Logan Is Both a Fitting Farewell for Hugh Jackman and a Pale Copy of Old Man Logan

First, if you haven't read the Old Man Logan comic, visit Arion's blog for a great summary of it.  It certainly helped me to remember what happened before I saw the movie.

As I said to Arion on that blog entry, Logan the movie basically only uses part of the title and the core concept of the comic book.  As kind of an FU to comic book writer Mark Millar, director James Mangold is the only one credited with the story.  Really James Mangold?  You came up with that all by yourself?  Are you sure you didn't get a little help somewhere?  Hmmm?

The core concept is that it's 2029 and Logan, aka Wolverine, and Charles Xavier, formerly the head of a school for mutants, are the only mutants left.  The rest were killed in "The Westchester Incident" that is never shown or really explained in detail.  Apparently that was going to be the first scene initially but then it was cut, probably for time and budget.  Xavier is in his 90s and suffers from dementia that he has to treat with pills or else he can send out psychic shockwaves that not only nearly kill people, but could also alert authorities to where they are.

Logan's planning to get enough money to buy a boat in Mexico and sail away with Professor X.  To do this he's driving a limo that in the first scene is nearly jacked until he slaughters some of the thieves.  Until Logan gets enough money, he and Xavier are living in secret by the Mexican border along with a former mutant tracker named Caliban, played by Stephen Marchant who I recently watched in Extras.  There is some indication that "the wall" has been built by this time.  But things start to go sour when Logan is contacted by a Mexican woman who wants him to drive her and a little girl to North Dakota so they can cross to Canada.

If Canada is a safe haven for mutants, why isn't Logan already there?  In the comics at least Wolverine is Canadian.  Xavier is British so you'd think he could get to Canada or back to England, right?

Anyway, bad guys track Logan down and so he, Xavier, and the girl hit the road to go to North Dakota.  It soon becomes clear the girl named Laura is a clone of Wolverine.  In the comics X-23 is a full grown woman but in this she's just a child.  She only has two claws on her hands instead of three like her daddy but to compensate she has a claw in each foot as well.  Xavier compares her to a lion because female lions use their front claws to attack and back to defend.  OK, sure, whatever.

They go to Oklahoma City to change cars and clothes and such, but the bad guys are soon on their tail again.  Eventually they come to the aid of a farmer (ER's Eriq la Salle--remember him?) and his family.  Of course the bad guys follow them there too.

All through this Logan is slowly dying because the adamantium that makes him so indestructible is also poisoning him and his healing factor can no longer compensate enough.  But as you might expect, he has enough left in the tank (with the help of some steroids) for one final showdown in North Dakota.  Unlike Christian Bale's Batman, Logan doesn't get to jet off to Italy with Anne Hathaway.  And it's a fitting way for him to go since he was always supposed to be like Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name and aging gunfighters usually go out in a blaze of glory, right?

As far as X-Men movies go it's one of the best.  It's not nearly so stupid as the recent big ones and has an actual point to it, unlike The Wolverine.  The R rating allows it to have a more appropriate amount of blood and gore and also lets Patrick Stewart curse hilariously; this is probably his best performance of the X-Men movies, probably because he does more than use Cerebro and chat with Magneto.  He gets to have a little more range, and less so does Hugh Jackman.

I remember the late Roger Ebert criticizing Kick-Ass for 12-year-old Hit Girl beating people up and getting beat up in turn.  He'd probably be mortified with the body count Laura generates and the times she's beaten up and even harpooned through the chest once.

Anyway, on its own it's a decent movie.  But it really is a pale imitation of the Old Man Logan comic.  For one thing, since it was a comic book they could use the whole stable of Marvel characters, something rights issues between Disney and Fox would obviously prevent here.

The setup for the story is a lot different.  50 years after all the heroes have died or gone into hiding, Wolverine owns a farm and has a wife and kids.  His landlord is the Hulk and his creepy redneck sons, who insist Logan pay them rent or some bad shit's going to happen.

Then along comes Hawkeye, formerly of the Avengers, who's old and blind yet still able to drive the Spider-Mobile across the country.  He wants Logan's help to deliver something to "the resistance" to maybe save the world or something.  Logan has taken a vow against violence to the point he hasn't "popped his claws" in 50 years but he agrees to go so he can make money to save the family farm.

In the movie Xavier is the stand-in for both the family and Hawkeye.  In a way it makes sense as who else from Fox's roster would they get:  Mystique?  Jean Grey?  Cyclops?  Rogue?  Storm?  Actually I was thinking a great choice, though it would have altered the tone dramatically, would have been Deadpool.  He's got a healing factor like Wolverine and obviously kicks a lot of ass too.  But I guess then instead of a sort of Western it would have ended up as a more of a buddy comedy.  If they had cast Cable sooner he would have been a good choice too as it would then give him a reason to go back in time and hook up with Deadpool.

Anyway, in the comics they go through a few places where heroes died like "Hammer Falls" where Thor's hammer lies and "Pym Falls" where Giant-Man's skeleton lies.  They ultimately go to Washington DC, where the Red Skull has taken up residence in the White House and has superhero artifacts on display like Captain America's shield and Iron Man's armor.  By contrast going to an Oklahoma casino and a farm and North Dakota don't seem nearly so epic.

The problem is thanks to licensing and budgets and such this can't be as universe-spanning as the comic book.  But I think they lost something by Logan not having a family and not taking a vow to not kill because that really made it more important when he did finally decide to kill.  But then there wouldn't have been nearly the body count, right?

It's not quite as disappointing as watching "Flashpoint" on CW's The Flash and comparing it to the Flashpoint comic.  That barely managed to retain the core concept; it was such a pale imitation it couldn't see its own reflection in a mirror.  This does a better job but still leaves you longing if you've read the comics, which I'd recommend.

This whole thing gave me an idea for a more epic Logan movie that I'll share (and no one will read) on Friday.

In Memoriam...Blogger Edition

Today's Memorial Day so it seems like a good time to honor those who used to read this blog.  Those blogger buddies can be broken into a few categories.

Special Mention, Dead IRL
Yzerbear19, aka Melissa Dilloway

My sister was not a regular blog reader but she did comment from time-to-time

Now the less depressing entries.

Because Life, You Know?
Rusty Webb
Jay Noel
David Walston
Neil Vogler
Stephen Hayes
Lisa Potts

I know Rusty and David have been busy and Jay has been sick, so not really into blogging anymore.  I still see Rusty around Goodreads, where he usually has epic reviews.  Neil I still follow on Twitter.  He has an album out that's a good listen.  I still read Stephen Hayes (aka the Chubby Chatterbox)'s blog and sometimes he emails me.  Lisa was someone I knew from writers.net and followed my original writing blog for a while but then I guess she got busy.

Those Who Pissed Me Off:
Andrew Leon
Briane Pagel

I don't need to explain that, do I?

Those I Pissed Off:
Michael Offutt
Tony Laplume
Laura Diamond

I'm still in contact with Offutt but Laplume has mostly dropped off the grid.  I don't know what his deal is other than I didn't like his one book like 4 years ago.  Talk about holding a grudge.  Laura was a sometimes reader of my first blog until I pissed her off about some other friend using the same cover image as another of my Facebook "friends."

With the exception of Andrew Leon, if anyone else on this list wants to read my blog again, they're more than welcome to.  It is kind of sad on the Internet how we just lose touch with people.  I suppose to some extent that happens in real life too.  That's just life, both "real" and online.

Passengers: An Ode to Male Privilege & Stockholm Syndrome [Spoilers]

I've talked before about how sometimes it's just one little thing that can ruin a movie or book.  Whether it's whitewashing a part, some bad special effects, or a plot twist that doesn't make sense, all you need is one thing to go bad and it causes a cascade effect.  Which is an apt description because in Passengers, one meteor getting through the ship's shielding eventually starts to cause the entire ship to fail.

While the meteor is what ruined the ship, something else ruined the movie for me.  After that meteor hits, Chris Pratt's hibernation pod is activated.  For a year he tries various things to go back to sleep, but nothing works.  Then he sees Jennifer Lawrence sleeping in her pod and becomes infatuated with her.  She's a writer and he reads some of her work and starts to think about waking her up too.

Where this whole movie goes off the rails is when he actually does this.  Because now what's supposed to be a love story of two people stranded on a ship in the middle of space becomes what's essentially a rape as he decides to doom her along with him.  It's male privilege in action as he thinks, "What I want is more important than anything else."  And when Laurence Fishburne is woke up he tries to excuse this by saying, "A drowning man always tries to take someone with him."  In other words, "Hey, it's OK he ruined your life, he was desperate."  And obviously his needs were more important than your need to not die in space.

At first when they meet, Jennifer Lawrence doesn't know she was woke up intentionally.  So as she falls for him, it's still creepy, but less so for her.  But then after she finds out and falls for him again, that's where it gets creepy again.  It's like Stockholm Syndrome with the kidnapping victim falling in love with her captor.  Or a woman falling in love with her rapist.  He cursed her to die on the ship with him and she decides to make a life with him because they worked together to save the ship?  Really?  I'm supposed to buy that and cheer for it?  REALLY?

Naturally the previews were smart enough to leave that angle out, letting you think--like J-Law in the beginning--they were both just randomly woke up by the ship.  Whoever cut the previews probably knew people weren't going to want to watch a movie where a guy intentionally wakes up a woman just so he'll have some company, cursing her to die of old age in space along with him.

Why was it even necessary?  Why couldn't the two pods have gone haywire?  Since you had a third go haywire later, why couldn't Chris Pratt's have opened and then later J-Law's?  That would have sidestepped this whole creepy, disgusting element.

Not surprisingly the writer, director, and I think all of the producers are guys.  I mean, if there had been a woman involved you think she probably would have pointed out that maybe a woman isn't going to fall in love with a guy who cursed her to die in space.  Obviously the guys involved didn't see a problem with it.  And really, why would they?  That's just par for the course in Hollywood.  We like to say Hollywood is liberal and while many of its stars are, most movies not intended for awards consideration are fairly conservative.  In this case the movie could have been written by Mike Pence or the "Freedom Caucus" as the moral of the story is:  Hey, women, just let the man decide everything for you and it'll work out in the end.  I'm not a pussy hat-wearing feminist and even I think it's pretty disgusting.

Anti-Sequelitis

Considering I wrote 7 sequels (and 2 prequels) to the Scarlet Knight series, 2 sequels (and a spinoff) to the Chances Are series, and 2 sequels (and a collection of short stories and a spinoff) for the Girl Power series it's kind of weird that I've only written four direct sequels since 2014.  Those are both for Eric Filler series Gender Swap Challenge and Gender Swap Detective.  Otherwise the "sequels" are unrelated stories.

Once or twice someone has asked if there's a sequel for a particular story and no there isn't.  The thing about those gender swap stories is there's usually no point for a sequel.  Because unless you change the main character into a man again (like in Last Chance) you can't really do a gender swap again.  So for those sequels I did write it's the character changing into different kinds of women.  Like in the Gender Swap Challenge it was the main character changing from a stoner guy to a bimbo, then into a sultan's plaything, and then a virgin schoolgirl.  Or in the Gender Swap Detective stories first the hard-boiled detective turns into a beautiful woman, then an exotic dancer, and then a little girl.  So really that makes those ones kind of hard to write direct sequels for them.

I've toyed with ideas for sequels for Another Chance but weirdly the problem in part are the covers.  I use a pair of silhouettes for each cover and I really like them, especially the ones Al Sirois made up for the revised versions of the Chances Are series.  So to make a sequel I have to have two different silhouettes; it can't just be a sexy woman and another sexy woman.  So looking around it seems like I can do exotic dancer, pregnant woman, little girl, or go back to a male one.  It kind of limits the options.

And storywise there's usually no reason to do a sequel for most of the gender swap stories.  The character usually lives happily ever after or ends up unhappily ever after, but either way it's over one way or another.  So in my mind there's not any unfinished business left behind.

Someone said about the novella From Warrior King to Peasant Girl:  it ended when it was just getting started.  And I'm like, "What the fuck you talking about?"  I mean the King Arthur-ish character had become a little girl, grown up again, discovered she had witch powers, overthrew the bad guy, and retaken her kingdom.  What the hell else was there to do?  I guess unite the whole kingdom but who cares about that?  I mean she has witch powers and a magic sword so it's not like that's going to be too hard.  I really don't know how you could say it was just getting starting, but people are annoying.

I have a couple of ideas for gender swap series.  First was the superhero-themed one Secret Origins and I have some vague ideas for a sequel.  Then there's the Transformers-themed one Only Human where I'm thinking of having bad guys adopt human forms in a sequel.  I also have an idea called Gender Swap Therapy where a shrink would be a recurring character who uses gender swapping/age regression to cure his/her patients.  And another inspired by Quantum Leap would have a scientist "leap" back in time as various female characters.  But those are just in the drawing board stage.

As for non-gender swap stories I just really haven't come up with any solid ideas.  Mostly because no one buys the first book hardly so there doesn't seem to be any reason to waste time with a second or third one.  With the Scarlet Knight, Chances Are, and Girl Power series I had ideas for sequels as I was writing the first one but Justice for All (The Outcast #1--and only?) or Army of the Damned (Sky Ghost #1--and only?) I didn't really think of anything solid at the time and I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about them.  Someone said about Justice for All (The Outcast #1--and only?) that "You can't leave it like that" and I disagree.  I have absolutely no idea why I can't leave it like that.  The main character is alive and going back to school in the town where her boyfriend lives.  The Kingpin-ish bad guy is still out there, but so what?  It's not like it ended on a cliffhanger.

Lately, maybe because I watched a couple of Mad Max movies I was thinking of something similar to do for a Sky Ghost sequel.  The idea would be the good guys are starting to run low on gas and so ace pilot Hunter Hawking is out looking for some when he stumbles across an oil tanker that's run aground but still has plenty of oil on board just waiting to be plucked.  So they'd have to clear the ship of zombies and get the oil off it (or maybe get the ship working) and then try to get it back to their home in Salt Lake City while some other groups try to steal the oil from them.  Maybe I'll do that or maybe not.  Since it has zombies I just don't want to be like The Walking Dead and just have it be they find a group of survivors who are good/evil and then mayhem ensues.

Long ago someone suggested I write a sequel to Where You Belong and I'm like, "I have no idea what that would be about."  I mean I was using the cradle-to-not-quite-grave John Irving formula, so what would there be to do in a sequel?  If it were going to cover another 35 years it'd be going until like 2044 so then it'd be science fiction instead of literary fiction.  I guess that's why Irving doesn't write sequels. And more to the point I don't think I'm ready to write about Frost Devereaux in his 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s because I haven't lived that yet.  Maybe in another 30 years...

But I don't know.  Maybe if someone has a sequel idea for another story they can send it to me.

Grumpy Blue Dogs

I’ve gotten into arguments with plenty of right-wingers on Facebook, etc., but sometimes I piss off the other side too, especially when it comes to Hillary Clinton. In the last couple of months I had someone on Twitter and someone on Facebook block me because I wasn’t really with her.

The first time was when some lady on Twitter complained about Bernie Sanders’s ideas. And my response was: At least he has ideas. What great ideas did HRC have—except those she pilfered from Bernie? And this lady was like: she has ideas! Tons of ideas! Like what? Go to her website and find out, I don’t have to tell you! Which to me seems pretty funny. I mean, if you can’t name one idea she had then that’s kind of a problem. And then she blocks me, still without providing one idea HRC originated.

And then a month or so someone on Facebook posted a link to an article about HRC coming out of the New York woods to make a big speech and I made a snide remark about her Wall Street speeches. And then it was on! You’re the reason HRC lost! (I voted for her in the general election.) So on and so forth. Then finally: We’re not friends! Go away! And then finally blocking me.

The disturbing part of this second encounter was the attitude of if you’re a progressive who wasn’t on Team HRC, you should just shut up and vote for whoever The Party tells you to vote for. Which it’s like, that’s Republican thinking. Democrats aren’t supposed to be authoritarian; we’re supposed to be inclusive.

As long as you have this core of “moderate” corporate Democrats with an attitude of shut up and do whatever we tell you, it’s going to be hard to bring the farther left Bernie faithful into the mix. Those people don’t want to be told “This is fine” or “let’s just try to inch forward a little;” they want real change. And so do disgruntled “independent” voters in states like Michigan; they wanted real change so badly they voted for a lying, pussy-grabbing “billionaire” who made a bunch of crazy promises he had no intention of going through with. While it would be nice if these people woke up and realized that the Republican Party cares only about making rich people richer (see their “health care” bill that was just an excuse for a big tax to the rich), you can’t realistically expect people to stop believing what they want to hear. Had the corporate Democrats actually listened to Bernie supporters instead of just trying to suppress them or make half-assed attempts to placate them, HRC might be in the White House right now.

It wasn’t a good sign when they pushed through another corporate Democrat as DNC chair and then demanded everyone working for the DNC tender a resignation. It’s just more authoritarian bullshit. Cleaning house like that is something dictators do.

I’m still not sure if the corporate Democrats have really learned their lesson. They seem to think the problem was not campaigning hard enough. The real problem is you tried to water down Bernie’s platform and make the face of it someone few people trusted to actually try to enact that platform. So in 2020 if you try to run another corporate Democrat (like, say Cory Booker who has ties to Big Pharma) and think you can just demand the allegiance of Bernie supporters, it’s going to be hard to unseat…whoever will be president by then.

Last month there was a third one, though it wasn't exactly because of Hillary.  After US ships bombed a Syrian airbase, this one corporate Democrat was whining about progressives who weren't rolling over to heap praise on Trump.  "You guys are like the Tea Party after the bin Laden raid!"  It's like, hold on man, the Tea Party were just a bunch of racists; progressives complaining the Syria attack was a smokescreen could point to that the FBI was investigating Trump's Russia ties.  So it's not just some tinfoil hat conspiracy.  He tried to big stuff me by saying he works in Washington, so he knows way more than peons like me.  If people like him are in charge, it's no wonder Democrats lost.  His response was, Well Hillary said we should bomb Syria too, so checkmate!  Which really didn't make a lot of sense.  Just because Hillary thought the same thing doesn't have any affect on the Trump administration's thinking.  Also, Hillary thought Iraq was a good idea, so not exactly the best judgment.  Then of course he blocked me. 
 
The moral is that corporate Democrats can't stand being challenged by those who don't share their wishy-washy views.  So when they can't shout you down or roll over you, they just ignore you, which is ultimately self-defeating.  HRC’s slogan was “Stronger Together” and that’s true; we just need all progressives to actually put that into practice.

This Rolling Stone article on the book Shattered, an analysis of HRC's failed campaign, backs up some of what I've been thinking.  Because she had no ideas or vision, her campaign was completely stymied on coming up with a reason why she was running. In addition, she and Bill had gone through to pick out "disloyal" Democrats and in some cases even try to make sure they were voted out. That's not exactly "Stronger Together" is it?  More like "My Way or the Highway."  And that's unfortunately the attitude of too many corporate Democrats yet.  Instead of listening to progressives, they hope to just ram their watered-down Republican agenda down people's throats.  As long as they stay out of touch, it's going to be a long road back to the top.

Stuff I Watched Again

More Stuff I Watched...

Coming Through the Rye:  In 1969 a Jewish kid at a prep school decides to do a play of Catcher in the Rye.  His teacher asks if he has the permission of JD Salinger, so the kid decides to go track Salinger down.  During a trip to New York he finds an old magazine article saying Salinger lives in a town in New Hampshire so he goes there with the help of a girl.  Along the way he and the girl make out and have sex.  And then Salinger (Chris Cooper in fake eyebrows) turns him down because Salinger is kind of a jerk if you didn't already know.  It's a good fairly light indie drama that reminds me of a story I wrote about 13 years ago where a would-be author tracks his literary hero down and the moral of the story was:  never meet your heroes.  That's good advice but the kid got a girl out of it so it wasn't all bad, right? (3.5/5)

U-Turn:  A small-time gambler (Sean Penn) breaks down in a small Arizona town called Superior.  He then gets robbed, beat up, and embroiled in a scheme between a husband and wife who want to pay him to kill the other.  It's directed by Oliver Stone but feels more like a film student's homage to David Lynch.  It squanders a lot of acting talent including Billy Bob Thornton, Jon Voigt, Nick Nolte, Joaquin Phoenix, Clare Danes, and Jennifer Lopez. (2/5)

The Angriest Man in Brooklyn:  The late Robin Williams is a man with a brain aneurysm.  His harried doctor (Mila Kunis) tells him he has 90 minutes to live and so he goes running around Brooklyn trying to make amends to his son, wife (Melissa Leo), and brother (Peter Dinklage) while the doctor tries to find him.  What I didn't understand is if the doctor has a cell phone and she has Robin Williams's cell number, couldn't she just text him?  Anyway, it was a good mix of drama and comedy, though the bit with James Earl Jones as a stammering electronics salesman was pretty lame; I remember Night Court did something similar back in the 80s where they were in a big hurry and of course there's some guy who stutters and stammers and talks really slow.  Just saying. (3.5/5) (Depressing Speculation:  Some of Williams's last film credits are this, World's Greatest Dad, and The Final Cut, which all feature death rather heavily.  Could this have helped push him to suicide?)

Predestination:  In time travel stories they often mention the paradox of someone going back and inadvertently being his own grandfather; they even spoofed it on Futurama like 14 years ago.  This movie tops that by having a time traveler be her own mother AND father!  Oh and she/he is also her/his own mentor and enemy too!  It involves a lot of machinations including sex change surgery and plastic surgery, but basically everyone is the same character.  Up until the big reveals it was a fairly interesting drama about a lonely orphaned girl who gets knocked up and during the cesarean, doctors find out she also has boy parts and so start transitioning her into a man.  It probably would have been better off without all the creepy time travel stuff. (2.5/5)

Casino Jack:  I watched this back in 2012 but I watched it again recently on CBC.  In what could be seen as an audition for House of Cards, Kevin Spacey is "superlobbyist" Jack Abramoff who made a name lobbying for Native American casinos.  When he gets embroiled in trying to buy a shady floating casino, it ends up toppling his whole house of cards.  It's kind of sad how cheaply Congressmen and senators can be bought; I mean they do Abramoff favors for rounds of golf and theater tickets.  No wonder we're so fucked.  Something I pointed out on Facebook was at one point Abramoff goes to Paramount to pitch a movie about Moses and the exodus starring Russell Crowe and directed by Ridley Scott; ironically two years after this movie came out, Ridley Scott made Exodus: Gods and Kings, but with Christian Bale, not Russell Crowe.  Still, pretty close!  At the end of the movie Abramoff sends a letter to Bill Clinton to say he'll use his knowledge of Republicans to help the Democrats...I guess they should have taken him up on it. (3/5)

Silicon Cowboys:  This not-hard-hitting documentary chronicles the startup of Compaq in the early 80s.  Basically 3 Texas Instruments employees quit their jobs to create a "portable" computer that was like a suitcase and weighed 28 pounds.  Yet people went crazy for it and soon Compaq had IBM on their heels.  IBM made their own "portable" that ironically was less compatible with PC software than Compaq's.  Later IBM tried to clear the "clone" field with IBM PC2 that didn't have any backward compatibility--big mistake as businesses weren't keen on buying an entirely new set of computers.  By the early 90s Compaq began to decline thanks to lower-priced competition like neighboring Dell.  The last of the company's founders then was forced out.  In 2002 Compaq was absorbed by Hewlett-Packard.  But they had a great 8 year run or so.  It was interesting though like I said not really hard-hitting journalism.  If you want a dramatized version, AMC's "Halt & Catch Fire" is inspired by this story.  A couple of modern Silicon Valley things Compaq helped popularize:  the "fun" workplace and big showy rollouts for new products. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  I owned a Compaq in the late 90s.  I absolutely hated it.  Worst computer I ever owned.  The two Compaq laptops I bought weren't good either.  The second one had a design flaw with the screen that ended up making it useless except for parts.  So...good riddance to them.)

American Experience:  War of the Worlds:  The Trump campaign popularized "fake news" but one of the best instances of fake news was the 1938 Orson Welles broadcast of War of the Worlds.  The play was hastily written to sound like an actual news broadcast.  Even though there was an introduction, many people missed that to listen to a ventriloquist act (which seems lame since it's radio) and then joined in later to think New Jersey was being invaded by Martians.  A panic ensued in many places.  Welles took his sweet time to tell people it was a hoax even after it was known people were panicking, because Welles was kind of a dick if you didn't know.  Later he apologized publicly but privately wasn't sorry since this really put him on the map.  In a little bit of Welles fakery, the documentary stages interviews that are based on what some people actually said.  Not hard-hitting either but a good reminder that #fakenews has been around for a long time. (3/5)

Art and Craft:  This documentary is about a scrawny old guy named Mark Landry who forges art as a hobby.  A weird legal loophole apparently is that if you donate forged art to a museum it's not a crime.  I guess because you're not profiting off of it the FBI doesn't give a shit.  But to museum curators it's pretty annoying.  One named Matt who first worked in Oklahoma City and then Cincinnati kind of made it his life's work to track the forger's activity and warn museums, though in the process he lost his job and as kind of an FU the Cincinnati museum put on a show of the forger's work.  Apparently the forger is still at it, using several fake names and even dressing as a priest.  Kind of weird that they don't have text on the screen at the end to tell you what happened to the people.  It was a pretty interesting story.  Next time you go to an art museum you might want to look a little closer at the pictures.  (3/5)

Cool as Ice:  This woeful Vanilla Ice vehicle was corny enough before the Rifftrax treatment.  The plot makes little sense.  After an overly long musical number, Vanilla and his 3 black friends get on motorcycles and go...somewhere for...reasons.  I wasn't sure if the people in the town where they stop to get a bike fixed were freaked out more by the motorcycles and 90s clothes or just that three black people to them probably equate to a gang.  Anyway, after spooking a horse and causing it to buck its female rider, ladies man Vanilla Ice doesn't apologize and gets punched by the girl, who he then stalks and steals her planner and "saves" her from a douchey boyfriend before she takes him to a construction site for an extremely lame romantic montage.  Meanwhile the girl is featured on a TV news segment for...reasons and her father (Family Ties's Michael Gross) is spotted by a couple of bad dudes who recognize him as a cop who ratted them out.  So they go there and kidnap the guy's young son while he's playing Tecmo Super Bowl (because it wasn't 90s enough already) and only Vanilla Ice can save the day!  It was as godawful as you'd expect.  It took the movie/music industry a full ten years to make something almost as bad with From Justin to Kelly.  8 Mile and Purple Rain look like Citizen Kane compared to this. (1/5)

Frankenstein Island:  This early 80s movie doesn't really make a lot of sense.  4 hot air balloonists crash on an island that's populated by hot chicks in leopard print bikinis, salty sailors who can't stop chuckling, a crazy guy quoting Poe, van Helsing's daughter(?), and her ancient husband (?).  And Frankenstein's monster is chained underwater.  And a bunch of stuff happens.  Not even Rifftrax can make this turkey watchable. (1/5)

ROTOR:  I saw the original version of this on late night TV and it was pretty awful.  The Rifftrax version makes it more fun.  This is a cheesy combination of The Terminator and Robocop but far, far worse than either.  Basically a police robot goes around killing people because its standards are too high.  And only a cop/rancher/scientist and his burly skunk-haired lesbian friend can stop him!  With lassos, a Jeep Cherokee, and its car horn.  Epic!  My favorite part is still when they spent five minutes of the  movie checking into a hotel so the skunk-haired lesbian can change into a tank top.  I mean they totally couldn't just go to a rest stop or gas station to do that, right?  Nah, why do that when you can pay $100 for a hotel room you'll occupy for three minutes? That's the kind of thought (or lack thereof) that went into this movie. (1/5)

One Punch Man:  They had a dubbed version on Cartoon Network, but on Netflix it's in Japanese with subtitles.  As with a lot of anime, it's kind of weird, but there's a neat concept:  a superhero is so powerful that he can beat any enemy with one punch.  While you might think that's awesome, for him it makes life kind of boring.  I suppose that's why they had to invent Kryptonite for Superman, right? (3/5)

The Last Samurai:  I fell asleep so I didn't really know why Japanese soldiers were fighting samurai.  What I can tell you is guys with swords on horses are no match for Gatling guns.  Just saying. (Inc)

Amazon's Jackbooted Thugs Are At It Again

I've had Amazon pull one of my books a few times before.  The frustrating part of it is that they have no definition of "offensive content" that actually provides any guidance.  Their whole policy is one sentence:  What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect. .  WTF?  There is no court of law where that definition would hold up because it's far too broad to have any meaning at all.  What it really boils down to is:  it's our site so we can do what we want.

The second annoying thing is once someone (or something) flags a book for offensive content, no one has any idea why.  I've emailed and emailed and emailed them and never gotten a reasonable response.  Really I think it'd make a good Michael Moore-type documentary to have me go to their help center in India and try to track down and confront whoever flagged my book.  (And I say India because every email has the name of someone with an Indian-sounding name, so I assume that's where it's coming from.)

The latest beef began a month or so ago when they alerted me to some "book" called When You Were Young that had the same text as MY book When You Were Young.  I looked it up and it was 7 pages long with a different author name and different cover, but the first chapter of my book.  Only it was published 2 years later.  It had a sales ranking so someone bought it for some reason.  Or maybe they borrowed it.  Either way it seemed pretty dumb.  So naturally I tell Amazon this person is plagiarizing my book.  For once they agree with me and pulled the thing.

That should be it, right?  Well a couple of days later they come back demanding I prove I own the copyright to my book.  As proof they wanted a letter from the publisher, something official saying I'd filed a copyright with the government or whatever, or an email from the owner.  It's like, 1. I published the book with your platform so technically you're the publisher, 2. I don't bother wasting time and money filing copyrights, and 3. I wrote it so why would I email myself?  They sent me an email saying that was fine...and then blocked the book two days later.  So I have to send them an email asking why they blocked it if they had approved it?  Then they unblocked it.

Now that should be everything, right?  Well no, a few days later I had submitted a paperback for Transformations:  The Gender Swap Collection, which was an omnibus of a bunch of my books.  Instead of approving the paperback they say they can't publish it because of something about mentioning it's a box set or whatnot.  Before I could get around to attempting to fix that they blocked it for "offensive content" and for good measure blocked the ebook too.  And yet they didn't block any of the individual stories included in the collection.

Then a few days later I get the ultimate kick to the balls when they declared I'd had three books blocked already so now they were going to suspend my account until I took a loyalty oath--or promised I wouldn't do whatever it is I did again.  Since I haven't the slightest idea what I did it's kind of a hard promise to keep.

You might say, well just write clean books.  Except one of the ones they blocked, Transformed for Mother's Day Too, was a clean book.  It wasn't classified as erotica so it shouldn't matter it had kids in it.  There was no sex, no violence, and very little bad language.  One of the people who reviewed it originally said it was wholesome enough to let her grandkid read.  So if that gets blocked, what the hell is safe to publish?

Of course this would be a lot easier if they just said what the hell was wrong, but see above.  There's no way to know why they flagged a book.  It's like if a cop pulls you over, doesn't say why, gives you a ticket that doesn't have a reason on it, and then says if you do it again he'll put you in jail.  You'd be like, What the hell did I do?  If you don't know what you did, it's impossible to avoid doing it again, but Amazon chooses to hide behind vagueness and boilerplate than provide anyone with actual reasoning.  And now that they're threatening to shut down my account, the shit is getting real.

It would be nice if I could just go to Smashwords or Draft2Digital or something, but they don't distribute to Amazon.  Amazon has walled themselves off from any other site and if your book isn't on Amazon you might as well be trying to sell it out of the trunk of your car.  And in all honesty Smashwords and Draft2Digital aren't really much better about that stuff, though I think they've provided slightly more specific responses.

It really leaves me between a rock and a hard place.

The Gravy Train Derails

For a while last year book sales were really humming. For about two months I never had one of those days where I only sell two or three books. I was selling at least ten every single day. Granted that’s not in Stephen King or JK Rowling territory, but I always figure 10 books per day at 30 days for about $2.00 in royalties would make about $600 in sales royalties and then usually about that much from Kindle Unlimited, which is a decent second income.

But towards the end of last year sales started taking a dive. Those streaks of 10 or more books sold became a lot shorter. Instead of plateaus you have more of a mountain range going up and down. January bounced back a little but then February wasn’t great. I could have written that off as being a short month, but then March was even worse.  April was slightly better in part because one day I think someone bought like 30-35 books.  I sold 41 that day and most were single purchases so I tend to think someone bought a bunch.  That was just an aberration though.

Part of it might be I worked on a couple of longer projects so I wasn’t putting out a book every couple of weeks. The rest of it I’m not really sure about. It could be a number of things. Sales for indie authors in general are flatlining. There are too many authors in the gender swap niche anymore, many with what I’d consider inferior products.  Or like that one ring I caught on to who were just posting the same crappy book under seven or eight different names.  Shit like that, helps to drive business away.

Despite my newsletter getting more followers I’ve never really gotten much of a real following. Most of my books either get no reviews or just one crank giving it 1 star because it didn’t end Happily Ever After or whatever. I tried offering books in advance for reviewers, but only one person took me up on it and then disappeared after a couple of months.

It’s hard to isolate which of these variables might be the biggest drag. It could be all of them. It could be something else entirely. Who knows?

Sometimes I think I need to find a new niche. I just stumbled into this one, so I’m not sure how I’d find a new one. Some people make money with “normal” books like mysteries, thrillers, and romances but then far more people don’t. It’s all kind of a crapshoot.

Of course the tailspin might stop on it’s own. Or not. Who knows?

"Reviews" like this don't really help to motivate me either:

This story was divided up into three separate parts that in my opinion each could have stood alone as a separate story on their own. Instead the author tried to shorten them all into one book, leaving out a lot of description of what was happening. Very little on the actual changes that happened with each individual. Clothing and mental changes were very bare in my opinion. The first person's story was one I would have enjoyed much more, but the whole thing was very lacking in plot structure and was very lacking in information that would have made it a better read for me. Second one was again very lacking in detail and description and too short to make much of a story. The third story was the best and was better done in my opinion. If the author had put more into the first two parts, this book would have been much better in my opinion.

The "reviewer" doesn't seem to understand that my time is not infinite for these things.  I had about a week to put the story together before Black Friday, and that's leaving a day or so for Amazon to review and post it.  So I couldn't exactly stretch each part into a novel as this asshole wants.  And the idea that I "tried to shorten them all into one book" is just nonsense.  I started out with the first story where a guy gets turned into a girl but I gave him a girlfriend so he'd have a reason to be at the mall on Black Friday so it's like, "What happens to the girlfriend?"  So I thought I'd write her a story too.  And then I had an idea for a couple and I did that.  It was all organic; I didn't try to "shorten them all into one book" at all.  It's annoying when people who don't even know your real name think they know more about my motives and techniques than I do.

Black Mirror: The Twilight Zone for the 21st Century

People had been telling me to watch Netflix's Black Mirror.  My brother really liked it and I think Offutt liked it too.  I finally got around to it and was mostly impressed.  Like the title says, it's The Twilight Zone (or Outer Limits) for the 21st Century.

Like those shows it's an anthology series so each episode is a different story with different characters, mostly focusing on how technology screws up our lives.  Like The Outer Limits or 4th season of The Twilight Zone the stories are about 45-60 minutes long.

I'm going to do something different and bore the shit out of anyone who actually reads this by talking in brief about all 13 episodes.  Here we go!

The first episode is called "The National Anthem" and has an interesting premise:  a "terrorist" is holding a popular duchess hostage and will kill her at 4pm unless...wait for it...the UK's prime minister fucks a pig on live television.  Yeah, they'll kill her not for money or freeing prisoners or anything like that but for something really gross and embarrassing.

The first question is:  would you fuck a pig to save a celebrity's life?  I suppose it'd depend on the celebrity.  If it were Kim Kardashian, no thank you.  Hmmm, now I have to make a list of celebrities that are pig-fuckable.

The second question is:  would you watch?  The UK government makes it a crime to record or distribute the event, but of course plenty of people are going to do that anyway.  They even have a long air horn-type sound before the broadcast to try to shoo people away.  Of course that doesn't work.  People love trash TV and your state leader fucking a pig is pretty much the ultimate incarnation of that--which is what the terrorist was hoping for.  Me, I think I might watch for a few second and then turn the TV off.

Anyway, even if the concept seems kind of silly, it is thought-provoking.  As far as pilots go it was really good.  And really if you think that was far-fetched the British prime minister at the time of the episode's airing reportedly did fuck a pig as a college frat prank.  Why didn't anyone think to videotape it?

The second episode "15 Million Merits" is by far my favorite episode of the first two seasons and probably second favorite overall.  In a future dystopian world, people live in tiny cubes covered in video screens, where they're subjected to ads almost constantly.  Their jobs are to pedal bikes while watching more screens.  For all the time they ride they get "merits" which is like mining Bitcoins.  The title comes from the amount of merits needed to buy a ticket to audition for an America's Got Talent-type show.

The guy at the center of the story has 15 million merits, which allows him to live in almost luxury.  He can buy the food he wants from the vending machines and skip ads if he wants.  Then he hears a brunette singing in the toilet and convinces her to take his 15 million merits to try out for the show.  She does so and he goes to the audition with her.  The judges are like parodies of the original American Idol judges except the Randy Jackson one is a pimp with his own porno network.  While the girl's singing is good, they say, it's not good enough to win, but she's pretty enough to get a job on the porno network.

When she agrees to that, her would-be boyfriend is enraged and hatches a plan for revenge.  But like pretty much every other episode of this show, things don't go as planned.  The show's judges quell his insurrection with a bribe:  his own show that he'll be handsomely paid for.  In other words, he sells out while the girl is still stuck doing pornos.

What I really liked was how well the episode conveyed the claustrophobia of this world.  The room the guy lives in is literally a mattress and a bunch of video screens.  Even prisons have windows.  I think one day of that and I'd start cracking up.  But then fat guys like me end up cleaning floors or going on an embarrassing game show.  Anyway, it really reminded me of Ready Player One where the main character infiltrates this big gaming company that basically uses indentured servants to mine data.  This was pretty much the same thing.  I'm just not sure what the bikes were for; generating electricity maybe?  Like I said though it was great.

The last episode of the first season was kind of boring.  "A History of You" stars the guy who played Dr. Doom in the lame Fantastic Four reboot.  Basically in this world everyone has these ocular implants that let you store all your memories from birth.  He becomes obsessed with his wife and some friend of hers so he starts playing memories over and over and making her play memories and then going to the guy's house.  Like I said it wasn't all that interesting.  The concept was neat but the whole overly jealous husband thing has been done before.

The second season has 4 episodes, starting with "Be Right Back" starring Hayley Atwell of Captain America/Agent Carter and that ginger guy from Ex Machina and Force Awakens.  Basically ginger guy dies and Hayley Atwell brings him back in a manner of speaking first as a phone app and then an actual body.

Except the android or whatever you'd call it is not exactly like the genuine article.  As time goes by, the more obvious the flaws become.  It was a pretty good episode.  The concept isn't all that unique, but it was done well.

The next episode "White Bear" has a woman with no memory being stalked by a dude in a ski mask, another dude with a club, and a woman with an electric bread knife.  Almost all the people she encounters just stand by taking pictures with their phones.  She meets a woman and man who are also being hunted.  The man is soon "killed" by the two women head south to blow up a TV station that's supposedly controlling everyone's minds.

The twist is actually all of this is sort of a show.  It turns out the woman with no memory was an accomplice to the murder of a little girl.  She taped the girl being killed on her phone and so the UK justice system created this elaborate game where every day she wakes up with no memory and everyone records her as she's being stalked and potentially killed.  The idea being to give her a taste of her own medicine and for the public it's a bit of fun.

It actually reminded me of a story I wrote in 2004 called Tartarus where an assassin would relive the murder of his family every day.  No matter what he tried, they would always die one way or another.  This episode was kind of like that mixed with The Running Man.  I liked the episode for the most part, though not really in my favorites.

The next episode was kind of prescient for the 2016 election.  On a news parody show there's a computer generated cartoon bear named Waldo who starts out mocking a politician.  When it becomes a bit of a scandal, Waldo ends up running against the politician and a female politician whom Waldo's controller falls for.  The public becomes so enamored with the foul-mouthed Waldo that he actually gets 2nd place.

His controller, though, starts to feel guilty and tries to convince the public not to cynically vote for the "None of the Above" candidate because that's not really going to change anything for the better.  We're seeing now where voting for someone unqualified because he "speaks his mind" is getting us.  Like in the US or UK in 2016 no one listens and so in a flashforward Waldo's (now former) controller is homeless while Waldo has become the symbolic head of a fascist government.  It's a good reminder that as citizens we should take the voting process seriously.  It might be funny to vote for Papa Smurf or Harambe or Jill Stein but it can have dangerous consequences.

So that was a good episode and pretty entertaining too.

The last episode for Season 2 "White Christmas" ostensibly features two guys in a station in the Arctic or Antarctic or whatever.  One guy is Jon Hamm and the other is a British guy.  Jon Hamm convinces the British guy to sit down and have a Christmas dinner with him.  He then relates how he used to be the leader of a club where they would coach a nerd on picking up women by video remote.  Except one rendezvous went horribly wrong.  And then he talks about his job, which was kind of weird.  Basically you could pay to have a digital version of your brain (a "cookie") put in a little egg-looking thing to work like an Amazon Echo or Google Home.  So his job was to train the cookies to stop freaking out about being trapped in an egg and do their job of maintaining the house.  Which seems a bit unnecessary, but it was kind of a plot device that pays off later in the episode.

Finally the British guy talks about how his wife got pregnant but didn't want the baby.  He got mad at her and she walked out.  Not only did she leave, she "blocked him" so his ocular implant thing would only show her as a blur and muffle any sound.  Eventually he found out she had a baby but it too was blocked from him.  Only when she died in a train crash could he see the child and find out he's...not the father!  Because the kid was Asian and he and his ex-wife were both white.  So then he realizes his ex-wife was cheating on him with this Asian guy they were friends with.  D'OH!

The British guy goes nuts and winds up killing the kid's grandpa and leaving her in the house during a snowstorm.  Guess what happens to her?  Yeah, not good.

The twist then is all this isn't really happening in real time.  The British guy is just a "cookie" not the real guy and Jon Hamm was just coaxing him into a confession.  Then the double twist, for the club Jon Hamm was leading and the murder he didn't report they put him on a sex offender list that blocks everyone from his sight--and him from them.  I'm not sure how you're supposed to function then if you can't see or talk to anyone.  How would you buy food?  And it seemed like an unnecessary dick move by the cops since he helped them get the confession.  Shouldn't he get immunity for that?

Something interesting was the various Easter eggs in the episode.  The ocular devices were like the ones from "A History of You."  One of the screen names for the guys in Jon Hamm's club is "I am Waldo" like the bear in the previous episode.  A pregnancy test is the same model Hayley Atwell used in the first episode of the season.  At a karaoke bar the British guy's wife sings the song the girl sung on the talent show in "15 Million Merits."  It was kind of fun how they tied things together in a way.  It was a good episode, though like I said it kind of ended on an unnecessary down note.

My big complaint going into the third season was that all of these stories are kind of downers.  I know it's Black Mirror, but even The Twilight Zone had some fun and schmaltzy episodes to mix it up a little.

The first episode of the third season, "Nosedive," kind of remedies this.  It's about a world where everyone is constantly being rated 1-5 stars by everyone else.  The higher your rating, the more things open up for you while if you have less than 3 stars you're a bottom-feeder.

Bryce Dallas Howard is on 4.2 stars by consistently being a huge phony--along with most everyone else.  But to get an awesome new condo she really needs a 4.5 star rating.  Her chance to boost her rating comes when an old "friend" who has a higher rating is getting married and invites her to be the maid of honor.

But when her flight is cancelled, she begins a quixotic quest to reach the wedding that soon becomes like a suicide mission.  She drops a couple of f-bombs and the airport security drops her rating a whole star and any down votes will be doubled for 24 hours.  Because of that she can only rent a shitty Czech car that runs out of power and doesn't have the right adapter to charge.  She gets picked up by a trucker who only has a 1.4 rating because she stopped giving a fuck when her husband died of cancer because his rating was slightly too low for treatment.

When the trucker drops her off Bryce Dallas Howard hitches a ride with a bunch of cosplayers of a Star Trek-like show, but after getting thrown off for admitting she's never seen the show, she borrows someone's ATV to ride the rest of the way to the wedding, which is in progress.  By the time she gets there, she's dirty, drunk, and has like a 1-star rating.  She breaks in to make her speech, which is pretty hilarious.  She ends up in a jail cell, where she and the guy across from her start to engage in insult comedy because neither has a rating anymore so what the hell.

This was probably the lightest episode, which after bingeing the other two seasons was a little overdue.  In a world like that I'm sure I'd have a 0 rating after about a day.  Maybe at some point though popularity will become our currency.  What a terrifying prospect because even if you are popular, maintaining that popularity is a real bitch.

The second episode of the season, "Playtest" gets into some Inception-type ground.  A guy backpacking around the world runs out of money and so is convinced to take a job testing some video game.  It's supposed to be some kind of virtual reality thing but soon things go off the rails.

Then like a better version of Inception you wonder what's real.  It goes through one ending and then another ending and then another ending before we finally have the real ending.  It got to be a little annoying then as you wait for the real ending.  Otherwise it was a decent episode, though not the best.

The third episode, "Shut Up and Dance" is kind of similar in that someone is being used for a game.  In this case a young guy's sister steals his computer and gets it locked up with a virus.  He downloads some anti-malware program but it starts spying on him through the computer's camera, including when he jerks off.

Then they threaten to reveal the video to everyone he knows if he doesn't do what they want.  First they have him ride to a parking garage and get a cake from someone.  Then he has to go to a motel to give the cake to Bron from Game of Thrones.  Together they have to get the keys from a car and drive to a bank, where the kid has to use a gun hidden in the cake to rob the bank.  And then take the money somewhere.  Except then he has to fight some guy to the death while a drone records everything.

And...of course they screw everyone over and post all the blackmail anyway.  I guess they were just doing it for kicks.  Or maybe page views or something.  It never really says who's doing it or why.

It says the reason the young guy was so scared was that he was looking at kids.  They never really specify so I'm not sure how disgusted I'm supposed to be about it.  I mean looking at a "kid" of 16 or 17 is different from 5 or 6, especially since the guy was probably late teens or early 20s.  Like I said, I'm not sure exactly how disgusted I should be.  A little better indication would have helped.

The concept itself isn't very original.  There was a Richard Matheson story and movie of it called "The Box" where a mysterious box shows up on a couple's door and if they push the button in the box they get a million dollars--and some random person dies.  There was also a show on Crackle called Chosen where some random person would receive a gun and picture in the mail and have to kill that person or they'd become a target..  And movies like Speed and Die Hard With a Vengeance have a bad guy playing sadistic games like this with people.   So it's a decent episode but not extremely clever.

The fourth episode, "San Jupinero" is a deviation in that it's a love story.  In "1987" a gawky redhead named Yorkie goes to the eponymous town.  She meets a young black girl named Kelly.  And eventually they make out and then go to bed together--though of course they don't show much because except for language this show is pretty PG-13.  A week later Yorkie is looking for Kelly but she's disappeared.

You start wondering what the hook is and then she goes to this kind of heavy metal bar called the Quagmire and another friend of Kelly's says to look for her in 1996 or 2002.  Oh, so they're time travelers?  Is that the deal?  Before the time skips weren't hugely noticeable unless you're a music and TV historian to get all the references but when it shows a poster of Scream and play Alanis Morrissette and stuff you know it's definitely not 1987.  In "2002" Yorkie finally finds Kelly again.

So now we get to the actual deal:  the town is kind of like a holodeck.  Old people go into it for a few hours once a week to kind of relive their youth.  Which for Yorkie is good because in real life she was crippled from age 21--about the age she is in the holodeck.  When people die, their minds are uploaded into the simulation forever if they want.  Which Yorkie does.  Then it becomes: will Kelly join her?

At this point I'm thinking, "Come on, just let them have a happy ending.  Don't fucking ruin it!"  And of course they make you wait until the credits to find out.  It was a really well-done episode that really sold the love story.  I was glad they didn't piss all over it with some downer twist ending.  Sometimes Happily Ever After is all you want.

BTW, the girl playing Yorkie would make a great Emma Earl in a Tales of the Scarlet Knight movie.  I'm just saying.  Someone get her agent on the phone!

The next episode, "Men Against Fire" really could have been called "Rose Colored Glasses" since that's kind of the concept.  A new recruit and his platoon are in Denmark to hunt "roaches" so your first thought is giant bugs like Starship Troopers.  But soon you realize the roaches are people.  To the soldiers they look like zombies more or less. When the new recruit gets a glitch in his ocular implant (yes we're going back to that well, which is kind of disappointing) he realizes that they aren't zombies; they're actual people.

A psycho member of his platoon takes him captive, where he meets with Doug from House of Cards, who explains to him that the implant makes the enemy look like monsters so the soldiers won't have a problem killing them.  It also censors sounds and even smells to avoid traumatizing the soldiers.  The goal is a sort of eugenics, killing people whose DNA is deemed "inferior" so future generations will be "pure."

He's presented with two options:  either let them fix the implant or they'll use it to show him the true horror of the "roaches" he killed.  So he gives in.  Then later he goes home and sees an idyllic scene with a beautiful woman when really it's an empty wreck.

It was an OK episode, but again not the greatest.

The last episode "Hated in the Nation" was unnecessarily expanded to 90 minutes.  It seemed to drag a little because of that.  It's kind of like a super-sized episode of The X-Files more than anything.  There's a veteran detective (Kelly MacDonald of Brave and No Country for Old Men who uses her native Scottish accent) and her new partner who's a computer nerd who used to work in forensics.

Basically a columnist who mocked a handicapped woman is found dead, but that's only the beginning.  The next day a rapper who mocked a little fan is also killed.  The common thread is they both had a social media hashtag #Deathto and their name that went viral.  The murder weapon turns out to be mechanical bees that are being used to replace real bees for pollinating plants.

As they try to find out who's controlling the bees, they take the next potential victim to a "safehouse" in the country--because there are totally no bees in the country, right?  Eventually the bees get to her.  Working with the company who makes the bees they track down a former employee whose girlfriend was targeted on social media.  So this is his revenge.

Except that's not all he has planned.  When they try to shut down the bees, he has them attack everyone who played the hashtag game.  Which is millions of people probably.  In the end the former forensics nerd goes rogue and tracks down the hacker, though they don't tell you if she kills him or anything.  It was OK but really, it was all just some former employee out for revenge?  That's pretty cliche.  I thought the bees were becoming sentient or something.  Also kind of cliche I suppose.

Like the very first episode, this one poses the question, Would you play the hashtag game?  Even if you knew it could potentially kill someone in real life?  I think a lot of us would because it's all just fun and games--until it comes around back on you.  Social media can do some good things, but it can also be used for petty squabbles and bullying that drive real people to attempt suicide.  I guess in a way then it was like an antibullying PSA.  Only 90 minutes long.

Not a great finish for an otherwise great show.  That's all there is--for now.  If you're still reading then thanks and sorry to spoil it for you.  (OK, I'm not really sorry.)

Grumpy Bulldog vs Rigid Reviewer Thinking

About two months ago I got an annoying review on my novel Secret Origins that said:

Yet another terrible book by this author that completely disregards and degrades an individuals sexuality as somehow sudden gender change can(f.y.I. it cannot) affect a persons sexuality with no respect for the established sexuality that themselves initally set up. Makes for an incredibly irratating read.

The first thing that annoys me is the way this “reviewer” singles me out with that crack about “another terrible book by this author.” As if I’m the only author who ever has a straight man change into a woman and then fall in love with and/or fuck a dude. Hello, pretty much everyone does that! Even far more famous authors like Viriginia Woolf in Orlando and Yann Martel in Self; so why are you singling me out? Go pick on them! They did it a long time before I ever did.

The other thing is this idea that if someone does change sex they have to like the same sex as before. Look, I get that being gay or straight isn’t a choice. But these are just stories. Sudden gender change isn’t a real thing unless you’re one of those Jurassic Park dinosaurs or the frogs they were based on. It’s just fucking fantasy, dude. Who’s to say that if you a straight guy were changed into a woman by an alien artifact or a witch that it couldn’t alter the way their brain is wired? You can’t be so goddamned rigid about something that isn’t real.

It’s like when I wrote an early draft for what eventually became Sisterhood. Sylvia the witch was battling some “class-4 demons.” This dude on a critique group said, “That’s not a class-4 demon. A class-4 demon is…” There aren’t fucking demons! They aren’t real! You can’t set rules in stone for something that doesn’t even exist. It’s like people who say vampires can’t sparkle like in Twilight. Why not? Vampires are as real as the tooth fairy; they can do whatever the author wants them to do. You don’t like it, write your own goddamned book.

This “reviewer” should have read the book Secret Origins was partially based on, the Girl Power book I wrote back in 2013. Because in that one they did still like the same sex. For instance the Aquaman character was gay so when he became a woman he still hooked up with men. And the Batman character hooks up with a girl, which was then ironic because he used to give the Aquaman character a lot of shit about being gay. The Flash and Superman characters still liked the women they were with before.

And going into Secret Origins the game plan was for the Batman character to hook up with Melanie, the nerdy girl who befriends him after he becomes a nerdy teenage girl named Wendy. But then I decided to throw in some relationship drama where Melanie asks Wendy to talk to a boy she’s crushing on. The boy doesn’t want anything to do with Melanie, but he likes Wendy and they eventually become a couple.

Part of the idea behind this was to force Wendy to come to terms with how she treated her former sidekick who is gay. When she found out, Wendy basically had him exiled to a boarding school out west. Now that she’s starting to like boys, she has to start asking herself some hard questions because inside she still thinks of herself as a boy, so if she likes boys what does that make her?

Of course you can’t embrace complexities like that if you just say “This is how it is and that’s that.” It’s kind of sad though because someone skewered Girl Power for the gay sex scenes and then with this review someone basically accuses me of being a homophobe. It’s that old adage that you can’t please everyone—or anyone as it often seems.

#AtoZChallenge Reflections: Cool But Useless

Today is the A to Z Challenge "Reflections" post to milk one more day out of the A to Z Challenge.  I didn't really get much out of the "Challenge."  I think only two people made drive by comments that basically said, "Thanks for sharing.  Now go to my blog!"

As usual, social media wasn't much use.  I used the #AtoZChallenge hashtag on just about every post and as I said, not much for comments.  I have over 2,500 Twitter "followers" and I doubt a single one came by.  Sad!

The annoying thing this year is they didn't do a master list so you were supposed to go back to their site every single day and post a link.  That's way too much work for me.  Plus somehow they got ahead a day, maybe to accommodate those in other countries.  How am I supposed to post a link before the article has even posted?


I don't know why they didn't do a master list and then let people post specific links every day.  Would have made it easier to see what was there.  I might have gotten a couple more drive-bys that way.  Though really I think the think is way too bloated now to be much use.  There are so many blogs that not even the people in charge have time enough to go to all of them once, let alone every day.

It'd probably work better if they separated the blogs into categories.  I think that "Crusade" thing from 5-6 years ago was like that, so all the writing blogs would be in one category.  Then maybe have genre categories so everyone can focus on blogs that are similar to theirs.  That would make it easier for people to find blogs they want to read instead of trying to browse through 2000 links and hoping to find something.

I don't think I'd do the A to Z thing next year.  One of the reasons I used to do it was everyone else was but this year the only other one in my circle to do it was Sandra Ulbrich Almazan.    There doesn't seem much reason to go through so much work for such little gain.  Though after doing Transformers this year, doing a GI JOE one next year might be neat.

I could do it in the same fashion with one good guy and one bad guy, though I'm not sure there would be enough for each letter.  Cobra at least has a couple of Zs:  Zartan and Zarana.  The Joes have Zap, so there you go.  And there's a Joe Q:  Quick-Kick.

Just a rough list from browsing yojoe.com:
A: Ace & Alley Viper
B:  Beachhead & Baroness
C:  Clutch & Cobra Commander
D:  Duke & Destro
E:  Effects & Eel
F:  Flint & Firefly
G:  Gung-Ho & Golobulus
H:  Hawk & Hydro Viper
I:  Iceberg & Ice Viper
J:  Jinx & N/A
K: Knockdown & N/A
L:  Lady Jaye & Lamprey
M:  Mutt & Major Bludd
N:   Night Force & Night Creeper
O:  Outback & Overlord
P:  Psyche-Out & Predacon
Q:  Quick Kick & N/A
R:  Rock n Roll & Road Pig
S:  Snake Eyes & Storm Shadow
T:  Torpedo vs Tele-Viper
U:  Updraft & Undertow
V:   VAMP & Viper
W:  Wild Bill & Wild Weasel
X:  N/A & Xamot
Y:  N/A
Z:  Zap & Zartan

Just like Transformers there's nothing going on with the letter Y.  Not even any vehicles.  What's the deal, Hasbro?  And some of the other letters I have to get a little obscure, but that's kind of fun.

Stuff I Watched Returns!

It's all the stuff I watched since the last time, which was way back on March 24th.

Live By Night:  Ben Affleck stars in, wrote, produced, and directed this gangster movie.  Affleck is a stick-up man who gets put in jail but thanks to his cop father (Brendan Gleeson) is out in three years.  He takes a job for an Italian gangster to take over the rum racket in Tampa.  There he meets Zoe Saldana and they fall in love but the police chief's wayward daughter (Elle Fanning) makes things difficult by making the shut down of a proposed casino a big religious thing.  The film feels overly long, sagging in the middle and lingering too long at the end.  There's not really much you haven't already seen in The Godfather, The Untouchables, so on and so forth.  It's probably just as well that Affleck stepped aside from directing his Batman solo movie because you can see what happens when one guy is wearing too many hats. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Leonardo DiCaprio also produced the movie though he doesn't appear in it.)

The Founder:  Michael Keaton stars as Ray Kroc, the man who didn't create McDonald's but turned it into a household name.  He starts as a struggling milkshake machine salesman.  When McDonald's orders a bunch of the machines, he goes to San Bernadino to find people queued up for a block.  Dick and Mac McDonald show off their innovating process for serving burgers in 30 seconds or less.  Kroc then franchises McDonald's restaurants around the country, starting in his native Midwest, but the punitive contract he signed with the McDonald brothers makes it hard for him to turn a profit, until a lawyer gives him the idea to buy the land for the restaurants and lease it to franchisees.  It starts off as pretty light drama and then gets darker as he turns on the McDonald brothers and his wife, but Michael Keaton manages to keep the character likable even as he's being a total asshole.  Like most biopics I'm sure there's plenty of poetic license, but probably not as much as an Aaron Sorkin screenplay.  The funniest line of the movie is when Dick McDonald (Nick Offerman) says in response to Kroc wanting Coke to sponsor menu boards, "McDonald's isn't about crass commercialism."  I assume that was written for its irony.  (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Jeremy Renner produced the movie though he doesn't appear in it.)

Allied:  It starts off like a riff on Casablanca as Brad Pitt parachutes into French Morocco in 1942 and meets up with a member of the French Resistance (Marion Cottillon) who poses as his wife.  They get close as they set up an operation to assassinate the German ambassador.  After that operation they get married for real and go to England, where she gives birth to their daughter during an air raid in London.  But as D-Day approaches, Allied Command believes Brad Pitt's wife might be a German agent and want him to help smoke her out, but he's more interested in trying to prove her innocence.  Overall it's well-made and well-acted and the end wasn't too obvious.  Though that the end largely hinged on an airplane not starting like a car in a bad horror movie was kind of annoying.  (3/5)  (Fun Fact:  This was directed by Robert Zemeckis of Back to the Future and Forrest Gump fame.  He also directed Brad Pitt's second ex-wife in Beowulf.)

Nocturnal Animals:  I ended up watching this twice because I forgot the Redbox disc at home and so if I were going to pay for 2 days I might as well watch it twice.  That was probably for the best as it helped to straighten things out because there's a movie within the movie and then flashbacks mixed in so you kinda need to pay attention to things.  Basically in grad school Amy Adams and Jake Gyllenhaal got married but then got divorced a short time later when she ragged on his writing and aborted his child before running off with Armie Hammer.  20 years later Jake Gyllenhaal mails her a manuscript he's written.  This is the movie-in-the-movie where Jake Gyllenhaal plays a father whose wife and daughter are taken by some hoods on a West Texas highway and then later raped and murdered.  Michael Shannon is the cop who helps him track down those responsible.  Back in reality, Amy Adams is kind of freaked out by the book but she arranges to meet Jake Gyllenhaal, except he blows her off.  The End.  So yeah once you unravel the plot it's not all that great.  The Amy Adams parts tend to move at a glacial pace.  The movie starts by showing all these grotesquely overweight women dancing naked or in lurid poses; it turns out that they're installations for some art show, but it is just the worst way to start a movie.  Makes me glad I didn't watch this in the theater where I didn't have a fast forward button. (3/5)  (Fun Fact:  In the movie-in-the-movie the Amy Adams part is played by Isla Fisher, which makes sense since I always mix them up.)

Masterminds:  This is "based on a true story" but I assume very loosely based.  It's directed by the director of Napoleon Dynamite so it's not exactly a crime drama.  It's mostly a slapstick comedy about a dumb guy in North Carolina who works for Loomis Fargo in 1997 and steals $17 million from their armored truck warehouse.  Then he goes on the run in Mexico while the "mastermind" of the scheme lives high on the hog back in Carolina.  There are some funny parts but it drags a little after the robbery.  Zach Galifinakis...or however you spell it--the guy from The Hangover--is the robber and Owen Wilson the "mastermind" but when they show the photos of the real life guys they really should have switched roles.  The cast also includes all of the female Ghostbusters except Melissa McCarthy. Jason Sudekis plays a hitman who is sent to kill the Hangover guy but doesn't because they share the same name--except the Hangover guy's I thought was just an alias. (2.5/5)  (Fun Fact:  Owen Wilson's wife in the movie is played by "The Waitress" from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.  Her character actually gets a name in the movie.)

Legion:  I never really read the comic books this show is very loosely based off of, though I do know Legion is the son of Charles Xavier, the leader of the good mutants in the X-Men movies.  He's never mentioned by name, nor do they talk about anything in those movies, though they do make some references to his father that definitely sound like Professor X.  Anyway, David Haller hears voices and so he's in a mental hospital for schizophrenia, but really he's a powerful telepath like his father.  Except there's a weird entity called the "Shadow King"  latching onto him, trying to control him.  He's taken in by a place called Summerland where they try to teach him to use his powers.  Along with him is a woman named Sydney who has the power to temporarily swap bodies with people; David escapes the mental hospital when she touches him and he becomes her for a little while.  There are also bad guys known as Division 3 trying to kill them.  There's a lot of trippy stuff.  I was kind of annoyed when for two episodes near the end everyone was in the mental hospital being told nothing was real because I'd just watched the same thing in Ash vs Evil Dead Season 2 a few days earlier and remembered that same thing on DS9 in the 90s.  The cookie scene in the last episode sets up a mystery going into season 2.  Overall it was an interesting show.  It'd be good if they tied it more to the X-Men universe.  Maybe when they get some other shows they can start doing like the CW and crossing them over. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Dan Stevens plays the main character and his voice always sounds like Hugh Laurie's as Dr. House.  If I closed my eyes and you played clips of both I doubt I could tell them apart.)

Ash vs Evil Dead Season 2:  I watched the first season of this show last year during Comcast's Watchathon and so this year I watched the second season during the Watchathon week.  It was maybe a little improvement over Season 1.  At the end of that season Ash (Bruce Campbell) left the evil Necronomicon in the hands of Ruby (Lucy Lawless) and retired to Jacksonville to hang out and drink with his two younger buddies Kelly and Pablo.  But eventually some of Ruby's minions turn on her and she needs Ash's help, which draws him back to his hometown in "Michigan" (aka New Zealand, because they're totally the same, except for the mountains, ocean, hobbits, etc...) where he meets some old friends and his dad, played by Lee Majors.  It's pretty good.  Basically it maintains the Evil Dead schtick of mixing a lot of violence and gore with slapstick humor.  For fans there are also a lot of Easter eggs, like going back to the house from the first two movies and the appearance of Ted Raimi as Ash's buddy Chet; Ted Raimi is the brother of Evil Dead creator Sam Raimi and like Bruce Campbell usually shows up in Sam Raimi's movies like Darkman, the three Spider-Man movies, etc.  They even make a few references to Army of Darkness, the third movie they didn't really seem to mention in Season 1.  For non-fans like me it's pretty good, but like the movies can get tiresome.  The chainsaw duel near the end was pretty neat, though.  (2.5/5)

Superstore Season 2:  I watched the first season on Hulu last year and thought it was OK.  The second season I watched during Comcast's Watchathon was also OK.  It's still not as good as Parks & Recreation or Community but it's not terrible either.  I still think the mistake they make is having too much of the comedy driven by the employees instead of the customers.  That's fine for an office setting but in a retail setting there are so many weirdos out there.  I mean have you ever gone to Wal-Mart?  None of the characters really stands out all that much and I really wish they'd get a better boss character, someone who could be as good as Ron Swanson or Michael from The Office.  Still at least it's better than the laugh track dreck over on CBS. (2.5/5)

Super Mansion Season 2:  This stop motion superhero series from the creative team of Robot Chicken first aired on Crackle back in 2015 and then later on Cartoon Network.  The second season began airing this year and is a step up.  The plotting is tighter and more focused.  There are some big reveals, epic battles, and new characters to spice things up.  Most of the season revolves around Titanium Rex (voiced by Bryan Cranston) and an invasion of people from his home of Subtopia deep within the Earth.  It becomes kind of like Superman II or Man of Steel then as he and the League of Freedom have to take on a bunch of superpowered beings.  It's just a shame there are only 10 episodes. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Community's Yvette Nicole Brown joined the cast in Season 2 as Portia Jones, an Oprah-like talk show host who also could become the goddess Zenith...who pretty much disappeared halfway through the season.  The rest of the season Zenith was unable to come out because of "trouble in the god's realm" which was kind of lame.)

The Unusuals:  This sounds like the title for a superhero show but it's actually a cop show that's kind of like a mix of gritty procedural like Law & Order or NYPD Blue and a cop comedy like Brooklyn 9-9 or Angie Tribeca.  It stars a pre-Hurt Locker Jeremy Renner as a detective who gets a new partner when his old one is murdered.  The new partner (Amber Tamblyn) is a rich, reformed party girl who became a cop.  Another cop is suffering from a brain tumor and his partner wears a bulletproof vest all the time because he's deathly afraid he'll die at 42 like his father and grandfather.  It's kind of an interesting show even as it mixes tone. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  In the second episode a bank robber is played by a young Miles Teller of Whiplash and Fant4stic.  The creator of this show also created FX's Legion)

Action:  This Fox series from 1999-2000 was ahead of its time for network TV.  There was plenty of bad language and sex with no laugh track like most comedies of the time.  Jay Mohr starred as movie producer Peter Dragon, whose latest big-budget movie flops.  Facing becoming a has-been, he has to make his next project work.  Then he meets a hooker who used to be a child star (Illeana Douglass, who I often confuse with Allison Janney) who helps him find the perfect script.  But that's about the only thing that goes right.  From there it's a series of disasters with a star who's a struggling addict and another who has body issues, a neurotic writer, and a director who dies.  Watching this would have been better if Crackle hadn't mixed up the order of the episodes.  This is the kind of series where you need to watch them in order to really understand what's going on.  Fox not surprisingly cancelled the show after 8 episodes.  As sort of a screw you to the audience they ended with Peter "dying" of a heart attack so viewers thought that's how the series actually ended.  They dumped the remaining 5 on FX later.  Anyway, some of the references are dated now, but it's otherwise a good show. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Originally this was going to be on HBO but Fox outbid them.  In hindsight HBO probably would have been a better home for it as they could have really gone all-out and they would have had less pressure ratings-wise than a major network.)

Mystery Science Theater 3000 The Return:  This Kickstartered Netflix series is a reboot of the old 80s/90s series.  It's basically a guy and mostly two robots making fun of a bad old movie.  The plot device is that a mad scientist (the daughter of the original mad scientist) is trying to continue her father's work on an unsuspecting spaceship pilot.  The effects are suitably cheesy.  Like any of the old series or Rifftrax or anything similar some jokes hit and some miss.  There are more hits than misses I'd say.  The first episode features a really cheesy Danish kaiju movie called "Reptilicus."  The monster is obviously a model and a part where he eats a guy looks like it was done with a cartoon.  There are about 20 episodes, which at 90 minutes apiece make bingeing a bit of a chore. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Original creator Joel Hodgson produced and co-directed the first episode.)

Powerless:  I watched the pilot of this and wasn't really very impressed.  It's supposed to be an office comedy set in the DC Universe.  Of course no major characters appear, but God knows they mentioned Bruce Wayne enough.  Which like in Supergirl where they kept mentioning "her cousin" it gets to be irritating because you know Ben Affleck isn't going to appear so unless they set it in a parallel universe and hire someone else they're just going to keep mentioning him without showing him.  None of the characters shown really seemed all that interesting and Vanessa Hudgens especially wasn't very good as the perky would-be Leslie Knope of the office.  Pilots can be pretty shaky, so maybe it'll come together later, but I don't really feel like finding out. (1/5)

The Road Warrior:  I think now I finally watched all of the Mad Max movies, though none of them really impressed me.  The plot for this one is pretty much the same as the two movies that came after it.  Max gets involved with a group of people and winds up helping them escape from a bad guy to go start life anew.  In this case he hooks up a big rig to a tank of fuel so a group of people can escape from "Humungus" (who looked like a bare-chested Jason Voorheis) and his minions.  There's a lot of car chases and not much dialogue, which is I guess what you expect.  Meh. (2/5)

The Man With X Ray Eyes:  This 60s Roger Corman film follows a pretty familiar formula:  scientist experiments on himself and things go to shit.  In this case the guy invents eye drops that let him see in other spectrums.  Somehow he kills his partner and has to go on the lam in a sideshow run by Don Rickles.  When Don Rickles is going to rat on him, though, he decides to go to Vegas and use his powers to cheat at cards.  Except he makes it painfully obvious he's cheating and so he gets run out of there, chased by cops, and ends up in a revival where his eyes explode or something.  Better effects and less cliche storytelling would have made this better but you can say that Corman is at least usually competent. (2/5)

Novocaine:  Steve Martin stars in this dark comedy about a dentist who gets involved with a drug addict and then is framed for murder by his assistant.  I didn't pay all that attention to most of it.  The end hinges upon Martin ripping out all the teeth in his mouth and leaving them in his dead brother's mouth before burning the place down so cops will think he's dead.  That's implausible for a number of reasons.  Even with Novocaine, it's hard to pull one tooth out let alone all 32 of them.  And the blood loss would probably kill you or make you faint before you could get out the door.   Even more implausible is that he writes a book under an assumed name and sells it for enough money for a chateau in France.  Ha.  We should all be so lucky. (2/5)

The Hollow Point:  In an Arizona border town (actually Utah) Mexican cartels are having rednecks smuggle bullets across the border.  When a deal goes sour, new sheriff Patrick Wilson has to find out who did what...and then gets his right hand cut off by a machete-wielding John Leguizamo.  Yeah, that's kinda unexpected.  I mean Leguizamo as the stone-faced, machete-packing tough guy?  Really?  Somehow Patrick Wilson is out of the hospital the same day to go and find Leguizamo and his conspirators, including a bloated Jim Belushi.  It's an OK action movie though it's hard to take it as seriously as it would like you to. (2.5/5)

The Beaver:  This was supposed to be Mel Gibson's big comeback film--at least on the screen.  It didn't really turn out that way.  And almost a decade later he still hasn't made that comeback as an actor, though Hacksaw Ridge bought him some credibility as a director.  Anyway, this is like a creepier, less slapstick version of Mrs. Doubtfire.  Mel Gibson is a depressed toy company exec who gets thrown out by his wife (Jodie Foster, who also directed the movie) and finds a beaver puppet that he starts to use as a surrogate.  The device works for a little while as he connects with his younger son and much creepier fucks his wife in the shower with the beaver still on his hand--though turned away.    The movie also features the late Anton Yelchin as Gibson's teenage son who makes a lot of money writing papers for other students and who gets paid to write the valedictorian speech of a pretty, popular girl played by Jennifer Lawrence.  Drama ensues and some Twilight Zone-type weirdness where the puppet becomes more and more its own entity.  It's OK but not great.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Netflix captioning says the puppet uses a Cockney accent though I think it's more like the Australian accent Gibson had in Mad Max and other earlier films.)

Cold is the Night:  Alice Eve (that chick who ran around in her underwear in the second Star Trek reboot movie) is the manager of a dumpy motel.  Then Bryan Cranston and the Penguin from that crappy Gotham show check in, presumably to rest for a few hours but Penguin guy buys a hooker who then kills him.  His car is confiscated with a bunch of drug money in it so Bryan Cranston takes Alice Eve captive to get her help.  Cranston plays the role with a Russian accent and sunglasses because he's legally blind, which could be like a sequel to the Maragaret Atwood book The Blind Assassin:  The Legally Blind Assassin.  Anyway, it was OK but really Cranston's character goes out like a bitch, which was underwhelming.  In the end Alice Eve smuggles out some money in a turtle tank so she doesn't have to live in a dumpy motel anymore.  Yay! (2.5/5)

Come and Find Me:  Another Breaking Bad alum, Aaron Paul, stars in this thriller.  Aaron Paul and his girlfriend move into an old house and then one day he wakes up and she's a gone girl.  After more than a year a "friend" of hers comes over and starts knocking holes in walls to look for something.  Later Aaron Paul finds some photos she took that show Russian(?) gangsters and other people.  Long story short, she was working for the government.  It's OK, not really as messed up as Gone Girl.   The end is a bit cryptic.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The movie was written and directed by Zack Whedon, the sibling of Joss I assume anyway.)

Midnight Meat Train:  Bradley Cooper is a photographer in New York who sees a woman disappear on a train.  Investigating this, he finds that a big, weird guy (Vinnie Jones) is murdering people on the train and literally butchering them, hanging them like sacks of meat and stuff.  He and his girlfriend work on different angles then to try to stop Vinnie Jones.  And eventually the find out that the train is run by a secret society to feed CHUDs or Mole People or some goddamned stupid thing like that.  It's based on a Clive Barker story so there's lots of blood and gore and of course not a happy ending. (2/5)  (Fun Fact:  Ted Raimi from Ash vs Evil Dead--see above--is one of the victims.)

Animal Kingdom:  A boy's druggie mom overdoses and so he goes to live with his grandma and three ne'er do well uncles in Sydney.  They press him into the family business but when one of the uncles (Joel Edgerton) dies the kid is torn between his family and a cop played by Guy Pearce with a cheesy mustache.  But after one uncle (Rogue One's Ben Mendelssohn) kills the kid's girlfriend, he decides to take justice into his own hands.  It was interesting but I fell asleep in the middle of it and had to go back and watch the rest later, which isn't a ringing endorsement. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: The kid should have choked Ben Mendelssohn to death since he's been choked out by both Darth Vader and Bane.  I'm just saying.)

The Guard:  Sort of a buddy cop movie about a local Irish cop (the Garda as they're known) played by Brendan Gleeson of Live By Night--see above--who gets help from an American FBI agent played by Don Cheadle.  They don't really have chemistry like Danny Glover and Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies but it is a fun pairing of small town street smarts and American technological analysis.  They have to work together to spoil a big drug deal led by Mark Strong (Kingsman, Green Lantern) and Liam Cunningham (Game of Thrones) that has also led to a couple of murders around the town.  Overall it's pretty good, like Lethal Weapon meets Hot Fuzz, though the ending is a bit cryptic as to weather one main character survives or not. (3/5)

Extras:  I'm not sure if there was an American version too, but this was the original BBC show.  Ricky Gervais is a struggling actor who along with his female friend gets work as an extra.  His epic quest is to get a line.  Each episode has a famous guest star including Ben Stiller, Kate Winslet, Samuel L Jackson, and Sir Patrick Stewart, who uses his connections to get Gervais's sitcom script a pilot on BBC.  In a way it's like a British version of the Seinfeld because a lot of the humor is from Gervais and his friend consciously and unconsciously offending people and digging themselves only deeper into social awkwardness.  As you might expect there's less slapstick humor and more subtlety than most American sitcoms. (4/5) (Fun Fact:  In the overly long Christmas Special Gervais plays an alien slug on Doctor Who and gets bested by David Tennant with a salt shaker.)

Hard Eight:  I had to watch this on YouTube years ago because Netflix, Blockbuster, etc didn't have it in stock.  It's the directorial debut of Paul Thomas Anderson, who went on to make movies like Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and There Will Be Blood.  Many of the actors in this later appear in those movies like Phillip Baker Hall, John C Reilly, and the late Phillip Seymour Hoffman.  The premise is that Hall finds Reilly outside a restaurant and takes him under his wing as a gambler/con man in Reno.  But then Reilly falls in love with Gwyneth Paltrow but things fall apart when she has sex with a guy who refuses to pay and they beat him up.  It's a decent movie, especially for a first film, with a noirish feel.  It's not as slow and bloated as some of Anderson's recent efforts. (3.5/5)

My Cousin Vinny:  I had never actually watched this before.  It's a good fish-out-of-water story as two kids are going to college when they're arrested for murder in rural Alabama.  One guy's mom calls his cousin Vinny (Joe Pesci) who has a law license but has never actually tried a case before.  He stumble bumbles his way through the trial before finally proving the kids innocent with help from his fiancee Marissa Tomei, who won an Oscar probably for kissing and sleeping with Joe Pesci.  It has to take real acting chops to find him attractive. (3/5)

They Live:  It's amazing how prescient this movie from 1988 was.  Its focus on class warfare and our consumption economy is more relevant than ever.  WWF superstar "Rowdy" Roddy Piper is a drifter who finds a pair of sunglasses that let him see that aliens (or ghouls as they're called in the credits) are controlling our world through subliminal messages and bribing those in charge.  With the help of Keith David, Piper takes down the system to let everyone see the true face of evil.  It would be a better movie with a real actor in the starring role, but otherwise even after nearly 30 years the message isn't dated at all. (3/5)

4:3:2:1:  4 female friends in London have 4 converging adventures over a weekend.  One's parents are splitting up and she's bummed about an abortion.  One is essentially raped by a guy she thinks is someone she's been talking to on the Internet.  One fails a driving test and gets locked in a panic room with her lesbian lover.  And one stumbles on a diamond smuggling ring in the market where she works.  Eventually it all ties together and they seemingly live Happily Ever After...except one of the diamond smugglers is probably going to murder them.  Yay? (2.5/5)  (Fun Fact:  Kevin Smith has a small role as an overweight air traveler--get it?--and Alexander Siddig of DS9/Game of Thrones has a small role as one girl's dad and Mandy Patinkin has a small role as a piano teacher, but writer/director Noel Clarke gives himself the "And" credit.  Because he's done way more than those guys...um, maybe?)

The Big Kahuna:  This is the kind of movie that feels more like a play as it has only 3 actors (and some extras) and very few settings.  Kevin Spacey and Danny Devito are two veteran sales reps for industrial lubricants at a conference in Witchita.  They have a younger guy with them for the experience or whatever.  The title refers to some big CEO they're hoping to talk into a lucrative deal.  Except at the little get together they're throwing in a hotel suite the guy doesn't seem to show up.  But then they realize he was there and chatting with the young guy about religion and dogs for a while.  They dispatch the young guy to track the guy down and close the sale...except he's more interested in selling the guy on Jesus.  That's pretty much it.  Kevin Spacey dominates the movie with a lot of rapid fire snark and most of the movie Danny Devito is in the background, though he gets a nice soliloquy at the end.  It's OK but not really a whole lot going on. (2.5/5)

No Retreat, No Surrender:  In the mid-80s karate movies were en vogue and this shamelessly attempts to capitalize on that.  It starts in LA where some gangsters muscle a guy out of his karate dojo.  Because that seems like a sound business plan, right?  Maybe if you bulldoze the dojo for a Starbucks.  Anyway, the guy and his son Jason move to Seattle...which still looks like southern California.  Jason makes a black friend who has a jheri curl and since it was the mid-80s is into break dancing, another popular trend of the time.  And some fat kid takes an instant dislike to him.  Then Jason runs afoul of some kids at the local dojo because the most popular kid there's girl is into Jason.  What's funny is they mention that they know each other and met up at a pet shop in the mall and yet that's never shown on the screen, so I guess you take their word for it.  That's the level of filmmaking we're talking about here.  And then Jason calls on the spirit of Bruce Lee to teach him.  Some Asian guy who's supposed to be Bruce Lee then shows up at an abandoned house Jason turns into his clubhouse to run him through a bunch of drills.  These help him to defeat Jean-Claude van Damme, one of the gangsters who try to take over the Seattle dojo.  Another great investment, right?  This cheesy movie is made better by the Rifftrax treatment. (2/5) (Fun Facts:  The Bruce Springsteen song "No Surrender" features  the repeated lyrics:  "No retreat, baby, no surrender" which is probably where they got the movie title from, trying to capitalize on another popular trend.  I don't know if this is the secret origin of JCVD, but the director must have told him that he was a robot because he acts about as woodenly as Dolph Lundgren as Drago in Rocky IV--and their characters are both named Ivan!  Real original.  BTW, amazingly there was a sequel to this piece of crap.)