Orlando & The Loss of Perspective

After the massacre in Orlando, there were the inevitable articles like this one on Medium titled: Why I Need an AR-15. Right in the title you have part of the problem. No civilian NEEDs a machine gun. You WANT one, but you can function easily enough without one; I’ve lived 38 years and never NEEDED a machine gun.

Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, what are the crucial reasons he needs an AR-15? Because it’s good for killing both feral pigs and small animals like groundhogs. There’s also target shooting and of course “home defense.”

The maddening thing about this article (and similar ones) is the complete lack of perspective. Fifty people are DEAD. Half as many were injured. Many more are going to be seriously traumatized. And that’s just one shooting; don’t forget about the carnage in Newtown and San Bernardino. But what’s a hundred or more human lives compared to your need to hunt pigs? And to blow paper targets to bits. And to be ready in case Russian paratroopers come down a la Red Dawn, which other than a zombie apocalypse is the only time you’d NEED a machine gun for “home defense.”

This is what happens when you become so desensitized to killing sprees that fifty lives no longer matter to you. It’s also part of a larger problem in our society where we can no longer distinguish between what we NEED and what we WANT. As with violence, we’re conditioned pretty early by TV to want the latest toy, fast food sandwich, shoes, and so forth. The trick of advertising is to turn that WANT into a NEED so you’ll go out and buy it. Or when you’re a kid, beg your parents for it. We have an entire holiday season dedicated to that.

The problem is people grow up but they don’t really grow up in that way. They still think they NEED the latest iPhone or TV. If you ask why they have “good” reasons too: it comes in rose gold! It has 4K! Never mind you’re getting along perfectly fine with your white iPhone or HD TV. You NEED the latest, “greatest” thing, especially before someone else on your street has it.

In this case you have people who NEED a machine gun for all the BS reasons described. The conditioning is so strong that they simply can’t weigh their “NEED” against the damage said product is actually doing. People like that seriously need a kick in the pants to wake them up to the fact there are a lot more people out there; it’s not all about YOU.

What you have to do is look at it objectively. Who benefits if we ban AR-15-type weapons? Well it would make it more difficult (not impossible) for psychos to get their hands on machine guns that can kill dozens of people in minutes. That would seem to benefit all of us who don’t want our lives cut short thanks to a killing spree. Who is hurt? People who don’t want to use two guns to kill pigs and groundhogs. Is it really that difficult of a decision?

People like the one who wrote that article and other morons on Facebook and such really should have to go up to the families of the victims and tell them why people NEED to have machine guns.  "I'm sorry your son is dead, but I NEED to hunt feral pigs and groundhogs."  Yeah, I don't think that'd go over well.  Or that well-worn excuse, "Well, it's too bad your child is dead, but that guy could have got the gun anyway, so why bother banning assault weapons?"  One thing I'm sure Obama is really glad about is having only 7 months until Hillary or Trump can be the one to go to the funerals and try to comfort the victims; gods help us if it's Trump.  How awful would that be for the families when he goes up there and says, "Well I told you this would happen if we didn't ban all Muslims.  Ha ha, told ya so!  I'm the greatest!!!"  Eek.

When the next massacre happens—and it will, sadly enough—all of us need to start acting like grownups and figure out the difference between WANT and NEED. In some cases it might save a life.

PS: On my Twitter I pondered why don’t these losers hunting with AR-15s use a REAL weapon like a bow? That’s how they did it in the old days. These same people claim hunting is a “sport” but what’s so sporting about shooting a pig with a machine gun? I could do that and the only hunting I do is on my Kindle Fire. You should get a sword and do it like the real old days. Sure it didn’t work out so well for Robert Baratheon in Game of Thrones, but then it’s a real contest between man and beast. Unless you’re just such a wimp you can’t kill a dumb animal with the same weapon your ancestors used. I’m just saying.

Comics I Read Recently...

It's been a few months since I talked about comics.  In that time I've read a few.  So here we go...

Dawn of the Undead:  This is an indie comic that I heard about from Arion's really great blog.  He worked on the art for it and I have to say it's really good.  Up to professional standards and in some cases above.  Like the previous one he worked on, it's a grab bag of topics.  The title comes a pair of short zombie stories as the walking dead rise and people have to seek shelter.  But then there's other stuff that's completely different, like one where a boy stands up to bullying by coming out of the closet.  There's also some sci-fi and stuff too.  It really whets the appetite for more.  You can buy it here for $1.99.

DC Rebirth:  The most-recent reboot rejiggering of the DC Comics universe.  The idea is to gain back market share by bringing back much of the status quo that they thought 5 years ago required a reboot.  Yeah, makes perfect sense.  The book is from the perspective of Wally West--not the black Wally West who has been in the comics for the last few years, but the white Wally West who predated him--who is trapped in time or space or whatever and has learned that something has fucked with time for...reasons.  The something is Dr. Manhattan, the god-like being of Alan Moore's seminal Watchmen series in the 80s.  Using Dr. Manhattan as a deus ex machina for Geoff Johns to undo the work of...Geoff Johns seems pretty ridiculous all around.  The 80-page issue itself is mostly vague and written like a whiny fanboy bitching about DC's "New 52" initiative and how much it sucks.  (You know, the New 52 Johns was largely responsible for.)  I don't see how you win new fans by bringing back old characters and relationships, so this seems largely preaching to the choir. (1/5)

Convergence:  Here was the last rejiggering of the DC Comics universe.  Or that's how it was billed and then largely nothing changed because of this.  Mostly this affected the failed "Earth-2" comic that involved a parallel universe.  The initial New 52 idea of that series was it was a universe without the "Big 3" of Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman, but when that didn't sell enough copies they brought in a new Batman who was Bruce Wayne's dad and a black Superman who was the son of General Zod.  Anyway, those guys and a different Flash and Green Lantern are transported to a barren planet where Brainiac's minion Telos has captured doomed cities, put them in domes, and stored them.  Now for...reasons...they all have to fight each other.  This series was just the main part of the series about the Earth-2 folks trying to stop Telos and whatnot.  There were a bunch of spinoff issues, only 2 of which I read.  Those weren't very good.  In the end this was all pretty pointless and as you can see, only led to another non-event. (1/5)

Superman: The Men of Tomorrow:  An all-star team brings to life this story arc.  A man arrives from the "Fourth Dimension" (nice Buckaroo Banzai reference) with pretty much the same story as Superman:  his parents put him in a craft when they thought the planet was dying and sent him away to a place he had superpowers.  At first he and Superman team-up, but inevitably it goes bad.  The end is like that Twilight Zone episode To Serve Man where the aliens show up and offer to take everyone home with them, but it turns out there's a catch:  "It's a cookbook!"  Anyway, it's a decent Superman story, though the ones that followed sound pretty lame and now this Superman is "dead" so I guess this doesn't really matter. (3/5) (Fun Fact: The "solar flare" power Superman uses that drains him of all power and makes him human for a day was used in the Supergirl TV show.)

Superior Spider-Man, Volume 6:  I had read the rest of this series except for the finale because for some reason there was no Kindle of it and to buy the issues separately would have been like $20.  Finally they had a sale on Comixology where you could buy one, get one for as many Marvel comics as you wanted, which made this far cheaper.  Anyway, Superior Spider-Man was the series where Dr. Octopus took over Spider-Man's body.  He used his superior brain and more flexible morals to bring peace to New York City.  Except the Green Goblin and his minions have been operating under Dr. Spidey's nose and finally start to launch their assault.  The part I still have trouble buying is when Doc Ock throws in the towel to let Peter Parker take the driver's seat again.  I still don't believe he'd do that, but otherwise it was a decent ending to arguably the best replacement superhero ever. (4/5)

Captain America #355-357:  I remember seeing this in the comic book store a long, long time ago and since it was on sale on Comixology I bought the three issues of this story line for the sheer hell of it.  It's a good illustration of how ridiculous comics plots can be.  Captain America is contacted by a female friend whose teenage kid has disappeared.  He finds out from his hacking team that other kids were disappearing.  So right then he decides to go see a witch and become a teenager again in the hope he'll be abducted and find their base.  Because naturally that's the first thing you'd do in that situation, right?  I mean you wouldn't just go and look for them as an adult or contact all your Avengers buddies or someone like Charles Xavier who has psychic powers and junk like that.  Anyway, the problem for him is that as a teenager he has no superpowers, so when he does find the evil cult of anarchists or whatever, he can't escape until conveniently the spell wears off.  This isn't as silly as the Thor becoming a frog story, but it's pretty ridiculous just the same.  It's also a good illustration that comic book covers rarely ever reflect the actual plot of the story.  That's something to keep in mind should you ever feel compelled to shop for comics. (2/5)

Developmental Issues

You know the problem with movies like the Avengers ones (including 2.5, aka Civil War), Batman v Superman, and all the X-Men ones?  There are so many characters it becomes hard to really focus.  And when you only have 2 1/2 hours (or less) and you have to dedicate a lot of that time to fighting, there's really not much time for any characterization.  You get maybe one scene per character at the beginning, middle, and end at most, though even that's usually weighted towards whoever the most popular characters are.

Even in the original comic books you only have about 23 pages per issue  and again you have to dedicate a lot of that to fighting and one splash page at the beginning for the credits and one at the end to set up a cliffhanger usually, so it's more like 20 pages.  That doesn't leave much space for the characters to do much more than go from one fight to the next.

I was thinking that was the good thing when I wrote the Scarlet Knight and Girl Power books.  Since they were books and as long as I wanted them to be, I had time to explore the characters a little more than a movie or comic book would.  And since the Scarlet Knight series was 8 books (plus a full prequel, a short prequel, and a short midquel) there was a lot of time to flesh out Emma and her whole crew.  Mostly because when it comes to series I don't hit the reset button.

Any series of connected stories I do always snowballs so that the characters grow and change over time--literally in cases like the Chances Are series.  It's not like comic books where a writer does a run on Batman or Superman or Spider-Man or whatever and then another writer comes in and loses a lot of the continuity of the last writer.  Nor are there big wholesale reboots.  It's more like dramatic TV series like Breaking Bad or Game of Thrones or whatever where you don't just reset from one episode to the next like The Simpsons or Mike & Molly.

The good thing (and bad thing) is that everything sticks.  When Emma Earl loses her job she doesn't just get it right back in the next book; she has to actually find a new job.  When her friend has a baby in one book, in the next books that baby grows up (and in real time, not like some TV series where one day the kid is a toddler and the next day a teenager).  The point being that the good thing about those books is since there was all that time and space, the characters could become a lot more rounded than those in movies or comics.  So at the end of the series it really does feel like she and her crew have all lived pretty full lives--far fuller than mine will ever be since it's not like I'm going to save the world any time soon.

Not to go all book snob on you (because you know I watch a shitload of movies) but there are still some things books do a lot better than other forms of media.  I'm just saying.

$$$$ Decides Who's the Boss

Last month I re-watched Chappie on Showtime, which was Neil Blomkamp's third major film.  The movie co-stars Sigourney Weaver who was in the original Alien movies.  The irony there is Blomkamp has been lobbying to make a sequel to those movies, going so far as to post storyboard images on Twitter or Instagram or whatever.  But in one of those weird cases of Hollywood logic, after the success of Ridley Scott's The Martian, Fox gave him money to make three crummy sequels to Prometheus, which no one except maybe Michael Offutt is looking forward to.  Having watched Blomkamp's work, I think he'd actually make a better movie in the Alien universe than Ridley Scott.

The reasoning for me is pretty simple:  Blomkamp is a fan while Ridley Scott, who directed the first movie as well as Prometheus, is not.  What Scott was trying to do in Prometheus is like George Lucas with the Star Wars prequels.  He's trying to take his sci-fi masterpiece and add all sorts of philosophical weight and significance to it to create a legacy for himself.  Which no one except Ridley Scott (and maybe Michael Offutt) gives a shit about because to everyone outside of Ridley Scott Alien was just a fucking slasher movie in space, like Halloween or Friday the 13th only with a killer alien that has acid blood and that creepy second mouth instead of wearing a mask.  Trying to tie the monster to the creation of humanity was just an exercise in futility because, again, Alien was a slasher film, not 2001:  A Space Odyssey.

James Cameron got that when he did Aliens, the sequel to Alien.  He just took the concept of the first movie and expanded it so there were a lot more aliens and a lot more shit getting blown up.  Which is why that movie was awesome and why the follow-up Alien 3 (directed by a then largely unknown David Fincher) sucked ass, because after a whole herd of aliens you go back to just one, violating the rule of sequels that you have to get bigger with the action, not smaller.  Then after Joss Whedon's too-little-too-late Alien Resurrection (which maybe you could consider a prototype for Firefly) you go back to Prometheus with no fucking alien monsters at all, just weird worms and face-hugger-type dealies.

Anyway, what was working for Cameron back in 85/86 is that he was still a relatively young filmmaker.  He had the big success of The Terminator, but he wasn't firmly established yet.  And also from The Terminator and all his work with special effects before that, he knew how to blow shit up.  So he was the right guy at the right time because he was still hungry and not so pretentious to make a movie for himself instead of for fans.  Which incidentally is why the Avatar sequels will suck ass.  First the original movie wasn't great except for effects and second, at this stage in career Cameron will be like Ridley Scott and George Lucas, looking to create some grand "legacy" instead of just blowing shit up, which is all most people going to see big-budget sci-fi movies really want.

That's why if I were Fox, I'd write Blomkamp a check to make his Alien sequel and tell Ridley Scott to go steal another studio's money for his pretentious bullshit.  Blomkamp is a fan of the original movies, he's not that established outside his native South Africa so he has the hunger to make a movie that will sell tickets, and from watching his previous movies he knows how to blow shit up.  With Ridley Scott you're just throwing a billion or so down the shitter for more pseudo-Kubrick garbage.

If you want confirmation of my logic, just look at Star Wars.  When Disney took over and hired JJ Abrams, they went back to the drawing board to make the movie fans wanted, not George Lucas.  Look, you can say Star Wars is Lucas's baby and he can do what he wants, but really he can't when he's taking hundreds of millions of dollars from other people.  If he had self-financed the prequels then he could do whatever the fuck he wants, but taking someone else's money to throw away on your "legacy" vanity project is an abuse of trust.  The same holds true for Scott, Cameron, and everyone else:  if you're taking someone else's money, you got to deliver a movie that's aimed at more people than just you.

That's a situation that's a lot more prevalent in film than books, because books don't cost nearly so much to produce.  And also like Stephen King, JK Rowling, and others (including me) have done, you can use a pseudonym when you want to do a side project that isn't necessarily in the wheelhouse of your fans.  (Though when that side project isn't selling, then you let your real name slip a la JK Rowling and her "thrillers.")  But still, when you're an author taking money from a real publisher then you owe it to them to deliver books people actually want to read.  When you're like me, you can do whatever the fuck you want, because no one is paying me an advance for my books.

I know, I know, creative freedom and all that jazz.  That stuff is great, but they tell every aspiring author you have to think of your audience.  Somehow people who reach a certain level of success think they can forget that.  If you're writing a book or putting out a music album you can probably get away with that, but not with a blockbuster movie costing hundreds of millions of dollars.  There's just too much dough at stake and too much visibility to let creative freedom interfere with delivering a product people actually want.

The De-Pantsing of Jay Greenstein

I've mentioned my writers.net nemesis Jay Greenstein before.  Anytime someone posts something for critique, he gives slight variations of the same speech about how they haven't learned to write in school and they need to study the teachings of Dwight Swain.  This despite that it has done nothing for him.  

I finally decided to put him to a little test.  So I created another name and make a few routine posts with it through Memorial Day.  Meanwhile I typed up a section of Dwight Swain's The Transposed Man.  Then a couple days after Memorial Day I baited my trap by posting it.  Read it for yourself:

Chapter 1 4

They called the place the Moon Room. A replica of Luna, as seen from Earth, hung like a dim gold crescent against the deep blue of the artificial sky. Stars twinkled, and an aromador brought subtle fragrances of forests and streams and wind-swept hills. A thread of faint, languorous melody sighed and rippled on the climarizer’s gentle breeze.

I gulped a vidal, then ordered spiked loin of rossa, seared in lorsch, with doralines from Mars and a salad of Ionian tabbat stalks.

It was good food. The rossa measured a full two inches thick, deep pink straight through, the fibers so tender from the infradation that my fork sliced them like a knife. The quince-tinted tabbat stalks—not one longer than a tarosette—had been gathered at the peak of their delicate flavor.

I ate slowly, savoring every mouthful.

Afterwards, there was thick Venusian ronhnei coffee, then more vidal. This time I didn’t gulp it.

The cycle was over now. The long, dim room began to fill with other patrons, couples mostly. I leaned back, rolling the tear-shaped glass between my hands, watching them idly as they took their places.

A woman, alone, paused momentarily at the threshold. She was taller than most, sleek-lined with her hair swept up and around in a style I’d never seen before. Stepping inside quickly, out of the opener beam, she disappeared into the shadows. The chromoid street door whispered shut behind her.

I caught the waiter’s eye, tapped my empty glass. He nodded and headed for the bar.

A hand touched my elbow.

I came round with a jerk. The teardrop glass rang against the table.

“Oh, did I startle you, darling? I’m sorry…”

It was the woman—girl, rather, I saw now—with the unique coiffure, the one who’d paused in the doorway.

She sat down beside me without waiting for an invitation.

Seeing her at closer range, I understood why she’d picked such an unusual style for her hair. Even in the dimness, it shone and rippled—thick, rich, tawny.

She smiled at me and moved her chair around a little closer. “Please try to forgive me, dear; I know I’m late. But they had a sale on hair brooches at a little place over near my unit, and you know how I love that kind of thing. Just look at the one I picked—the sets are real fire rubies!”

She slipped a clip out of her hair; handed it to me.

The pattern was one of interlinked zeros.

“Nice,” I said. I pushed back my chair. “Shall we go?”

“Oh, can’t I have just one vidal?” The girl was half smiling, half pouting.

Even pouting, she was pretty.

The waiter picked that moment to come back. I gave the girl the vidal.

She sipped it slowly, still smiling. There was something about her smile…something that reminded, me of Maurine. I said, “Hurry up. We’re late already.”

She drained the glass without a word; rose in one smooth, graceful motion.

We left the Moon Room.

Outside the street was narrow. It ran between buildings so tall that down here at ground level we stood in deep shadow, crushed down by the sheer bulk of looming spun-doloid walls. The stars overhead were pale splotches against the sky. Even the air seemed heavy.

The girl tilted her head. “Which way?” Her eyes were wide, and the corners of her mouth twitched as if she were having a hard time trying not to laugh.

“To the Quiverna,” I said.

It's not terrible, but it's not great either.  His use of the semicolon seems pretty wonky.  Someone else pointed this out:  "I leaned back, rolling the tear-shaped glass between my hands, watching them idly as they took their places." The antecedent for them, they, their has to be hands, which is nonsensical.

Apparently the editor never noticed that.

Later that night (far sooner than I'd have thought) Greenstein fell right into my trap:

This reads as if written by someone skilled in writing for academia or journalism, It's clean, accurate, and fact-based to the point where the sentences could be labeled, fact #1, fact #2, etc. And it all is being explained by a dispassionate offstage voice.

Look at a few lines from the viewpoint of a reader, who has only the context the words seem to suggest based on that reader's background, not the image in your head.

They called the place the Moon Room.

This is, clearly, the voice of the narrator, who, as yet, may or may not be the protagonist. They're telling me that an unknown "they" called a place with unknown function, "The moon room." And the voice goes on to describe things the reader, who is waiting for the story to begin, doesn't give a damn about because we can neither see the things being mentioned, or know why it matters.

You're thinking cinematically. And because you hold the vision of the place, its purpose, and its role in the plot, the words call up image, ambiance, emotion, and backstory, all stored in your mind. So as you read, the video plays and the story lives. But what about the reader? For them, the words call up image, ambiance, emotion, and backstory, all stored in your mind. And since you're not there to explain…

I gulped a vidal, then ordered spiked loin of rossa, seared in lorsch, with doralines from Mars and a salad of Ionian tabbat stalks.

As yet, we don't know where we are in time and space. The protagonist is an unknown, so far as age, character, background and more. And we have not a clue of what's going on. Given that, why would the reader care what the protagonist ordered, or how he or she enjoyed it? As yet, the story hasn't begun. You're opening the scene as you would on camera, with the protagonist eating, to establish place and ambiance. But listing what was ordered and how it was enjoyed is data, not entertainment.

In the film version, in the space between eyeblinks we would know the place, the protagonist's gender and place in their society, the room's ambiance, size, customers, and more. A glance at the protagonist's face and we know his or her mood, we see mannerisms, the character's opinion of the food and the place, and much more. And we do that in the time it took to read the first two sentences.

My point? You cannot use the techniques of cinema in a medium that does not reproduce either sound or picture. So the reader can't hear the emotion in the narrator's voice. They can't see the things being mentioned. And, they're waiting for something related to the story to happen. But the woman doesn't interact for 255 words, which means we've read the first, and more then half the second manuscript page and not a damn thing has happened.

I'm absolutely certain you weren't hoping to hear something like this. Who would? But it's not a matter of good/bad writing, or talent. It's that your current tool-set is inappropriate to the needs and limitations of our medium, a fixable situation.

Without sound or picture, we need to give the reader an emotional experience via other ways. We can't show the action visually, but we can go where film can't, into the protagonist's head. By making the reader know the scene as that protagonist does, in real-time, complete with their evaluation of it, their needs and imperatives, and their resources, the reader will "see" from the protagonist's viewpoint. And that's what's missing.

The woman, who appears to be a stranger, calls him "dear," and he reacts to that neither internally nor externally. Nor does he ask why she chose him, or speculate on that. Nor do they exchange names, or enough conversation for the reader to have a clue of what the other person wants, or expects to happen. He tells her they're late. For what? He knows what's going on. She apparently does, too. Probably everyone in the place does. But the reader, the one who you wrote this for, has not the slightest bit of context. And fair is fair. They are the paying customer, after all. Why not let them in on the secret? In the film version, the hair clip evokes a response that speaks volumes. Perhaps he nods when he sees the pattern, or raises an eyebrow. You and I react to what has our attention. Can the protagonist seem real if they don't?
- - - - - -
So the problem, boiled down, is that you're explaining story points to a reader who came to you to be entertained, and doing it because you're missing the specialized knowledge and tricks of the trade the publishers expect to see in use. They expect us to write emotion-based prose, not fact-based. They a expect character-centric, not narrator-centric viewpoint. The short version? You're telling when showing would be far more exciting.

So first, you need to get into the protagonist's viewpoint, and in the moment that character calls now. First person defines which personal pronouns are in use. But that is a very different thing from being in the protagonist's viewpoint. Having a later incarnation of the protagonist seem to be the storyteller is not placing the reader into the scene as the character, because the narrator lives in a different place and time from the action, so they cannot appear on stage with the protagonist.

Take a look at this article. It's a condensation of a very powerful way of showing the reader what matters to the protagonist as they live the scene. Not only does it place the reader there, it forces you to see the scene as the protagonist, and think about how they would react, given the situation, their personality, and their needs. Without that, it's too damn easy to make the protagonist smart when smart is needed, and toss away that characteristic when the plot needs him dumb.

Play with the technique till it makes sense. I think you'll like the result. And check a modern novel that made you feel as if you were living the story as you read it, to see how that author made use of the technique.

And if it make sense, and seems worth pursuing, I agree with the man who wrote the article. The book it was condensed from should be on every writer's bookshelf, because it's filled with things like that. Many of the articles in my blog are based on that book.

Sorry my news wasn't better. But I thought you would want to know. You have the chops, you're just missing a few tricks. So hang in there, and keep on writing.

Jay Greenstein

Yup, he gave his hero Dwight Swain the same "pep talk" he gives everyone else.  He essentially told Dwight Swain to study Dwight Swain.  Hang in there and keep on writing is great advice...except Swain died in 1992.

Not only did this give me considerate Schadenfreude, but also it proved my point.  This guy knows jack about writing.  All he can do is repeat the same crap ad nauseum no matter who writes it--not even if it's the "respected professor" he reveres.  And yet he smugly looks down on people like me for just reading stuff and giving our opinions because we haven't been published by big houses or got a teaching job somewhere.  (Neither has he done either of those but it's OK to him if you're parroting someone else who has.)  This emperor definitely has no clothes.

That's why it's always important to take critiques with a grain of salt.  Even advice that might sound wise could be coming from an idiot who just gives the same carbon copy critique to everyone.

As for Greenstein, his response was of course to double-down.  Oh, well, this was written in 1953 and writing technique is completely different.  Back then they wanted telling instead of showing.  Um...really?

Then he tried this gambit:

Something interesting that you missed. In the first line of my critique I noted, "This reads as if written by someone skilled in writing for academia or journalism." So his writing was so professional that I noted that as line one

Except right after that he said:

It's clean, accurate, and fact-based to the point where the sentences could be labeled, fact #1, fact #2, etc. And it all is being explained by a dispassionate offstage voice.

Does that really sound like a compliment to you?  It's a backhanded compliment at best.  This is like when someone gets caught on film and then tries to say it's not them.  Dude, you're busted.  Just deal with it already.  Maybe start trying to think for yourself.

Which is another point.  Never be such a slave to a philosophy that you become completely blind to the rest of the world.  In this case, a fool who loves the teachings of Dwight Swain so much that not even Dwight Swain can live up to them.  It's pretty sad.  And also funny--for me at least.  Bwahahahahahahaha...

X-Men Apocalypse: Destroying the World With Zero Consequences

I finally broke down and watched X-Men Apocalypse on Monday.  I haven't really liked any of the X-Men movies that much since the very first one--not counting Deadpool.  They're more in the OK, reliable action movie category where I wouldn't turn them off but I rarely seek them out.  Apocalypse continues that tradition of being OK but unlike the first movie so long ago isn't going to redefine the genre the way Marvel's movies have.  It doesn't really take any big risks like you could say about Batman v Superman.

Following the pattern of recent movies, this takes place 10 years after Days of Future Past, in 1983 with a mish-mash of 80s references and nods to Return of the Jedi, Madonna, Michael Jackson, and so forth.  There's been kind of a stand-off between mutants and humans since Magneto nearly killed Nixon and a bunch of other people in DC.  And then along comes Apocalypse, who has some weird name I'm not bothering to learn.  Back in ancient Egypt he ruled the world with an iron fist from his weird blue pyramid.  Whenever he was dying, he would transfer his consciousness to someone else.  In the last such instance he transfers it to Oscar Isaac, aka Poe from Star Wars Episode VII, who's an Egyptian guy with Wolverine or Deadpool-level healing ability.  Transferring his consciousness into that body gives Apocalypse that ability, which comes in handy when his "loyal" guard drops the pyramid on him using kind of a Rube Goldberg-type setup with giant blocks.  (Because I'm sure they could totally do that in 3600 BC.)  So basically he's been sleeping for about 5600 years.  Man, I bet he really had to piss when he woke up, right?

Meanwhile in the present, serial almost-destroyer of the world Magneto has gotten married and had a kid in Poland until like Man of Steel he uses his power for good and people narc on him.  His wife and daughter are killed with a single arrow by a cop who must secretly be Green Arrow or Hawkeye.  And it's not even an arrow with any metal and yet it somehow penetrates the heart of a little girl and an adult woman to kill them almost instantly.  (Totally plausible!)  Even less plausible is that Magneto then beheads them all with a locket that he must have been sharpening for the last 20 years.

Meanwhile Apocalypse recruits Storm, Psylocke, and Angel to join him as his "Horsemen."  None of them are given even the most rudimentary backstory and contribute very little to the plot.  Which should be pretty disappointing to fans since Storm and Psylocke have pretty meaty backstories in the comics by now.  And then they recruit Magneto since he's all pissed off at humanity again, though this time there's probably more righteousness to his anger than the last couple movies.

When Professor X tries to find Magneto, Apocalypse realizes that Xavier's psychic power is what he really needs to complete his awesome collection of mutant powers because then he could just brainwash everyone to do what he wants.  So he captures Xavier and in the process destroys the X-Mansion.  Then he decides to set up his capital in Cairo, demolishing most of the city to build a new pyramid.  With Apocalypse's help Magneto starts destroying the rest of the world, notably the Sydney Opera House.  (Someone had the good sense to not have the World Trade Center be destroyed in this, because how tasteless would that be?)

Maybe the mention of Return of the Jedi was a subliminal cue to the ending, where Magneto turns on Apocalypse like Vader on the Emperor, though also with a lot of help.  Meanwhile there's a kind of silly-looking psychic battle in Xavier's head between him and Apocalypse and then Jean Grey, who still doesn't get a cool X-Men name.

After all that, Magneto just gets to walk away and Storm gets to join the mutant school and everyone's totally cool with it, because they learned a lesson.  Even though they helped kill hundreds of thousands of people, neither one is held accountable for it.  Xavier was just as culpable even if under duress, but he seems to give zero fucks about it.  Basically it was like the end of Man of Steel on an even bigger scale.

Though it's hard to tell if they really did kill anyone since there weren't really any reaction shots of actual people running from all the destruction.  They probably would have been mostly CGI people, but it would have helped to make it seem less like a video game cut scene.  You showed people being beheaded, partially beheaded, and disemboweled, so don't tell me the MPAA would have put up a fuss with showing a dead body or two.

At the end Magneto and Jean Grey rebuild the X-Mansion with magnetism and psychic power, which doesn't make any sense.  I mean sure they can fit the pieces together, but how does it stay together without nails, screws, welds, or whatever else?  It's not a fucking LEGO set.  (Or maybe there's a mutant with caulking powers.)  Which is another example of destruction with no consequences.  Blow up the house, so what?  We'll just put it right back together again.  When Bruce Wayne burned down his house in Batman Begins it took until the third movie for it to be rebuilt.

Even when Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Nightcrawler go to the mall nothing really happens.  I mean you take a blue dude with a devil tail to the mall and no one's going to hassle him?  Or be the slightest bit freaked out?  Maybe there's a deleted scene but as it stands there's again no consequences to leave any impact.

Honestly the IQ of this movie is about Michael Bay Transformers level.  I mean Nightcrawler says he can't teleport somewhere he can't see or hasn't been to but he beams right into the helicopter when the others are being abducted and later he beams right into the pyramid, despite that he couldn't have been to either before or seen inside without X-Ray vision.  And there's really no way this can still be affiliated with the original three movies.  For one thing Cyclops and Jean Grey have already met Wolverine, so wouldn't they recognize him years later?  Especially Jean who's been in his brain.  (And while it was supposed to be touching when she and Wolverine--or Weapon X--hold hands it's kind of creepy when she's supposed to be like 17 and he looks like he's in his 40s.)  And now they've already met Nightcrawler and Angel is dead and Jean Grey has tapped into the Dark Phoenix she wasn't supposed to know about and on and on.  The "parallel universe" or "altered universe" thing is hard to buy too when the end of the last movie brought all the original actors back.  (Which for the next movie if they're going to have it take place in the early 90s, which actors are they going to use?  Or are we supposed to think over the span of a few years McAvoy turns into Patrick Stewart or Sophie Turner turns into Famke Jansen?)

Anyway, Bryan Singer is supposed to be leaving the franchise (again) so maybe they can find someone who can make an X-Men movie that actually makes me give a shit again. 

Amazon Doesn't Care About Sellers

I've made money off Amazon from selling books, but that doesn't mean they're perfect.  I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before their extremely lenient return policy that lets people read and/or download and copy your book and then "return" it for a full refund, thereby taking money out of my pocket.

Their "Marketplace" isn't any better, as I found out recently to my dismay.  I received a laptop a couple of months ago, but it was more laptop than I needed or wanted, so I thought I'd sell it.  It was pretty easy to set it up on Amazon and I hoped I wouldn't have to worry as much about scammers.

The laptop sold to some guy named Jose after a few days.  I shipped it and figured that would be the end of it.  Well a couple weeks later--the day before Amazon was going to pay me--the buyer decides he wants to send the laptop back because of a "broken button on the left side of the mouse."  Which seemed odd since he'd had the laptop for a couple weeks and it's a touchscreen laptop so it's not like you really need a mouse anyway.  But the first netbook I bought in 2009 has the power button mashed in and needed returned so maybe there was something wrong with it. 

Jose took another week or two to actually mail me the unit, during which time Amazon paid me the money for whatever reason.  Good thing I didn't spend it.  Eventually the laptop showed up on my doorstep.  I opened it up and turned it on...and there was nothing at all wrong with it.  Except that Jose had set up a Windows 10 profile in Spanish, practically bricking the thing without a password.

I contacted Microsoft about unlocking it and they were complete idiots.  The guy even suggested Microsoft isn't responsible for their own products--we're just the distributor.  Is that why you have that big Windows logo on your building and everything else you sell?  He was no help at all but looking some information on Google I got Windows reinstalled.

I was seriously pissed off so I didn't refund the jackass's money.  I figured I might as well let that asshole sweat it out.  A few weeks later he whined to Amazon with a claim under their "A to Z Guarantee."  Amazon then said I had to refund $1359 to the jackass, even though I only got $1241 from them after their fees.  So I'm supposed to lose money because this guy lied about the unit being broken?

Of course protesting to Amazon was useless.  Their drones actually told me I didn't ship the unit as advertised because I said it was new and I had opened the box to make sure it had all the parts.  So even though I never used it I'm supposed to classify it as used?  That didn't make sense.  Meanwhile they gave zero fucks about the buyer lying about the product.  Oh, no, I'm the liar here because I opened the box and said as much in the description.  That's the sort of "logic" they use.

Now if Jose had been truthful and just said he didn't want it anymore he couldn't have gotten a full refund.  By lying and claiming it was broken, he gets a full refund.  And I get used even though I didn't do anything wrong.

Shit like that is great for the buyer, but where's the protection for me, the seller?  If I'm a big company like Amazon or Wal-Mart or Home Depot I can absorb losses from assholes who game the return system.  But I'm not a Fortune 500 company with billions in profits; I barely have two nickels to rub together.  So while Amazon's lenient policies are great if I'm a scumbag "buyer" who wants to rent a laptop for a couple of weeks or steal a book, it winds up hurting the people who use Amazon to sell.

That's not even counting some of the other shit you have to deal with when selling a laptop or anything else.  I had one person call him/herself "amazon customercare" and tell me the unit had been sold and I should send it by USPS to someone in Denver.  Which at first I'm like, "Oh, good, it's sold."  Then looking more closely I realize that Amazon doesn't send you a private message when you sell something.  And they don't tell you to use USPS and that the buyer is paying an extra $75 for shipping.  Something's fishy...And for some reason I had a bunch tell me they're interested and I should send a picture to some email account.  I guess they want me to give them my email so they can try to sweet talk me into selling it off Amazon the way one person did, making up increasingly ridiculous stories for why they needed to pay for it with PayPal off Amazon.  Then there are just the regular folks who badger you with annoying questions like someone who apparently wanted an essay on why I was selling the item.  It makes it a real pain in the ass.

There needs to be some accountability and equality to protect both buyers and sellers.  If there were another bookselling platform that could generate the same cash flow for me, I wouldn't hesitate to use it, especially if there's more protection built in for me as an author.  Someone get on that.  As for the laptop, I'm selling it somewhere else.

A Weird Trick for Reviews

It seems after I wrote this entry about people panhandling Amazon reviewers to get reviews for their books, I got a lot more of those emails.  Usually I would direct them to my blog post so they could get why I have no interest in that.

One day someone brought up a review I wrote 9 years ago.  9 fucking years ago!  Jeez, how desperate are you to go back that far?  It got me thinking that if you really want me to review your book, don't bring up some moldy old book review I wrote:  suck up to me by saying you read one of MY books.  I mean I don't really give a shit if you liked my review of someone's book from almost a freaking decade ago; I don't even remember that review anymore!  But I do love, love, love people praising my books.

Thus the weird trick if you want me to review your book is to read one of MY books and then send me an email saying how awesome it was and what a great writer I am.  Then I'll be more likely to review your book.

Something to think about...

PS:  I got sick of people spamming me with their books so I took the contact information off the About Me page.  The contact info was for people to contact me about MY books, not to spam me with theirs.  That's the only way I can see that they keep getting my email address, unless they can see it on my Google+ or Blogger profiles, which I'm not sure how to change.

Stuff I Watched: May Edition

Here's the stuff I watched in May, sorted again by rating:

5 stars (Awesome!)
I guess I was being a real hard ass this month...

4 stars (Really Good)
Deadpool:  I saw this in the theater in February but I missed most of the opening fight, so now that it's on digital download I watched it again (and again).  Probably my most favorite superhero flick in years.  It's funny, violent, and crass, which is really everything fans (and not-really fans like me) were expecting and yet it still has considerable heart too.  The good thing is Fox thought so little of this they were free to do whatever they wanted without worrying about crossovers or "cinematic universes" or even setting up a sequel, as is noted in the post-credits scene.  That's pretty refreshing after Marvel and DC's recent movies with their relentless positioning for future stories.  And hey they finally got Colossus of the X-Men right! (4/5)

3 stars (Good)
Sex Ed:  The kid from the 6th Sense and AI has grown into a chubby adult who's teaching sex ed to middle schoolers.  It's like Stand and Deliver meets The 40-Year-Old Virgin as he has no actual sexual experience to speak of and yet he's trying to help the kids--and hook up with someone himself.  Overall it's funny, though the end is a bit of a letdown. (3/5)
Special Correspondents:  This Netflix original movie written, directed by, and starring Ricky Gervais is similar to Barry Levinson's Wag the Dog, only not quite as convoluted.  Gervais is a sound technician at a news radio station; he and a ne'er do well reporter (Eric Bana of Hulk and The Time Traveler's Wife) are supposed to go to Ecuador to report on a crisis.  When they lose their passports  and such before leaving New York, they decide to stay in the apartment of a Latino couple and fake the news.  Things snowball from there until they have to fake their own kidnapping.  Mostly fun, though it glosses over a couple of weak points in the plot.  At one point they drive from New York to southern California during a montage.  At that point since the whole country has heard about them, wouldn't they be recognized when they have to stop for gas or food or to potty?  At least throw in a close call. (3/5)
Zero Effect:  In this 1997 film, Bill Pullman is a quirky PI who only interacts with the world through various disguises.  For everything else, he employs an attorney (Ben Stiller) to act on his behalf.  Their latest case involves an executive being blackmailed in Portland.  It's not as funny as you might think but it is really good, with some twists and turns.  It does lose a little steam in the final act, but otherwise is worth watching. (3/5)

2.5 stars (OK)
Chuck Norris vs. Communism:  With a provocative title like that, how could I not watch it?  Except it's not really a movie movie; it's a documentary with some reenactments that's almost all in Romanian with English subtitles.  Basically in the 80s Romanian TV was just a bunch of shitty propaganda, so VHS tapes from the West were highly prized on the black market.  There was a woman who secretly dubbed most of the tapes, many of them Cannon movies featuring Chuck Norris and so forth but also classics like Scarface and The Godfather.  For reasons no one really understands the secret police never tried to shut down the smuggling operation despite that it probably helped fuel the eventual fall of communism in Romania.  An actual movie not in Romanian with subtitles would be better.  (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  Brett Ratner of Rush Hour fame produced this; is he from Romanian ancestors or something?)
This Magic Moment:  The Orlando Magic joined the NBA in 1990 and had a short window of greatness by first getting Shaquille O'Neal and then Penny Hardaway in successive drafts.  They went all the way to Finals in 1995 but got swept.  After that the wheels came off when O'Neal bolted to LA and Hardaway was wracked with injuries.  A story not really deserving of a nearly 2 hour documentary but it's fun anyway. (2.5/5)
The D-Train:  This is one that sounded vaguely interesting but I never got around to watching it on Redbox or that week it was in theaters.  Finally it was on Showtime.  The premise is that it's the 20-year reunion of Jack Black's high school class and he tries to get the most popular dude (James Marsden) to the reunion.  He flies out to LA where James Marsden is a struggling actor and (spoiler alert) they have sex.  Which makes things awkward.  And making it even more awkward, James Marsden goes back to suburbia with Jack Black and is not the best houseguest.  The sex thing kind of drags the movie down instead of making it funny.  Something really annoying to me is this is supposed to be for the Class of 1994 and yet at the reunion all the music is 80s stuff.  WTF?  You couldn't get any Nirvana, Pearl Jam, REM, Counting Crows, the Cranberries, or anything else that was popular in my day?  Could have just borrowed some CDs from me.  And I'm pretty sure Jack Black and James Marsden are both a bit older than I am too, which is maybe where the music coordinator got mixed up. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  This year is my 20th year reunion.  No one has invited me that I know of.  Or tried to have sex with me to convince me to go....Yet.)
The Last Survivors:  In the near future where Oregon has become a desert, a young woman protects the last well of water.  It's sort of a YA Mad Max or something.  It's pretty bad ass when she starts chopping people up with a sword like Michonne in The Walking Dead. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  The guide on my cable remote listed the description for a 1975 movie about Martin Sheen on a life boat.  Yeah, this is pretty much the same thing, right?)
Black Sea:  I saw a preview of this a while ago and wondered one thing:  How do you collect sunken treasure with a Russian diesel submarine?  It's not like they have robot arms and I didn't think you could just climb out.  But I guess you can--or at least that's what the movie wants you to believe.  I suppose at the bottom of the Black Sea it wouldn't be as hard as the bottom of the Pacific in terms of pressure and such.  Anyway, Jude Law heads a team of treasure hunters who buy the old sub and go to the bottom of the Black Sea to collect some Nazi gold.  Greed and jealousy lead to some deaths along the way and ultimately only a couple of guys make it.  Who?  It's on Showtime if you want to find out. (2.5/5)

2 stars (Meh)
Legend:  It's funny when a true story turns out to be a lot of cliches.  You wouldn't think true stories could be cliches but then it's probably "true" in the Aaron Sorkin biopic-writing sense.  This is a story about two gangsters in London who were twin brothers.  Reggie is the more normal one while Ronnie is crazy and also homosexual.  Both of them are played by Tom Hardy.  Then like I say it's a lot of gangster movie cliches.  There's a girl who marries Reggie but of course realizes the gangster wife life is shit.  He tells her he'll get out of the gangster life but of course he doesn't.  There's a cop on their tail and there's conflict between the two brothers and so on.  Other than the twin brother angle nothing really stands out.  There's certainly nothing legendary about it.  Mic drop! (2/5) (Fun Fact:  To have Tom Hardy play both brothers they would film scenes first as Reggie and then go back and do the parts with Ronnie and splice them together digitally.)
Shades:  A movie about making a movie--in Belgium!  In this 1999 flick, Mickey Rourke is the director of an international production shooting in Belgium about a notorious killer in that country.  There's a conniving producer, his wife the lead actress, and an annoying Method actor who starts getting too friendly with the real-life serial killer.  There were all the pieces for a good story, but it never really comes together.  What I don't understand is why Mickey Rourke is the director and not the prima donna Method actor; I mean isn't that real-life Mickey Rourke? Also they really needed subtitles for dialogue and newspaper headlines in Flemish; not all of us (or even most) are Belgian! (2/5)
Vice:  It's Westworld meets Blade Runner!  In the near future (or whatever) there's a theme park called Vice that promises you can do anything you want--even kill someone!  Except all the "employees" are androids who think they're human.  The androids have their memories wiped every day but when one female android is "killed" she starts remembering things.  The supervisor of the park (Bruce Willis cashing a paycheck) has his minions try to find and eliminate her while a cop (Thomas Jane of The Punisher (2004) and Hung) tries to get her to safety to bring the place down.  It was pretty boring.  When they sneak the android back into the park to take it down, they "disguise" her by having her slick her hair back.  Because this highly-advanced place with all the security doesn't have facial recognition or anything? (2/5)
Mojave:  Some annoying douchebag filmmaker goes into the Mojave desert for...reasons and runs afoul of Poe Dameron, which it's kind of ironic that he's playing a desert scavenger, like an evil version of Rey in Episode VII--or you could say a Tusken Raider in Episode IV since he has a gun and jumps travelers.  After the d-bag accidentally kills a National Parks employee, he runs home and Poe stalks him.  Since the supposed protagonist was such a douchebag, I was rooting for the stalker to win. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  The movie isn't great but if you watched Episode VII and wanted to see Poe Dameron in a thong, here's your chance.)
Dracula Untold:  The Dracula origin story no one wanted.  I think this was another of those where before it came out the studio was optimistically talking "cinematic universe" but then wah wah, it wasn't that great.  Basically to save Transylvania from the Turks, Vlad the Whatever goes to a cave and gets vampire powers from Charles Dance, whose career got a huge boost thanks to his stint on Game of Thrones.  The vampire power lasts only for 3 days--unless he drains a human.  So, yeah, guess what happens?  It never really connects to the book Dracula; in the end they show him in modern day, skipping over the whole 19th Century (and 18th, 17th, and maybe 16th) when the book takes place. (2/5) (Fun Fact:  I think I might have watched this in April but I forgot about it.)
Your Highness:  This is sort of a parody of The Princess Bride, Clash of the Titans, and maybe some other fantasy-type movies.  Danny McBride is a ne'er do well prince with a brave warrior for a brother (James Franco) who always upstages him and is the apple of his father's eye.  Then he rescues a really tired-looking Zooey Deschanel and a wizard comes to take her away.  Danny McBride reluctantly joins the quest to get her back.  Mayhem ensues that isn't as funny as it probably should be.  Ultimately while Danny McBride becomes more courageous, he doesn't even get to strike the final blow, so it seems kind of a ripoff. (2/5)
Slackers:  Three college slackers have been pulling numerous schemes to avoid actually having to study.  But then a stalker blackmails them into helping him try to get the girl of his dreams.  Except of course one of the slackers falls in love with her.  It's more creepy and sad than funny. Definitely not the highlight of the career for Jason Schwartzman or Jason Segel.  (Fun Facts: The girl they're ga-ga for is credited under the name James King, though in later movies she has gone by Jamie, because James was probably confusing when she had to show up at a premiere or something.  Also, a teaching assistant in the movie is played by Jim Rash, who more famously played the dean in NBC's Community.  Another assistant was played by Retta, more famously of NBC's Parks & Recreation.)
Route 666:  It's like Midnight Run--with killer ghosts!  Basically Lou Diamond Phillips and Lori Petty are US Marshals going to take an accountant from Arizona to LA for court.  They decide to take a shortcut known as Route 666 and that's where it all goes wrong.  Because the road is haunted by a work gang of psycho killer ghosts who in 1967 died on that road.  It gets increasingly silly and the lame camera tricks when the ghosts appear and when they're fighting the ghosts are pretty stupid.  Someone probably had the job of shaking the camera during the fight sequences.  Anyway, the original premise of the movie was a serviceable thriller but adding the ghosts was a real wrong turn. Boom! (2/5)

1 star (Shit)
Death Wish:  The classic revenge movie where Charles Bronson is an architect or something whose wife and daughter are stalked and attacked by a young Jeff Goldblum and a couple of other freaks.  After a trip to the Wild West of Tucscon, Bronson is given a gun and decides to start luring in bad guys and killing them.  Most of the criminals (especially the Goldblum gang) were pretty corny.  And those guys who attacked his wife are apparently never found or dealt with, which seems pretty lame.  The daughter goes catatonic after they try to rape her (and spray paint her ass for...reasons) and is put into a sanitarium but her father pretty much gives zero fucks about her and just leaves her behind to escape to Chicago.  It's hard to believe it launched like 4 even crummier sequels. (1/5)  (Fun Poll:  Was this the inspiration for Marvel's The Punisher?  And other revenge stories like Robocop, Darkman, and The Crow that were in turn my inspiration for Chance of a Lifetime?)
Lumberjack Man:  It's almost impossible to make a really good slasher movie anymore.  You've either got to somehow subvert the genre such as Scream breaking the fourth wall back in the day or have some kind of hook no one's seen before.  In this case you have a ridiculous concept told with a straight face.  There's a demon lumberjack who's returned from the grave to kill a bunch of Christian campers because some dude stole his pancake recipe back in 1892.  And somehow they have to stop him before he finishes his killer breakfast or he'll become unstoppable. Um, yeah.  That.  Overall it's boring and ridiculous but at least there are boobs. (1/5)  (Fun Fact:  Remember back in the 90s when Michael Madsen was in actual movies like Reservoir Dogs and Species?)
Compound Fracture:  Speaking of, this is more of a poltergeist story than a slasher movie, though people still end up dead.  It was so boring that I spent most of it reading comics on my Kindle Fire. (1/5) (Fun Fact:  It stars, was produced, and co-written by Tyler Mane, notable for being the first Sabretooth in the X-Men movies.)
House of 1000 Corpses:  Rob Zombie wrote and directed this movie where three college students stumble across a creepy roadside attraction and then are brutally murdered by a really annoying and weird family.  And then the people who investigate their disappearance are also brutally murdered.  It's loud, dumb, and gory if you like that sort of thing. (1/5) (Fun Fact:  This unfortunately convinced someone in Hollywood that Rob Zombie could do a reboot of Halloween.)
Wolves:  It's like a combination of Teen Wolf and The Incredible Hulk TV show.  A teenager finds out he's a werewolf and so goes on the road until he can learn to control the rage within.  Then he finds a town where coincidentally his werewolf daddy lives.  Except his werewolf daddy is evil and he was born from a rape of a female werewolf.  It's all incredibly dumb; the werewolves look even dumber.  It's 2013 but the makeup is pretty 80s style.  The whole thing is pretty lame. (Fun Fact:  Jason Momoa plays the evil werewolf and soon he'll be playing Aquaman, which begs the question of how kickass a werewolf Aquaman would be.)
Trojan War:  This ESPN "documentary" is thinly-veiled propaganda for USC's football team.  In the early 2000s they were the top dog of college football.  After losing the championship game against Texas, they lost most of their good players to the NFL and then recruiting violations put a damper on their program.  Before the full force of the scandal hit, their coach bailed to the NFL, where he won a Super Bowl in 2014--who says cheaters never prosper?  Like the similar Youngstown Boys, they really bury the lead in terms of the scandals.  A more objective approach would be better for these. (1/5) (Fun Fact:  Trojan War starring Jennifer Love-Hewitt and Will Fredell is a lot better than this as it involves a boy's quest to find a condom to use to fuck the girl of his dreams.  Just saying.)