In which the pond examines a crusading Dame Slap and lesser Akker Dakker ...

There are many things that could be written about today.

The pond, for example, has a dead rat under its office floorboards. The sweet, unremovable stench might be taken as a metaphor for the pond's daily task of tracking the reptiles ...

Then there's Malware channeling Hanson, in the guise of Trump and the Brexit election, wherein the fruits of sticking with Corbyn might finally be harvested by a cynical May, though there's a fair argument that whatever happens in that second rate, doomed, benighted isle is of no real consequence or interest ... not when the world now has the Donald ...

But instead, the reptiles decided to get into a lather and stick this at the top of the rotating digital page ... providing some kind of upside to the dead rat.

It puts the pond in the mindset to conduct a forensic study of the way that the reptiles embark on a crusade, which naturally will eventually involve Dame Slap swinging on to the scene like a dead rat ...

It almost goes without saying that the featured splash on the digital front page comes from an Akker Dakker of the lesser Tessa kind - the rotting fruit rarely falls far from the rabid tree ...

It was Tessas's second bite of the apple ... she had first come out a few days ago with this...

First up, the pond should discuss the idea of a "ban". In the pond's lexicon, a ban happens in the film world when federal or state censors refuse to allow a film to be screened anywhere in the country or anywhere in the state.

If the film is available for screening, can be screened, and has been screened, it hasn't been banned.

Actually what happened in the Tessa matter was that the USU disallowed the use of USU funds or resources for a screening of the film ...

That's not a ban. The bludging students, instead of relying on USU funds or resources, could go off and do their own thing.

They could gather around a television screen and watch the easily rented video together if they liked, or they could follow the pond in its preferred path and find a decent torrent ...the pond's motto is why pay hard cash for shit, when you can watch the shit for free?

Initiative, lads, initiative, when faced with this sort of attitude ...

There's a lot more - in the academic manner - available here ... 

Initiative lads, initiative, instead of expecting subsidy to fall into your indolent laps.

In the old days, the reptiles would have been bemoaning the lack of entrepreneurial flair in the students... the reliance on hand-outs, the lack of get up and go initiative, the caving in to the minor matter of using your own money and making a profit from the screening.

Ah back in the day lads, the pond could make money from screening films on campus ...all it required was a sheet hung in the shower block and a clattering Siemens projector, a reel or two of 16mm film cascading onto the floor, the insurance up to date,  and ... oh sheesh, is that the smell of a dead rat?

Never mind, the pond should publish the first official Akker Dakker report ...just to get it out of the way, which sadly can't be done with the dead rat, because its corpse lies in an inaccessible place ...

Uh huh, well Renee, student  of media practice, please learn the difference between an actual ban and a refusal to fund.

Of course the dissident fractious students could hold screenings by themselves. It would just involve them splashing their own cash, rather than the cash of the USU ...

The USU has decided to disallow the use of USU funds or resources for the recently advertised screening of the documentary The Red Pill. This event was advertised to take place in the International Student Lounge on 4th May by the Conservative Club, Students for Liberty and BroSoc, a society not currently registered in the Clubs and Societies Program. This decision means that no screening of The Red Pill may take place in a USU-managed space on campus, and that any such screening will not receive USU funding, or support via any other mechanism.

Look, the pond is quite happy to rent a space under its office floorboards for the screening ... think of the smell as a bonus ...

Speaking of smells, Dame Slap was quickly on the scene of the crime ...

A virus making us scared of ideas?

It's a nonsensical stupidity of course, but the pond once visited that sort of nonsense a long time ago ...

By golly, did Colin Wilson go weird in his dotage, or what, but Dame Slap is well on her way to the same sort of dotage on the planet Janet ...

Thought provoking?

Actually it's a crowd funded pile of unwatchable tedium ... as memorably assessed by Village Voice film writer Alan Scherstuhl, one of the few to endure the tedium and write a review, available here:

Here's a great example of how not to open your documentary. “After releasing my film in 2012 about marriage equality, I was at a loss of what topic to explore next,” says Cassie Jaye in the halting tones of a hostage reading her captors' statement to the world. That comes at the start of her film The Red Pill, and the high drama of her search for a subject gets illustrated with the results of a web search. “I started to research this 'rape culture,’ ” she tells us, each syllable so far from the next one that a tumbleweed could breeze through the gap. 
We literally see the words rape culture get typed into Google. “A website called A Voice for Men popped up,” she tells us. And then, for two agonizing hours, Jaye tumbles slowly down America's stupidest rabbit hole, discovering that Men's Rights Activists are actually just dudes who have been dicked over by a culture that punishes masculinity. 
Use Google yourself and you might come to different conclusions. Jaye's star witness, A Voice for Men's Paul Elam, plays the part in her interviews of a decent chap alarmed at the evidence of a crisis facing American men: Yes, men commit suicide more than women do, are more likely to drop out of college, and, when men are the victims of violence in a relationship, they do not have access to the same (threadbare, strained) network of shelters that women do. “We have video-game addiction, we have pornography addiction,” Elam points out, and a propagandist more adept than Jaye might not have included so much comic out-of-gas sputtering. 
I feel comfortable calling her “propagandist” because of my own “research” (ie. “reading the top search results”). Here's something Elam wrote on A Voice for Men in 2010: “Should I be called to sit on a jury for a rape trial, I vow publicly to vote not guilty, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the charges are true.” What excuse would any serious documentarian have for not asking Elam to explain that?

Well yes, but don't let any of that bother the virus in Dame Slap's head ...

Actually, to repeat, nobody's banning it, in the way the pond would like to ban its dead rat.

A few resources were withheld, a screening was not done ... but if anybody wants to go legit, they can pay to have the shit bored out of them, they can fork out near on seven bucks for a rental or just over seventeen bucks for a digital copy at Vimeo on demand here ... while it's thirteen bucks on iTunes here ...

The pond doesn't mind providing the links. The pond has discovered in the past that fools will discover any number of ways to be parted from their money.

The reality is that the only way to arouse any interest in this film is to produce some sort of faux controversy, or appeal to men to get their gonads in a twist ...

But as Dame Slap invited a panning, here's a little more of Scherstuhl ...

Some of the men's complaints are upsetting for the reasons that the men think they're upsetting. There's no doubt that men do sometimes suffer mistreatment from the courts or from the women in their lives. What the film and the movement fail to demonstrate is any kind of systemic cause. Instead, the author of men's troubles here is always that vague bugaboo feminism, which we're told is designed to silence its opponents. (Is it even worth pointing out that being criticized for what you say is not the same as being denied your right to say it?) Jaye renounces her own feminist past toward the end of the film, the announcement delivered over video of her typing, then looking at a computer, then driving around some more. 
Jaye does film some feminist protesters at MRA events, letting them swear on camera a lot, trying to paint them as unreasonable — even as she elides the deep, disgusting, public unreasonableness of MRAs like Elam, who once claimed online that young women walk through life “with the equivalent of a I'M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH — PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.” 
 “Why can't men talk about their problems?” Elam asks Jaye's camera in earnest, apparently unaware that he gets shouted at and pilloried not for identifying “problems” but for being a dick. Hey, Elam — men can talk about our problems. You're one of them. 
Also: Thanks to David Futrelle's invaluable site We Hunted the Mammoth for collecting Elam's most horrible bleatings. And it's worth pointing out that this movie is playing in two American theaters mostly so that outlets like this one get tricked into running reviews that, even if negative, confer some kind of legitimacy. I apologize for taking the bait.

Actually that link by Schersthul goes to the general We Hunted the Mammoth site. A gathering of Elam's thoughts can be found here ... they begin with ...

Weird shit eh, charming too, and elegant, so elegant, and the whiff, the smell of that dead rat persists ...

But now it's time to wrap up planet Janet ...

There was that word "banned" again. The film wasn't banned, the film can be seen in all its tedium at any time. The only reason any interest is paid is that Dame Slap and the lesser Akker Dakker minor and others like to whip up enthusiasm for alleged injustices ...

The fact that Dame Slap calls it a "brilliant documentary" suggests Dame Slap rarely actually sees any documentaries, let alone a decent one ...but it does  evoke the sort of stubborn, ideological blindness that the Dame routinely deplores ...

It's like calling Leni Riefensthal's Triumph of the Will a brilliant documentary. It's undoubtedly well-made, but the cumulative is mind-numbing and exceptionally tedious ...

If a commercial organisation decides not to screen a film, that's a business decision, not a banning. There's all sorts of films contending for shelf space on the silver screen. 

Any business has to assess the value of a quick hit of controversy, versus ongoing business opportunities with other films ...

... which brings the pond to the lesser minor Akker Dakker's work this day ...

Oh dear, and yet there it is, another business decision, in much the same way as the pond has decided to withhold funding from the reptiles.

Call it a ban if you like, the pond prefers to think of it as a sensible reallocation of limited resources ... but that's not to say that the thoughts of Paul Elam need to be censored or avoided in all their thoughtfulness, lack of anger and absence of rage ...

There's a man that's fully sick and knows nothing of women or abortion. 'Vile' springs to mind as a word, but using 'vile' defames a relatively harmless word ... even 'hideous' doesn't manage to conjure up the mood ...

Back to the lesser minor Akker Dakker, and the pond's ultimate point is the way her one par story - cinema drops planned screening - can be spun out into click bait rage which recycles the whole controversy yet again, so that the likes of Bettina Arndt can join the fuss and the fury, and be linked to, and with bonus controversies - anyone for a Coopers? - thrown into the mess to make a prime melange ...

Echoes Coopers?

In what alternative universe?

She thought it would be about an underground movement of misogynists? 

But the misogynists are fully above ground and freely featured in the film, without any sort of documentary examination of the kind that would allow a decent film to call itself a documentary ... instead of passing off, in the way this wretched, lickspittle, fellow-travelling, quisling, Vichy film manages ...

Well to cover the full nature of the crusading reptiles campaign, the pond should probably have also looked at Bettina Arndt blathering on about it...

But the stench of the dead rat is simply too much. 

The pond will have to settle for a Rowe cartoon - more excellent Rowe here - and move away from the office for a little while. At least the stench will go away in due course, the same sadly can't be said about the reptiles ...