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Five Nights at Freddy's (2023)
Watch Willy's Wonderland instead
Apparently adaptations of videogames are supposed to be good now, so every studio and their uncle wants to fart one out with all haste. The only problem is, even if you consider anything with an antivaxxer who was always begging for a kick in the teeth anyway good, the batting average of films based on video games is so low that a Little League team would want to show them the door.
So Willy's Wonderland has Nicolas Cage. Not just Nicolas Cage, but Nicolas Cage saying so much without speaking one word. Gesticulations, facial expressions, and so on, show he still has it when it comes to acting like he is not pleased that the pathologist stuck a needle in his arm and found blood in his cocaine.
The whole concept of a person or a group of people being locked in an abandoned place has been done twice before, and that is only if you look at my collection. I cannot say that The Banana Splits Movie is nearly as good as Willy's Wonderland, but it is infinitely better than this garbage. You deserve better, so go find it and watch it.
Go away.
Fallout (2024)
If Bethesda says it is canon, it is not
The late Shamus Young made a video essay stating that Bethesda does not understand Fallout. You can find his name on YouTube, but the pertinent quote about BethesdaOut goes like this. Black Isle Studios made games about survivors trying to rebuild from the ashes, Bethesda made a game about the ashes. Shamus said more, but I will stick with my own words going forward. BethesdaOut is basically the creation of two people who are both quite vile in their own ways. Todd Howard's sickening envy and Little Man Syndrome is its own essay, but a quote from Emil Pagliurio or whatever his name is says it all. He tells people at conferences not to bother working on a good story because the player will just tear it up and make paper airplanes out of it.
I have been playing Computer RPGs, CRPGs, since before Fallout existed (yeah yeah, trust me, the old man schtick is here for a reason), and I can tell you one thing about them that Emil is pretty incapable of understanding. The story is the whole point of the exercise. The Eye Of The Beholder games of the early 1990s, even the story from the technology-level drop of the ball that was the third game, will be remembered long after Pagliego's name is spoken for the last time. Because although the stories of the three games were rudimentary, they were examples of "because" storytelling, as opposed to the "and then" that Pagli throws into the games. But a more pertinent example that destroys Paglit's tantrum is Baldur's Gate III. The player character is fighting to stop themselves from being turned into Illithid, a stealing of the soul that illustrates what a disgusting and hate-able race Illithid are. Along the way, we learn that the titular city of Baldur's Gate is under the control of an "Elder Brain" or something like that (my memory problems make me unsure if that is the right name) that controls the government and wishes to turn a vast swathe of people into Illithid who do nothing but suck up to it forever and ever amen. This "Elder Brain" might be a moustache twirler, but in the context of Illithid and their society being a brutal construct that revolves around slavery and abuse, and they literally know nothing else including the concept of friends or family, is what "because" storytelling means.
Paglidiot's stories are not constructed with reasoning. He decides what he wants to happen, and then does nothing to make it make sense within the world he is making. In Fallout 4, he tells us that the bad guys in the game wanted a "pure" source of DNA to create Human-like constructs to replace people on the surface with. But one, the prologue's shifting of the protagonist from suburbia to the vault would have resulted in every occupant of said vault being stricken with terminal genetic damage. Two, one baby does not come close to equaling a healthy genetic pool. Three, killing almost everyone else in the vault to get this one baby as opposed to calmly leading them away and taking them for study would yield better results. You see what I am talking about yet when I say that Emil Pathetic cannot write a good story? Maybe, Emil, you should make a story that makes the player want to read it? You know, like the makers of Baldur's Gate III (and I and II), Pillars Of Eternity, or the original Mass Effect, did?
You might have noticed I have rattled on about the story of the BethesdaOut games a lot. Well, get ready for it. The story in this insipid series is worse. Something I did not think would be possible without bringing Ed Wood back to life and giving him the IP. Slow-burn storytelling works a certain way. As much as I want to keep anything to do with Robert De Niro out of my mouth, the film Heat is a classic example. The big bang inciting incident takes a long time to get to. We spend more than five minutes just getting through the opening credits and meeting the men who will perform the heist. But there is a slow sense of tension creeping in from the start that lets you know something big is coming around the corner. And even with the long, quiet build-up, there is always something happening, something that gives you more information, in every scene.
One man at a university course about filmmaking told me, and others, that if a scene does not tell the audience something the audience does not already know about the situation, the characters, or the world, then its proper place is on the cutting room floor. If BethesdaOut The Waste Of Streaming Time followed this rule, it would be a thirty-minute singular episode. And the little pieces of information that it gives maybe three times per hour-long (on average) episodes are communicated so poorly that one could be forgiven for believing that Emil Pathetic gave this project to his eight year old child. We are told that one of our protagonists is getting married to a dweller from another vault, but it takes us another two episodes for the series to properly explain that this vault is part of a three-vault system where dwellers are exchanged.
In canon, the vaults are experiments by a very nasty government that has ambitions to ditch Earth and send spaceships across the universe to find another planet and make a better world (yeah, I know how it sounds). Each vault is an experiment to determine what situations could occur and how to remedy them. One rather disturbing experiment that exemplifies the gulf between Emil Poorwriting and Chris Avellone involves vault dwellers being made to elect an overseer every year who is then ritually sacrificed to the vault's computer intelligence, lest every dweller be killed. Year after year, elections have become contests of favours, dirt-throwing, muck-raking, and power plays that eventually erupt in an open war. The end result is five survivors who refuse to participate in any more killing. But rather than the vault killing them, the vault "rewards" them by telling them they are free to leave and come back at any time. They choose to commit suicide (and murder the one who has second thoughts about that) because they feel they cannot live with these events. The obvious intent of this experiment is to determine what will happen if an authority figure tells potential passengers "kill one person of your choosing or we will kill all of you".
In this tepid series, we have a trio of vaults that exchange and wed dwellers... why? What information is a scientist of low moral fibre meant to gain from this? Wait a minute... does Emil Patheticstory even know how scientific experiments work? Does he believe that the company Vault-Tec just do this for giggles? And has he given the slightest thought to how suspension of disbelief works? Then again, given that the authors of this rubbish do not even understand the basic principle of Chekov's Gun, I already know the answer to that question. The words if you fire it in the third act, show it in the first are a bit vague here. In science fiction (which BethesdaOut is not), it is more like "if you fire it in the third act, explain how it works and why it works that way in the first". Emil and whoever, you have to explain how it works *before* you show it working. And putting it up on the wall with a sign saying "junk jet" is not explaining. Dune parts one and two have killed your kind, Emil. Among other things, they showed without a word, just the actions and visual cues, how the vibration shields that make conventional firearms useless work.
We also get a huge flip-off if we are invested in the story of the real Fallout. In canon, the Brotherhood Of Steel is a dying, starving husk because its refusal to adapt and its blind devotion to dogma has drained its life. The New California Republic is in trouble because a good leader has been replaced by an expansionist idiot who clearly never heard the saying "soldiers win battles, logistics win wars", but can squash the Brotherhood Of Steel under its boot like an ant. I am not sure whether Chris Avellone and the team used giant ants in New Vegas because Badstoryesda forbade them from using any other assets, Chris Avellone and Tim Cain would probably tell us today that giant ants and giant cockroaches are stupid ideas because the way insects take in oxygen means being over a certain size is impossible (read: fatal) for them.
Put simply, Streaming BethesdaOut For People That Shame Humanity fails on every level. It fails in storytelling (I am now recalling that five episodes in, I still cannot name one character that would pass the Plinkett Test). It fails as a science fiction, it is a five year old's idea of what science fiction is. It fails on its own merits, and the list of reasons for that is long. Many of its "hey, this is supposed to be impressive" moments would make no sense without having played the game. Many elements make no sense. Probably the worst element is that Buttheadesda wants us to believe that this story is taking place two hundred and nineteen years after the all-consuming nuclear war that the first real Fallout. With efforts to clean up and repopulate Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which are populated today) taking place in 1946. The US Army made pamphlets about Hiroshima that resulted in tourists coming to see the ruins of the "Atomic city". The authors of this trash series have no idea that the gap between nuclear destruction of a place and attempts to make the place habitable again is much, much shorter. It is probable that Emil, his minions, and his Napoleon Syndrome overseer have confused nuclear missile detonations with nuclear power plant meltdowns. Then there is the ever-pervasive "2077 looks exactly like 1957, just with cool toys added!". A real science fiction author thinks about how technology is pushed by Human nature. Emil and company think a society that can create robots that hover above the ground and can tend to some of the needs of a baby without injuring it would have televisions with screens that are no bigger than a Human head.
If you say this series is good, you are not. End of story.
Dune: Part Two (2024)
High in the running for best film of the past twenty-four years, but missed potential holds it back
I will get this out there right now. Denis Villeneuve made a big mistake by altering the events of the second half of Dune. He is not nearly as disrespectful to the author nor the audience as Peter Jackass and his pretending to be a Tolkien fan. But the choice Villeneuve has made hurt his telling of the story to such a degree that I am flabbergasted that he made it.
Essentially, Dune the novel has a few years pass between the assault upon House Atreides and Paul Atreides' Fremen-assisted return punch. During this time, his sister is born. The event of Jessica drinking the Water Of Life and then being told she should not have done so happens more or less exactly as depicted here, but we see that Alia Atreides is able to speak in whole sentences and walk unaided at ages where normal Humanoid children are struggling to make singular words and stand upright. Villeneuve's change to the story hurts it not because of anything to do with Alia, but because the timetable of Paul responding to House Harkonnen's power slap with a once-punch knockout using the Fremen as a fist becomes impossible this way. Jessica is shown being approximately eight months pregnant at the end of the film. Assuming that Paul sensed her pregnancy in the first week, this gives Paul nine months to:
* Ingratiate himself enough with the Fremen for them to follow him into battle en masse
* Disrupt spice production to such an extent that the reserves the Harkonnen keep are no longer enough to keep the Landsraad from taking notice
* Go from indifferent to receiving offers of sex from Chani (admittedly, depending on many factors, this is plausible in the given time period)
* Develop enough skill in worm riding to make the Fremen see him as their equal or even Messiah
I think you see where this is going. Put simply, too many events are compressed into a small timeframe, and the credulity suffers a lot for it. Knowing that Villeneuve loves Dune, calls it Star Wars for grown-ups (and rightly so), but he could have stood to turn the first novel into a three-film series and he would still have to leave out some pieces of the story.
We get a slew of new characters, including the much speculated-about Feyd Rautha, the character Sting checks under the bed for at night. If you have not seen the Flying Underpants, consider yourself lucky. Or unlucky if you are into that sort of thing. Anyway, Feyd Rautha is depicted beautifully and gets exactly the screentime he needs to fulfil his function in the story. Unfortunately, he is the only new character in this piece that we can say that about.
Princess Irulan is barely developed beyond "daughter of the Emperor". Even her function as a historian and one of the sources people in the far future will read when seeking an account of the events in these films is something you could not possibly know of unless you read the novel. The only reason she needs to be in the story is, as said, she gets half of her DNA from the Emperor.
Speaking of the Emperor, he is barely in the story. We learn that he is saddened by having had to send House Atreides to their doom, that the current unrest on Arrakis is bothering him, that it threatens his rule, but again, the only reason he cannot be cut from the story is because he has one essential function, to be overthrown, and the other details really only tie into that.
Léa Seydoux gets the worst of it. Lady Margot Fenrig is so superfluous it makes me weep. The one scene she does anything in involves subjecting Feyd Rautha to the same test Paul underwent in the beginning of Part One. One could simply remove her and give this scene to Princess Irulan or some anonymous nobody character, and the impact would not change.
This hurts development of a connection with these new characters, and the nearly nonexistent screen time of returning characters such as Gurney Halleck or Glossau Rabban undermines the connection we had with them if we saw them in Part One.
So what makes Dune: Part Two great? The collective aspects where Villeneuve once again hits it out of the park. The conflict between believers in the religious vomit planted by the Bene Gesserit and those who see it for what it is, although not central to the story, is a steady Billy Gould bass pattern throughout the film. In spite of the mishandling of the timeline, Lady Jessica's contribution to the story is as powerful as ever. She might not be commanding huge men to kill each other, but she is having no less of an impact upon the world around her. And Paul, well, the whole story revolves around Paul now, and he tears into it like an autoimmune disorder into healthy tissue. Paul is described in the novel as being fourteen years old when first he sets foot on Arrakis, and is around seventeen to eighteen years old at the conclusion of said novel. From an emotional perspective, Paul seems to be the exception to the bungling of the timetable. But hey, moments of incredible violence and threat to one's existence age a man up a bit (I know).
The choice to make all outdoor scenes on Geidi Prime an offensively bright monochrome, the return of the masterful rendition of Ornithopter wings, the fact that Villeneuve knows how to construct a scene of violence, the masterful environmental storytelling, it all comes back and reminds us of why Dune: Part One left us wanting more. The difference is that Dune: Part One left us wanting more of a story that is unassailable from a logic and worldbuilding point of view. But what we get in Part Two is still masterful. Probably my favourite aspect would be that in spite of the timeline, the actions of the characters both make absolute sense in context of their circumstances and come from a place of intelligently processing the available information. Baron Harkonnen in particular demonstrates this, by taking control of Arrakis away from Glossau Rabban and giving it to Feyd Rautha, still under the assumption that there are a lot less Fremen than is truly the case, and totally ignorant of the bucket of napalm he has kicked into a pool of nuclear waste.
If you are a fan of Dune, in the sense that you get the message of the story and understand its style (hey, certain director who everyone mistakes for understanding Tolkien, it is about consequences), Part Two is a must-watch. But people who have only seen the Part One film will walk away confused by the dropping of the timeline ball, and that is a problem for people who are familiar enough with Frank Herbert's novels to know that everything Paul does in Part One, Part Two, and Part Three will have repercussions that continue for another ten thousand years.
See it twice. Regardless of what I have to say, it is really good for your brain.
Army of One (2016)
Cage simply being Cage
Nicolas Cage has expressed disappointment with this film and made statements that imply a part of the problem stems from the director not having final cut. I would love to see the director's cut. But given that the director chose to ask Nicolas Cage to effect the most gently irritating voice possible, not realising this is Nicolas Cage we are talking about, perhaps the director is not the best judge of what this film should be. In any case, what we have here is a hundred minutes of Nicolas Cage pretending to be delusional on a level that rivals every psychiatric ward I have been on the inside of. I mean, seriously, the opening narration is just beautiful. They tell us that Gary Faulker, the real Gary Faulker, was said to not have any form of delusional disorder, nor schizophrenia, a condition that is as poorly understood as it is spoken about by the ignorant. Yes, some forms of schizophrenia cause hallucinations, but renal failure causes dementia-like symptoms, not hallucinations. Although the distinction is not totally clear to me, not having experienced any kind of dementia nor met anyone who experiences dementia. Lesser symptoms of renal failure in this spectrum including disordered (or more accurately, scattered) thought and confusion.
Come to think of it, renal failure can also cause speech problems, which explains a lot about Cage's performance. Anyway, to make this acceptable for the nappy-net, Faulkner's story is the definition of "I could not make up this feculence if I tried". But as the opening narration makes clear, numerous details have been changed. Some details were changed to make Faulkner more sympathetic. He did time for burglary and larceny as well as domestic violence. His claims of being in renal failure at the time that he was on his delusional mission to capture Osama are debatable. He does suffer from kidney disease as well as high blood pressure, but the likelihood of him surviving months in Pakistan without receiving dialysis is minuscule. By the way, no, Cage's constant expression is not constipated, it is extreme shock that the pathologist taking samples from his veins found blood in his cocaine. Back to the subject of Faulkner, apparently Faulkner was arrested for firing warning shots at a group of people who broke into his home. Upon going to retrieve his pistol from the police, a background check resulted in a felony summons. Faulkner's response was to tell the officers that he was above the law.
Somewhere in the film we got, assuming the director's vision included a more detailed look into the pure insanity that is Faulkner, is a great comedy. I wish the film took a few minutes to properly explain the renal failure and things it does to the brain. A visual deep dive similar in style to the artificial heart shots in Crank: High Voltage, focused on the kidneys and brain, would have kept this fresh in our minds. Instead, we can easily forget, and end up believing we are watching a garden-variety idiot. I know I did. We can write off the moments with Osama as being major hallucinations, as the claims that Osama himself was dealing with renal failure were only confirmed to be untrue when SEAL Team Six brought Osama's body back to Afghanistan for identification.
This is far from Cage's best film, but also quite far from being his worst. Sometime after the IRS problems, Cage stopped trying to be a serious actor (if he ever tried in the first place) and decided to ham it up exactly the way he did early in his career. That widely-seen video excerpt of him proclaiming that he never misfiled anything once, not one time, is from one of his earliest films. So it is not as if he is doing anything new here. The problem is that Cage's best work in hamming it up enough to make a billion serves of good fried rice needs grounding. Whether the rest of the world is playing realsies or a few people are responding appropriately to the mania of his character, he works so much better that way. Observe Mom And Dad or Willy's Wonderland and see for yourself. In Willy's Wonderland, he does not utter a word aloud and manages to say ten billion words with one series of hand gestures. There are characters in the film that try to inject some reality into Faulkner's life, but their performances are a hundredth as ham-fisted in a comedic manner as Cage's, meaning they are also impossible to take seriously. That seriously hurts the comedy.
Which brings us to Russell Brand as Faulkner's hallucinations of god. Brand is surprisingly good. He keeps it po-faced and grounded, which is a welcome relief from much of the rest of the film. His dialogue about trying to fix a house with paint and a nail, using that as a jumping off point to say that he did not make Humans in his image, it is the other way around, is probably the best part of the film. The truth of this statement is all over their bible, after all. Anyway, Brand keeps his parts of the film grounded by playing the god of emptiness the way that a Human hallucinating his presence would see him. As a guide and a man interested in their wellbeing. At least until the news report comes in that SEAL Team Six killed Osama and Osama was buried according to Islumic law, in the sea within twenty-four hours of his death. Then the god of emptiness returns to the way the real world knows him. As a bringer of delusions, among other terrible things.
Look, going forward, I will just focus on the film. Average photography, a great performance from Cage that is hampered by some things that are hard to take, a performance from Russell Brand that is easier to take than his other work (partly because his presence is used sparingly), some footage of the real Faulkner in the end credits (which will make it clear that Cage's performance is not as great as it could have been). Faulkner's speech in that footage is actually only a little less clear than mine (basso profundo here) and although his words betray a certain disconnect from reality, they also appear far more grounded than the performance. Granted, he is in front of a camera, and nobody acts natural in front of a camera, but this begs the question of why Cage hammed it up this much. Simply speaking like the real Cage would have been just fine. And there surely must be references to Faulkner's less noble actions in the director's cut. No, I am not going to make a hashtag.
If I could sum up the Army Of One that we did get in a word, it would be "misguided". Any director in this situation would ask themselves. Well, I have Nicolas Cage and Russell Brand in my cast, what now? The best answer is "not this".
Hellraiser (2022)
Better than all but one other sequel, but that bar is so low it is below the ground
If I could sum up the problem with this resequelmake in one word, it would be "overelaborate". The real Hellraiser was written exactly like a first-time director and screenwriter who was practically unknown before Stephen King proclaimed him to be the future of horror. That is, it got its points quickly, it knew how to maintain dramatic tension, and it made every moment including the weak ones (of which there were more than a few) count. People who have seen the real Hellraiser will have the image of the puzzle-like pieces of Frank's face being arranged in a shape vaguely resembling an actual face, with an expression that vaguely resembles a person who has just caught on to how big a mistake they have made. As well as the image of the Hell Priest retrieving the Lament Configuration and closing it as ghostly forms that resemble a merging of ghosts and sperm cells trickle their way back into the grooves. Who could forget those?
This was also a brilliant way to open the story because it laid out the stakes whilst also giving the audience something powerful to keep in their minds whilst the setup for the rest of the horror is being delivered. Which brings us to the biggest problem with Hellraiser Mediocre As Opposed To Just Plain Awful. The sense of escalation and the economic use of time are both gone.
We open with a rich man paying a young Joe Average to open the box, and we get a great visualisation of the problem. This time, the box changes shape every time it is opened. Why? It adds nothing to the story or the horror factor of the box itself. If anything, it takes away from those elements. It makes the box seem less frightening, and the story is only elongated beyond the necessary length by it. The reason the real Lament Configuration was such a prop of wonder is because its cosmetic design made it intriguing enough to explain why people are interested in it whilst also hinting at its terrible nature. What we get in this resequelmake is more like a rich man's toddler's toy. And the invented explanation, that the final shape will somehow summon Leviathan, a concept introduced in the first sequel (which is not nearly as good as some people say), is daft. That sequel also introduced a rule that has been lost in the ether during subsequent sequels.
Namely, it is not hands that call the Cenobites. It is desire. Were one to trick another person into opening the box during the real Hellraiser, the Hell Priest would take the person who tricked the opener of the box instead. The Hell Priest is not a psychopath slasher who tortures people for fun. He is a referee. Let us go over all of the people who meet their ends at the hands of the Hell Priest. The first is a hedonist who very well also might be a psychopath. He is willing to make his lover murder people in order to add flesh to his body. Okay, so maybe that was needed in the first one or two cases, but there was a point at which he could have done the killing part himself. Or his lover? The woman who married his brother and then pretty much proceeded to cheat with him from the get-go? Killing the first couple of victims horrifies her, but she gets over the "what have I done?" factor so quickly that she clearly is not so much upset about having taken lives as she is the reality of doing so.
Two people, or three if you count the second ensnaring of the man, and that film makes them count. Hellraiser Overlong gives us stock twenty-somethings who have one defining characteristic. Addict, gay, struggling to deal with his sister's addictions, feeding that woman's addictions, and I cannot even remember a defining characteristic for two of the others. The only character that is developed to the point where one can visualise them excreting (aka having developed them enough) is the new Hell Priest. She is the one good thing in the film, and the previous actor playing the Hell Priest is right to praise this new actor, but when that is the only good thing about your film, your film is bad. As the summary says, this is better than any Hellraiser film other than the real Hellraiser and Hellseeker (which at least has a good twist), but that bar is subterranean. Most species of worms are above it.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s, we used a particular word to describe films, books, or games that added material for no other purpose than to extend the runtime. Padded. The expression "filler" was also in use then, but calling a film padded was the ultimate warning to not bother. The most padded film of all time is, by far, Manos: The Hands Of Fate, but Hellraiser Mediocre is high on the chart. Without the superfluous "configurations" and characters that add nothing to the story, this film could easily lose twenty or thirty minutes without affecting the story. Then you have the detective subplot that ends with someone acting in a very silly manner, the "let's rob a shipping container without having done any casing whatsoever" moments, and the introductions of characters that, frankly, are boring. If this were an attempt to create a new property, no agent in Hollywood would touch it. Even the prologue, well, it is not promising enough when you know your storytelling. The aforementioned problem with people tricking each other (or the box having a mind of its own) to open the box makes this prologue fall flat on its face. You know from it that you are getting a horror film in which the characters do stupid things (as opposed to bad and ill-considered things borne out of intense emotions) for stupid reasons.
Hellraiser Mediocre is one of those films that manages to be too good to be watched as an unintentional comedy, but too bad to be watched as serious entertainment. The only circumstances under which you should watch it are if you can get it cheap and you are a film student or an aspiring author. Because you can learn a lot more about how to tell a good story by seeing examples of when it is not done well.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)
Yes, Dante does satire. Yes, we noticed. The satire just happens to miss the mark.
Leonard Maltin is shown in a scene in this disappointment, repeating his criticisms of the first film, before a mob of Gremlins savage him. That really shows the level that this "satire" is at. His words as quoted in this loss of a film have an emphasis on the question of why people would find this (the real Gremlins) fun. The thing is, and I think Leonard knew this both then and now, fun means different things to different people. There are some things people generally find universally fun. An elderly idiot who insists he has never been in an accident (apparently "been in" and "caused" are two different things to them) in forty years of driving getting smooshed between a car and a wall, for example, will never not be fun to watch. An antivaxxer dying of COVID-19 and begging for the vaccine, only to hear the doctor tell them vaccines do not work like that, and it is too late, will never not be fun.
You see, the real Gremlins is fun because the comedic timing and the actors treating the story with a completely po-faced attitude made it fun. Treating a story where a bunch of monsters that truly represent chaos destroy a small town as if it is really happening and letting the funniness come from the edits, the timings, and the retorts is fun. Watching Billy's mother yell at one such monster to get out of her kitchen before she stabs it to death, then spray another in the face with cleaning product before closing the microwave door on it and setting it to cook on high until it explodes, that is fun. Seeing a pair of drunken idiot small town policemen get a few hints that maybe they should have listened to that "kid" before we see a Gremlin laughing at the explosion caused by a traffic accident they are in is fun.
But there are some things that will never be fun. Comedy based on a character behaving stupidly when they are normally competent and good people, for example, is never fun. Kate, a character portrayed by Pheobe Cates, who in turn is an example of a career ruined by a bad agent, established a reputation in the first film as a woman who has it together and knows when to push the button on her antagonist. Here, she makes mistakes that the entire plot of the film turns on.
Kate met Gizmo in the original film. Even if she has not seen him in years, she would know that the gibbering idiot who cannot sit still for two seconds is not Gizmo. Her time with Gizmo in the real Gremlins is limited, sure, but she knows he is a soft, quiet, thoughtful creature who only raises his voice when he is scared or in pain.
There is also a massive clash of tones here. For near to two thirds of the film, incredible cruelty is done unto Gizmo whilst Kate and Billy seem to have utterly forgotten that it is a real priority to find him and keep him safe. At the same time, we have constant sketches aimed at what Steven Spielberg apparently thinks the six year olds of 1984, who are now twelve years old as of 1990, have the same mental wavelength as six month olds. Why not just save tens of millions of 1990 dollars and jangle your keys at the camera for a hundred minutes, Steve?
Yeah, I know Joe Dante's name is on the film and he allegedly got the creative freedom he desired for this project. Quite frankly, if this is true, I am glad that Dante was told to keep the baby movie crap out of the real Gremlins. In fact, this is a perfect example of the problem with films that are proclaimed to be "for all ages". Real adults can watch the real Gremlins and giggle about new context that adulthood brings to those moments when we, as children, just laughed at the wacky destruction. This poor imitation of Gremlins is a Harry Baby film before Harry Nappy.
Everything is overacted. It is on a level with bad children's television, where every line is spoken at a volume people do not use in real life unless they are angry, in a state of urgency, or in distress. And the "sharpness of the writing"? Are you kidding me? Again, if Kate had not mistaken the gibbering idiot (yeah, jokes about intellectual deficiency were funny to the people of 1990, what can I say?) for Gizmo, in spite of this being impossible for a woman with the intelligence she displayed in the real Gremlins, all of this would have turned out very differently. The show even does the dirty on Gizmo, who knows that he should not get water on him, yet does not retreat to a place where he absolutely knows for certain he will not get water on him. When you are twelve years old, it is easy to overlook how a "comedy" (and we are using that term loosely because the jokes are so poorly delivered) turns on characters with brains in their heads suddenly acting like they have intelligence quotients of 80. Oh yeah, and the high rise this film takes place in has a tenant that does genetic experiments on plants and animals. Look, Joe, I know it was 1990, but the fun thing about children is that they learn things. Such as how this kind of research would take place in facilities that are far away from populated areas. If this is what "sharpness of writing" means to one individual who will remain nameless, then I do not want to watch any film they call good.
It is ironic that in today's climate where we get oversaturated with one thing, endure years of bad material associated with that one thing, then wait for the next thing to be oversaturated with, the word "fun" is used so many times in press events that it sounds more like an incantation than an objective. Fun fun fun, fun fun fun fun, fun, fun fun, fun fun fun fun fun fun. Iggy Pop says it best about films that normies say are supposed to be "fun". No fun, my babe, no fun. No fun to be around, feeling that same old way, and so on.
If acting in the style of ten year olds whilst the real hero of the story spends seventy-five percent of the runtime absent or being abused is your idea of fun, have at it. Rating the real Gremlins and this ten-generation photocopy the same is a definite sign you should not be choosing the visual entertainment presented to any minors in your home. It is somewhat hilarious to hear a tiny snippet of a Faith No More song in this turgid film, given that Faith No More's primary audience consisted of people who were too mature for this.
Long story short, if you are a particularly undiscriminating toddler, you might find something of value here. Otherwise, the pantomime acting, the clashing tones, and the general stupidity of the plot makes this a worse film than Manos: The Hands Of Fate. At least Manos was funny.
Welcome to Flatch (2022)
What a waste...
So you have one of the cast from the best series of the last fifty years on contract, you know there are people who are going to make an effort to get to see your show because she is in it, and you present the audience with... this. I should have known, given that Paul Feig has directing and writing credits, but yeesh this series is an example of how we need gatekeepers. No, I am not going to praise 1980s television and say it is all perfect. But the late 1980s gave us the first season or two of The Simpsons When It Was Good, for example.
So you have a show featuring Seann William Scott who played a creepy wannabe womaniser in American Pie, and Aya Cash, the biggest star of the best depiction of mental illness in the history of mankind. And then you give them at most five minutes of screentime per episode. This would not be a big problem if the other cast were worth a puddle of urine, but therein lies the rub. They are not.
I am not sure what to pin the results on. Bad acting, bad writing, bad direction, it is really difficult to understand what the problem is. Likely because the problem extends in so many directions that one can be forgiven the entire show is a problem. The series follows a mockumentary style. We begin with a title card saying many Americans long for a simpler life in rural towns (and because big nappy-pushing Amazon will not let me frank about this, well). "Simpler life in rural towns" is like a new life waiting for you in the colonies. You are a sucker if you believe it, and if you have a chronic medical or mental health issue, expect to have your life expectancy shortened if you go there. Life in some of those feculences on the Earth entails a three hour drive in each direction just to see an oncologist. Your odds of surviving prostate cancer or melanoma drop dramatically. I could go on, but the point here is that making biting jokes about ruralists being delusional and living under a constant compression of lowered expectations is a no-brainer. Instead, we have a mockumentary in which we follow ruralist characters creating hair-brained schemes with not a single punchline to remind us that we are watching a documentary about morons.
I am forced to make comparisons to Trailer Park Boys, another Mockumentary set in a place where nobody whose IQ can be measured in three digits wants to live. At its peak, Trailer Park Boys had a constant throughline of people doing the stupidest things in the hopes of getting ahead in life. Suspense came from the idea that they just might come out on top this time and be able to stop doing idiotic illegal things, to just kick back and go on with the better parts of the lives they do have. But another thing TPB has that Welcome To Flatch does not is well-defined characters. And I do not merely mean the main cast. Bubbles, Rick, and Julian are the kind of characters you can picture on the toilet, which is the ultimate test of how well-developed they are, but the extras and supporting characters are also developed enough to make their shticks work. I forget the name of the individual who randomly appears and shouts insulting, offensive things at the top of his lungs whilst his face and a corner of his underwear are blurred out, but he reminds me of a neighbour around the corner from the place I did most of my growing up in. She would stand on her porch and yell in Maltese at the traffic passing by her house for hours. And that road connected the suburb with the two major suburbs it was a satellite of. The less we say about the spouses, son in laws, and grandchildren of the three Trailer Park Boys, the better.
That is one of the biggest things missing from Welcome To Flatch. We know less about the characters with each episode than we do at the beginning. The two people we follow throughout the series pose so many questions. What do they do when they need money? Do they ever contemplate packing up and leaving Flatch, as anyone above the age of twelve with a modicum of intelligence would want to do? And another problem is that even for idiots whose might have IQs of eighty-five, their ideas and expressions feel way too stupid to be believable as real people. Bringing back the spectre of the Trailer Park Boys again, Julian, Rick, and Bubbles concoct some shady and stupid as hell schemes, but there is a genuine throughline of logic to said schemes. They figure that if they steal little bits at a time and slowly build up a nest egg, they will be able to stop performing criminal acts and fund their more legitimate business idea. They only overlook the detail that you need to find ways to cover up your crimes and that they are known to the authorities in their locality. Time to commit crimes in places where nobody knows you, guys, regardless of how long the travel takes. Nobody in Welcome To Flatch has a solid logical throughline to their behaviour. The Aya Cash character, for example, could just move right back to New York and try to pick up the pieces of her journalistic career. No, she does not seem like the kind of journalist one would mention in the same breath as Roger Ebert, but it is very clear that she is not happy living in a place where the biggest news is one neighbour stealing another's cat food. Yes, country hellholes are like spider webs, but it is much easier to break out when you have real skills that can be applied to a decent job. Of course, get what you have very little chance of learning in such places?
So to sum up very gently, you have two regular actors who have some skill, one of whom is on the mantle for having given the best portrayal of a mentally ill character ever (and with competition like her former castmates or Katie Douglas, that is saying a lot). You have a semi-regular who demonstrates that just a little change in context can change the way you see him as an actor and the character he plays. And then you have a lot of mediocre at best in everything else. And telling people "it is only early days yet, it will get better" does not apply. It might have applied in 2001 when the Trailer Park Boys were a small concern that a nobody producer depended on to stay in the industry. But the world of televisual entertainment has changed, and regained one of the positive attributes of the 1960s, 1970s, or 1980s. That is, if you fail to present something that attracts an audience as quickly as possible, your days as a show with a network or service to broadcast on are numbered.
And that is the way it should be. We are still not back to where we should be, where someone with a good mind for entertainment is screening out the things that should not have funding. And the best evidence of that is called Welcome To Flatch. Get a good writing room next time, guys.
The Plague (2006)
So, there is a "release the director's cut" campaign dating back to the Myspace days. That explains a lot.
I game across this gem when I searched for films that have any connection whatsoever to Clive Barker. This was the one match that appeared and I had not yet seen. Little did I know that Barker's involvement is limited to some sort of executive producer or co-producer credit. In fact, there seem to be more producers than a film of this budget and kind really need. Therein lies the problem. There is a germ of a great idea for a horror story in here, but someone with more money than sense decided they wanted to make a film for teenyboppers. It is just like the song says. Mass appeal madness eats your brain.
So there is apparently a dead movement to get the director's and writers' original vision for this film released. Given that the website for this features a link to Myspace, I doubt this release is ever going to happen. For all we know, Clive himself might have taken the negatives and buried them in his backyard. In any case, contrary to what a lot of people will have you believe, not every film that was chopped and changed without the director's say-so is a butchered masterpiece. Sometimes, the cut that is known to the public is only slightly more or less garbage than what the director or writer has up their sleeves. Often, you can see hints of this in the product offered.
Probably the best examples of hints that the director's cut's virtues are exaggerated lie in the acting. Granted, James Van Der Beek is much better here than he is in the feculence he wishes he was not best known for, but everymen who have done time is definitely not his forté. He is far better as a comedian, as demonstrated by his work in a certain show about a woman in apartment 23. The rest of the cast are better at their roles, but the extent of how much better they are is quite limited. There are no Krysten Ritters in this show. The photography is also a bit on the flat side, with no interesting angles or compositions. I can only speculate about the sound, but the lack of any atmosphere, or indeed much sound other than "zombie" growls, gunshots, and dialogue, speaks for itself. There are characters that give the real feeling that they had lives outside of the story, but they are destroyed after at most ten minutes of screentime.
The plot device around which the film's ending is constructed is another warning sign. The actual mechanism by which it works gets no explanation. Apparently, one just kneels or lies down and lets one of the "zombies" put their hands on their face. Or something like that. Then you and all the "zombies" disappear. Or something like that. Oh, and if you are with someone who lets the "zombies" put their hands on their face, and you close your eyes real tight and think about fairies dancing in la la land, you get to open your eyes, stand up, and wonder where everybody went.
This begs a question, one that any writer, film student, or editor should be asking. If this is the material that the producers were happy with going into the market, what was left on the cutting room floor? The people who cry things like "release the director's / Snyder / dingdong cut" have one good justification. The addition or subtraction of just a little piece of footage can sometimes have a drastic impact on the film. But for every Blade Runner or Apocalypse Now, there are a million films like this one, where there is not one scene, not one shot, to suggest that a few nips and tucks here and there could make a remarkably different product. This is a C-grade horror story that lost its way in the middle, simple as that.
As for whether this is worth the attention of Clive Barker fans, well, I dearly wish he were more involved. The basic concept is very Barker, but it cannot commit to a Barker aesthetic, a Barker tone, or a Barker atmosphere. Instead, what we have is a secondary school play captured on film. It is productions like these that make one realise just how underrated pieces like the real Candyman are.
You're the Worst: The Intransigence of Love (2019)
It says a lot about my life that I wish I had a relationship like this
Sometimes you hear or read other peoples' thoughts about something and just wonder what kind of thought process they have. We are talking about a show that charts the progress of a mentally ill couple with a small group of mentally ill friends from friends with benefits to a couple with children and jobs they actually want to be in. If a show like this felt the same in season five as it did in seasons one or two, that would be bad writing. The rub is that we live in a world where some people expect their television to be like that of the 1980s, a half hour of gabs and routines where the characters never change and the same jokes are repeated over and over.
If you are one of these people, You're The Worst was never for you, and there is the door over there. We will gladly refund your money, to quote one of Taylor Tomlinson's best moments. Although the episodes make it easy to interpret the timeline as being continuous between seasons, that is, episode one of season four takes place immediately after episode thirteen of season three, or a year passing between seasons, the fact remains that people change, and TV with season after season after season of people not changing in fact has a shorter shelf life.
Anyway, I fondly remember watching the first ten to fifteen minutes of this episode and becoming incredibly confused. I even hit the back button on my remote control and checked that I had, in fact, selected episode one of season five of You're The Worst. And not long after I resumed playback, Gretchen pipes up and starts correcting elements of Jimmy's version of events. Both of them are lying their bits off, of course, but Gretchen's lies and Jimmy's lies vary in subtle ways that an attentive viewer can use to determine where the contributions come from.
One subtle feature of this episode that is lost on some people is that throughout the rest of the series, we have a couple whose relationship is kept healthy by the two halves telling themselves they can leave at any time. It is in the theme song, for crying out loud. The season is predicated on the idea that Jimmy and Gretchen are giving up the thing that has kept their relationship as healthy as it has been. And revealing how that works out is beyond the scope of this review, but a couple who lie so much about how they met to someone whose job is literally to optimise the romantic factor of their wedding is clearly not as committed to getting married as they think they are. Three seasons ago, imagining this couple being engaged was an impossibility.
If I had to tell someone what the story of You're The Worst was about as if it were a continuous one-season series as opposed to five, I would say that this is the story of a small group of people learning, and learning to deal with, the truth of themselves. Many, many people are afraid of the truth, and the truth for people suffering from mental illnesses, particularly ones who have suffered for decades, is a monster that makes the Incredible Melting Man look like a Cabbage Patch Kid. Gretchen has to deal with the truth that she will never be able to have a positive relationship with her parents, Jimmy has to deal with the truth that his histrionics are going to limit the number of people ready to continue knowing him for more than a year. And even beautiful truths, such as the potential of spending the rest of one's life with one of the most amazing women who ever existed, may be frightening.
Watching Jimmy and Gretchen invent a sloppy, completely idiotic story about how they met when you have already played kissy-kissy with the ugliest truths about your life is like watching people act out your fantasy of how the rest of your life will play out. The laughs we have about what the wedding planners are thinking in response to the tale spun by Jimmy and Gretchen are icing on the cake.
One article about my favourite episode of You're The Worst speaks of how that episode raises the bar for discussion of mental illness in fiction. Well, that applies to the whole show. It is a pity that there are no characters in the show that have bipolar disorder, because listening to a man or woman in a manic episode storying a wedding planner along about how they met their soon-to-be spouse is the only way one could top this routine.
No, this is not my favourite episode. Nor is it the best. But as an introduction to the insanity that is the final season, it is the ultimate "welcome" to people who have grown along with the show and understand that growing is an essential part of the story.
Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015)
The value of your opinion of anything creative is directly proportional to your hatred of Disney...
The nappy-net that the IMDB is now a part of forbids me to properly explain what the Reverse Midas Touch is, but Disney has it and then some. This film is like a Rorschach test for people who should or should not be allowed to make a film. And guess what, J. J.? You have failed hard enough that you having an active career is a slap in the face to good writers who cannot get a break, as is your continued drawing of breath.
Everything that happens in A New Hope 2: Electric Boogaloo happened in the first real Star Wars, and it happened there in a much better fashion. Probably the best example that I can give is that of the real Death Star destroying Alderaan. The real Death Star was orbiting Alderaan at a distance that, if the view through the window is anything to go by, is pretty similar to that at which the moon orbits Earth. This is for a good reason that someone who is into real science fiction would have noticed right away, and someone with a high school understanding of distance, velocity, et cetera, would work out very quickly. Light moves very fast, it is true, but the size of the universe is such that even at the speed of light, it takes years to go from one solar system to another. So the real Death Star fires into Alderaan from a distance at which it would take one percent of one percent of one percent of a second for light to cross. A similar principle applies with sniper shots versus plain old gunshot kills. There are records for the greatest distance of sniper kills, some of which are more than two or three kilometres. The average kill by a person who just bought a handgun in an American pawn shop is from less than a metre.
Which brings us to J. J. Abrams' Willy Envy Death Star. It fires at the "core worlds" from the edge of the galaxy. Assuming for the sake of argument that the galaxy of Star Wars is the same size as the Milky Way, this means that the Star Wars galaxy is somewhere from 83,800 light years to 91,000 light years from one end to the other. Let us be generous and go with the smaller number. This means that the multiple shots from Our Death Star Is The Scariest, Honest would take 41,900 years to reach said "core worlds". There is also a rule of science as regards distance and sight. Namely, when you are looking through the telescope at a planet that is a light year away, you are not seeing the planet where it is right now. You are seeing the planet where it was a year ago. The chances of hitting these planets is therefore smaller than the brain of a certain director whose name begins with J. J. and ends with Abrams. Maybe the mystery box is that tiny little space in his head where his brain sits.
Anyway, one point of my exercise with distances is to illustrate that even if your conscious brain does not notice the incredible insult to your intelligence posed by You Should Be Impressed By This Death Star, Really, You Should!, your reptile instinct brain notices the insult. Yes, I am mutilating a quote from Plinkett. Speaking of Plinkett, not one character in this film passes his test. People try to pretend Rey does by using vague objectives that could be applied to almost any hero character. But the people who described C-3P0, Han Solo, and so forth in Plinkett's example of his character test spoke in whole sentences. Fancies himself a playboy was probably the funniest sentence I have ever heard applied to Han Solo. And it is totally understandable that a person who has seen the real Star Wars might read him that way. Leaving aside god mode video game character who gets everything handed to her, it is impossible to use whole sentences to describe Rey. A common expression among good writers is that if you cannot picture your characters performing waste elimination actions, you have not developed them enough. Fan fiction has probably speculated about how toilets within the rebel base on Hoth worked. Rey is impossible to imagine doing anything other than talk. And talk she does.
A video essay is titled "why Rey is a Mary Sue and Luke Skywalker is not". Long story short, Luke starts the story with stars in his eyes and a longing for something more, gets told that his lack of concern about where he is and what he is doing is a big negative, and gets brutally humbled by his nemesis. Rey starts as the most powerful thing in the galaxy and ends as the most powerful thing in the galaxy. The sixth Hellraiser film, Hellseeker, develops its protagonist better than this. We start the piece thinking he is an unfortunate man losing his mind in the wake of a tragic accident, and slowly learn that he was in fact a horrible man who tried to kill his wife in order to get his money, and had the tables turned on him. As the referee of the piece tells him, welcome to the worst nightmare of all: reality.
And that is the problem with Disney Wars fans, Disney fans, and fans of a certain director whose ability to get work is an insult to people who have the potential to be the next Spielberg, Verhoeven, Donner, Coppola, or even Lucas. And whilst we are at it, let us talk a little bit about hypocrisy. All throughout the publicity for this insult, we were hearing how they were going back to practical models, practical this, practical that. Except that A New Hope 2: Electric Boogaloo and its sequels each, in and of themselves, have more computer effects shots in them than all of the prequels combined.
Back when the Internet was not run and controlled by people who want to put nappies on every living thing on the planet, a website existed that mocked film reviewers. Mr. Cranky, as the kind host called himself, summarised his review of Attack Of The Clowns with "When was the last time anyone said 'no' to George Lucas?". Well, that is exactly what the problem with A New Hope 2: Electric Boogaloo and Disney Wars full stop is. The same people who should be saying no are the people who have a vested interest in saying yes. It is delicious that near to all of the merchandise they produced was remaindered and is now likely part of whatever recycled plastic bottle you are currently drinking out of. If you think this is a good film, I do not want to know you. It really is that simple.
The end of Disney will be a bright shining light on this world.
Hellraiser: Revelations (2011)
Ladies and gentlemen, I present you with exhibit A concerning why authors need to be able to take back their IPs...
The Hellraiser property has had a long and troubled history, but the base of the problem is that Clive Barker sold the rights to people who went bankrupt, and during the bankruptcy, sold Hellraiser to whomever offered them enough. Barker never consented to this second sale, and given his response to individuals telling the world that this steaming pile was from his imagination or mind, it is very likely that he would have taken the rights back, had he the option to do so in the 1990s.
This "film" exists for no other reason than preventing Clive from getting the rights back. It is a spit in the face to Clive, and it is a spit in the face to the entire writer community. It speaks volumes about how out of touch copyright and intellectual property law is that lawyers for Clive did not just simply take this film (or the one before it) to court and say "my client's trademark and reputation are being abused, give him the trademark back, oh, and make these clowns pay us while we are at it". Some properties have been floating out there for decades without their creator having no recourse to negotiate more favourable terms or say no, thank you, I do not want this to be peoples' first impression of me.
So, onto the "story", such as it is. A pair of people you would want to slap senseless just for existing go to Tijuana seeking thrills. Everything about them screams "affluenza", or as people in the real world call it, no understanding of the reality that all actions, good or ill, have consequences. Yes, I am using the word consequences in a way that does not match the way it is normally used. But in any case, they get a rude awakening when one of them accidentally puts a clothes hook through the head of a sex worker that he is enjoying the services of. Notwithstanding that he would need to be deliberately and violently slamming her head on the clothes hook to do this, he and his fellow idiot sink into a deep spiral of misery and want out of Tijuana as quickly as possible. I have to give the filmmakers credit here for the idiots not believing that simply leaving the locality will adequately separate them from the crime.
In any event, one of our idiots is very awkwardly and unconvincingly convinced to buy the Lament Configuration Box, Pinhead's door to "hell". Clive Barker made it very clear in his writings and to a lesser extent his film that the door is in fact a schism to another dimension where members of a monastic order have a definition of pleasure that we would regarded as twisted, even psychotic. Told this this box will give him unimaginable pleasure, and not having the sense to ask "what is the catch?" like any person who is racked with guilt from having committed what is at least manslaughter, the dimwit opens the box.
Fast forward to when one of the morons' families comes into possession of the box and a tape showing what a pair of idiots the two idiots are, and they sit in a house arguing about what happened, what they should do, and what the box is all about. The dimwits have left enough clues for a woman unlucky enough to be a sister to one of them to start spouting dialogue about what a cenobite is, and make a very silly display of, shall we say, enjoying the box in front of family members nobody not from a family of child abusers would ever do this in front of. And then it happens. One of the idiots turns up in the yard of the family house and both families start pressing him for clues as to where the other idiot is. Of course, anyone in the audience who has read The Hellbound Heart or watched Hellraiser knows where this is going.
Which brings us to the biggest crime of this film. As I said, it has absolutely no other purpose than to deprive Clive Barker of the opportunity to take back his creation, declare everything that he did not write or direct non-canon, and do with as he pleases. You know, like any author in his position would. They did not even have the courtesy to come up with or buy a new script, as they did with Hellraisers In Name Only five through eight. (In fairness, six was a lot better than the rest but that bar is not low, it is on the ground.) Even A New Hope 2: Electric Boogaloo did not plagiarise the first entry of the series it purported to be part of to this degree. That it is legal for a company to plagiarise a man's work just to keep the intellectual property from being returned to him is motive enough for all writers to refuse to work in the Hollywood system at all, go to Europe, take their chances there.
Anyway, you cannot talk about a Hellraiser In Name Only film without talking about what subsequent producers mistook for Hellraiser's Freddy Kreuger, namely Pinhead. Pinhead was never the focus of real Hellraiser, he was the guy who came in and cleaned up the mess when the villains were done destroying one another. Much like Sergio Leone's Man With No Name, the real Pinhead only spoke as much as he needed to. He did not spout one-liners, he did not have catchprases, he just explained the rules and told the players what they had to do if they wanted to get out of this mess.
Stephen Smith Collins is not a good actor. Yes, the production was as rushed as all get-out, the director makes Ed Wood look like Francis Ford Coppola, and the script is like the work of a six year old who watched Hellraiser and decided to try to create their own written version. But somehow, Collins manages to overact and underact at the same time. He speaks in paragraphs about how this person made a terrible mistake and that person will come to seek the cenobites out in time and blah blah blah. If Doug Bradley is the Ewan McGregor, Collins is the Hayden Christensen. Again, the real Pinhead speaks exactly as much as he needs to, and he moves with exactly the same economy. All he needed to do was tell Kirsty why he and his cohorts were there, what her opening the box meant, and the consequences of her promise to bring them to the uncle that escaped them being malarkey. Bradley would have ad-libbed rather than read out the garbage lines that Collins manages to make worse.
Just as a film is only as good as its antagonist, a climax is only as good as the roots it sits on. Yet this film's climax is even worse than the build-up. In place of a man realising that the terrifying monsters he has been trying to escape throughout the story have found him, and the monster with a voice weaker than that of many customer service personnel these days tells him that they had to hear he killed his brother from his own lips, we just have the chains, hooks, and daft speechmaking.
This all ties back into my original point. As I said, this is just plagiarising Clive Barker's work in order to stop him from taking back the thing that most of the world knows him for. If this does not disgust you, then you should not have any say in any part of the entertainment industries, or pretty much anything.
It really is that simple.
Breaking Bad (2008)
First-time viewers think they are watching a good man turn bad. Then...
And then you count how many times a person rewatches the show before they realise that Walter was always a bad person. Water starts as a bad caterpillar, the cancer is the cocoon, and what emerges is a truly evil butterfly. Probably the least subtle clue is his response to the store bullies' mockery of his son. Sure, this is how every good father would respond, but a viewer who watches Walter's body language, expressions, and speech pattern notices something. He is enjoying hurting the individual whose attitude he is trying to adjust a little bit too much. And not in the way that was common to teachers in the 1980s or 1990s. This is one reason I enjoy rewatching Breaking Bad a lot. The realisation that the meth kingpin who enlists neo-Nazis to help him out of pickles and the sad, resigned chemistry teacher are the same person. The only difference is motivation and opportunity.
People often use Breaking Bad when criticising the American healthcare system, too. Where else in the so-called first world would a man need to turn to selling meth in order to try to ensure his terminal medical condition will not leave his family bankrupt, out on the streets?
I just have to say this quickly before I go on because I was reading a comment in which the commenter ends with "except hank I love u". Well, I hate to burst your bubble, but Hank is in fact one of the biggest cowards and villains of the series. A high candidate for the least corrupt and most honourable man of the series, Mike Ehrmantraut, was in the business to try and prevent his granddaughter from being driven into the poverty trap and potentially becoming one of those crack-addicted sex workers that Hank made such a show of for Flynn's benefit. Hank's constant attacks on Kaylee's nest egg are disgusting and watching Hank get a bullet in the head from one of the few people in the series who are more disgusting than he is was a cheerful moment, in spite of how miserable the events of the episode are otherwise. The saddest moment of the episode in question is when Steve is killed along with Hank, and Hank could have easily solicited backup from other officers if he had not been so determined to the point of tunnel vision to ruin the lives of those on Walter's peripherals.
Lest we forget Hank's "just say no to drugs" thing to Flynn. I am not sure if cannabis has a medical benefit for cerebral palsy, but a good uncle would be keen to find out and, if that does turn out to be the case, help him acquire it. But no, just say no to drugs, boy. Take my posit in conjunction with the fact that cannabis also has pain relief and seize-prevention effects, both of which would be necessary if one of the metastasised tumours showed up in Walt's brain, and, well, you get the idea. If there was a better way to show the audience that their government's attitude towards recreational drugs needs immediate and powerful correction, I cannot think of it.
Odin above, Hank's behaviour on first contact with Mexico, a state that has in part become hell because of American drug policy, is hardly the behaviour of a hero, either.
Are Walt's pride, ego, or vanity the reason he turns down more benevolent help from those who offer it? Maybe. But his actions throughout the latter half of the series are much more suggestive of flat-out maliciousness. He does not have antisocial personality disorder and he does have a concern about the consequences of his actions. But his actions in the hope of getting the people who cheated him to give what was left of his money to his son also demonstrate that he cares about others even when they are posing a real problem for him. The sad truth is that Walter has a soft case of what I might call Post Abuse Syndrome or Post Being Cheated Syndrome. People shafted him repeatedly in his life before the cancer, and although he always had a very evil side to him, he would be a very different person if not for being cheated out of things he earned.
Aaron Paul is the perfect foil, and he deserves better work that he has been receiving in more recent times. Jesse is not an innocent man, by any means, but Aaron plays his growing sorrow, anger, and confusion at the depths of what he has gotten himself into perfectly. We start out with an arrogant little weasel who thinks he is indispensable because he has a little knowledge of how it works on the street, and slowly metamorphoses into a competent businessman with great chemistry skills who becomes the voice of reason when Walt finally eliminates all opposition. In the brief moment of the closing chapters where people can reason with Walt, there is the Mike way, the Jesse way, and the Skyler way. It is not a coincidence that the Jesse way appears to work the best and most often.
Now that Better Call Saul is over, I hope that Giancarlo Eposito can come back to The Boys and lift it out of the troph it has found itself in. A man who can convincingly act like he is not merely unafraid but bored and contemptuous with a superhero is the perfect candidate for playing the man who runs the arm of a drug empire that has the other two arms in constant jealousy. Gustavo Fring is the Emperor Palpatine (the good one of Episodes V and VI) of the piece, and his vengeance against the Baron who killed his partner in front of him is the kind of moment that more traditional Westerns like The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly or Once Upon A Time In The West live in infamy for. Don Eladio's death is the discovery of the graveyard or the "keep your loving brother happy". And immediately after, we get a perfect piece of post-climax spice when we learn that Mike's blood type is O Negative. (And Peter Steele fans all had a good chuckle at that one, certainly. Mike is one of the few people who would look up at Peter and speak aggressively.)
Hank's blood type is probably AB positive. People who know their blood types understand what I am saying here.
Hell, Breaking Bad even has a musical moment that Sergio Leone would salute. Negro y Azul, aka The Ballad Of Heisenberg, is one of my favourite examples of how beautiful South American music can be.
I took a long time to give Breaking Bad a shot, but I am glad that I saw it when I did. Having the maturity and mental stability (I could do with medical cocaine and medical cannabis, ha ha) to appreciate what it is saying is a blessing. If you have not seen it yet, be prepared for a story that will amaze and sadden you with a tale of Humanity as it really is. Then be ready to be happy as it also shows you moments of Human triumph amidst the chaos and madness. Few as those might be.
And please sign the petition for a Young Mike Ehrmantraut show. His anecdotes about the foolish mistakes he or other people have made in the past are worth the price of admission on their own.
Lords of Chaos (2018)
Ever wanted to see black metal through a glam or "nu-metal" poseur's eyes? Then this is for you.
We will start with the things the stupid book and the even more stupid film got right. Because this is a short list. Euronymous talked a lot of garbage and made a lot of empty threats. One thing that has to be said right now is that this wretched film did very poorly is the black circle thing. Multiple sources, including people who knew Euronymous personally, have stated that it only existed in his mind. If the film is going for a dramatisation of the delusions in Euronymous' head, then I guess it succeeded.
The pieces of Dead's skull thing is accurate. Necrobutcher himself confirmed this, and here is the thing. Necrobutcher has openly said in interviews from around the time of this sad, sad film that he had plans to kill Euronymous himself. Dead was Necrobutcher's friend, and whether Euronymous encouraged Dead to commit suicide is not something I know for certain, but Necrobutcher's response to making necklaces out of pieces of Dead's skull (or so Euronymous claimed, as I think I have established by now, he talked a lot of garbage) was a lot more aggressive than is the case in this film. The words that went back and forth and the level of hate was even greater than that between "Varg" and Euronymous.
Speaking of things the film gets right (and wrong), Varg was a nobody. Just like Euronymous, he talked a lot of garbage and the right people listened at the wrong time. He is a poseur who just happened to be in the right place at the right time to be mistaken for some black metal composer genius. The amount of garbage that comes out of Varg's mouth these days... Well, let us just say that if the list of people Euronymous made angry enough to seriously plan to kill him was a mouse, the number of people Varg has made angry enough to want to kill him is Jupiter. There is a reason he lives alone on a fifty-acre farm somewhere in France with a nice collection of rifles, after all. Suffice to say, making Varg look like the big tough boy who knows what is going down is like saying that Bohemian Rhapsody was well-edited.
If Varg pulled a knife on a twenty-five year old Freddie Mercury, Freddie would have beaten the daylights, moonlights, and gaslights out of him.
So allegedly, Jonas Åkerland was a session drummer for Bathory. Um, Jonas, you have therefore worked with the real inventor of Black Metal. Why did you not point this out to the screenwriters?
Also disturbing is the manner in which the film somehow manages to do to the black metal scene what Disney has done to Star Wars. There were far more bands than just Mayhem and Burzum in the world. Bathory is the best example because Quorthon was to black metal what David Bowie was to mainstream rock. He was always one step ahead of the latest trend. When black metal bands were "raw", Quorthon already moved on to Viking-inspired epics, and so on. There is a site called metal archives where you can go and see how many black, doom, death, and everything in between (even glam poseurs are listed, to my chagrin) bands there are. The main criteria for being part of this database is to have released something that is available to the public. The number of bands in toto listed there is 172,157. They have 2,230 from Norway alone. Sure, this number includes bands that have disbanded, you would never think the number was this high if you only got your information from this film. And that is the worst part about these trendy, say-nothing biopics. They make a world and an experience seem so much smaller than it is.
There is also no mention of what happened to Mayhem after Varg murdered Euronymous. I can forgive not mentioning what happened to Varg because he is an idiot and anyone can confirm his sub-90 IQ by searching him out on YouTube. But Mayhem continued to record music after Euronymous, and whilst most of it ranges from pleasant to blah in quality, it would be worth mentioning. Just like the fact that there are black metal bands in places like Japan, what used to be Yugoslavia, Russia, Instanbul, Iran, you name it. In case it is unclear, for someone who is allegedly so connected to us, Jonas sure let the side down.
If you want a good indicator of the quality of this product beyond my words, consider this. The closing credits are accompanied by a cover of Freezing Moon, Mayhem's best and best-known song, but it is played by what sounds like a band of ten year olds. The real Freezing Moon, an example of how black metal uses tonality and mood to take the listener on a journey, was written by Dead and Necrobutcher.
Dead is, well, dead, so I cannot speak for him. But that Necrobutcher refused permission to this dreck film to use his song, and I am sure if you asked him he would say Dead would also refuse permission, should tell you all you need to know. The film (and the book), could not get access to the real thing, so they cobbled garbage together and called it a day.
Hey, at least it was competently shot and edited, so Bohemian Rhapsody is still worse on a technical level. But them, Bohemian Rhapsody had far more respect for its subject.
You're the Worst: Pancakes (2019)
Not the best episode of the series, but very close, and one of the best series endings ever made
It is funny that I am listening to a particular Type O Negative song called Too Late: Frozen as I begin to write this review, because that and Be My Druidess tonally match the changing character of Jimmy's relationship with Gretchen well. Sometimes, one feels so sad for them because the toxic models of how relationships work that they were given growing up are still hurting them even at the end of the story. But at the same time, the constant shift of the tone of their relationship, the way they have discovered some of the roots of that, and the major changes in other aspects of their lives, have ultimately changed them.
In a world where television shows and films are given ratings for how well they depict a subject, You're The Worst would be King And Queen Of The Hill when it comes to depicting characters that are mentally ill, and You're The Worst delivers one of its biggest hits in the finale. Jimmy's Histrionic Personality Disorder, in particular his wild, exaggerated, and disproportionate shows of emotion, almost scuttle the wedding completely. Gretchen's Major Depressive Disorder and seemingly complete absence of validation during childhood rear their head in response to that. So the way in which they resolve this conflict or case of cold feet is wonderful both because of how it means their relationship will continue for the foreseeable future, but also because of just how very Jimmy and Gretchen it is.
Watching Jimmy, Gretchen, and Lindsay take turns at telling Edgar off as he sits in his jeep hoping that Jimmy will flee the wedding is gold. Throughout the series, Edgar has been more needy and codependent than either Lindsay or Paul. Which is quite an accomplishment since they both have Dependent Personality Disorder. Seeing him reap his just reward after trying to tell Jimmy to not marry Gretchen and that they will "destroy each other" is both tragic and a great payoff for his arc throughout the entire series. When Gretchen tells him that the one thing she could never do is respect him, a savvy viewer realises that it is pretty much the same way for the audience. The thing that held us back from acknowledging it was that he had yet to use up the very reasonable excuse that PTSD is. But anyone who has had the love of a woman who is anything like Gretchen (not to boast, but yeah) and has had an upbringing like Jimmy's (definitely not a boast) knows that when someone says "you will destroy each other", you will respond with "there is no way I would rather go". Because being killed by someone who loves you...
Hearing Aya Cash deliver a speech that includes her telling the man she has had little else but contempt for throughout the series that at times of being a particularly horrible person, letting that man stay in their house was the one Humanising thing about Jimmy exemplifies what a treasure she is. What people get wrong about Major Depressive Disorder is the belief that without medication, it is all misery all the time. Nope, it is a Frostdemonstorm of emotions so powerful that they could kill if weaponised, and Aya hit every ball out of every park with it so much that one sometimes wonders if she does not suffer from MDD herself.
Great, now I am getting flashbacks to the music video for Therion's cover of Mon Amour, Mon Ami. But anyway, although they are very minor appearances in the film, it is also fun to get one final whiff of Vernon's socially inappropriate behaviour and Becca's antisocial personality disorder. The softer side of antisocial personality disorder is that one might attempt to solicit sex with the groom at a wedding. That should tell you all you need to know about the condition. Becca has spent an entire series disregarding the wellbeing and physical safety of others, and now she is seriously entertaining the idea of ruining a wedding day.
Oh, and Ben Folds (the fictionalised version) apparently likes what Vernon refers to as Trash Juice. Stop encouraging Vernon, please, Fictional Ben Folds.
The time jumps are the final knockout punch. At first, one thinks we are seeing the ashes of Jimmy's and Gretchen's relationship. Hey, it happens. Contrary to what some will tell you, Human social and sexual behaviour is very close to that of a rat. Rats begin with having sex like it is going out of style, slowly wind down to less and less often, and finally leave one another when they tire of each other. So a marriage falling apart at some point is hardly unexpected. And then we learn that not only has the relationship survived throughout the lengthy time of the jump (going by how old their daughter appears, the gap looks like somewhere from three to five years), but the florist who was the biggest iceberg to the ship, well, the relationship has worked out to the point where they can trust her to babysit.
If you want to subvert an expectation, this is how you do it. Everything about the show up to this point, including the brief jumps forward in time during the final two seasons, left us expecting the SS Jimmy And Gretchen to explode with the force of eight billion nuclear explosions. We even find out that Gretchen has a new job that she does not hate.
Normally, jumping back and forth as much as You're The Worst: Pancakes does is a recipe for disaster. But each jump is well-planned, delivers information in the perfect sequence, and gives us a full circle climax that keeps the happy feeling of the ending grounded. They are still able to keep one foot out the door, but now they have a child, a house that would not present a million ways for a child to hurt themselves, and the same difficulties that previously kept us in suspense as to whether they would be together in the next five minutes, never mind the rest of the season. The panning shot of Gretchen and the baby crying in unison followed by Gretchen reminding Jimmy of the ever-present possibility of her suicide during the conclusion of their aborted wedding is one of the most relatable parts of the series.
You're The Worst was a game-changer in more ways than one as far as television series are concerned. And whilst season two, episode seven ("There Is Not Currently A Problem") is the best episode of the series, Pancakes is high enough on the scale to look it in the eye whilst standing toe to toe. And those who are saying "...and then what happened?" are missing the point. Life can end the next day, it can end forty years from now, but for people who have the same kind of relationships with themselves as the main characters of You're The Worst, every day is a series unto itself. That is the main thing people who do not know through first-hand experience ought to learn from the series.
And be sure to catch the other cast members in other series. Kether Donohue and Aya Cash have already followed up with some legendary performances in great shows.
Television is now a more mature and flexible medium than cinema. If you are like me and only slightly older than the cast of You're The Worst, you know how big a "who'da thunk it?" that is.
Gen V (2023)
The pendulum swings back the other way...
I loved The Boys. For two seasons. My decision to purchase season one was based around the fact that Aya Cash was in the show. Little did I know at the time that she was only in season two, and from the moment a superhero ran through a woman and in the process made her explode, I cared a lot less. Then season two rolls around, and Aya Cash shows us again why she is the master of portraying people with neurological maladies. No, not every Nazi had antisocial personality disorder, but her portrayal of Stormfront screams that phrase loud and clear.
So then season three rolls around, and what I saw made me sad. Maybe the complaint that media and television and so forth is shortening our attention span is true, but I like to watch things and analyse them, or in many cases ask myself how I would tell this story differently. I came up with no answers to that question in the first two seasons, but many of them in season three. The most important of which is that they crammed too many plots into the one season! ... Six or seven stories were being told, from Soldier Boy being as big a bully as Homelander to Kimiko demonstrating that the writers do not know much about selective mutism to one of the most poorly constructed and overly rapid Child Turns To The Dark Side plots in history. Each of these stories is about as deep as a puddle and as wide as a hair. Each arc could have sustained a season of their own, assuming we had writers of the same level as seasons one and two.
So why am I telling you all of this? Because Gen V fails to live up to its potential in exactly the opposite way. One of the most important rules of storytelling is that one should spend exactly the amount of time it takes to tell the story well. No more, no less. The Boys proper had some long episodes, but the story being told in those episodes was more than enough to sustain the length. In Gen V, especially early on, episodes could be cut down by ten to fifteen minutes without losing any important information. Character introductions are exactly the opposite of those in season one of The Boys. That is, slow, inefficient, and often unable to give the audience a reason to care about the character. And amazingly for a show with so much redundant running time, there are precious few characters who meet the waste expulsion rule.
The waste expulsion rule (yes, it is worded very differently outside of the NappyNet) goes like this. If you cannot visualise your character expelling waste from their body, you have not developed them enough. The character of Marie Moreau passes this test well because she discovers her powers whilst apparently menstruating for the first time. Little Cricket's powers meet the rule because she has to either binge eat or purge in order to change her size. But when we meet the rest of the student body, so many students are difficult to remember because their powers are either insufficiently demonstrated or not used in a context that makes the viewer remember them. Which powers would you remember on first viewing? One demonstrated by crushing the groin of a metal statue? Or one demonstrated by a man returning to visibility inside the women's toilet block after being advised by a woman who is more powerful than him that she knows he is there? I am sure you can see where this is going.
A painfully obvious fact is that The Boys universe needs better writers, and fewer. If they were committed, this war could be won with a fourth of our present force. Sorry, wrong story. I mean that if the writers were the kinds of writers who wrote You're The Worst or Mary Kills People, The Boys would not be in the predicament that it is now. That is, it would not be making hard paces towards the very bland, baby-oriented, spiceless bottom-feeder rubbish that is the MCU (and has been since day one, with a couple of exceptions).
So the positives are pretty easy to list. Jaz Sinclair and Lizze Broadway perform the best-written characters on the show, and the writing of said characters is the best we have seen in this canon for three years. They even manage to elevate the poorly written and poorly acted characters around them. And the story is not all bad. When the story focuses on the sinister actions of the administration of the university and of Vought, instead of the ins and outs of university life that could have been written in a far more interesting manner, it is much more interesting.
When all is said and done, the problem is that the writers need to go back to the first two seasons of The Boys and see what made them work. Specifically, the writing focused on fleshing out and developing the characters rather than "wow! Look! Superpowers!". Yes, superpowers are an important aspect of a superhero, but a question need be asked. Which of the following stirs your curiosity about Homelander more? That he can shoot laser beams out of his eyes and fly? Or that he is a manchild who has about as much emotional and impulse control as a week-old baby?
When you answer that question correctly, you know what the problem has been with The Boys' universe, including Gen V, for a couple of years.
RoboCop: Rogue City (2023)
A very mixed bag. A sizeable handful of things a real fan will appreciate, scattered amongst a pile of things they will not.
In spite of attempts to infantalise and completely Harry Potty-ise him, RoboCop is still a superhero with a massive guaranteed audience. If you are a Generation X-er, you know the name, you know the social conditions his creation (in the sense of the writers inventing him) were in response to, and you know that things have only gotten worse since the one true RoboCop film was released. So this game was always going to have a guaranteed audience, regardless of who made it or why. I just wish that I could say the game is as great a masterpiece as the one true RoboCop film.
Well, having finished the campaign, I can tell you that in spite of some great moments scattered through the middle, RoboCop: Rogue City is a long way short of what it could have been. First problem is that it takes elements that it should not adhere to and adheres to them. Nothing outside of the Paul Verhoeven film written by Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner is canon, and every real fan knows that. Moreover, the phobia that Japanese corporations were going to buy everything in America was fading fast in 1993, when the first attempt to put a nappy on RoboCop as opposed to making a dull, lifeless copy was released. To regurgitate that old and ill-developed idea was just plain stupid.
Speaking of regurgitation, the Old Man is put into the body of a RoboCop 2 and, after listening to a rather puzzling message from him on the board room screens, your final fight is, well, with that. Moreover, the people who speak to you over comms in the lead-up make hyperbolic statements about monsters and something big, as if this incident with an attempt to make a giant RoboCop was not already over and done with a long time ago.
Lewis, and pretty much the entire Detroit Police Department, were first-hand witnesses when "RoboCop 2" (the machine, not the film) tore the city to pieces. So the speech and behaviour implying that they have no idea what is attacking the building is mind-boggling. Oh, and just wait, the way the fight ends is pretty much exactly the same in the bargain. The fight itself is another of those bullet-sponge affairs where you pound your enemy with everything you can get your hands on, and wait for the game to decide you have hit it enough.
Okay, I get it, we are dealing with a company I have never heard of before being published through a company that I only previously knew of for making cheaper PS4 controllers. But with the alleged involvement of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the idea that this is the best story they could come up with is sad. And I like first-person shooting just as much as the next guy, but we do need more to keep the party going.
Nearly everything in the skill tree is useless. There is a psychology skill that allows you to better influence the outcomes for the people you speak to, but it is useless when you stop to consider that there are only three or four people whose fates will be changed through your speech, and hundreds of enemies to kill. Similarly, engineering. You might want to open a safe without finding the combination, but there are barely any turrets to reprogram, and again, hundreds of enemies to kill. There are skills any player who knows the kind of game they are playing would be an idiot to not take. Why even bother having this system?
The attempted ending slides also fail because the actions that prompt them do not feel all that influential. Merely talking to one mayoral candidate is taken as supporting him even when you try to tell them over and over that you will not talk them up on the news. I was not even sure which mayor I helped because the one that won the election resigned after one day. The sort of cheap and childish joke we associated with Why Do You Not Just Paint An S On RoboCop's Chest And Call It A Day? A real RoboFan knows which film that code refers to.
So what can I say? You can pay full price like me, and feel like an idiot, or you can wait until this game inevitably crashes into the ten dollar bin. I can assure all and sundry that this will not take long, as the game has a third-rate story, and is a third-rate first-person shooter. It is only the individual moments such as when RoboCop is speaking with people who are on his side that make it worthwhile.
Saw X (2023)
Declare 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 non-canon. Then you have a perfect series.
I am late to the party. But one statement in the review on the site carried on in the name of the late Roger Ebert sold me. I am not quoting it word for word, but this is all about the worst kind of scammers picking the wrong guy.
I had an aunt. Well, she was married to my uncle, but her bright, energetic, and powerful personality made her more like one of my clan than most of my clan. She was that energetic that she scared me at times when I was a little boy. Then one day when I am in my late teens, I learn that she had lung cancer. Everyone smoked during my childhood, and everyone was warned over and over, so it was a shock and a not-shock at the same time. Long story short, they took out half of one lung, told her to come back for further testing, and they they found a new tumour in her brain. In the last months of her life, she was still possessed of a fighting spirit the like of which would still be a fright to some children, but her body was so worn out that walking from her lounge to her bed was a challenge. I have also had more than half a dozen skin cancers removed, the first at age twenty-two, and wear a scar in my face that can be seen across the room to this day.
As the review also put it, this is the first time in who knows how many Saw films where the sins of the people John is torturing are sufficient to justify his actions. Odin knows that if someone had tried to trick my aunt in this manner, they would have a decent number of people with Scottish ancestry to deal with. The "traps" themselves, although not genius, are more on-point than any in any other Saw film. I have never had a cancer beyond that of the skin, and thankfully the most curable kind so far, but I know well that during the terminal stages, people would give anything to stop feeling the pain. Including cutting off a limb.
Previously, the series' punchline was about the irony of the hero turning out to be not so heroic. Saw X switches it up a bit by making us think there is any danger of Jigsaw being outsmarted, even killed. Given that this film takes place between 1 and 2, we already know on a base level that Jigsaw will get out of this one, so the film gives us a proxy to be frightened for instead. A little boy who was unfortunate enough to arrive at the building at the wrong time. Jigsaw's and Amanda's fear that this little boy who did nothing to deserve their attention might get hurt keeps us anchored in the righteousness of their cause.
This is far from a perfect film. The final act, the moment when our last two contestants think they have outsmarted Jigsaw and Amanda, drags a little, the pacing of that part of the film is off. It is as satisfying as hell to see how our chief scammers die, but cut five minutes out of that segment of the film, and it would have been more satisfying. Before I continue, I have to point out that scammers do not play to stupidity, but to emotion. People with terminal cancer will often do almost anything to turn off that time bomb, and those who promote a remedy that is not only untested but also lacks a plausible rationale prey upon that desperation, that feeling that one will do anything to make it stop. That is one clever part of this film. The scammers never go into the specifics of what they are doing and how it is meant to work, but they do give enough of a story that to a person who knows a little more about medicine than the average bear (just enough to get myself into trouble, says my general doctor), the scam here seems to have an actual, plausible rationale. Meaning our scammers are, as the final act shows, smarter than the average Bear.
I will forgive the fact that Shawnee and Tobin look far older than they did in Saw 1 or 2. We can call this the Better Call Saul Effect, where the story is compelling enough to stop the audience from caring about that. No, Saw X is not nearly in the league of BCS, but now I can imagine Saul arguing for the sparing of each victim.
The big surprise at the end, when the control room also has a gas chamber style mechanism, stretches credulity to an extent that can only be survived because this film does a better job than any of the other nine of selling Jigsaw's knowledge of engineering. The problem that everything has to go exactly right for Jigsaw is still present, but this time he hints that he has made contingency plans, which is a touch that would have improved many a Saw film, including 2 and 3.
It is also perhaps timely that I watched Saw X at a time when I was in the middle of watching the Amazon Prime revival of Takeshi's Castle. The traps in this one have a real Takeshi's Castle flavour to them. Close enough is not good enough. We are given a real sense of wonder as to what will happen if our contestants complete the inhumane task given unto them. Indeed, one of them does succeed, and John tells Amanda to take that winner, get them to a hospital. It is true that John, or Jigsaw, has never directly killed anyone. Never caused them the fatal injury, even if the detective in 2 is right in that making a person put a gun to their head and pull the trigger is the same thing. But I will just say that our lucky contestant who should have lived to see another day is not killed by anyone on Team Jigsaw and leave it at that.
I would talk about how I would improve the final act, but the simple truth is that for a series that became more comedy than fear, Saw X is a great reminder of what once was. The Saw series was never that good, but now there are four we can argue about which is the best. And this one is a great contender for the top of that dogpile.
Disenchantment (2018)
What a sad way to go out...
Yes, my review title does refer to the final episode, but the roots of how awful season five was in general were planted at least a couple of years prior.
On first look, Disenchantment was a fantasy series set in a realistic medieval world. It deconstructed tropes of fantasy series in ways that were as brilliant as they were snarky. On this go-around, the Princess not only flees her wedding, but shows through her actions that she would rather die than be married to her betrothed. Elves, or more accurate Elfs, are shown as ugly little critters whose society, be it their own or their enclave within Dreamland, is one nobody would want a bar of. The King is neither of the standard binary choices of wise warrior sage whom everyone goes to for justice or a cruel tyrant. He is a bumbling idiot who gets tricked at every turn by the Princess. We even have moments in which he compares himself with siblings or ancestors. But he is also Humanised by the fact that his first Queen, the mother of said Princess, has been turned to stone, and he is searching relentlessly for the means to undo this.
(I should note at this point that the Elves are also depicted in a way that suits their appearance. In place of a certain director and his vision that makes you certain you never want to play Dungeons & Dragons with him, these Elves are idiots whose refusals to break with tradition have literally made them the village idiots of the show's world.)
Which brings us to our central character, the aforementioned Princess. Tiabeanie is everything the deep as a puddle and about as wide in the bargain Princess Arwens of the world are. Although Tiabeanie, or Bean to everyone who knows her, is not as unpleasant to look at as the Elves, she is a buck-toothed, sharp-faced individual that could be mistaken for male at a certain distance. But she has what so many Arwens do not. That is, she has the internal mechanics to be worthy of being a future Queen. As previously stated, she is vastly intellectually superior to the King, and puts one over on him so frequently that it was a cleverly-constructed running gag in the good seasons. Indeed, Bean is outwitting almost everybody in every situation she is in. Which makes it all the more rewarding when her path to her goal is blocked by someone that she cannot outwit, and has to change her tactics. The reflective moments in which she stumbles for solutions that are not meant for idiots or barroom brawls are fun scenes in themselves.
And no great character is complete without great sidekicks. Elfo, the lesser of the two in this story, leaves the magically hidden Elf realm because he is sick of the stifling adherence to order. All of the Elfs have names that end in an "oh", such as Shocko, and their dominant behaviour is the basis of their name. Shocko will, surprise surprise, act shocked in response to shocking behaviour from the likes of Bean. A big "whaaaa?" sound from him. Other fun names include King Rulo, Superviso, Leavo, or Grifto. These name-based jokes are funny because of context. More on context in a moment. Elfo is probably my pick for my least favourite character in the series, but fish out of water characters taken to this extreme have never appealed to me. Elfo makes his way to Dreamland, develops a crush on Bean, makes a fool of himself constantly trying to win her over, and on occasion delivers the best short gags in an episode. "I'm drowning!" "Hi, I'm Elfo!"
The devil on Bean's shoulder is a literal demon conjured by evil sorcerers as part of their plot against Dreamland. Lucielle, or Luci as he makes certain everyone calls him, is the most fun character outside of Bean. Make statements of how rotten he is, he does, but he does it far better than the characters in dramas (or those stupid stereotypical fantasy films) who try to use this to intimidate others. When he talks about the souls he has tormented or the people he has convinced to do terrible things, he says it in a very calm, matter of fact manner, and usually to himself as a form of contemplating whether his latest nefarious idea will work. Moreover, when he suggests a terrible thing for Bean to do, his way of urging her is like that of a high school boy. "Come on! Doitdoitdoit!" or the like. Oh, and he is at best a foot tall. Needless to say, he is rather good at persuasion.
There is a rule in storytelling forgotten by storytellers and audiences alike. Context matters. The stereotypical Arwen's final choice depends so much on context. In one version, she gives Frodo her place on the road to paradise, telling him that it is his to take if his wounds physical and emotional are too much for him to take in life. In the other, she is just told the option is no longer open to her. One of these versions is what Good Disenchantment follows. Bean is not what Brits used to refer to as wanton because of a bad childhood or because she is upset about the iron expectations placed upon Princesses. She is this way because she enjoys how life as a drunken gambling brawler feels. Is she sad about being expected to marry a Prince or to cede the throne to her younger brother? Sure, but as her interactions with Luci or Elfo reveal, she would be drinking her weight in alcohol regardless.
Unfortunately, the rule of context begins to turn against the series at the moment that the King is buried alive. (By the way, Zøg is not pronounced "Zog", a translation engine pronounces it more as "Sayg", and it is the Norwegian word for "Search". *Those accent marks mean something!*) We stop deconstructing fantasy tropes and start telling straightforward stories that feel padded, often repetitive, and towards the end simply repeat the tropes. Only, the tropes without being given any foundation or uniqueness, thus any context, fall flat and do not bring any emotional response from the discerning audience.
And thus, instead of the story going to the point of Dreamland facing a massive existential crisis because Bean's mother turns out to not be the wonderful wife and mother that Bean and the King had constructed in their minds, and building on from that point, we watch the story go around and around in circles as characters die, are resurrected, die again, and on and on it goes. The uniqueness is gone, and instead we are following Bean to Steamland to listen to her say "stience" over and over. And hey, Caitlin Kennedy, if you want a comedy where mental health is done well, go watch You're The Worst, please. The only reason I do not feel insulted after Disenchanted's deep and wide as puddles touching on the subjects is because I was pretty much checked out by then.
Season Five is a sad, sad note to go out on. I found one joke as funny as those in Season One, and part of the problem is, as the critical consensus has it, the show is too willing to play it safe. Once you take away the aspect of the drunken gambling Princess who would rather go to hell (literally) than marry the prince, you have nothing. And acid jokes will not change the fact that every story choice in the finale is so typically fantasy trope, playing it safe, that it has zero impact. Evil Queen dies, love interest is resurrected through the choice of a hero's dead friend, nobody that we are taught to take an interest in is made a Queen, and on and on it goes.
I recommended this series to a person I trusted, before they bared their fangs, when it was only two seasons. If I could have seen what was then "tomorrow", I would have advised them that the show was going to turn bad. Watch season one, then imagine what you would write for the next four seasons. It will be hard to make a structurally worse show.
You're the Worst: Insouciance (2014)
Imagine it is that time of the month, and your boyfriend has Histrionic Personality Disorder
So I have to disclose before I opine about the writing, acting, or direction that I am about as male as it is possible to get. Every aspect of my appearance from the near-black when freshly shaven facial hair to the shoulders you can balance a beside table on, all screams very male. I grew up in an abusive household where my mother and sister might as well have been aliens. The former may as well have been one of the Aliens from the film of the same name. And the male half of the gene pool, a person I would show to Jimmy and say I would be glad to swap with him (this is putting it *very* nicely), well, that was no help.
I have been dealing with support workers, people who are helping me, one of whom has in conversation helped me better understand the workings of the feminine form and Odin above, it is like nature hates women, too. So after watching this episode with a new perspective, I have to wonder what Gretchen is thinking in the wake of Jimmy's histrionic failures to understand.
Jimmy, for those who have been misled by the idiotic plot summaries, has Histrionic Personality Disorder, a condition in which the sufferer experiences their emotions very shallowly or superficially, and is prone to enagage in all manner of histrionics with the slightest provocation. This episode comes before the disclosure Gretchen's illness, Major Depressive Disorder, but if you are capable of imagining the effect that having that mental illness, being in the middle of menstruating, and experiencing the complete lack of understanding combined with histrionics that on occasion stem from the subject. One of the funniest things about You're The Worst as a series is how the relationship survives in spite of the two halves of the couple.
The other side of the plot, as stated in the plot summary, is Jimmy attempting to take Gretchen on a date. His choice is to take her to a restaurant, one that the episode derives its name from, and hoo boy what a restaurant it is. Jimmy has clearly never been there before. When Gretchen tells him she has, and she enjoys it, just not with him, it is one of the biggest laughs in the episode. This kind of honesty is, contrary to what many people who carve smiles into faces will tell you, essential to a healthy relationship. I enjoyed listening to G. G. Allin, just not with the girlfriend I had at the time when I first heard one of his most disturbingly-named songs. It is just one of those things.
And really, I like it when a show about relationships demonstrates how much drama can be made out of a simple misunderstanding, and how the drama can be resolved. Again, the honesty. Jimmy mistakenly believes he has to take Gretchen somewhere "special" because of his insensitivity concerning one of (what I have been led to understand is) the most unpleasant aspects of being a woman. This is so early on in their relationship, so neither of them really have a good idea of how to respond to one another's quirks. So it is a bit of a joy to see them enjoy each other's company by going to a theatre showing Ferris Bueller's Day Off and both being insensitive to the other patrons.
For reasons I still cannot fathom, people who clearly do not understand the show wrote reviews saying it was good until the nature of Gretchen's illness was revealed. To that, I say did you even watch any of the episodes before then, especially Insouciance? Or do you really think so-called normal people behave like Jimmy in public?
For a show with an average episode length of twenty-two minutes, You're The Worst manages to cram in so much insight, and this is no exception. It is not my first choice of episodes to introduce new viewers with, but just as the first episode after a pilot generally finds the series getting into its stride, Insouciance shows that they quickly figured out what worked here. You're The Worst works best when two or more characters have conflicts about things that normies (the real meaning of that word being neurotypicals who hate neurodivergents for being neurodivergent) take for granted.
You're The Worst is best watched in sequence, and there are greater, in a number of cases much greater, things to come. Think of it as a snowball. The pilot was the boy smooshing the snowball together, and this is the snowball beginning to roll down the hill. If you think this one has outrageous behaviour, just you wait.
You're the Worst: There Is Not Currently a Problem (2015)
The best of the best
Remember when we thought As Good As It Gets was a good portrayal of mental illness?
You're The Worst sets the bar so high that one would need to jump the equivalent of the distance between this planet and Andromeda to clear it. And this episode is not merely one of the best examples of how it manages that. It is the best.
Gretchen has been having a difficult time. She is in a job that she dislikes, a job in which she has to deal with spoiled, borderline delusional brats from the entertainment industry. She has a "family" that would have me enacting violence in a heartbeat. And she has a boyfriend whose histrionic personality disorder makes him just as likely to make her miserable as it is to lift her spirits.
So what happens when she is, for all practical purposes, trapped in the house and drinking her sorrows away ceases to be an option? Well, for one, she lets everyone know exactly what she thinks of them at that point in time. Oh, if only we had certain of her clients (you know the ones), Paul, her gene pool befoulers, and Becca in the room to get a serve, too. Especially Becca, that raging psychopath.
Unless you are one of those people who cannot see obvious signs when they are highlighted in neon, you already know that all seven of the main characters in You're The Worst live with some form of mental illness. Three of the illnesses amongst the characters that have not already, or are not about to, explicitly spelled their illness out have very unsubtle hints given in this episode. Well, except for Jimmy. His illness is a very difficult one to explain even to an audience who knows their butt from their ear about the subject matter. But it is the way these hints are delivered that makes all of the difference. There is a reason why Aya Cash has been getting some very high-profile roles recently. This woman could make a reading of the phone book a disturbing, terrifying, exhilarating, and emotionally devastating experience.
You're The Worst also accomplishes another milestone in There Is Not Currently A Problem. Very few You're The Worst episodes require more than two or three locations, but this is how You're The Worst delivers a bottle episode. Everyone in television, even Vince Gilligan, can learn a lesson from this bottle episode. One location, two rooms, and well-developed characters with serious interpersonal conflicts. The show is pretty no-budget most of the time, anyway, but Jimmy's house is the kind of location to use as much as your story allows.
If I had to choose a favourite performance outside of Aya Cash in this episode, it would have to be Todd Robert Anderson. His character, Vernon, cannot finish one conversation without saying something inappropriate, oversharing, diverting into a story both with common elements with and totally irrelevant to the topic of conversation, or combinations thereof. He even gives the recurring guest a couple of moments to bounce off him with a puzzled look or asking if he is really a doctor in a way that sounds like she hopes the answer is no.
There Is Not Currently A Problem is the episode where You're The Worst finally slapped all of its cards down on the table and showed us what it is really all about. And it was a triumph of storytelling. Characters who were already extremely relatable become the kind of people you wish you had (more of) in your life. Questions are answered, and new ones that you know might have an unpleasant answer are raised.
You're The Worst needs to be compulsory viewing for every person who wants to become a psychologist or psychiatrist. It is the best show about mental illness because it is not about the illnesses themselves, but rather the effects that the illnesses have on the relationships the sufferers have with others. Be they social, sexual, or occupational. Or even just a random acquaintance.
You're The Worst is an example of storytelling at its best, and There Is Not Currently A Problem is high in the running for the series' best. If you know someone who is mentally ill and you want to understand just a little better, this episode is a good place to start.
Black Mirror: Joan Is Awful (2023)
A concept that any science fiction author would love to be able to take on, taken on by a hyperlexic four year old
Joan Is Awful is by a long reach the best of season six. Which is like saying that The Last Jedi is the best Disney Wars film. Or saying that Smithereens is the best episode of season five. You could not find fainter praise to damn with. And in anticipation of someone out there saying you have to not think of it as a Black Mirror episode, well, first off, that is the name it is promoted with, and secondly, the execution is poor anyway.
Oh, the basic premise and beginning is very good. Joan is some sort of middle management in a corporation. She is called upon to fire an employee. But this is the first problem. Joan gives the employee the reasons given unto her by the head of the company, but the responses from said employee all suggest plot threads that turn out to be better than what we get to see. Joan is awful because she could have saved an environmental initiative that would have eventually saved the world, for example. Instead, we get to see Joan unloading about her bland boyfriend, who is thankfully disposed of soon enough in the story, and we get to see Joan watch a dramatisation of her day, a dramatisation that makes everything out to be a step worse than it was.
Joan seeks the advice of a lawyer, who tells her that she signed a contract allowing "Streamberry" to do this simply by accepting the terms of using their app. An EULA that violates laws or is contrary to public policy will not stand up in court. Wait, this is where I have to tell you that I am not a lawyer and am not giving legal advice. But an EULA giving permission to broadcast the unpleasant moments of your life to make you look "awful" would expose you to people being motivated to do harm to you. A streaming service with an audience of tens of millions is going to have some neurochemically imbalanced individuals who would feel motivated to punish a person for being "awful" in its audience. So... illegal? Likely not. But contrary to public policy? Oh, you bet. Broadcasting where a person lives, or doxxing, is also illegal. And can we say "unconscionable contract", boys and girls? Because those get struck down pretty regularly.
Then there is the in universe justification for the show. That people respond better to negative content about a person. Joan Is Awful gets better results than Joan Is Awesome, goes the logic. Well, I feel like I am speaking to an infant when I try to tell the writers of this episode this, but people respond better to good stories. This is why the ratings for Westworld season four killed the show. I was all geared up to see what kind of society Delores would build in place of Rehobham's abomination and instead I got an eight-hour snoozefest that ends in a reset button.
So what we have driving the plot is an artificial intelligence program that takes the events of peoples' lives and remixes them into tunes that make them seem like devils. Only, suddenly, without any setup, we are expected to believe that there are different levels of simulation. The Joan we have been watching for an hour is a TV simulation of the real Joan, the Salma Hayek Joan is a simulation of the TV Joan, Cate Blanchett is a simulation...
I hate Shakespeare, blah blah, but his quote "brevity is the soul of wit" applies here. Another saying that applies here is from the engineering community. If you have two designs that accomplish exactly the same things, the simpler one is the better choice. And whilst this saying from the writing community is not completely on point, it still relates. The length of your story should be the exact length you need to tell it well. Joan Is Awful does not feel padded, but this malarkey about there being this wannabe Rehobham that turns peoples' lives into hideos parodies, and that it uses multiple layers of realities to accomplish this, is overelaboration at its worst. There is literally no need for any reality above Salma Hayek's. And the ending feels like a cop-out. Okay, Charlie, I get it, you do not want to have bleak endings all of the time. But forced happy endings are worse. Do you seriously mean to tell me that when word got out about Netflix's... sorry, *Streamberry*'s show, that an army of affected people would not storm their offices and commit arson?
Every creative artist goes through a rough patch where nothing seems to work and the output feels terrible. That is why a good writer will show a draft of their work to someone they can trust to give them good feedback during the writing process. I guess I have just figured out what Charlie Brooker is not doing, and badly needs to do. Because credulity ends up utterly destroyed here, and that makes for bad science fiction.
I also want to ask, Charlie, are you upset at the people who gave season five the well-deserved thumbs down? Because carry on like this, and you are going to end up not having an audience at all.
Black Mirror: Beyond the Sea (2023)
One of the better episodes of season six, but that is a low bar
Right from the first, this episode is bad science fiction. It is, at least, science fiction, and it is the kind of science fiction that explores Humanity's relationship with technology. So it is a genuine, real Black Mirror episode, as opposed to a "Black Mirror" episode. Unfortunately, the central premise does not hold up under the slightest weight. We have two Humans who are the crew of a spaceship. They have duplicates on Earth that are supposed to keep their families happy with their presence. They spend the majority of their time on the spaceship lying in consoles to control their duplicates. And that is the big problem. Why not put the duplicates on the ship and have the pilots control them from their home on Earth?
It is ironic that one of the astronauts recommends The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, a Robert A. Heinlein novel, to the wife. Robert would be mortified by the multiple breaches of basic engineering laws seen in this episode, and I am sure he would notice ones that I do not. And that is before we get into the "alternative 1969" idea. The entire course of Human history for the past two hundred years, or more, would need to be altered for Beyond The Sea to be physically possible.
Suspension of disbelief is like a rubber band. You can bend it so far. A good author bends it until it is just about to start warping and weakening, just to the point before the one where the tension has to be relieved or else. An average author might bend the band to the point where it warps a bit and it has a visible stretch mark where it was bent too far for too long. A bad author breaks the band.
Beyond The Sea has a bad author. There is no getting around that.
So I will make a little specific comment or two about the plot. One of the Earth-based duplicates of our astronauts is murdered by a Manson-like death cult that considers the duplicates to be abominations. As a result, the real astronaut is left to stay up in space, alone for weeks or months at a time (I forget which), and his sanity is slowly deteriorating. How this idea got past the first edit without someone ordering the writers to change the story to put the duplicates in space is a question for the ages. Anyway, as a gesture of goodwill, the Aaron Paul astronaut allows his crewmate to make use of his duplicate. The idea being that maybe this will help the character maintain what is left of his sanity.
Leaving the "why have the duplicates on Earth?" plot problem aside, Heinlein would probably find this idea goes a little too far, too. He was big-time into rules. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress gave us "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch", and that is just one of the more famous examples. He would likely be asking "Black Mirror"'s writers why the military, who would doubtless be commanding this expedition, did not include failsafes to make sure that the only person who can use a duplicate is the person the duplicate is a duplicate of.
Anyway, this becomes the saving grace of the episode because leaving aside all of the idiotic aspects, whomever wrote this part of the story did a good job. And Aaron Paul shows us that he has been getting better and better since Breaking Bad came to an end. Whenever the story needs you to know which of the two astronauts inhabits his body, Aaron has you covered.
And this is also a huge missed opportunity. The growing mental illness of the stranded astronaut would make for a much better conflict, and exploring what the powers that be on Earth might try to do about the situation would also make for much better conflict. Mission control would be working overtime to find exercises and stimuli to use to keep the lonely astronaut from losing his mind. Real, actual Black Mirror would end this story with both men landing and being pestered by the cameras. It would probably be more interesting to follow the two after they land, seeing one living without anything that kept him going during the mission, the other shaken by witnessing his crewmate's mental deterioration. Black Mirror staff, I will work for half of what you paid the clowns who wrote this season.
Unless this is one big practical joke upon the fans that expressed their well-earned discontent with season five. In which case, this is a level of pettiness that Disney would find horrific.
If you have already seen Joan Is Awful, this one is worth the once-over. Stress on the once.
Black Mirror: Mazey Day (2023)
So am I supposed to not think of this one as Black Mirror and treat it as a masterpiece, too?
Werewolf stories are not easy to do well, leave alone to the standard that Black Mirror episodes one through four set. Probably my favourite werewolf film is An American Werewolf In London. The werewolf is incidental to the plot. A pair of young men go hiking through the more Celtic parts of the not-United Kingdom and encounter a werewolf. The one who survives starts seeing ghosts, being told that in order for the victims to be able to go on into the afterlife, he has to kill himself, and has a love affair with one of the nurses who tended him during his hospital stay. He turns into a werewolf a total of two times in the hundred minute film, and the repercussions of the first leave him in a powerful emotional agony. The conflict of wanting to die but not being able to suppress basic Human survival instinct is compelling. The protagonist even tries to get himself locked up in an effort to prevent himself from hurting more people.
By the way, if Demon 79 is Black Mirror canon, there is no way that the events of this episode could have happened. I just want to throw that out there. They could not even go a whole season without completely throwing the albeit fan-theorised timeline out the window. Great. (Not sure when Suri Cruise was born, but her birth is loudly mentioned on the radio at the beginning.)
Anyway, our plot consists of one woman who is in the business of taking photos for salacious tabloids, or the websites they ran at this point in history. And the biggest celebrity of the moment is the titular Mazey Day, an actress who is apparently in a leaked sex tape. Our protagonist is introduced taking photos of one male celebrity leaving a hotel room, and the other person in the image is a man, causing the press to print and broadcast stories that he is cheating on his wife or girlfriend with another man. Our protagonist is given a couple of brief moments of Humanity through her reaction to the news that the man she photographed committed suicide and her response to another photographer talking to Mazey Day in a manner that no man should tolerate someone talking to his sister or mother in. So at least this episode gives us a bit of a reason to care about important characters.
In the early days of DVD, the studios and distributors of the film industry worked with an independent and very underground internet press to get the word out about the product. We would write about the technical aspects of the presentation of the disc, such as whether there were signs of video overcompression or audio distortion. Plot summaries were also given, and in those, we would talk about those horror films where the characters' deaths were dependent upon the characters' stupidities. Sometimes a film could get away with this by pushing the characters into a situation where one choice makes sense to them but the next one is idiotic. Sometimes a film could get away with this by having one or more characters die for reasons other than stupidity. Example A, Ash trying to kill Ripley in Alien by way of choking her to death before Parker, a giant of a man, knocks his head clean off with a fire extinguisher.
The entire cast of photographers that come to get photos of Mazey Day, on the promise of thirty thousand for the first picture of her, are morons. There is no way around it. Our protagonist has issues with not being able to pay her rent and such, but going for the big prize and risking it all on one shot is profoundly stupid. Writers, photographers, musicians, etc, always need a backup plan. And while we are at it, what kind of photographer points a camera at a car when the driver is facing directly towards them?
I can also see all of the argument about the money. Two photographers might agree to dividing it down the middle. But when you have three or more, that starts to get problematic. Anyway, when you come into a dark place in the middle of nowhere and find a woman chained to a bed (with chains that magically disappear between shots in spite of the fact that none of these idiots brought bolt-cutters or blowtorches), your instinct tells you that they need help. But when you start trying to liberate them and they keep telling you, with expletives included, to leave them be, then you have to wonder. Oh, I know first-hand due to health issues how morons like to ignore requests to be left alone. So whilst I can understand the chain of motive and action, the stupid is strong in these ones.
Credit where it is due. The ending is a good one.
But anyway, to get to the central questions. This is not science fiction. The transference of a real-world element into a new context to examine it there is nowhere to be seen. And last I looked, Black Mirror was being sold to us as science fiction. It has built a reputation as such, one that could not be shaken even if Charlie Brooker told a conference "okay, it is just a story anthology show now". And as a horror film, well, it has enough to sustain its running time, but it would make a lousy feature film, and it would be unlikely to be made if it were not leeching off the Black Mirror trademark.
In contrast to those "do not think of it as Black Mirror" apologists, I found myself confronted with a review stating that it was all of the flash and frenzy with none of the Black Mirror. Right on. Problem is, if you think of exploring the dehumanising nature of fame as the flash and frenzy, well, there is not a lot of that, either.
Black Mirror: Loch Henry (2023)
Rebut this.
This is not Black Mirror. Black Mirror has always been sold to us as an exploration of what happens when technology collides with Humanity's worst instincts. Black Mirror is sold to as as a science fiction show, meaning that you are taking a situation from the real world, divorcing the situation from the real world, and putting the situation into a new world. The new world will generally have some peculiar edge to it that is based in science, hence the genre name. Which science is within the discretion of the author. Linguistics was Orwell's thing, Dick was into drugs, and Heinlein loved engineering.
But the root here is science. Fifteen Million Merits showed us the logical conclusion if we do not put our foot down and tell the videogames industry no, you cannot sell players a frock for the character on the screen at a price that would buy you a loaf of bread. Hated In The Nation showed us a world where people talking garbage about a celebrity or people over "social" media are suddenly made to face the kind of blowback they would get if they spoke like that to the recipient's face. White Bear quickly uses memory erasure through a form of electroconvulsive therapy and repetitively being forced to undergo the same torture scenario again and again to show how society is so easily concerned more with vengeance than justice.
Which brings us to Loch Henry. What aspect of society, and its relationship with technology, are we exploring here? If you removed the VHS cameras and the making a film aspect of the story, it would make no difference. The leads would still be investigating the site of some notorious murders, and the same twisted outcome would take place.
This is to say nothing of how little there is to say about Homo Sapien's relationship with VHS. It tossed film studios (especially independent ones) a lifeline, it enabled fans of TV series to in theory never miss an episode without having to change the schedule of the rest of their lives. It enabled a small fraction of the market to make moving pictures of moments in their lives that they believed were worth saving. And precious little else. The possibilities for exploring how VHS could change Humanity were pretty much exhausted in Videodrome.
Black Mirror is advertised to us, and was understood by those of us who watched it in toto prior to 2023, to be about the dark side of Humanity's relationship with technology. A hard (in other words, real) science fiction anthology. Loch Henry is not Black Mirror because it does not explore the relationship between Humanity and technology. It is not science fiction because it does not present an aspect of Human society or Human consciousness in a new context. It is a short horror film with the Black Mirror title tacked onto it.
Assessing it on its own merits, it is okay, even good at times, but pretty bland. The twist at the end, when our protagonist has fame and cred in the film industry, and the town has a working economy again (although an economy reliant solely on tourism is always on the verge of collapse), is an okay one. But it could have been good, even great, if the episode spent more time exploring properly how much it has cost the two people who are broken by the town's triumph over what was killing it. The twist in which we learn how the murders really happened needed much better foreshadowing. Even the pretext under which our heroes come to be in the town is flimsy. And the manner in which the original motive is shifted is pretty underdeveloped.
Even if you forgive the fact that Loch Henry has nothing in common with actual Black Mirror, the plain truth is that every Human relationship in the story is badly underdeveloped and the story relies on far too many plot crowbars for anyone who has watched a good episode of Black Mirror to want to show a person this episode in order to introduce said person to Black Mirror.
Although I have gone into excruciating detail to do this, rebutting the rebuttal is as easy as asking one question. If you met someone who has no idea what Black Mirror is, hell, if you met the proverbial Man From Mars, and wanted to show them what Black Mirror is, would you show them this episode? Because just like season five, the answer in this season is a resounding oh my gerd no. And given that Black Mirror is an anthology of stories that all stand on their own and live or die by their own merits, that is more than enough to make this episode stand out as not being actual Black Mirror.
If it were called anything else, nobody would be trying to defend it.
Black Mirror: Demon 79 (2023)
Unfortunately, you -have- to treat it as a Black Mirror episode
Commenting on other peoples' reviews might be crass, but after watching this season, I saw one review of an episode that tells us that it is good if we do not treat it like a Black Mirror episode. Well, unfortunately, these episodes are presented as episodes of Black Mirror, and thus we are not merely in the right, we are obligated, to treat this episode like an episode of Black Mirror. And by Black Mirror standards, this particular episode comes off pretty bad. It is not the worst of season six, for sure, and it is far above two thirds of season five, but great Black Mirror this is not.
For five seasons, we have been sold a Black Mirror that sets a very big precedent. Specifically, that we are watching science fiction. Science fiction means different things to different people. People who have no idea think laser beams and spaceships equals equals science fiction, so let us define science fiction the way someone who really gets seasons on through four would. Science fiction is when you take a situation from the real world, divorce it from its real world context, transplant it into a different, fictional world, and explore how it would play out in that fictional world. With changes to the fictional world from ours that revolve around science, including such Human sciences as psychology. Hence the phrase, science fiction.
That is what Demon 79 is not. It is not science fiction. It is a horror show with a woman being targeted with racist and class abuse during the year 1979 finding a domino-like "totem". Before she knows it, she is seeing a demon that has shaped himself to resemble one of the pop stars she has seen on television, and he tells her that she has to kill three people over three days or else the world will explode in a nuclear blaze.
So the idea is that our heroine has to kill one person every day for three days. All well and good. But we soon run into some frankly childish storytelling problems. For starters, our demon can put on some contact lenses (not literally) and know what kind of person he is recommending the heroine kill. I am normally all for the killing of a man who is abusing his daughter, but the way our demon friend gives us a quick goldilocks-like summary of what her life will be like now is so far from sci-fi, never mind the grown-up sci-fi that Black Mirror used to be, that it hurts. We are never explicitly told what happened to the Prime Minister of our first episode after his uncomfortable return home with his wife. We are never told whether the couple at the end of Hang The DJ are really as compatible as the system says. We never learn what happens to the techie after the end of White Christmas, whether he appeals to a government to deem the being blocked by everyone to be cruel and unusual.
Demon 79, on the other hand, has to explicitly spell it all out for us. Any good science fiction or fantasy videogame would give us the choice to kill a character or not, and then tell us what happened in the story world as a consequence of our actions. Even in our final act, when our heroine is trying to kill a would-be Prime Minister who is apparently aspiring to be Adolf 2.0, we are shown real images of what the future will be if he lives. One of the future snippets we see is borrowed from the very superior episode Metalhead. Is this the way the world will end if the heroine does not kill three people, one each for three days? Apparently not. Which gives us the impression that our demon friend is lying in order to get our heroine to kill people. The motives he gives are completely understandable. But the way the world actually ends does not line up with anything we see in the rest of the episode.
And exactly what real-world element are we transplanting into a new world? And how are we seeing how it would play out in that new world? The answers are pretty simple. None, and we are not. This episode would be a weaksauce entry in such franchises as Stranger Things or Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinet Of Curiosities. Branded as a Black Mirror episode, it is an unacceptable shade of mediocre.
And therein lies the rub. *This weak and frankly insulting to good writers script was pitched at the audience as a Black Mirror episode, so you have to judge it by Black Mirror standards.* You do not buy a fridge and then excuse it failing to keep your ice cream from melting or letting your milk turn rancid when the motor breaks down six months into use, saying you should treat it like something other than a fridge.
Sure, better than two of three season five episodes, but that bar is not low. It is on the ground.