Action Figures I Would Like: Baze Malbus

 Back in 2016 when Rogue One came out, Hasbro came out with some of the figures in the six inch size but not all of them.  They made Jyn Erso, Caspian, and Director Krennic but for some strange reason not the other characters.  Only now are they finally getting around to doing that.  One of those is Baze Malbus, the chubby guy with the big gun and sort of a cannister vacuum on his back.

I have him and his blind friend in the small size already.  I got them in a two-pack for like $5 from Ollie's a few years ago.  This one is obviously bigger and more detailed.

Action Figures I Would Like: Luke and Ysalamiri

For Black Friday, how about a Black Series figure?  This is the Lucasfilm 50th Anniversary Heir to the Empire Luke Skywalker and Ysalamiri figure.  This one of a few they've done from the "Legends" properties, ie books and comics from before the merger with Disney.  There's the rabbit guy from the Marvel comics and one of the Emperor's guards from some other thing.

It's kind of neat but these are more expensive and you know the base figure is just a recolored Dagobah Luke figure with his green saber.  It's nice that they're at least acknowledging Heir to the Empire exists, which keeps the door open for making some of the original characters like Mara Jade or Talon Karrde.  I'm just saying.

If I could get it for a good price, I'd probably do it.

Action Figures I Would Like: Lex Luthor Green Power Suit

I don't know when the first version of Lex Luthor's green power suit appeared in the comics, but it's had a few iterations in comics and animated movies.  It has yet to be seen in a live action movie, which would have been pretty awesome--even if Jesse Eisenberg were in it.  

Anyway, McFarlane is coming out in the next week or so with a new figure that it says is based on the New 52 version.  It looks pretty cool.

This is how it looked on the cover of Forever Evil in 2013:

There are some slight differences, but close enough.

They're also coming out with the blue power suit with a Superman-style S on it that was in the Rebirth comics like this:

I already have the Mattel Build-A-Figure one (except the cape) so I don't really care about that one.

My Birthday Gift to Me: A Theme to Complete the Year

 Today is my birthday.  The big double-four.  That is if I'm still alive because I'm writing this in October, so you know, maybe I didn't make it.  That never stops the Internet from celebrating a birthday, even if someone has been dead for decades.  I always find that ridiculous.

In real life if I am alive I probably won't do much to celebrate.  On my blog, I'm celebrating by announcing the theme to close out the year.

Last year I did Action Figures I Like, featuring some of my cool action figures.  Then at the start of the year I did Action Figures I Don't Like to feature some of the ones that gave me buyer's remorse.

This year I thought about a different twist.  Since it is the holiday shopping season, why not do...Action Figures I Would Like!  As in would like to own.  Some are probably not coming out until next year or some are maybe too expensive or I just haven't gotten around to buying.

This one coming out shortly is at the top of my Amazon wishlist:

I'm not a big fan of Batgirl comics but because she inspired the look of Emma Earl, I have a soft spot for her.  So I already have a couple of figures.  One is the purple Burnside costume that I mentioned last year.  One is an older set that has her black costume and came in a two-pack with paralyzed Barbara Gordon, aka Oracle.

I didn't like the first McFarlane Batgirl figure because it was the lame costume that came out after the Burnside one.  The gray suit and blue cape is cool but the mask is tiny and there's no cowl so there's nothing to hide her identity.  It makes no sense, so I rejected it.

This one I haven't read the comics but it looks cool because it's like the black suit from the New 52 and prior years, only a dark gray.  There's an actual cowl to hide her identity too.  The Bat-symbol boots are kind of neat too.

As soon as I saw that, I put it on my list.  Maybe I'll get it.  Maybe I'll never get it.  But whatever.

More to come!

The "Arrowverse" is Dying, But Why?

 On some clickbait site I saw an article saying the CW superhero series The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Batwoman are hemorrhaging viewership even as The Flash launches another big crossover, Armageddon.  Trolls were of course quick to say that it's because they're too "woke" and all the usual crap.  And maybe some of it is that trolls and incels aren't watching anymore.  But there are probably some other reasons.

1.  AGE.  The "Arrowverse" started with Arrow about 10 years ago.  That was only a couple of years after the MCU debuted.  In that time the flagship show has changed from Arrow to The Flash and that has been on for 8 seasons.  It's hard for most shows that aren't The Simpsons, Family Guy, Law & Order SVU, or South Park to stay on that long; even the CW's longest-running scripted show Supernatural finally called it quits after like 15 years.  Besides Arrow, Supergirl recently folded and Black Lightning ended earlier in the year--or last year, whatever.  The Superman & Lois show was a hit but it's not back until next year.  And also The Flash has lost some of its cast like Cisco and the guy who played Ed on Ed and probably some others, which is usually a problem for shows in decline.

2.  UNDERCUTTING:  DC undercut itself by rolling out new original series on DC Universe HBO Max like Titans and Doom Patrol.  Stargirl and Swamp Thing were also made originally for that but wound up on CW and are not part of the "Arrowverse."  The thing about those shows is they were made with much better production values, slightly bigger name actors, and more adult storylines.  By comparison the "Arrowverse" looks like cosplay junk some fans threw together in their backyard.  Some people might then think, "Why have hot dogs when I can have steak?"  Especially when you put them side-by-side on the same channel.

3.  PEAK CROSSOVER:  From the start the "Arrowverse" featured crossovers.  Barry Allen first appeared on Arrow, after all.  And characters from the two shows would periodically show up on the other one.  Legends of Tomorrow was mostly made from characters in those other two shows.  And then the Flash showed up on an episode of Supergirl in the first season.  Eventually the crossovers got bigger and then they shot their wad with the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" event that put together all their shows and even featured actors from previous series and movies like Burt Ward, Robert Wuhl, Ezra Miller's Flash, Kevin Conroy playing Bruce Wayne in live action, and Brandon Routh reprising his role as Superman.  The problem then is:  what do you do for an encore?  You pretty much reached peak crossover by doing a weak version of the biggest crossover event in DC Comics history.  It really shouldn't be a surprise that some viewers decided the universe had gone as far as it could and there was really nowhere to go but down and starting tuning out.

4.  PEAK CROSSOVER PT 2:  Another extension of crossover fatigue is that they didn't really take advantage of it much.  At the end of the "Crisis" series they set up a potential Justice League, but from what I've heard from probably the same clickbait site, they hadn't really done much with the concept.  Probably for real life monetary reasons they never put together a JLA show or anything like that.  And Covid didn't help either.

5.  SCANDAL:  They say any publicity is good publicity, but maybe not in this case.  The Batwoman/Ruby Rose feud probably hasn't really helped in terms of publicity.  Those who side with Rose are probably not going to be big CW boosters.

6.  COMPETITION:  Shortly after Arrow premiered, Marvel introduced its own shows like Agents of SHIELD, Cloak and Dagger, and Legion.  On Netflix it also added its own mini-universe of Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and Punisher.  Disney+ eliminated the latter shows, but even then, none of the Marvel shows were really "canon" in that none of it was part of the precious, precious MCU.  I mean most of them were, but not really; nothing on those shows ever had any impact on what happened in the movies.  But now Disney+ started introducing actual canon MCU shows like WandaVision, Captain America & the Falcon, Loki, and Hawkeye, which takes competition with the "Arrowverse" up a notch.  Sure one is over-the-air and one is streaming, but people still only have so much time to watch TV.  Thus when people are watching Disney+ they generally can't be watching the CW.  Sure they can DVR stuff or whatever, but there probably is a limit to how many superhero shows average people can watch.

There's probably other reasons we could come up with.  What do you think?  Do you watch the "Arrowverse?"

(PS:  I lobbied to change it from "Arrowverse" to "CWverse" since Arrow was gone, but of course no one listens to me.)

When Should a Property Die?

 Last month I watched the Disney+ special Muppet Haunted Mansion.  It was about Gonzo and a shrimp (you know, an actual shrimp like you eat?) going to a haunted house.  It was enjoyable but really if you don't like Muppets it would probably not make you a believer.

Since Disney bought the property and since the death of Jim Henson about 30 years ago, they've tried numerous times to get the property back to the popularity it held in the late 70s.  For the most part none of it has really stuck.  Not the various movies in the 90s and early 2000s.  The reboot movie in 2011 or so did pretty well but the sequel didn't.  A TV show on ABC flopped.  I doubt the Disney+ stuff has done great either and at this point the Muppets have outlived Jim Henson and his son has pretty much retired.

So at what point does Disney just say, "enough is enough" and stops throwing bad money after good?  Probably not for a long time, but the audience who really remembers the Muppets in their prime of the late 70s, early 80s is mostly over 50 now.  Even people like me who only vaguely remember the live action show but better remember the Muppet Babies cartoon on CBS in the 80s are in our 40s for the most part.  So you have to think they're running out of time to recruit new generations of fans.

This is a problem that has happened to plenty of other properties as well.  Universal has tried to revive their classic monsters like Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the wolfman, and the mummy, but the last hit they had were the Brendan Fraser/Rachel Weisz Mummy movies 20 years ago.  The Tom Cruise reboot flopped, Dracula Untold flopped, the Benicio del Toro Wolfman movie flopped.  Their hopes of a "Monsterverse" were summarily dashed.  As classic a character as Dracula might be, the last time he was successful in his own movie was "Bram Stoker's Dracula" nearly 30 years ago.

Around that time, Hollywood tried to mine old 30s pulp heroes like Dick Tracy, The Shadow, and The Phantom and those failed pretty spectacularly.  Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon briefly had a moment in 1979-1980 before pretty much disappearing.  The latter thanks to its cult status has had some talk about revivals, but nothing really solid yet.

Some have been more successful in staying relevant like Sherlock Holmes while recent attempts to make big budget movies about King Arthur or Robin Hood were met with failure.  Disney's animated Tarzan did pretty well but live action versions haven't worked.  John Carter was a monumental flop.  Hercules and Conan reboots flopped.

Anyway, a lot of these you have to think are probably just too far gone to really bring back.  Something that was popular in the 30s, most of its fans are either dead or really, really old.  A lot of those classic characters, it gets harder and harder to put them in a modern context so they might become popular again, though it's unlikely they will ever reach the fame they once did.

The exception is for properties like Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, and James Bond that have had ups and downs but they've pretty much always been around in some form since their creation.  There have always been comics with those superheroes while James Bond has had a few breaks but managed to reignite the franchise.  

Maybe it's because it's easier to update those characters to whatever decade it is.  It's easier than trying to update Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers or even the Muppets.

While many of us (rightfully) hate prequels, sequels, reboots, and revivals, besides the shameless money grab aspect, they're also important to create new generations of fans.  Without the Star Wars prequels, sequels, and TV show spinoffs, the fandom would probably just be getting older and dying slowly through entropy like the 30s serials it sought to emulate.  As far as that goes, you have to keep stoking the flames or they die out.

Maybe that's why Matt Groening, Seth MacFarlane, and Matt Stone/Trey Parker seem to want to keep The Simpsons, Family Guy, and South Park on forever.  If you keep your show on forever, you never have to worry about the fandom slowly dying out, right?  Though you have to think it can only last until they and/or enough other voice actors on their shows literally die.  It's kind of depressing to think about.

But like with The Muppets, how long can you keep shoveling coal into the furnace when all it does is smolder?

I was thinking the other day that I could probably add Mystery Science Theater 3000 to this list.  Creator Joel Hodgson has tried bringing it back a few times but the big Netflix revival only lasted two seasons and I'm not sure they found a new streaming home yet.  Mostly they seem to be concentrating on live shows right now.

I loved the show in the 90s, but I think Rifftrax has proven you don't really need all the extra stuff for movie riffing, like characters, sets, intermission sketches, and some overall framing device.  All you really need is a good bad movie and 2-3 people making witty comments and jokes during it.  That format has worked pretty much continuously for 15 years because it's cheaper to produce and not as much maintenance.  As far as the audience goes you can put on any Rifftrax VOD and not have to worry about understanding any characters or framing device story, so it's really easy to just dive on in.

The MST3K format probably is better for live shows just because you're in the room with them so having that framing device makes for a more entertaining show than three guys standing at podiums reading jokes off a script.  For TV, though, it's not really something you need anymore and thus it can probably just die out.

But those are just my thoughts.

Fake Social Justice is the Worst Kind

On Collider, one of those clickbait sites that comes up on my Facebook, there was an article saying the scene in Avengers:  Endgame where all the female heroes gather together was reshot because people thought it was "Pandering," which is true.  But apparently they didn't reshoot that scene itself, but add a few more shots of female heroes together, which was supposed to make it seem more organic--it didn't.

Seeing it, you're supposed to go, "Yay, girl power!"  Which is fine if you don't know really anything about Marvel or superhero movies in general.  But if you do, like I do, it came off as pandering and hollow because Marvel started the revered "MCU" in 2008 but didn't release a solo female superhero title until 2019--just about a year before Endgame.  They had ample opportunity to do so, but always held back because they were in that camp that a female superhero movie couldn't make money.  Until, of course, Wonder Woman did.  They had about an 8-year head start on DC/WB but never made a Black Widow movie until after the character had already died.  Never made a solo movie for the Wasp, Scarlet Witch, or any of the other female heroes in their inventory.  Hell, in that scene the only character to even appear before 2015 was Pepper Potts and she didn't get her Rescue suit until that very movie!  The first 7 years of the MCU, the only female hero was Black Widow.  

So, yeah, your record on female empowerment isn't really good enough to be bragging.

More fake female empowerment comes in the form of a DirecTV commercial where Serena Williams merges with Wonder Woman.  You go girl!  Maybe if I'd just seen the ad one time I'd be fine, but since they show it roughly 50 times every football game, I saw it enough that something bugged me:  the only ones who get any lines in the commercial are men!

Serena doesn't get a single line and the woman on the couch just mugs to the camera.  I think you're supposed to think the guy next to her is her husband and yet he says, "With DirecTV, I get..."  Not "we" get.  So does she not live there?

In a follow-up ad a woman screams but still none of the women (including Serena) get to speak.  Again it's a man on the couch bragging about his great DirecTV service.  Now, really, if they actually cared about women, why not have the woman on the couch speaking and the man mugging and probably getting paid much less?

Again, it rings really hollow once you get past the surface.

Not to sound like Andy Rooney or someone like that, but have you noticed how it seems 90% of ads now feature black people?  I'm not saying that like it's a bad thing.  It's just funny how after all the protests and stuff last year, just about every ad features a black or multiracial household.  A few even feature gay/lesbian multiracial households, which in real life are probably as rare as unicorns.

Again, I'm not saying that's a bad thing.  Representation is good.  It's just the timing that bugs me.  It feels like businesses aren't really doing it because they wanted to but because they wanted to earn brownie points with social media by appearing to be inclusive.  They didn't want to get cancelled and so they've kind of overcompensated.

And the problem is, if they're doing it for the wrong reasons, how long until they revert back to their old ways?  Representation shouldn't be a PR stunt or a fad; it should be something you're doing because you genuinely care.  I just don't think Marvel, DirecTV, and these other companies really do and that's what concerns me.

But I'm a middle-aged white guy so what the fuck do I know?

At Last: The Futile Supermansion Post!

Last month I found out that all three seasons of Crackle's Supermansion had reverted to Amazon Prime, which was good because the show had disappeared from streaming soon after the end of the third season on Crackle in 2019.  It finally gave me a chance to binge the complete third season as I really hadn't been able to see it because the way Crackle spread out the episodes was basically 6 at a time for a total of 18--plus 3 holiday specials.  I actually bought the first season on DVD because it was like $6 and bought the second season on Amazon but the third season wasn't available anywhere.

After rewatching the third season, I looked and noticed I had mentioned the show in passing a couple of times but I have never done one of my futile posts where I talk about it in-depth and people either ignore it or blow it off with "I haven't seen it" and/or "I don't have [whatever streamer]" or just make some generic comment like, "That sounds interesting."  Now it's time to correct that oversight!

The series has sort of a complicated beginning.  Originally there was a contest on Adult Swim where like Amazon was doing around that time they'd air some pilot episodes and people would vote online and the winner--or maybe a couple of winners--would get taken to series.  Robot Chicken creator Matthew Senreich and writer Zeb Wells created what was originally called Ubermansion about a house of superheroes.  I don't think I ever saw the actual pilot that aired for that.

That pilot won the contest...and yet it never went to series on Adult Swim.  I suppose I could check Wikipedia or something for why.  But a year or two later, the renamed "Supermansion" began airing on Sony's Crackle streaming service.

Like with many animated pilots, the first episode is a little off.  The anamorphic cat Cooch especially looks different from later episodes.  But the first episode does largely set up the premise and characters.  

It focuses on the super-team the "League of Freedom" that's led by Titanium Rex (voiced by Bryan Cranston), who's sort of the Superman of the group--if Superman aged like a normal human.  While Rex is still strong and flies and deflects bullets, he also has old man problems like a prostate that makes it hard for him to piss.

The rest of the team is:

• American Ranger (Keegan-Michael Key): a Captain America-type who was recently woke from a "time tunnel" after 70 years and is as casually racist, misogynist, and homophobic as most of his generation.
• Black Saturn (Tucker Gilmore):  a wanna-be Batman who is in reality a dumb narcissist who throws "Saturn rings" instead of Batarangs.  Unlike Bruce Wayne, his parents are still alive and he mooches off their fortune to fund his superhero lifestyle.
• Robobot/Jewbot (Zeb Wells):  a former military robot with a defective empathy chip that made him too sensitive to be a killbot.  For the first season and about half the second he goes by "Jewbot" as he thinks his creator is Jewish.  Learning she wasn't, he goes back to his original name.
• Cooch (Heidi Gardner):  she was an ordinary cat hit with an evolution ray that caused her to become human-like, though she still looks like a cat and has a lot of cat traits like a short attention span and sniffing butts.
• Brad (Tom Root):  a junkie who takes a special serum to make him a pinkish Hulk-like thing. 

The first five episodes are pretty general about adopting and then fighting "Omega Pets" (evil Superpets), Rex being humiliated while trying to fight the evil Blazaar, Cooch trying to pass a test to remain with the team, and most of the team turning grocery shopping into a disaster while Rex entertains the Secretary of Defense, Ranger's former kid sidekick.  When Rex defeats Blazaar, his body is regenerated slightly (internally anyway) which helps to explain in future episodes why he doesn't have quite as bad of old man problems.

It's after that where the overall story arc for the season starts to kick in when a young woman calling herself Lex Lightning shows up and claims to be Rex's daughter.  Rex really doesn't want anything to do with her but as she becomes popular with the public, he lets her stay and comes to love her.  She starts going out with Saturn and even defeats the evil Dr. Deviso--

Except at the end of the penultimate episode, when she finally gets full League membership, we find out she's really a villain!  She's working with Deviso to get access to the League's systems--and the nuclear launch codes.  Since she's the daughter of the evil Frau Mantis, she has insect DNA that lets her change shape into a gross-looking dude.  Rex uses a laser blast from his Titanium fist to blind her/him/it and she/he/it flies away.

To stop Deviso and save the planet, Brad drives the drilling machine Rex used to first come to Earth's surface from deep underground deep enough to destroy the mansion's computers with magma.  He's killed in the process and unlike comic books he actually stays dead.

It wasn't really until the end of that penultimate episode that you realize there really is a plan for the show.  You'd think it being from people behind Robot Chicken that it's just going to be a lot of random wackiness, but there actually is a method to the madness.  Frau Mantis was referenced in the second episode and Lex's heel turn was hinted at a couple of times, like when she supposedly joking says, "You think I'm just here to infiltrate the League and get all its secrets?"  Later while tripping on drugs, Brad sees Lex in her male form.  At the time these things don't seem like anything, but looking back you can see they were hints at a larger overall story.

Season 2 starts off a little quicker.  The villains that escaped from the mansion in the previous season are all living in an old pizza restaurant that dared to try to compete with the Arby's across the street--the blatant product placement becomes a running gag through the season.  They're led by Deviso and a recovered Lex who vows revenge on her father.  Rex has to go into cyberspace to try to recover some stolen data, which becomes important later on.

When Deviso can't get the data himself, who does he send in?  Actor JK Simmons, playing a fictionalized version of himself.  While trying to impress the actor, Rex reveals his one weakness:  the crystal that powers the drill that brought him to the surface.  Eventually Rex's brother down in "Subtopia" finds out where he went and an army of Subtopians swarms to the surface to take it over.  To stop them, the heroes and villains have to work together.  Lex saves her father and in the process decides to actually be a good guy.

There are a couple of side plots as well.  After losing Brad, the team recruits former member Zenith, who's a black goddess bonded to Portia Jones (voiced by Community's Yvette Nicole Brown), who has become an Oprah-like figure.  There's also an episode where Black Saturn swaps places with his older, fatter self and finds the future ruled by a woman called Gamora, the daughter of Zenith and Ranger, who killed Rex and took over the Earth thanks to Saturn's blundering.  This plot is revisited in the next season.

Like how the prequels made the first six Star Wars movies really about Anakin's fall and redemption, season 3 makes it clear that overall, Supermansion is about Lex.  In season 1 she rises, then falls.  In season 2 she rises again.  And in season 3 she struggles not to fall again.

The first few episodes of season 3 start harmlessly enough as the League has to incorporate the villains into their roster now that they've saved the world.  There's another one of those seemingly innocuous things that turns out later to be a clue when the former villain Bugula (an overgrown ant) is attracted to Lex while every "normal" human is repulsed by her.  Later, after saving Zenith in "the god's realm," the team winds up in that dark future from the previous season, only instead of Gamora, now it's ruled by an evil Ranger.  Except it's not really Ranger:  it's Lex disguised as Ranger!  Once she unlocked the insectoid DNA from her mother, she became an unstoppable evil mastermind.

In the last batch of episodes, Lex's efforts to keep her insectoid DNA from emerging fail and she steals a nuke to drop into the super-volcano under Yellowstone in order to recreate the Earth.  Only thanks to a sacrifice by Deviso and a weapon designed by him and Robobot is Lex able to purge the insect DNA and become fully human--and no longer a villain.

Really what's good about the show is while there is a lot of slapstick and foul-mouthed, potty humor there is at the core a real story.  They do actually develop some of the characters like Lex, Rex, Deviso, Robobot, and even Black Saturn, who has to reconcile his feelings for his archenemy, an evil prop comic (is there any other kind of prop comic?) called The Groaner.

I of course would have liked a season 4 but I doubt that's in the works.  Maybe if viewership on Amazon is high it would convince them to make another season, though it takes a while to make these stop-motion shows and the people behind it are already busy with Robot Chicken, MODOK, and other stuff.

Fun Facts:  Obviously since it was created by Robot Chicken staff there are a number of actors who frequently appear on that show in this one like Seth Green, Breckin Meyer, and Michelle Trachtenberg.  Star Trek reboot actors Chris Pine and Anton Yelchin both voiced characters in the show.  Pine played Deviso while Yelchin played Saturn's psychotic little brother Dudley; the character was retired after Yelchin's death.  Michael Dorn of TNG and DS9 voices a Galactus-like character while Ron Perlman (who was in Nemesis but more famously Hellboy) voiced his "herald" Blazaar.

It took a really long time before I equated Supermansion with Superman.  You have to think about it sort of phonetically:  Super-Man-Shun and then it makes sense and you wonder why you never thought about that in almost 4 years.

After Lex is added to the credits in season 1, instead of showing footage from the pilot episode, it shows silhouettes of villains through the season.  Every episode then another of the silhouettes would be filled in, allowing the audience to try to guess who the next silhouette might be.

After Zenith nearly mates with Ranger in the middle of season 2, she isn't seen again until about a third of the way through season 3.  Portia remains with the team through the end of season 2.  It seemed weird to add her to the roster (and the credits) and then not use her for almost half of the season.  Then in the third season trip to the God's realm she fuses with Portia to create Meta-Zenith, who doesn't show up until nearly the end.  Kind of wonder in a situation like that if there were real world issues getting in the way.

Today's ADHD-Friendly Filmmaking is Why TV is Better

Watching the Lego Star Wars "Terrifying Tales" special on Disney+, my brother and I both came to the same conclusion:  a simple Lego special did a better job with Kylo Ren's backstory than 3 big budget movies!  That seems pretty ridiculous.  And as I've said before, all the best Star Wars stuff since 1983 has been on the small screen:  The Clone Wars, Rebels, and The Mandalorian.

Last month also finally saw the release of the final Daniel Craig James Bond movie No Time to Die.  A lot of people like me, consider Skyfall to be the best one of his era and one of the better ones overall.  Why is that?  Because it actually tried to delve into the characters a little bit instead of just non-stop action scenes like Quantum of Solace and it didn't take a shortcut by trying to rip off Austin Powers like Spectre.

Anyway, I think as the title says, the problem in the last 25 years or so is that movies are being made for ADHD audiences.  It's this philosophy that if there's not a chase or explosion or gun battle or sex scene, the audience is going to pick up their phones or just leave the theater outright.  And that kind of short-changes character development.

You could probably blame Spielberg and Lucas for starting the whole "blockbuster" movie thing, but even most of their movies like Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the original Star Wars trilogy didn't move at a frantic pace.  There were big action set pieces but in between those were quieter moments where characters could actually talk.  The same could be said for some of the better Bond movies like Goldfinger, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, or The Spy Who Loved Me; there was some time to actually talk with the villain and love interest instead of just Bond hopping from one chase scene to another for 2 hours.

The good thing about TV shows like the Star Wars ones is they can slow things down and actually do some character development.  It doesn't have to be one big action scene after another.

I think though you have to in part blame ourselves for supporting the Michael Bays, Zack Snyders, and JJ Abramses of the film world.  And focusing on those big action moments when talking about movies on social media.  It is as always:  if you support crap, more crap gets made.

2014 Movies: Grumpy Bulldog v Tony Laplume

For whatever reason Tony Laplume still isn't allowing comments on his Film Fan blog, despite that it's not one I ever made "political" comments to for him to get butthurt about.  Anyway, in an entry last month he reviewed a bunch of 2014 movies, many of which I had also seen, so I thought it'd be fun to do sort of a Siskel & Ebert with his opinion and my opinion.

I'll try and copy stuff from actual reviews I've done so I'm not changing my opinion after the fact.

This was his take:

Interstellar

rating: *****

review: For me this was unquestionably Christopher Nolan hitting his highest note after The Dark Knight, and still his best film since, his most deeply piercing of the human experience, and the reason I personally became a big fan of Matthew McConnaughey.

This was my take:

Interstellar:  Most of this movie felt emotionally flat and I had a hard time suspending disbelief that some helpful aliens had told humans how to build a starship and space station and whatnot.  Though then at the end it's explained how that stuff happens.  The movie owes a big debt to Arthur C. Clarke, especially the end that first invokes 2001 and then 3001.  It wasn't the best Christopher Nolan movie but I liked it more than Inception.  Jessica Chastain's presence helps a little with that. (3/5)

Locke (Laplume)

rating: *****

review: Back when there was still chatter of Tom Hardy being the best actor of his generation, there was a lot of interest in this hugely ambitious and yet incredibly simple movie: Hardy talking into a phone the whole movie, and that's it.  I find the results fascinating.

Me:

Locke:  This is I guess what you could consider a "ticking clock" movie.  Tom Hardy plays a British guy who's driving from somewhere in northern England to London.  The whole movie is literally him on the phone to various people while on the highway; he is the only character actually shown on screen.  There's no real mystery about what he's doing:  he knocked up some older woman in London and miraculously she got pregnant and so he's doing the "right thing" by going to be there.  But of course she goes into labor on the night before a really important thing involving pouring concrete.  He has to deal with the woman going into labor, the concrete job, and his wife, none of whom are happy with him.  It's obviously not the most exciting movie ever, but it does a good job at really bringing the scenario to life.  You really feel like you understand Locke and what makes him tick by the end.  And there's a nice Dark Knight Rises reference when he says how he would have liked to break his drunken father's back. (4/5)

The Grand Budapest Hotel (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: Believe or not, but for those who are aware that Isle of Dogs later became one of my all-time favorite movies, I haven't really immersed myself in Wes Anderson's films.  This was very, very easy to love, and hits the kind of notes most other films don't even dream considering while employing Anderson's trademark all-star ensemble cast formula.

Me:

Grand Budapest Hotel:  I'd been wanting to see this for a while, but never got around to seeing it in theaters.  Anyway, it's probably Wes Anderson's best movie in years.  Not that I didn't like his last couple, but they were more YA-flavored, whereas this is a movie for grown-ups.  It starts off with essentially 3 framing elements:  a girl going to the grave of an author who wrote a book about the hotel; that author doing a TV interview in 1985; and then when he visits the hotel in 1968 and meets the owner.  Then we get to the actual story in 1932 where the concierge of the hotel M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes) is breaking in a new lobby boy named Zero.  And then one of his elderly lovers (Tilda Swinton, who this time is actually in a Wes Anderson movie) dies and he goes to her funeral.  There he finds out he's to inherit a valuable painting and when her son Dimitri (Adrien Brody) disputes this, Gustave steals the painting.  Mayhem ensues!  I'm sure for a lot of people they either really like Anderson's movies or they really hate them.  Obviously I've been in the former for a few years since I started watching them.  What's always great is that while on the surface they can seem silly or goofy or perhaps too precious from the brightly colored sets, the deliberately unspecial effects, the way none of the actors try to conceal their various accents so you have Americans, Brits, Irish, etc. all inhabiting what's supposed to be an Eastern European country, this is only a surface coating over serious issues.  In this case it's the start of WWII and the oppression that followed as well as really Gustave is kind of a pathetic figure, even if on the surface he seems so grand as the practically omniscient concierge; we see that he lives in a tiny room and hooks up only with old ladies to get their money.  So while it's a charming movie, it's also got a brain. (5/5)

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: Yeah, it's the movie that allowed everyone to love Michael Keaton again, a brilliant jazz case study of legacy and stage acting, filmed as one long cut.  It's hard not to be impressed.

Me:

I wrote kind of a long entry that concludes:

It's worth watching and now it's in wide release, so go check it out. (3.5/5)

Edge of Tomorrow (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: You may not realize this, but Hollywood really does go out of its way to try and make you hate its stars, after a while, and they'll do it in such a way that you think it was your idea.  Tom Cruise had already reached that point ten years earlier, and he had increasingly relied on action roles to keep his popular career going.  By the time this one came out everyone was tired of the act, but then enough people realized that it was actually pretty good that it deservedly became a cult hit.

Me:

Edge of Tomorrow:  or Live, Die, Repeat as they've renamed the DVD release, though in the credits it still uses the original title.  I suppose the latter title is a little more memorable.  It does seem unusual to rename your movie after it has already been released.  They probably should have listened to the focus groups.

The premise is like "Groundhog Day" combined with the HALO video game series or one of those sci-fi shooter games I've never played..  Aliens called "Mimics" (for some reason) have invaded Earth and taken over most of Europe.  Humanity mounts a D-Day type invasion, except as Ackbar would say, "It's a Trap!"  Tom Cruise is a former ad exec who gets busted down to private and becomes part of the front wave.  But when he kills one of the aliens, he gains the alien power to reset the day.  Except it only happens when he dies, so he has to die numerous times trying to fix things.

There's kind of video game logic to the plot as there's the easy tutorial levels where Tom Cruise trains with a female soldier (Emily Blunt) who has gone through what he has only in another battle.  Then there's the tougher levels to get off the beach.  Finally you have the big Boss level fight.  Though unlike "The Matrix Reloaded" for instance it doesn't actually feel like a video game.

Overall I really liked it.  There was a lot of sci-fi action and I'm a sucker for robot suits.  There was some humor, especially early on when he's first trying to figure out what's going on and when he's training.  The romance was a little lacking, but not nonexistent.  Although the Happily Ever After twist didn't necessarily make a lot of sense.  (3.5/5)

Inherent Vice (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: Thomas Pynchon at last earns his Hollywood moment, and it was absolutely worth the wait.

Me:

Inherent Vice:  I was interested in watching this because I usually like PT Anderson's movies and not just for the initials.  Though I didn't really like his last one, The Master that much.  And I didn't really like this one either.  Maybe he should stop putting Joaquin Phoenix in his movies.  Anyway, this starts out pretty interesting, but it just piles on all these characters and plots and red herrings that after a while you have to wonder what the hell any of it means.  I just started drifting off after a while.  I guess you should expect that from a movie adapted from a Thomas Pynchon book. (2/5)

The LEGO Movie (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: In what might have come off as a shameless plug for toys, it actually turns out to be one of the great Will Ferrell movies, among other things.  Everyone just assumes in animated movies these days it's a Disney Pixar world, but neither Disney nor Pixar is capable of something like this.

Me:

The Lego Movie:  I finally got around to watching this.  It was as fun as advertised.  There are enough references to other stuff in it to keep older viewers like me entertained while it's not so adult that the kids can't watch it.  And there's a great message about creativity and also for those nerds who glue Legos together and only build stuff to specifications.  Alas I wish there hadn't been so much Will Farrell in it. (4/5)

A Million Ways to Die in the West (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: Maybe you have to be the rare demographic that's familiar with both the western genre and Seth MacFarlane to appreciate it, but I found this hilarious, a spoof worthy of comparison with Blazing Saddles.

Me:

A Million Ways to Die in the West:  This was Seth MacFarlane's comedic Western that was unfortunately released the end of May when many of the big blockbusters were still playing.  Thus it didn't do all that well, not nearly as well as MacFarlane's previous "Ted."  Or maybe it was that people just don't want to see Seth MacFarlane unless he's voicing a loudmouthed fat Rhode Island guy or Boston teddy bear.

And watching this movie I'd have to say he's pretty much on par with Justin Timberlake or 50 Cent or Mos Def or one of those other musicians turned actors.  I mean it's not as bad as like Paris Hilton or Tara Reid, but when you're co-starring with Charlize Theron and Liam Neeson it's hard not to look outclassed.

Anyway, there are a lot of the crude jokes you'd expect about shit and farts and fucking; I mean it's written by the creator and two main writers of "Family Guy."  There were some decent laughs about mustaches and such too.  Overall, though, the story is pretty predictable.  I mean you know who he's going to end up with and you know the bad guy has to die.  I wouldn't put it on the same level as "Blazing Saddles" but it's not bad either. (3/5)

Noah (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: Russell Crowe brings so much weightiness to his performances it can sometimes seem difficult to justify.  I think this one does.

Me:

Noah:  As a non-religious person I had no interest in watching this but finally I was bored and so put it on Netflix.  I really didn't miss much.  The way it starts out with magic stones, swords, and rock giants made me think this was a Bible story if it had been written by L. Ron Hubbard.  It has been a while since I read the Bible, but I'm pretty sure there wasn't anything about rock giants helping Noah construct the Ark. Once the rest of civilization gets wiped away it gets awkward as Noah decides he has to kill his daughter-in-law's baby once it's born to ensure that Man dies.  But I'm sure it's not a spoiler to say he doesn't because well otherwise there'd be none of us here, right?  Though like Adam and Eve it's creepy to think we're all descendants of eons of inbreeding.  Anyway, like Darren Arronovsky's "The Fountain" you kind of have to wonder if any studio execs ever bothered watching the dailies and wondered, WTF?  How a piece of shit like this gets out the door is beyond me. (-5/5)

The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: I mean, sure, if you're worried so much about how the villains come off, you might worry about enjoying this one.  But everything else is literally amazing.  There are no better Spider-Man movies than the Webb/Garfield/Stone ones.

Me (I wrote a longer version but this says pretty much the same thing):

The Amazing Spider-Man 2:  With Marvel doing so much business, Sony got dollar signs in its eyes.  This movie winds up doing too much too soon in a vain attempt to create a "cinematic universe" that wound up destroying the franchise.  The movie itself isn't terrible as Harry Osborn recruits Electro to help him get Spider-Man's blood.  That's what Spidey gets for being greedy with blood.  Electro's origin seems to borrow heavily from the Riddler in Batman Forever, which really wasn't a good movie to borrow from.  Dane DeHaan is creepy as Harry Osborn, making you yearn for the clueless rich boy air of James Franco.  Again Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone have good chemistry, but her death is completely forced and Peter's grieving is given about five minutes.  Between that and trying to introduce a whole Sinister Six all at once, the movie just never works.

Monuments Men (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: Critics seemed baffled that anyone would waste time about making a movie around the guys who saved art during WWII.  I think the movie itself explains that, and does it entertainingly.  

Me:

I don't have an actual review but I did watch it in the theater one boring weekend and really liked it.  It's mostly a lot of older, noncombatants risking their lives to save priceless treasures from Nazi assholes.  It often walks a fine line between comedy and drama. (3/5)

John Wick (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: I admit I was pretty late to this party, so I'm still working at fully appreciating the results, but c'mon, this is Keanu Reeves finding a third defining film series.  Who does that???

Me:

John Wick:  This is like a modern, stupid version of Road to Perdition.  The story is pretty much the same where a hitman turns on his former employer because the employer's idiot son killed everything the hitman loved.  Only in this case it's a dog the eponymous character's dead wife left to him.  (And stole his old Mustang.)  Because of that I'm not sure if we're supposed to take the movie seriously or not.  Anyway, after that it's pretty much just assassin movie cliches. (1/5)

The Zero Theorem (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Terry Gilliam is sometimes just weird.  This is him being weird without really nailing the magic he finds in his best work.

Me:

The Zero Theorem:  I put this on one night expressly because I thought it'd be really boring and put me to sleep.  I think I had that idea because I confused Terry Gilliam with Terrence Malick.  It wasn't really boring, just weird.  In a strange "Blade Runner"-type future Christoph Waltz works at some company processing data which for some reason requires pedaling like a bike and using what looks like a big video game control pad.  He's kind of agoraphobic and wants to stay home to wait for "his call" so finally Management (ie Matt Damon looking like that Tim Gunn guy I think it is from Project Runway) assigns him to work at home on "the zero theorem" which is...you got me.  It's like supposed to prove that everything equals 0 or something.  To help him keep working Management assigns him a hooker who takes him to kind of a holodeck and so on and so forth.  I don't know what the whole point was, but I'm sure Tony Laplume would think it's brilliant. (And I guess he did on his blog back in February, though with his reviews it's hard to tell sometimes.)  (2/5)

Guardians of the Galaxy (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: It's very enjoyable, a huge breath of fresh air in the MCU, but it ain't quite Star Wars and it ain't quite Princess Bride, both of which it kind of wants to be.  

Me:

Guardians of the Galaxy:  When this was first announced like most people I thought, WTF?  Especially when people mentioned this involved a talking raccoon and a living tree.  So I wasn't all that excited to see this.  But in some ways it was better than The Avengers.  Since they all pretty much had their own movies with their own girlfriends, there wasn't much in the way of romantic tension in that.  But with Guardians there's some between Star-Lord and Gamora.  Really when Star-Lord sacrifices himself to save Gamora or when Groot sacrifices himself to save everyone it was actually more more moving than anything in The Avengers.  I guess as Andrew Leon said it's because they actually become a real team, not just a bunch of people crammed together.  Since Chris Pratt had only been a comedic second banana to this point I wasn't sure how he'd do in a leading role, but he was good.  I was surprised too that Dave Bautista wasn't completely terrible.  Rocket Raccoon was kind of annoying, but it is awesome to see a raccoon with a big frickin' gun.  Overall it was a good time and I'd be more excited for the eventual sequel. (4/5)

Dumb and Dumber To (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Even though Jim Carrey is one of my all-time favorite actors, I confess one of the movies he's best known for I don't really know that well.  So this sequel is greeted, by me, as funny, but maybe not the best way to try and salvage his career at that time.

Me:

Dumb & Dumber To:  I wouldn't have paid to watch this, but it was on HBO so what the hell.  The plot is similar to the first one where two idiots go on a road trip to find a hot girl.  Only this time they're going to El Paso to find the daughter of Harry (Jeff Daniels) in order to ask her for a kidney.  Her adopted father is a famous scientist whose wife is trying to poison him so she sends a guy along to kill Harry and Lloyd.  And of course mayhem ensues.  There were some decent gags though obviously it's not as good as the first one.  At the beginning is a meta joke where Harry says, "Wouldn't this have been just as funny 10 years ago?" which is a reference to it taking 20 years to make the movie.  There's another reference to that after the credits.  Do you suppose since Jeff Daniels has had a more consistently good career in the last 20 years that's why it seems in this like Jim Carrey is more his sidekick?  Ponder the mystery. (2/5)

Snowpiercer (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Greeted as an instant cult favorite, I caught it later and enjoyed it, but not sure it's quite the treasure everyone says it is.

Me:

Snowpiercer:  Michael Offutt reviewed this and then I saw a Comcast commercial saying you could get it On Demand while it's still in theaters, so why not pay $1-$2 more than a matinee to be able to watch it in your home without annoying other people or obscene movie theater snack prices?  Anyway, as I Tweeted to Mr. Offutt, it's very strange, but mostly in a good way.  Like "Elysium" last year, this is a fairly obvious attempt at depicting class struggle.  Basically the Earth has frozen thanks to a chemical that stopped global warming a little too well and the only people left are on this big train called the Rattling Ark, which was intended by its John Galt-ish designer as a luxury train that would circle the world indefinitely.  So that's what it's been doing for almost 18 years now.  Curtis Everett (Chris Evans, ie Captain America) is one of the steerage passengers in the back of the train, eking out an existence eating protein Jell-O made from something really gross.  But Curtis has a plan for revolution--and this time it'll work!  So much of the movie is them trying to move from car-to-car, battling the evil goons, including this chunky balding guy who had a Michael Myers-ish quality of hardly saying anything and not dying.  The leader of the goons is a woman played by Tilda Swinton, who seems under the impression she's still in a Wes Anderson movie, which I found a little too hammy.  Along the way there are some surreal moments as they go through the upscale cars of the first class passengers.  There's a car with sea life inside and one with gardens and one with saunas.  The most surreal part is when they enter the schoolhouse car, where a teacher is indoctrinating young children on how awesome the train is.  I could share Curtis's look of WTF is this shit!?  Eventually you start to realize this is a lot like the second Matrix movie, only the video game-ish organization (find this guy, get this thing, go here, etc) seems far less artificial given the environment.  Overall it's a sometimes wacky and sometimes poignant concoction that is kind of that old school apocalyptic sci-fi like Planet of the Apes (the original) or Logan's Run, etc.  It's the kind of movie I'd probably like to watch again just to see if I get more out of it a second time. (4/5)

NOTE:  I don't think I have watched it a second time yet, nor have I watched the TV series prequel or remake or whatever. 

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: This kind of became the franchise where popular film careers came to die.  Undeservedly so.  This was another fine Chris Pine showcase with a fun supporting cast around him.

Me:

Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit:  If you don't know, Jack Ryan is the guy from the series of Tom Clancy books that began with The Hunt for Red October, when he was a nerdy CIA analyst who convinces American officials a Soviet sub is trying to defect.  Later he went on to be president or something.  In the movies he was played by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, and then Ben Affleck.  This movie is a reboot of all that and who better for Paramount to star in it than Chris Pine, the star of their Star Trek reboot, right?  In a couple early scenes we see Jack Ryan drops out of school after 9/11, joins the Marines, gets shot down and badly wounded, meets his future girlfriend Cathy at Walter Reed, and then is recruited by Kevin Costner of the CIA.  That's all a prologue to 10 years later when he has to prevent an evil Russian scheme dreamed up by Kenneth Branagh, who also directs.  It was surprising how few real surprises there were in this.  (The biggest for me was the woman who looks like Keira Knightley actually is Keira Knightley!)  I mean there's no real attempt at a big twist.  You think maybe Kevin Costner will be evil (he did play a turncoat Russian agent in No Way Out) or maybe Cathy will be a turncoat like Total Recall or something.  Nah.  It's all pretty straightforward.  I suppose a warning flag was when a movie with known actors like this was released in January, the typical cesspool for Hollywood movies.  (2/5)

The Drop (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: James Gandolfini must have been a very confused man.  He received endless praise for his TV work (hey, Bryan Cranston has received the same treatment, by the way), but anytime he did a movie he couldn't find any love.  This is another movie worth considering to try and figure out why.  Tom Hardy, meanwhile, does another accent job.  A movie I personally need to revisit at some point, too.

Me:

The Drop:  This was notable for being James Gandolfini's last movie and not much else.  It's written by Dennis Lehane of Mystic River fame and that's the sort of gritty attitude it's going for, only Brooklyn instead of Boston.  Tom Hardy, aka Bane and soon Mad Max but not Rick Flagg, runs the bar while his cousin Marv (Gandolfini) supervises.  The bar is really a front for the Russian or Chechyan mob, who routinely drop payments there, hence the title.  It's kind of a slow movie, but there's sort of a twist at the end.  Still, it's kind of a forgettable movie. (2.5/5)

The Theory of Everything (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Kind of the opposite of A Beautiful Mind, this is the Stephen Hawking movie that kind of asks you to be okay with the way his marriage ended.  Colors my whole perception of the results.

Me (not being very verbose):

The Theory of Everything:  It basically felt like a far more boring version of A Beautiful Mind. (2/5)

X-Men: Days of the Future Past (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: Hugh Jackman had become bigger than the X-Men franchise from the moment he first appeared in it, but at the same time he also forever found it difficult to outlive.  This is the exact moment in which he began to succeed, and it's all the more impossible to care about anything else happening around him.  Except Quicksilver.  That was the second brilliant thing these X-Men movies did.

Me (read the full review here but this is basically the summary):

This was the type of movie where as long as you didn't think too hard about anything it was fine.  Obviously the whole point was so they could launch a broader X-Men universe, because it's not enough to have a franchise; now you need a whole cinematic universe thanks to Marvel.  I think at this point they're running second behind Marvel in that department.  We have yet to see how DC's result is going to look and Sony's just sounds awful.

Of course the next X-Men movie is due out in 2016, providing Bryan Singer isn't in jail--or probably even if he is.  I mean Brett Ratner is probably available.

The only thing going forward is I assume we'd be seeing the McAvoy and Fassbender Professor X and Magneto, not Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, which kind of sucks.  The younger actors don't have the same gravitas for obvious reasons.  Overall I'd give this a 3/5.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: I originally thought of this as the Nick Fury movie.  Then I thought of it as the elevator fight movie.  Now I guess I really just have to rewatch it, and I still think it's one of the better MCU efforts, but it's still tough to think of the whole movie as a distinct achievement.

Me:

Captain America:  The Winter Soldier:  This is largely held as the best MCU movie.  It's a fairly good thriller more than a superhero movie.  Other than the unconvincing romantic plot it's a well-done movie that really brings Captain America into the modern era.  It's just too bad they couldn't have done it before the first Avengers so the character might have been better acclimated before taking on aliens.  As far as the MCU this had a much bigger impact on the SHIELD TV show but it did introduce the new Captain America, or the Falcon, and re-introduced us to Bucky.  And Robert Redford is probably the best Marvel villain to that point not named Loki.

The Expendables 3 (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: I love how this one commits to Mel Gibson being the villain.  If he can't be a Hollywood star like he used to, he ought to at least have interesting roles available.

Me:

I didn't write an actual review, but it was pretty lame and not as good as the first one or really even the second one. (1/5)

Transformers: Age of Extinction (Laplume)

rating: ***

review: I love how these movies suddenly just dive into a dystopian future in this one.  

Me:

Age of Extinction:  Again, it'd be hard for me to describe the plot of this.  Marky Mark Wahlberg is some kind of inventor who finds a truck in an old movie theater that turns out to be Optimus Prime, who's all broken up even though all he had to do was scan another vehicle to fix himself.  Meanwhile there's some kind of plot to make Transformers that goes awry.  And some dude called Lockdown hunting other Transformers.  It was a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  The hapless new Autobots were kind of funny but Drift was way less cool (and more racist) than the original IDW comics version, Hound was not as cool as the original TV one, and Crosshairs was nothing like the original Crosshairs.  And the Dinobots don't talk?  No "Me, Grimlock, kick butt!"?  What happened to fan service, goddamnit!?

A special note:  I rented my copy of this movie from a Redbox in Portland, Oregon and watched it in Yreka, California before taking it back to a supermarket there the next morning.

Let's Be Cops (Laplume)

rating: **

review: If Jake Johnson had significantly changed his persona from New Girl for this, he might have gone on to have an actual movie career.  Still enjoyable.

Me:

Let's Be Cops:  Amusing though overly long farce about two idiots who get mistaken for cops and end up taking on police corruption and drug dealers. (2.5/5)

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Laplume)

rating: **

review: I always thought the Transformers were far too big in their movies.  And essentially it's difficult to love these movies for the same reason.  Only here, it just seems more egregious.

Me:

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014):  With Michael Bay involved and Megan Fox starring, I was planning to hate this, but I didn't, which is kind of a backhanded compliment.  The turtles look kind of weird and Splinter the rat looks really gross, but otherwise it's a lot better than the last 3 Transformers movies.  The plot is fairly cliché, with a weapons designer trying to create a crisis to then solve said crisis, but it's not like you can expect a whole lot. (3/5)

Left Behind (Laplume)

rating: **

review: Kind of technically the last time Nicolas Cage was in something the studio actually expected someone to see while making it, a remake of a prior set of films based on the book series.  Too bad the whole budget was blown on Cage, although it's still interesting to think he made it at all.  In some alternate reality there're people who equally believe the whole series will be filmed someday, much like the Narnia books.

Me:

Left Behind (2014):  I knew I wouldn't like this movie but I just wanted to see how lame it was.  In 2005 if you said a movie starred Nicolas Cage and Chad Michael Murray that would be a big deal but 10 years later they've fallen far enough to star in straight-to-Redbox religious trash like this.  I never watched the probably even worse Kirk Cameron version but this mostly features a plane Nic Cage is flying when the Rapture hits.  Pretty much all the kids are beamed up (because all kids are good...lol) but otherwise it seems kind of random.  Why is an old man beamed up but not his senile wife?  Senile people are condemned to Hell?  The Rapture itself was pretty lame.  There's just a flash and people are gone, including Nic Cage's son whom his daughter is hugging and yet she for some reason spends half the movie looking for him.  Anyway, if you want to see an awesome Rapture there's a great "American Dad" episode that was far more entertaining. (1/5) 

Exodus: Gods and Kings (Laplume)

rating: ****

review: Yeah, it's Ridley Scott waxing poetic about the sad lives of great men, on a biblical scale, but for me it's always been the showcase for Joel Edgerton's best performance.

Me:

Exodus, Gods & Kings:  I was surprised at how old-fashioned this was.  Not really as much as the old Charlton Heston movies, but there was actually a “god” (played by a little kid) and no really plausible explanation for how all those plagues happened.  Kind of expected more from the guy made Prometheus and Blade Runner.  There was also a lot of old-fashioned Hollywood casual racism in casting white people Christian Bale, Joel Edgerton, Sigourney Weaver, and Aaron Paul as Egyptians.  Hey, just give them a tan and black hair and it’s all good, right?  Um, yeah, right.  Seriously, you think I’d believe Jesse Pinkman as an Egyptian?  Fuck you, Ridley Scott.  Anyway, a lot of the background of Moses seems cribbed from Gladiator and Robin Hood; financially I think this did more like the latter.  As a backhanded compliment it wasn’t as asinine as Noah.  So there’s that. (2/5)

A lot of these are surprisingly similar in score, but obviously some are not.  Now we should contact Netflix and see if they'll give us a show; they'll greenlight just about anything for one season, right?

Dear Hollywood: Enough With Sequels and Revivals!

I don't know the exact point where I reached my limit on this.  Maybe it was Picard with dying, geriatric Picard and tubby Riker and unattractive Troi.  Maybe it was The Matrix Resurrection.  Or Halloween Kills.  Or Michael Keaton coming back as Batman in that "The Flash" movie.  Or Tobey Maguire coming back as Spider-Man.  Or Stallone doing Expendables 4.  Or The Connors, Saved By the Bell, and Punky Brewster revivals.  Or Scream 5 or...make it stop!  Make it stop!

The point is, I'm really sick of Hollywood bringing back characters from the past in sequels and revivals and shit like that.

Someone might say, You loved them in the past, don't you love them now?  But really it's like people you knew in school:  you knew and liked (or didn't) that version of them.  It doesn't mean I would like the version of them 25 years later.  In fact I probably won't because I remember them a certain way and now I have to update my mental image to some new, lesser version.  Some older, grayer, often fatter version.  Yuck.  (This is one of many reasons I don't go to class reunions.)

It's worse for fictional characters because now that hero you adored in the 80s or 90s can barely do anything--except for Tom Cruise, yay Scientology!  It just makes me sad and contemplate my own mortality and a bunch of gloomy stuff I don't want to think about.  And part of this is Hollywood never, ever allows these characters to be happy.  Nope, they've all got to have some tragic, miserable backstory where they broke up with their love or had a kid die (or both) and/or became old and bitter.  Enough!

The only times Hollywood has done this right was in The Mandalorian where they used motion capture and deepfake computer technology to recreate the Luke Skywalker from Return of the Jedi.  Or like in Lower Decks where because it's animated they could bring back a young(ish) Riker and Troi and Tom Parris.  And that's the point:  I don't want these people as they are today; that's just sad.  I want them as they were back when they (and I) were young.  

I hate to say it, but I think I'd take a reboot of Star Wars (or another of Star Trek) over another one of these sad-assed sequels.

But, as usual, if people keep watching these crap movies and shows then Hollywood will keep pumping them out for as long as they can.  Because God forbid they try anything different or original, right?

I just don't get why people even want this shit?  Why do you want to see a 60-something Keaton in a black rubber suit as Batman?  Or a 70-something Stallone pumped full of steroids for one last action movie?  Or an 80-something Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones?  Why do you want to see your former heroes all wrinkled and gray and feeble?

I get we like nostalgia but there's a limit--at least to me.  We like these characters and often the actors playing them, but at some point you have to let go.  I get why the actors do these things:  it's a way to get back in the spotlight and pay the bills.  I just wish some of them had the integrity to say no, that character's story is done now.  Otherwise it seems that only Death is going to stop this.

I'm not a fan of Will Farrell's movies but there was a story a few weeks ago that he turned down $29 million to do Elf 2 because he thought the script was a rehash and he didn't think he could honestly promote it.  That's the kind of artistic integrity that's needed to stop this shit.  But in 10-15 years if someone offered Farrell a truckload of money, would he turn it down again?  Probably depends on his financial situation then.

And really, how much longer can it last?  Most of the people referenced above are in their 60s-80s.  They have maybe 10-25 years left.  I suppose that's more than long enough for Hollywood to cash in, but what then?  At some point you need fresh blood as more than just some old guy's sidekick.

I only hope this is a fad that will die out before the actors themselves literally die out.  Though probably not.  In a world where we're on season 32 of The Simpsons and season 41 of Survivor, perhaps nothing ends anymore.

At Least for Now Vella is No Substitute for EBooks

Right up front, let me say my title is referring to the business end and not the reading experience.  That may also be true, but it's not really what I'm interested in.  Though a lot of people never seem to understand it, I am running a business--or trying to.

So Monday I talked about my first attempt at a Kindle Vella story.  And now I want to talk about the non-creative aspects of it.  Since this story was actually published, it has allowed me to see more into the process than my first attempt when I tried to use a story I had previously published and it got blocked.

The process of loading the file isn't too hard.  Unless you want to write directly on their site (being somewhat old-fashioned, I don't) you really need to save each "episode" or chapter or however you want to think of it as a separate Word file.  It's easier to import as a Word .DOC than it is to copy and paste because with pasting it seems to mess up the line breaks and stuff whereas importing a file formats better.

The first time I did this I got some annoying error message that I realized after a couple of tries was because the file was "In Review."  The stupid thing is I loaded 6 episodes and episodes 3 & 5 were approved before the others.  Why?  I don't know.  Fortunately I don't think any of them were live on the site yet or it might have been weird for people to only be able to read two episodes in the middle.

Not that that was a problem because interest has not really been very strong.  Like selling things on eBay or Mercari I have a number of people "following" the story--more than actually reading the story.  It is like those auction sites where people "watch" or "like" something but never seem to DO anything productive.

The biggest hitch is the royalty structure.  For a shorter chapter you might only get a nickel per read.  For one of 2500 words you get $0.12.  Crunching the numbers, I get $2.09 in royalties (US market) at the 70% royalty with an ebook.  To make the same with Vella, I need to have about 18 episodes of 2,500 words or 45,000 words.  And the first 3 episodes are free so you get nothing for those; thus I really need to write 21 episodes.  If you do the minimum of 500 words then you'd have to have almost 100 episodes or if you do the max of 5,000 words then you only need about 11 (3 free plus 8 at about $0.25) It is fairly comparable but the difference is if someone buys an ebook I get the whole $2.09(ish) whereas with Vella that's only if someone reads all of those episodes.  If they stop reading after a few episodes, you get a lot less.  I'm not sure about returns; it wouldn't surprise me if Amazon let you "return" an episode after you read it.

The inverse logic though is that if I sell a 70,000-word novel on Amazon at $2.99 I only make that $2.09 royalty.  If I chop that novel up into 28 2,500-word episodes, then I get $3.00 if someone reads them all. 

So really the way to make money is you need people to read ALL of the episodes, which might dissuade an anthology-style story where there's not as much incentive to go from one episode to another.  You really would be better off with a connected story so there's more incentive for people to read everything.

The issue right now is getting enough readers to where it's worthwhile.  I had one person quit my newsletter because he/she was pissed I advertised my Vella story.  "ebooks are all right but NOT KINDLE VELLA!" he/she wrote as the reason for quitting.  I'm not sure what that backlash is about; maybe you can't use Kindle Unlimited for tokens and so it's not "free" after three episodes?  And God forbid anyone pay for books. [eye roll]

Anyway, these are just initial findings; things might change or as is its wont, Amazon might make changes to how things work and royalties are calculated and so forth.  So stay tuned!

Into the Fillerverse! (My First Kindle Vella Effort)

Since Kindle Vella debuted as kind of Amazon's answer to Wattpad and other microfiction sites, I've been wanting to do a story there.  The problem as I said earlier is they wouldn't let you repost stuff you've already published, like the flash fiction stories I put together for Last Dance and Other Stories and Mortal Sins, which would have been perfect for that platform--had it existed at the time.

I kept thinking of doing an Eric Filler story on there but just didn't have the idea or the time.  And then after watching Marvel's What If...? series I was writing a story and I threw in a reference to Eva Vantu, who I realized was the closest to a Watcher in my Eric Filler stories.  Besides being the framing device and sometimes star of the 13-book 24 Hour Gender Swap series, she has also appeared in Casting Change, Presto Change-O 3, The Magic Panties 2, and soon in From Boss to Goth.

Kindle Vella covers are supposed to be square with no words. 

Who is she?  Eva Vantu is a Gypsy from Eastern Europe who was born about 100 years ago, shortly after WWI.  Her parents were killed by Nazis (Gypsies being one of the early groups targeted by Hitler's minions) and she and her brother fled to France.  He put her on a ship to America while he stayed to fight the Nazis--and was killed.

In America she wound up living in a house on Long Island, where she made charms and potions and read palms and stuff like that.  But unlike scammers, her charms and potions actually work and her palm readings would be accurate.  She got a huge crush on Elvis and in Casting Change she gets the movie producer main character to arrange a meeting with the King.  

During the 24 Hour Gender Swap series she comes to adopt two girls.  In the last book she uses a potion to make herself a young girl and leaves Long Island.  In The Magic Panties 2 we say she's working at a coffee place in Seattle and in From Boss to Goth it mentions she stopped in Chicago to do some palm reading and stuff on Navy Pier to pay her way to Seattle.

Since she's been in multiple stories and since she has magical abilities, I was thinking that she could be kind of a Watcher character.  And then thinking of the end of What If...? I got thinking that maybe there could be some big crisis that prompts her to recruit characters from across the Fillerverse (trademark pending) to fight back.

But the thing is, you wouldn't really want characters who are guys turned into normal women or bimbos or anything like that.  I mean, what use would that be?  So I focused on stories where the characters have useful skills.  So I was thinking my Guardians of the Fillerverse Team would be:

1. Dixie Larson (aka Eunice Collins) (Gender Swap Detective series):  She was a male private eye who became a girl (mostly), so she has investigating skills and stuff.
2. Chase (Gender Swap Warriors series):  Chase was a rich college kid whose body was merged with the spirit of a female alien warrior named La'ce who was a strategic genius, so she has strategy and fighting skills.
3. Bluestreak, aka Allison Bassett (Gender Swap Heroes series):  Allison used to be a scientist until a meteor turned him into a young woman with superspeed, so she has a skillset like The Flash.
4. Princess Alta (From Hero to Shero):  Alta was a warrior prince named Altor until the evil Lord Boniface changed him into a girl.  But since then she has a magic sword and a flying war pig, making her kind of like She-Ra.
5. Zenna Howser (Presto Change-O 3):  Harold Howser was a stage magician in 1928 when a rival changed him into a young woman and sent him across the world, where he met a young Eva Vantu living in Eastern Europe.  An old magician gave the female Harold the name Zenna after his daughter and she soon found she had real magic abilities.  At the end she was living with her fiancé with a baby on the way.
6. Morgan Casey (Swapp:  Jailbreak):  What does every 21st Century super-team need?  A computer hacker!  And Morgan is the best.  He was a convict recruited to infiltrate a computer company by becoming a woman with the help of AMI the AI and a program called Swapp, so presumably AMI could also show up.

That seems like a pretty formidable team, wouldn't you say?  But now who could they fight?  I was thinking of doing a Grant Morrison thing and making their enemy...me!  (Or Eric Filler.)  But then I thought, who is even more of a threat in my universe?

The answer:  Amazon!  You know, the assholes who while they sell my books and take my money have stomped out about half my books and sabotaged others?  Yeah, them.  So a big, evil corporation in Seattle is killing men who have been turned into girls and because she's sensitive to these things, Eva sees the danger and recruits her team to break into the company's headquarters and stop them.

And this could easily play out over a bunch of episodes on Kindle Vella.  The first episode focuses on Eva recognizing the problem.  Then through the next 10 episodes we have her recruiting the other main characters while they also learn more about the Nozama company.  It's like one of those heist movies or Seven Samurai, Magnificent Seven, Justice League where she goes around recruiting people of different skills.  We try to make it organic.  First she recruits Zenna, who has the magic ability to reach others.  And young Eva is featured in Presto Change-O 3 so it's easy for Eva to send herself a message in the past and have her young self deliver the message to Zenna.

I wanted to use Dixie/Eunice but I wasn't sure why Eva would need a private eye from 1940.  But since book 3 was deleted by Amazon because it featured Dixie becoming a little girl, I realized I had an easy way to work her into it by making her a target of the thing killing gender swapped people.  Zenna and Eva show up to try to stop the thing, but while they fail, they save Dixie and bring her back to the future.  She brings with her a chunk of the thing that helps them identify Nozama and then she tries to infiltrate the company.

I had her in a Starbucks, where she's trying to get used to the modern world, and meet a Nozama driver.  I saw another opportunity there and had the driver get shot.  He's given a potion that makes him into a young woman.  And that way we have a fresh gender swap in the story, plus it should lead to some sex with him and Dixie, providing some romance too.

From there they recruit Chase because they need to make a plan and she's good at that.  And when they have trouble getting into Nozama they recruit Allison for her speed that can go through walls and stuff.  When she's trapped by the bad guys, Morgan bails her out and reveals that she's also been watching Nozama.  For the final assault, they recruit Alta for extra muscle.

Another thing I had to work out was the bad guy.  Who is Nozama?  Why are they doing this?  I thought maybe they were just trying to censor the real world like the FCC in Family Guy or V-GINY in Futurama.  But it didn't really make much sense why they would be doing that.

Then I thought of using someone from a previous book as the villain too.  I was thinking of Morgan being a turncoat, who infiltrates the team to destroy it from within.  And that got me thinking of the Race Against Time books where Detective Lottie Donovan and her daughter Casey are put into a VR game where they keep getting younger if they don't pass whatever challenge.  In the end Lottie's mind is basically wiped and her daughter ends up part of the Matrix.  In the next two books Casey abducts men and tortures them in various ways.

So then I got the idea that Casey could be behind all of this (and in one of those happy coincidences, Morgan's last name is Casey!) for some reason.  And then I got the idea that all of these men are being turned into younger girls, so what she could want is the temporal energy from these swaps.  With that energy she hopes to go back in time and save her mom.  Tragic villain backstory!

That's at least the plan.  I might change it as I see fit.  When I started this entry it was all pie in the sky but now I'm actually writing it and using this entry as sort of my blackboard to write notes and stuff.  I have it down on paper but in case I lose the paper or spill on it or something, it's good to have it in "the cloud" somewhere.

It sounds like a lot of work, but the first six episodes ranged from 1000-2500 words for less than 9000 total.  So the whole thing might end up about 35,000-45,000 words or so.  Some of it in Episodes 1-2 I just pasted from previous stories, only in Episode 2 I had to convert it to 3rd person from 1st person.  Still, that's a lot less time-consuming than rewriting it from scratch.

I'm not sure how readers will respond, (so far, not great) but it sounds like a fun idea for me and a way to get my feet wet with the format.  Plus for readers who might not have discovered Eric Filler books in the traditional format, it's kind of like advertising for those other books.

The link!

Wednesday I'm going to crunch the numbers on Vella royalties.  Fascinating stuff.