Top Gun: Maverick

 I have a deep-seated dislike for Top Gun, an extremely '80s movie that's all surfaces and very little else even by '80s standards. Yes, the plane scenes are grand, but they can't make up for the rest of the film. 

 Hot shots! part trois Top Gun: Maverick, its 30-odd-years-apart sequel, is just as cheesy, but it pulls a neat trick by letting Cruise be charming and relaxed, and by not making the whole movie a dick measuring contest between him and his dad and the rest of the planet: it's allowed to be likeable now!

 That's not clear from the start. First impressions are pretty bad, with a lot of aggressive nostalgia-baiting - the music, images and even title fonts are carefully calibrated to give dads the world over a dopamine hit, and an early scene at a bar that introduces this film's roundup of cadets, along with the obligatory love interest is pretty bad.

 But.

 In another early scene where the protagonist is test-driving a bonsai SR71, he goes against orders and does as maverick do not because he wants to wave his willy around - he's taking another hit to his career for the team; He's trying to make it so their project doesn't get canned, thus saving their jobs. That's kind of emblematic of how this picture is different from the 1986 model.

 I mean, he does end up willy-waving in the end and causes the project to fail, but it's played for laughs.

 So yeah, Tom Cruise's character, despite being the absolute best at what he does and always pulling off any supposedly impossible flying feat he puts his mind into, is kind of a fuckup. His career is on the rocks after far too many reckless stunts and some self-sabotage so as to not get saddled with a desk job; It's always perfectly clear he's going to end up earning everyone's admiration by dint of being so fucking awesome, but he makes enough mistakes that it's possible to root for him. Even better, and unlike on the first film, his motivations aren't a mess of selfishness and various insecurities. He at least tries to put other people's interests before his for pretty much the whole movie.

 Even the obligatory love interest is more interesting. Beyond it being the great Jennifer Connelly, there's a sense of shared history now, not just some girl he gets an inappropriate boner for. Their big love scene is actually a conversation in bed.

 

 Back to the plot: his old buddy Iceman gets him to prepare a bunch of young Top Gun graduates for a seemingly suicide mission against a fortified military installation in a carefully unspecified country against a very tight time limit. 

 This leads to a lot of drama, not just from the clashing personalities but because among the young whippersnappers is Rooster (Miles Teller), son of Maverick's old buddy Dead Meat Goose.

 The drama is nothing out of the ordinary, but it's a little bit cleverer and more nuanced that it needs to be (or than it would have been in the hands of Tony Scott). It's very enjoyable. The always welcome John Hamm is there as the authority figure who's always busting Maverick's balls, so that's another plus.

 And the frequent flying scenes are, as advertised, incredible. Everyone's saying that this movie needs to be watched on the biggest screen possible... and yeah, I fully endorse that. It's consistently stunning, all the real hardware and stunts lending a tactility and a sense of weight that's very much appreciated in this age of blue/greenscreen. The sound design is incredible, too. It's unimpeachable as spectacle, expertly delivered, and frequently peppered throughout the movie, and it makes an already very likeable film essential viewing.

 It all ends with a suicide mission into enemy territory that bears so many Star Wars similarities I was  kind of expecting Lord Vader's tie fighter to pop up at some point to shoot at the good guys. It sports some of the most glorious vehicular action since Fury Road (this is not nearly as good as that, but that's absolutely not a knock on its quality). It also starts piling up the cheese in an entertaining fashion, along with script inconsistencies and ridiculous developments. Not that there wasn't any of that going on before, but it really goes into overdrive in the third act.

 And that's ok! It's all earned. This is not a movie that even pretends to try for realism - it operates on a kind of heightened, operatic reality that makes all the cheese easy to forgive. I mean, it's a new Top Gun movie.

 But this time, it's good.

 So do we need to get Friedman and Seltzer to make a shitty parody now? You know, for symmetry?

Nekrotronic

 From the first days of humankind, demons have lived among us. Trying to possess us, causing suffering and mayhem and... you know, typical demon shit. They had us against the ropes, a handy animated introduction tells us, until some people rose against them and got magical powers and vanished them all back to hell.

 But they're still among us, both devils and hunters, waging a war unseen that can determine the whatever and you get it by now. Basically, the plot of every other horror/fantasy nerd-baiting manga/RPG/videogame mediocrity.

 I wish I could say Nekrotronic, Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner's follow up to Wyrmwood, rises above that crap pile. And, well, I will say it, because that's a pretty easy bar to clear, but... not too confidently, because it's just not very good. It spends too much time setting up a universe that isn't that interesting, with jokes that aren't that funny, and the low budget action varies wildly in quality and effectiveness.
 It starts promisingly enough: After a short infodump we're introduced to our protagonist Howard (Ben O'Toole), a sewage worker and his buddy Rangi (Epine Bob Savea) - ostensibly a co-worker, but he just stays in the truck playing on his phone all the time. That's what counts as a joke in this movie, by the way. Beyond that, though, they have a likeable enough chemistry. It's Rangi's game that starts driving the plot, because it (a kind of Pokemon Go with ghosts) is actually part of an eeeeeevil corporation's plan to use phones to possess people en masse. Oh, and yeah, apparently demons found a way to get into the internet. That... actually explains a lot.

 Soon enough something goes wrong and Howard realizes there's a secret world filled with hostile occult forces - something about reality being a sugar-coated topping, etc. etc. While running away, they get rescued by Luther (David Wenham), a guy who kind of looks like Sean Bean and drives around in a high-tech van with his two beautiful daughters (Caroline Ford and Tess Haubrich).
(There are quite a few spoilers from here on out - you have been warned)
 Luther does indeed shortly get Sean Beaned, but not before explaining to our intrepid protagonist that the demon hunter powers are hereditary, and he's the son of the demon hunterest demon hunters that ever demon hunted. Oh, and his mom (Monica Bellucci!!) got possessed and is the big bad.
 Howard's buddy is shortly killed but brought back as a ghost who follows everyone around, kind of like a lame, unfunny Griffin Dunne; his main thing is popping up leaning casually at weird angles, something the filmmakers apparently thought was hilarious. I guess Joe Piscopo in Dead Heat is a better comparison.

 Will young Howard master his gifts? Will the prettiest demon hunter daughter inexplicably fall for him in the few hours they have together? Well, yeah, duh. But what is pretty unexpected is that along the way Howard fucks up, repeatedly, to a degree that these movies seldom have the balls to pursue. Sure, it makes it that much harder to buy him as a hero (or to understand why two certified, experienced badasses would put up with him or come to like him) but it offers up some really funny moments in a movie that mostly flubs it jokes.

 It's an action/horror/comedy hybrid with just a few laughs and no scares, so the action has to pick up the slack. And it does, kind of, in a very low-key way. I liked the designs, some of which are pretty out there:

Pretty metal, right? Or at least very Doom.

 The whole film's deal is a mix between demons and technology, and it does ok on that front. The effects are a mix of practical and digital with mixed, but mostly likeable results. There's some shootouts, some cool ghosts, a lot of energy attacks and wavy power lines coming out of hands. It won't blow anyone away, but there's an energy to it I kind of like, at least when it's not shaking the camera for (shitty) effect.

 So definitely not a great movie, and maybe not one I'd recommend, but I don't know, it's kind of fun. It's silly, overstuffed, buys into its own mythos with way too much enthusiasm, and honestly is just kind of a mess overall, but I found it enjoyable. It's similar to Wyrmwood, but where that film's oddball ideas mostly worked, here... they mostly don't.

Thanos is a fucking moron and how the hell are people not talking about how stupid his whole deal is?

So - I  thought I'd posted this already, but apparently I didn't. Rant ahoy!

 Oh, Thanos. You purple moron.

 You're a con, pure bullshit. An established, overwhelming threat for so many movies. All your appearances used framing and cinematic language to double down on how tragic/awesome/dangerous you were supposed to be. And they got Josh Fucking Brolin to play you - that's a personality injection right there, and does wonders for your credibility.

 Which is useful because we never really get a good sense of who you are or why you do it, just some vague bullshit about balance and a wiff of a tragic backstory. We just know you by what you're trying to achieve, and how far you go to achieve it.

 So... let's talk about that - your plan, ok? Your genius plan.

 Your great work, for which you sacrificed so much, in which you used up the mcguffins seeded across several different films. Even if those pesky superheroes hadn't interfered, It wouldn't have lasted, you fucking idiot. A generation or two, tops. A blink in history, an infinitesimally small blip in geological terms, nothing on a cosmic scale.

 I guess being an alien, no one bothered explaining this to you, but as LaTour discovered back in the early 90's, people really like fucking. Although maybe you should know this, since Marvel seems to operate under Star Trek rules and aliens are just different colored people. Anyhow. Depopulations are followed by population booms. You know, as in baby boomers. People are just going to get it on more.

 So, you didn't foresee this? OK, fair enough, you're insane or delusional to a degree that would actually affect your basic reasoning, though you're never really portrayed that way. But none of the superheroes, some of which are supposed to be pretty smart cookies (despite all evidence to the contrary presented in the events of Avengers: Civil War). They never mention this, or call you out on it? Even when they can't stop quipping about whatever other bullshit crosses their minds?

 Bull. Shit.

 That's even before looking at how you actually went about doing it. You expended the stones to wish, if I understand it correctly, fifty percent of all life, determined at random, gone. Turned to dust.
 Let's assume this 50% took place within each species. This includes animals, because that's how they figure out things are fixed in Endgame, right?

 Let's also assume this includes rock-based beings, microbes, and other life forms, because this is Marvel, and there are Korgs and I'm sure nano-lifeforms too.

 We're talking mass extinctions, multiple. Ecosystems will collapse as they suddenly find they no longer have a viable local population.

 OK, OK. Let's say that the wish somehow keeps things so that the missing 50% has an even geographical and gender distribution, and most populations can hang on after such a drop. In for a penny and all that, it's a reasonable suspension of disbelief request for a superhero movie. Let's not go completely hard sci-fi on this shit.

 Still. You got free rein to rewrite the script for reality as it happens with a collection of artifacts with poorly-defined abilities... (incidentally: face it, dude, if you had any smarts at all, no superhero would have even got close to you once you collected half of them). And yet you barely used them except in the most brute force of ways, because... damn the scripts for these movies are so fucking dumb. These fucking Russos.

 Anyhow, this is the best you could come up with. This is the masterplan it took you however many MCU movies to build up to.

 Wiping both 50% of life in the universe, and 50% of the biological resources they consume, which is bound to be the biggest part of any given lifeform's consumer footprint.

 That's not bringing balance, dumbass. You're basically keeping the same ratios; It's just an exercise in futility. 

 Still, we get that shot of you looking satisfied with your job:

Magic hour lighting, Josh Brolin, an idyllic background, and a pose that says "I'm a tough antihero who just pulled off something amazing." Nope! You're just a fucking moron and you didn't do shit.

 You fucking idiot.

 You could have played with reproduction rates to force sustainable populations. If you have a boner for murder, you could have done what you did, but have said "50% of intelligent life to be culled every x amount of time ad infinitum (Mass-Effect style)." You could have made resources self-replenishing, but I guess that wouldn't be evil. Any mix of these would have at least made your wish consistent with what  you wanted, and some of them would have worked, kinda.

 Or you could have wiped out all life, started again from scratch; you know, proper supervillain shit, not this half-assed idiocy.

 I mean, I'm not an immortal, god-level intelligence (yet!) and I thought of most of these as I was watching these fucking movies. Just saying. Not that I'm smart, I'm saying that you're dumb; I'm explaining that because I think you're dumb.

 

 But I guess any of these options would preclude a hilariously maudlin scene where Spidey slowly pops out of existence in slow motion at the most melodramatic possible moment, in the most melodramatic way possible. (I'm so glad I didn't watch this at the cinema, because that scene made me laugh out really, really loud.)

 I guess it's kind of pointless to try to get through to you, though. I mean, you did think it was a perfectly good idea to do the whole 50% genocide thing in an analog fashion before you got the stones.

 Going planet by planet, taking a force big enough to conquer entire populations and handle the ensuing genocide, killing half of everything, I guess? Let's be charitable and say you only killed sentients, though I wouldn't be surprised if there's an extra somewhere in the Infinity War blu-ray showing your troops shooting down alien bunnies and centipedes and trees on whatever planet it is they show you killing off half of the population. Or actually, it would be surprised- that'd take way more consistency and thinking than I'm willing to credit the writers of these movies with.

 If you'd been doing that for a while (and I can only imagine how long it would take to organize random mass-murder on a planetary scale, even if after a couple of planets you had evolved an efficient industry around it that would have given the Nazi higher-ups raging murderboners) - as I was saying, if you'd been doing that for a while, it'd be easy to see just how unsuccessful your plan was, just go back to one of your previous stops. See how they're repopulating.

 Just something for your science team to bring up at some point. Bet that'd be a fun meeting.

  Anyhow. You did this all by hand, went artisanal with your depopulation plans for however many worlds. What's the carbon footprint of your genocidal spree, Mr. Balance? No suspension of disbelief is ever going to make this shit even remotely work - not even in a world where space travel is cheap and instantaneous, or where people shoot lasers out of their arse because they were bitten by a rabid unicorn.

 Based on the fact you considered that a valid use of your time, your (mis-)use of the infinity stones is perfectly in-character, I guess.

 Maybe you're just a genocidal maniac who doesn't really care about the sustainability, effectiveness, or even common sense of  your plan. You're just straight up insane, and shoot any underling who questions you.

 That's actually a fun take! I'd be completely on board with that, and it would make for a fun running gag as the avengers or whatever bring it up repeatedly. Except, no, that doesn't happen. The films, and the universe within them, completely buy into your bullshit. Because... well, let's not pretend the non-Thanos elements are worth a turrd-embedded peanut in any of the Russo films. They manage to cram a whole lot of heroes together, and that's their mission accomplished - logic, sense or narrative be damned. These movies run off excel sheets, not scripts.

 Disney's banking on viewers having invested enough into these characters or the MCU itself, to find enough goodwill to overlook these things.

 And lots of these things there are, but still lots of money these movies made, and almost universally beloved they are. So... good job, I guess? God I hate this universe so much it's made me speak like Yoda.

 I once played in a D&D game (I know, I know. Neeeerd! Shut up, you comic book character) where one of the players, after being injected with poison, made the following wish: "I wish all the liquid was taken out of my body, and deposited right there (pointing to a spot by his side.)

 So, shockingly enough, yours isn't the most obviously dumb use of a wish I've ever heard. It also gets at least some points for ambition. Dumb, dumb ambition.

 But you don't fool me, Thanos. I'm not drinking the purple kool-aid. You are a fucking moron and shame on anyone that posits you as a proper - or even marginally acceptable - villain.

 It's almost as if you were just a plot necessity, a poorly made hook to hang a creaking, tangled mess of just as dumb plotlines on.

 Fuck you and the fucking stupid movies you rode in on.

The Sadness (Ku bei)

 The Sadness is a new zombie (or more appropriately, a rage virus) Taiwanese movie. It's also a type of film I haven't seen in a while - a gorehound endurance test, an extreme-horror assault on good taste that riffs on George Romero's The Crazies, but focuses and revels in horrific violence to the exclusion of almost everything else.

 The story follows a young couple, Kat (Regina Lei) and Jim (Berant Zhu), who are separated and try to find each other in the midst of the outbreak of a pandemic that turns people into violent, rapey fast zombies. After some establishing scenes, the movie kicks into high gear when a morning commute turns bloody:

Mind the wet floors.

 It's a genuinely disturbing, well-made scene, especially in the opening stages, with a single, knife-wielding nutjob stabbing his way through a crowd. When it gets going, his movie does not fuck around, and set-pieces like these make it more than worthwhile.

 But... well, it doesn't get going for a while, and when it does it's a bit stop-start. While the part of the movie that focuses on Kat is a relentless, tense series of chases, it frequently cuts back to her boyfriend Jim, who spends most of the movie trying to track her down. The pacing feels a little off, with some episodic encounters that keep deflating the nervous energy the movie had managed to build up. The whole story develops much as you'd expect, with a few elements that have been done to undeath elsewhere in the zombie space.

 It also ends up being a bit shallow, despite flirting with commentary a couple of times. In that early subway scene, before it turns into a bloodbath, Kat is harassed by a creep (Tzu-Chiang Wang) who then acts like an entitled little shit when he's rebuffed; He gets infected and turned into a literal fucking monster that stalks her throughout the rest of the movie. Seriously, fuck that dude. He makes for an effective, hateable villain, but the movie seems to be a bit too much on his wavelength, which is unfortunate in a movie that reserves its most horrifying tortures for helpless women. To be clear, the movie is not team #rapezombie, but its dour tone makes it a bit harder to watch than I'd personally prefer.

 Contributing to that: the film also devotes some time to a few infected doing some anime-style shallow philosophizing on how good doing bad things feels. They never strike upon anything interesting, just juvenile word-wankery. It's like the makers of this movie were aware zombies are often used as metaphors, but didn't really have an interesting metaphor of their own.

 It's a very well-directed, well acted, and technically well-crafted movie; There's lots of bloody mayhem, and the gore is appropriately gruesome and excellently realized. A really promising start for writer/director Rob Jabbaz.

Detective Dee: The Four Heavenly Kings

 The Detective Dee series is a weird and interesting one. It's basically Sherlock Holmes done as wuxia, in the form of action movies with a lot of spectacle. Because they take place in a heightened Chinese magical past, it's tough to work out the internal logic, which is important if the main character is a detective. Gravity is optional, giant animals abound and some minor (mostly Buddhist) forms of magic seem to work, but when a storm is summoned in a room it's down to hypnotism and 'machine parlor tricks.'

 The first film did a better job of being a detective story, while the sequel leaned into the more extravagant elements; With this one it's best not to expect too much logic and deduction, and just go with it; It's a fun ride.

 This third installment starts out with Mr. Dee saddled with a powerful weapon which makes the empress jealous; she goes out and gets a few sorcerers to get back at him, turns his best friend against him, and then things turn out to be more complicated

 I'm relatively ignorant with respect to Chinese films, but there seem to be two broad types of historical/martial arts films - Wuxia, more grounded, fights-based films (which I expect is what most of us think when we talk about these things - it's the type of film I'm more familiar with from when I was a kid) and Xianxia, special effects extravaganzas that focus on spectacle (Chinese Ghost Story, Warriors of Zu.)

 I far prefer the first camp, especially since CGI has replaced a lot of the practical effects I enjoy in the second one. Four Heavenly Kings falls firmly in the second category, despite it being set in 'reality' as opposed to a mythological realm, with CGI that ranges from just bad, to so bad it's good, to bad but cool, to actually this is pretty cool- but it's directed by the great Tsui Hark, so it's filled with neat visual ideas and a lot of energetic filmmaking. My particular favorite is a chase with a flying Nazgul trio who proceed to Voltron into a bigger threat:

And every so often there'll be some incredible set or costume. I mean, look at this!

 Unfortunately, beyond the terrible acting and unfunny broad humor that are endemic to these films, the script lets the film down.  I just didn't find it engaging - a lot of scenes which could be taken out with no impact, and a cool story tangled up in bad storytelling. It also has genuinely awesome fight sequences devolve into bad CGI clashing into other bad CGI in garish ways. 

 Detective Dee remains a pretty boring character, one of those uncorruptible, infallible types who seem to have already read the script so they're three steps ahead of everyone else. Apparently acknowledging this the movie focuses on Yuchi -Dee's best friend turned reluctant betrayer- who's a more interesting, conflicted dude, and more importantly his acting style consists mostly of staring at things as if he was willing them to explode with the power of his mind:

 The rest of the cast includes some fun villains and Dee's underlings in the bureau of investigation, who mostly are of the unfunny comedy sidekick variety. The movie also introduces Moon Water, one of the bad guys who later turns coats; She's the one that gets the chase scene with the Voltron Nazguls. Unfortunately she also has to endure a cringeworthy 'sexy' scene with one of the underlings, but seems like a cool character. Maybe the next Dee adventure will find a better use for her.

 Nothing you wouldn't expect from this type of movie, then. Still, though it's uneven as hell it achieves the most important things I wanted from it: it showed me cool shit I hadn't seen before, it was entertaining, and it managed more than a few good-looking scenes. To be brutally honest, I had to skip  through some of the boring bits, but I'd still recommend it if you like this sort of thing.