Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Futuresport (1998) and Much More


I’ve heard many times that older people will be wiser than those who grew up after them. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they are smarter. The idea that someone is wiser because they are older is based on the fact that they have been around longer. They’ve lived a longer life, which has allowed them to witness more things. Does it mean that they learned from any of it? Not at all. When people say that older means wiser, it means that they’re more life experienced.

The thing about life experiences is that they can change your perspective. Something that you saw a certain way at a young age may be seen differently as you grow up. You might have thought vegetables were yucky as a kid, before finding them delicious as an adult. Things change. You experience more, push yourself to do more, and you grow. You’re not necessarily smarter in the traditional sense. Your morals might be out of whack, and you might still hold onto things from when you were younger without adapting to the modern world. But your perspective has changed, and you might think of those same things a little differently.


That wisdom and perspective shift could also be seen in movies. Culture changes. What may have been popular at one time could be offensive in another. Think of all the classic films that have a dash of racism here, a pinch of sexism there, and a heap of homophobia and transphobia covering the whole thing. Those aren’t acceptable anymore. The cultural perspective shifted. The change in perspective changed movies, and television, for the better. There’s an effort to tell jokes that aren’t at the expense of an entire demographic. Did the movies get smarter? Not always. But they wised up.

Now, it’s not just movies themselves that find wisdom and perspective shifts with age. Movies aren’t sentient, so they aren’t what is wising up. The people behind the movies wised up. They realized that [most of] the audience didn’t want casual bigotry in their entertainment anymore. The filmmakers had their perspectives shift because the perspective of the audience had changed. Sure, there have been exceptions. There are exceptions to anything. For the most part, audiences have grown with the times and there has been a change in movies because of it.

With the rise of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, and the internet after it, people have discovered more about celebrities and filmmakers than they ever knew before. It has led to a lot of negativity coming to light and a lot of perspective changes for audiences. Discovering the deep, dirty secrets of people whose work they had been watching made them change how they thought of said work. I can’t really speak for everyone on some of these things. I’m a straight white man and clearly wouldn’t be able to understand what women, LGBTQ2+ people, and other races have had to reconcile with as they learned more about the artists they liked. I can only speak from my perspective. So take anything I say with a grain of salt.

I want to go through a few of the things I watched growing up and how my perspective changed as I aged and discovered more about the people behind the stuff. I should note that this is not a definitive list of problematic work or people. These are just going to be a few of the people that come to mind and how finding out more about them shifted my perspective of their work. I’m going through my own personal perspective shifts, which might not be the same as yours.


This week’s movie seems like the perfect place to start. Futuresport was a 1998 television movie about Tre Ramzey (Dean Cain), one of the biggest stars in Futuresport, a full-contact rollerblading basketball sort of sport. I know, it sounds familiar. Tre got caught up in a political battle between mainland USA and Hawaii. The tensions grew to the point that it could only be solved with a Futuresport match between USA and the Pacific Islands. There was a little bit of kidnapping sprinkled in there, as well.

The star of Futuresport is where I want to begin. Though the movie also featured Wesley Snipes and Vanessa Williams, it was Dean Cain who was out front and centre. He was the cocky all-star who only cared about his own stats. Through the movie, he would learn about teamwork and what it meant to be a real leader, but he was mostly just the hotshot star of the team. He was also a romantic lead, since the movie included a love story between his character and Vanessa Williams’s.

Prior to Futuresport, Dean Cain was the star of a television show called Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. It was based on the Superman comics and was a huge success. It may have been even more successful than the comics at that time, especially since I think it forced the comics to marry Superman to Lois Lane. Could you blame them? If the characters were going to get married in the show, it was perfect synergy. And the high ratings of the show might translate to better sales for the comics. Everybody wins.

I watched Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman a bunch as a kid. It was one of the shows my mom watched regularly, alongside Star Trek: The Next Generation, Nash Bridges, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, and reruns of the 60s Batman show. Dean Cain was a regular presence on the television in our house. He also had a bit role in Rat Race, a movie that always found it’s way on when we got into the new millennium.


His specific roles didn’t matter too much. Dean Cain has always been an alright actor. He had the presence of a star, but didn’t quite have the chops to be the bonafide draw that you might have thought from his television days. Futuresport was another one of his alright performances in an alright project. It was good fun, but wasn’t anything more than that. It wasn’t a spectacle. It was just a movie.

More recently, Dean Cain has become outspoken about his political leanings, which has given me a new, more negative opinion on the guy. I’m not saying I looked up to him before. Well, maybe I did a little bit. He was Superman during my childhood, after all. In recent years, the guy has talked about his support of Donald Trump. He voted for Trump in 2016 and in 2020. I could forgive someone for voting for Trump in 2016. It was clearly the worst choice, but everyone makes mistakes sometimes. However, after all the bad that Trump did during his four years in office, it’s hard to forgive someone who continued to support him. Dean Cain still supported him. My perception changed. Instead of seeing Dean Cain as one of the Supermen, I now see him as that guy who, sadly, played Superman in the 90s. Maybe it’s not enough to keep me from seeing the stuff he has been in, but it’s enough to keep me from watching things because he’s in them. I’m never going to be like “Dean Cain is in this? I should check it out.” This blog aside, of course. Exceptions.


I’m going to quickly go through a few other people that fit into this problematic-outlooks category for me, then get into some bigger ones for the rest of the post. I grew up in a house where my dad would watch any Mel Gibson movie he could. Mel Gibson was basically a part of my life. Well, now I know he’s a racist, misogynistic piece of shit. Kevin Sorbo was the star of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Guess what? He’s overly religious to the point of bigotry, including antisemitism. Then there are Tim Allen and Clint Eastwood who sometimes go a little far in their siding with Republican views.

One of the more recent examples of my perception changing on filmmakers in a big way has to do with something in the news right now. There are a couple major court cases going on that people are glued to. One of them is the political one, looking into the January 6th stuff and trying to find who is to blame. It’s obvious who is to blame, but they need to go about it this way. The other major trial is a defamation suit between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard.

Johnny Depp is an actor who has been around since before I was born. He rose to fame in the 1980s and remained one of the biggest stars through the 2010s. I’ve seen a bunch of his movies and thought he was good in many of them. Mainly the 80s and 90s ones. I kind of checked out of his work sometime during the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels. Amber Heard, on the other hand, became semi-famous in the late 2000s and early 2010s, mostly through horror work. I can’t say I thought she was a great actor. She was fine. But she was hot, and I was a teen going into my university years when she found fame. Of course I was going to watch her stuff simply because I found her attractive.

Anyway, this whole lawsuit has to do with Amber Heard and Johnny Depp having an abusive relationship. Amber Heard said she was a victim to Johnny Depp’s physical abuse. Johnny Depp said he was a victim to Amber Heard’s physical abuse. Neither of them wanted to take the blame. It’s possible they both abused each other. It doesn’t matter to me, at this point. I think they were both abusers and I’m tired of hearing about them at all. This whole thing has turned me off wanting to see anything they do from this point on.


Now we’re getting into the really bad ones. Two more. With a few other quick mentions thrown in. People constantly bring up this next one, mostly because the filmmaker is still semi-relevant in modern Hollywood. One of his movies was nominated for an Academy Award only a few years ago. If you know, you know who I’m about to write about. Here comes the section on Bryan Singer.

Superhero movies are huge. Marvel, DC, and all the other superhero movies rule the box office. For the most part. The build up to the success of superhero movies can be partially attributed to Bryan Singer’s work with the X-Men franchise. The first flick came out in 2000, a year before the first Spider-Man flick. Yeah, Batman and Superman hit the big screen in the decades before, but X-Men was the start of the superhero boom. That’s not what I want to talk about, though.

I’ve been a Stephen King fan since my childhood. You might already know where I’m going with this. I worked at a hotel during my teenage years and spent a lot of time working in their parking lot. During that time, I would read books when nothing was going on. One of the books was Different Seasons, a collection of four Stephen King novellas. Three of those novellas have been adapted into movies. You might know two of the movies: The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me. The other one was Apt Pupil. I didn’t love Apt Pupil as a novella or a movie. It was about an unhinged teenager who became obsessed with his neighbour, a former Nazi. When I saw it, I was really into Stephen King and I appreciated Bryan Singer’s work on movies like X-Men, X2, and The Usual Suspects. So, I was looking forward to it. It was alright.

My opinion on the movie has greatly changed because of a shift in perspective over the past few years. Things about Bryan Singer surfaced. Some of them were directly associated with that movie. There have been numerous sexual assault allegations against Bryan Singer. Because of the sheer number of allegations, it is extremely likely that he had non-consensual sex with underaged boys. The allegation associated with Apt Pupil was that Singer told some of the young boys performing in the movie that they would have to get naked for a shower scene set at the school. That was a big no-no. You can’t do that. All this statutory rape and predatory behaviour stuff changed how I’ve viewed Singer’s work since it came to light.


For many people, Joss Whedon, Woody Allen, Louis C.K., Rob Lowe, Kevin Spacey, Harvey Weinstein, and Roman Polanski would fall into the same area. They’ve done some horrible sexual stuff that it’s hard to overlook. Sexual coercion and harassment, statutory rape, trapping people in hotel rooms and masturbating at them. The work that audiences appreciated from some people who were seen as great artists now has baggage attached to it. It’s tough to see it the same way when you’ve grown wise to what happened with the artists involved.


The final one I want to touch upon is the one that most affected me. The stuff that happened was before I ever got into this guy’s work. I just didn’t know. There were a few horror movies I would watch a bunch when I was a teenager. The first two Final Destination movies were favourites of mine, as was Joy Ride. Then there were the two Jeepers Creepers movies. There’s a third now, but I’ve never seen it. I also haven’t gone back to the first two movies for years. Why? I found out about Victor Salva’s history.

Before I get to exactly what he did, let me explain what the movies were. There’s a connection that makes the movies hurt on a whole different level. The first Jeepers Creepers involved a demonic being chasing after a brother and sister because it wanted the young man’s body to help regenerate a body part. The second Jeepers Creepers involved the same demonic being targeting a bus full of teenage basketball players, trying to get their bodies for regeneration, and licking bus windows as a form of psychological terror.

Anyway, when I was around twenty years old, I found out that Victor Salva had gone to jail in the 1980s. It wasn’t for petty theft or drugs. He was convicted of child pornography. He had some, and he made some. Ew. In fact, he had sex with a twelve-year-old boy who had been in his movie Clownhouse. He went to jail because of statutory rape that happened on one of his sets. Statutory rape that he committed. And he WAS ALLOWED TO MAKE MORE MOVIES. And those movies were about a monster targeting boys for their bodies WHILE SEXUALIZING THE BOYS! The Jeepers Creepers movies felt so connected to Salva as a predator that I can’t bring myself to watch them anymore. As much as I enjoyed them as a teen, I don’t think I’ll ever revisit them because the thought disgusts me.


The more you discover about the people who make the movies you enjoy, the more you’ll find some disturbing stuff. Nobody is perfect. Many people are far from perfect. The people I’ve mentioned through this post are some of the people who aren’t anywhere near perfect. They are very much bad people and that has influenced how I see their movies. That has changed my perspective. I have grown wiser when it comes to the people I choose to watch in movies and on television.

When people say that older people are wiser, the implication is that they are smarter. That’s not necessarily true. It just means that their eyes have been opened to more things. They’ve experienced more. Their perspective changed over time. Because someone has experienced something, it doesn’t mean they’ve learned from it. They still make mistakes. They still do the wrong thing sometimes. The thing about wisdom is that it doesn’t mean you know more. It simply means you’ve gained a new outlook. Knowing that is real wisdom.


Maybe these notes will make you wiser:

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