Downtown Boise has quite a few movie theaters and my “escape from the Florida heat” plan featured 100-degree temps so I dragged a somewhat reluctant 10-year-old to see Elio, a movie about a Latinx boy who ascends into the heavens to join the “Communiverse”. Hard SciFi fans will be disappointed to learn that all of the universe’s life forms are able to breathe the same atmosphere and drink the same drink. The bad guy who ultimately is turned into a good guy bears a strong resemblance to Satan in The South Park Movie. Queers for Palestine members will be disappointed to see “Jennifer Jew” in the credits.
All of the good humans in the movie are Latinx and/or Black. The senior military officers are Latinx and female. The military base is Latinx (“Montez Air Force Base” in a city called “Montez”). The big bad bully kid is… white male.
I’m not sure why this movie gets 83 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Star Wars is more interesting in terms of trying to conjure up what an alien society might be like. Elio envisions a universe inhabited entirely by Jar Jar Binks’s spiritual and intellectual cousins (plus a few bad guys who are, in fact, all male (the movie does not seem to envision anything beyond the gender binary).
Separately, here’s a Communiverse F-86 aircraft shared during the Korean War by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. From the Warhawk Air Museum in Nampa, Idaho (not to be confused with NAMBLA):
the anti-elio. parental discretion advised
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYatLKK31-g
tl;dw version:
A local once told me “Boise is like death in July.” Any reason for choosing that instead of Glacier, Yellowstone or the Utah high country?
Steve: I had a meeting in Sun Valley with a patent litigator who fled San Francisco during Coronapanic. I figured it would be good to show our son some of the rest of the state so we drove to Twin Falls and Boise after Sun Valley (which is nice, but it isn’t “Idaho”).