low risk.” I can make a consistently good cake using the same recipe 22 times, but I bet you’d get sick of eating it pretty quickly.

On the other hand, there’s a universe of difference between Batman Begins and Aquaman, between The Dark Knight and Shazam. Differences in tone, in dialogue, in color palette, in realism, in effects, in acting style. DC takes risks. Sometimes they don’t work, and we get a Suicide Squad, and sometimes they do and we get The Dark Knight, which tops list after list of the greatest superhero movies of all time. Among all the movies you listed, which is most likely to be remembered as a classic, most likely to be taught in film studies courses and, in retrospect, be considered revolutionary in its genre? Many would say The Dark Knight.

The upcoming Joker film is another example of DC’s creative risk-taking. I don’t know for sure that it will be good, but I do know that the modern iteration of Marvel Studios would never even attempt anything like it.

Additionally, without the original Batman (1989), we probably wouldn’t have superhero movies as we know them today. It proved that even with controversial casting choices and plot changes that pissed off the fanboys, superhero movies could be not just profitable, but critically successful.

And while DC was setting the stage for decades of brilliant superhero films by a range of studios, what was Marvel doing? Crapping out the 1990 Captain America, which has a staggering 7% Tomatoes consensus. That’s the lowest rating of ANY Marvel or DC movie EVER—even lower than Fant4stic (another Marvel failure you forgot to mention) at 9%.

We could also discuss other kinds of cultural considerations. Despite Doctor Strange’s decent Tomatoes score, it was widely panned for character whitewashing by casting Tilda Swinton (literally the whitest living human) as The Ancient One, a role held in the comics by an Asian Man. When I look at a poster of the Justice League, I see an Israeli woman for whom English is a second language, an Ashkenazi Jew, a Native Pacific Islander, and a Black American man. When I look at a poster of the original Avengers, I see white guy, white guy, white guy, white guy, pretty white lady. Is diversity the best metric for deciding whether a movie is “good”? No, but it’s certainly relevant—at least as relevant as the consensus of professional movie critics, who themselves are overwhelmingly white and male. Has Marvel taken great strides in diversification in recent films? Absolutely. But again, I argue, DC got there first.

So you’ve seen why your premise is flawed from the start. But for the sake of argument, let’s use your premise—that Tomatoes critical consensus is a valid metric for this debate—and see how well your argument holds up.

You compare the average score of the 22 MCU films against a fairly random selection of DC films: the first four Batmen, the Dark Knight trilogy, and the official DCEU films. But this is completely arbitrary. You also mention the X-Men franchise and two pre-MCU Spider-Man iterations as points in your favor, so I say, let’s really go for it. Let’s count up EVERY Marvel and DC film that received a wide theatrical release, using your preferred method of critical consensus.

For reference, films that weren’t considered include films made from “imprint” properties rather than the true Marvel and DC labels (such as, sadly, V for Vendetta, a personal favorite), films that received only a partial theatrical release (such as Batman: The Killing Joke), and films that are too old to have a critical consensus listed on Tomatoes (such as the 1944 Captain America—but trust me, you don’t want that one affecting your score anyway).

Among Marvel’s complete collection are critical and box office flops such as Daredevil (you forgot Affleck was the blind vigilante before he was Batman, didn’t you?), Elektra, two versions of The Punisher, and, oh yes, Howard the Duck. Which, by the way, is clearly part of the MCU since he appears in BOTH Guardians movies.

DC has had some tragedies too, such as Superman IV and Catwoman. But the point is that to pretend that every Marvel movie is by default a gem is intellectually dishonest.

I won’t keep you in suspense: if we average the critical scores from all of these movies, what do we end up with?

Marvel 65%

DC 53.9%

DC is failing, but Marvel is skipping class, sitting in the back with their friends, goofing off, barely paying attention, and one bad test score away from repeating the semester.

If you’re curious, audience scores average to Marvel 69.5%, DC 58.8%.

To say that one is great and one sucks, well, the numbers just don’t back it up.

Book Review and Discussion: Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences by John Allen Paulos (1988)

Imagine a test for cancer that is 98% accurate.

Now assume that 0.5% of the population has cancer.

That means in a test group of 10,000 people, 50 of them have cancer. If the test is 98% accurate, then 49 of those 50 will test positive: that means 49 accurate positive tests.

The other 9,950 people in the group do not have cancer. But if the test is 98% accurate, then 2% of them will get incorrect results, i.e. false positives. 2% of 9,950 is 199 false positives.

Are you surprised that the false positives outnumber the true positives 4 to 1? I was.

Now imagine that instead of testing for cancer, we’re testing for drug use. A misunderstanding of these numbers could have major implications in states where laws require low-income people to pass a drug test before they can receive food stamps or other public assistance.

In his 1988 book Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences, mathematician John Allen Paulos discusses the many ways that innumeracy, “an inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance, plagues far too many otherwise knowledgeable citizens” and has real-world consequences for health, public policy, criminal justice, and other areas. “The same people who cringe when words such as ‘imply’ and ‘infer’ are confused react without a trace of embarrassment to even the most egregious of numerical solecisms,” he writes. “In fact, unlike other failings which are hidden, mathematical illiteracy is often flaunted: ‘I can’t even balance my checkbook.’ ‘I’m a people person, not a numbers person.’ Or ‘I always hated math.’” (3-4)

You know who you are.

Paulos points out that our lack of understanding of statistics in particular can affect policy in many ways. The media’s tendency to fixate on every terrorist attack and mass shooting, for example, leads citizens to believe that their risk of dying in one of these is far higher than it actually is, and it leads politicians to focus on policies addressing those issues, but ignoring far more common killers such as suicide and heart disease. (Steven Pinker also discusses this phenomenon at length in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature, which I reviewed here.)

Paulos also shows that the human tendency to attribute meaning to coincidences and other rare events can lead us to fall for frauds such as psychics and quack medicine. TV talk shows make hay from every “correct” psychic prediction, ignoring the dozens of incorrect ones that preceded it. Similarly, if an ordinary person has a dream, and the events of the dream then occur in real life, they remember this and find it significant; they forget the thousands of dreams they had before and since that did not come true. But even an event that is statistically rare will happen occasionally, given enough time and opportunity. It would be much more unusual if you went your entire life without having a predictive dream; it would be much more surprising if a psychic’s random or intuitive guesses never aligned with reality.

Paulos presents one example after another, always spelling out the basic math required for understanding. This might lead you to think that the book is tedious, but in fact the opposite is true. Paulos’s explanations are clear and simple, and he uses humor throughout to lighten the mood. Knowing that many in the audience will be intimidated by chunks of numbers, he writes, “Now is probably a good time to reiterate my earlier remark that an occasional difficult passage may be safely ignored by the innumerate reader. … The occasional trivial passage likewise may be quite safely ignored by the numerate reader. (Indeed, the whole book may be safely ignored by all readers, but I’d prefer that, at most, only isolated paragraphs will be.)” (16-7).

Further, though the book is now 30 years old, every point that Paulos makes is still timely; indeed, prescient. In his conclusion he writes, “I’m distressed by a society which depends so completely on mathematics and science and yet seems so indifferent to the innumeracy and scientific illiteracy of so many of its citizens; with a military that spends more than one quarter of a trillion dollars each year on ever smarter weapons for ever more poorly educated soldiers; and with the media, which invariably become obsessed with this hostage on an airliner, or that baby who has fallen into a well, and seem insufficiently passionate when it comes to addressing problems such as urban crime, environmental deterioration, or poverty” (134). Clearly, the problems Paulos discusses are at least as relevant today as they were at the time of his writing.

What are the causes of these issues? Paulos points to “poor education, psychological blocks, and romantic misconceptions about the nature of mathematics” (72-3). Too many people (including many teachers) believe that one is simply born with or without mathematical ability; you either get it or you don’t. (I find a similar belief about writing among my English students.) He discusses math anxiety and its sources: “The same people who can understand the subtlest emotional nuances in conversation, the most convoluted plots in literature, and the most intricate aspects of a legal case can’t seem to grasp the most basic elements of a mathematical demonstration. … They’re afraid. They’ve been intimidated by officious and sometimes sexist teachers… they’re convinced that they’re dumb” (88). Paulos discusses a few simple solutions to this that can be integrated at any grade level, but too many teachers do not have the time, resources, or sometimes the will to implement them.

This section reminded me of an NPR story that aired a few years ago, “Why Eastern And Western Cultures Tackle Learning Differently,” which discussed differences in our views of struggle in education. Americans tend to believe that struggling with a subject is a bad thing, a sign of failure or stupidity, while Japanese educators treat struggle as a natural and expected part of the learning process. Western schools reward those who don’t struggle, who breeze through school with little effort; eastern schools value perseverance and celebrate those who push through and overcome struggle. Perhaps a more eastern view of struggle in math could help us overcome our math anxieties.

Before reading this book, I would have called myself numerate; I did well in math in school and was never intimidated by mathematical concepts. But as I read, I realized that my numeracy was deficient in a key area, the area to which most of Paulos’s book is devoted: statistics and probability. Among all math concepts, these are the most applicable to our everyday lives, yet most people understand them poorly. Further, statistics are easy to abuse, and they can be manipulated both intentionally and unintentionally to deceive people about important issues like the relative danger of terrorism or the prevalence of other types of crime. A strong grasp of statistics would be a major advantage to individuals and to society at large.

Why, then, was I never required to take a statistics class in high school or college? Algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus—that was the expected progression of my math education and the path that I followed. I was not required to take statistics at any point; I was never encouraged to take statistics for any reason; so far as I can remember, no one ever suggested that I take statistics. It seems that this one change in requirements could make at least some small positive difference in numeracy among Americans.

Paulos’s book is short, readable, and important no matter what your current degree of numeracy. Students and parents in particular will find it both informative and encouraging. And concerned citizens of all stripes should take its message to heart and examine how their own innumeracy affects their beliefs, behaviors, and, perhaps most importantly, voting habits, and what they can do about it.

In Defense of Learning a Language Badly

I just started learning American Sign Language… sort of.

I’m enrolled in a 6-week class through Community Education of the Black Hills, a program that sponsors all kinds of adult education classes, from dance to dog obedience. The class meets once a week for two hours. It’s a small group: about ten students of all ages and backgrounds, each learning ASL for a different reason. The teacher is energetic and knowledgeable. We spend the two hours learning new vocabulary and grammar and practicing simple conversations with each other. The teacher sends us home with a handout of the signs we learned that day and some historical background on the development of ASL.

I won’t learn much in 12 hours of classroom instruction—maybe enough to make some basic small talk. And though I’m practicing outside of class, in a few months, I’ll probably forget most of what I do learn. So why bother? If you haven’t attempted to learn a secondary language since you were forced to do so in high school, you might not see much point in such a small effort. But there is value in learning another language beyond the ability to converse in it fluently.

For starters, you might be amazed how much you can say and understand after only a few weeks of practice. Collins Dictionary estimates that the 25 most common English words “make up about a third of all printed text”; the 100 most common make up about half. Think of that—with just 100 words and a little bit of grammar (recognizing first, second, and third person; singular and plural; perhaps present and past tense), you can decipher quite a lot. Could you read Proust or understand a lecture on differential equations? No. But airport signs, restroom signs, travel directions, menus, and weather reports? Certainly.

Additionally, if you travel overseas or interact with a non-native English speaker in your home country, you’ll often find that even a meager attempt at using their native language will elicit a surprising amount of warmth and gratitude. Residents of countries where English is not a primary language are accustomed to dealing with monolingual English speakers at work and in public life. The rare American tourist or businessperson who makes an effort (no matter how poor) at speaking Russian or Japanese or Kikuyu is almost invariably met with praise and delight. This simple, selfless gesture is like an extended hand, an expression of fellowship made more valuable by its rarity. (Germans might be an exception—their English is better than your German, and most of them aren’t shy about letting you know it.)

A few weeks of learning a language very different in structure from your native one can also familiarize you with the spectacular diversity that is possible in human language (a source of continual delight for linguists). If you’ve only studied European languages such as Spanish or French—which are fairly closely related to English and not that different from it grammatically—then you’ve encountered only a tiny fraction of the ways a language can encode meaning. You probably don’t know, for example, that written Chinese indicates gender in pronouns (it differentiates between “he” and “she”) but spoken Chinese does not. Or that Lakota pronouns and verbs indicate not only gender, but whether the subject is animate or inanimate. Or that Korean uses different words for goodbye depending on whether the speaker is the one leaving or the one staying. Or that Tamil grammar requires the speaker to indicate whether a piece of information is hearsay or something they confirmed themselves. (This is called “evidentiality.”)

How cool is that?

Furthermore, although linguists still debate how much your native language affects how you think and view the world (called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis), a little bit of exposure to a secondary language can provide a window into the culture and values of the people who use it. For example, does the language distinguish between informal and formal “you” (like Spanish “tú” and “usted” and German “du” and “Sie”)? If so, how soon after meeting do strangers switch from one to the other? This tells you something about expectations for politeness and formality. Does the language make extensive use of titles and honorifics, like Japanese? This tells you something about the importance of rank and hierarchy in the culture. And most beginner language classes will include lessons on cultural basics like food, clothing, and etiquette.

Finally, we’ve probably all overheard a conversation in a language that we didn’t understand and thought that it sounded like nothing but noise. The more the sounds of a language differ from the sounds of our native language, the more true this will be. Yet after just a couple of weeks of practice in that language and its sounds—after learning just a few of the most common words and phrases—suddenly it begins to sound like speech, not noise. And its speakers, by extension, are actually talking, not uttering gibberish.

I had an experience like this during my 6-week Chinese class two years ago. Prior to taking this class, I knew exactly nothing about Chinese grammar and not a single word in the language. After a couple of weeks, I could pick out a word or phrase here and there while listening to an NPR reporter interviewing a Chinese speaker (before the translator butted in with the English voiceover, that is). It had a humanizing effect on the Chinese speaker that startled me. He no longer sounded like an incomprehensible foreigner living in an incomprehensible part of the world; he sounded like a person speaking a language. A language that, with practice, I could learn. And indeed, research shows that exposure to other languages increases empathy (I discussed this in my 2017 post “Value (Not Profit) in Studying a Foreign Language”).

If you’re even a little curious about learning another language, there are many free and low-cost ways to do so, most of which are more flexible and more fun than the high school classes you’re familiar with. Many communities offer free and low-cost classes for adults (if you’re in western South Dakota, check out Community Education of the Black Hills). Language-learning apps like Duolingo and Babel are convenient and low-pressure; Duolingo is particularly useful for increasing your vocabulary if you already have a bare-bones understanding of the grammar. Pimsleur audio lessons are great for practicing pronunciation and learning basic phrases for travel and business; you can buy them online or download them for free via the Hoopla audiobook library app. And the website The Mixxer can connect you with native speakers of your target language with whom you can practice (and who want to practice their English with you).  If you know of any other cheap or free ways to practice a language, please share them in the comments below.

Six weeks of classes, or a few months of skyping with a native speaker, or twelve audio lessons won’t make you fluent, but you might be surprised how fun, useful, and interesting language learning can be when you stop pressuring yourself and settle for doing it badly.

Talking Past and Talking With

It’s widely acknowledged that many Americans live in an echo chamber in which we’re fed only information that corroborates beliefs we already hold, as result of either social media algorithms designed to generate clicks or our own viewing, reading, and listening choices. In public debate, individuals on opposing sides of a given issue consistently talk past each other and straw man their opponents’ views with the goal not of problem-solving or of compromise, but of rallying those who already agree with them.

In this era, the value of seeking out unbiased media and reading sane opinions on both sides of important issues is obvious. (PolitiFact has an excellent bias-checking tool here, for those who want to assess their current media sources and/or seek out less biased ones.) But I would also argue that having one-on-one conversations with real people who disagree with you on specific issues is even more valuable.

I witnessed an example of this on a recent episode of Sam Harris’s podcast Waking Up. In this episode, Harris had a two-hour conversation—an argument, really—with Vox Editor-at-Large Ezra Klein regarding Harris’s May 2017 interview with Charles Murray. Murray is infamous for his 1994 book The Bell Curve, which examined the genetic basis of IQ and included data which suggested that IQ differences among racial groups were at least partly biological. Nearly twenty-five years later, Murray is still protested when he engages in public speaking—sometimes violently—as in March 2017, when protestors at Middlebury College attacked Murray and injured his debate opponent severely enough to require hospitalization. In keeping with his absolutist attitude toward free speech, Harris invited Murray on his podcast to discuss his research and allow listeners to judge it for themselves.

After Harris’s interview with Murray aired on Harris’s podcast, Vox published a response that called Murray’s research “junk science” and attacked Harris for “endorsing” his views. This launched a year-long back-and-forth between Harris and Vox in which Harris criticized the Vox response in later episodes of his podcast, Vox published more critiques of both Harris and Murray, and Harris continued to accuse Vox of “intellectual dishonesty.” The feud migrated to Twitter and also spawned a private email exchange between Harris and Ezra Klein, which Harris eventually publicized on his blog.

At last Harris and Klein agreed to do a podcast together to discuss the issues at hand and to broadcast their conversation unedited. Their discussion is long and at times frustrating, and they never reach anything that could be called a resolution. But significantly, both speakers remain civil throughout the conversation.

Despite disagreeing on nearly every point that is brought up (including what topics are even worth discussing), neither speaker raises his voice or engages in ad hominem attacks. Neither speaker purposely misrepresents the other’s arguments; rather, both repeatedly say things like, “If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that….” Although neither actually convinces the other of anything, and you get the impression that they still don’t particularly like each other, they’ve managed to transmute a public feud into a civil, open, and honest dialogue in which they’re genuinely seeking to understand each other—something which so many of our politicians, policymakers, and we ourselves are unable to accomplish.

The value of this practice can’t be overstated. Most people who have thought seriously about an issue have good reasons for their beliefs about it. Yet our tendency to vilify our ideological opponents—to accuse them of ignorance, selfishness, corruption, or bias without objectively examining their reasoning—enables and encourages ad hominem and straw man attacks that do nothing to address the serious problems that this country currently faces.

It’s easy to fall prey to recency bias and assume that the country is more divided—and discourse less civil—than it has ever been, but the U.S. actually has a long history of mudslinging and even violence in public debate. As PBS reports, dueling over political disputes was widely accepted until after the Civil War; Vice President Aaron Burr famously killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804, and Andrew Jackson had been shot so many times that he supposedly claimed to rattle with bullets when he walked.

In the decades leading up to the Civil War, it wasn’t uncommon for members of Congress to pull guns on each other during floor debates and to attack each other with canes, sometimes violently enough to require hospitalization. In 1858, during the debate over whether to admit Kansas to the Union as a free state or a slave state, a “brawl” broke out on the floor of the House of Representatives that involved at least 30 members. The snide comments and pejorative nicknames that are trademarks of today’s administration are quite tame by comparison.

And yet rational, open dialogue between opposing parties seems to be nearly nonexistent in today’s political discourse. Speaking calmly and civilly with a real person who disagrees with you—and who has sane, well-thought-out reasons for doing so—forces you to acknowledge the rationality—indeed, the humanity—of that individual and, by proxy, others who hold their views. It also forces you to present and defend the rationality of your own views, and in so doing, ensure that your views are rationally supported.

I have a very old friend whose background is substantially different from mine. She was raised in a conservative, religious environment and is still a believer who leans right of center. I was raised in a secular, almost hyper-liberal environment, and I still hold most of those views. It’s a wonderful stroke of fortune that we became friends as children, because otherwise our paths probably wouldn’t cross as adults.

My friend is highly intelligent, educated, and compassionate. She cares about people and wants to be a force for good in the world. And we disagree on nearly every political issue that matters today.

Although my friend and I live in different states and don’t see each other often, this friendship has been a valuable leveling force for my opinions. When I’m tempted to share a far-leftist article or meme on social media, I know my rational, conservative friend will see it, and might even fact-check it. If the facts turned out to be wrong, I’d be embarrassed and ashamed to have shared this view, whether my friend called me out on it or not (she probably wouldn’t). This motivates me to do my own fact-checking before sharing something simply because it upholds my previously-held beliefs. When my friend shares a post that I disagree with, I trust her conscientiousness and reason enough to know that it won’t be a Breitbart-style conspiracy theory, and that I might learn something useful by reading it.

I’m grateful to have this friend in my life; her views are a sanity check on my own. If you don’t have such a person in your life, try to find one. If you don’t already engage with media whose biases oppose yours, add a few such sources to your feed. If you haven’t fact-checked your own views lately, now’s a good time to start.

Snopes.com

PolitiFact.com