Monthly Archives: May 2015

The Walking Dead: Whispers into Screams

81+TMcOUkvLBravo, Kirkman. You’ve done it again.

That is to say, he has lived up to and/or refused to live up to (depending on your perspective) the immortal words, Set me free, why don’t you babe? Get out my life, why don’t you babe? Woo-oo-oo-ooo. ‘Cause you don’t really love me, you just keep me hanging on. 

So, it’s like this. I still believe that he has reached the natural end of his story possibilities like two books ago, and that all of this is superfluous at best, wasted opportunities at worst. That said, I will continue reading the Adventures of  Carl Grimes and His Incredible Hat until the cows come home, and that was about 75% of the focus of Whispers into Screams. So, y’know, that’s cool I guess? Or incredibly diabolical, again depending on your perspective.

Powers: Secret Identity

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71c4PfYYnGLA thing you may or may not know is that there is a TV show based on the Powers series of comics. It is available to Playstation Network users, which gives you an idea of just how variegated (or perhaps I should say splintered) the streaming landscape looks these days. But hey, people are making enough money to get more and more niche-interest programming created, and that’s fine by me. I’ve only watched one episode so far? But that’s what summer is for.

Anyway, that has almost nothing whatever to do with Secret Identity, which is so far ahead of where they could have gotten in one season that I may as well assume it will never actually be filmed. (Also unlikely to ever be filmed: the literal monkey vagina from a few books ago.) This? This is the book where things get weird. And I say that in full knowledge of my parenthetical above. It starts with yet another superhero team imploding, and ends with Christian Walker’s and Deena Pilgrim’s deep dark secrets all but exposed, just in time for a cliffhanger about how they will deal with the fallout.

That’s not the weird part. Here‘s the weird part.

Along the way, Walker maybe learns something important about his shadow-shrouded past and confronts[1] the multi-pronged cock of Satan. You know, like you do sometimes.

[1] I swear I am not making it up, and I think it’s possible nobody has ever said this phrase on the internet before.

Avengers: Age of Ultron

MV5BMjMxMTIyNzQxMV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMDQ1ODk1NDE@._V1__SX1859_SY893_Last Friday, I made a joke about putting up the wrong review, secure in the knowledge that the correct review, about the blockbuster sequel that was kicking off the summer season, would be following that first review by only an hour or two. So, that was six days ago.

Yep. I really am that busy, apparently.

Anyway, though, Avengers. Did you see it yet? No? I guess that’s not numerically surprising, it has not made the bank it was expecting. And there have been all kinds of complaints, from anti-feminist to muddled and confusing to unnecessary antagonists. Some of that is fair, and some of it is not. I come neither to defend Caesar nor to bury him, just to say that, you know, I still liked it?

Obviously I’m a total Marvel fanboy. But I don’t think that’s it. It got me in the door, sure, but the things that I liked were along the lines of, “It’s really awesome that Whedon managed to provide a character arc for every person onscreen, even though there were like ten of them.” I completely get why someone would turn that around and complain about how overstuffed the thing is, it just wasn’t my experience. Or, “I appreciate how Ultron’s[1] motivations are thumbnailed so quickly, so we can get on to the plot and character development that succeeds his existence.” Which was turned into a question by a person that I wouldn’t have expected to hear it from, about why nobody bothered to explain why Ultron is trying to <spoiler elided>.

And more things like that. Basically, it’s possible that even though I’m actively looking for details about these characters, my decade long immersion in the characters they’re based upon is giving me an unfair advantage over the uninitiated viewing audience. So, I cannot say if this movie is for you. (Well, I can, for three or four specific values of “you”, but mostly I cannot.) I can say that the director’s cut is probably a visibly better movie than this was, and that this movie, despite a couple of missteps, was still a really excellent chapter in what is probably the most ambitious long-form piece of storytelling Hollywood has ever attempted.

There are worse epitaphs.

[1] He’s the guy whose Age it is, right? Age of Ultron? Right? Also, while I’m here: Spader nailed that character. I’m not surprised, but I am pleased.

Unfriended

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MV5BMTUwNzg3Mzg1OV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMDY2NTAwNDE@._V1__SX1859_SY893_Friday morning, bright and early, time for an Aven-. Wait. Uh-oh. Yep, it’s like that. I watched a movie like two Tuesdays ago, and its review has sat languishing in my brain ever since. In my defense, I’ve been swamped between work and social time and trying[1] to watch a stupid amount of TV before the release of that other movie I’m not reviewing yet. Mostly work. And commuting to work. I miss not commuting to work, or at least I miss my commute not being from the bedroom to the TV room.

Enough about me. This is about Unfriended, a movie that does its level best to remind you that it’s time to trim down your facebook account by at least a third[2] of the people in it that you have not thought about in the past year. Well, it’s probably only tangentially about that? What it is about is a very rough night experienced in approximately real time by a group of highschoolers whose classmate committed suicide last year due to cyberbullying. Probably also regular bullying, but the cyber part is certainly more relevant in a modern movie about antisocial media.

Plotwise, it’s a by-the-numbers revenge mystery, which, y’know, cool enough. What makes it stand out is the format, which is entirely comprised of a first person perspective of the main character’s computer screen. There’s still plenty of footage and people/events to look at, because, after all, skype is a thing. But I find that the focus on chat windows, music programs, web research, troubleshooting, and so forth was very cinéma vérité in a way that so few films with computers have ever been[3]. These kids live on their computers, and the movie was made for that audience, by someone who knows exactly what it looks like. By-the-numbers horror or not, that’s a hell of an accomplishment.

[1] And failing.
[2] AT LEAST. If this is untrue, you are either lying or you really have basically no #friends. Or no facebook account, which I applaud.
[3] It is a tragedy that the blonde kid in Jurassic Park has been so roundly mocked for saying, “This is a UNIX system. I know this!” I mean, it straight up was, and hardly anyone else has gotten computers on screen right before or since.