As IF Times

Source: Jury selection begins in Erin Andrews $75 million lawsuit against Marriott | syracuse.com

Although stupid lawsuits are as common as insults during a Trump family dinner, when it’s worth 75 million dollars and involves an attractive female ‘personality’ it’s still news. The defendants in this peeping Tom case are not only the perp, but also the Marriott hotel chain which supposedly aided and abetted the creep in allowing him to film Erin in the expected privacy of her room.

You won’t find anyone taking the side of the creep who should get whatever punishment he deserves based on existing laws.  Without the benefit of a procedural legal system, the best solution would be for Erin’s brothers or friends to take this guy out in the back alley and sh0w him some manners.  No lawyers, no judges and possibly no repeat crime.

But the Marriot company is also drawn into this as a co-defendant and likely the only party that will have to pony up $75 million in the case of a court loss.  This is preposterous. It creates a wildly asymmetric cost/benefit profile for the hotel.  Imagine that for the price of a 200 or 300 or even a 500 dollar room, the hotel is expected to provide complete and absolute security for the entire duration of the customer’s stay.  It implies that the customer can never be harmed by virtue  of putting down a few hundred bucks per night.  If that were the case, the FBI witness protection program may as well contract out to hotels.

If in fact there is the expectation that absolute privacy and safety must be ensured by the hotel, a few hundred bucks per night isn’t going to pay the cost of such security.  They may have to reassess their business model and add a few digits to all room rates in order to prepare for the lawsuit contingency. You may need mortgage brokers in the lobbies of these places. Only in the west and the U.S. in particular,  are people so delusional that they think their ‘hurts’ have a legal price tag attached to them.  Every visit to a business including hotels,  grocery stores, yoga studio, movie theaters or fast food outlets which  results in real or imagined harm would have the potential to be  lotto ticket winners.

In Erin Andrew’s case, we wonder how they arrived at the $75 million dollar damages number.  If the point was to teach Marriot a lesson, why not claim $200 million and really teach them a lesson?  I suspect that the hotel can argue that sexism is at play here, because if it were Terry Bradshaw being the victim, he’d be lucky to be offered a room upgrade on his next visit.

Source: Students at Lena Dunham’s college offended by lack of fried chicken | New York Post

The great gulf between what is depicted in the movies and what you observe in real life is laughingly wide to those that pay attention to these things.  Whomever said that life imitates art hasn’t been paying attention.  The majority of movie trailers today tease filmgoers with chaotic scenes of violence and action: well coiffed heroes with guns ablaze performing superhuman acts of courage and daring while cavalierly dispatching bad guys.

There is no angst expressed during  the decimation of faceless thugs and evil despots; nor in the property destruction that is typically a horror show for insurance adjusters.  All of this visceral action and mayhem is undertaken ostensibly to benefit the greater good of mankind.

Movie depictions are truly created out of the most improbable adolescent fantasies.  Given today’s cultural zeitgeist, there is zero chance that such alpha personas exist other than as portrayed in cinema.  Kids on college campuses can barely withstand the horrors of name calling much less take a roundhouse to the temple.

It’s comical to imagine that 20-somethings today could possibly handle a multi round automatic weapon when the mere image of one sends them scurrying away to their self declared safe zones.  If they can’t handle the odd verbal slur, they aren’t going to like their nether regions being slammed by bolo balls while tied naked to a chair like 007 in a recent Bond movie.

While film has always been about creating idealized escapism, they may want to make movies that can more identify with today’s real world.  Conflicts between despotic villains can be resolved by earnest discussions without resort to violence or name calling.  Climactic scenes will include the peaceful surrender of evil doers by the marshaling of opposing protesters holding placards instead of the generic gun battles with infinite bullets.  Instead of stylized mano-a-mano kung-fu fights, they can instead be filmed as intense rock, paper, scissors scenes.  There will always be lawyers accompanying covert operators as they parachute into enemy territories on missions.  Perhaps in a delectable bit of rapturous fantasy, they can all be sacrificed for the good of the rest of society.  Meh, that’s probably too much of a stretch.

If you think about it, Star Wars as a concept couldn’t exist.  Societies would never be allowed to continue shooting and slashing in their struggles.  More likely, the conflicts would be determined by bands of lawyers huddling over canapés and scotch while the fearful masses sit huddled nearby anxiously awaiting the results like waifs in a Dickens novel.

Yep, the entertainment of today is mislabeled.  It’s not action/adventure; it’s all fantasy.