Issues of Character

First off, a little story about how I found this thing I'm going to talk about.  A couple months ago I was on my PT Dilloway Twitter account and someone retweeted a picture someone took of a couple of Transformers toys.  I thought it was cool so I followed that guy.  I tried to talk to the guy but he ignored me, even though it's not like he has thousands of followers or anything.  Still, I kept following because I'm not a fragile little bitch like some people.

Anyway, then he retweets someone who has been doing sort of an MST3K/Rifftrax thing on old Transformers comics.  I thought that was neat so I followed them.  And yes, they are a them, though singular.  Whatever.

This is Issue #20

They mentioned how by issue 28 or so, writer Bob Budiansky was showing signs of burn out.  And a lot of it is the toy company, Hasbro, was probably mandating that a bunch of new characters get shoved in.  Basically every new issue had to bring in some new characters like Omega Supreme, the Decepticon Triple Changers, the Throttlebots, or the Predacons.  And it was noted how much sharper Budiansky's writing was when he could just focus on one character, like issues focusing just on Ratchet or Skids.

I got thinking that really the same is true for me in most of my stories.  I always enjoy writing character moments more than other things.  Readers might enjoy sex scenes or action scenes, but they're not really that interesting to me.  Going back as far as the original First Contact in 1995, I was always more interested in writing the character moments than the battles.  With the Scarlet Knight series, I had more fun writing about Emma's personal life than the superheroics.  And with all the Eric Filler stories, setting up the sex scenes is almost always more interesting to me than the actual sex scenes.

Why is that?  Mostly because there's really not much of depth happening with action or sex scenes.  It's just mostly physical movement.  As a writer, that's not really all that exciting.  It all boils down to, He/She goes here, does this, stuff blows up.  Or, He/She sticks whatever in whatever hole and they get excited.

Again, as the reader that's the stuff you want, especially when most of the audience is probably under 18 like with the original Transformers comics.  As the writer, it gets pretty dull.  I mean it's basically just writing, "So-and-So fires weapon, shit blows up" over and over again.  It's got to be pretty boring for the artist too.

And really even writers of crap like a Transformers comic or gender swap book still want to think of themselves as real writers.  We like getting the chance to stretch our legs and do some real writing.  That's more exciting and challenging for us.

So as a kid you might think, "Wow it's so cool you get to write all these big battles" or whatever, but really for the writer that's painfully dull.  And so if you approach that person at a convention and say how neat that big battle in issue #28 was, the writer will probably at best just humor you until you go away.  Just like if you send Eric Filler an email about how great the sex in whatever swap story was or say how great it is that I get paid to write sex, I'll just say, "Yeah, great, thanks for reading."  Because I'd much rather talk about the real character moments.

I suppose there probably are writers who like that other stuff more, though when you have to do that for 40 issues or 200 books, let's see how much you like it then.

Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Great Disney+ Show That Demonstrates What Might Have Been

 Last week was the final episode of the Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi.  It took place about 10 years after Episode III and has Obi-Wan come out of hiding to save a young Princess Leia from pirates and Inquisitors.  For those who watched Rebels, the Inquisitors are Force users who are not full-fledged Siths and work for Vader to help hunt down Jedi.  There's a "Grand" Inquisitor who was killed in the end of the first season of Rebels and a couple of underlings.

Though in this case most of the focus in on the "Third Sister" Reva who became "controversial" because she's black.  Because black people can't exist in Star Wars, right?  Ugh.

Anyway, while this series, like Rogue One, really doesn't need to exist, it was really good.  In the final two episodes of the prequels, Ewan McGregor was the standout as Obi-Wan Kenobi, so it was great to see more of him in the role.

But this Obi-Wan at first is not really the one we remember from the prequels or the very first movie.  This Obi-Wan is hiding in the desert, living in a cave, with his lightsaber buried in the desert and too afraid to use the Force.  He won't even help another Jedi on the run from the Inquisitors.  He justifies this by thinking he's looking after Luke Skywalker, but since Luke's Uncle Own won't let Obi-Wan near Luke it's kind of a dodge.

Then Leia is kidnapped on Alderaan and Bail Organa contacts Obi-Wan to ask for his help to track her down and suddenly Obi-Wan has to get out into the world again.  He goes to some shitty planet where we see a clone soldier begging for money and a dude pretending to be a Jedi to bilk people out of money to escape the planet.  The latter is sort of a Casablanca thing, where unscrupulous people would sell fake travel visas that could wind up getting those holding them jailed or killed.

Obi-Wan clumsily rescues Leia only to have Reva on his tail.  From there we see a sort of Underground Railroad for Jedi or possible Force sensitives, Snowspeeders not on snow, and a couple of epic duels between Obi-Wan and Vader!

In six episodes, some only about 40 minutes, it manages to pack a lot in there.  The actors and director/producer Deborah Chow do such a great job at bringing this universe to life.  You can really feel how broken Obi-Wan is at the beginning.  In the third episode when he's hiding from Vader, you really get a sense of his fear because he knows he's not ready to face the big black killing machine that Anakin has become.  Hayden Christenson redeems himself as Vader/Anakin, though they probably needed some better deepfake stuff when he was out of the armor.  For all the largely racist complaints about Moses Ingram as Reva, her story turned out really well.  She was a bit scene-chewy, especially at first, but she's a villain in a Star Wars show, not part of a Terence Malick movie.  And the young actress playing Leia steals every scene by really not taking any crap from anyone, even the Inquisitors. 

There are a couple of questionable plot moments.  Like in the third episode when Tala rescues Obi-Wan from Vader, why does Vader just let him go?  He could have probably just used the Force and dragged Obi-Wan back.  And in the final episode, if Vader was going to take his shuttle down to face Obi-Wan alone, why didn't he just go take that and let his Star Destroyer chase after the rebels?

But overall my biggest complaint is I wish it could have been longer.  There really wasn't enough time to do a lot with some of the new characters to make them more memorable, though I'm sure many will end up getting action figures made eventually.  Being set between movies this was kind of handcuffed by those movies, or I think they could have done more.  In the end, Obi-Wan's arc seems kind of hollow as he basically goes back to the desert, though I guess a different place in the desert.  It's just that he's now a little less afraid of the Empire and the world around him.

Mostly what this shows is what could have been if George Lucas had hired some competent people to make the prequels instead of insisting on doing so much of it himself.  Like the Clone Wars show before it, this shows there are good pieces of a story in the prequels that Lucas didn't have the vision or skill to really bring together.

It's too bad there can't really be a second season but maybe they can do a Vader series or a young Princess Leia series.

The sad thing, especially given Friday's overturn of Roe v Wade, is  how well the world of this show relates to our current world.  It's a world of fear and cruelty and hatred, persecuting those who are different.  Those who are still good and remember things the way they were struggle against the rising tide of darkness, trying in vain to make an impact.  An especially prescient moment is when Reva describes how she survived the massacre at the Jedi temple, which came only a short time after the real-life story of how a girl survived the massacre in Uvalde.  Sometimes life imitates art, but other times it's art that imitates life.

At least in this show we know Luke, Leia, and the rest are going to destroy the Empire.  In real life we really don't know how long this new Dark Age will last because there probably is no "Chosen One" out there to save us.

The Movie House Is Misleading But Not A Scam

 On Facebook a couple months ago I posted:

I saw commercials on Pluto TV and Xumo for this app called The Movie House TV https://themoviehouse.tv/ and it promises "thousands of new releases" for free.  My first thought is that has to be bullshit.  I tried it out and it was not a "scam" but definitely misleading.  Basically you have to watch movies from their "standard" collection which predictably are smaller than small movies that probably not even the people who "star" in them have heard of.  For each "standard" movie you watch, you get like 25% towards a "premium" movie, aka movies you might have heard of.

Except you can't watch "premium" movies through them.  What happens is if you get to 100% you get a gift card code for $5 at Vudu or Amazon and then you watch something through there.  

But a lot of what they advertise as "premium" movies like Spider-Man or James Bond would cost you a lot more than $5 to watch so you either need to collect 2-4 gift cards or pay out-of-pocket.

BTW, since no one says you have to physically sit there and watch these movies to earn your credit (there's no test or anything), I just put them on before I went to bed or went to work.  So I got $5 without really doing much.

I did watch a few of the movies on there and they range in quality from really cheap, amateur jobs (like the original, un-riffed version of Feeders) to professional (though small-time) movies:

Like Sunday, Like Rain:  This was a really great light drama about a young woman named Eleanor who has lost her boyfriend, home, and job all in the same day.  She gets a job as an au pair to a 12-year-old boy named Reggie who is super-smart and really talented cello player.  His bitchy mom (Debra Messing) leaves for a couple of months, so they're basically alone for the next few weeks and start to bond.  Reggie gets a crush on Eleanor, who struggles with some family issues.  The end was really realistic and yet still a bit hopeful.  And the composition by Reggie is really beautiful; it makes me wish I could get a copy of the soundtrack. (5/5) (Fun Fact:  This 2014 movie was written and directed by Frank Whaley, who in the early 90s starred in movies like Career Opportunities with Jennifer Connelly and Swimming With Sharks with Kevin Spacey but has since mostly played supporting roles.)

Ordinary Day:  This 2018 Canadian drama was actually really good and a professional quality film, though I only recognized one cop from Due South in the 90s.  A young woman goes missing and it shifts perspective from her mother to a detective working the case and then the girl herself, where it turns into a 127 Hours thing.  You have to carefully watch the last couple minutes to really understand the ending. I actually had to rewind it because I missed a critical piece of information.  (4/5)

8 Slices:  I thought this would be a workplace comedy like Waiting but it's more of a light drama about a North Carolina pizza place that's going under in large part because the owner's policies are not very capitalist.  He makes employees read a list of books and for each one they read, he gives them a raise.  He also keeps like 8 people working when most pizza places might have half that at most.  A YouTube "journalist" infiltrates the place to make fun of it, but learns a valuable lesson.  It was actually a decent indie movie.  The only criticism I have is that about 90% through one of the workers starts breaking the 4th wall and doing his own narration.  I'm not really sure why. (3/5)

Rum Runner:  This was the kind of movie that wasn't really bad, but could have used better production values.  A few times when characters were talking low I couldn't really hear them; they could have used a better microphone.  It's basically a story about two guys running rum in the 20s using a biplane in part.  One of them falls in love with a black girl and someone ends up dead.  The story was probably better than that Ben Affleck movie from a few years ago or that one with Tom Hardy and Shia LeBeouf from the early 2010s. (2.5/5)

The Fitzroy:  If Wes Anderson made a post-apocalyptic movie it would probably look something like this.  In an alternate 1950s where poison gas has made pretty much the whole Earth's surface unlivable, a group of Brits run a hotel in an old submarine moored off the coast.  Bernard is the young bellboy who keeps everything running until he's accused of murdering the hotel's owner at the behest of a sexy young singer.  It was a fun movie, though one of those that could have used a Wes Anderson-caliber cast to really make it great. (3/5)

OMG I'm In a Horror Movie!:  A fun low-budget comedy about a group of young, multicultural people who (probably after starring in a beer commercial) are playing Settlers of Catan when one guy rolls three sixes.  Suddenly everyone hears a voiceover that's like a trailer for a horror movie.  Immediately the two black guys take off, because we know what happens to most black guys in horror movies, right?  And then everyone starts trying to figure out how they can avoid a horror movie fate.  There were some good bits but besides not exactly top-notch actors, equipment, and so on it drags on a little too long.  But the end is good as the two black guys basically murder the horror movie tropes. (3/5)

My Tiny Universe:  A failed actor who wanted to kill himself finds the cell phone of a famous producer (John Heard) and instead of giving it back, makes the producer go to his house and then it all gets overly complicated.  The title seems like it should be about someone who shrinks down or plays with Legos or something. (2.5/5)

Bugs on the Menu:  This is a documentary about eating bugs.  There is a growing movement to use bugs instead of beef or pork or chicken.  Not only is it better for the environment, but also it takes far fewer resources and in some cases is better nutritionally.  Predictably while much of the world already eats bugs with no problem, provincial Americans are like, "Ewwww, gross!"  I think I would try some of the stuff they show, but maybe not things like maggots.  Anyway, it was interesting...for about the first half.  Then it just kind of seemed like it was repeating itself.  It probably could have been summed up into a 15-20 minute YouTube video. (2.5/5)

Raising Flagg:  I think maybe this was a TV movie, though I'm not sure what channel, but it seemed like it had commercial break cutaways built in.  Anyway, Alan Arkin is Flagg, who does odd jobs and with his wife has gotten by until he gets into a feud with the bad guy from Short Circuit over some sheep pissing on a well Flagg uses.  Though he wins in court, people are pissed at Flagg and he's frozen out of getting jobs.  Eventually he retires to his bed to wait for the end.  His various children (Lauren Holly, one of Arkin's real-life kids, and not-quite Judy Greer) then show up from different places and in helping Flagg they help themselves too.  It's a fun light dramedy that's sort of a more modern and dysfunctional Waltons. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  On the Rifftrax app you can watch this weird short film made by Arkin and starring his kids--one of whom I think is in this movie--called People Soup.  It's as weird as it sounds.)

3 Weeks to Daytona:  Ironically I watched this just a few hours removed from being in a car accident.  Anyway, an aging stock car driver who moonlights as a limo driver (or is it the other way around?) struggles to make ends meet and be a father to the son he has partial custody of.  Then Rip Torn (who looks like a sad hobo clown at this point) and not-quite Brandon Routh come up with a scheme to buy a place in the Daytona 500 for the winner of the next race so not-quite Brandon Routh can advertise his furniture store chain.  So the aging stock car driver has to try to get his car ready and win the race with the help of his son and girlfriend.  And gee, what do you think happens?  It's predictable and fairly low-budget but not terrible. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Like the 80s volleyball movie Spiker that was all about the journey to get to the Summer Olympics and yet we never see any actual Olympic volleyball, we don't actually see the race in Daytona to find out how the guy does.  Kind of a rip-off.)

Revenge of the Samurai Cop:  the original 1991 movie was a bad ripoff of the Lethal Weapon and martial arts movies.  It became infamous years later, probably in part thanks to the Rifftrax, and so this awful sequel was made.  It brings back the old cast and adds Bai Ling and Tommy Wiseau, who seem to be in a competition to see who can act worse.  It's sad to watch because Ling has been in good movies like The Crow, so she should know better.  The "story" is almost incomprehensible, the acting is hammier than a restaurant on Easter Sunday, and the effects are anything but special.  Probably the worst thing was seeing in the credits that this was funded by Kickstarter and Indiegogo; just think of what decent projects could have been made with that money. (0/5)

Death Game:  Proving the Samurai Cop movies were no fluke, this movie is from the same director and every bit as awful as Revenge of the Samurai Cop.  Terrible acting, an incoherent story, lousy effects, and pathetic green screen sets make it really hard to watch.  So after about half an hour I stopped watching. (0/5)

Gumshoe (or Help! My Gumshoe is an Idiot!):  Kind of a low budget version of The Pink Panther or Naked Gun movies.  A schlubby PI who thinks he's hard-boiled gets hired by a dame to get some blackmail back but soon it turns to murder and a theft of jewelry like a Marlowe mystery.  A lot of kinda lame dad jokes but still entertaining as the gumshoe blunders his way to solving the case. (3/5)

They Call Me SuperSeven:  This is like if you rebooted the old Mexican or Spanish superhero movie Superargo only more in the style of The Tick and did it all on a Rollergator budget.  A really cheesy superhero/secret agent parody that really goes nowhere.  There are some funny bits but it basically could have been about 10 minutes long for as much story as there is. (2/5)

The Takeover:  I watched about 10 minutes of this "comedy" and got a real James Nguyen vibe from it.  Really cheap camera work and poor acting.  Definitely one to avoid. (1/5)

You May Not Kiss the Bride:  Surprisingly this was a real, professional movie with some actors you might have heard of like Kathy Bates, Mena Suvari, Vinnie Jones, Rob Schneider, and Tia Carrere and guys you know you've seen but don't remember their names like Kevin Dunn (the dad in Transformers among hundreds of things) and Stephen Tobolowosky (Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day among hundreds of things).  The plot is sort of cliché as a pet photographer is forced by a gangster to marry his daughter so she can get citizenship.  I thought it would become Forgetting Sarah Marshall as they go to Hawaii for their honeymoon but the girl gets kidnapped and so it becomes more of a comedic action movie like a discount Romancing the Stone.  It's pretty good if you're into that sort of thing. (3/5)

Wal-Bob's:  Another one that would probably be better if it had better production values instead of basically being a film school project.  A jock who was the Big Man on Campus in high school flunks his SATs and loses his football scholarship, so he goes to work at a pharmacy that's supposed to be like Walgreens.  The store is really weird because the stockroom is upstairs and there's a parking garage and like a lot of workplace comedies they have far more people on staff than a real drugstore would.  Anyway, they have their own sort of football game they play upstairs and the jock makes friends and learns life lessons and stuff.  He falls in love with a black girl so they attempt to have some real life issues.  Again if they had had money for real actors, cameras, and a less fake store it would have been better. (2.5/5)

W@nnabe:  A mockumentary about the degradations of a wannabe actor.  A British guy who was in a boy band until the rest of the band dies in a bus accident is trying to make it as an actor in LA.  But other than the weird indie movie Heir of the Dog (where he plays a dog in a suit sort of like that show Wilfred) he doesn't have much happening.  There's a rival from a different boy band who's trying to horn in on his acting gigs and roommate too.  It's pretty decent and the mockumentary style works better for low-budget movies like this. (3/5)

Jake's Corner:  This was misfiled under "action" and at first I thought it'd be a Roadhouse or Radical Jack-type movie but in reality it's more of a light drama.  After his parents die, a kid comes to live with his uncle in the tiny Arizona town of Jake's Corner.  His Uncle John, who looks like if Tom Berenger put on a few pounds to play Billy Ray Cyrus, won the Heisman Trophy in 1990 and uses it as a doorstop.  Uncle John puts the kid to work in the bar as a busboy even though he's only like 10.  And doesn't tell him about his parents dying; he just says they're in a hospital.  But you know the kid will remember.  There's a mix of characters like Danny Trejo as a crazy guy who cleans up garbage, a Brazilian waitress, a Bosnian bartender, a black guy who always wears shades and paints weird paintings, and Diane Ladd as an old lady who won't leave her trailer.  Other than shooting some frat jerks with paintball guns there's really no action to speak of and the drama doesn't really rise above your typical Hallmark movie.  There are worse ways to spend not-quite 2 hours. (2.5/5) (Fun Facts:  the credits thank Ty Detmer, the real winner of the Heisman Trophy in 1990 and the movie was produced by former Phoenix Suns player Dan Majerle.  It was filmed in 2008 somewhere near Scottsdale and ironically I was in Scottsdale in 2008, so in theory I could have run into someone from the movie.)

An Innocent Kiss:  This was pretty much a sitcom plot stretched to almost 2 hours.  A pest control guy in South Carolina has a wife and two kids and one day she kisses his brother and he gets pissed and she gets pissed at him being pissed and then everything is made better pretty easily.  Burt Reynolds cashes a paycheck as the grandpa.  It wasn't a bad movie or badly made, but it didn't really hold my interest. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  the opening shot shows the Gurnee, South Carolina "Peach Tower" that was featured in a first season episode of House of Cards where Frank Underwood had to broker peace after someone died trying to take a picture of the thing that looks like a sex organ, which was all much more interesting than this movie.)

End of Days, Inc.:  This was under "Foreign Films" though it was made in Canada.  I guess technically that is foreign.  Anyway, it's a weird little movie about a few people in a factory that does...something.  On their final night they have to complete a big order and maybe get a bonus...or they'll die.  It's all a bit strange but kind of fun.  I was confused about the time this takes place in at first because all the technology is really old and yet the receptionist has beach waves with pink highlights and another woman has modern-looking glasses?  So I guess it was in modern times but for some reason all the equipment is old. (2.5/5)

Tentacle 8:  A pretty dull movie about some kind of conspiracy to do something for some reason.  At the center of everything is some guy who's like a really-depressed Clark Gregg.  He's abducted in the beginning but then that turns out to actually be towards the end of the movie, which just made things unnecessarily confusing.  If you're like this guy who did a whole A to Z on conspiracies you might like it more and pay more attention to it.  Unlike some others the movie was professionally made, just not a story that really grabbed me. (2/5)

Guardian of the Highlands:  This is the sort of movie that couldn't really decide what it wanted to be.  It's cheap-looking CGI animation with characters looking sort of Wallace & Grommet like.  So you might think it's a movie for kids...but there's some adult content like the women are all really sexualized with huge boobs and Barbie curves and the old guy "flirts" with one of them.  Also a couple of rabbits fall in the water and one is nearly paralyzed and a rabbit and beaver are nearly chopped up in a dam.  So I'm not sure this is really appropriate for kids.  Sir Sean Connery voices the titular "Guardian" and Alan Cumming is his anamorphic goat who breaks the 4th wall like he's Deadpool.  It was a thoroughly strange affair. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  there are a bunch of James Bond references like the opening credits, various signs referencing movies, and Sean Connery's character even drives the old Aston Martin from Goldfinger.  Alan Cumming was also a villain in Goldeneye.)

The Lost Dogs:  Since this was in the "Comedy" section and about stealing a rich couple's bulldogs, I thought it'd be a delightful romp.  Instead, this is more like one of Guy Ritchie's early films like Snatch or Revolver as it's more of a heist movie that takes place in the UK.  At one point the dognappers cut off the ear of one of the bulldogs so it's definitely not a delightful romp.  That being said it wasn't a terrible movie.  The production values were professional quality; it just wasn't what I was expecting.  Something to keep in mind if I ever write my Dognapping story. (2.5/5)

Sullivan:  This was a 22-minute short film about a nerdy kid who loves 80s movies (though it was made in 2012 and seems to take place then) and dreams of knocking out Sullivan, the star football player, and taking his place.  It then gets a little over-the-top before he comes back to reality.  It was pretty fun though. This was apparently made for a graduating class in a Western Michigan school.  Why it ended up on this app under "Foreign" films, I have no idea. (3/5)

The Last Schnitzel:  This was another short film, from Turkey, I think.  It's a weird little dystopian story.  In a future where Earth is pretty much dead and people are moving to Mars, the US is about to finish off the planet with some nukes.  The Turkish president only has room for a few people on his escape ship.  So he challenges his chef to make him a chicken breast.  Except there's no real meat anymore.  What to do?  Well, the clever chef slices off a chunk of his ass and cooks it up and the president doesn't know the difference.  So the chef, minus some butt cheek, gets to escape as Earth is destroyed.  Yay?  It was very strange--and not just because it was in Turkish or whatever with subtitles--and yet the end is funny.  Though with a good environmental message. (3/5)

Overall, the Movie House wasn't as bad as I thought.  It was basically like other small-time apps like Popcornflix only you get paid.  Really, I don't know why they need to be so misleading with this whole "premium" movie thing.  For me, just saying I can essentially get paid to watch some not-terrible movies sounds like a good deal to me.  You could actually get the $5 gift cards with not much trouble and if you pick the Amazon option you don't have to use them on movies.  I have in fact never used any on a movie; I've just used them on normal stuff I routinely buy from Amazon.

Unfortunately after about a month it seemed they started dialing back how much credit you get per movie.  Before a movie would get you like 20-25% it seemed like.  Then after about a month it seemed to be more like 7%.  Probably they were giving away too many rewards so they had to scale it back.  Between that and they don't really seem to add many movies to their selection, I'm not sure how sustainable it is.  There are also glitches where some movies don't play or more weirdly, some play the video with no sound.  I tried it on both of my Roku devices and it was the same on both, so it's probably not just me.  I reported the issue to their support...and got no response.  And it likely has still not been fixed.

They did recently add a feature where once a day you can spin a wheel with your remote and get rewards--usually an extra 5%, which at this point is pretty much like watching a movie.  That makes it a little better but still even if I put on a movie before I leave in the morning and at night when I go to sleep, it'll take a week to get a gift card.  But I guess that's not nothing, right?  And with all the shit I buy on Amazon, those gift cards come in handy.

And if you do the wheel 5 days in a row you get a bonus gift card.  So even if you don't watch any movies and just spin the wheel every day you could get like $30 in gift cards.  And even if you just got 5% a day you'd get at least 1 more.  But I'm sure anyone reading this will just say, "Meh, whatever."  And pretty much pass up free money.

This is something I really wish some other streaming services would do.  Some like Peacock where there's really not that much I want to watch, it might give me some incentive to watch.

Why Can't Hasbro Get Anyone to Take a GI Joe Movie Seriously?

 A couple of months ago the latest lame attempt at a GI Joe movie:  GI Joe Origins:  Snake Eyes--always good to remind people of that dreadful X-Men Origins Wolverine movie--came to Prime Video so I watched it.  Not surprisingly it was another disappointment for anyone who's really hoped for a decent GI Joe movie.  

Most of the movie is an OK kung-fu movie but then it ham-fistedly tries to work in Cobra, GI Joe, Storm Shadow, and Snakes Eyes getting his suit and that's where it all falls apart.  The problem is the same since 2009:  no one who makes these ever seems to really take them seriously.  By that I mean no one ever seems to treat the canon with any respect.  There's way too much artistic license taken.

And I'm not talking about minorities playing characters like Snake Eyes or any of the other roles.  I'm talking about that by the end Snake Eyes is still talking.  I mean the one thing we all know about Snake Eyes is he does NOT talk.  So by the end he'd have to suffer a vocal cord injury or take a vow of silence, right?  Nooope.  He gets the more or less traditional Snake Eyes costume but there was no setup.  The old ninja lady just hands him this thing that wasn't shown previously and seems to come from nowhere.

And even though Cobra's machinations caused Storm Shadow to get booted from his warrior clan, he's going to join Cobra?  How does that make any sense?

And can we get a Baroness who actually talks with an Eastern European accent?  You know, like the character is supposed to?  Why is even that tiny thing so fucking difficult?  

Scarlett was OK--for all fifteen minutes she's on the screen.  In the comics especially, she and Snake Eyes had a sorta brother-sister relationship.  It spilled over into one of the early 90s toy lines when they made her a ninja along with Snake Eyes.  Absolutely none of that is evident here.  Or really any backstory on Scarlett except she works for GI Joe.

The first two movies are on Amazon, Paramount+, and Pluto TV.  Rewatching some of the first one it reminded me of all the problems with it:  Destro and Cobra Commander being unmasked; Cobra "Commander" being a peon; Baroness being American and not a bad guy but Duke's brainwashed girlfriend; Snake Eyes with a mouth on his costume; and of course those awful robot suits they were running around in.  Retaliation did a little better job, but Zartan killed Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow's ninja master?  WTF?!

All these things are what really turn off an old fan like me.  The problem at the core is Hasbro never seems to get anyone to actually take this stuff seriously.  I tend to think whoever they hire has this attitude of, "Heh, this is kids stuff!"  Then they take all this creative license to make it more "real."  But the comic book runs of Larry Hama and Mike Costa had some really good stories that were not really all that suited for kids.  Why don't they use more of that instead of doing this lame, half-assed shit?  Come on, Robot Chicken parodies do a better job than these expensive movies.

I get this is based on a toy line, but also one of the most successful and enduring toy lines of all time.  People have played with Joes for almost 60 years!  So, maybe you should actually take that seriously instead of basically using the character names and a few very basic facts?  Maybe get someone who can check his fucking ego at the door and actually try to give fans what they want?  Find someone who wants to make a real GI Joe movie as much as I want to watch it instead of someone just cashing a paycheck.

Besides just thinking, "this is a toy, it's kids stuff," I think there's also this attitude that fans are just nerds living in Mom and Dad's basement.  Maybe some are, but fans of GI Joe and Transformers from the 80s are mostly middle-aged with kids of their own now.  It's not just a few nerds--otherwise they wouldn't be spending all this money on movies, would they?

It's kind of odd with that Snake Eyes movie because you'd think Hasbro learned a little something from the failure of their last regular Transformers movie versus the success of Bumblebee.  That is that people are tired of movies that really only give the barest lip service to the toys that inspired them.

It was a costly lesson Disney already learned with Star Wars after the complaints on The Last Jedi and failure on Solo that pretty much derailed the last movie.  As I noted in one article no one probably read, Marvel has gravitated towards more and more comics accurate costumes since the MCU started in 2008.  They don't always stick too close to the comics, but they usually get enough right that people don't complain too much.  Snyder nuts aside, people didn't really take to the DCEU's gritty take on Superman.

It's a pretty basic idea to me:  there's a reason that stories and characters stick in the public consciousness.  Filmmakers should set aside their own egos and gravitate towards those characters and stories.  Or in short, give the people what they want.  If you want to make "art" then make an indie movie.  You're making an action movie based on a toy line, then actually give fans what they want.  Because those fans are the core of your audience.  

Or Hasbro could use the ideas I've put on this blog already.  I'm just saying.

Time to Take Out the Well-Made Trash: Stuff I Watched

I spent most of March watching quirky dramas on DVD, all but one of which was shot in Canada.  One-and-a-third of those were made for Canadian TV too.  So really that leaves April and May and half of June for what I watched.  And it will probably start small and just keep getting bigger.  But no one really cares, so whatever.  The good thing for me in doing this is later if I don't remember whether I watched something, I can look it up on here and realize that I did.

The King's Man:  I really liked the original Kingsman movie but the sequel looked lame so I never watched it.  This is a prequel that goes back to 1914.  As I said on Facebook, this really could be called "An Idiot's Guide to World War I."  Basically some Spectre-like group led by a Scottish guy played by an Irish guy (Matthew Goode) starts a world war because he hates England for oppressing Scotland and whatever.  There's a whole Legion of Doom like Rasputin, Lenin, Mata Hari, and some other dudes.  And later Adolf Hitler. [eye roll]  Ralph Fiennes is the Duke of Oxford whose son dies in the war and so he tries to help England win the war by getting America into the fight.  I guess we're supposed to be thrilled that thousands of Americans will die to save England...for 25 years, until we do it again.  And it's all so dumb that I'm surprised Matthew Vaughn made it and not Michael Bay.  Like most of Bay's movies it's well-made trash.  (2/5)  (Fun Fact:  As I said on Facebook as well, if you're a woman in a Ralph Fiennes movie don't go to Africa because things will go badly for you.  As in this movie, The English Patient, and The Constant Gardener.)

Nightmare Alley:  More well-made trash!  This time by Guillermo del Toro.  Bradley Cooper is a guy who murdered his father, joins a carnival, and then becomes a mentalist with his lovely assistant played by Rooney Mara.  Being a del Toro movie I was waiting for something creepy or macabre or something, but it's just a really, really dull fake noir movie as Cooper attempts to con a rich guy with the help of a psychologist played by Cate Blanchett until his scheme falls apart.  From looking at my unauthorized biography of del Toro, I guess this was a remake of a 1946 movie; if I had known that, I might not have been waiting for some kind of creepy plot twist. The last ten minutes were so annoying as I already knew what was going to happen.  It was telegraphed pretty clearly when he takes refuge in a train car full of chicken cages.  So I was almost literally screaming at the screen to just get on with it and make him the geek already.  Look up what a carnival geek is to understand that. (1/5)

No Time to Die:  "Well-made trash" is how I could describe a lot of Bond movies--but not really this one.  I have not been a huge fan of the Daniel Craig Bond movies that often seemed too concerned with constant movement and dumb plot twists.  But this final film gives Craig's Bond an actual character arc as he goes on one last big mission to stop a bad guy planning to use a secret virus to kill millions--which would have been less awkward if this had been released in 2019 as it was originally slated.  There are still plenty of chase scenes and fights, but there's more of a purpose for Bond this time around, which makes it more worthwhile.  But really, for a guy who deals in secrets and lies, Bond is pretty easy to deceive as it turns out. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  I was curious at the end to see if this would say, "James Bond Will Return" as they usually do--in the old days it was with the title of the next movie but then with studio troubles and such that was sometimes hard to predict--and it does, which was a little disappointing because it pretty much negates the ending.  Saying "007 Will Return" would have made it a little more open.  I mean, I know James Bond is going to return, just like Batman or Spider-Man and so forth but we just had the big emotional death scene like 10 minutes ago.  Give us a little time with that, why don't you?)

Death on the Nile:  The sequel to the latest remake of Murder on the Orient Express with Kenneth Branagh as French detective Hercule Poirot.  This begins with the secret origin of Poirot's mustache!  (Seriously.)  It also shows some woman he loved...who really has no bearing on the plot at all.  I mean you might think she'd come back or even be the murderer, but nope, she's not seen again.  There's a lengthy setup as a wealthy star (Gal Gadot) and her new husband take Poirot and a bunch of friends and family on a steamboat up the Nile.  It's almost halfway in when she dies and Poirot starts "investigating" basically by asking everyone questions.  If you want a lot of action there's not much here, just a couple of brief moments of murder and mayhem.  If you like that old-fashioned kind of mystery where the detective gathers everyone together and works out the case verbally then you'll like this.  If you want something action-packed or with more humor like Knives Out, then it's not for you.  I didn't hate it as much as the previous two movies on this list because it's not dumb or extremely dull, just old-fashioned.  I don't think I've read the book to know how accurate it is, but I think it's a good adaptation of the style of an Agatha Christie mystery.  (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Besides Branagh and Gadot, the cast includes Black Panther's Letitia Wright, Oscar winner Annette Bening, Russell Brand in a strangely conservative role, and the now-disgraced Armie Hammer.)

Wrath of Man:  The hook for this movie is it reunited director Guy Ritchie with Jason Statham, who starred in Ritchie's early movies like Revolver, Snatch, and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels.  Instead of the UK, it takes place in Los Angeles.  And unfortunately it's more well-made trash.  You could say Ritchie is parodying himself with a lot of style but not much substance.  Basically like the Nic Cage movie 211 I talked about a couple times before there's a crew of former Army guys (led by Burn Notice's Jeffrey Donovan) knocking over armored cars.  Jason Statham is a mob boss whose dorky son is killed in one of the robberies and so after killing a bunch of criminals, he joins an armored car service to wait for the bad guys.  It's a sorta simple plot that Ritchie tries to make a lot more complicated by not telling things in order and jumping POVs.  I suppose the tricks are necessary, because we know what's going to happen:  Statham and the former Army guys are going to tangle.  It's definitely not as good as Ritchie/Statham's previous team-ups. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  I thought this originally streamed on HBO Max but I saw it on Paramount+ and also saw it advertised on Amazon Prime.)

Jerry and Marge Go Large:  This is on Paramount+ and is sort of a modern-day Frank Capra light drama about little people beating the system.  In this case a retired Kellogg's employee in Evart, Michigan (Bryan Cranston) realizes a lottery game called "Winfall" has a flaw:  if you buy thousands of tickets, you'll make enough to profit even if you don't win the jackpot.  After a couple of successes, he tells his wife (Annette Bening) and she gets into it with him.  But after Michigan closes the game, they have to travel to Massachusetts and play there.  Soon they're selling "shares" to most of Evart but their enterprise meets some competition when a douchey Harvard kid figures out the same thing.  I'm sure the real story is not really as cheery and neat as this movie, but it's still a fun story of a small town that manages to beat the system and make their lives better.  Not really a bad way to spend about two hours. (3/5)

Scream (2022):  The problem for me from the start is the filmmakers really expected you to remember what happened in Scream 4, which came out in 2011 but I hadn't even realized was a thing until I saw it on Netflix in 2014.  I haven't watched it since, so I really had little to no memory of it.  My example on Facebook is it's like if they made a fifth Jaws movie 10 years after the poorly-received flop Jaws 4: The Revenge and expected everyone to have intimate knowledge of it.  Why would people?  So why would people intimately know that fourth Scream movie?  Anyway, it's largely the same as always:  Ghostface kills people and they try to get clever about who's doing it and why.  The motivation is supposed to harken back to the first one.  But really they got it wrong.  They should have been trying to frame Sam, the survivor character of the fourth movie who's the daughter of original killer Billy Loomis, and drive her to become the psychotic killer her father was to make her the "villain" of the franchise.  Anyway, the "legacy" characters Sidney, Gale, and Dewey don't really do a whole lot and one of them dies.  What was sad to me is the stuff they talk about in relation to movies actually relates to Star Wars (especially when they talk about the 8th movie directed by the Knives Out guy) and Zack Snyder's Justice League, where it talks about toxic fandom.  So at this point it's not even "a horror movie about horror movies" like the first three.  That's what really worked with the first one is it was a horror movie about horror movies, so it seems like they drifted a bit too far off brand when they start referencing sci-fi and superhero franchises. (2/5)

Sonic the Hedgehog 2:  I really liked the first movie, despite I never really played any Sonic games except maybe a demo in Best Buy or Electronics Boutique.  I didn't have high hopes for the sequel because sequels for movies like this are usually not very good.  But the movie managed to exceed my low expectations.  Not really enough to make it better than the first one but at least so that it's not a disaster.  While it brings in Tails and Knuckles, it doesn't try shoving in too many new characters or creating a "cinematic universe" for Sega or creating a "multiverse" or any junk like that.  There's a fairly typical hunt for a MacGuffin--a giant emerald that's sort of like the Infinity Gauntlet.  There's too much scene-chewing Jim Carrey and not really enough James Marsden and his wife but mostly it manages to retain the fun and heart of the first movie.  Knuckles turns out to be a big surprise as I thought he'd just be an evil henchman but he has surprising depth; maybe I should have expected that since he's voiced by Idris Elba.  Michael Bay and the writers of those awful Transformers sequels could have taken a page from this as both Tails and Knuckles actually have something of a character arc.  (3/5) (Fun Fact:  There is an awkward cookie scene to set up an evil Sonic clone or robot or whatever for a third movie.)

All the Old Knives:  This Amazon original stars Chris Pine and Thandiwe Newton as CIA agents who worked in Vienna.  Eight years earlier their torrid affair was ended after a planeload of people were killed by terrorists on the runway.  Newton went to California and got married and had two kids while Pine stayed in Vienna.  Now someone wants to reopen the case to find out what went wrong so Pine goes to California to talk to his ex.  It can get a little confusing to figure out when stuff is happening because it jumps back-and-forth a lot between 8 years ago, 2 weeks ago, and the present.  There are a few twists and turns to keep you guessing.  If you like a John le Carre-type spy thriller then it's a decent movie.  If you want a Bond-type spy thriller then you'd be disappointed. (3/5)

The Protégé:  This was not trash, though a bit on the cliché side.  Maggie Q is a hired killer who was taken from Vietnam when she was a little girl by Samuel L Jackson after her entire family was murdered.  She lives in London and runs a bookshop until someone comes after her and seems to kill Sam Jackson for some old job.  The trail leads back to Vietnam, where she meets a hired killer on the other side played by Michael Keaton and they have sort of an Out of Sight-type thing, only they're both killers.  While it didn't reinvent the genre or anything it was an entertaining and Maggie Q is pretty badass.  It was a little disappointing when the final act mostly uses her as a decoy.  I was relieved when the final shot shows who won the final gunfight because some annoying movies would cut off before letting you know who survived when you know there's not going to be a sequel. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  A chubby Robert Patrick plays the head of a biker gang in Vietnam, which seems pretty weird.  Do they have biker gangs over there?)

Deep Water:  Back to well-made trash!  This Hulu original stars Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas from that last James Bond movie.  They've been married for years despite that she seems to hate him and is always drunk and flirting with guys and even bringing them around to kiss and probably fuck them.  He's rich from making drone computer chips and for some reason farms snails.  At one point he says that snails with food in their bellies are poisonous but nothing is really done with this.  Basically he kills some of her paramours while she and everyone else seems to be oblivious.  One old writer guy is suspicious and catches him in the act of hiding a body, but he stupidly veers off the road instead of running Affleck over.  The whole thing is sooooo boring just waiting for something to happen.  This wants to be Fatal Attraction or Gone Girl but it's just dull. (1/5) (Fun Fact:  the end credits have their kid doing carpool karaoke.  Because nothing screams erotic thriller like an eight-year-old singing "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing" or whatever it's called.)

GI Joe Origins: Snake-Eyes:  I will have more to say on Wednesday.  Suffice it to say it was not even that well-made of trash.  The first 3/4 are a decent kung-fu movie but when it tries wedging in the GI Joe stuff it starts going off the rails. (2/5)

Love and Monsters:  Basically it's like if you took Zombieland or Warm Hearts and replaced the zombies with giant bugs/reptiles.  A wimp has to try to survive a harrowing journey across the monster-strewn surface to find his former girlfriend.  It's pretty fun and I kept really hoping this wasn't the kind of movie where they'd kill the dog he finds that follows him around.  It stars Dylan O'Brien of those Maze Runner movies and Michael Rooker appears for one section of the movie but otherwise not a lot of known actors.  Anyway, I really enjoyed it despite that I'm sure it's not scientifically plausible--someone get Neil deGraase Tyson on the line!  I had it on my Hulu queue for a while but never got around to watching it there and when I was going to I found it had moved to Amazon/Paramount+.  By now maybe it moved somewhere else. (3/5)

Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar:  I had vaguely heard of this but one day I saw it was on Hulu and for the hell of it I watched it.  I'm not sure what exactly I was expecting, maybe something like a parody of the Golden Girls from the looks of the main characters and the Florida setting.  What I was not expecting is the whole female Dr. Evil wanting to release mutant mosquitoes to kill the titular town.  It seemed a bit too much for me.  And I'm not even sure what they were lampooning in terms of Barb and Star, who are two gabby Middle American women who live together--in separate beds--and really don't seem to have much of a life.  I work with and am generally around middle-aged Middle American women and really they aren't much like Barb and Star.  For me maybe it would have worked better if instead of the female Dr. Evil (played by Kristen Wiig, who also plays Star) they just inadvertently bought some drugs or something and had to run from more ordinary drug dealers or gangsters.  You know, something not so big and crazy as to be completely unbelievable.  Anyway, mark this up as well-made trash. (1/5) (PS:  Can someone tell Hollywood that not everyone in Middle America talks like a character in Fargo?)

Moon Knight:  Since this time around Amazon Prime Reading didn't offer any "free" comics, I really had very little idea about Moon Knight going in.  I knew in the comics he was pretty crazy, but that was about it.  Fortunately you don't really need to know much because the actual Moon Knight character is on the screen for maybe 15 minutes combined in all 6 episodes.  This was easily the worst Marvel series since the boring Punisher series on Netflix.  Really since this has absolutely no MCU connections, it has the feel of the Netflix shows.  It really squanders the talents of Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke in a story that's more style than substance and most of which has already been done better in Legion and Ordinary People.  And I'm 99% sure multiple personality disorder does not work they depict it here.  This probably needed the 10-13 episodes of a Netflix series season instead of trying to cram the whole story into 6 episodes.  Anyway, the first episode really made me yearn for a Scarlet Knight or Night's Legacy TV show as it's mostly in a museum with Egyptian artifacts.  Either of those would be 10,000% better than this. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  At least the cookie scene in the last episode wasn't a 10-minute musical number that had nothing to do with anything.  So there's that.)

Halo:  I never really played the video game series, which maybe wasn't a bad thing?  There's less shooting and fighting than you'd probably expect since it's based on a shooter video game series.  It's mostly about John, the Master Chief, who finds an alien artifact and suddenly starts regaining the humanity he lost when he was abducted from home as a child.  So there's kind of a Robocop aspect as a guy who was forced into becoming a killing machine starts remembering things.  Meanwhile there's a lot about this planet called Madrigal that has some kind of importance.  Most of it was pretty good but the ending leaves a lot of questions for a Season 2 with no real closure to all the Madrigal stuff or the former soldier-turned-pirate. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  I have such a crush on Cortana.  Someone actually make a real version of that!)

Chip n Dale Rescue Rangers:  This Disney+ original movie trades on a lot of 80s/90s nostalgia.  Besides referencing the early 90s TV show, there are tons of other properties shown and mentioned from a lot of non-Disney properties:  Batman, ET, Looney Tunes, South Park, Beavis & Butt-Head, Peppa Pig, Gumby, He-Man, My Little Pony, Voltron, and most prominently the original version of CGI Sonic the Hedgehog, aka "Ugly Sonic."  Other than Paul Rudd there was a surprising lack of Marvel and not much for Star Wars either.  The story follows Chip and Dale as they reunite to find Monterrey Jack when he's kidnapped.  It was pretty funny even if the story was fairly cliché.  If you're Gen X or Millennial you'll probably like all the reference humor.  If you're a Boomer or Gen Z it'll probably go over your head. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  Besides voicing a weird CGI Viking, Seth Rogen reprises his role as Pumbaa, the same one I have on my couch; seeing that cameo in the trailer was the main reason I watched this.)

Road House:  I had watched this a long time ago but with all the references to it on MST3K, Rifftrax, and Family Guy, I decided to re-watch it.  It's a pretty corny movie that at nearly 2 hours needed about 20 minutes cut from it.  I mean we know what's going to happen, so why do we have to drag it out that long?  As far as adversaries go, Brad Wesley might have money and power, but we know he's not really a match for Patrick Swayze in a fist fight. (2/5)

The Mechanic (201?):  A while back on This TV I saw the original version of this movie with Charles Bronson as the assassin and Jan Michael Vincent as the young protégé.  Later I watched The Mechanic Resurrection with Jason Statham and Jessica Alba.  But I hadn't watched this remake of the 70s movie until I saw it on Pluto TV On Demand.  So I watched it and it was pretty much what I expected.  Jason Statham is the "mechanic" or assassin who kills one of his bosses, Donald Sutherland, and then takes on Sutherland's screw-up son, Ben Foster, as his protégé.  They do a couple of jobs until Foster finds out the truth about his father.  That final battle could have been better, but for the most part it's a pretty typical Statham action movie that will somewhat entertain you for not-quite two hours. (2.5/5) 

American Siege:  Not even well-made trash.  Just trash.  Sadly (or not) one of Bruce Willis's last movies before a medical condition forced him to retire.  To cover for Willis's condition that makes it hard for him to talk, his character is a well-known drunk--who's also the sheriff of a small town in Georgia.  After getting out of prison, a guy, another guy, and that guy's sister take a black doctor hostage because they think he had something to do with the latter two's half-sister going missing and probably dying 10 years earlier.  They lure the cops in to I guess try to force some kind of situation that will reveal the truth.  Which in a half-assed way it does.  It is predictably cheap and other than Willis you probably won't recognize any of the actors except the missing girl might make you think, "Hey, is that Zendaya from those Spider-Man movies and stuff?"  Except this is way too small a movie for her, right?  Yeah.  Anyway, it's a below-mediocre action movie that tries to have some deep message, but doesn't really.  Not really how you want Bruce Willis to go out. (1/5)

Grand Isle:  Nic Cage is a greasy drunk who lives with a faded Southern belle who for some reason is into voodoo.  As a hurricane approaches, they lure cut-rate Zac Efron into their old Victorian-type house and mayhem ensues.  Not really very good mayhem. Like Cage's Dying of the Light, there's a final act that seems kind of tacked-on, as if the producers didn't want the bad guy to get away.  Kelsey Grammar plays the Bruce Willis sheriff role, only more fake Southern and less drunk.  As I noted on Facebook, for some reason the cop cars they use look like ones from the early 70s despite this takes place in modern day.  (2/5)

Looking Glass:  Nic Cage and his wife buy a motel in Arizona (actually southern Utah) after their daughter dies in an accident--or something; it's never fully explained.  Then it's kind of like part of Bad Times at the El Royale as Nic finds all these hidden passages to let people spy on the rooms.  And he spies on people having sex.  And someone is murdered.  And a pig is thrown into the pool.  Because why not?  It's not great but not terrible either. (2.5/5)

American Hero:  The concept is Hancock meets Chronicle as it's a "found footage" type movie (or mockumentary would be more accurate) about a guy (Stephen Dorff) who has telekinesis but he doesn't really do much with it.  Mostly he just gets high or drunk and chases tail in New Orleans.  When he finally does try to do something heroic he forgets the reason heroes wear masks:  so the bad guys won't go after you or your loved ones.  I wasn't expecting Spider-Man type action set pieces, but the "plot" is pretty lethargic; I kept waiting for it to really get going and it never did. (2/5)

Dicktown:  Like Cougar Town, this is a funny comedy with a shitty name.  I mean you'd think with a name like that it'd be about porn stars or something.  Actually it's an animated comedy that's sort of like Mike Tyson Mysteries that I have repeatedly watched throughout the pandemic.  Only this is a little less Scooby Doo-inspired as comedian John Hodgman is John Hunchman, a cut-rate amateur detective who mostly solves mysteries for teenagers with a slacker friend.  A lot of it is really about the culture clash between Gen X and Gen Z.  The second season has a little more serialized format as there's someone from Hunchman's past who keeps sabotaging him, which ultimately leads to some revelations about a past case.  It's pretty funny and like Mike Tyson Mysteries, only about 10 minutes per episode on FX/Hulu, so it doesn't take long to watch. (4/5) (Fun Fact: Paul F Tompkins, Janet Varney, and Kristen Schaal guest voice characters and all three along with Hodgman were part of the 2013 Rifftrax Live show at Sketchfest in San Francisco.  The animation is from the same people as Archer and Sterling Archer himself, H Jon Benjamin, voices a villain in one episode.  The name "Dicktown" comes from the town being named "Richardsville."  It's still pretty lame; calling it John Hodgman Mysteries or Hunchman or Hunchman Mysteries would have been better.) 

Welcome to Flatch:  While I guess this is based on a British TV show, to me it was like Letterkenny if it were written by the writers of Parks & Recreation.  It uses the same fake documentary crew style as The Office and Parks & Rec to chronicle life in the small town of Flatch, Ohio.  The opening card talking about the population of the town invokes Letterkenny, but not much else does because this has actual, coherent stories instead of a lot of riffing.  A lot of it focuses on two clueless young people who I think are supposed to be in their 20s but act more like teens.  Anyway, while some of it is funny, it feels really fake and artificial; you know watching it that it's a TV show and not a real small town.  Letterkenny probably is a better depiction of small-town life with all the drinking, fighting, drug use, and sex. I don't necessarily want all of that but more of a PG-13 edge would have been nice.  (2.5/5)

Ghosts:  I got desperate enough to watch this CBS comedy, which is also based on a British TV show--because of course it is!  Americans can't make their own TV shows; not even most of our reality shows originated here.  Anyway, a woman inherits an old house in upstate New York and along with her husband decides to turn it into a B&B, but it's haunted by a variety of ghosts.  When the woman falls and dies for a couple of minutes, it gives her the ability to see and talk to the ghosts.  I thought from there it would be about her helping them cross over, but I guess then they would need to keep updating the cast, so instead it's just a variety of sitcom things that are sometimes amusing and sometimes less so.  Michael Offutt would probably like the one involving Dungeons & Dragons more than I did. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Someone on Facebook called the show "campy and unbelievable" and so I asked what ghost show is believable, to which she said The Ghost Whisperer.  Um...OK then.  This probably would be better with Jennifer Love Hewitt's boobs.)

No Activity:  I saw previews for the fourth season that were in an animated format.  But it turns out the first 3 seasons were done in live action.  Not that a lot of action is involved.  I mean the whole first season is just 4 groups of 2-3 people taking turns yammering.  There's two cops in a car, two police dispatchers, and two groups of guys digging a tunnel from Mexico to San Diego.  There are some OK bits but since it is mostly just sitting/standing around talking it's not all that fun to watch.  It's better to just put on in the background while playing on my phone or reading a book. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  the cast in the first season includes SNL alums Tim Meadows, Will Farrell, and Amy Sedaris; as well as Breaking Bad alums Bob Odenkirk and Jesse Plemmons; Oscar winner JK Simmons; and Jason Matsoukas of The League/Star Trek Prodigy.)

Ewoks: Caravan of Courage:  I saw Disney+ added these two old Star Wars TV movies from the 80s that feature the Ewoks.  The first one is about two kids whose parents are taken captive by a giant after their ship crashes on Endor.  The kids meet the Ewoks and then it becomes Fellowship of the Ring meets Jack and the Beanstalk as they go on an epic quest to the giant's lair.  While it might have been exciting or scary when I was 6, 38 years later it was mostly boring and the effects were not great even by the standards of 1984. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  the narration is provided by Burl Ives, the narrator of the famous old Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer special.)

Ewoks:  Battle for Endor:  The sequel a year later was a pretty bad mess probably from being thrown together too quickly.  It can't seem to sort out whether it wants to be a fun family adventure or a rugged action movie as it cuts between scary pirates murdering 3/4 of the family from the first movie to the surviving little girl and Wicket baking pies for Wilford Brimley, a grizzled old guy who crashed on the planet a while ago.  There's a lot that doesn't make sense, like why there's a huge pirate fortress on Endor and why the pirates think a starship's power supply is "magic" and yet they use laser blasters.  Most of the effects manage to be even worse than the first movie.  They really must have been using ILM's interns or something. (1/5) (Fun Facts:  The dad from the first movie is replaced by the crusty principal from The Breakfast Club--for all ten minutes he's in the movie.  The bad guy is played by Carel Struycken, whom you might remember as the silent valet for Mrs. Troi on Star Trek The Next Generation, Lurch in the Addams Family movies, an alien in MIB, or as Gaunt the undertaker in Oblivion and Oblivion 2.  The production designer for both movies was Joe Johnston, who helped create Boba Fett and directed movies like Captain America: The First Avenger.  Clearly this was not his best work.)

Where Are Your Blind Spots?

 A couple months ago when I was putting together the Tales of the Scarlet Knight 10th Anniversary Bundle, I saw this fairly nasty review of Book 7 again:

I give up. I managed, over the past three days, to read the first seven books in this ongoing series, but now I quit.

On the positive side, the series is imaginative, an easy read, and reasonably well plotted (and without the purposeless sex scenes too many indie fantasies throw in just to attract a certain group of readers-- not that there's no sex, but it doesn't show up in lurid detail, every half-dozen pages, whether it benefits the plot or not). Again on the positive side, there are remarkably few typos, in a genre rife with them.

That said, there are some major problems in the writing, and as I wrote, I finally hit my limit. It wasn't just that P.T. Dilloway cannot tell the difference between a subject pronoun and one serving as a direct/indirect object-- lots of folk can't, and I'm therefore not going to condemn the writing merely for that. No, it's other things: things so comic that I at first thought were meant that the books were supposed to be spoofs of the genre. An ongoing example is that of on of the villains of the series, an evil 'crime boss' named "Don Vendetta". Not only is the crime 'Don's' name Vendetta, which is an Italian noun meaning "revenge feud" (and not an Italian name at all), but then it turns out the the Don is actually female, and thus the title would actually be Donna and not Don. Although I winced each time I read it after I figured out it wasn't supposed to be a joke, again, lots of folk don't know much about either Italian or Italians, and lots of indie authors don't do a lot of research. I was willing to let that slide, too.

But then I figured out that Mr. Dilloway is convinced that it is the city council, and not the school board, that makes budgeting decisions for the schools in American cities, and worse, that police cars have red and blue sirens (and in one of the installments we learn that the city workers have yellow sirens). Sirens, last I checked, made noise; it's flashing emergency lights that come in red and blue or yellow. Once could be an editing error; on the third or fourth time it became clear that he didn't know the difference between lights and sirens. An author that is going to set his story around law enforcement in the modern world (albeit in a fictionalized American city) should at least have some knowledge of his subject-- failing that, he should write 'swords & sorcery', where he's allowed to make everything up as he pleases.

And the I found, at the end of the seventh installment in the series, that even that wouldn't have been good enough. When Mr. Dilloway wrote that 'two police officers were sitting between a woman', instead of the other way around, I knew that I couldn't bear to read any more... I was done. Too bad.

(First, I'm a little skeptical that this person could actually read the first "seven" books in 3 days.  Since this is book 7 maybe they're counting the Dark Origins prequel?  Still, it seems kinda fishy because while book 0 and book 1 are fairly short they get longer from there.  But there's no way to prove it, is there?)

I actually can't argue with some of it.  I just don't think it was that serious to act like such a dick and stop reading.  (Not to mention of course this person ONLY gave a review to the one book he didn't like, not to any he did like.  People who do that suck.)

The "Don Vendetta" thing he could have just read this blog in 2012 and would have known it's not that I don't know what Vendetta means or that Don is the masculine form.  The city council thing I just half-assed and so after this review, I took like ten minutes to change it.  The point wasn't the subject of the meeting; it's what happened to Becky at the meeting.  So, not really a reason to quit reading a book.  I mean as I've said before, I've read a Pulitzer-winning book with factual errors and I didn't drop it--and obviously neither did the people who vote for Pulitzers.

It's really the "siren" thing I wanted to talk about.  For whatever reason I just always thought of the lights as "sirens."  I guess because on TV the lights and sound are usually together, so I just lumped them together in my brain.

It's a blind spot, something I just didn't realize I was thinking wrong about until someone pointed it out.  It reminded me of the British series The IT Crowd where in an episode the office manager says she doesn't want to be "put on a pedal stool" instead of "put on a pedestal."  One of the computer nerds mocks her but then he says "damp squid" instead of "damp squib," which I guess is some kind of expression in the UK.

The point being that everyone has one (or many more) blind spots.  No one is perfect.

And the reason I mention this is two-fold:

1. We should really try not to be so dickish when someone makes a mistake.  Because everyone makes mistakes.  Everyone has a blind spot they don't realize until it's too late.  Gleefully pointing this out or ranting about how stupid the author is makes you seem like an asshole.  But unfortunately the Internet makes that pretty common.  And yes, I know I do it too.
2. As writers, it's always good if you can get some other trusted person to read your manuscript before you publish it.  Maybe you don't need to spend $2000 on an editor, but at least get someone to look at it first.  If I had such a person, he or she might have noticed my blind spot and pointed it out before some dick ranted for paragraphs about it.  In turn maybe you can read someone else's rough draft and notice their blind spots.

We're all in this together, right?  So, what blind spots have people pointed out to you?

Who Controls the Narrative?

In the previous post I talked about reading the second trilogy of Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs.  I'm not going to recap the whole thing again, so if you didn't already, read the previous post.

In the first three books, our narrator Jacob falls in love with Emma, a girl with fire powers like the Human Torch or Firestar or whoever.  Emma has lived in a time loop for about 70 years so she's remained 16 years old that whole time.  Back in the 1940s she was in love with Jacob's grandpa, but he left their loop to live a normal life.  Weird, huh?  Or you might even say...peculiar.

So through the first half of the fourth book we've established Jacob and Emma as a couple.  But, then when they go to a loop that's in 1965, Emma calls Jacob's grandpa.  When Jacob finds out, he decides Emma isn't over his grandpa and drops her like a hot potato.  And that's pretty much it for Emma.

Enter Noor, an Indian (from Bombay) girl who can swallow light and puke it up, which is really important.  Jacob helps save her from some bad guys and so then they fall in love, basically starting the whole thing over again.

Now the problem here is that as the author you can make your characters dance to whatever tune you play.  So you can have Jacob drop Emma and almost instantly fall madly in love with Noor.  Buuuuuuuut (it's a big but) as the reader, it might take me a little more time to get used to that idea.

I mean, I've spent 3+ books with Jacob and Emma getting together and in the span of about 20 pages the author breaks them up and washes his hands of the whole thing.  Then just summarily drops Emma in the discard pile, making her essentially a background character, or just another one in the gang.

It just doesn't work for me as the reader because I've invested so much time in this already.  Over three books the author set this whole relationship up.  I was wanting them to live Happily Ever After.  Get married, have babies, and all that stuff.  Then because she makes one phone call I'm supposed to instantly throw the whole thing out and pivot to some new relationship?

Noooooope.  (It's a big nope.)  It does not work for me.  As I said in the previous post, it seemed so obvious what the author was trying to do.  Basically the author hit the reset button because with 3 new books, what could you do with two 16-year-olds in a YA series?  They can't fuck, so they can't have kids.  They can't get married, though it is in Florida, so maybe they could.  There was really nowhere for them to go, so just reset and start over.  It's so obvious and lame.

And just sidelining Emma was a dick move too.  The author could at least have given her someone else.  Let her be with Jacob's grandpa in the past or something.  Or some alternate universe version of him or some damned thing.  Or give her a new guy too.  Or hook her up with one of the others in the gang.  Or just fucking kill her off.  That would have been better than that weak-ass excuse to break them up and then relegating her to a secondary character for the last two books.

Anyway, the point is, the author controls what happens in the story, but the author does not control whether or not the reader will buy it or not.  You just have to hope they'll go along with whatever shit you pull.  For the most part, readers will because a lot of readers for books like these are not very sophisticated thinkers.  The Goodreads scores for all 3 books are over 4.00 so I think that bears that point out.  So I guess most readers were cool with Jacob just dropping Emma and basically tossing her aside like an empty beer can for the mortal sin of wanting to say goodbye to a man who had died whom she loved once.  I mean, that's a pretty terrible thing, right?  If you happened to go back into the past, you'd never do something like that, would you?

Or if you got a bunch of Infinity Stones you'd never go back in time to marry your old sweetheart, right, Steve Rogers?

Anyway, like I said, the author can dangle some new relationship in front of us to try to make us forget the old one, but that doesn't mean I will right away.  Just because you as the author want something to happen doesn't mean it will happen that way for your audience.  We're all different people and think and feel differently, right?

Just something to keep in mind.

The Second Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children Trilogy Is Spoiled By Bad Plotting

A few years ago I read the first three books in the Miss Peregrine's Peculiar Children series.  I even wrote an article comparing the first book and the movie, which strangely was made as a one-off with no real attempt to make it a franchise.  For the most part I liked the first three books.

Eventually I got the next three books on sale and so started to read these.  To set it up, the series is about a kid in Florida named Jacob who finds out that his grandpa was a "peculiar," which is sort of like a mutant in X-Men.  His grandpa's power was he could see and control evil monsters called "hollows" that no one else could see.  Jacob soon finds he has this power when he goes to Wales and finds a "time loop" where the titular Miss Peregrine and her peculiar children are living.  

Jacob falls in love with Emma, a teenage girl with fire powers.  She was also his grandpa's girlfriend until he left the time loop to have a normal life while she stayed and so never got any older than sixteen.

Then the loop is destroyed by Miss Peregrine's evil brother Caul and she's kidnapped (or birdnapped) and Jacob and Emma and the rest have to flee and go save her.  But except for Jacob the others can only stay outside time loops a very short time or they'll suddenly age rapidly until they pretty much turn to dust.  They go to various loops and ultimately a place called the "Library of Souls" where the souls of ancient peculiars are kept and Caul wants to use to make himself a god and take over the world.  Jacob and company stop him and in the process Emma and the other peculiar kids get their clocks reset so they will now age normally.

After Caul is defeated, Jacob goes home and starts wondering if it's all a dream...until Miss Peregrine, Emma, and everyone else shows up in Florida.

So the fourth book starts off with the fallout of this.  Miss Peregrine has to put Jacob's parents to sleep and then wipe their memories.  The parents then are implanted with a suggestion to go on a vacation to Asia for a long time--something I already did in the first Scarlet Knight book back in 2009.  Eat it, Ransom Riggs!  So this way we don't have to worry about the parents anymore.

Then some lip service is given to showing these kids from 1940 the modern world and getting them modern clothes.  About then the first book is almost half over and there doesn't really seem like a plot.  But then it finally starts in earnest when Jacob and Emma find his grandpa's secret lair and undertake a mission to go to New York to find a new peculiar girl.

The trip of course is not simple as they run across some highwaymen and take a detour back into 1960s America, which becomes awkward when they pick up a black kid and he can't go into diners because they're segregated.  Eventually they get back to the present and find an Indian (from Bombay) girl named Noor who has a weird power where she can swallow light to create darkness and then barf it back up or some shit like that.

There are people with black SUVs and helicopters and stuff who chase them and then they get captured by a creepy kid who turns victims into dolls and sells the ones she doesn't want into slavery.  Only with Miss Peregrine's help can Jacob and most of the others get free--except Noor, who remains captive.  So then he goes back to rescue her.

This fourth book was really poorly paced with things really slow in the first two-thirds and then hitting overdrive at the end.  But what really irked me starting with this book is the way the author sidelines Emma.  It's kind of like one of those sitcom things where something happens to sabotage her relationship with Jacob to set him up with someone else.  In this case Jacob finds out Emma called his grandpa when they were in the 60s.  They didn't see each other or kiss or anything, but still he takes this as a sign she's not over his grandpa and so they break up.

Which frees Jacob up to go after Noor in the next book.  And then Emma is relegated to a secondary character and really not given much to do the rest of the series.  I really didn't like it because it was so obvious what the author was doing.  Really I think there were a couple of factors here:

1. The relationship between Emma and Jacob was always a little creepy with her essentially being old enough to be his grandma.
2. Since this was not an erotica book, there was really nowhere for their relationship to go after they professed their love and made out.  And being only 16, they weren't going to get married or have babies.
3. And also Emma is just an ordinary white girl and there's not a ton of diversity in the original group of peculiars.

So maybe for those reasons (and others) Emma has to do something to poison her relationship with Jacob.  Then he can get together with Noor, who's the same age as him (literally), is a fresh relationship, and a person of color for added diversity.

It always bugs me when you can see behind the curtain to the author pulling levers and turning wheels to make the story work a certain way.  It takes me out of the story itself.

Besides that, there were a couple of retcons that made me think of the crappy Star Wars sequels.  

Something else that happens in the fifth book is all those dudes with black SUVs and helicopters and stuff chasing Noor turn out to be "wights," the bad guys from the first three books.  Which seemed like a retcon after someone mentioned in the fourth book there was a secret society of normal humans chasing after peculiars.  But, um, nope that's not really a thing now.  I guess the author decided that was going to make the plot too complicated, or else he decided to do something different.  Still, it was some Rise of Skywalker shit.

In the fifth book it's mentioned that Noor is part of "the Seven" who are prophesized to prevent an apocalyptic war and stop Caul.  Fast-forward to the last book and then it says that all of these Seven are like Noor.  OK, fine.  Pretty unoriginal, but whatever.

And then when we find out four of the Seven are dead, well, you only actually need one; the other six are just spares.  What?  So why did they even need to bother going through a hellish World War I loop to find these others when they didn't even need them?  And the two they do find get killed by Caul anyway because Mary Sue Noor has to be the one to defeat him on her own.  It was another really obvious retcon, like the author couldn't think of six other neat Peculiars so he just changed them all to the same thing.  And then he didn't want to juggle six new characters so he just used two and said the rest didn't matter.

Something else that was Star Wars like was the fourth book didn't really set up a new villain of note.  There were just those random highwaymen and bad guys with SUVs and helicopters and then the evil Peculiars near the end.  So then just like the Star Wars movies it goes back to the villain of the original trilogy.  But to Riggs's credit, at least he established in book 5 that they were trying to free Caul from his prison.  He didn't just start book 6 saying, "Hey, Caul's back!"  I mean, that would be about the stupidest thing ever, right?

Stuff like that really ruined this second trilogy of books.  With the messy plotting, I start wondering if this was just a cash grab because the first three books were pretty successful.  And maybe the author didn't have anything else going on.  So just throw together some more books in this successful series.

Like someone ranted about Second Chance, I call betrayal!  Betrayal!  Because with Miss Peregrine and the kids coming to Florida you'd think they would stay there and join the modern world, but nope.  Most of them are in another time loop called "Devil's Acre" in Victorian-era London most of the time.  And you have to think those sort of MIB-type guys would have tied into a plot about the conflict between peculiars and normals in the modern world...but nah, let's just get back to wights and Caul and all that.  Why try anything new?  Which again is like the Star Wars sequels, only instead of Rian Johnson fucking it up the author kind of fucked things up himself.  Or maybe his editors fucked it up.

And in the end everything pretty much goes back to where it was at the very start, except Jacob and Noor are in Miss Peregrine's old house with the other kids.  So what was the freaking point?  They're in practically the same loop and while Caul is defeated, most everyone is just doing what they were doing before.  I'm sure people considered that a happy ending, but it made it all kind of pointless.

Anyway, it just didn't work as well.  So you definitely don't need to read those three books.

What Does Misogyny and Racism Cost You?

 On Twitter one day there was a Tweet about something all too common, and I would have favorited it or something but I didn't and now I can't find it because Twitter and Facebook algorithms make finding stuff all but impossible sometimes.  Anyway, a woman who works for the horror magazine Fangoria was wearing a T-shirt for the magazine.  Then a guy comes up and starts questioning whether she knows what that magazine is and goes into the whole "women can't get horror movies" despite that it's 2022 and women have starred in horror movies, written horror movies, and directed horror movies.  But work for a horror magazine?  Nope, inconceivable!

Unfortunately the woman's story is pretty common so it didn't stick with me as much as it should.  Another person's comment, though, really stuck in my brain.  That was that this guy really missed a chance to have a good conversation and learn something because he was such an asshole.  By going straight into judging the woman and mansplaining and generally being a dick, he lost the opportunity to actually have an interesting discussion with someone who maybe has a pretty cool job.

That's a problem with misogyny and racism and discrimination in all its other forms in general:  it robs you of the chance to really broaden your knowledge about the world and just to have some cool experiences.  Approaching someone hostilely just because of their gender or skin color or religion takes away the chance for anything good to happen before you even open your mouth.

And really you could also include objectifying women.  I mean if you're a guy and you see a cute girl and instantly start throwing out lame pickup lines, it doesn't give you a chance to actually talk to her.  More than likely she'll get annoyed by your lame advances and it'll spoil her evening.  Instead of going right into horn dog mode, maybe try acting like she's a human being.  Once you know her a little better, then maybe she won't mind you being a horn dog. 

In the example above, if the man had gone in with an open mind and just said, "That's a cool shirt."  Then the woman might have said, "Yeah, I work for Fangoria."  And the guy could have said, "Really, that's awesome!"  And then they could have had a pleasant discussion about horror movies and books and whatever.  Instead of it being a hostile encounter that ends up with a lot of hurt feelings and outrage.

On Facebook, the Chive posted someone's Instagram story from 4 years ago.  It's about a black guy and his son who invite a lonely old white guy to sit with them during March Madness:

I think you can see the difference between this story and the other one.  When you approach people with kindness instead of hostility, the result is much better.  You get more flies or bees or whatever with honey and all that.

There was another similar story recently when racist "fans" took to social media to attack Moses Ingram playing Inquisitor Reva in Obi-Wan Kenobi.  It's really stupid, not just because of the obvious racism but because her casting was probably announced a year or more ago and the show is already in the can, so why bother attacking her now?  What good can come of it?  All I can think is it's to get attention and so the next time they're casting a Star Wars show maybe they'll have all white people. [eye roll]  It got to the point where star and executive producer Ewan McGregor had to record a message to basically tell "fans" to STFU.  And like with that first example, it really distracts from what could have simply been nice conversations about a TV show.  Instead we had to twist it into something awful and ugly like Darth Vader when he's not in the armor.  Why is this the world we live in?  Why can't we just live and let live instead of trying to control people all the time?

Really as writers we should try to approach people with an open mind because learning about people helps to make better characters and give you more ideas for stories.  It's something we should do online as well as in person, not just attacking someone because they're a woman or black or Muslim or a Trump supporter.

After all, what's so funny about peace, love, and understanding?