the oscars music criticism hour

Another awards show dead and buried.

Honestly, what are we even supposed to say about it, besides the fact that everyone seems to have forgotten their history: Straight Outta Compton's only nomination was for its two white screenwriters, which happened to the (vastly superior) Spike Lee film Do The Right Thing in 1989. Of the entire movie, only Danny Aiello was nominated for best supporting, and Public Enemy's seminal track Fight The Power, which was played at the 2016 show, lost to -- of all god-forsaken things -- Under the Sea from The Little Mermaid.

Quickly: I am glad that Spotlight won best picture. It was an underdog production from start to finish. The state of investigative journalism in the U.S. and, hell, around the world, is patently pathetic. Even the much-lauded war journalist is labeled by the official Defense Department as an "unprivileged belligerent" -- basically a thin notch above "enemy combatant." Even former actor and "Great Communicator" Ronnie Reagan hot-mic'd himself back in 1986 by calling the media "sons of bitches." Much like the troops themselves and to a similar extend police, journalists are the heroic risk-takers of American legend ... just as long as we don't have to see them, know them, deal with them or think about any of the things they say.

Additionally, while I was rooting for Mad Max: Fury Road all the way through (which cleaned up with six creepy gold statues of Klaatu), I'm glad all of the recognition was for crew, design and stunts -- the non-glamours parts of film making we slobbering media-whore consumers rarely see. The fire coming out of that guitar was real and Sunday it got it's due.

You've seen this before but I reiterate that it's a goddamned guitar that shoots fire and you will see it again and enjoy it!

And there's not a whole lot one can say about Chris Rock's admirable but supremely awkward attempts at addressing the everyday racism of Hollywood, except that somehow Asians ended up as the ass of the joke? I guess there's a valid criticism there but some more focus would've helped, particularly that there were no Asians* up for anything this year, with the exception The Look of Silence, a second-half of the documentary The Act of Killing that approximately nobody saw (but really you should see both). This comes soon after word that Scarlett Johansson will take the lead in an American live-action reboot of the seminal cyber-punk anime Ghost in the Shell. I'm not trying to put people in boxes or anything, but I don't know many Jewish women native to NYC who go by Motoko Kusangi.

[UPDATE: I started this post several days ago and it seems her entry for the movie has been removed from IMDB. This is what listening to the internet gets you.]

* * * * *

If there was a high point -- or low point? -- of the night, it was Lady Gaga losing the best song award to Sam Smith. Let's be clear: Gaga is effectively the most overrated** musician working today. Depending on what side of spectrum you come from, she's either Amy Winehouse without the deeply tragic personal demons and far better adapted to fame, or Tori Amos on bath salts. Her performance was great comparatively, but without her patented Gaga-ness -- the ever present need to charge her fans a few hundred a ticket so she can light a baby grand on fire or something -- it didn't exactly stand out.

But this was the "issues" Oscars and issues it brought. Until It Happens To You was written for the documentary film The Hunting Ground. It tracks the many, many failures many different social and legal systems as they pertain to the epidemic of college campus rape, and her performance brought dozens of rape and sexual assault survivors out on stage. That Brie Larson won for Room, a movie that heavily features the dis-empowerment of women, doesn't exactly seem like an accident (like Spotlight, it was an underdog movie that came out of nowhere, adapted from a best-selling novel that came out of nowhere).

The other two songs paled in comparison. The Weekend's Earned It is a forgettable little bit of pop/soul/R&B crud that somehow posits that women "earn" their domineering and abusive partners by, being better victims I guess? It was written for 50 Shades of Gray, after all. And given what astute readers who don't forget or block out that the mega-successful PG-13 semi-smut is elaborate Twilight fanfiction, twin Mary-Sue heroines Bella Swan and Ana Steele "earned" something between jack and shit.

But it really sticks in my craw (and I'm a dude so, ya know, use your imagination) that Sam Smith's James Bond crooning of The Writing's on the Wall won. The thing that made Skyfall stand out was that it was also a good movie on top of being a James Bond movie, and the titular Adele theme actually had something to do with the movie itself. Smith's Bond song hammers home the idea that Bond is old and soft and just wants to settle down. Spectre the movie takes absolutely zero of such advice into consideration. And that the risk of crossing into dudebro territory: when one has even an inkling of a shot with Monica Belluci and you aim for a skinny blonde French chick, that is basically worthy of psychotherapy.

The Writing's on the Wall is just a bad song, squeaked out by an equally forgettable singer who I can't tell apart from all of the other equally-forgettable singers blasted out with strobe-light frequency on Q102. And I'd like to imagine, since part of our theme here is forgetting history, that after Sam Smith's acceptance speech, his agent backstage told him with much fluster, "Mr, Smith, Elton's on the phone and he sounds pissed."

* Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, whose film A Girl in the River, won best short-subject documentary, is Pakistani. Chris Rock and Sacha Baron Cohen's jokes were clearly aimed at East Asians. Incidentally, Leo was allowed to go way over his time talking about climate change -- a subject that (as Chris Rock noted early in his routine) that people who don't have to worry about ritual killings get to think about -- way over his time, but Obaid-Chinoy was played off halfway through explaining that her movie actually caused Pakistan to outlaw honor killings.

** You'd think this label would go to Taylor Swift or Beeb but I don't think it applies as nobody actually expects anything of them. Swift's entire persona and music are based around being a really dumb, white chick. Gaga, you know, tries.

THE TRUTH IS OUT -- just shut up

Guess I should get off my lazy ass and write something, yeah? It's been a kind of long dry spell thanks to not taking any time off work for the string of winter holidays ancient man invented to keep Western civilization from committing mass suicide from lack of endorphin and vitamin D deficiency (Merry Christmas friends; I just got you some insight.)

So the X-Files wrapped up Season Ten last night and mercifully it was shorter than the basically unwatchable Season Nine -- the one were Gillian Anderson reads her lines as great as ever, but her face makes all the words come out as, "Holy shitballs I am so done!" I can't tell of the flash of THIS IS THE END after the credits was a signal that the rebooted series' six episode pseudopod lurched out of its hardened bunker where it's been holed up eating baked beans for the passed 14 years into warm and familiar waters where an adoring viewership and gentle caress of renewal awaited, or the entire thing got cracked open with shucking knife and slurped down with butter to a guttural sucking noise, or it was just trying to be clever.

It wasn't clever, in any case. The intro tries to make sense of the fabled X-Files core mythology and while my memory of the original series is only partly intact, I get the feeling it skipped about half. Mind you, this wasn't for time constraints: the seasons of writing ignored to make the finale work were the bits that make the entirety of the show make not a solid but of fucking sense. The truth is indeed out there. And it's really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really dumb.

The sendoff felt more like an X-Files medley than an actual episode, but then again, that was the general feeling and indeed the likely purpose of the reboot in the first place: the next station stop of the Reboot Train. The first and last episode are the weakest of the six, and not just because they try to take root in a fictional narrative that has long since duct-taped itself to the wall for fear of self-harm. More time is spent showcasing Soup host Joel McHale's character -- a kind-of Glenn Beck spoof who serves as a jumping-off point for Mulder and Scully's eventual reunion and also as a one-man Greek chorus to remind the viewers were we left off. Much of the dialog follows suit. Mulder's final confrontation with The Smoking Man is laughable, and aside from a quick fight scene that's somehow never resolved, he's barely in the episode. Most of Scully's lines are wasted explaining things to the viewer as they're happening on the screen, and then after commercial, we get McHale's Tad O'Malley repeating them. I won't spoil the end but suffice to say it wraps up kind of awkwardly with Scully explaining the plot of more episodes to come before credits roll. Look, I get that people felt the original show didn't explain itself that well but this isn't really the best way to -- where the friggin' crap that UFO come from, come on guys!

The thing that feels so un-X-Files this go around is that it's all just so fast. X-Files didn't invent the slow burning story but honed to almost perfection, doling out breadcrumbs of both the FBI's most unwanteds' burgeoning love plot and the fate of the human race through 24-episode seasons. Like the way it tapped into the everyman's distrust of his government in the 90s and American's fascination with and indeed willingness to believe urban legends, it was really a show of its time. Syndicated shows gave you something to look forward to every week -- a kind of way to mark the time passing -- and allowed for a real dedicated fanbase to grow, not unlike that layer of orange slime you wipe out of the vegetable crisper every few months. Nowadays, you can binge Orange is the New Black in a coffee and pizza-fueled day, and then its over. The discussion lights up like a supernova for a few weeks, and then eventually it all fades to black and silence until the next season drops. The irony is that the delivery of more content instantly leads to less of an impact. Back in X-Files time, you got a big moment every week for months on end. Now you get one a show, maybe once a year.

The only episode that came close to good was the third, a kind of obligatory joke episode with a reverse-werewolf plot. It takes a while to get there, and most of it is Mulder discussing life's harsh realities with monster, whose turned into a man, and whose brush with humanity is turning into a monster, while Scully slowly and methodically discovers the real monster is only too human. It's almost like watching Scooby Doo on acid and thinking the entire experience is, like, transcendent, only to come to your senses amid urinating on your own couch.

But it hit that sweet spot of being funny but meaningful, and outlandish but allowing the viewer to hang disbelief on the coat rack for the evening. None of the other episodes quite did that, and worse, every time I felt like getting on board with the finale, a line of terrible dialog or the fact that the next generation of Mulder and Scully are named Miller and Einstein (sweet Jesus!) would curb-stomp me down back on the pavement. And can someone please explain how an 80-year-old intubated burn victim took down Mulder during a commercial break, after Mulder totally kicked some much younger dude's ass?

My hope is that this puts the final nail in X-Files coffin and we can bury that shit for good. Fiction is the world's magic mirror: it doesn't always show us exactly what we want to see -- when the Queen asked who was fairest she was left shouting at her glass, "You had one job!" -- but it shows us something about ourselves we perhaps don't realize or accept. We still need myths to explain the things we can't quite comprehend or reconcile, and those are what become handy placeholders for facts. The X-Files was not so much about the gap between myth and fact, but the journey from one to the other. From belief to evidence. Feeling to truth. Will it ever get there?

Not in six episodes.

star wars is now the legend of zelda

So, three-ish months of blogging down and here we are reviewing Star Wars. Here goes...

Let's get the positives out of the way now. Star Wars: Episode 7: The Force Awakens: Again With the Colons is full stop the best Star Wars movie made. It is superior to A New Hope in every conceivable way. and for clarification on that, here's a list:

Inclusion! This Star Wars features an elfin heroine named Rey and a black defecting Stormtrooper named Finn. Already both of them pull the story away from the almost entirely white cast of the original and, Samuel L's novel badassery aside, the entirely white cast of the 2000s prequels. Casting a black Stormtrooper (John Boyega of the British sci-fi/comedy Attack the Block) with the back story of being taken as a child and raised in a military academy to serve the First Order has some obvious allusions to slavery, but it also reminds the audience that the white clad menaces are just people. Not droids or mindless clones, just average people, and when people who are just like you and me are the ones massacring entire villages seemingly at will, well, that's scarier than the most cloned of clone armies or the droidiest of droids.

Rey, played by an absolutely wonderful Daisy Ridley, makes it known pretty quickly that she doesn't need anyone to take her hand and lead her away from danger, and more than once rushes, overwhelmed, under-prepared and outgunned, straight into it. There's a great dynamic between Rey and Finn, each prisoners of a very small world in their own regard. Finn may be physically strong, a crack shot and a determined fighter, but that's all he is, whereas Rey has had to learn survival on her own, selling scrap to a slum lord on a desert world. She is clearly the more capable of the two, and I don't know if Abrams or writer Lawrence Kasdan (of Raiders of the Lost Arc script-fame) intended, but it's a pretty damning implication of militarized society. Finn existing in civilian society, to the extent that there is one in the Star Wars universe (it's called Star Wars, not Star Town-Hall Discussion or Star Disciplinary Committee Action Plan for Christs' sake) comes across as wooden, awkward, even a little scared when simply interacting with other people. Rey also speaks a ton of alien languages and often gets stuck interpreting for Finn. She's has seen that the outside world requires a little more finesse when one looks at straight on and not down the barrel of a blaster. And speaking of Rey...

Acting? Star Wars is the last place one looks for good acting, but hope against hope, Ridley and Boyega pull it off. Ridley's best scene is her confrontation with bad guy Kylo Ren (played also wonderfully by Adam Driver), when she begins to understand her connection to the plot-- er, Force. She manages to convey with facial expressions alone the act of discovery: first confusion, then fear, and finally understanding that Ren's mind probe is not only useless to him, but a tool for her. This comes across again in her lightsaber battle with Ren later. It's a nice and badly needed injection of both subtlety and humanism into the otherwise flat landscape of cardboard cutouts with people in black leotards carrying then around that serves as typical Star Wars characters.

Han Solo -- arguably the real protagonist of the first three movies -- makes a prominent appearance playing the role of Darth Your Dad, and while the performance is good, Harrison Ford is, at the end of all things, Harrison Ford. It is the reason for his nearly half-century of incredible personal success and also his single greatest limitation. The inclusion of the Raiders script writer plants on Han the onus of cheeky one-liners (like, "Escape now, hug later!"), and Han's short-fused but admiring relationship with Chewbacca is as endearing as ever. He was far too likable in the first three movies for this, but now that Han is old, guilt ridden and back to smuggling like the the Jabba the Hutt days, it is evident that Chewie is not only his oldest, but his only friend.

I was disappointed that Carrie Fisher's reprisal of now-General Leia was so short and insubstantial, considering the degree to which Fisher's honesty about being a woman in her 50s navigating the chew-em-up-n-spit-em-out gauntlet that is a Hollywood career has blown up TV-land. No metal bikinis this time around. Fisher's admission that she has never "not been in Star Wars," and her personal history of feminist activism in a landscape that hasn't changed syncs up nicely with Leia, taking an active part in another rebellion against yet another macho space-fascist regime.

And it isn't really worth mentioning Mark Hamill reprising his role as Darth Red Herring but I will leave you to judge if those few precious seconds were worth it.

A kind of pathetic villain. For all the time and massive, phallic towers of money spent hyping evildoer Kylo Ren, I feel bad for the guy If the film were flipped to his point of view, it would be titled Kylo's Really Crap Week at Work or something. Ren worships Darth Vader's rotting skull and doesn't need the mask or voice modulator but wears them anyway. They straight up gave him a World War 1 German helmet too; slap a spike on it and you have Darth Picklehaube. But under the mask, Ren is just a kid, markedly younger than the military commanders with whom he serves and it shows, and has a propensity to temper tantrums involving his lightsaber. He is less omnipotent sovereign of pain and hate and more spoiled brat whose dad gave him a middle-management job he totally didn't earn. It is a welcome departure from the menacing calm of Vader or the scheming evil of Emperor Palpatine.

No mention of those goddamned Midichlorians. Back in 1977, people were legitimately worried about computers taking over the world (hint: they were right). Part of why Star Wars hit such a cultural note was that it played off this fear. In a galaxy where there was space travel and laser guns, there was still The Force -- that unexplained connection that a living thing has to life, the universe and everything. Audiences reportedly gave standing ovations when Luke Skywalker famously switched off his targeting computer and eyeballed his shot on the Death Star.

Fast forward to the cynical 2000s and The Force was explained away with breeding: Force-capable kids were born with a high count of bacteria called Midichlorians that allowed them to tap into cool junk-throwy mind-controly lightning-shooty powers. This was actually closer to the original script Lucas envisioned, where Starkiller (bet you didn't get that reference, nerds!) passes use of the force on only through his children and the Jedi order is essentially a carbon-copy of the Bene Gesserit messiah-generation program from Dune (Lucas had an early problem with lifting plot points and entire scenes of dialog from other works, including an almost word-for-word rip of Gandalf's "Good morning!" speech from The Hobbit).

Episode 7, smartly, thankfully, does away with this Nazi bullshit and never brings it up. The Force still does whatever the plot needs it to, but now at least does it more mysteriously and maybe a little more zen, like someone bought it a feng shui book or something.

Now the other stuff. Comparing The Force Awakens to A New Hope directly in the beginning was deliberate, because it is A New Hope. Almost every plot point, twist, and archetype show up again in almost the same order (unlikely and/or unwilling heroes find destiny; surprising parentage, mentors meet their fate; a planet-destroying weapon and long-ass space battle). The new Star Wars treads so much old ground that it likely died of thirst wandering the Dune Sea or tripped into a Sarlacc pit. This isn't to say that it's a bad movie, of course; just mind-numbingly unoriginal.

It's the same issue long-running video game franchises have as well. The Legend of Zelda is damn near 30 with half as many iterations, and while they are very good at exploiting the technology of the time (moving from 2D to 3D or using physics engines for example), jumping from the 1986 debut to the most recent brings nothing new to the table. I feel confident enough saying that The Force Awakens had what was effectively an unlimited budget, so it could fully realize the potential for animation, but how much of it is new is up for serious debate. (Aside: this is ironic considering Lucas created the cowboys-in-space classic he did almost directly because he kept running out of money.)

The biggest problem with Star Wars as a whole is that you don't get much wiggle room as a writer when everything comes down to a cosmic battle between two extremely rigid ideas of good and evil. The fabled Sith might sound imposing on paper, but they make no goddamned sense: if each individual Sith is supposed to kill any other fellow Sith in order to seize power, why do people join in the first place and how does the organization last long enough to build the biggest space army in all of space?

Likewise, many writers have pointed out the Jedi are essentially the secret Gestapo-like police of the galaxy: they claim children born into certain conditions whether the family agrees or not and otherwise undermine the politics of even the most backwater worlds to suit a notion of order that may or may not work for that world.

When you slap all of these limitations on to the fact that it's freaking Star Wars, the kinds of movies one is allowed to write that will have the requisite box-office success required of Hollywood and franchise-owner Disney dwindles. For example, I imagine someone at a meeting about the concept of the film brought up the fact that it isn't Star Wars without R2D2, so a tiny portion of the script has to justify the world's favorite ambulatory trash can reentry into the series. The same goes for C3PO (played by original actor Anthony Daniels), though at least "I've been helping out Leia for the past 30 years" is way more plausible than "A bunch of bacteria made a child in the Alabama trailer park of the galaxy mega-smart and he built C3PO to be his friend before handing the droid over the rebellion and then turning evil." Think of it as the creative version of death by a thousand cuts: banality by a thousand self-references.

It is also plagued by action sequences that, I am sorry to say, just aren't very good. I said in my first post for this site that the elements of a J.J. Abrams Star Wars were largely known by virtue of what he did with Star Trek and I was right. Lots of Tie Fighters explode and crash into things and the entirely-animated dogfight scenes drag on for way too long. I don't know if I am getting older or what, but extended battle scenes just bore me. I can't stay awake for Return of the King.

At the end of the day, I don't have any real feelings of substance towards J.J. Abrams. He directs movies that go on for a length of time and are generally entertaining. But, as I said, when everything is boiled down to such base elements and all of the subtlety and nutrition float off like so much vapor, it is difficult to feel a strong anything.

But I digress. See Episode 7, even if you're not a Star Wars person. Like Skyfall did for James Bond, it straddles both worlds of being a Star Wars movie and also being a good movie at the same time. A couple of times I caught myself with a big dipshit grin on my face, and you can ask Ash: that doesn't happen very often.

Wait a minute: where hell are Han's dice!?

the law of unintended consequences

New movie (that nobody cares about) so basically everything that can be spoiled is spoiled. It's like the vikings were up in there or something.

Before I go ahead and say that any movie -- any movie -- is a shitty movie, I have to stop and recognize that making movies is really, really hard. I have a particular respect for B-movies since lacking an army of bodies and effectively unlimited resources to pull the best talent in the world exacerbates this process. It doesn't feel good to dump all over the effort of the actors, staff, writers and technical crews when so much of their time, effort, and more of than not honest-to-god love went into 85 minutes of screen time me and maybe other six other dorks will watch. Sooooooo... with all that being said, 2015s Stung is a really shitty movie.

Listed as a comedy for some reason, Stung is funny only if you enjoy a particular kind of bro-tastic humor where a pathetic and somewhat hopeless bro tries (and fails, and fails, but ultimately prevails!) to mack a weapons-grade hottie. It's also supposed to be a horror, although aside from some cookie-cutter ominous-music Attacks from Planet Jump Scare, it isn't exactly frightening. It was also hailed for months as my favorite kind of B-movie, the practical effect sci-fi, but it's staple giant wasps are animated on screen for just as long, if not longer, than the puppet counterparts. Don't even have plot yet and we're in "Three strikes, yer out!" territory. Yikes.

No, the other kind of wasp.

I, and I imagine others, came away from Stung with a strong, "I don't get it" feeling. For all of the empty promises, the framework is largely there. Human beings impregnated with giant wasp eggs that literally explode the hapless ambulatory wombs on the way out doesn't exactly breed chuckles, but there was opportunity in the victims being a gaggle of insufferable rich couples. The unlikely heroes, two small-time caterers running a failing family shop, trying to keep a straight face as they sneak booze and tokes to get through the night and make wage had some potential. Neither Jessica Cook or Matt O'Leary come across as bad actors, but I got the feeling they did scenes written with jokes and nobody told them they were supposed to be acting funny. When O'Leary's character Paul sneaks off to share a joint with the hired musician, Paul, who we've established something of a rebel and a layabout, just comes off as sad, out of his depth, basically pitiable. And Cook's young on-the-ground business owner Julia jumps between right bitch and intensely protective mom figure but doesn't quite live up to either (because there can't possibly be a woman with any modicum of power who isn't a total queen-b, amirite?), and of course takes her clothes off more than once. The script is sort of dumb, but the party guests, particularly Lance Henricksen's grouchy, alcoholic town mayor, are developed a bit. And even though the animated wasps are horrendous, there are some nice touches, like chunks of former human clinging to the newborn abominations virgin carapace as it is first gently caressed by the air. The failing here, as I see it, is a lack of focus, and taking the usual Hollywood path of cramming in far too many elements into one movie and ultimately watering all of them down.

Stung is an unintended consequences movie, sometimes better knows as chaos theory or The Butterfly Effect, as made famous by that film about seemingly predictable events spiraling wildly out of control. You know, Serendipity. The ill-fated party is thrown for Sydney, a disabled son of a wealthy chemist, and it is later explained that Sid doesn't have much love for dear ol' dad. Sydney, played quite well by Clifton Collins Jr., has a hunch and a limp, and his father tried to improve upon the original but giving him growth hormones, fueling the next generations descent into drinking and generally being an asshole. Sid, however, finds dad's hormones (of which there are several 55-gallon drums up lying around the house for some reason) might not work on birth defects but does wonders for plants, so he sews it into mom's garden to grow some impressive foliage and ease the widow's grief.

Gallons of growth hormones also work well on wasps. Who knew!? Bet you'll think twice before throwing that pan of anti-freeze out in the back, yes?

Fast forward through a bunch of exploding guests and Sid gets stung (haha, get it?), but the wasp only grows out of his hunch, takes over his mind and makes him a kind of human-wasp emissary and the movie, once again, has the chance to be funny but the actors make the critical error of taking it seriously.

Basically this. But with wasps.

It's around this point he kidnaps Paul and tries to impregnate him with a queen wasp using a giant grub, and Julia comes to the rescue. And it's also around this time that the entire end sequence shamelessly rips off Aliens. Lt. Ellen Ripley is not amused.

Stung ends with the wisdom that nothing gets a girl in heat like nearly being burned to death by a eight-foot airborne arthropod that's on fire almost taking you out, so sad bro Paul and Julia get jiggy 'wit it in the back of an ambulance in full view of first-responders and still covered in wasp-goo. I hope there's no such thing as wasp herpes. Yick. And to add a whiz-bang factor to the end, Paul, Julia and whole lot of very confused EMTs are beset upon by more giant wasps, burst forth from cows and dragging the carcasses behind them. Certain death for all descends from the sky the clanking of cowbells and roll credits.

* * * * *

A far better example of this genre of unintended consequences movie is 2013s magically titled Blood Glacier. I have to start by warning that the English dub is terrible, so if you catch it, make sure it is in its native German (the title in that is Blutgletscher... not exactly scoring points there Germany*).

If Stung's Paul is presented as a I-do-my-own-thing tough guy but comes across as a pathetic loser with serious self-esteem issues, then Blood Glacier's hero Janek (pronounced yann-eck) is an actual pathetic loser with serious self-esteem issues, in a sort of self-imposed exile working with a geology team as a kind of handyman in literally The Middle of Nowhere, Austria. Janek is a supreme screw-up, barely able to stay sober enough to keep his job doing patrols and menial repairs around the base, and is the subject of relentless abuse at the hands of his snooty scientist co-workers. Why is our hero in such a state? A woman, of course. The same woman who is now visiting the base with some government dignitaries to visit the operation and take some landscape photos.

Janek and Tanja, played by Gerhard Leibmann and Edita Malovcic respectively, are not exactly the breakout starts of tomorrow, but Blutgletscher has a segmented leg up on Stung in that the two actors know they are in a campy, extremely obvious homage to John Carpenter's The Thing and while the humor isn't overt, it is obvious the two are just having fun with it.

Tanja shows up with an obvious stand-in for current German president Angela Merkel. She's there to assess climate data the mountain-bound team is gathering, and while there they discover that the nearby glacier they are monitoring for shinkage has started bleeding. Another plus this latter film shows off is that it actually is a practical effects sci-fi. The "blood" from the glacier is actually an ancient, possibly alien bacteria that combines the DNA of an animal with whatever other animal is touching it (and also sends these chimera-like abominations into a murderous frenzy, though presumably if you woke up and had become half groundhog overnight you'd probably be a little pissed off about it).

The prospect of certain death or mutation pulls Janek out of his stupor and he becomes the de-factor leader of the survivors, although the award for pure badassery goes to Herr Chancellor, because who doesn't want a scene with a woman in her sixties murdering a mutant deer with goddamned rock drill? Tanja tries to explain the events as they unfold and Janek strains his mind to get it, but it's his survival skills that win the day.

Blood Glacier has a lot of the elements of Stung: disgusting, gooey monsters, an awkward love story, finding creative uses for power tools, and a final bang! at the end to tie things up. But instead of the cow/wasp airdrop, Blood Glacier ends with Janek and Tanja finding that a pregnant dog on the base has given birth to a mixed-up, half-human puppy. It is a quiet and somewhat somber ending, considering the revelation that the pair's former fling crumbled when Tanja got an abortion and neglected to inform Janek. It's a far more mature, and darker, setup, resulting in a bigger impact when the two are brought closer together by the dog-faced boy. Ellen Ripley approves.

Or at least won't melt your face off.

* * * * *

Oddly enough. Stung's plot resonates somewhat with this week's climate conference in Paris, where the industrial world will decide how much it can pollute the planet while still making things comfortable for the people they don't exploit as much as everyone else, with uninvited U.S. representatives trying to prove that the basic pillars of the scientific method are a Herbalife-style scam. Blood Glacier might be about the more existential and arguably dire threat of global warming, but pollution is just as large an issue, and in many ways is much easier to understand and do something about. Both movies work off of our basic fear that each new convenience mankind invents, the side-effects are going to be wide reaching and ultimately unreversible. Will there be giant wasps and recombinat virus monsters? Probably not. But something made that bloop and if the oceans get much warmer, I bet it's gonna be pissed.

* Despite how funny Mark Twain's essay "The Awful German Language" gets, German is actually quite pleasant when spoken in a normal tone; literally the only exposure Americans get to German is old broadcasts of Hitler, so it does come with quite a lot of bias. But just imagine for a moment that a person mutters to you in a reassuring tone, "Warum Insekten haben so viele Beine ? Es ist einfacher, um durch Ihre Albträume zu kriechen."
Beautiful.

dog is (hit)man's best friend

To clarify, John Wick is a movie that Ash and I bought on a whim for a dollar because, aside from movie-obsessed nerds like us, who buys DVDs anymore?

It is a very, very stupid movie dressed up very well, similar to Keanu Reeves's titular character donning a four-figure suit in which to go a-killing. It's almost a shame that this is clearly a contract movie, featuring Willem Dafoe, Michael Nyqvist, a Swede portraying a Russian gangster* whose accent gets lost somewhere in the middle, and Alfie Allen of Game of Thrones fame. It builds a fictional world where assassins have a secret underground economy complete with a no-kill upscale hotel and trade favors in gold coins. Either that, or it's a grim alternate reality where Ron Paul is Lord Sovereign Commander of God's Green Earth.

*Aside: Since when are all gangsters Russian? I guess the Very Serious People who write movies have decided that it's a good idea to make us afraid of stereotypical Ruskis because AK-brandishing brown people with funny accents was played out when True Lies did it and would somehow be less tasteful given world affairs? Give it time, VSPs, give it time.

Anyway, John Wick the character is a hitman with a heart, out of the business but reeling from the death of his wife to a fatal but unspecified illness. The day after her funeral, an adorable beagle puppy arrives on his doorstep and oh holy shit the dog is going to eat it, isn't s/he!? Of course! Look, he even gave it a friggin' bowl of cereal -- that dog does not have long for the world.

Yes, the dog dies. At the hand of Allen's character Iosef no less: a spoiled snot-nosed daddy's boy who gives spoiled snot-nosed daddy's boys a bad name. The seemingly random carjacking and dog murder connects all the way back to gang boss dad Viggo, Wick's ex-employer, and thus begins the highly symbolic and blood-soaked punishment for the two men's collective sins.

John Wick the movie falls into a lot of the obvious traps of dumb action movies: it's essentially a series of completely unrealistic bloody gunfights broken up by dialog that is supposed to be deep, with the usual pretention to maturity that makes every third word "Fuck!" or "Shit!" We get it, writers: these are bad men who trade in bad things, but at this point they all sound like a pack of 12-year-old boys who accidentally turned the dictionary to the FT-FU page.

Giving credit where it's due, the movie is stylized and consistent. Professional killers for hire hang out at clubs and hotel bars like high school teachers in the Atlantic City Tropicana for the NJEA convention. There's a "code" that gets mentioned but never fully explained, save that there's no killing in the hotel and "dinner reservation" is hit-speak for "I just murdered the ever-loving shit out of a lot of people and would like a new sofa." And a small personal enjoyment: the camera pulls back from the action and lets you see the stunts, unlike the now-popular Batman Begins formula, in which some film editor wanted closeups of Christian Bale's teeth instead of action. Another much better hitman movie Haywire did this as well to great effect. (Like JJ Abrams use of lens flare to cover up crappy graphics, close up fight scenes mock intensity but are really just pulling the camera in to show less detail because the stunts aren't particularly inventive.)

But the real high point amid reliably silly and overtly expository speech is one simple exchange between John Wick the character and Viggo during their eventual showdown. Viggo laments for simpler days when murder was business and business was good, and the better killer answers with, "Do I look civilized to you?" Maybe it's unintentional, but the first thing one learns about screenwriting is that in an insane world, insane things are normal. John Wick the movie takes this to its logical conclusion and then tears the rule book up with Wick's character. He's been out of the job for a few years living perhaps better than the everyman, but not shooting people in the face for a paycheck and presumably paying for groceries with normal, everyday dollars. And upon going back in, he's seen the outside and that it is better, and the world of paid killers he left behind looks as nuts to him as it does to us. For as dumb as the movie was, there was a real attempt at connection between the audience and the character that was not entirely unsuccessful.

So, props, I guess? If I had to make an analogy, John Wick is worth seeing for the spectacle: it's a kid whose clearly fallen asleep in class but tiny glints of brilliance reflect off the drool pooling around his face.

now i want a sandwich...

New movie, so, spoilers.

Before we begin, a confession: I only read the first 'Hunger Games.' Right now I'm picturing you, dear reader, with a shocked -- shocked! -- look on your face and in your best Martin-Lawrence-as-Shanaynay voice going, "Say whaaaaaaat!?" But honestly, I feel I can better judge the movies having not read the source material and therefore knowing them on their own merit. At least that keeps me from shelling out for them.

Despite being an enjoyable series as a whole, there's two big complaints. First, and regarding the movie itself, it didn't need to be split into two movies. I'd forgotten large chunks of the first and struggled to remember who half the people were while processing the action. It also gives the beginning a disconcerting start in the middle feeling -- probably because it does -- and at about hour two it passes from expanding on a detailed fictional world to just wasting everyone's damn time.

Secondly, I never felt that much about The Hunger Games had much to do with anything that happens in the real world. It's not a stretch, given that Collins is American and that the book is aimed at an American audience, that Panem is a dystopian America far in the future. For example, a government that purposefully forces its subjects into starvation is kind of asking for the rebellion that concludes the series, and my guess is real life people would've put up with it for a hell of a lot less time than at least the 75 years Districts 12 thru five did. I always thought it would've been much more interesting if the government provided a super unhealthy but cheap to produce food for its subjects, keeping them fed but rendering them weak with obesity and its many related health problems, and that Katniss stayed fit and fed her family meat and grain not out of death-defying need but simply choice.

Plus, the messages about conformity and following orders would never fly with an actual population, especially if the contemporary era is the basis of that future. The reason so many angsty teenagers buy into the mantra that they are different, just like everyone else is different, is that everyone is a maverick in the modern age. Part of the hilarity of presidential elections is watching people like Hillary Clinton or George W. Bush try to convince everyday Americans that somehow they are different, and not a bland emissary of the ruling class; that sending their children to the most exclusive prep schools in the world puts them on par with confused middle-income moms hopelessly confused over a high school grading system. In my estimation it would be impossible to keep a people down by convincing them of their place in society and just hammering the point. Americans are ceaselessly optimistic, after all, which is why I guess President Snow had it coming all along.

So The Hunger Games: Mocking Jay: Too Many Colons: Part 2 sums up Panem's revolt against power with a bang and a stern warning never to trust anyone over 40. Katniss herself is and isn't part of the climatic battle, but hangs back to film propaganda shots for the rebellion and carry out a super-secret mission that somehow everyone knows about. She feels almost ancillary at this point. Even the scene where she's filmed turning a captured worker to the cause ends with a gunfight that was going to happen whether she was there or not, and the incident quickly spirals out of her control and into rebellion leader Alma Coin's endless stream of Girl on Fire inspirational posters. The tango between Coin and Snow is perhaps the best written part, and its to Donald Sutherland's credit that he comes across as an evil leader, perfectly aware of his evil, who knows that his time is over and doesn't care one bit. It's to Julianne Moore's credit to play a younger version of exactly that during a moment of unfettered victory and rise to power -- you could say it's two sides of the same yeah I'm not even going to dignify that with a complete sentence.

In fact, the "beginning" to about the hour-thirty mark is sort of a blur since nothing very interesting happens, and the pivotal moments come crammed together at the end. Peeta slowly recovers from his government brainwashing and turns human again, while Gale leads what amounts to a rebellion-sponsored death squad. Haymitch, Effie, and the other tributes and side-characters are barely around before they're swiftly killed off or forgotten, and then there's zombies in a sewer for some reason?

The climatic battle is fantastically filmed and genuinely hard to watch, but leaves out what would otherwise be gallons and gallons of blood for that sweet PG-13 rating, and from then on the movie is solely about Katniss's plan to stop the original evil government from transitioning to a new evil government. I counted 3 plot twists heavy with mom-style hometown wisdom about power and double-edged swords and something-something violence begets violence before a very long end sequence that doesn't so much close the story but just kind of Peetas out.

Yep, that happened. I'm not funny. And did I mention the zombies?

Maybe it's mechanically-delivered end speech to a baby that doesn't yet have object permanence let alone speech centers or J-Law's seemingly unchanging youthful looks, or maybe it is the stupid yellow dress, but I don't buy Jennifer Lawrence as a mom. She's an immensely talented actress and a delight to watch, but the five minute appendix of her with babies being motherly and reassuring while Peeta does his best fun dad impression in the blurry distance felt forced. Perhaps after the intense breakdown scene where Katniss finally learns to love the mangy cat introduced in the opening paragraphs of the first book, the writers decided everyone needed a break and a cute baby. Here's a hint: if you want to end on a cheap positive note, just play this video of Tumbles the two-legged puppy getting wheels.

The thing I like the most about Hunger Games is just how cynical it all is. I said before that the best part of the final movie is watching Coin and Snow send respective legions of wide-eyed loyalists to their not-at-all-bloody deaths, literally playing chess with living pieces. It is an entirely unromantic image of political rebellion.

People have complained that Hunger Games ripped off Battle Royale but having seen the entire thing through I believe the author when she said she didn't know anything about it beforehand. If it does rip anything, Katniss Everdeen has a distinctly Paul Atreides quality to her. If Dune was the story of a young, charismatic warrior leading a downtrodden people to a destiny of freedom, but unleashing a shit storm of unending slaughter as a by-product, I'd say Collins took far more inspiration from that than Japanese high schools students killing each other with Uzis and cleverly hidden razor blades. The comparison to Battle Royale is one of complete surface analysis that only makes sense as long as you don't think about it too much; Battle Royale is far more optimistic in its world view and opinion of people as heroes than Hunger Games. Which is what makes Hunger Games so good.

a spectre draws near!

New movie, so, spoilers.

If Skyfall set the new tone for James Bond by catapulting him from the 1970s -- where he's been stuck since the end of the decade like your uncle Luke who can't let go of his polyester wide-collared button-down -- into the modern age, then Spectre is a return to bad habits by washing Skyfall in an entire tub of OxyClean until the barbecue sauce stains come out. It is by no means a bad movie, just going from zero to more-of-the-same in about 3.1 seconds.

Let's set up a little comparison: Skyfall is to James Bond as Die Hard is to 80s action movies. No doubt many of the unkillable ain't-got-time-to-bleed heroes of the hair metal era took a thing or two from the master himself. But Die Hard made Commando look like the G.I. Joe doll he was: a plastic, two-dimensional and otherwise flawless robot -- it's difficult to understate what John McClane, a hero who bled, cried, got tired and screwed up his marriage, did in the face of action heroes who were otherwise a bulletproof hybrid of man and backhoe. Likewise, Bond as a franchise was basically unchanged since the Sean Connery era, and Skyfall put a bullet right between that one's eyes.

Now that I think about it, Skyfall probably should have been the second movie and Spectre the prequel. We've known about unlimited/unquestioned government surveillance for some time now, but the more recent development is the dangers of hacking en masse, which was more Skyfall's techno-anarchist baddie's thing, are perhaps the larger concern when it comes to privacy. One thing I really hate that movies do is assume that everyone computer, phone, camera and garage door opener is on some kind of Wi-Fi network and can be hacked into and taken over by a few nerds and rapid typing. Speaking of Die Hard, #4 mangled this worse than almost any other movie I've seen. Good job.

Anyway, hacking on a "Tarje" or Office of Personnel Management scale is only possible because of how data is stored and if you think of hacks as a natural by-product of the Internet existing, logical. Likewise, the tech industry is not only complicit in government snooping, but its obsession with mass storage, cloud computing and data backup lends itself toward mass collection. The best prisoner, after all, is the one who locks himself up. Large, centralized databases make big targets to unsavory folks. But probably the best argument I've come across against such bulk dredging is that it provides too much useless information through which to sift and not only doesn't work, can't work. The volume is so huge that the government pays wads of taxpayer dollars to millions of private contractors, and to me it's sort of amazing that there has only been one Ed Snowden thus far. And since we've seen the kind of damage one singular person can do the structure as a whole, casting a wide net for (comparatively) cheap private labor doesn't exactly give me much comfort. Plus, I don't exactly want some 23-year-old Reddit addict knowing that I bought baguette pans on Amazon. 

Alright, back to Spectre. Government spying bad. Like the way Silva in Skyfall modernized the individual Bond villain, Spectre tries to drag the rest of the component parts that make up a Bond movie into the future as well. Problem being that such things were silly in the Fleming novels and remain silly to this day. Spectre itself is a massive criminal network pushing the world to adopt its spying measures by committing acts of terrorism to scare governments into it for... reasons? Good megalomaniacs are hard to come by and as creepy as Christolf Waltz gets, he doesn't come close to John Huston in Chinatown. He could've just as easily become a bank or insurance company CEO and had a similar amount of government influence and lived a life of needless violence away from the prying eyes of law enforcement, so the entire Stonecutters thing has a cartoony feel.

There are further attempts to humanize Bond -- give him the full McClane so to speak -- but they fall sort of flat. Monica Bellucci had the potential to be a great Bond Girl (or Bond Woman has Daniel Craig himself pointed out), but all we get is a PG-13 sex scene and a quick PG shot of her in some sexy lingerie that she somehow had time to put on between assassination attempts. She's never in the movie again. Lea Seydoux does a nice turn as the actual Bond Girl, but as Ash pointed out, why does she have a French accent if her dad is Austrian, and why does that accent start to go away at about the three-quarters mark? Another way Spectre fails to live up to its predecessor is trying to have a tough Bond Girl, and Seydeoux is at turns tough and icy, but then all hot and bothered for some Bond action and really doesn't do much else. Skyfall did this better to by making the ultimate Bond Girl "M," which works as a far better humanizing force: Bond only knows the job, so having his boss as his lady tugs at whatever heartstings he has left even more, and there's no possibility of humping, which forces Bond to understand her as human and not an ambulatory penis receptacle. It hurt when she ate it.

Finally, Waltz himself does a turn as Bond's long-lost sort of adopted brother and man does this go nowhere. I don't know if it was intentional or not, but the entire thing made me want to see the movie from Waltz's point of view: a kid who had his childhood stolen away by an adopted stranger and used the drive as a rise to prominence and vehicle to exact symbolic revenge.

Oh wait, that's Old Boy.

Waltz is a good actor and all, but I got a sort of Gary Oldman in Book of Eli feel from it, where some studio head said to another, "Hey, Terry, who does creepy really really well?" and Terry responded "You know, this movie sounds suspiciously like some Korean flick I saw a while back and, hey, where'd you get a hockey sti--" *WHACK*

But the biggest sin of Spectre is also its largest departure from Skyfall. See, Skyfall worked because it spent a lot of time distancing itself from other James Bond movies and really pulled new fans into the fold. When we saw it, Ash went into the theater feeling like I was dragging her to some stupid dude movie  and left singing the theme song. Spectre (which means, by the way, Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, but you wouldn't know that from seeing the goddamned film named after it) references not only the Daniel Craig movies but goes back to the Connery era -- the entire torture scene is pretty much lifted from Goldfinger with crappier dialog. Even for people in their 30s like my, James Bond is kind of old, and the references were so many and so frequent it's like the Spectre was just a cut-n-paste job of other, arguably better movies.

That, or they just ripped off freaking Old Boy.

The rumor is that Craig is done with James Bond, and I suppose the future is a little brighter given the fact that World War 3 might just start if they don't cast Idirs Elba.