I saw Companion the other day. It’s quite good, but it falls into the trap that every… other… damn… robot… story… falls into. It makes the robot human. I don’t mean shaped like a human. That’s obvious. But it acts like a human in every way except for how it was created. It’s the protagonist. It’s the one who has to change. It’s the one who has all the obstacles to conquer. It’s making the hero’s journey. And it’s making all the mistakes. Human mistakes. But robots are not people. They’re robots. They don’t make mistakes. And they also can’t do anything outside their programming. Stories about robots are not…
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Tropes to Lose: He Was Never Real to Begin With
In addition to “it was all just a dream“, here’s another trope I’d love to get rid of: “He was never really there the whole time.“ This trope is so overused, so cliché, that at this point I can see it coming from miles. I just watched Goodnight Mommy and (spoilers) I knew within the first minute of the first interaction with the three main characters that Lukas wasn’t really there. We, the audience, were supposed to think he was, because the story is from Elias’s perspective. But it’s obvious from the get-go. Only someone missing a modicum of intelligence wouldn’t be able to tell. I realized it as soon…
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Thomas F. Wilson Needs More Credit
No one gives Thomas F. Wilson his due. The guy played one of the greatest villains in cinema history and no one let him do anything else. He’s like the J.D. Salinger of acting. Not only that, but he played totally different versions of that villain. The only equivalent I can think of is Kelsey Grammer playing the same character, Frasier Crane, for forty years. I mean, let’s think about it. How many different roles did he play over the trilogy? YEAR ROLE PIC 1985 George McFly’s boss Biff 1955 teenage bully Biff 1985 subservient Biff 2015 elder Biff 2015 hophead Griff 1985 Donald Trump Biff 1955 teenage bully Biff,…
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Things I Think About
According to the game Lordle, the word “boner” is somewhere in the Lord of the Rings books. Could Taylor Swift be a real-life Dazzler from X-Men? My wife told me, compared to Our Flag Means Death, I look masculine. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice. No one believes they are evil because every side thinks they are the good guy. That’s fine. But a plan to help people shouldn’t mean having to hurt others. A plan like that is not a good plan. That’s how you tell if you’re evil or not. Wicked is a movie based on a musical based on a book based on…
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Are Alien Xenomorphs the Perfect Monster?
So I’ve been watching all the Alien movies in anticipation of Alien: Romulus. Some I haven’t seen yet, some I’ve seen a few times. But watching them all together, I’m noticing a pattern or motif that keeps coming up. The “company” (Weyland-Yutani) really wants this creature. They knew about it before anyone else in the universe did. They know where it is. They keep sending people out to get one and bring it back discretely (by which I mean setting them up to become infected). Why do they want it so bad? Well, it’s not clear, but one thing they keep saying is that it’s perfect. So my question is,…
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Rape Revenge Movies: Who are they for?
I don’t remember when or why, but I found a list of a few “women’s revenge” movies that I added to my list and only now I’m getting around to seeing. So far I’ve seen “Bandit Queen“, “M.F.A.“, and I watched “Promising Young Woman” a little while ago. Bandit Queen seemed more like a fetishy “watch a woman get raped” film than a satisfying vengeance film. M.F.A. was the opposite–a woman falls into a pattern of violent revenge she can’t get out of. And Promising Young Woman is just… it’s just so good, it should’ve won the Oscar. Especially that scene in the dean’s office. So much tension, anger, only…
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Actors vs. Writers: Who’s Right When It Comes to Character?
I don’t agree with this. Granted I’ve never worked with actors or adaptations of my book. I could be talking out of my ass. But movies, unlike books, are collaborative creations. Everyone’s got to share the same vision or it won’t work. When it comes together, you get Star Wars. When you don’t, you get Dune (the David Lynch one). Art works best when a single person is driving the vision, the idea. That’s why bands like Smashing Pumpkins, Nirvana, Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, etc. persist. Even though the art they make needs all of them together, one single person writes the music and lyrics (usually). It’s also…
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Things I Like: American Fiction
It’s hard to make a movie about writers. There’s “The Man Who Invented Christmas” about Charles Dickens. And “Best Sellers” which has Aubrey Plaza trying to get Michael Caine–a J.D. Salinger style curmudgeonly shut-in–to promote his new book. Neither of these were particularly exciting because writing just isn’t exciting. But American Fiction is very good, especially if you’re a writer. In the same way I was charmed by Chants of Sennar, I was intrigued by American Fiction. It’s about an affluent African-American professor (his sister’s a doctor and his brother’s a plastic surgeon). He writes normal literary books, but they aren’t selling because publishers only want stories about Black people…
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Why Movies are Underperforming — The Obvious Answer
This is more of an addendum to my earlier rant about why all media feels disappointing these days. But focused on movies. But that’s a big chunk because pretty much all eyes are on movies these days. Aren’t you sick of headlines that say “XYZ Underperforms at the box office”? Napoleon was out for two days and it was labeled as underperforming. I don’t know if these movies are good or bad or simply not interesting, they’re just underperforming and I don’t know what I’m supposed to take from that. The Marvels, Trolls: Band Together, The Little Mermaid, Fast X, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, Elemental, Oppenheimer, Killers of the…
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Maybe It’s Us (Why Is Recent Movies and TV So Disappointing)
Are my expectations too high? Is it wrong to have high expectations of media? They can make magic… so why aren’t they? Why does it feel like everything anticipated in the last year/year and a half has been a disappointment? Why are they filling the void with Space Jam 2 and Trolls 3 and Five Nights at Freddy’s and another Saw movie and another Fast and Furious movie and Blue Beetle and Shazam 2 and another Indiana Jones and Disney live-action remakes and, of course, anything from Marvel. MOVIES Avatar 2 was more of the same, another bloated military rah-rah explosions and gunsfest. Lightyear puts its message before the story.…
