Last year I wrote an entry on all these omnibuses that ranged from 800-2500 pages and were being sold for a piddly 99 cents. At times they've really clogged up Amazon charts, especially in erotica categories.
It turns out there's something even worse: stuffing. A few "authors" have been very successful manipulating Amazon's Kindle Unlimited system by selling a book that also includes several other books, though it's not necessarily indicated in the book's description. And sometimes in "mosaic stuffing" those books stuffed into the book are themselves stuffed with another book! It's like one of those Russian dolls where you open it and there's a smaller doll and you open that and it's a smaller doll and so on.
This David Gaughran guy seems to be really on top of it, so you can read a couple of articles about it, like this article from Nigel Mitchell's Twitter feed and this article from Facebook "friend" Kathy Steineman. The first one also has some stuff on "#Cockygate" and also describes a sleazy way that these stuffing "authors" would use to get people to flip through their books and post reviews. It's called #Tiffanygate because everything needs a fucking "gate" attached I guess.
This is another of Amazon's self-inflicted problems and in Amazon fashion they're kinda, sorta handling it--erratically as always. They won an arbitration suit against some authors recently. Some authors have had books taken down and some authors might have accounts blocked but others are still alive and well. The second article talks about some of the minimal ways authors are changing their stuffed books. Mostly it's just calling it a "compilation."
Now some legit authors like me do things like omnibuses or boxed sets. Those are not "stuffing," though I worry Amazon in their jackbooted way will start to just shut down anything that even looks vaguely like stuffing--so long as it's not a Big Five compilation. I do omnibuses because I figured that they might attract the value-conscious consumer. I mean someone might not want to pay $2.99 a book but maybe they'll pay $4.99 for a trilogy or $9.99 for a bunch of books. Or get them from Kindle Unlimited.
Other authors like Sandra Ulbrich Almazan and Jay Noel have been in compilations and box sets. Those are done so that authors can band together for the greater good. Again it's about creating a value for customers and then hoping that some of those readers will like your story or book and go to find more. It's like if an indie band puts a song on a soundtrack or sampler; the point is to draw listeners in so they buy more.
Those are all legit uses, or at least they should be. "Stuffing" is just a lot of bullshit. It's just throwing a bunch of stuff together to get page views and thus more money from the Kindle pot. At least those omnibuses I complained about said they were compilations so they aren't technically "stuffing" though still skeevy. Any time someone puts out a 2000-3000 page book for 99 cents, you should know it's not on the up-and-up. In my original entry I think I compared it to if someone offers 200 cans of pop for a dollar then it's probably not very good. Even authors looking for "exposure" probably aren't that desperate, right? Or not.
But I don't know how you can really solve it. This sort of stuff is always like a game of whack-a-mole: you knock out one stuffer and there'll be another and another. Or if you change from page views to something else then scammers will find a new way to manipulate the system. That's just what people do. It's like viruses and hacking; they make software to stop this worm or virus and then another one pops up. It never ends when there's so much money at stake. And for Amazon there's no need to work too judiciously on this problem as they're making money on this stuff. It's really other authors these "stuffers" screw over, not Amazon. So you can't really expect Amazon to move too quickly on the problem.
If you've seen a stuffed book, report it to Amazon and maybe the Evil Empire will stop it. Or not.
Monday, July 30, 2018
Friday, July 27, 2018
Hasbro's Distribution Is Still Stuck in the 80s
In the last couple of years I started buying Transformers toys again, but I never imagined that it would be so goddamned difficult. I mean it's 2018, so all you have to do is go to Amazon, right? Right? Well no, because Hasbro has an asinine distribution system that's stuck in the brick-and-mortar days. Except the brick-and-mortar doesn't really give a shit anymore. Thus, it ends up that most of their reimagined original Transformers toys end up either being shunted to discount stores or bought out by EBay or Amazon Marketplace buyers.
Up until last January it was actually kind of fun. Sort of a scavenger hunt as some stores were still selling old Combiner Wars toys from like 2015. Last year when I went on vacation to Petoskey it was a fun diversion to go to the various Wal-Marts, KMarts, Meijers, and whatnot just to see what stores had. I got a couple of Titans Return toys I hardly ever saw in Detroit and a Combiner Wars Silverbolt that was fairly old by that point.
Around January, though, pretty much every store ditched the Titans Return toys (and any older ones) in favor of the new Power of the Primes series. The first wave of which: Jazz, Slug, Swoop, and Dreadwind are pretty much everywhere now. Some stores have the larger Starscream and Grimlock too. Some.
Now the asinine part is that there was in theory another series out since then and yet you can't find those hardly anywhere. I found Snarl at a Meijer, Rippernsapper and Blackwing (whose wings are purple BTW) at Wal-Mart, and the larger Elita-1 and Hun-Grrr hidden on a top shelf of another Wal-Mart. But I could not find Moonracer or Sludge anywhere. The latter really annoyed me because I had 4 of the 5 pieces of "Volcanicus" the giant robot you can form with the five main Dinobots, something fans have wanted to do since the Dinobots first appeared around 1985. Yet no matter where I looked, no one had him! (I finally did see him and Moonracer in a store--last Monday, months after they were supposed to be out.)
Finally I just gave up. EBay had a Sludge and Moonracer for a fairly reasonable price and I had a 15% coupon so I just used that and said fuck it. I mean if Hasbro doesn't want my money then fuck them, let some skeevy online seller have it.
As someone with a fucking business degree, this makes no fucking sense to me. Why make your product unavailable to consumers? That's what Hasbro ends up doing because they apparently don't distribute most of their toys through Amazon, only the world's largest online retailer and perhaps largest retailer in general. I did get my Grimlock from them but that was only a brief window when they had it. The movie-based toys they do a little better on, but the rest of the Transformers line is pretty much only available through third-party Marketplace sellers, who of course mark the prices up, often two or three times what retail would be.
Many of the Titans Return line I saw once--if at all--in stores. It was basically if you didn't pounce on them right away, you'd never see them again. There were some that would rot the shelves until being marked for clearance, but so many were almost as rare as Bigfoot.
Now since in theory Hasbro distributes to brick-and-mortar stores they might have some online, right? Or at least let you reserve them online like you can do for fucking boxes of cereal? Nah. Wal-Mart just says "in store only" and Target is entirely useless; according to their site the store near me in Novi has every toy from 2014 on in stock...somewhere. Of course they won't let you reserve it online and I'm sure if you ask an employee they'd just give you a blank stare.
To make it all worse, Toys R Us went out of business this year. So now there are no big toy store chains left. Yet even last year Hasbro was still marketing a number of Transformers (and other toys) as "Exclusive" to Toys R Us. Now those are being liquidated at rock-bottom prices.
Other Transformers toys have ended up on discount store shelves like Five Below and Ollie's. I never saw the giant Trypticon toy at Wal-Mart, Target, or Toys R Us but when I walked into Ollie's before Memorial Day they had 12 fucking cases of them by the entrance! Instead of selling those for $100 or so on, say, Amazon, Hasbro wound up liquidating them for $50 at Ollie's. Who the hell is running that place?
It simply makes no sense to me. My marketing teacher in college said one of the most important rules of marketing is that your product has to be available to buy. You can have awesome commercials and presence online and all that, but if people can't find the fucking product, what good is any of it? That's Hasbro's problem. Their hidebound policies have made most of their products unavailable.
It's real simple to figure out: their bread-and-butter (toy stores) are gone. Brick-and-mortar stores will give you like four pegs at most for Legends and Deluxe class and only a bit of shelf space for larger Voyager and Leader class. As for Titans like Trypticon and Fortress Maximus? Yeah, right. And you're lucky if these brick-and-mortar stores bother restocking more than three times a year. So, hello, you've got to get your shit online. Not through EBay. Not through Marketplace. Not through "Joe's Toy Box" or some other rinky-dink website. Through your own website, through Amazon, and it'd be great if Wal-Mart, Target, etc could get their shit together too.
It's not just Transformers. Some of their Star Wars toys have the same problem. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same with My Little Pony or some of their girl toy lines. And it's not probably just Hasbro. I collect some of the superhero toys, many of which are unavailable in brick-and-mortar stores and erratically priced online. Most of those I think are Mattel, so it's probably unfair to single Hasbro out. But it's still pretty fucking asinine.
I heard yesterday Mattel is cutting 2,000 jobs--mostly white collar, I think--because of a drop in sales. They attributed it to the closure of Toys R Us. Which shows how much they're still relying on the brick-and-mortar. I guess in a way it makes sense as kids aren't on the Internet quite as much as adults and they don't have credit cards to buy stuff either. At least not usually.
If getting answers from Amazon weren't like talking to the Sphinx or the fucking Oracle of Delphi, maybe I'd ask them what the deal is. Why aren't they carrying more of the Transformers and so on? Is it their fault or just Hasbro's? I blame Hasbro, but maybe it's not. Maybe John Oliver or someone can do a piece on it. It just pisses me off because it's so illogical.
Up until last January it was actually kind of fun. Sort of a scavenger hunt as some stores were still selling old Combiner Wars toys from like 2015. Last year when I went on vacation to Petoskey it was a fun diversion to go to the various Wal-Marts, KMarts, Meijers, and whatnot just to see what stores had. I got a couple of Titans Return toys I hardly ever saw in Detroit and a Combiner Wars Silverbolt that was fairly old by that point.
Around January, though, pretty much every store ditched the Titans Return toys (and any older ones) in favor of the new Power of the Primes series. The first wave of which: Jazz, Slug, Swoop, and Dreadwind are pretty much everywhere now. Some stores have the larger Starscream and Grimlock too. Some.
Now the asinine part is that there was in theory another series out since then and yet you can't find those hardly anywhere. I found Snarl at a Meijer, Rippernsapper and Blackwing (whose wings are purple BTW) at Wal-Mart, and the larger Elita-1 and Hun-Grrr hidden on a top shelf of another Wal-Mart. But I could not find Moonracer or Sludge anywhere. The latter really annoyed me because I had 4 of the 5 pieces of "Volcanicus" the giant robot you can form with the five main Dinobots, something fans have wanted to do since the Dinobots first appeared around 1985. Yet no matter where I looked, no one had him! (I finally did see him and Moonracer in a store--last Monday, months after they were supposed to be out.)
Finally I just gave up. EBay had a Sludge and Moonracer for a fairly reasonable price and I had a 15% coupon so I just used that and said fuck it. I mean if Hasbro doesn't want my money then fuck them, let some skeevy online seller have it.
As someone with a fucking business degree, this makes no fucking sense to me. Why make your product unavailable to consumers? That's what Hasbro ends up doing because they apparently don't distribute most of their toys through Amazon, only the world's largest online retailer and perhaps largest retailer in general. I did get my Grimlock from them but that was only a brief window when they had it. The movie-based toys they do a little better on, but the rest of the Transformers line is pretty much only available through third-party Marketplace sellers, who of course mark the prices up, often two or three times what retail would be.
Many of the Titans Return line I saw once--if at all--in stores. It was basically if you didn't pounce on them right away, you'd never see them again. There were some that would rot the shelves until being marked for clearance, but so many were almost as rare as Bigfoot.
Now since in theory Hasbro distributes to brick-and-mortar stores they might have some online, right? Or at least let you reserve them online like you can do for fucking boxes of cereal? Nah. Wal-Mart just says "in store only" and Target is entirely useless; according to their site the store near me in Novi has every toy from 2014 on in stock...somewhere. Of course they won't let you reserve it online and I'm sure if you ask an employee they'd just give you a blank stare.
To make it all worse, Toys R Us went out of business this year. So now there are no big toy store chains left. Yet even last year Hasbro was still marketing a number of Transformers (and other toys) as "Exclusive" to Toys R Us. Now those are being liquidated at rock-bottom prices.
Other Transformers toys have ended up on discount store shelves like Five Below and Ollie's. I never saw the giant Trypticon toy at Wal-Mart, Target, or Toys R Us but when I walked into Ollie's before Memorial Day they had 12 fucking cases of them by the entrance! Instead of selling those for $100 or so on, say, Amazon, Hasbro wound up liquidating them for $50 at Ollie's. Who the hell is running that place?
It simply makes no sense to me. My marketing teacher in college said one of the most important rules of marketing is that your product has to be available to buy. You can have awesome commercials and presence online and all that, but if people can't find the fucking product, what good is any of it? That's Hasbro's problem. Their hidebound policies have made most of their products unavailable.
It's real simple to figure out: their bread-and-butter (toy stores) are gone. Brick-and-mortar stores will give you like four pegs at most for Legends and Deluxe class and only a bit of shelf space for larger Voyager and Leader class. As for Titans like Trypticon and Fortress Maximus? Yeah, right. And you're lucky if these brick-and-mortar stores bother restocking more than three times a year. So, hello, you've got to get your shit online. Not through EBay. Not through Marketplace. Not through "Joe's Toy Box" or some other rinky-dink website. Through your own website, through Amazon, and it'd be great if Wal-Mart, Target, etc could get their shit together too.
It's not just Transformers. Some of their Star Wars toys have the same problem. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same with My Little Pony or some of their girl toy lines. And it's not probably just Hasbro. I collect some of the superhero toys, many of which are unavailable in brick-and-mortar stores and erratically priced online. Most of those I think are Mattel, so it's probably unfair to single Hasbro out. But it's still pretty fucking asinine.
I heard yesterday Mattel is cutting 2,000 jobs--mostly white collar, I think--because of a drop in sales. They attributed it to the closure of Toys R Us. Which shows how much they're still relying on the brick-and-mortar. I guess in a way it makes sense as kids aren't on the Internet quite as much as adults and they don't have credit cards to buy stuff either. At least not usually.
If getting answers from Amazon weren't like talking to the Sphinx or the fucking Oracle of Delphi, maybe I'd ask them what the deal is. Why aren't they carrying more of the Transformers and so on? Is it their fault or just Hasbro's? I blame Hasbro, but maybe it's not. Maybe John Oliver or someone can do a piece on it. It just pisses me off because it's so illogical.
Wednesday, July 25, 2018
You Know You Don't Want It: Stuff I Watched
So yeah more stuff I watched. Hooray.
Annihilation: Like the director's previous Ex Machina, this is a sci-fi movie that is not extremely action-packed, but is tense, gorgeous, and hard to pin down. (And both feature Oscar Isaac--bonus!) Basically a meteor or something hits a part of the southern coast by a lighthouse and starts mutating all the life in the area: grass, trees, animals, and even people! Natalie Portman's husband Oscar Isaac (so yes, Star Wars nerds, Padme Amidala hooked up with Poe Dameron!) was part of an expedition to explore "the shimmer" and disappeared. Until he comes stumbling home with amnesia and then passes out. So she agrees to join 4 other women to explore the Shimmer. The place is just crazy with all the mutated stuff. And naturally the people are not immune either. Anyway, if you're more a fan of sci-fi like 2001 or Solaris than Star Wars or Transformers (Michael Bay version) then you'll probably like this. And I guess if you're a fan of women in movies who aren't taking off their tops or wearing skimpy costumes. (4/5)
Rememory: This is the same sort of movie as Annihilation. Only it involves a machine that can let you see your memories without the "rose-colored glasses" or shit-colored glasses with which we remember so many things. And it can also bring back repressed memories. Peter Dinklage becomes obsessed with the machine after his brother is killed in a drunk driving accident--caused by him. With the machine he hopes to hear his brother's dying words. On the night he's planning to see the machine's creator, that creator is murdered! So Peter Dinklage steals a copy of the machine from the creator's widow (after plying her with Scotch and telling her a sob story about her husband) he starts to investigate the prime suspects: the creator's mistress and one of his test subjects (the late Anton Yelchin). But the solution turns out to be something unexpected as is a revelation about the night Peter Dinklage's brother died. Like Annihilation it's a slower sci-fi movie but it ends with a lot of emotional depth. It's definitely worth watching. (4/5) (Fun Fact: Ironically for a movie about memory I forgot I had got a copy free from Google Play months ago until I saw a preview on another movie. And then I watched it on Amazon Prime anyway.)
Pacific Rim: Uprising: As far as sequels go, this was a Temple of Doom or Terminator 3 where it wasn't terrible, but it lacks the epic grandeur of the preceding film. T3 especially comes to mind as that largely involved a new cast, like this. The two scientists and the female pilot from the last film return, though the latter dies soon into the movie, which I always hate. John Boyega stars as Idris Elba's son we never heard anything about in the previous movie. He's thrust back into action as a rogue giant robot kills his adopted sister. They do a little switcheroo so the bitchy woman you think is the villain and a good guy from the last movie switch places. Still, overall there's just not the same epicness of the first one. Though they hint at a third one, I doubt it'll happen. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: It's funny at one point when John Boyega switches from his natural British accent to American to make fun of a guy because then he sounds like Finn from Star Wars.)
Tomb Raider: I've never played the video games and I only watched the Angelina Jolie movies once maybe. Like Pacific Rim, this was OK but didn't really feel all that epic or fun like the previous movies, Indiana Jones, or even National Treasure. I guess to pad the run time it starts out with a pointless kickboxing scene and then some extreme bike riding. Simon Pegg's frequent cohort Nick Frost shows up in a cameo as a pawn shop owner who gives Lara Croft money to go to Southeast Asia and get a boat to a mysterious island. It's funny how the boat captain she barely knows is like instantly ready to lay down his life for her. I guess she's attractive, but I wouldn't sacrifice myself for her in like ten minutes--at least not without getting some first. (Oink, oink.) Anyway, eventually she has to stop a bad guy from unleashing one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I'm not sure if there will be a sequel or not. Maybe they can put more effort into the script. (2.5/5)
The Commuter: A fairly predictable "thriller" with a convoluted plot. Liam Neeson is a former cop and now former insurance salesman who's on a commuter train when Vera Farmiga offers him $100K to find a Federal witness code named "Prynne." I figured out who this was about a half-hour into the movie. And I figured out who the bad guy was long ahead of time. I mean it was one of those things where they hadn't really used one somewhat well-known actor so they had to use him at some point. And really the whole thing seemed pretty dumb; if the people running this were so powerful, couldn't they have just killed the witness themselves? (2/5) (Fun Facts: Liam Neeson's had a movie where he's solving a mystery on a plane and a train, so now all he needs is to solve a mystery in an automobile. Also, the cop played by Patrick Wilson was named Alex Murphy--which was the name of the dead cop who was turned into Robocop in the original and shitty remake!)
Game Night: A bunch of supposed thirty-somethings get together for a game night that's hijacked when Jason Bateman's rich brother Kyle Chandler stages a phony kidnapping of himself that turns out to be real. So at first everyone thinks they're playing a game but then it turns real. Meanwhile their weird cop neighbor (Todd from Breaking Bad) has a game of his own going on. Some funny bits but mostly not all that interesting. It was the free part of a rent one, get one free so I guess I got my money's worth anyway. (2.5/5)
Baywatch: As I said on Facebook, some movies sound bad but end up pretty good. This is not that. It's just a bunch of warmed-over cliches strung together into a lame movie about lifeguards trying to foil a drug smuggler. The Rock is fine as the head lifeguard, but there's not really much to work with. David Hasselhoff shows up for a cameo, as does Pam Anderson, though they wisely don't give her any lines. (2/5)
American Made: This one slipped under my radar as I never was going to watch it in the theater and just never got around to renting it on DVD. But now it's on HBO and so I finally watched it On Demand. Tom Cruise is an airline pilot who's recruited to work for the CIA taking pictures of communists in Central and South America. Eventually though he starts running drugs on the side with Pablo Escobar and that whole crew that so much has been made of the last few years. When the heat gets put on his home in Louisiana the CIA moves him to Arkansas and sets him up with a private airport where they start training Contras to fight against the communists in Nicaragua. Tom Cruise is still running drugs too and the problem becomes he has so much money that eventually people take notice. Though it's been almost 40 years since this shit started it's a good reminder of the stupid bullshit the US government often does. The ineffective strategy in Nicaragua was slightly more effective in Afghanistan--until of course bin Laden turned on us. Anyway, it's an OK movie but pretty standard stuff if you've seen Goodfellas or Scarface or whatever. His wife in the movie is pretty standard going from ignorance to turning a blind eye to actively participating in his schemes. Not essential viewing but not poor viewing either. (3/5) (Fun Fact: Tom Cruise reunites with Edge of Tomorrow director Doug Liman for this but since it called for a brash, middle-aged Texan wasn't it an ideal part for Matthew McConaghuey?)
Office Uprising: What if you went into the office one day and everyone had turned into psychotic monsters? That's what happens in this Crackle original movie. Brandon (the guy playing Robin in the newTeen Titans show) goes to work only to find most of his coworkers have drank a "weaponized" energy drink that turns them all into psychotic rage monsters. The only one unaffected is his Indian coworker friend (the cab driver in the Deadpool movies) while the girl Brandon likes has drank half a can so if provoked she flips out in violent rage. Together they have to go upstairs to get the password to unlock the building's security system before the deranged workers led by Zachary Levi (soon to be Shazam!) can break out and wreak havoc. It was pretty funny and decent production values. I thought the good guys would be smart enough to use the robot suit down in the R&D department they show early on but it turns out the bad guys were smarter there. (3/5)
Death Wish (2017): This is a remake of the 1974 Charles Bronson movie that pretty much started the whole NRA revenge fetish porn industry. In that movie Bronson's character was an architect whose wife is followed home from the store by goofy punks led by a young Jeff Goldblum. In this version Bruce Willis is a doctor (lol) who goes out to dinner with his family one night. The valet gets the location of his house from his car's navigation system (good thing I'm too poor to valet) and gives the location to some crooks, who then break in when the family isn't supposed to be at home but the wife and daughter are. The wife is killed and the daughter put into a coma. So after the cops come up with zip, Bruce Willis gets a gun to play vigilante. Unlike the 1974 version he actually finds the right people to get revenge. Willis gives a B+ effort while Vincent D'Onofrio cashes a paycheck as the brother who never really contributes anything and Dean Norris basically reheats Hank from Breaking Bad. While this tries to be socially relevant by taking place in Chicago, which has had a lot of gun violence the last couple of years, The problem is since 1974 this formula has been used time and again in a variety of ways like Robocop, Darkman, The Crow, Chance of a Lifetime--oh wait that's just in my head. Anyway, so unlike 1974 this feels pretty generic. (2/5) (Fun Fact: Elizabeth Shue is Bruce Willis's wife in the movie, so her and Vincent D'Onofrio have an Adventures in Babysitting reunion. That movie took place in Toronto-as-Chicago about 30 years ago.)
Braven: Jason Momoa (Aquaman!) is a family guy who works at a logging company. His dad (Stephen Lang) has dementia. So he takes his dad to their remote cabin to talk about putting him in a home or something. But unbeknownst to him (but beknownst to us) a friend has stashed some drugs there. When the drug dealer and his henchmen go to retrieve it, it becomes like Die Hard around a cabin. Bad guys die from guns, axes, arrows, knives, and falling off cliffs. It's the kind of action movie that's fine as long as you don't think about it. (3/5) (Fun Fact: One fight between Jason Momoa and this one henchman it's hard to tell them apart and then in the credits I realized the guy he was fighting was one of his stunt doubles! I guess that explains it.)
Walking Tall (2004): A remake of the movie based on a true story. The Rock (and this was still when he used that name) returns home from the army to find a casino has taken over his small town home. A former school bully (Neal McDonaugh, whom you might remember from the CW superhero shows) runs the casino and the town. Until the Rock barges in with a 2x4 and is arrested. He convinces the jury to find him not guilty and then runs for sheriff. It's an OK action movie, though feels more "inspired by" than "based on" a true story. The movie itself is only about 75 minutes long with credits stretched to cover the last 12 minutes. I mean come on, some Marvel movies don't have credits that long! (2.5/5)
Acts of Violence: Another of the cheaply-made straight-to-Redbox (or Amazon Prime) Lionsgate features starring Bruce Willis. In these sometimes Willis is the bad guy. Sometimes the good guy. And sometimes (like Fire With Fire) he's just in a few scenes so they can put him on the cover. This is mostly the latter. It's kind of a low-energy mash-up of Taken and The Boondock Saints. After a bachelorette party, a bride-to-be is taken by sex traffickers. Her family, led by a brother who was in the army, take the law into their own hands. But they should have listened to Batman Begins and worn masks because the bad guys take revenge. And so it goes. Bruce Willis is a detective who lets a bad guy fall off a roof and later does a Mark Wahlberg at the end of The Departed. (2/5) (Fun Fact: Co-star Cole Hauser is the son of Rifftrax favorite Wings Hauser, who took his name from playing wingback in football. Thanks IMDB!)
Miss Sloane: Like Thank You for Smoking or Casino Jack, this is about a lobbyist. In this case a female lobbyist (Jessica Chastain) who goes to work for an anti-gun lobby for...reasons. After some twists and turns, she's brought to the Senate on some trumped-up charges on unrelated issues. And then she basically sacrifices herself for the greater good. Which would mean more if we knew who she was or anything about her. BTW, it's kind of weird that everyone calls her "Miss Sloane" like it's the 50s or something instead of Ms. Sloane. (2.5/5)
Hangman: A forgettable movie that probably went straight-to-Redbox starring Karl Urban and Al Pacino's corpse as detectives. Some dude is going around hanging people and carving letters in them. The actual Hangman game part didn't really matter as much as it probably should have; the detectives make almost no effort to actually solve it. But as a fan of Due South it was funny that Pacino's detective is named Ray and drives an early 70s Riviera just like Ray Vecchio on Due South--except his was green, not brown. Probably the most interesting thing about this. (2/5)
Favor: You know they say you shouldn't judge books by their covers. And movies either. The cover they use on the Amazon app made it look like a black comedy and the description seemed sorta like it too. But it's actually pretty straight-up suspense. A successful ad man with a pregnant wife accidentally kills his mistress at a motel. He goes to his old loser friend to ask for help moving the body. His buddy takes care of it and that's the end, right? No. First the buddy just wants to hang out. Then he wants money. Then he wants a date. Then he wants a job. A job he's so unqualified for he embarrasses the ad guy and this finally brings things to a head. A good indie picture, unlike the ones they show on Rifftrax. (3/5)
The Secret Lives of Dorks: I missed the first quarter or so of this, but the rest was a sorta funny indie teen comedy. A high school dork wants to win the heart of the girl who works at the comic book store he frequents. The head cheerleader gives him advice but things keep going wrong. It intersperses animation of his daydreaming with live action. Not exactly Napoleon Dynamite, but not terrible either. (2.5/5)
Justice League Dark: This was one of DC's animated releases from last year. When people start seeing demons and going on killing sprees, Batman receives a message to contact John Constantine. He in turn goes to the magician Zatanna and Boston Brand (aka Deadman) tags along. Then they run into Jason Blood/Etrigan the demon. Together they have to track down the magical source of the problem. I think they're missing a couple of people from the team in the more recent comics but it was mostly a decent representation. Batman wasn't really necessary, but I suppose they figured more people would watch if Batman were involved. It's better than cramming Harley Quinn in there I guess. They also involve Swamp Thing; DC tries really hard to make Swamp Thing a thing in comics, movies, and now a new TV series, though people aren't really buying. (3/5) (Fun Fact: There were rumors of a live action movie but I guess this is the best we'll get for the immediate future.)
Justice League vs Teen Titans: The title is a bit of an overstatement. The Teen Titans fight a demon-possessed Justice League briefly before they team up to track down the demons and save the Teen Titan witch Raven from her father who's a devil or THE devil; I'm not really sure which. The generic superhero action is OK but it's better when it focuses on the alienation of Raven and Damian Wayne's Robin, who's sent to the Titans by his father--Batman--to try to get him to play nice with others. Which is somewhat successful. (3/5)
Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders: This was the first animated revival of the Batman 66 show from a few years ago. It was pretty odd. Since it's animated they could do a lot of stuff they couldn't in 1966: Batman and Robin in space! Batman clones taking over the city! Batman and Robin fighting on a blimp! Those original actors still alive at the time (Adam West, Burt Ward, Julie Newmar) reprise their roles but since it's almost 50 years later they don't sound quite right. Though it's just over an hour it feels kind of long. (2.5/5)
Lego DC Heroes Justice League vs Bizarro Justice League: After Superman dumps Bizarro on a barren, cube-shaped planet, Bizarro returns to make Bizarro versions of the Justice League. They go back to the cube planet to fight Darkseid, who's mining some weird rocks on the planet. Goofy superhero fun with Legos. (2.5/5)
Lego DC Heroes Justice League vs Legion of Doom: In this sequel, Lex Luthor unites some supervillains and goes to Area 52 ("the new 52" ha) to "rescue" an alien from Mars named J'onn J'onzz. The Martian helps Luthor frame the Justice League for a crime, getting them banished, but Cyborg helps J'onn see the error of his ways. More goofy Lego fun. (2.5/5)
Made: Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn reunite as wanna-be mob henchmen. They have to go to New York to make a deal with Puff Daddy, but Vince Vaughn's loud, annoying mouth keeps getting them in trouble. Which is especially bad for Jon Favreau as he vouched for his friend. Vince Vaughn is so annoying that it makes it hard to watch. (2/5)
Cyborg: One of Cannon Films' later films starring Jean-Claude van Damme asthe cyborg some guy who saves the actual cyborg from "pirates" in post-apocalyptic New York, until the pirates steal her back. She has some valuable information that could create a cure for the plague that ravaged the world. Most of the "dialog" in the movie was grunting and shouting between fights. Meh. (2/5)
Espionage Tonight: This sounded like an interesting concept: an espionage reality TV show, but the execution was so muddled and confusing it soon lost my interest. It was supposed to be an action comedy but there wasn't really anything funny about it. Besides Sean Astin the only other person I recognized was the guy in the fez in Wonder Woman; I forget what his name was in that was. I'd look it up on IMDB but I don't feel like it. Maybe if this was a bigger budget movie with some better talent on the writing and directing end it would have come together better. (1/5)
Teen Wolf Too: Did you see the first one? This is the same movie except it stars Jason Bateman instead of Michael J Fox, takes place on a college campus instead of high school, and features boxing instead of basketball. Otherwise pretty much the same plot: boy becomes werewolf, werewolf becomes popular, boy lets it go to his head, boy is snapped out of it, and boy competes in one final event without the werewolf as a crutch to prove himself. The End. (Though this time in the end no one has their dick out in the crowd.) (2/5)
Friends Effing Friends Effing Friends: It delivers what it promises: 5 shitty young people in LA who fuck each other. Three are girls, two are guys. The guys are not nearly hot enough to have these girls fawning over them. I'm just saying. It reminds me of my entry about Superstore where I talked about trying to get me to root for shitty people; I really didn't want anything to work out for these shitbags because none of them deserved it. Not even all that great of effing scenes. (1/5)
LA to Vegas: This seemed like a limiting concept: a show focusing on a low-rent airline flying from LA to Vegas. As happens in shows like this, improbably you have the same recurring characters from week to week. The commercials made it seem like it focused on erratic pilot Captain Dave, but actually the central character is Ronnie, the stewardess. There are recurring passengers like a young stripper, a bookie/dentist (Peter Stormare of Fargo woodchipper fame), and a UCLA professor who was married to a magician's assistant. Unfortunately the latter and Ronnie have one of those boring sitcom "will they/won't they" relationships that's complicated when she meets a Vegas restaurateur. As always that just brings things down. Why do shows keep doing this? It's so annoying. Anyway, it was pretty decent when not rehashing Cheers romantic plots. It's kind of funny that Dylan McDermott's Captain Dave has a rival played by Dermot Mulroney; I always get their names mixed up. Captain Dave seemed to me like an airline pilot version of Sterling Archer. I'm just saying. (3/5)
Ghosted: I remember seeing ads for this but I never got around to watching it. I didn't miss much. The first nine episodes are about a former LAPD cop (Craig Robinson) and a crazy science professor (Adam Scott) enlisted by a secret government agency called the Bureau Underground to track down ghosts and monsters and stuff. It never really gelled. And it wasn't as funny as I thought it would be. In the first episode they mention Adam Scott's wife, whom he thought was abducted by aliens, is in a mental institution. It's not until the third episode he goes to see her, then she escapes, showing superhuman ability...and then is never seen until maybe the final episode. For the most part it was supposed to be a funny X-Files with the two main characters investigating a monster-of-the-week. That show I guess ran the first nine episodes from October to January. Then they decided to "retool" it. They brought in a writer from The Office to make it a workplace comedy, which was really jarring. And the problem is they hadn't really set up an ensemble cast. Besides the two main characters there was the woman in charge, an Indian scientist guy, and a black woman who in the pilot makes them awesome guns and after that just kind of fills whatever role they need to help them. Then all the sudden they start showing all these weird losers who work there and it's like, where'd they come from? They brought in Kevin Dunn (the dad in Transformers among other things) to be a new boss and then demoted the lady in charge so she had nothing to do but sit around being sad and alcoholic. (Hilarious!) She had a daughter in one episode but we never heard of her again. They switched the will they/won't they relationship with the black woman from Adam Scott to Craig Robinson. And it went to more of a serial story that just kind of limped along in the first four episodes. Then to add to the confusion the latest (final?) episode goes back to the original format and original pilot story without all the extraneous characters introduced in the last 6 episodes like it's a "lost episode" or something that still leaves a lot of threads hanging. I watched the first 13 on Hulu and figured that was it but then in June all the sudden they started showing more episodes; Fox basically just dumped the rest out in summer when no one would really give a shit. Retooling on the fly--or on a hiatus--never really works so it's no surprise Fox pulled the plug and I highly doubt any other network showed interest. In the original format with better writing it could have worked out, but it didn't. (1/5) (Awkward Fact: In the pilot episode the two guys are in a car and Craig Robinson asks about parallel universes. Then he asks, "Is there a Kevin Spacey in all the other universes? I think we have the best Kevin Spacey." That joke aired probably around the time Spacey's sexual harassment scandal came to light. And watching it now it's really awkward. Too bad they couldn't go back and replace his name with someone else.)
Hope & Glory: This answered something I was too lazy to look up on IMDB: was Cynthia Rothrock a real person? They used the name in a Robot Chicken sketch but I was never sure if she was a real person or someone they made up. Her name sounds like a Flintstones character. Anyway, she is a real person because she's the co-star in this early 90s movie about two sisters. Rothrock is an FBI agent and her sister is a TV reporter. They both know kung fu thanks to some Chinese guy who raised the reporter for...reasons. Their enemy is a bank president who is really buff and likes to go around shirtless and kill people. This was probably the most hilariously cheesy early 90s kung fu movie since Samurai Cop. You've probably never heard of that movie either but the recent sequels star Tommy Wisseau! (You know, the subject of The Disaster Artist played by James Franco?) So that's something.
Merlin: The Return: This 2000 movie stars Wayne's World and True Lies's Tia Carrere as an evil scientist who's trying to help Mordred escape another dimension Merlin trapped him in. And Merlin himself and Arthur and his knights. And somehow a couple of kids are involved. None of it made any sense at all. That's really all I can say about it.
Cyborg Cop 2: I've never seen the first one. I'm not sure if there was a Cyborg Cop or not. This one is 100% Cyborg Cop free! There are cyborgs and a cop who fights said cyborgs, but there are no cops who are cyborgs. So maybe they mean he's a cop who polices cyborgs? Too! This was a pretty cheesy 90s action movie overall. It borrows from the even shittier Robocop 2 as a scientist uses a convicted murderer for a cyborg and then guess what? The cyborg rebels! Only a cut-rate Lorenzo Lamas and his female sidekick can stop him! Which would be easier if they were cyborgs too. Just saying.
Superargo: A former Mexican wrestler who looks like he's wearing a red version of The Phantom's costume battles a mad scientist who's captured athletes and turned them into cyborgs. This was from the 60s and the cyborgs made me think of what Borg would have looked like if they had been part of the original series. The funniest part is earlier Superargo says his costume is bulletproof yet when he's climbing up the stairs with some escaped prisoners and the bad guy fires a gun, Superargo ducks and lets some poor schlub get killed. Our hero!
Ator the Fighting Eagle: Like Cyborg Cop 2 had no cyborg cops, there are no fighting eagles in this movie. It's your pretty standard 80s Conan ripoff. Except with a bit of Game of Thrones as Ator grows up wanting to marry his adopted sister. But before the wedding can happen (gross!) some bad guys make off with the bride. (Whew!) So the whole rest of the movie then is Ator battling to rescue his adopted sister so they can get married. (Yay?) Which involves all the standard chosen one cliches. Well I guess Luke Skywalker was trying to free his sister he fell in love with too, right? The perhaps good thing is the sequel called Cave Dwellers on MST3K in the early 90s features Ator but makes no mention of his sister.
Terror at Tenkiller: And like there are no fighting eagles in Ator and no cyborg cops in Cyborg Cop 2, there's no terror in Terror at Tenkiller. It's a pretty boring early 80s horror movie about two girls who stay at a cabin and are "terrorized" by a fisherman/boat mechanic/serial killer. Terror! If you're having trouble falling asleep, maybe watch this.
Julie and Jack: Unlike those other movies this actually has someone named Julie and someone named Jack. Well done, James Nguyen, director of the all-time cheesy classic Birdemic. This first film by the director has all the hallmarks we'd come to love in Birdemic: wooden acting, pointless driving/parking scenes, and stock options! Instead of pathetic CGI birds, the plot revolves around VR technology. Long before Inception or Her, James Nguyen was freaking people's minds with this movie where a tool falls in love with a woman who it turns out lives inside a computer after she died. What a twist! It's the love story only James Nguyen could tell in the way only he could--because no one else is so stupid and incompetent.
The Dark Power: In the "southeastern United States" an old Native American guy dies. His son rents out his house to some college students who are then terrorized by "Native American" spirits---or most likely white guys in terrible rubber masks. But even in our outrage culture it's hard to be mad about that; rather I think any Native American actors dodged a bullet by not appearing in what is the lamest and most boring slumber party ruined by a killer(s) since The Last Slumber Party. Lash Larue stars as an old forest ranger with a whip who proves a whip is a completely useless weapon. Early on he scares away some wild dogs with about twenty cracks of the whip when one gunshot in the air probably would have done the trick. And then later he spends ten minutes whipping a bad guy into submission while a black girl has already killed two of the bad guys with ceremonial knives. I mean come on, Lash, even Indiana Jones carried a gun; even he knew a whip wasn't a good choice for a primary weapon .
Kiss of the Tarantulas: This 70s "horror" movie makes Night of the Lepus (Lepus=Bunnies) seem brutal and edgy. A girl who's like a female Willard--only with tarantulas--kills some mean "college" boys who broke into her dad's funeral home wanting a casket for...reasons. Mostly it seems people in this movie kill themselves when she puts tarantulas near them. Oh and she has a creepy uncle who routinely fondles her who also happens to be chief of police. Gross. There was a moment of synchronicity when this one guy comes onto the screen and I say, "He looks like a fat Hitler" and then the Riffers said the same thing! Great minds think alike. Or I've just watched too many of these. Probably that.
City of the Dead: Like there were no...whatevers in those other movies there was no CITY of the dead. It was a village and most of the people were still alive. They were just Satanists leftover from witch burnings in 1692. In 1960-ish, a young-er Christopher Lee (who looks like mid-career James Woods) sends a student to the village where she's sacrificed to Satan. And then her brother and boyfriend go to look for her. Low-key mayhem ensues. It was pretty boring. It was shot in England but the sets looked like something you'd see on The Twilight Zone. Which either means the latter had good production values or the former had poor ones. Take your pick.
Deadly Prey: For...reasons some...guy is paying mercenaries to do...something. To train these mercenaries in the jungles of suburban San Diego, they kidnap a shirtless guy in tiny jean shorts so they can hunt him. But the joke's on them as he's an awesome special forces guy who then runs around killing them--still shirtless, barefoot, and wearing tiny jean shorts despite that he has ample opportunities to steal some clothes from his victims. I mean, at least take some boots, right? All their feet can't be too small. Anyway, like Cyborg above most of the "dialog" is grunting and screaming. In fact it ends with the shirtless guy screaming in triumph.
Firehead: This 1990 action movie is filled with head-scratching questions. Like, why do they call him "Firehead" when he shoots lasers or whatever from his eyes? What the hell does "bigger than a hog's dick on Sunday" mean? And how did they get legendary actors Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau to appear in it? The plot is that "Firehead" defects from the USSR to America and starts blowing up factories working on some secret government project. Chris Lemmon (son of Jack) is brought in to investigate and with some female agent they track Firehead down and join with him to overthrow Christopher Plummer and a bunch of guys who dress like extras of The Prisoner. It's a pretty corny movie with a cornier theme song. Besides the hog's dick line there was also another animal-themed goody: cleaner than a wolves' tooth--that's their wording. I don't know what either of those expressions is supposed to mean.
Deadly Invasion: A 90s movie about a college that's overrun with an alien. Mayhem ensues. With a lot of bad effects and bad acting.
Annihilation: Like the director's previous Ex Machina, this is a sci-fi movie that is not extremely action-packed, but is tense, gorgeous, and hard to pin down. (And both feature Oscar Isaac--bonus!) Basically a meteor or something hits a part of the southern coast by a lighthouse and starts mutating all the life in the area: grass, trees, animals, and even people! Natalie Portman's husband Oscar Isaac (so yes, Star Wars nerds, Padme Amidala hooked up with Poe Dameron!) was part of an expedition to explore "the shimmer" and disappeared. Until he comes stumbling home with amnesia and then passes out. So she agrees to join 4 other women to explore the Shimmer. The place is just crazy with all the mutated stuff. And naturally the people are not immune either. Anyway, if you're more a fan of sci-fi like 2001 or Solaris than Star Wars or Transformers (Michael Bay version) then you'll probably like this. And I guess if you're a fan of women in movies who aren't taking off their tops or wearing skimpy costumes. (4/5)
Rememory: This is the same sort of movie as Annihilation. Only it involves a machine that can let you see your memories without the "rose-colored glasses" or shit-colored glasses with which we remember so many things. And it can also bring back repressed memories. Peter Dinklage becomes obsessed with the machine after his brother is killed in a drunk driving accident--caused by him. With the machine he hopes to hear his brother's dying words. On the night he's planning to see the machine's creator, that creator is murdered! So Peter Dinklage steals a copy of the machine from the creator's widow (after plying her with Scotch and telling her a sob story about her husband) he starts to investigate the prime suspects: the creator's mistress and one of his test subjects (the late Anton Yelchin). But the solution turns out to be something unexpected as is a revelation about the night Peter Dinklage's brother died. Like Annihilation it's a slower sci-fi movie but it ends with a lot of emotional depth. It's definitely worth watching. (4/5) (Fun Fact: Ironically for a movie about memory I forgot I had got a copy free from Google Play months ago until I saw a preview on another movie. And then I watched it on Amazon Prime anyway.)
Pacific Rim: Uprising: As far as sequels go, this was a Temple of Doom or Terminator 3 where it wasn't terrible, but it lacks the epic grandeur of the preceding film. T3 especially comes to mind as that largely involved a new cast, like this. The two scientists and the female pilot from the last film return, though the latter dies soon into the movie, which I always hate. John Boyega stars as Idris Elba's son we never heard anything about in the previous movie. He's thrust back into action as a rogue giant robot kills his adopted sister. They do a little switcheroo so the bitchy woman you think is the villain and a good guy from the last movie switch places. Still, overall there's just not the same epicness of the first one. Though they hint at a third one, I doubt it'll happen. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact: It's funny at one point when John Boyega switches from his natural British accent to American to make fun of a guy because then he sounds like Finn from Star Wars.)
Tomb Raider: I've never played the video games and I only watched the Angelina Jolie movies once maybe. Like Pacific Rim, this was OK but didn't really feel all that epic or fun like the previous movies, Indiana Jones, or even National Treasure. I guess to pad the run time it starts out with a pointless kickboxing scene and then some extreme bike riding. Simon Pegg's frequent cohort Nick Frost shows up in a cameo as a pawn shop owner who gives Lara Croft money to go to Southeast Asia and get a boat to a mysterious island. It's funny how the boat captain she barely knows is like instantly ready to lay down his life for her. I guess she's attractive, but I wouldn't sacrifice myself for her in like ten minutes--at least not without getting some first. (Oink, oink.) Anyway, eventually she has to stop a bad guy from unleashing one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I'm not sure if there will be a sequel or not. Maybe they can put more effort into the script. (2.5/5)
The Commuter: A fairly predictable "thriller" with a convoluted plot. Liam Neeson is a former cop and now former insurance salesman who's on a commuter train when Vera Farmiga offers him $100K to find a Federal witness code named "Prynne." I figured out who this was about a half-hour into the movie. And I figured out who the bad guy was long ahead of time. I mean it was one of those things where they hadn't really used one somewhat well-known actor so they had to use him at some point. And really the whole thing seemed pretty dumb; if the people running this were so powerful, couldn't they have just killed the witness themselves? (2/5) (Fun Facts: Liam Neeson's had a movie where he's solving a mystery on a plane and a train, so now all he needs is to solve a mystery in an automobile. Also, the cop played by Patrick Wilson was named Alex Murphy--which was the name of the dead cop who was turned into Robocop in the original and shitty remake!)
Game Night: A bunch of supposed thirty-somethings get together for a game night that's hijacked when Jason Bateman's rich brother Kyle Chandler stages a phony kidnapping of himself that turns out to be real. So at first everyone thinks they're playing a game but then it turns real. Meanwhile their weird cop neighbor (Todd from Breaking Bad) has a game of his own going on. Some funny bits but mostly not all that interesting. It was the free part of a rent one, get one free so I guess I got my money's worth anyway. (2.5/5)
Baywatch: As I said on Facebook, some movies sound bad but end up pretty good. This is not that. It's just a bunch of warmed-over cliches strung together into a lame movie about lifeguards trying to foil a drug smuggler. The Rock is fine as the head lifeguard, but there's not really much to work with. David Hasselhoff shows up for a cameo, as does Pam Anderson, though they wisely don't give her any lines. (2/5)
American Made: This one slipped under my radar as I never was going to watch it in the theater and just never got around to renting it on DVD. But now it's on HBO and so I finally watched it On Demand. Tom Cruise is an airline pilot who's recruited to work for the CIA taking pictures of communists in Central and South America. Eventually though he starts running drugs on the side with Pablo Escobar and that whole crew that so much has been made of the last few years. When the heat gets put on his home in Louisiana the CIA moves him to Arkansas and sets him up with a private airport where they start training Contras to fight against the communists in Nicaragua. Tom Cruise is still running drugs too and the problem becomes he has so much money that eventually people take notice. Though it's been almost 40 years since this shit started it's a good reminder of the stupid bullshit the US government often does. The ineffective strategy in Nicaragua was slightly more effective in Afghanistan--until of course bin Laden turned on us. Anyway, it's an OK movie but pretty standard stuff if you've seen Goodfellas or Scarface or whatever. His wife in the movie is pretty standard going from ignorance to turning a blind eye to actively participating in his schemes. Not essential viewing but not poor viewing either. (3/5) (Fun Fact: Tom Cruise reunites with Edge of Tomorrow director Doug Liman for this but since it called for a brash, middle-aged Texan wasn't it an ideal part for Matthew McConaghuey?)
Office Uprising: What if you went into the office one day and everyone had turned into psychotic monsters? That's what happens in this Crackle original movie. Brandon (the guy playing Robin in the new
Death Wish (2017): This is a remake of the 1974 Charles Bronson movie that pretty much started the whole NRA revenge fetish porn industry. In that movie Bronson's character was an architect whose wife is followed home from the store by goofy punks led by a young Jeff Goldblum. In this version Bruce Willis is a doctor (lol) who goes out to dinner with his family one night. The valet gets the location of his house from his car's navigation system (good thing I'm too poor to valet) and gives the location to some crooks, who then break in when the family isn't supposed to be at home but the wife and daughter are. The wife is killed and the daughter put into a coma. So after the cops come up with zip, Bruce Willis gets a gun to play vigilante. Unlike the 1974 version he actually finds the right people to get revenge. Willis gives a B+ effort while Vincent D'Onofrio cashes a paycheck as the brother who never really contributes anything and Dean Norris basically reheats Hank from Breaking Bad. While this tries to be socially relevant by taking place in Chicago, which has had a lot of gun violence the last couple of years, The problem is since 1974 this formula has been used time and again in a variety of ways like Robocop, Darkman, The Crow, Chance of a Lifetime--oh wait that's just in my head. Anyway, so unlike 1974 this feels pretty generic. (2/5) (Fun Fact: Elizabeth Shue is Bruce Willis's wife in the movie, so her and Vincent D'Onofrio have an Adventures in Babysitting reunion. That movie took place in Toronto-as-Chicago about 30 years ago.)
Braven: Jason Momoa (Aquaman!) is a family guy who works at a logging company. His dad (Stephen Lang) has dementia. So he takes his dad to their remote cabin to talk about putting him in a home or something. But unbeknownst to him (but beknownst to us) a friend has stashed some drugs there. When the drug dealer and his henchmen go to retrieve it, it becomes like Die Hard around a cabin. Bad guys die from guns, axes, arrows, knives, and falling off cliffs. It's the kind of action movie that's fine as long as you don't think about it. (3/5) (Fun Fact: One fight between Jason Momoa and this one henchman it's hard to tell them apart and then in the credits I realized the guy he was fighting was one of his stunt doubles! I guess that explains it.)
Walking Tall (2004): A remake of the movie based on a true story. The Rock (and this was still when he used that name) returns home from the army to find a casino has taken over his small town home. A former school bully (Neal McDonaugh, whom you might remember from the CW superhero shows) runs the casino and the town. Until the Rock barges in with a 2x4 and is arrested. He convinces the jury to find him not guilty and then runs for sheriff. It's an OK action movie, though feels more "inspired by" than "based on" a true story. The movie itself is only about 75 minutes long with credits stretched to cover the last 12 minutes. I mean come on, some Marvel movies don't have credits that long! (2.5/5)
Acts of Violence: Another of the cheaply-made straight-to-Redbox (or Amazon Prime) Lionsgate features starring Bruce Willis. In these sometimes Willis is the bad guy. Sometimes the good guy. And sometimes (like Fire With Fire) he's just in a few scenes so they can put him on the cover. This is mostly the latter. It's kind of a low-energy mash-up of Taken and The Boondock Saints. After a bachelorette party, a bride-to-be is taken by sex traffickers. Her family, led by a brother who was in the army, take the law into their own hands. But they should have listened to Batman Begins and worn masks because the bad guys take revenge. And so it goes. Bruce Willis is a detective who lets a bad guy fall off a roof and later does a Mark Wahlberg at the end of The Departed. (2/5) (Fun Fact: Co-star Cole Hauser is the son of Rifftrax favorite Wings Hauser, who took his name from playing wingback in football. Thanks IMDB!)
Miss Sloane: Like Thank You for Smoking or Casino Jack, this is about a lobbyist. In this case a female lobbyist (Jessica Chastain) who goes to work for an anti-gun lobby for...reasons. After some twists and turns, she's brought to the Senate on some trumped-up charges on unrelated issues. And then she basically sacrifices herself for the greater good. Which would mean more if we knew who she was or anything about her. BTW, it's kind of weird that everyone calls her "Miss Sloane" like it's the 50s or something instead of Ms. Sloane. (2.5/5)
Hangman: A forgettable movie that probably went straight-to-Redbox starring Karl Urban and Al Pacino's corpse as detectives. Some dude is going around hanging people and carving letters in them. The actual Hangman game part didn't really matter as much as it probably should have; the detectives make almost no effort to actually solve it. But as a fan of Due South it was funny that Pacino's detective is named Ray and drives an early 70s Riviera just like Ray Vecchio on Due South--except his was green, not brown. Probably the most interesting thing about this. (2/5)
Favor: You know they say you shouldn't judge books by their covers. And movies either. The cover they use on the Amazon app made it look like a black comedy and the description seemed sorta like it too. But it's actually pretty straight-up suspense. A successful ad man with a pregnant wife accidentally kills his mistress at a motel. He goes to his old loser friend to ask for help moving the body. His buddy takes care of it and that's the end, right? No. First the buddy just wants to hang out. Then he wants money. Then he wants a date. Then he wants a job. A job he's so unqualified for he embarrasses the ad guy and this finally brings things to a head. A good indie picture, unlike the ones they show on Rifftrax. (3/5)
The Secret Lives of Dorks: I missed the first quarter or so of this, but the rest was a sorta funny indie teen comedy. A high school dork wants to win the heart of the girl who works at the comic book store he frequents. The head cheerleader gives him advice but things keep going wrong. It intersperses animation of his daydreaming with live action. Not exactly Napoleon Dynamite, but not terrible either. (2.5/5)
Justice League Dark: This was one of DC's animated releases from last year. When people start seeing demons and going on killing sprees, Batman receives a message to contact John Constantine. He in turn goes to the magician Zatanna and Boston Brand (aka Deadman) tags along. Then they run into Jason Blood/Etrigan the demon. Together they have to track down the magical source of the problem. I think they're missing a couple of people from the team in the more recent comics but it was mostly a decent representation. Batman wasn't really necessary, but I suppose they figured more people would watch if Batman were involved. It's better than cramming Harley Quinn in there I guess. They also involve Swamp Thing; DC tries really hard to make Swamp Thing a thing in comics, movies, and now a new TV series, though people aren't really buying. (3/5) (Fun Fact: There were rumors of a live action movie but I guess this is the best we'll get for the immediate future.)
Justice League vs Teen Titans: The title is a bit of an overstatement. The Teen Titans fight a demon-possessed Justice League briefly before they team up to track down the demons and save the Teen Titan witch Raven from her father who's a devil or THE devil; I'm not really sure which. The generic superhero action is OK but it's better when it focuses on the alienation of Raven and Damian Wayne's Robin, who's sent to the Titans by his father--Batman--to try to get him to play nice with others. Which is somewhat successful. (3/5)
Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders: This was the first animated revival of the Batman 66 show from a few years ago. It was pretty odd. Since it's animated they could do a lot of stuff they couldn't in 1966: Batman and Robin in space! Batman clones taking over the city! Batman and Robin fighting on a blimp! Those original actors still alive at the time (Adam West, Burt Ward, Julie Newmar) reprise their roles but since it's almost 50 years later they don't sound quite right. Though it's just over an hour it feels kind of long. (2.5/5)
Lego DC Heroes Justice League vs Bizarro Justice League: After Superman dumps Bizarro on a barren, cube-shaped planet, Bizarro returns to make Bizarro versions of the Justice League. They go back to the cube planet to fight Darkseid, who's mining some weird rocks on the planet. Goofy superhero fun with Legos. (2.5/5)
Lego DC Heroes Justice League vs Legion of Doom: In this sequel, Lex Luthor unites some supervillains and goes to Area 52 ("the new 52" ha) to "rescue" an alien from Mars named J'onn J'onzz. The Martian helps Luthor frame the Justice League for a crime, getting them banished, but Cyborg helps J'onn see the error of his ways. More goofy Lego fun. (2.5/5)
Made: Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn reunite as wanna-be mob henchmen. They have to go to New York to make a deal with Puff Daddy, but Vince Vaughn's loud, annoying mouth keeps getting them in trouble. Which is especially bad for Jon Favreau as he vouched for his friend. Vince Vaughn is so annoying that it makes it hard to watch. (2/5)
Cyborg: One of Cannon Films' later films starring Jean-Claude van Damme as
Espionage Tonight: This sounded like an interesting concept: an espionage reality TV show, but the execution was so muddled and confusing it soon lost my interest. It was supposed to be an action comedy but there wasn't really anything funny about it. Besides Sean Astin the only other person I recognized was the guy in the fez in Wonder Woman; I forget what his name was in that was. I'd look it up on IMDB but I don't feel like it. Maybe if this was a bigger budget movie with some better talent on the writing and directing end it would have come together better. (1/5)
Teen Wolf Too: Did you see the first one? This is the same movie except it stars Jason Bateman instead of Michael J Fox, takes place on a college campus instead of high school, and features boxing instead of basketball. Otherwise pretty much the same plot: boy becomes werewolf, werewolf becomes popular, boy lets it go to his head, boy is snapped out of it, and boy competes in one final event without the werewolf as a crutch to prove himself. The End. (Though this time in the end no one has their dick out in the crowd.) (2/5)
Friends Effing Friends Effing Friends: It delivers what it promises: 5 shitty young people in LA who fuck each other. Three are girls, two are guys. The guys are not nearly hot enough to have these girls fawning over them. I'm just saying. It reminds me of my entry about Superstore where I talked about trying to get me to root for shitty people; I really didn't want anything to work out for these shitbags because none of them deserved it. Not even all that great of effing scenes. (1/5)
LA to Vegas: This seemed like a limiting concept: a show focusing on a low-rent airline flying from LA to Vegas. As happens in shows like this, improbably you have the same recurring characters from week to week. The commercials made it seem like it focused on erratic pilot Captain Dave, but actually the central character is Ronnie, the stewardess. There are recurring passengers like a young stripper, a bookie/dentist (Peter Stormare of Fargo woodchipper fame), and a UCLA professor who was married to a magician's assistant. Unfortunately the latter and Ronnie have one of those boring sitcom "will they/won't they" relationships that's complicated when she meets a Vegas restaurateur. As always that just brings things down. Why do shows keep doing this? It's so annoying. Anyway, it was pretty decent when not rehashing Cheers romantic plots. It's kind of funny that Dylan McDermott's Captain Dave has a rival played by Dermot Mulroney; I always get their names mixed up. Captain Dave seemed to me like an airline pilot version of Sterling Archer. I'm just saying. (3/5)
Ghosted: I remember seeing ads for this but I never got around to watching it. I didn't miss much. The first nine episodes are about a former LAPD cop (Craig Robinson) and a crazy science professor (Adam Scott) enlisted by a secret government agency called the Bureau Underground to track down ghosts and monsters and stuff. It never really gelled. And it wasn't as funny as I thought it would be. In the first episode they mention Adam Scott's wife, whom he thought was abducted by aliens, is in a mental institution. It's not until the third episode he goes to see her, then she escapes, showing superhuman ability...and then is never seen until maybe the final episode. For the most part it was supposed to be a funny X-Files with the two main characters investigating a monster-of-the-week. That show I guess ran the first nine episodes from October to January. Then they decided to "retool" it. They brought in a writer from The Office to make it a workplace comedy, which was really jarring. And the problem is they hadn't really set up an ensemble cast. Besides the two main characters there was the woman in charge, an Indian scientist guy, and a black woman who in the pilot makes them awesome guns and after that just kind of fills whatever role they need to help them. Then all the sudden they start showing all these weird losers who work there and it's like, where'd they come from? They brought in Kevin Dunn (the dad in Transformers among other things) to be a new boss and then demoted the lady in charge so she had nothing to do but sit around being sad and alcoholic. (Hilarious!) She had a daughter in one episode but we never heard of her again. They switched the will they/won't they relationship with the black woman from Adam Scott to Craig Robinson. And it went to more of a serial story that just kind of limped along in the first four episodes. Then to add to the confusion the latest (final?) episode goes back to the original format and original pilot story without all the extraneous characters introduced in the last 6 episodes like it's a "lost episode" or something that still leaves a lot of threads hanging. I watched the first 13 on Hulu and figured that was it but then in June all the sudden they started showing more episodes; Fox basically just dumped the rest out in summer when no one would really give a shit. Retooling on the fly--or on a hiatus--never really works so it's no surprise Fox pulled the plug and I highly doubt any other network showed interest. In the original format with better writing it could have worked out, but it didn't. (1/5) (Awkward Fact: In the pilot episode the two guys are in a car and Craig Robinson asks about parallel universes. Then he asks, "Is there a Kevin Spacey in all the other universes? I think we have the best Kevin Spacey." That joke aired probably around the time Spacey's sexual harassment scandal came to light. And watching it now it's really awkward. Too bad they couldn't go back and replace his name with someone else.)
"New" Rifftrax Movies!
I know you won't like these because I like them, but what if I told you Alex Cavanaugh likes them? Now you have to like them, right? Anyway, whenever Amazon Prime adds some new titles I can watch for free, it's like the Ice Cream Bunny is bringing my XMas gifts early. Here are some of the latest additions:Hope & Glory: This answered something I was too lazy to look up on IMDB: was Cynthia Rothrock a real person? They used the name in a Robot Chicken sketch but I was never sure if she was a real person or someone they made up. Her name sounds like a Flintstones character. Anyway, she is a real person because she's the co-star in this early 90s movie about two sisters. Rothrock is an FBI agent and her sister is a TV reporter. They both know kung fu thanks to some Chinese guy who raised the reporter for...reasons. Their enemy is a bank president who is really buff and likes to go around shirtless and kill people. This was probably the most hilariously cheesy early 90s kung fu movie since Samurai Cop. You've probably never heard of that movie either but the recent sequels star Tommy Wisseau! (You know, the subject of The Disaster Artist played by James Franco?) So that's something.
Merlin: The Return: This 2000 movie stars Wayne's World and True Lies's Tia Carrere as an evil scientist who's trying to help Mordred escape another dimension Merlin trapped him in. And Merlin himself and Arthur and his knights. And somehow a couple of kids are involved. None of it made any sense at all. That's really all I can say about it.
Cyborg Cop 2: I've never seen the first one. I'm not sure if there was a Cyborg Cop or not. This one is 100% Cyborg Cop free! There are cyborgs and a cop who fights said cyborgs, but there are no cops who are cyborgs. So maybe they mean he's a cop who polices cyborgs? Too! This was a pretty cheesy 90s action movie overall. It borrows from the even shittier Robocop 2 as a scientist uses a convicted murderer for a cyborg and then guess what? The cyborg rebels! Only a cut-rate Lorenzo Lamas and his female sidekick can stop him! Which would be easier if they were cyborgs too. Just saying.
Superargo: A former Mexican wrestler who looks like he's wearing a red version of The Phantom's costume battles a mad scientist who's captured athletes and turned them into cyborgs. This was from the 60s and the cyborgs made me think of what Borg would have looked like if they had been part of the original series. The funniest part is earlier Superargo says his costume is bulletproof yet when he's climbing up the stairs with some escaped prisoners and the bad guy fires a gun, Superargo ducks and lets some poor schlub get killed. Our hero!
Ator the Fighting Eagle: Like Cyborg Cop 2 had no cyborg cops, there are no fighting eagles in this movie. It's your pretty standard 80s Conan ripoff. Except with a bit of Game of Thrones as Ator grows up wanting to marry his adopted sister. But before the wedding can happen (gross!) some bad guys make off with the bride. (Whew!) So the whole rest of the movie then is Ator battling to rescue his adopted sister so they can get married. (Yay?) Which involves all the standard chosen one cliches. Well I guess Luke Skywalker was trying to free his sister he fell in love with too, right? The perhaps good thing is the sequel called Cave Dwellers on MST3K in the early 90s features Ator but makes no mention of his sister.
Terror at Tenkiller: And like there are no fighting eagles in Ator and no cyborg cops in Cyborg Cop 2, there's no terror in Terror at Tenkiller. It's a pretty boring early 80s horror movie about two girls who stay at a cabin and are "terrorized" by a fisherman/boat mechanic/serial killer. Terror! If you're having trouble falling asleep, maybe watch this.
Julie and Jack: Unlike those other movies this actually has someone named Julie and someone named Jack. Well done, James Nguyen, director of the all-time cheesy classic Birdemic. This first film by the director has all the hallmarks we'd come to love in Birdemic: wooden acting, pointless driving/parking scenes, and stock options! Instead of pathetic CGI birds, the plot revolves around VR technology. Long before Inception or Her, James Nguyen was freaking people's minds with this movie where a tool falls in love with a woman who it turns out lives inside a computer after she died. What a twist! It's the love story only James Nguyen could tell in the way only he could--because no one else is so stupid and incompetent.
The Dark Power: In the "southeastern United States" an old Native American guy dies. His son rents out his house to some college students who are then terrorized by "Native American" spirits---or most likely white guys in terrible rubber masks. But even in our outrage culture it's hard to be mad about that; rather I think any Native American actors dodged a bullet by not appearing in what is the lamest and most boring slumber party ruined by a killer(s) since The Last Slumber Party. Lash Larue stars as an old forest ranger with a whip who proves a whip is a completely useless weapon. Early on he scares away some wild dogs with about twenty cracks of the whip when one gunshot in the air probably would have done the trick. And then later he spends ten minutes whipping a bad guy into submission while a black girl has already killed two of the bad guys with ceremonial knives. I mean come on, Lash, even Indiana Jones carried a gun; even he knew a whip wasn't a good choice for a primary weapon .
Kiss of the Tarantulas: This 70s "horror" movie makes Night of the Lepus (Lepus=Bunnies) seem brutal and edgy. A girl who's like a female Willard--only with tarantulas--kills some mean "college" boys who broke into her dad's funeral home wanting a casket for...reasons. Mostly it seems people in this movie kill themselves when she puts tarantulas near them. Oh and she has a creepy uncle who routinely fondles her who also happens to be chief of police. Gross. There was a moment of synchronicity when this one guy comes onto the screen and I say, "He looks like a fat Hitler" and then the Riffers said the same thing! Great minds think alike. Or I've just watched too many of these. Probably that.
City of the Dead: Like there were no...whatevers in those other movies there was no CITY of the dead. It was a village and most of the people were still alive. They were just Satanists leftover from witch burnings in 1692. In 1960-ish, a young-er Christopher Lee (who looks like mid-career James Woods) sends a student to the village where she's sacrificed to Satan. And then her brother and boyfriend go to look for her. Low-key mayhem ensues. It was pretty boring. It was shot in England but the sets looked like something you'd see on The Twilight Zone. Which either means the latter had good production values or the former had poor ones. Take your pick.
Deadly Prey: For...reasons some...guy is paying mercenaries to do...something. To train these mercenaries in the jungles of suburban San Diego, they kidnap a shirtless guy in tiny jean shorts so they can hunt him. But the joke's on them as he's an awesome special forces guy who then runs around killing them--still shirtless, barefoot, and wearing tiny jean shorts despite that he has ample opportunities to steal some clothes from his victims. I mean, at least take some boots, right? All their feet can't be too small. Anyway, like Cyborg above most of the "dialog" is grunting and screaming. In fact it ends with the shirtless guy screaming in triumph.
Firehead: This 1990 action movie is filled with head-scratching questions. Like, why do they call him "Firehead" when he shoots lasers or whatever from his eyes? What the hell does "bigger than a hog's dick on Sunday" mean? And how did they get legendary actors Christopher Plummer and Martin Landau to appear in it? The plot is that "Firehead" defects from the USSR to America and starts blowing up factories working on some secret government project. Chris Lemmon (son of Jack) is brought in to investigate and with some female agent they track Firehead down and join with him to overthrow Christopher Plummer and a bunch of guys who dress like extras of The Prisoner. It's a pretty corny movie with a cornier theme song. Besides the hog's dick line there was also another animal-themed goody: cleaner than a wolves' tooth--that's their wording. I don't know what either of those expressions is supposed to mean.
Deadly Invasion: A 90s movie about a college that's overrun with an alien. Mayhem ensues. With a lot of bad effects and bad acting.
Monday, July 23, 2018
Heirs to the Empire
One of the things I hate the most is when publishers come out with new books using a property created by an author who's deceased. James Bond, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Tom Clancy, The Godfather, and even Gone With the Wind have been victims of this. You can almost count To Kill a Mockingbird but that wasn't a sequel and the author was technically not dead. Or in cases like Ray Chandler's Poodle Springs they actually take a partial manuscript and have someone else finish it. Maybe because I write books this seems so disrespectful. It's like pissing on the author's grave to churn out what are usually inferior books exploiting the author's work so the publisher can make some money. And in most cases I doubt the author they have continue it is making much money; it's probably about what you get for a movie adaptation or something.
Last month longtime author Lawrence Block Tweeted a reply to someone who asked who should write Sue Grafton's 'Z' book since she passed away before completing the whole alphabet. To which Block said basically he didn't think anyone should.
I Tweeted him to ask if there was any kind of legal action he could take to make sure his books would be protected from publisher schemes to revive his characters like Matt Scudder, Bernie Rhodenbarr, or Keller the hit man. To my surprise I actually got a response!
Basically what he's saying is that in these cases it's up to the estate to decide what to do. Usually that's the author's family, but if the author has no family it could be his/her agent or some other delegated person. That person(s) then gets to decide whether to let publishers use some other author to continue the series or not.
A couple other people horned in to yap about copyrights not expiring for 95 years. Which doesn't really matter. That only means the property doesn't become public domain for 95 years. Which means it's under the estate's control for that long. So the gist is that after you die, your works end up in the hands of your family or whoever controls your estate. It's up to them then what to do with the future of your work. Since you're dead, you're powerless to do anything.
Now maybe you spell out your wishes ahead of time. That might do the trick. Or they might not care. Or if they get in a tight spot financially they might sign over the rights for whatever they can get. It's all a crapshoot and as I said, you can't do anything about it.
It doesn't seem fair, does it? Of course there is a simple solution: people could just not buy these books. Then publishers wouldn't bother trying to exploit authors after they've passed. They wouldn't try to make authors like Tom Clancy a brand name like Disney or Sony or Chevrolet. But can you really expect that? Not really.
The same applies to music. Not so much movies. But you know how it is: after someone like Elvis, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Tupac, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, or Prince dies there are suddenly all these "new" songs that are "discovered" and in the case of Elvis they've been issuing and reissuing "new" versions and compilations for 40 years now.
I was happy when Terry Pratchett's estate said there would be no continuation of the Discworld books. I hope they can continue to resist the call of money. Like with Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide series it's just not the same written by someone else.
Probably when Stephen King, JK Rowling, GRR Martin, and John Grisham die, publishers will keep using their names for the next 95 years. Whether it's with new stories written by someone else or publishing every scribble they ever wrote, there's money to be made, damn it. Respect for the dead be damned.
Of course for most of us it'll never be an issue. I mean no publisher is going to want to continue pumping out Eric Filler books. Still, it's a shame that you can only control your work until you hit a slab at the morgue. I guess I'm Type A like that.
Last month longtime author Lawrence Block Tweeted a reply to someone who asked who should write Sue Grafton's 'Z' book since she passed away before completing the whole alphabet. To which Block said basically he didn't think anyone should.
I Tweeted him to ask if there was any kind of legal action he could take to make sure his books would be protected from publisher schemes to revive his characters like Matt Scudder, Bernie Rhodenbarr, or Keller the hit man. To my surprise I actually got a response!
Basically what he's saying is that in these cases it's up to the estate to decide what to do. Usually that's the author's family, but if the author has no family it could be his/her agent or some other delegated person. That person(s) then gets to decide whether to let publishers use some other author to continue the series or not.
A couple other people horned in to yap about copyrights not expiring for 95 years. Which doesn't really matter. That only means the property doesn't become public domain for 95 years. Which means it's under the estate's control for that long. So the gist is that after you die, your works end up in the hands of your family or whoever controls your estate. It's up to them then what to do with the future of your work. Since you're dead, you're powerless to do anything.
Now maybe you spell out your wishes ahead of time. That might do the trick. Or they might not care. Or if they get in a tight spot financially they might sign over the rights for whatever they can get. It's all a crapshoot and as I said, you can't do anything about it.
It doesn't seem fair, does it? Of course there is a simple solution: people could just not buy these books. Then publishers wouldn't bother trying to exploit authors after they've passed. They wouldn't try to make authors like Tom Clancy a brand name like Disney or Sony or Chevrolet. But can you really expect that? Not really.
The same applies to music. Not so much movies. But you know how it is: after someone like Elvis, John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Tupac, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, or Prince dies there are suddenly all these "new" songs that are "discovered" and in the case of Elvis they've been issuing and reissuing "new" versions and compilations for 40 years now.
I was happy when Terry Pratchett's estate said there would be no continuation of the Discworld books. I hope they can continue to resist the call of money. Like with Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide series it's just not the same written by someone else.
Probably when Stephen King, JK Rowling, GRR Martin, and John Grisham die, publishers will keep using their names for the next 95 years. Whether it's with new stories written by someone else or publishing every scribble they ever wrote, there's money to be made, damn it. Respect for the dead be damned.
Of course for most of us it'll never be an issue. I mean no publisher is going to want to continue pumping out Eric Filler books. Still, it's a shame that you can only control your work until you hit a slab at the morgue. I guess I'm Type A like that.
Friday, July 20, 2018
The Android Ate My Homework
Almost two months ago on Critique Circle, someone posted a query. The writing of the query was meh, but there were some big plot holes in the story itself.
The idea was that this movie studio guy named Otis (because so many studio execs are named after the town drunk from Andy Griffith) sees an android in a brothel in the year 2025 and so he decides to replace his star in a movie with an android.
A weird contrivance is that the android can't do the actress's voice, so he tricks the real her into dubbing the part. This was the first plot hole. It's 2025 and they can't synthesize a voice? They already did that for Roger Ebert back in 2010 or so. After his jaw was wired shut after surgery a company used clips from his TV show and interviews and stuff to synthesize his former voice on a computer. So if they could do that in 2010 why can't they do that in 2025? I mean if you're trying to create the voice of a famous actress then obviously there's footage of her speaking all over the place: movies, interviews, awards shows, and so on. Duh.
Then really the whole premise wouldn't fly legally. I mean you can't just make an android to look like a living person and claim it's that real person in your movie. I can't just make an android of George Clooney and make Ocean's 14 or The American 2: Electric Boogaloo and say George Clooney is actually in the movie. I'd get my ass handed to me in court for using his likeness and falsely claiming he was in my movie. So the actress in this story would have plenty of legal recourse--unless Otis tricks her into signing a waiver.
Stop me if I'm wrong, but I think even with dead people you have to contact their estate to get the rights. Like with Rogue One when they used zombie Tarkin, I'm sure they had to contact Peter Cushing's estate and get permission--and maybe pony up some dough. If it's someone historical like Lincoln or JFK then probably not, but I'm pretty sure you do if you're going to create a digital or robotic Elvis or Michael Jackson or Marilyn Monroe or someone like that.
So the whole premise of the story doesn't make sense! I guess like I said about bad movies, bad stories can follow their own faulty dream logic. But really before you're getting a query ready, you should probably make sure your story premise actually makes sense. I doubt this dude will go change anything, though clearly he needs to.
As I like to do with movies, I rewrote the idea to improve it. In this case to eliminate the weaknesses I saw:
In the 1960s a producer named Gus recently had an expensive flop, which put him on the shit list of studios. A studio head calls him in with a script for a movie. The only hitch is it has to star his ex-wife Lizzy or they'll lose the rights. But when Gus goes to talk to her, he realizes she's pregnant! She'd be showing by the time they'd have to start filming. He tries to find a lookalike, but when his top choice falls through, he goes to a woman who gives him a potion that lets him become Lizzy. So he has to go to the set and complete the movie as her. I've been writing it for the last couple of weeks so it should be done in the next month or so.
Have you ever written something and then someone told you the whole premise makes no sense? Do tell!
The idea was that this movie studio guy named Otis (because so many studio execs are named after the town drunk from Andy Griffith) sees an android in a brothel in the year 2025 and so he decides to replace his star in a movie with an android.
A weird contrivance is that the android can't do the actress's voice, so he tricks the real her into dubbing the part. This was the first plot hole. It's 2025 and they can't synthesize a voice? They already did that for Roger Ebert back in 2010 or so. After his jaw was wired shut after surgery a company used clips from his TV show and interviews and stuff to synthesize his former voice on a computer. So if they could do that in 2010 why can't they do that in 2025? I mean if you're trying to create the voice of a famous actress then obviously there's footage of her speaking all over the place: movies, interviews, awards shows, and so on. Duh.
Then really the whole premise wouldn't fly legally. I mean you can't just make an android to look like a living person and claim it's that real person in your movie. I can't just make an android of George Clooney and make Ocean's 14 or The American 2: Electric Boogaloo and say George Clooney is actually in the movie. I'd get my ass handed to me in court for using his likeness and falsely claiming he was in my movie. So the actress in this story would have plenty of legal recourse--unless Otis tricks her into signing a waiver.
Stop me if I'm wrong, but I think even with dead people you have to contact their estate to get the rights. Like with Rogue One when they used zombie Tarkin, I'm sure they had to contact Peter Cushing's estate and get permission--and maybe pony up some dough. If it's someone historical like Lincoln or JFK then probably not, but I'm pretty sure you do if you're going to create a digital or robotic Elvis or Michael Jackson or Marilyn Monroe or someone like that.
So the whole premise of the story doesn't make sense! I guess like I said about bad movies, bad stories can follow their own faulty dream logic. But really before you're getting a query ready, you should probably make sure your story premise actually makes sense. I doubt this dude will go change anything, though clearly he needs to.
As I like to do with movies, I rewrote the idea to improve it. In this case to eliminate the weaknesses I saw:
You don't want to hear it, but just for my own amusement here's how I'd rewrite your story to eliminate the problems I see.
Otis (though could we get a better name? I keep thinking of the drunk on Andy Griffith) has finally acquired the rights to [some big superhero property] incumbent upon he casts the property owner's favorite actress, Lola, also known as "The Blonde Barracuda." That night Otis goes to see Lola and immediately sees a big problem: she's pregnant! And she says the baby is his.
Otis is considering his options (cancelling the movie and being fired, trying a body double, using a motion-capture suit) while getting drunk at a local watering hole. He starts to hit on the hot female bartender only to find out she's an android! Otis asks the owner of the place where he got the android. Then he calls up his long-suffering assistant Elizabeth to get him an android that looks like Lola.
Elizabeth has served Otis for years and even gotten an expensive makeover to try to get some interest, but still he sees her only as a go-fer. She goes to the android factory and decides she'll sabotage Otis by ordering a refurbished android. She figures when the project flopped and Otis is ruined, he'll need a shoulder to cry on--hers. When the android arrives at the studio it looks like Lola but the voice system is damaged. With filming set to begin soon, there's no way the android can be repaired or a replacement purchased in time. Elizabeth secret celebrates, but she's thwarted when Otis gets an idea.
He goes to Lola and asks her to dub in her real voice for the android's lines. In exchange Otis will acknowledge their child and sign a very unfair child support agreement.
It seems like the project is saved, but as production begins, Elizabeth continues trying to sabotage things at every turn, until finally ratting Otis out about the android. He has to work a little studio magic to convince reporters that the android is a real person.
Enraged, Elizabeth tries to kill Otis, but is stopped by Lola. By the time of the premiere, Otis and Lola are together and Elizabeth is thinking up ways to sabotage them from her jail cell.I actually thought of how to use this for an Eric Filler gender swap story too. It involves a little rejiggering with the idea so you can't say I'm plagiarizing it. Just using it for inspiration.
A Hollywood ending!
In the 1960s a producer named Gus recently had an expensive flop, which put him on the shit list of studios. A studio head calls him in with a script for a movie. The only hitch is it has to star his ex-wife Lizzy or they'll lose the rights. But when Gus goes to talk to her, he realizes she's pregnant! She'd be showing by the time they'd have to start filming. He tries to find a lookalike, but when his top choice falls through, he goes to a woman who gives him a potion that lets him become Lizzy. So he has to go to the set and complete the movie as her. I've been writing it for the last couple of weeks so it should be done in the next month or so.
Have you ever written something and then someone told you the whole premise makes no sense? Do tell!
Wednesday, July 18, 2018
The Obnoxiously Miserly Habits of Non-Wealthy People
As part of my job, I open a lot of envelopes from people. What soon became apparent is the annoying extremes people will go to to save a few cents on an envelope. A lot of people send in birthday card envelopes. Or window envelopes they salvaged probably from bills they received. One guy takes it to an extreme by like taking paper or maybe an old envelope and taping a bunch of old bits of ads to it. Then he writes "cut here" on one end. But guess what? No one ever cuts there. Because we have a machine that opens the stupid things. And I have a letter opener. The people who use window envelopes often spend time cutting their payment coupons and sometimes taping them so the address shows up.
When you think about it's pretty pathetic. I mean, a box of envelopes costs a buck at the dollar store. Even at Wal-Mart, Kroger, etc they're around a dollar. And security envelopes too, which would be good for the guy who every month sends in a check between two strips of black construction paper. But to save like two cents, they go to all this effort.
I think though everyone has something they get miserly about. I mean when I go to the grocery store I'll stand there for five minutes debating which brand of tuna is the best value. Or I'll save myself a whopping twenty cents by buying store brand Atkins bars even though I don't like them as much.
The really dumb thing is then I'll just throw in some candy or Shrimp Chips or a Son of Zorn Pop Vinyl on clearance. I worry so much about saving a few cents and then waste whole dollars.
I think the gas pump is a place where miserly behavior takes hold. If gas goes up twenty-thirty cents a gallon, you get people who drive off or get pissed off and break stuff. Or people lining up for a mile at the station that's like ten cents cheaper. But have you ever done the math on it? My gas tank holds 13 gallons but obviously I never buy the full amount, so at most it's more like 12. So even if gas spikes 30 cents, I'm paying $3.60 more. That's barely a coffee at Starbucks! It's not exactly going to wipe me out. Maybe one less coffee.
Yes I know it all adds up. Still, like I say, I waste way more than that without thinking about it. As I'm sure most people do. We're miserly about some things and splurge on other things. But really, can't you save yourself (and me) some hassle and just buy a box of number 10 (or the smaller size) security envelopes for a whole whopping buck? I mean with like 40 in a box you're covered for almost 4 years! That's about a quarter per year!
Or you could pay online and not need any fucking envelopes. Think about it.
When you think about it's pretty pathetic. I mean, a box of envelopes costs a buck at the dollar store. Even at Wal-Mart, Kroger, etc they're around a dollar. And security envelopes too, which would be good for the guy who every month sends in a check between two strips of black construction paper. But to save like two cents, they go to all this effort.
I think though everyone has something they get miserly about. I mean when I go to the grocery store I'll stand there for five minutes debating which brand of tuna is the best value. Or I'll save myself a whopping twenty cents by buying store brand Atkins bars even though I don't like them as much.
The really dumb thing is then I'll just throw in some candy or Shrimp Chips or a Son of Zorn Pop Vinyl on clearance. I worry so much about saving a few cents and then waste whole dollars.
I think the gas pump is a place where miserly behavior takes hold. If gas goes up twenty-thirty cents a gallon, you get people who drive off or get pissed off and break stuff. Or people lining up for a mile at the station that's like ten cents cheaper. But have you ever done the math on it? My gas tank holds 13 gallons but obviously I never buy the full amount, so at most it's more like 12. So even if gas spikes 30 cents, I'm paying $3.60 more. That's barely a coffee at Starbucks! It's not exactly going to wipe me out. Maybe one less coffee.
Yes I know it all adds up. Still, like I say, I waste way more than that without thinking about it. As I'm sure most people do. We're miserly about some things and splurge on other things. But really, can't you save yourself (and me) some hassle and just buy a box of number 10 (or the smaller size) security envelopes for a whole whopping buck? I mean with like 40 in a box you're covered for almost 4 years! That's about a quarter per year!
Or you could pay online and not need any fucking envelopes. Think about it.
Monday, July 16, 2018
On the Road With Bad Movies
One thing about bad movies is that generally they have their own system of logic that doesn't really follow real life. They're like dreams that way. Bad dreams. I mean, where else would the girl run UPstairs to escape the maniac with the knife? Or decide that a creepy old house/cabin/motel is the perfect place to spend the night? Or where every sheriff/cop ignores the obvious warning signs about a killer/demon/zombie apocalypse?
There is one convention that's popped up in a few bad movies I've seen on MST3K and Rifftrax. It's the convention that when you're traveling, basically you can take shelter wherever you feel like and do whatever you want.
In the MST3K version of A Touch of Satan (which sounds like a terrible perfume), a guy is driving in the country and sees a dirt road through a meadow. So he simply drives onto the dirt road and throws himself a little picnic in some trees by a stream or whatever. And then meets a girl who turns out to be an evil witch.
Or in Tourist Trap, three hot girls' car breaks down and while walking around they spy a pond. And promptly go skinny-dipping. Until the property owner comes around and tells them that the pond fills up with water moccasins at night. Eek! Then later two of them are turned into mannequins by the crazy property owner. EEEK!
In Hillbillys in a Haunted House, the eponymous hillbillys (and I'm using their spelling) are traveling and their car breaks down or something. They see an "abandoned" house and since it's night they decide to just break in and spend the night. Then it turns out there are some bad guys using the house as a hideout.
In Bloody Pit of Horror a film crew and some hot chicks see an Italian castle that looks deserted. So they decide to break in and take some pictures with the hot girls and the old furniture and torture dungeon. Until it turns out there's a crazy guy living there who calls himself the Crimson Executioner and tortures several of them to death.
My favorite is Ghosthouse, where this guy named Jim Daylen and his little sister and brother(?) and his girlfriend are traveling in an RV. They see an "abandoned" house and decide to park in the driveway. Then Jim Daylen breaks in and goes upstairs to set up his HAM radio in the attic. The radio sends out the sound of his death before it happens. Because the place is haunted by an evil spirit. Later there's this guy named Pepe who hitchhikes to and breaks into the ghosthouse. He starts rummaging around and is actually surprised when the dusty old box of croutons is full of roaches. I mean even if the box were intact who wants to eat raw croutons? Later in the movie, long after they've been terrorized by a ghost, one girl goes inside to take a shower and is surprised when blood comes out of the faucet. If the house is abandoned why the hell would the water work in the first place? And after you've had a ghost try to murder you and your family/friends already, why would you want to take a shower in there? See what I mean about operating under a different kind of logic?
In all these cases no one ever stops to consider whether they're trespassing or breaking and entering. If a house looks abandoned and you're tired or bored it's fair game, right? Somehow I don't think the police would agree with that logic. OK, in a post-apocalyptic wasteland you can use those rules, but not in conventional society. Yet time and again we have people in bad movies breaking into places or trespassing on private property for the sheer hell of it. And as you can see there are usually terrible consequences.
At least the dorky metal band in Rock n Roll Nightmare (also called Edge of Hell) rented the house where they were terrorized bypuppets demons. Way to buck convention, guys. That's why they're rockers, because they're rebellious like that.
Anyway, this summer if you go on vacation, maybe you should try just breaking into anywhere that looks abandoned. Or just skinny-dipping in any body of water you come across. I'm sure it'll work out fine for you, just like in all these movies! So put on your headphones, microwave a croissant, and hit the road!
There is one convention that's popped up in a few bad movies I've seen on MST3K and Rifftrax. It's the convention that when you're traveling, basically you can take shelter wherever you feel like and do whatever you want.
In the MST3K version of A Touch of Satan (which sounds like a terrible perfume), a guy is driving in the country and sees a dirt road through a meadow. So he simply drives onto the dirt road and throws himself a little picnic in some trees by a stream or whatever. And then meets a girl who turns out to be an evil witch.
Or in Tourist Trap, three hot girls' car breaks down and while walking around they spy a pond. And promptly go skinny-dipping. Until the property owner comes around and tells them that the pond fills up with water moccasins at night. Eek! Then later two of them are turned into mannequins by the crazy property owner. EEEK!
In Hillbillys in a Haunted House, the eponymous hillbillys (and I'm using their spelling) are traveling and their car breaks down or something. They see an "abandoned" house and since it's night they decide to just break in and spend the night. Then it turns out there are some bad guys using the house as a hideout.
In Bloody Pit of Horror a film crew and some hot chicks see an Italian castle that looks deserted. So they decide to break in and take some pictures with the hot girls and the old furniture and torture dungeon. Until it turns out there's a crazy guy living there who calls himself the Crimson Executioner and tortures several of them to death.
My favorite is Ghosthouse, where this guy named Jim Daylen and his little sister and brother(?) and his girlfriend are traveling in an RV. They see an "abandoned" house and decide to park in the driveway. Then Jim Daylen breaks in and goes upstairs to set up his HAM radio in the attic. The radio sends out the sound of his death before it happens. Because the place is haunted by an evil spirit. Later there's this guy named Pepe who hitchhikes to and breaks into the ghosthouse. He starts rummaging around and is actually surprised when the dusty old box of croutons is full of roaches. I mean even if the box were intact who wants to eat raw croutons? Later in the movie, long after they've been terrorized by a ghost, one girl goes inside to take a shower and is surprised when blood comes out of the faucet. If the house is abandoned why the hell would the water work in the first place? And after you've had a ghost try to murder you and your family/friends already, why would you want to take a shower in there? See what I mean about operating under a different kind of logic?
In all these cases no one ever stops to consider whether they're trespassing or breaking and entering. If a house looks abandoned and you're tired or bored it's fair game, right? Somehow I don't think the police would agree with that logic. OK, in a post-apocalyptic wasteland you can use those rules, but not in conventional society. Yet time and again we have people in bad movies breaking into places or trespassing on private property for the sheer hell of it. And as you can see there are usually terrible consequences.
At least the dorky metal band in Rock n Roll Nightmare (also called Edge of Hell) rented the house where they were terrorized by
Anyway, this summer if you go on vacation, maybe you should try just breaking into anywhere that looks abandoned. Or just skinny-dipping in any body of water you come across. I'm sure it'll work out fine for you, just like in all these movies! So put on your headphones, microwave a croissant, and hit the road!
Saturday, July 14, 2018
Recent Batman Comics Make a Nolan Bat-verse Revival Possible
Since my job is pretty boring, I usually have a lot of time
to think about stupid shit. The other
day I was thinking about recent Batman comics they could use for their stalled
solo movie. And then it occurred to me
that some of Tom King’s recent Batman comics would be a perfect way to revive
the Christopher Nolan Batman movies. I
know Christian Bale hasn’t expressed any interest in returning but after 6
years maybe he’s ready, especially financially.
The perfect revival story (with some tweaking) is the second
story arc of Tom King’s Rebirth-era Batman comics called I Am Suicide. In that Batman, Catwoman, and his personally
chosen Suicide Squad go to Santa Prisca to steal the Psycho Pirate from Bane, who
controls the island.
At the end of the Nolan Batman movies Bruce Wayne and Selina
Kyle had run off to Europe under assumed names to live it up. Bane was presumably killed in the final
battle to liberate Gotham, though really you don’t see a body or anything,
which paves the way to make this happen.
So we start in Europe somewhere. Bruce and Selina are hanging out when they’re
suddenly surrounded by armed goons.
There’s a scuffle until a black woman shows up--Amanda Waller whom you
might remember from the Suicide Squad movie.
She gets everyone to stand down and then she, Bruce, and Selina go off
to talk.
She reveals that in the old days Bane did some off-the-books
work for her. After he “died,” her
agents took the body that was barely alive.
They injected it with an experimental drug codenamed Venom and Bane came
back to life stronger and meaner than ever.
To make it worse, Bane took the head scientist who made the
Venom drug and bust out of there. From
her sources, Waller knows Bane is working on producing the drug in the prison
he came from. They’ve tried storming the
place but failed. Since Batman is the
only one who’s defeated Bane, Waller decided to track him down. They make the offer he can’t refuse: clean up her mess or she exposes that he’s
still alive and ruins his retirement.
Reluctantly he says yes, and Selina agrees to help. (If we need to
stretch the story then the location can be less sure so they have to do a
little tracking.)
In the comics they recruited Bronze Tiger and Punch &
Judy but I suppose they recruit some different characters who are maybe
established already like Captain Boomerang or Katana or Deadshot. (Not Harley Quinn. Ugh.)
Scarecrow with his fear toxin might make a good ally.
Then they head off to the desert. Their plane is shot down but they’re able to
escape. Still, now they have to hoof it
through a lot of desert with few supplies.
And there are a lot of unfriendlies among the locals who hinder
them. But the team bonds along the
way. (You could have Batman in a duster
and goggles like in the Knightmare sequence of BvS too.)
By now Bane is tipped to their arrival. He’s contracted Deathstroke to work for him
and sends him out to bring down the Bat and company. During a sandstorm or something Deathstroke
and goons fall upon the team. There’s a
fierce battle but in the end Batman and the rest except for Selina are
captured. They’re taken to the prison to
face Bane.
Meanwhile, Selina sneaks into the prison. She finds the scientist and his team working
on the Venom. With his help she’s able
to locate the rest of the team and spring them.
Meanwhile Bane is beating up Batman out of spite. That is until the alarms sound. Then Batman reveals that getting captured was
all part of his plan. Now they really
begin to fight while Deathstroke and goons go to find the rest of the team.
There are some fights between the team and goons with Selina
knocking out Deathstroke using some cunning strategy. Then they get the scientists and haul
ass. Meanwhile Batman is fighting Bane
and finally gets the upper hand. He
leaves an unconscious Bane in one of the old prison cells he used to inhabit,
leaving him, Deathstroke, others for Waller to clean up. (More fight specifics would depend on which
characters you're using.)
Later Waller meets with Bruce and Selina to thank them and
say that she’ll keep her part of the deal.
They’re free to go. That night in
a secluded place Bruce proposes to Selina...and then you could use more of the
engagement story arc for sequels. If you want a cookie scene then Waller could sneak away a sample of Venom maybe even to Lex Luthor.
So there we go we used some of the old and some of the
new. Is it perfect? No, but is it better than what they’re
likely thinking of doing? Probably.
Friday, July 13, 2018
When Nostalgia Goes Bad, Part 2
A few months ago I posted about when I played some old video games and realized they weren't as good as I remembered. Here's another nostalgia fail:
Back in April I was bored on a Sunday afternoon and on the Roku Channel they had Short Circuit 2, which I remembered was not a great movie, but since I couldn't think of anything else to watch, I decided to put it on.
The first movie was about a robot that's struck by lightning and comes to life. The military wants to capture and/or destroy the robot but its creator (Steve Guttenberg) and a food truck lady who was apparently ahead of her time (Ally Sheedy) save the robot. And then don't appear in the second movie, because they were smart, not that we ever really heard of them much after 1989 anyway.
The second movie focuses on Steve Guttenberg's assistant, who has made toys of the robot and moved to New York. When I watched the opening credits though I realized that the Indian assistant was played by Fisher Stevens. I remembered seeing him in the 90s CBS series Early Edition (with Kyle Chandler who went on to star in the Friday Night Lights series) and the thing is, he ain't Indian. He's white and Midwestern like me!
So the star of this movie is a white guy wearing brownface and talking like Apu from The Simpsons--who is also voiced by a white guy. That made it kind of icky to watch.
The thing is, when you're like 10 years old you don't really pay attention to that stuff. It doesn't even occur to you that Indian guys or black guys or Asian guys might actually be white guys in makeup. Some things you know are made up (like talking robots) but why would grown ups lie to you about that? And back then we didn't have the Internet like IMDB to look up stuff so easily. So I can let myself off the hook for not noticing back in the 80s, right? Right?
The irony is both movies are supposed to be about tolerance and accepting those who are different, like a robot that's alive. And yet the producers and director thought using a white guy in brownface was totally cool? Really? I mean come on, it was like 1985, not 1935. But oh hey, we couldn't find a real Indian actor...like the millions of them in fucking India! Or we needed the awesome star power of Fisher Stevens...who no one had fucking heard of outside maybe Chicago.
They should have known better, but I guess since there was no Internet to stir up outrage, they didn't really give a fuck. And now I'm pissed off because I liked that first movie and it's forever tainted! It's like finding out your favorite athlete was on steroids or cheated. (You know, like Barry Bonds or Lance Armstrong...) I feel like such a dupe, not that I spent any money on it; I'm sure it was my dad's money back then.
It makes me wonder how many 80s movies are similarly tainted. I rewatched Trading Places a few weeks ago and near the end when Dan Ackroyd gets on a train, he disguises himself as a rastafarian--in blackface. The weird thing is he ends up in the same room as Eddie Murphy, who's disguised as an exchange student from Africa. Shouldn't there have been some discussion of this disguise beforehand? I mean, why would Eddie Murphy let him go around in blackface? Pretty tacky.
I really don't want to find out what other examples are out there.
Back in April I was bored on a Sunday afternoon and on the Roku Channel they had Short Circuit 2, which I remembered was not a great movie, but since I couldn't think of anything else to watch, I decided to put it on.
The first movie was about a robot that's struck by lightning and comes to life. The military wants to capture and/or destroy the robot but its creator (Steve Guttenberg) and a food truck lady who was apparently ahead of her time (Ally Sheedy) save the robot. And then don't appear in the second movie, because they were smart, not that we ever really heard of them much after 1989 anyway.
The second movie focuses on Steve Guttenberg's assistant, who has made toys of the robot and moved to New York. When I watched the opening credits though I realized that the Indian assistant was played by Fisher Stevens. I remembered seeing him in the 90s CBS series Early Edition (with Kyle Chandler who went on to star in the Friday Night Lights series) and the thing is, he ain't Indian. He's white and Midwestern like me!
So the star of this movie is a white guy wearing brownface and talking like Apu from The Simpsons--who is also voiced by a white guy. That made it kind of icky to watch.
The thing is, when you're like 10 years old you don't really pay attention to that stuff. It doesn't even occur to you that Indian guys or black guys or Asian guys might actually be white guys in makeup. Some things you know are made up (like talking robots) but why would grown ups lie to you about that? And back then we didn't have the Internet like IMDB to look up stuff so easily. So I can let myself off the hook for not noticing back in the 80s, right? Right?
The irony is both movies are supposed to be about tolerance and accepting those who are different, like a robot that's alive. And yet the producers and director thought using a white guy in brownface was totally cool? Really? I mean come on, it was like 1985, not 1935. But oh hey, we couldn't find a real Indian actor...like the millions of them in fucking India! Or we needed the awesome star power of Fisher Stevens...who no one had fucking heard of outside maybe Chicago.
They should have known better, but I guess since there was no Internet to stir up outrage, they didn't really give a fuck. And now I'm pissed off because I liked that first movie and it's forever tainted! It's like finding out your favorite athlete was on steroids or cheated. (You know, like Barry Bonds or Lance Armstrong...) I feel like such a dupe, not that I spent any money on it; I'm sure it was my dad's money back then.
It makes me wonder how many 80s movies are similarly tainted. I rewatched Trading Places a few weeks ago and near the end when Dan Ackroyd gets on a train, he disguises himself as a rastafarian--in blackface. The weird thing is he ends up in the same room as Eddie Murphy, who's disguised as an exchange student from Africa. Shouldn't there have been some discussion of this disguise beforehand? I mean, why would Eddie Murphy let him go around in blackface? Pretty tacky.
I really don't want to find out what other examples are out there.
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
Medical Drama is the Cheapest Drama
A couple of weeks ago I was playing this book called The Animators on my Kindle Touch. I thought the book was about two women who are the eponymous animators and some rivalry develops and stuff. But then one of the women collapses with a stroke and I groan. Ugh, not a medical drama!
Of course half her body is paralyzed and she has to go through rehab. And her partner who had been mad at her is suddenly at her side helping her to recover. Ugh.
The problem with books that rely on medical drama is it's just the laziest way to introduce drama or to solve conflicts. Cancer is probably the one authors use most often. Then you have strokes or some other paralysis. The idea is if you have characters who are angry at each other or estranged or whatever they'll be brought together by this crisis and learn valuable lessons and shit. Ugh.
OK, I've had a sister die of cancer and a father with several medical issues and quite a few uncles also die of cancer and you know what: it didn't really bring anyone together. It didn't teach us valuable lessons about life or some fucking bullshit like that. You know what happens in the real world: you go to the fucking hospital and you sit around watching TV, playing on your phone, doing Sudoku or crosswords or whatever, and other shit like that. You basically just try to pass the time and hope like hell that your family member recovers.
At a hospice it's not even that. My mom and I basically sat by my sister's bed for two days watching TV and waiting for the end. We weren't sitting there hugging and crying and working out any long-standing issues. We weren't arguing and then hugging and crying. Maybe it's because we're Midwesterners; maybe in California or New York they do that other stuff.
I'm not saying this to make you feel sorry for me or anything. I'm just saying that using medical drama to introduce and/or solve drama in your story is lazy fucking writing. It's a cheap way to introduce drama or to bring characters together without having to do any actual plotting. The only lazier way would be to have "God" or whatever deity hurl a thunderbolt down. It's basically a deus ex machina. And by now it's cliche. I guess it's not surprising this was the author's first novel. And it's not surprising hacks like Nicholas Sparks go to that well so often.
So from now on save the medical drama for TV.
Of course half her body is paralyzed and she has to go through rehab. And her partner who had been mad at her is suddenly at her side helping her to recover. Ugh.
The problem with books that rely on medical drama is it's just the laziest way to introduce drama or to solve conflicts. Cancer is probably the one authors use most often. Then you have strokes or some other paralysis. The idea is if you have characters who are angry at each other or estranged or whatever they'll be brought together by this crisis and learn valuable lessons and shit. Ugh.
OK, I've had a sister die of cancer and a father with several medical issues and quite a few uncles also die of cancer and you know what: it didn't really bring anyone together. It didn't teach us valuable lessons about life or some fucking bullshit like that. You know what happens in the real world: you go to the fucking hospital and you sit around watching TV, playing on your phone, doing Sudoku or crosswords or whatever, and other shit like that. You basically just try to pass the time and hope like hell that your family member recovers.
At a hospice it's not even that. My mom and I basically sat by my sister's bed for two days watching TV and waiting for the end. We weren't sitting there hugging and crying and working out any long-standing issues. We weren't arguing and then hugging and crying. Maybe it's because we're Midwesterners; maybe in California or New York they do that other stuff.
I'm not saying this to make you feel sorry for me or anything. I'm just saying that using medical drama to introduce and/or solve drama in your story is lazy fucking writing. It's a cheap way to introduce drama or to bring characters together without having to do any actual plotting. The only lazier way would be to have "God" or whatever deity hurl a thunderbolt down. It's basically a deus ex machina. And by now it's cliche. I guess it's not surprising this was the author's first novel. And it's not surprising hacks like Nicholas Sparks go to that well so often.
So from now on save the medical drama for TV.
Monday, July 9, 2018
Page to Screen: The Girl With All the Gifts (Spoilers!)
I first heard of this book back in 2016 when Rusty Webb reviewed it on Goodreads. A while later the movie was on Amazon Prime so I bookmarked it but I hadn't gotten around to watching it when the book was on sale in the Kindle Store. So I figured I might as well buy the book and then watch the movie afterwards.
Like Rusty I really liked the book. It's a zombie story but it's one of those like Warm Hearts where it's not a traditional zombie story. In this case it focuses on a 10-year-old girl named Melanie (or Test Subject #1) who is locked in a room every night after school. The next morning soldiers come in, one pointing a gun at her while another soldier straps her down to a wheelchair. Then she's taken to a classroom with a bunch of kids exactly like her. Once a week the kids are fed a bowl of worms, which sustains them until the next week.
Since Melanie can't remember anything before this place, it all seems perfectly natural to her. It's like the little boy in Room whose mother was kidnapped and locked in a room and then gave birth to him; he doesn't realize there's a whole world beyond the confines of his prison. Nor does Melanie, though she loves to hear her favorite teacher Miss Justineau's stories, especially the Greek myth of Pandora, the girl who was created by Zeus to open a box of horrors, at the bottom of which was one final thing: hope. Except for the being strapped down and eating worms Melanie seems like a bright little girl, maybe a bit too much of a teacher's pet type. You know, the one who always raises her hand and knows all the answers? The one who'd ask for more homework?
The thing is, though, Melanie is a "hungry" or a zombie. The author makes no attempt to hide this; it's pretty much the first paragraph describing her as extremely pale and then the being locked up and being fed worms. And then it also cuts to Miss Justineau, who has a conflicted relationship with her students and Dr. Caldwell, who wants to cut them up and find out what makes them tick--and whether they can cure the plague. There's also Sgt Parks, a man with a badly scarred face who is in charge of the base they're on, especially securing the students. He and soldiers like Private Gallagher went out into the ruins of the world and found these strange zombies who seem almost normal.
So then one day Parks takes Melanie to a different place: Dr. Caldwell's lab. She's learned all she can from other students so now she wants the best. Parks leaves as there's a commotion outside the base. Then Justineau busts in to try saving Melanie, though she's hit with pepper spray. Hungries are attacking the base and eventually some get inside the lab, killing Dr. Caldwell's assistant and injuring her hands. Melanie escapes and rescues Miss Justineau by eating a couple of men.
Eventually Melanie, Miss Justineau, Parks, Gallagher, and Dr. Caldwell get in a Humvee and escape into the woods. Since they can't raise anyone at their headquarters of "Beacon," they decide to head south to get to the place. Melanie is chained up; she still doesn't full understand what she is, but she has an inkling of it.
Their Humvee breaks down so they have to go on foot. They stop in a couple of smaller towns, avoiding hungries and "Junkers," survivalists who haven't been turned but roam the land scavenging and basically living like savages. It was the Junkers who sicced the hungries on the base to destroy it and the lab and everything. Along the way Melanie proves herself as a scout to Parks while Miss Justineau and Parks get fairly close one night after they find some booze. Miss Justineau confesses that before the plague 20 years earlier she had killed a kid by accident; before she could bring herself to tell someone the plague hit and there was no one to tell. Dr. Caldwell's hands are getting worse, but she manages at one point to snag some brain tissue from a dead hungry to study later.
Eventually they get to London and find some really weird shit like hungries who have just fallen down and sort of mushroom-type things have sprouted out of them. There's also a sort of wall made by fungus strands. Melanie gets behind it and finds sort of trees with pods that Dr. Caldwell says are spores that could infect the whole world if they eventually open up.
Also in London they find this huge, armored vehicle. It was a mobile lab sent into the city years earlier to study the plague and find a cure. There's no one in the vehicle except the driver who shot himself. While Parks tries to get the thing working so they can use it to drive to safety, Dr. Caldwell fires up the scientific equipment.
While Melanie is out, she goes into a theater and sees a group of kids hunting rats. She soon realizes the kids are like her! Except they never went to school so they're primitives for the most part. They're led by a boy who has painted up his face like a mask of a monster and carries a baseball bat.
That night Private Gallagher sneaks out of the vehicle to go off on his own. Some of the feral kids find him and kill him. Their leader takes his jacket to wear as a trophy. Parks and Justineau go to find him while Dr. Caldwell stays behind. She's tricked into going outside and nearly killed by the feral kids. She's able to kill one of them and take some of its brain tissue. When Melanie comes back, Dr. Caldwell no longer has any interest in cutting her up: there would be no point in it as there is no cure to be had. Melanie and those feral kids are a second generation of hungries, born from other hungries. As weird as it is to think about, apparently zombies could have sex and conceive! While in normal humans the plague is devastating, in the second generation the plague stabilizes so they can be pretty much normal with proper guidance.
Parks and Justineau find Gallagher but then are beset by the feral kids. Melanie comes to their rescue and takes on the lead feral kid. When she defeats him that makes her their new leader. But by then Parks has been bit so Melanie puts him down at his request. She then gets Justineau back to the lab and locks her in.
Later Melanie sets fire to the weird trees and pods, causing them to hatch. Spores are released into the air and presumably they'll be spread by the winds to the rest of Britain and maybe even the world. When Melanie goes back to the vehicle she tells Miss Justineau it was the only way to save the world because eventually humans (normal and Junkers) and hungries would have destroyed everything. So now there will be no more humans, only hungries. She brings the feral kids to the vehicle and Miss Justineau starts to teach them, only now she's the one locked in a cage.
The end was somewhat obvious as the Pandora symbolism was pretty evident. I mean, you know Melanie is Pandora and has to empty out the box of evil while leaving some hope for the future. Once the big weird plants are introduced it became fairly clear what she was going to do. Still, it was a nice twist though that instead of saving OUR world, she saves HER world. Yet it doesn't feel like a betrayal, like if Luke Skywalker had saved the Empire or something, because there was no way to cure the plague. Thus the only way for any kind of society to survive was to get rid of the old world entirely. Though you have to wonder how long they can survive because they're carnivores so they need a source of meat. Unless Miss Justineau teaches them how to raise livestock they'll eventually run out of food, right?
What I really liked about the book is that it does a good job of making Melanie seem like an innocent little girl--who just happens to eat people, cats, pigeons, or whatever else. Her innocence is almost heartbreaking when you realize what's actually going on. The other characters are all given some backstory so that not even Gallagher seems like a redshirt or Slipknot who's only there to die.
Now then, we get to the movie. What surprised me was the author wrote the script because he really neutered his own story. Kind of like Ernest Cline with Ready Player One I think he was a little too willing to change his story to get it on the screen. What he ends up doing is cutting basically all the backstory and most of the stuff in the school, pretty much turning all his characters flat. The script doesn't even convey Melanie's innocence all that well or her growth as it's in too much of a rush to get from one place to another. Some of that might have been the director and producers cutting for time, but the end result is like a bad Cliff Notes version of the book.
There are also some poor artistic choices by the director. Someracists "fans" might complain about Melanie being race-swapped from white to black. That's not really the problem; the problem is the director has Melanie and the other kids look normal. They're not supposed to look normal; they're supposed to look like death warmed over--like monsters! Like how Frankenstein's monster doesn't realize it's a monster (at first anyway) these kids don't realize they're monsters though everyone else can see it. Similarly the removal of Parks' scar makes him less scary than he should be. They also race-swapped Miss Justineau from black to white and in this case I think it was a bad call. Though she's a middle-aged schoolteacher, Miss Justineau is kind of a badass in the book, like Pam Grier in Jackie Brown or something; she's not some frumpy, bookish white girl. They didn't really make any changes to Dr. Caldwell but they never really get into her backstory, which is that she was one of the alternates to go on the armored vehicle they find in London. So it's kind of sweet revenge when she finds it later. Also it brought home some of the desperation as the best and brightest are gone and all that humanity has left are also-runs like her. Gallagher is basically a redshirt in this as they never get into his backstory, about how he pretty much grew up with this world his entire life with only a vague memory of anything else.
There are no mentions of the Junkers so there's no real reason the hungries are suddenly able to storm the base. Most of the journey to London is cut out so basically they get there in a day. That also cuts out a lot of time the characters had to bond or to divulge any history.
But probably the worst change is that Dr. Caldwell never tells Melanie there is no cure. She still thinks there is a cure when Melanie destroys the world. So now it does seem pretty selfish of Melanie to destroy humanity because it seems like an alternative was available. There also seemed some insinuation at the end that Parks might be Melanie's father because Dr. Caldwell says the babies came from mothers who were infected after conceiving and he knew a woman who was 7 months pregnant when she disappeared; I guess the producers or studio weren't comfortable with the idea of zombie sex so they changed it. Like most of the changes, not for the better.
Normally I say either the book and movie are the same or the movie is just a shorter way to get the gist of the book. In this case I definitely recommend the book. It's a lot better. At 420 pages it'll take a little longer but it's worth it.
Like Rusty I really liked the book. It's a zombie story but it's one of those like Warm Hearts where it's not a traditional zombie story. In this case it focuses on a 10-year-old girl named Melanie (or Test Subject #1) who is locked in a room every night after school. The next morning soldiers come in, one pointing a gun at her while another soldier straps her down to a wheelchair. Then she's taken to a classroom with a bunch of kids exactly like her. Once a week the kids are fed a bowl of worms, which sustains them until the next week.
Since Melanie can't remember anything before this place, it all seems perfectly natural to her. It's like the little boy in Room whose mother was kidnapped and locked in a room and then gave birth to him; he doesn't realize there's a whole world beyond the confines of his prison. Nor does Melanie, though she loves to hear her favorite teacher Miss Justineau's stories, especially the Greek myth of Pandora, the girl who was created by Zeus to open a box of horrors, at the bottom of which was one final thing: hope. Except for the being strapped down and eating worms Melanie seems like a bright little girl, maybe a bit too much of a teacher's pet type. You know, the one who always raises her hand and knows all the answers? The one who'd ask for more homework?
The thing is, though, Melanie is a "hungry" or a zombie. The author makes no attempt to hide this; it's pretty much the first paragraph describing her as extremely pale and then the being locked up and being fed worms. And then it also cuts to Miss Justineau, who has a conflicted relationship with her students and Dr. Caldwell, who wants to cut them up and find out what makes them tick--and whether they can cure the plague. There's also Sgt Parks, a man with a badly scarred face who is in charge of the base they're on, especially securing the students. He and soldiers like Private Gallagher went out into the ruins of the world and found these strange zombies who seem almost normal.
So then one day Parks takes Melanie to a different place: Dr. Caldwell's lab. She's learned all she can from other students so now she wants the best. Parks leaves as there's a commotion outside the base. Then Justineau busts in to try saving Melanie, though she's hit with pepper spray. Hungries are attacking the base and eventually some get inside the lab, killing Dr. Caldwell's assistant and injuring her hands. Melanie escapes and rescues Miss Justineau by eating a couple of men.
Eventually Melanie, Miss Justineau, Parks, Gallagher, and Dr. Caldwell get in a Humvee and escape into the woods. Since they can't raise anyone at their headquarters of "Beacon," they decide to head south to get to the place. Melanie is chained up; she still doesn't full understand what she is, but she has an inkling of it.
Their Humvee breaks down so they have to go on foot. They stop in a couple of smaller towns, avoiding hungries and "Junkers," survivalists who haven't been turned but roam the land scavenging and basically living like savages. It was the Junkers who sicced the hungries on the base to destroy it and the lab and everything. Along the way Melanie proves herself as a scout to Parks while Miss Justineau and Parks get fairly close one night after they find some booze. Miss Justineau confesses that before the plague 20 years earlier she had killed a kid by accident; before she could bring herself to tell someone the plague hit and there was no one to tell. Dr. Caldwell's hands are getting worse, but she manages at one point to snag some brain tissue from a dead hungry to study later.
Eventually they get to London and find some really weird shit like hungries who have just fallen down and sort of mushroom-type things have sprouted out of them. There's also a sort of wall made by fungus strands. Melanie gets behind it and finds sort of trees with pods that Dr. Caldwell says are spores that could infect the whole world if they eventually open up.
Also in London they find this huge, armored vehicle. It was a mobile lab sent into the city years earlier to study the plague and find a cure. There's no one in the vehicle except the driver who shot himself. While Parks tries to get the thing working so they can use it to drive to safety, Dr. Caldwell fires up the scientific equipment.
While Melanie is out, she goes into a theater and sees a group of kids hunting rats. She soon realizes the kids are like her! Except they never went to school so they're primitives for the most part. They're led by a boy who has painted up his face like a mask of a monster and carries a baseball bat.
That night Private Gallagher sneaks out of the vehicle to go off on his own. Some of the feral kids find him and kill him. Their leader takes his jacket to wear as a trophy. Parks and Justineau go to find him while Dr. Caldwell stays behind. She's tricked into going outside and nearly killed by the feral kids. She's able to kill one of them and take some of its brain tissue. When Melanie comes back, Dr. Caldwell no longer has any interest in cutting her up: there would be no point in it as there is no cure to be had. Melanie and those feral kids are a second generation of hungries, born from other hungries. As weird as it is to think about, apparently zombies could have sex and conceive! While in normal humans the plague is devastating, in the second generation the plague stabilizes so they can be pretty much normal with proper guidance.
Parks and Justineau find Gallagher but then are beset by the feral kids. Melanie comes to their rescue and takes on the lead feral kid. When she defeats him that makes her their new leader. But by then Parks has been bit so Melanie puts him down at his request. She then gets Justineau back to the lab and locks her in.
Later Melanie sets fire to the weird trees and pods, causing them to hatch. Spores are released into the air and presumably they'll be spread by the winds to the rest of Britain and maybe even the world. When Melanie goes back to the vehicle she tells Miss Justineau it was the only way to save the world because eventually humans (normal and Junkers) and hungries would have destroyed everything. So now there will be no more humans, only hungries. She brings the feral kids to the vehicle and Miss Justineau starts to teach them, only now she's the one locked in a cage.
The end was somewhat obvious as the Pandora symbolism was pretty evident. I mean, you know Melanie is Pandora and has to empty out the box of evil while leaving some hope for the future. Once the big weird plants are introduced it became fairly clear what she was going to do. Still, it was a nice twist though that instead of saving OUR world, she saves HER world. Yet it doesn't feel like a betrayal, like if Luke Skywalker had saved the Empire or something, because there was no way to cure the plague. Thus the only way for any kind of society to survive was to get rid of the old world entirely. Though you have to wonder how long they can survive because they're carnivores so they need a source of meat. Unless Miss Justineau teaches them how to raise livestock they'll eventually run out of food, right?
What I really liked about the book is that it does a good job of making Melanie seem like an innocent little girl--who just happens to eat people, cats, pigeons, or whatever else. Her innocence is almost heartbreaking when you realize what's actually going on. The other characters are all given some backstory so that not even Gallagher seems like a redshirt or Slipknot who's only there to die.
Now then, we get to the movie. What surprised me was the author wrote the script because he really neutered his own story. Kind of like Ernest Cline with Ready Player One I think he was a little too willing to change his story to get it on the screen. What he ends up doing is cutting basically all the backstory and most of the stuff in the school, pretty much turning all his characters flat. The script doesn't even convey Melanie's innocence all that well or her growth as it's in too much of a rush to get from one place to another. Some of that might have been the director and producers cutting for time, but the end result is like a bad Cliff Notes version of the book.
There are also some poor artistic choices by the director. Some
There are no mentions of the Junkers so there's no real reason the hungries are suddenly able to storm the base. Most of the journey to London is cut out so basically they get there in a day. That also cuts out a lot of time the characters had to bond or to divulge any history.
But probably the worst change is that Dr. Caldwell never tells Melanie there is no cure. She still thinks there is a cure when Melanie destroys the world. So now it does seem pretty selfish of Melanie to destroy humanity because it seems like an alternative was available. There also seemed some insinuation at the end that Parks might be Melanie's father because Dr. Caldwell says the babies came from mothers who were infected after conceiving and he knew a woman who was 7 months pregnant when she disappeared; I guess the producers or studio weren't comfortable with the idea of zombie sex so they changed it. Like most of the changes, not for the better.
Normally I say either the book and movie are the same or the movie is just a shorter way to get the gist of the book. In this case I definitely recommend the book. It's a lot better. At 420 pages it'll take a little longer but it's worth it.
Friday, July 6, 2018
Cursed Words
Recently I finally got around to reading Tom King's A Once Crowded Sky. It was actually an ARC though not one I got from Amazon Vine. Anyway, because it was an ARC there were a few typos and such. If I were the editor, though, what I would have marked the most were annoying, unnecessary contractions.
Something me and my possibly-deceased frenemy John Oberon agreed on is one of the lamest contractions is 're. Some of the common uses like "they're" or "we're" aren't so bad but other uses it's pretty lame like "where're" or "there're" because if you actually say it aloud the contraction 're sounds exactly like the word "are" and really the only difference is one character for the space, so you're not really saving much effort. I mean go ahead and try it. Say, "There're four lights!" Or, "Where're the Pop Tarts?"
Even if you don't say it aloud, you can think it and realize it's a pretty useless contraction. An editor should really eradicate the useless contractions like that.
It's one of those things that when you think about it, it's pretty dumb. Contractions're not always the best way to go.
Something me and my possibly-deceased frenemy John Oberon agreed on is one of the lamest contractions is 're. Some of the common uses like "they're" or "we're" aren't so bad but other uses it's pretty lame like "where're" or "there're" because if you actually say it aloud the contraction 're sounds exactly like the word "are" and really the only difference is one character for the space, so you're not really saving much effort. I mean go ahead and try it. Say, "There're four lights!" Or, "Where're the Pop Tarts?"
Even if you don't say it aloud, you can think it and realize it's a pretty useless contraction. An editor should really eradicate the useless contractions like that.
It's one of those things that when you think about it, it's pretty dumb. Contractions're not always the best way to go.
Wednesday, July 4, 2018
America is a Nation of Grumpy Bulldogs & That is the Problem
One lady mentioned that there was an accident and someone died because he wasn't wearing a seatbelt. And then she goes on to talk about how annoying it is that her car beeps a whole bunch of times until you put the seatbelt on. But she outsmarts it by just outlasting it. So every time you get in the car you'd rather have the car ding at you for ten minutes than just putting on your seatbelt?
So here are the facts:
- Someone died because he wasn't wearing a seatbelt
- Car's seatbelt warning is annoying
That's America 2018 in a nutsell: disregard facts and common fucking sense because...I don't wanna. I'd rather risk death (or serious injury) or getting a ticket and have the car ding obnoxious for 10 fucking minutes every single time I drive than put on my seatbelt. What's the benefit? Ooh the seatbelt is so restrictive and chafing...I'm a big fat guy and I barely notice the seatbelt. And it literally takes 10 fucking seconds to put it on!
Stubborn defiance is what made America Great the first time. The British wanted to tax stamps, tea, sugar, and all that so we said Fuck That and overthrew them--with a lot of help from the French. But unfortunately stubborn defiance has also held us back. It's why the South didn't get rid of slavery until the 1860s--and only by force. And why the South maintained segregation until the 1960s--though in many ways there's still a lot of economic segregation there and in the rest of the country. So yeah stubborn defiance can help us defeat Germany (twice) and survive a civil war and Great Depression, but it also causes its fair share of problems.
And in 2018--really way before that--we have this 30% of the population that refuses to believe that our president is a monstrous, wanna-be dictator. Or that taking away children from their parents and locking them up (both children and parents) is wrong--so long as they're brown. Or in many cases even that the goddamned Earth is round, despite all evidence to the contrary.
The latter goes back to the seatbelt story. I mean you have these "flat Earthers" who choose to believe that there's some massive conspiracy between the government, science, and private enterprise rather than the far simpler idea that all these pictures and videos and books and everything might be right. You can argue and show proof and they'll still say it's "fake news!" because...they don't wanna change.
Unfortunately social media has given all these kooks and crackpots a forum to wallow in their ignorance. That's made them even more dangerous than before. Also unfortunately too many of them are too proud of their ignorance to recognize the problems it has created.
In America 2018 we unfortunately have a lot of grumpy bulldogs who stubbornly cling to beliefs that are objectively proven untrue, many of which are dangerous or destructive. And when those people are put in charge it degrades our entire country and the world at large--the objectively round not-quite-spherical world.
Happy Fucking Fourth of July!
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