The Black Phone

 It's a risky endeavor to expand a short story to fill out a film. There are many ways to do this - you add characters, you draw things out, you expand on some aspects or add b-plots... my favorite example of how to do this is Stuart Gordon's From Beyond, which uses up the story it's supposedly adapting before the starting credits roll; the rest is a (characteristically) bonkers story wholly cooked up in Gordon's evil, twisted brain.
 The Black Phone, adapting an extremely lean thirty-page Joe Hill story, is a great example on how to do it the right way; most of the additions are solid, and they build towards a theme that wasn't there in the source material (I think! It's been a long time since I read it.)

 Taking place somewhere in suburban America during the '70s, the movie tracks the story of pre-teen Finney as he navigates a gauntlet of peer and domestic abuse, and later, an abduction by a serial killer who kidnaps and kills children. That's where he runs into the titular phone, which lets him communicate with the ghosts of victims past. Between them, they try to figure out a way to escape, while his sister never gives up hope and uses some unreliable psychic powers to try and track him down.

 The late 70s slightly-run-down americana setting is evoked beautifully with subdued colors, great production design, iconic (but not too well-known) period song choices, and some outstandingly greasy-looking teens. It's not exactly naturalistic - this is a world where a kid beats down a bully using martial arts moves, or a teen pulls a knife at a corner shop brawl (who wrote this, a Daily Sun columnist?) - but it captures the feel and anxieties of teen-hood very well. Everything is heightened, fraught, exaggerated.

 Some stylistic choices I didn't much care for, but the tone is much more controlled and well maintained than the (terrible) trailers would lead you to think. There's a lot to like here; Director Scott Derrickson and Robert Cargill continue to make for a great team.

 Ethan Hawke gives it his all, as he always does. He plays the main antagonist, but he's not even in the movie all that much; just a human-shaped blob of pure evil who's there to move things along, never really taking the spotlight. Most of the time hidden behind a mask. This is not his movie.

 The film rests entirely on child actors to carry it - and luckily, they're all great. The actor playing the protagonist gives a brilliant, very internal performance. The younger sister is also excellent - I wasn't a fan of how precocious her character was, but that's on the script, not on her; she gets one of the most upsetting scenes in the movie, and it's very much thanks to her acting chops. Hopefully this will put them both on the radar. The other kids are great, too.

 The Black Phone takes its sweet time before the actual black phone enters the picture, but it's time well spent introducing several characters and their world, raising the emotional stakes for when things inevitably get worse. This is, along with raising the number of ghosts imprisoned with Finney, one of the biggest additions to Joe Hill's short story. It's a smart call; it shows how Finney and his sister rely on each other to tough things out, something that will resonate when he's later helped by the Grabber's previous victims. It's a sweet message, and powerful.

Monstrous

 Monstrous is a Christina Ricci-led horror movie that... well, it's really hard to talk about without entering into spoiler territory. I'll try to keep them mild, but consider yourself warned.

 Ricci plays a woman moving in to a new town in California with her son, back at some point in the '50s.  They have trouble fitting in the new place, the son wants to go back, and it's increasingly apparent they're fleeing a bad domestic situation. And then a monster starts coming out of the lagoon out back to stalk first the boy, then his mother.

 There are a lot of problems with this film. The whole thing looks like a TV movie- which, for its obviously modest budget, it might as well be. This includes a be-tentacled, protean creature that's just not very scary, or even interesting to look at; part of it is that the CGI used for it looks cheap as hell, but it also doesn't really have a visual identity. The script also meanders a bit - the details do end up fitting together, but I didn't find the journey interesting at all, especially when most of the elements are borrowed from other, better movies. And yes, it does have a couple of gotcha! twists, one of which I guessed about a third of the way in, and the other so unnecessary that it barely counts as a twist.

The ghost of Alien sequels past

 I feel kind of bad for bashing on Monstrous - it's got a honest attempt at mindfuckery and a proper monster/ghost/spirit creature thing that they have come into focus in the background a few times, a type of shot I tend to enjoy. Effort was clearly expended in writing and making the film, what with all the foreshadowing and references to stuff to come, and it's got a good emotional core. Christina Ricci gives a good performance as well, even when half of her acting notes could as just well be "put on a brave face" and her dialog, as written is... often not great.

 But the thing is I found it pretty boring. It seemed to me that director Chris Sivertson and writer Carol Chrest were more interested in wrangling its puzzle into the shape of a movie rather than telling a good story, which will always be a problem with this sort of thing. And though a lot of the choices that render the movie problematic for most of its running time are deliberate and make sense in retrospect, it takes so long to make that clear that by the time the revelations come it's hard to give a shit.

Hellbenders

 Hellbenders is a gleefully blasphemous horror comedy about a bunch of warrior exorcist priests -the Augustine order of hellbound saints- who commit to a regime of sins to make their souls attractive to  demons; they're basically waking honeypot operations to draw out spirits from their possessed victims. And, as a last resort, they're trained to kill themselves so they'll take the demon back to hell with them.

 For a little bit during the introduction it looks like the movie is going to be a bit too much -too in your FACE- but luckily the aggressive tone is scaled back somewhat. Some creative cursing, fun character work and some very good jokes pick up the slack and help make up for the very low budget and sometimes meandering plot.

 The Hellbound Saints live together in a New York apartment and are a fairly varied bunch of mostly likeable assholes. The movie gets a lot of comic mileage out of how sinning is basically in these folk's job description- one of them carries a ledger of misdeeds around, and keeps nagging them on how they're falling behind on their unholy quota. The nature of the sins themselves is sometimes suspect -an arbitrary slap counts as Wrath, for example- but I guess you need to hold back a little if you want anyone to root for your characters... and it also pokes funs at bible literalism (at one point someone says something along the lines of 'don't come to me with those bullshit Leviticus sins', which made me laugh.) Also, this is the sort of movie that falls apart under any close scrutiny, so it's better to just go along.

 Which brings us to the plot. It's ok, serviceable: an ancient god is trying to open a gate to hell just as the Hellbenders are being audited by an (understandably) unsympathetic church servant. There are some documentary-type asides, which do serve a purpose, but consistency is an issue as one of the characters is introduced talking to the camera for a scene and never does it again. Other than that the dialog is sharp (if  juvenile), and there are a lot of cool concepts and weirdness thrown into the mix. In the end there's too little heft and detail to the fight against demon/god Surtr to really carry the movie, but it allows for a lot of fun character moments and bloody exorcisms.

 The whole endeavor has a sort of puerile energy that I found very easy to like, and unlike the vast majority of similar films it doesn't push its lore upon you. There's no pace-killing glut of exposition (hello Nekrotronic!) and it doesn't feel like it's trying to set up a franchise or a string of sequels. It's slight to a fault, it's never scary, and it doesn't really pull off a satisfying finale, but that's fine. It's a great little goofy blasphemous lark.

 The humor doesn't wholly come from inventive swears and casual blasphemy. A weird aside to why there aren't any classic superheroes called Clint gets a killer, flamboyantly delivered punchline for example, and some of the jokes and jargon are relatively deep theology or occult cuts: Besides the previously mentioned Leviticus dig, for example, I got a chuckle out of the auditor being revealed as a member of the Opus Dei and the crew's reaction to that. It's... a weird movie, with a game cast led by the redoubtable and stentorious Clancy Brown really elevate it.

 Writer / Director J. T. Petty does a pretty great job on both counts with a tiny budget; Between this, Mimic 3 (way better than it had any right to be), and The Burrowers (highly recommended) he's more than proven to be worth following; It's a shame he hasn't been able to make more movies.

Mad God

 You may not know Phil Tippet's name, but you know his work. He's one of the main driving force behind the dinosaur effects in the Jurassic Parks, the AT-ATs and Tauntauns in Empire Strikes Back, and more importantly (to me!) the animation for the ED-209 in Robocop. Dat death rattle.
 Anyhow, the guy's an absolute legend. And for the last thirty years or so he's been working on and off on his own weird dream project, a mostly stop-motion trek through hell, which he started in 1990, kickstart-funded in 2012, and fully released a few days back on Shudder.

 Mad God is a surrealist walk through many, many different types of hells, using several different types of animation (puppetry, stop motion, the type of mixed liquid shots that made The Fountain so memorable) and a little live action here or there to basically throw cool-looking creepy shit at your eyes for its duration. Cool creepy shit: The motion picture would be a pretty accurate name for this.

Metal as fuuuuuuuck!

 After a particularly unhinged bible quote (courtesy, of course, of Leviticus*) and some staggeringly awesome tower-of-babel-like scene setting, a gas-masked dude is lowered into an apocalyptic wasteland via a rickety diving bell. Once he gets off he starts legging it through a ridiculous number of insanely detailed and varied tableaus.
 He wanders among monsters and bystanders (who have a pretty funny tendency to bite it in elaborate and horrifying ways) in these incredible locations, having many adventures (mostly of the sneak-by or run-away-from-some-menace variety.)

 The film has an incredible, hypnotizing momentum while it accompanies this man, and then others like him in their scenic walk through horrible places. And that's what most of the movie is, really. There are a couple of interludes, one of which is not a lot of fun and unfortunately stops the movie dead for way too long, but most of the running time is taken by this extremely cinematic, ridiculously well crafted travelogue.

 There's just one line of (minimalist) dialogue, and like in most surrealist movies, there's not a lot of story - it's more thematically coherent than a 'proper' narrative. You might be able to mine some sense from it, since the film has enough mythic resonance and pulls out far enough a few times to show enough pieces you could put together into a semblance of an explanation, but your interpretation will probably look very different from mine (which, for the record, involves Gnosticism... because of course it does.)
 But that's all part of the charm in this sort of thing. I'm so glad it was made.

* (I like that passage, it's a good bit of old testament don't-fuck-with-me swagger. Somewhat shockingly, it's not the only bible quote that mentions munching on your children... guessing that was a thing with infant mortality rates and hunger back then? Leviticus is also known as that book most Christian homophobes use to justify their bullshit, and a lot of atheists use to point out all the ridiculous crap that's in the Bible)

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

 In the catalogue of movies starring actors playing a lightly fictionalized of themselves, Nick Cage's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent would come in slightly below JCVD and miles and miles above Pauly Shore is Dead.
 (I'd love to have more movies to include in that list, but I couldn't think of any others... There's tons of movies where actors play a slightly fictionalized version of themselves as minor characters - There's Being John Malkovich, Last Action Hero, The Player - but none of them are built around the actors-as-characters.)

 After failing to get a role he had his heart set on, beset with money and family problems, Nicholas Cage (Nicholas Cage) decides to take on a paid gig to spend a couple of days at a rich fan's birthday party in Majorca. It's exactly as cringeworthy as it sounds, except that the millionaire (Pedro Pascal) turns out to be a pretty cool guy, and they rapidly become friends.
 And if you've seen the (terrible) trailer, then you know what's next: the millionaire is apparently the head of a Spanish drug cartel (this is actually a thing that exists, and the film accurately ties it down to Galicia, the area where most of them are based!) so a CIA agent (Tiffany Haddish, who gets a couple of good jokes in) gets Nick to spy on his new found buddy. What follows is a pretty mellow, charming comedy with two very charismatic actors having some misadventures: a very funny acid freakout, some low-budget shoot outs and chases (a respectable effort for a low budget action comedy.) Maybe, just maybe, by the end Nick Cage will learn how to be a better human being, parent, and ex-husband.

 The Nicholas Cage persona is used reasonably well, scoring some big laughs with ridiculously pompous statements that... yeah, I can totally buy him saying. There's some post-modern riffing, but don't expect a deconstruction of Nick Cage's career, or any degree of reflection on his real-world off-screen antics. His movie daughter isn't called Kara. This is light, Cage-friendly entertainment, and what little mind-fuckery there is never intends to even begin approaching Charlie Kaufman levels.

 What does drag the movie down a little, besides some pacing problems in the early going, is how patently fake a lot of the showbiz talk seems to be. The dialog in the fake movie Nick is trying to get into (to be directed by David Gordon Green!) is so purple I can't see it flying in a 30s pulp novel, much less anything produced this century. When talking about respectable character actor roles, someone puts forth "the gay uncle in a Duplass movie" as an example, someone else says that a script is a mix between three lesser-known or niche directors that don't make any sense in context, that sort of thing. Dunno, it all sounded extremely inauthentic to me. That also was a problem in JCVD, mind.

 That, and they cast Neil Patrick Harris but they just had him play an agent instead of letting him reprise his role as Neil Patrick Harris from the Harold and Kumar trilogy. Talk about missed opportunities.
 

Lightyear

 On the leadup to its release Lightyear was touted as a more serious Pixar outing, a proper sci fi film that within the Toy Story universe would be the launching point for the Buzz Lightyear toy line.

 Within its first few minutes, it's pretty clear that this is just a bog-standard Pixar movie - a kid's animated adventure that leans a little on sci fi trappings in the same way The Incredibles leaned on superhero tropes (to be clear, this is nowhere near as good as The Incredibles). Any attempts to mimic a proper movie are barely skin deep; characters are still hyperactive and mug constantly to the camera, the emotional beats are exaggerated and simplistic, and everything is pitched to an elementary school level.

 

 It's a bit unfair to judge a movie on expectations, especially when I may have misjudged its marketing. Even a middling Pixar movie is better than most of kid's anything, and it remains a fun, funny, and cool-looking adventure by any metric. But it's also very recognizable as a Pixar(tm) product that plays it completely safe while much braver stuff went directly to streaming before it. Maybe that's a statement.

 So yeah, there's a lot to like here: the designs are incredible, there's a lovely montage of an alien planet being terraformed organically integrated as the background to a story beat, the pacing is expertly judged (except for a weird aside with future sandwiches) and the action is fun. The plot holes and dumb errors and contrivances that are unforgivable for sci fi, but ok in a kid's movie; the formulaic character arcs are a bit harder to swallow, but they're handled with enough grace. The biggest shame here is the missed opportunity to aim a little higher, to make a movie not for Andy as a six-year old, but for when he was a little bit older and discovering Heinlein, Asimov, CJ  Cherryh or whatever. You know, a proper science fiction film, not yet another kid's adventure.

Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers

 It's pretty fun.

 What, more? OK: So... Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers is the latest result of Disney deciding to dust off an old but well remembered IP. That's had various results over the years -for every Pete's Dragon, we got a bunch of those awful live action remakes- but this is firmly on the 'It looks like everyone involved actually wanted to make this one' category. And the people involved in making it are the fine folks at Lonely Island, so it was always going to be worth a watch.

 In an inspired touch, it's not a direct continuation of the short lived very late '80s Chip and Dale Series. It takes place in an extremely Who Framed Roger Rabbit?-influenced setting where cartoon and real people mix - and cartoons are made by, well, cartoons acting in front of painted backgrounds. In fact, Roger Rabbit has a big cameo here, so this movie can and should be understood to take place within the Roger Rabbit cinematic universe.

 After a short summary of Chip and Dale meeting and rising to fame the film jumps forward to the modern day, a bunch of years after their series was cancelled. Chip has survived on the margins of showbiz and Dale gave up on it and became an insurance salesman. Salesmunk? Anyhow, a mystery involving an old friend reunites them and off they go on an investigation of animation's seedy underworld.

There's a jaunt into Uncanny Valley

 It's very, very similar to Roger Rabbit, right down to smuggling in adult situations and jokes a la Jessica Rabbit's pattycakes subplot. There's a killer roster of voice talent on hand, all very game, and while this doesn't have Rabbit's seemingly bottomless pockets for securing the rights to other studio's properties (The Looney Tunes crowd remain conspicuously absent), it does have some pretty funny inclusions like MC Skat Kat or Ugly Sonic, and some of the cameos make for pretty good jokes just in and of themselves. The limited budget also unfortunately makes it so that the animation here isn't even close to Rob Zemeckis's masterpiece, but it does well enough, and it's got the energy and enthusiasm to make up for it.

 It's hard to say how much tinkering director Akiva Schaffer and the other guys at Lonely Island did with the script, but it feels very much of a piece with their sensibilities- even the character arcs for Chip and Dale feel very similar to the ones in Popstar. The story isn't going to blow any minds, but it's fun, self-aware, and it goes to some inspiredly (google informs me that isn't a word; fuck google) weird places.

 It does feel at times like a bunch of great ideas or jokes strung together with lesser connective tissue, but hey, it got quite a few solid laughs out of me. It's cute even when it's spinning its wheels, and I suspect anyone with a fondness for the original series will get a lot more out of it than I did.

 

Bloodbath at the House of Death

 Bloodbath at the House of Death is a fairly witless 1984 British comedy that reads like an attempt to do an Abrahams\Zucker style parody by way of Hammer Horror, but comes out feeling like a particularly unfunny Carry On or Benny Hill skit.

 There's a couple of cute jokes here, but for the most part it trades on mild subversions of expectations without a decent punchline. Or even worse, just thinking some mundane thing is intrinsically funny and letting it play out: Hey, this guy is blind! Look, he crashes into things all the time! Or look at these guys, they're gay! Here they are, liking other men! Again, with no real punchline, no jokes. It's... pretty fucking terrible.

This, I'm sorry to say, is about as funny as it gets.

 It starts out all right - likeable, if not actually very funny, and with a high body count as well. In a short pre-titles prologue a terrible massacre is carried out by a bunch of monks on a secluded manor house. A few years later a group of scientists go in to investigate, spooky hijnx ensue. You get your requisite references to then-recent(ish) hollywood hits (ET! Carrie! The Entity!) but unfortunately the movie never has the grace to more closely emulate Top Secret!, released on the same year.

 And it's not just the humor that's Z-grade. The movie boasts a decent budget for what it is - there's a few big scenes with a lot of extras, some animated effects, and a decent amount of locations, but it looks cheap and tacky throughout, and while there is some gore, it's nothing special. The acting ranges from "they did what they could with the material given" (this includes Vincent Price, classing up the joint a little) to painful to watch ("comedian" Kenny Everett, who I'm happy to say I'd avoided up to now and will continue to do so; Reading up on the movie, it came as no surprise that he was a radio jockey.)

 Just... seriously, don't bother. There are no real laughs to be had here, and the few decent jokes (like someone getting decapitated with an electric can opener, or... um, a cute bit with a bookcase, I guess?) are few, far between, and better on paper than in execution.

Morbius

 At this point, I don't think there's any big studio out there with a worse track record for terrible, terrible scripts than Sony Pictures; They just don't seem to give a single fuck about storytelling. This has been clear for ages (Ghostbusters 2016, a movie I actually kind of like, seems to have been shot from an unfinished script; it's far from the only one), but it's never been clearer than with their latest slate of Spiderman Villain films: Venom is a movie that's so bad it's almost entertaining, and Morbius is somehow even worse than that.

 Jared Leto plays the titular vampire doctor with admirable conviction, but all his intensity and charismatic weirdness are wasted in a cliched and pretty staid character. He's got some sort of consumptive disease, he tries to cure himself by something something vampire bats, and of course he becomes a vampire. That's the level we're operating at here. Which... fine, it worked for the Spiderman movies, but they had a ton of other stuff going for them; here we get cut-rate CGI, poor acting, some of the worst script writing I've seen in a long time, and a bunch of weirdness that's kind of respectable in how wrong-headed it is. I mean, there's a bit where Matt Smith struts around in his pimped-out room, preening and making evil vampire faces at the camera not once, but twice. And it's filmed like a commercial or a fashion shoot! Besides the titles, it's the best part of the movie.

Vamp's gonna vamp. Wish more of the film had as much fun as this bit.

 Smith plays Milo, Morbius's childhood friend turned antagonist. Since Morbius is one of those saintly characters that is always on the right, they had to introduce some conflict somehow, right? Matt Smith ratches up the camp admirably, but the film doesn't have the wit or verve needed to actually make his character fun. They fight a bit, Morbius kills him, then it's time to start setting up the sequel and a Sony Villains Assembled film that nobody in their right mind should want.

Every single scene in this film is weirdly truncated, the storytelling so blunt it can't be arsed to thread scenes with any sense - it's just going through the motions, trying to get through its shit story as quickly as possible with seemingly nothing but contempt for its characters or the audience.
  Much as I hate the scripts for some modern superhero movies*, they're at least seem slick and maintain a pretense of professionalism. This... does not.

 Beyond the incompetent pacing, you get all the expected dumbness and then some. This is a movie that handles exposition by having characters telling each other things they both already know, that transitions from the line "that's so illegal that we should do it in international waters" to a shot of an ocean liner with a title card saying "International Waters". It has a father figure (poor, poor Jared Harris) who's only there to dramatically die in someone's arms, and a "touching" scene where a villain who's been an irredeemable piece of shit the whole movie goes for a grace note that's so unearned it plays as comedy.

 There's at least an attempt to give the movie some interesting visuals, which mostly come down to giving the characters a kind of trail that looks like ropy coloured smoke when they jump and shit, and an echolocation effect that applies a similar mist effect to any surrounding structures. It didn't work for me at all - I found it to be a butt-ugly movie that looks remarkably videogame-y.
 And don't get me started on its (quickly abandoned, I think) attempts to cultivate a horror movie atmosphere. Matter of fact, while we're discussing horror credentials, Blade proved that you could have a successful Marvel movie and keep it gory more than twenty years ago. This bloodless PG-13 crap was never going to cut it. For Shame.

 They do have Morbius do some bat shit I haven't seen Batman do, including hanging upside down for a bit, and getting swept around in currents of wind; I don't think the writers understand echolocation (or, more likely, they don't give a flying fuck.) The first time Morbius uses it, he doesn't screech to get the echoes back, which is a huge wasted opportunity - that would have been hilarious! Now I think of it maybe he's meant to be getting the echoes from his fishtank bats? Still stupid, and much less fun.
 If I may make a humble suggestion for the sequel, maybe Morbius could fly into someone's house, and they would have to shoo him around with brooms until he found a window he could fly out of? It'd make for a hell of a dramatic setpiece. I'd watch the hell out of that.

 Anyhow them's the breaks with Sony. I had extremely low expectations for Morbius, and the film duly lived down to them and then some. I wouldn't say it's so bad it's good, but it did made me laugh out loud a few times. If I have to be honest, I prefer proper bad like this to mercenary mediocrity like Ghostbusters Afterlife or plain old shitshows like Uncharted.

Because I'm feeling magnanimous, let me list a couple of other things I actually liked about Morbius besides Matt Smith's glam scene:

- The title sequence and end credits kick ass, a neon laser-show-like display that had nothing to do with the rest of the movie but looked really neat.
- The movie is only one hour forty-four minutes long, which is about half an hour shorter than superhero movies inexplicably feel is the minimum runtime these days.
- Obligatory love interest Adria Arjona is very pretty, and Jared Leto is as usual a good-looking, charismatic weirdo. The acting is bad across the board, but with this material I wouldn't pin the blame on the actors; No amount of Brandoing or Day-Lewising is going to elevate this shit.

 And that's it; Morbius out.

*(And if you thought I'd miss a chance to fling some feces at the Russo bros or Snyder, you don't know me well enough!)

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 been among us, trying to possess us and cause suffering and mayhem, 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 back to hell.

 But they're still among us, devils and hunters, waging a war unseen that can determine the whatever and you get it by now. Basically, the plot of every other Netflix mediocrity; Nerds have taken over, and this sort of geeknip is all the rage.

 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 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, a sewage worker and his buddy Rangi, ostensibly a co-worker, but he's just basically playing ARGs 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. So, the newest game Rangi is playing, a kind of Pokemon Go with ghosts, is actually part of an eeeeeevil corporation's plan to use phones to possess people en masse. because oh yeah, apparently demons found a way to get into the internet.

 Soon enough something goes wrong and Howard realizes there's a secret world filled with hostile occult forces 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 ridiculously beautiful daughters (Caroline Ford and Tess Haubrich).

 Luther does indeed shortly get Sean Beaned, but not before explaining to our intrepid protagonist that the demon hunter powers are hereditary, an 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.

 Yeah, the plot is not great. Even though it's an original idea, it feels extremely comic-book-ish.

 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 against 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 inexplicably fall for him in the few hours they have together? Well, yeah, duh. But what is pretty funny 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 pretty fun 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 3.

 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 predictably mixed results. There's some shootouts, some cool ghosts, a lot of energy attacks and wavy power lines coming out of hands. It's not great, 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 definitely 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 it's enjoyable as background watching. 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 whiff 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 for 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 people 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 portrayed that way. But none of the superheroes, some of which are supposed to be (despite all proof to the contrary presented in the events of Civil War) pretty smart cookies - they never mention this, or call you out on it? Even when they can't stop quipping about whatever 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. 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, and plants because Groot (never mind that all the forests we see in the movies that take place before the fingersnap is reversed look just fine.)

 Let's also assume this includes rock-based, 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 will 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 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 all 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. Fuckin 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." You could have made resources self-replenishing. 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. Stoopid.

 

 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 few 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 years. 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 perfectly 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.

 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 a 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) Chinese movie. It's also a type of film I haven't seen in a while - a gorehound endurance test, a pretty juvenile attack 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 and Jim, 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 setpieces 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 pretty 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 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 death elsewhere in the zombie genre.

 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 who  then acts like an entitled little shit when he's rebuffed. He gets infected and turned into a literal fucking monster and stalks her throughout the rest of the movie. The guy 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, I don't think the movie is on team rapezombie, but the dour tone makes it a bit harder to watch than I'd personally like.

 Beyond that there's also a few infected doing some anime-style crappy philosophizing on how good doing bad things feels. It never really coheres into 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 anything to say through them.

 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. Hopefully the next one will have a better script and a bit more taste in its tastelessness.

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.

The Superhero movie rant

 Here's my hot take on Marvel movies: I really like some of them and I really dislike others. On average they're pleasant timewasters. Edgy!

 They've achieved some sort of miracle formula with their character writing and casting that makes them way better than they have any right to be. And the ambition of the unified thing is kind of amazing, in a depressing way. Unfortunately their scripts, villains and plotting usually let them down, so there's a familiar arc to them where they're a lot of fun to for the first act and get duller as they go along and the life gets sucked out of them by plot needs. It's on full display in Iron Man, and it's happened again and again. More likely than not it isn't enough to dislike them, but it's disappointing.

 Beyond that they're often lightweight, childish, vapid and weightless. Smothered under committee decisions and corporate goals which make them extremely samey; But despite all that,  they're fun to various degrees, mostly.
 A lot has been made of them being more roller coasters than 'film' films, but there's a place for that, and I like me some well-made roller coasters. Also, every now and then they put out a genuinely good film. It's easy to say oh, that's down to Taika Waititi, or Shane Black or whomever... but the best  (in-house MCU) film by far was by Scott Derrickson, whom I like but is no auteur.  (yeah, Sinister was scarier than most horror movies, but ended up being mostly OK.)

 If I'm to be honest I kind of prefer the DC movies - not the Zak Snyder ones, hell no: they're some of the most joyless, dumb dumb DUMB shit I've ever seen. But other than those the folks at Warner seem happier with each of their movies being way more unique, giving them a lot more personality. Less of a sense of corporate oversight. I'm a big fan of Aquaman (probably the best 80's nostalgia world-trotting adventure-type film made outside of the 80's), Shazam and especially the great Suicide Squad. They show much more range than Marvel's 'let's pay some lip service to a different genre to give our superhero formula a little bit of flavor' philosophy.

 So that's the good. And a lot of the bad, because I can't be nice and just compliment things unequivocally, and also because I use this blog to vent. My main problem with all but a few of the MCU films is that they're ostensibly action spectacle movies, but both the action and the spectacle are almost always mediocre. Even when what's happening is interesting or cool, it's either poorly edited or shot in a pedestrian, boring way. The one thing they consistently nail is comedy- So it's better to consider them action comedies, which makes them go down easier because outside of Asian films the action in that genre is almost universally mediocre.

 When I don't like them, it's because they focus on plot. Yeah, that's the point I'm (slowly, verbosely) working my way to.

 Force me to be objective and I'd have to say the worst one of the lot is probably Iron Man 2, because that's the one they chose to sacrifice to get the MCU going. That's ok, they're allowed to screw up every now and then, they were working out the kinks of their masterplan to franchise the everloving fuck out of these things. I honestly can't work myself up too much about it, because it's less than two hours long; things can get so much worse.

 No, It's the Russo Brothers films that I reserve my pure undiluted hatred for - Civil War and the last two Avengers. I won't say they're the worst superhero movies I've ever seen, because Glass is a thing that exists. Not even the worst mega-budget superhero movies, because Batman Vs Superman conveniently came out to show everyone just how motherfucking joyless a superhero film could be. Still, the Russo crapfests drained a dozen hours (triple that in subjective time) of my life, so I might as well shit-post about them.

 They're a relentless cavalcade of contrivances, cheap manipulation, hollow character moments, Marvel house style action (IE: crap), artlessly inconsistent tone, bullshit twists and so much sheer dumbness  thrown at your eyeballs in the hope it'll slip by quickly enough that you don't notice before they assault you with the next ludicrous event and I have no idea why people like these things. I mean, I'm used to being out of sync with what most other people enjoy, but I can usually see and often appreciate why they do enjoy it. In this case, beyond attachment to the characters, I've got nothing. These are (to me, obviously) transparently cynical, bullshit films and I just can't fathom why anyone would like them.

 And they color the ones I liked retroactively! I am way less interested in any sequels to Thor, even with Waititi signed on, after despising every scene the character is in on either of the last two movies. I'm supremely uninterested in whatever complications the idiotic twists in Endgame introduce to the inevitable Guardians of the Galaxy sequel. The best Marvel movies are by far the ones that act like the MCU doesn't exist, but now there's the spectre of the next crossover event looming over any future Marvel flick. Screw that noise.

What's that, they're making a Dr. Strange sequel? With Sam fucking Raimi at the wheel? Oh... wow. Sure, OK, I'm excited.

And now without further ado: A list of all Superhero movies, ranked by objective* quality category!

*: May be subjective.

Excellent:

Spiderman - into the Multiverse (put me against the wall, and this is the one I'd pick at no.1)
Dr. Strange
Batman 2 (Tim Burton)
Suicide Squad (2021)
Unbreakable
Aquaman

Good:

Thor Ragnarok
Guardians of the Galaxy
Iron Man 3 (would be excellent, but it's got too much fluff...)
Shazam
Logan (would be excellent, if not for an extremely weak third act.)
Deadpool 2
Birds of Prey
Blade 2
Superman (the OG one)
Superman 2 (The OG really good, proper DC superhero movie)
X-men 2
Shang-Chi (Possibly excellent, if they had kept it a martial arts movie instead of the shitty final fight against Cthulhus)
Batman (Tim Burton)
The Dark Knight
Pootie Tang
Avengers 1
Spiderman (the OG really good, proper Marvel superhero movie)
Spiderman 2 (should also probably go under excellent)
Spiderman - Far from Home (dumb but fun)
Spiderman - No Way Home 
The Wolverine
Howard the Duck (I last saw it when I was ten, and I won't hear your horrible lies about it!)
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 (debating whether to place it here or under OK, but its earnestness won me over.)

OK:

Iron Man
Lego Batman (fun, but the least good of the big screen lego movies.)
Spiderman - homecoming
Thor 1 & 2 (I know, I know, but I didn't hate the sequel... what can I say?)
Thor Fhor
Dr Strange 2 (big, big disappointment, but worth it for some good scenes.)
Captain America 1
Avengers 2 (I suspect I'd file it under bad if I saw it again these days)
X-men
Blade. (Snipe's sheer awesomeness as Blade would rate as excellent; unfortunately, I don't like the movie around him.)
Watchmen
Batman Begins (Great, right up to when he dresses as Batman.)
Ant-Man (would be bad, but it's extremely charming until the plot kicks in.)
Captain Marvel
Deadpool (Sorry! You can't have your cake and eat it, chum; you can't be an irreverent parody and a cookie-cutter template superhero origin story. Other than that, good job!)
Wonder Woman (it peaks halfway; it's all downhill from there.)
Wonder Woman 1984 (somewhere between OK and bad. It's got a LOT of problems, but it's a noble failure.)

Bad:

Iron Man 2
Captain America 2 (gets by on goodwill for a while, but is brought down by its plot and terrible action much harder than usual for Marvel.)
Incredible Hulk
X-men 3 and the rest.
Blade 3 (No amount of Snipe is going to compensate for this bad a film)
Black Panther (I get its cultural significance and I'm happy it was hugely successful. But it's got bad action, even for Marvel, severe pacing issues, and honestly besides the wardrobe and some really charismatic performances - a huge asset, to be sure... I couldn't find anything to like here.)
Dark Knight Rises
Superman Returns
Superman 3 & 4 ('80s) (Poor Richard Pryor.)
Eternals
Superman (Zak Snyder)
Suicide Squad 2016
Daredevil
Spawn
Batman with nipples 1 & 2
Electra (at least it had more fun than Daredevil.)
Ghost Rider (for fuck's sake, why would you give an action movie to these two guys? Never watched the sequel)
The Garfield Spidermans

THE FUCKING WORST:

Civil War (AKA: Everyone be dumbing around! Except the bad guy, he's friends with the scriptwriters.)
Avengers Infinity (more like infinite, amirite?) War
Avengers Endgame (The best of the three. That's extremely low praise.)
Batman Vs Superman (Why the HELL did I even watch this? WHY?)
Glass

 That's... a lot of films. I'm not going to do the math, but more than half of them are at least OK. Not bad for not-real-cinema, huh? The one conclusion I think we can all draw is that if the Winter Soldier is in any movie, even mentioned in passing, it's going to suck ass with a straw.

 I got bored with the list half way, so there you go. I put up most of the big ones I've seen; If you want to know how Dolph Lundgreen's Punisher ranks up there, smash that subscribe button, like my channel, sacrifice your firstborn for my patreon and maybe I'll be arsed. Or not.

 So I've ranked a bunch of widely-beloved movies that have made more money than I can imagine below Superman IV: Quest for Peace or the Batman sequels that became a cultural punching bag pretty much the instant they were released. I realize how ridiculous that looks. But I honestly think they are worse. All those movies I listed under Bad (and some of them are really, really bad)… I rolled my eyes at them, laughed at them, made fun of them. But I don't regret watching them that much, and some of them I found interesting for some reason or another.
 The Avengers movies, though, they got a visceral reaction pretty much from the get-go. Why? The action is bad, but it's not illegible like on the Ghost Riders, and plenty of other Marvel films I do like have uninteresting visuals (helloooo phase 1!)
 Why I feel these films' scripts insulted my intelligence while I pretty much forgot all about Amazing Spiderman 2 or Spawn the minute they ended, I don't know.

 Tone is a huge problem, sure - portentous and apocalyptic, but borderline anxious to wink at the audience and assure them that they're still watching a breezy entertainment. Annoyingly Ingratiating. Everything feels arbitrary, calculated, contrived. Their pacing is a complete wreck - they're the busiest boring movies I've seen... They last forever. And yeah, part of it must be a reaction to how much other people like them, I guess; not in a "Haha, let's be contrarian" way, I hope, but more a "What the actual fuck?"
 I've read a lot of people defending these things, looking for a way to at least appreciate what they're doing - but beyond the (pretty impressive) feat of mashing together so many characters and storylines into a... barely cohesive tangle of bad scripting (a feat that I'd argue wasn't worth doing), I can't see anything to latch onto. Man, I kind of feel bad - contrary to what it may seem, I don't like shitting on things others genuinely like; But these are not films I can say "Eh, they're not for me." I can't see them as anything else but objectively shit films disguised by their level of budget and competent craftmanship, and buoyed by the many, much much better films that came before them. I think I barely ever say anything is 'objectively bad', at least I barely ever mean it, no matter how much I might put a movie down. We'll see how time treats them, but I'm sure as hell never watching them again. Once is once more than enough.

 Coming up next: Thanos is a fucking moron and how the hell are people not talking about how stupid his whole deal is? Wake up, sheeple!

Pop Music

 I grew apart from pop music in the early nineties. Just lost interest in it; nothing in the mainstream appealed much to me, and I didn't manage to find what interesting music there was. A circuitous route led me from The Jesus and Mary Chain to punk and heavy metal, and that was pretty much it; with a few exceptions, like Radiohead, The Wedding Present or the Foo Fighters, I pretty much gave up on pop music and dedicated myself to the heavier stuff. I'd still identify myself as mostly a heavy metal listener, though I'm not sure it's true anymore.
 The thing is, in the early '00s I ran across the AV club website. I mostly followed them for their movie coverage, but some of the bands they covered sounded interesting. This led me to download Death Cab for Cutie's We have the Facts and we're Voting Yes, and to indie pop.

 Living in Argentina, I'd never been exposed to any of these bands - from what I could tell from the outside, most of the music I was discovering was 'hipster' music (a label I've never really understood, at least when applied to very accessible, poppy music - guilt by association, I guess). In any case, I was excited to find that I'd discarded a whole genre as prematurely dead, and managed to miss a huge number of artists who were making the sort of pop music I liked.

 I've been trying to put together a list of pop music recommendations for my sister (she asked me a few years back, but what can I say? I'm lazy). So here it goes. I'll limit this post to relatively new stuff - hopefully later I'll work my way through older stuff. I'm also sticking to the sunnier end of the pop spectrum for now, since I know that's what my sister prefers. I've included a ton of songs as links below, one per word.


 Let's start with Death Cab for Cutie, then; good time for it, since their latest CD -Codes & Keys- is excellent. Here are a couple of songs from it. Their older stuff varies, but my favorite CD of theirs is Transatlanticism.

Cloud Cult is a weird one; if I had to put a genre on it, I'd call it electro-hippy pop. Still, there's no arguing with a song as beautiful as this. The rest of that CD - Feel Good Ghosts - is pretty great, too.

 Pop doesn't come any sunnier - and guilty pleasures any guiltier - than Jimmy Eats World. You've heard them, even if you don't know them by name. They've written a lot of pop gems over the years; their best CD is Clarity, but their catchiest songs are either on Bleed American or Invented. Warning - do not listen to if you're allergic to cheese. Your credibility may be impacted if you admit to liking this band. Do not, under any circumstances, pay attention to the lyrics.

Nada Surf is another great pure pop band. Here's a few songs to try; please don't pay attention to their lyrics, they're pretty terrible. Let Go is probably the best place to start, but Lucky or The Weight is a Gift are pretty good too.

Stacey's Mom is a kind of terrible gimmick song which Fountains of Wayne will probably never live down. Look past that, however, and you'll find a really good power-pop band with impeccable songwriting and some very funny, incisive lyrics. Check this out, or this, or this. Welcome Internet Managers is the CD to get. Warning: it contains Stacey's Mom.

 In a perfect world, Shearwater would be huge. The whole of their last CD, Animal Joy, is essential - and Animal Life is probably the best single pop song I've heard this year. It's one of my favorite bands, and they've remained amazingly good throughout the years.

 Regina Spektor is a lot of fun - her first two CDs, Soviet Kitch and Begin to hope are both great - The first skews weirder, and the second has catchier songs. Us is probably her best song, but she's got plenty of great stuff.

 Andrew Bird's been around for ages, and he's put out some really great music in that time. Armchair Apocrypha and The Mysterious Production of Eggs are the ones to get.

 The National's Boxer is highly recommended. Here are a couple of standouts.

 There's no arguing with The Arcade Fire's Rebellion - a track so great I'd still consider the band great even if everything else they ever put out was shit. Good thing the rest of their stuff holds up pretty well. Of their CDs, I'm partial to Funeral, but the rest have good songs too.

 I'm not a huge fan of 80's revival bands - The Killers and Film School, for example, leave me cold. But The Editors, for one CD at least, hit it out of the park; An End has a Start has these two songs.

 Bloc Party have made two really great albums (Silent Alarm and Weekend in the City), and another one that's still pretty good but comes front-loaded with some truly horrible songs. Here's some of their stuff.

 And now, for the Scottish. Frightened Rabbit make some lovely music - a good place to start would be their Midnight organ fight CD; it's got gems like this, or this.

 Malcolm Middleton is a particular favorite, though he's definitely an acquired taste - I can't think of many musicians who write pop as acid as his; try A Brighter Beat and work your way from there if you like it; its first three songs are unbeatable.

 Finally, a band I was introduced to fairly recently - Vast. Both Nude and April are really great, chock-full of great songs. I'm really not sure why this band isn't a lot bigger.

 And that should be enough for a while!

28 Weeks Later

28 weeks after the beginning of 28 days later (which would make it 224 days after the first infection, but that just isn’t as catchy enough a title) all the zombies- ehr, infected- have starved and died out. A repopulation effort begins, spearheaded by the US military, in a cordoned-off area of London. Of course, it goes to hit and the infection starts up again and you get hordes of infected running around acting all spooky and feral and eating non-infected repatriates and soldiers alike, and a small group of people band up to survive both them and the US military, who are trying to contain the spread of the infection.
Extremely visceral and surprisingly intelligent, I have to admit I liked this movie much better than I liked the first part (which I liked a great deal). It goes out in all sort of random, wonderfully unexpected ways; the characters, while stereotypical, have unexpected reactions which make them feel very well rounded out and involving; it’s got flat out great action scenes which don’t work against the horror and suspense, and it’s the rare kind of horror movie that actually works for its scares. Oh, it sneaks in some biting political commentary, and the gore is pretty magnificent.
And yes, most of the action scenes are muddied up with trendy, overly jumpy editing. And you could say the three standout scenes are a bit derivative, (the best scene, and first runner up for Best. Use. Of. Helicopter. Ever., was used in a throwaway line in the book World War Z, and the other two are a bit too close to Creep and The Descent for comfort), and that the script has a few holes here and there. (Nothing major, though) But it’s still a thrill to see a movie that not only uses something a bit more elaborate than the cheap shocks and gross-outs most horror movies these days manage, but isn’t afraid to evoke grander things- be it as large as parallels with a certain current middle eastern conflict, or as small and intimate as the way guilt makes us desire to violently put out an accusing stare- even after we’ve been undeservedly forgiven.

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Dead Man’s chest came out while this blog was on hiatus, so let’s get it out of the way: it was one of the best movies last year. Incredibly fun, imaginative, smart and perversely unpredictable, it also had that elusive quality movie theorists like to call balls – making it all the more unbelievable it had come from the toxic bowels of both Disney and Jerry Bruckenheimer. It was shot concurrently with the third part of the (so far) trilogy, and has spent most of the year since in post production. (Judging by the end product, the script was written during that time too, but more on that later)

So it’s fair to say my expectations ran very high, especially after watching the excellent trailer (a cannon fight OVER A FUCKING MAELSTROM- holy fucking shit!) It’s also fair to say the final film not only didn’t live up to its promise, it’s also a crap movie on its own right. Messy and lackluster in almost every respect, it manages to miss everything the previous installments nailed just right, and indulges in their worst excesses.

The plot, such as it is, follows the rescue of Jack Sparrow from the land of the dead (or Davey Jones locker), pirate politics, and the subsequent showdown between pirates and the forces of modernism and civilization. It also tries, but not too hard, to tie up the impossibly high number of loose ends from Dead Man’s Chest. Sounds exiting, right? Well, looks like it didn’t to anyone involved, so they spent more time thinking up wacky stuff for Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow than developing the script.
I mean hell, I like Jack Sparrow as much as anyone else- his first entry in Pirates of the Caribbean is probably the best character introductions since the Dude Lebowski - but it was always understood that it needed to be dosed carefully… well, until this film, that is. They’ve got Geoffrey Rush as Barbossa – a great character that could easily drive the whole movie if they needed a main character, (and remember Dead Man's Chest didn't, through skillful storyline juggling) but he’s relegated here to be the straight man for gags that I wouldn’t be surprised to find out were improvised by a stoned Johnny Depp. And when he’s not providing angry reaction shots, he’s spewing important-sounding bullshit to cover up for plot holes. Actually, that describes most of the dialog in the movie. But it’s that kind of careless pandering to audiences that sinks the flick; save for the first few minutes it feels, and this wasn't the case in any of its prequels, like Disney and Bruckenheimer had an active voice in it. It feels like a committee movie.

So we get an overdose of all things Sparrow, but unfunny. We get lame slapstick and gags that are taken just a bit too long- Just count the number of animal reaction shots or cutesy gimmicks like Jack’s father. We also get characters we couldn’t give a shit about and major plot elements that are pulled out of nowhere (and that are dropped before they go anywhere) – and that might be the most puzzling thing in this movie; I mean, I could understand it on the second one, it was a sequel to a movie that didn’t really leave room for one, but for fuck’s sake- these last two were written at the same time! A couple of major plot lines not only don’t really make sense, they also turn out to be completely unnecessary and are forgotten and left unresolved halfway through. And forget about character attachment- they are either too busy explaining the plot dramatically enough to fool people, or making decisions which are so random one wonders if they’re not rolling dice to see what they do next.

What the hell happened? I can take a couple of guesses. Dead Man’s chest began with a crow pecking out a corpse’s eyes, and it’s a smart, complex film. I can see how that would give a Disney exec a heart attack, and lead to the studio forcing their standards on Verbinski and the scriptwriters to make this piece of shit under legal threat.
Time is also undoubtedly a factor here- either all the good stuff was left on Dead Man’s Chest, or the two-films at a time thing was all a hoax and this movie was indeed written and made in this last year or so. I could also blame CGI, I dunno. (It would explain Orlando bloom, at least…)
Finally, it could be that Verbinski and Co. fucked up. It could happen.

There are some saving graces to the movie. It’s telling it has striking images which display an incredible visual imagination. (Which I’d attribute to Verbinski; most of them are shamefully squandered in the trailer) It’s also worth noting that unlike in the previous two installments, where a sequence would start being amazing and end up being stunning through unexpected developments and wit, here they fall through almost instantaneously without a script to prop them up.
I also liked that a theme running subtly through the previous movie was picked up and pushed to the forefront- that the positive aspects of piracy, the freedom, mysteriousness and adventure of it are only possible at the fringes of civilization; it’s hammered home too soon, too often and too obviously, and it’s also lifted directly from some of the best westerns, but hey- I still like it.
And whoever thought of the whole worthless oriental angle (poor Chow Yun Fat is woefully underused- this movie demanded full on wuxia action, dammit!) still deserves a raise, simply because it allowed them to cram Keira Knightley into all sorts of tight oriental costumes.

But yeah, all in all, it sucks pretty bad.