What's so terrible about being beautiful?

Now 20 years old, you likely best know the Matrix as that film made by two trans women about a white male who shuts the heck up for a whole minute and lets a woman and a black man speak to him about their experiences of how the world works and their insights expand the white male's view of his own place in the world and how he has been manipulated by a vast mechanism which profits from his running in place like a hamster in a wheel.  Quite how this got co-opted by a bunch of whiny internet babies to explain why they weren't getting puss because of the shape of black people's skulls is anybody's guess - the internet is weird, you guys.
Did you know the "red pill" in the Matrix is red because estrogen pills were red in 1999?  Taking the red pill is a metaphor for listening to women's experiences, I guess, so now I am very confused what the alt-righters who bang on about feminism going too far are on about.  Agh.  I can't think about this right now, I'll watch the trilogy again and see how it holds up.
Still - 20 years?  Say It Ain't So!

I was also watching The Enemy Within*, a show that clearly has money spent on it but at no point did any of it get spent on an action director and so you have an actual scene where two grown ass men roll about on the floor tugging at each other's jackets while music went DUNDUNDUNDUN and I thought "oh no" but it was okay because after that was over I took a chance on Warrior, a period drama about a Chinese worker doing kung fu on the Irish in the 1870s and billing itself as "based on the writings of Bruce Lee" and it's a HOOT.  Best described as Gangs Of New York, but obviously on a tv budget and with kung fu and loads of swearing and gore and boobies, I'm not so crazy about a show that so willingly embraces anachronism pushing the whole "bisexuality means deviancy" angle, but then I guess you can't have everything.  It's been a while since I watched The Big Boss so can't speak to this being a remake of that, but the trappings seem familiar, and along with Into The Badlands, I'm doing alright for telly that knows how to do a decent action scene, so The Enemy Within ain't as big a drag as it otherwise might be, kind of like how you keep your marriage alive by seeing a 19 year old medical student on the QT.


* Well, I say "watching" but it is more accurate to say "catching up", which of course means I viewed multiple episodes in one sitting, which means okay dammit you have worn me down with your questions questions questions I watched 8 episodes in one go.  I would not recommend the experience.

I just said literally when I meant figuratively, like a crazy person

The culture wheel has turned since Runaways first appeared in comics form in 2002 wielding its open disdain for its own genre like an obnoxious teenager devoid of self-awareness in a bit of meta-commentary from creator Bryan K Vaughan that was sadly lost on the title's vocal online fanbase who - despite reading a superhero comic set in a superhero universe about people with superhero names and superpowers who fought supervillains - would regularly insist that "Runaways is not a superhero comic" even when the writer expressly wrote Spider-Man and Wolverine into the stories.  Runaways is a superhero comic, but part of its gag was that the characters didn't consider themselves superheroes despite doing all the things superheroes did, like fighting supervillains and vampires, traveling in time, battling shape-changing aliens, etc, and you would have to take an incredibly shallow surface reading of the material to not see any of this...
Anyway, the second season of Marvel's Runaways is not very good, which is my polite way of saying it is bad.
A below-average teen show with the word "Marvel's" bolted onto it, it's roughly 95% people talking or shouting at each other and then the other 5% is something happening in CGI or slow motion.  The straightforward originating premise of kids discovering their parents are supervillains so they Run Away from home has been convoluted with unnecessary backstories for characters who worked best as archetypes, an approach that just serves to reinforce that there are no new ideas in play*, and somehow, despite the sometimes-laughable lengths that the makers have gone to in order to divorce the show from anything vaguely superhero-y, the characters often just look outright ridiculous in a way they wouldn't if they were dressed in modern superhero outfits.
The superhero genre has been  rehabilitated since the Runaways comics first landed, and not only have all the things that made it unique since become standard, but we've had 7 years of a tv show about Green Arrow, which has spun off four years of the Flash, three years of Legends of Tomorrow, and will shortly be joined by a Batwoman series that will be showing alongside the third season of Supergirl, while in cinemas, Marvel have to date made 22 films and roughly 30 billion dollars, and spun off Agents of Shield, Daredevil, Jessica Jones, The Punisher, Iron Fist, Luke Cage, and Agent Carter tv shows.  This would, by any objective evaluation, be the absolute worst time to base a tv show on the idea that superheroes as a concept are stupid and lame - and yet here Runaways comes anyway, peddling its shame at its own genre like Smallville was still a thing.
And what's with the synthwave OST?

It's a genre utilised in evoking the 1980s, but how does that relate to a television show about the post-millennial generation?  I could postulate about how it might be a means to reference the decade that spawned the media which provided the inspiration for the original comics, or suggest that it's a means to channel the post-internet world where all media is available to be consumed at all times and thus genres become meaningless and children pine for the artifacts of cultures that lived and died before they were born but really, I think we all know that's a stretch and it's far more likely it's just a stylistic choice that has no meaning beyond its current and likely fleeting appeal, which is as goo a paradigm for this show as any.  I am implying that Runaways is bad television.
Let's face it, though: if it was good I wouldn't be watching it because I apparently only like dreadful tv.

It does, however, meet the high standards demanded of 13 year old television viewers - by which I mean characters occasionally say the word "hashtag" and the nerd character says something related to Star Wars - but I admire the show's commitment to the rejection of binaries both in its diverse casting, and in its firmly and oft-affirmed belief that the show doesn't have to suck or blow and can, in fact, do both at once.


* Worse still, existing characters from the comics are expanded upon to become what can only be described as racist stereotypes, with the most obvious example being all the black characters having links to gang culture and crime, or the only Asian characters facing off in a martial arts battle, or the only Latino character defeating an opponent by speaking Spanish - and no, I am not making that up.

You have borne your sorrow well. I will not forget you.

8 Mile is a vehicle for the once-popular pop singer Emineminem, and it reminded me of the denouement of Patrice Lecont's Ridicule in which Grégoire Ponceludon denounces the arrogant presumption of the court of Versailles that they are the heirs of Voltaire, as for all their disdain for the illusion of civility and their use of competing insults in lieu of open violence, they do not possess Voltaire's compassion.  Sickened by the decadence and corruption, Ponceludon takes his leave of the court and it is shortly thereafter destroyed in a popular revolution, and while the opulent trappings of American culture serve as a lure for the fame-hungry Emineminem, ultimately they serve only to obscure that the desperate elevation of caustic repartee is but one of many distractions from the crumbling of an empire, Emineminem's Jimmy T Rabbit finding solace and comfort in neither their pursuit nor their acquisition.
Sexual conquests are meaningless, the defeat of social superiors in battles of wits are hollow no matter how the crowd may chant his name, and in his moment of supposed triumph he renounces his victory and alights into the darkness a lonely man as the actor who portrays him mocks the character's existence with a fictionalised recounting of his own rags-to-riches story set to music, all notions of identity and purpose revealed as constructed, empty theater.
In many ways, the "rap battle" culture of 8 Mile's 1995 Detroit is an analogue of the decline of discourse in the West, made as it was in 2002 and prophesying the humor of Family Guy, Brooklyn 99 or Deadpool in that what the audience has been conditioned to crave and expect is not exquisitely-constructed jokes and their punchline payoffs, but to see which unlikeable character can say the most transgressive thing at any given time, a trend seen as admirable and good in the realm of "old" media, but as somehow terrible in the realms of social media where attention is now acknowledged as the only truly viable currency. Objectively speaking, it cannot be said that this is a culture that seeks or rewards worth but which instead needs immediate gratification, and in 8 Mile, the lead character achieves all of his ambitions and indulges all of his immediate desires and is ultimately left unfulfilled, so it feels like we've had adequate warning from history about spectacle, but now instead of heeding it, we make the warning just another part of the distraction and it washes across us, unheeded, as our societies seek immediate rewards in their entertainments and in their politics seek out similar short-term gratification in acts of self harm like electing a racist president or voting to leave a mostly-beneficial cultural union.
Faced with the life of hollow decadence that is his reward, Eminimemem chooses to walk away.  Would that this were an option for the rest of us.

I also watched Arctic, in which Mads Mikkelson encounters a polar bear but they don't have a fight.  I think my feelings on the matter of not having a fist fight with a polar bear have been adequately established over the years, so I will leave it at that.

I don't WANT to go out and have fun

Why yes the flu was terrible and the recovery was somehow even worse, thank you for asking.
Stuffed up in bed unable to put one foot in front of the other for a week or two, I did have time to catch up with my much-neglected gaming habit, however, and in the course of playing Days Gone I sometimes felt that explaining to kids nowadays that we used to have black and white tvs that had screens smaller than the one on their laptop and yet weighed a ton and were huge and bulky and on them we played Jet Set Willy makes us sound like one of the Yorkshiremen from the Monty Python sketch, and yet my takeaway from the underwhelming Days Gone is to think of the technology of the 8-bit era and remember that no matter how laughably clunky and low-resolution it was, you could at least read the flipping text onscreen without a magnifying glass.  TVs have never been bigger and yet somehow onscreen text has never been smaller.


The point I rage-quit this turkey came when I encountered my first "destructible barrier" and how to deal with it was not explained with an in-game tutorial but in tiny, tiny text that flashed onscreen for roughly 3 seconds before disappearing forever, so now I don't know how to deal with that in-game problem unless I load an earlier save, navigate back to that spot, then either sit with my head less than a foot away from my 39 inch smart tv (I usually sit five feet away from it) and hope that this time I can read the instructions when they appear, or I can take a screenshot, quit to the console dashboard, open the capture gallery, look at the screenshot and try to read the instructions there - but even that's not a given method of success because of the PS4's terrible multimedia options that Sony designed it to have on purpose so as to make you use (paid-for) streaming services for media on the console instead of just viewing your existing (already paid-for) media stored on the internal HD, so the PS4's native image viewer doesn't have a zoom function.
And then there's the controls: for some reason you have to hold down buttons instead of just tapping them if you want to do something like pick things up or interact with the environment, which combined with the brief animations results in confusion as to whether or not you've actually done what you wanted to do, which was a feature I didn't like in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, which changed the way you looted the environment from the previous game - Assassin's Creed: Origins - from simply hitting the triangle button to holding it down for some (but not all) looting interactions.
Buggy, undertested, possessed of story that is so aggressively banal and uninteresting that it may as well be terrible, and undercooked combat mechanics that just draw your attention to the fact that this isn't The Last Of Us, a game that it clearly wants to be yet whose many strengths Days Gone does not seem to be familiar with, primary among them being The Last Of Us' simple and responsive controls transplanted from a combat game to the then-aging survival horror genre still obsessed with the tank control system developed in the 1990s for games with pre-rendered backgrounds and a fixed camera.  But the most disappointing thing the game fails to transplant from The Last Of Us is a laughably overambitious story director who might have made something of the futility at the heart of the main characters of the game, two ex-bikers who cling desperately to outdated notions of masculinity not because it serves them well in a post-apocalyptic world but because the game story just doesn't have any original ideas or interesting ways to execute what it lifts from other sources - it even has your grizzled biker hero rescuing his girl from rapey rednecks in a flashback.  There is plenty of grist for the mill here, but no-one seems interested in exploring it so the cut scenes - which require lengthy loading times, naturally - just drag on forever and never tell you anything important that you can't glean from the slightly messy story/inventory screens.


Aaaaanyway, this rambling review is basically building up to me saying I did not like this game, but on balance, it was mostly more enjoyable then being bed-ridden... up to a point, and then it wasn't.so I watched Robot Jox on Netflix again instead.

Your pain is a gift. My pain is just painful.

Being struck down with the flu, I was bed-bound for much of the last ten days and so of course I watched a bunch of films for children, I mean, I am a grown man - what else would I watch?
ISLE OF DOGS is an adult's idea of what a film for children might be like, but just comes off as less adventurous or inventive than actual animation for children like World of Gumball or Stephen Universe, resulting in something that really just comes off as Wes Anderson self-consciously working Wes Anderson The Brand.  It's not without charm, but Anderson has been here before, and done it better.
INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE is a reminder that Spider-Man never used to be this big.  I mean, sure I knew who he was because I'm a big nerd, and he was certainly there in the background of popular culture in movies or US tv shows or whatever when kids would be wearing Spidey pajamas or reading a Spidey comic, but that was a constant reminder that he was never going to be Superman big, or Batman big no matter how many crappy but eventful cartoons or crappy and slow live-action tv shows and tv movies got churned out - in fact, these were more sort of barometers of his level.  Spidey was never destined to be a big thing in popular culture because Superman was a simple and iconic concept, the very definition of a superhero, while Spidey was... well, he had the primary-coloured costume and the colourful villains, but Spidey was kind of complex, especially compared to DC heroes.  Spidey's whole origin is basically an explanation of how he isn't a selfless person by inclination, and had to be taught social responsibility, and when he discarded that lesson he paid for it dreadfully and would be driven by guilt for the rest of his days - by contrast, Superman's origin is that he just does the right thing.
But then the Raimi movies happened, and DC fumbled the ball with Superman and Batman for a few years and now Spidey is so huge he is probably what most kids think of when they think of superheroes as a concept, and just to really rub it in how DC fumbled the ball, Into The Spider-Verse even takes those many years Spidey was just so much pop-cultural landfill and makes them a part of the mythos.  Where Batman had to wait six decades to get to a point where the character could sustain multiple reinventions within the same generation and the Nolan Bat-movies could coexist alongside the Brave and the Bold cartoon show comfortably, Spidey did it in half that time, and without the head start of a big pop-cultural splash in decades past that both Batman and Superman enjoyed.
Spidey is a meta-franchise, and that is what Into the Spider-Verse is about: "I'm Spider-Man, and I'm not the only one." "Anyone can wear the mask." and so on, and so on...  I'm sure purists will point out the flaw in this take is that Peter Parker's moral complexity is what makes Spider-Man a compelling character, though this would miss that the point isn't that Parker is a replaceable element in the Spider-Man franchise but that social responsibility is not a lesson only Peter Parker can learn.  Miles Morales' mother is a nurse, his father is a police officer - this is a character that doesn't need to learn the same lesson Peter Parker did (although after a fashion, he does), and instead he simply needs to find the direction to implement the lessons he's already learning from his family.
Anyway, I liked this.  It was very entertaining.
NANCY DREW AND THE HIDDEN STAIRCASE is not much of a Nancy Drew movie, the lead character not having anything to do with Nancy Drew, but I do like the lead character of the movie all the same as she's got sass, so I'm not sure what my point is.  Maybe something to do with reinventions like what Spider-Verse does?  Mmmm, I am certainly enough of a hipster wanker to try that one, but Nancy Drew has never done particularly well in her periodic reinventions for a variety of reasons, and this one seems to be an inversion of the fish-out-of-water comedy movie starring Emma Roberts from the early 2000s in which Nancy Drew was a teen sleuth in a perpetually 1950s setting who suddenly found herself in the big modern city and yeah if you didn't see it you missed absolutely nothing of note, as quite why a character who was invented in the 1930s would live in a town that looks like the 1950s is never explained, nor does it even have any bearing on the character or her interactions with a modern American city.  The Hidden Staircase inverts this premise, however, having Nancy be a big city teen sleuth who comes to a small town, and it also has little bearing on the way she interacts with her new environment.  There's this bizarre bit where Nancy says "maybe I'll do some Instagram and talk about boys" and then she laughs because it's a psych-out about what a clumsy reinvention/update would do and yet she does these exact things in the course of the movie anyway - there's a 17 minute sequence right at the start about cyber-bullying that has zero bearing on the rest of the movie, and then she meets a boy.
Nancy Drew reinvented in the novels as she went along - and I don't just mean the constant rewrites of earlier novels to remove outdated (racist) content or risque (bondage) scenes, I mean she's been in publication for 80 years, the books just kept catching up with the periods in which new writers were dropping them, so updating or reinventing the character doesn't require anything drastic, it just needs the usual tweaks for adaptation, and anything beyond that just seems desperate or wrong-headed - like the tv pilot where Nancy was a middle-aged Muslim homocide detective in New York City and you're just like "whoa who asked for this?"  (SPOILER literally nobody asked for this, the pilot has never seen the light of day and even the actor who played Nancy has expressed relief that it never went to series)
Anyway, I am grumping on this an awful lot when it isn't really that bad, just lacking in a solid central theme to tie all the disparate stuff together into a coherent whole, as it's just a jumble of cliches shot and performed capably but unexceptionally, as one might expect of a children's television movie, I guess, but I can't help but think if someone came along with a clear idea of what made Nancy Drew appeal to audiences and then transferred that to the screen, it would probably be good.  And yes, I realise I am describing Veronica Mars there.
THE KID WHO WOULD BE KING is also a movie about reinventions and cheese and crackers there is a lot of it going about it's almost like there is not a lot of demand for original things these days.  That's maybe unfair, as Joe Cornish's kiddie adventure romp about the reborn King Arthur does try and do things differently here and there, but there is a really confusing through line about the role of women in the Christianity-appropriated post-pagan mythology of Britain that I'm not sure what to make of.  A common trope I noticed in superhero comics when I started going up my own arse a bit was male characters taking on the role of their absent fathers while never acknowledging strength or resolve as being things that they learned from their mothers, almost as if women could not be acknowledged within male power fantasies as a source of strength or wisdom, only compassion or love, and I think The Kid Who Would Be King falls into this trap, too.  Like I say - right up my own arse.
I liked it and it was entertaining, if slightly overlong.

Do I look worried? I'm wearing ladies' make-up right now.

"I know, I'll retreat into the past in order to escape this hell future we have made!" says me, and no, I don't mean I've snapped and sought to build a time machine, I mean I decided to watch older films and tv shows for a bit so that I might avoid the constant harping on about division that seems to occupy every tv show now in what I am slowly coming around to thinking is a paradigm shift in our culture that is likely coming two decades too late.  Sorry, next generation - maybe you'll like being born with asthma and paying through the nose for dirty water, I dunno.
So into the past I go with The Intruder, a William Shatner joint where he plays a hate preacher spreading racial tension under the pretense of being on the side of local working class townsfolk.

You know, sometimes I wish history had given us some warning how the future would turn out.  Just any kind of heads up about what to be wary of.
Anyway, this is an actual sequence from the film:
(William Shatner as Adam Carver addresses a town rally)
"And you know what they're saying that means?  They're saying... that you all don't give a darn whether the whites mix with the blacks because you didn't fight against it.  Well I say, how can somebody fight what he doesn't see?  They kept the facts away from you - they cheated and deceived every one of you!  They filled your heads with filthy lies and kept you in the dark so that when you finally do wake up..?
"Why, we're sorry - but it's just too late!"
Now... I'm associated with the Patrick Henry Society, which is an organisation dedicated to giving the people the truth.  What I'm gonna tell you... is gonna make your blood boil.  Because I'm gonna show you that the way this country is gonna go depends entirely and wholly and completely on you!
Now you all know that there was peace and quiet in the South... before the NAACP started stirring up trouble.  But what you don't know is that his so-called advancement of coloured people is now and has always been a communist front headed by a Jew who hates America and doesn't make any bones about it, either.   Well the commies didn't waste a second - they knew only too well, friends, that the quickest way to cripple a country is to mongrolise it, so they poured all the millions of dollars the jews could get for them into this one thing: desegregation!
They went to the courts...now Judge Silver - who is a jew and is known to have leftist leanings --
(man in crowd)  Who says so?
THE RECORD SAYS SO.  Look it up - Abraham Silver for one thing belongs to the Quill And Pen Society which receives its funds indirectly  from Moscow!"

So yeah, this whole "retreating into the past" thing is not going well so far for your old pal Brigonos.
I'll explain the Seven Degrees Of Kevin Bacon that got me to this film: I was doing one of my periodical dips into The Twilight Zone and the short but prolific life of writer Charles Beaumont popped up and I came by mention of the films made from his screenplays or novels and once I clocked the name "William Shatner" in the credits for this, that was pretty much 90 minutes of my future accounted for.  I suppose it's fascinating to see how little populist rabble rousing has changed in the 60 years since Beaumont's story was published, Carver's speech being a hodge-podge of rhetoric ranging from white supremacism to liberal conspiracy theories about interference from Russia in Brexit.  I normally scorn Horseshoe Theory as lazy thinking, but how such familiar talking points slip so comfortably into the trappings of wildly different political agendas is just so maddening when you know full well that 60 years after Charles Beaumont sniffed this stuff out as bullshit it's still being peddled uncritically by all sorts of actors.  I suppose now I have to read the novel.

The speed of technological advancement isn't nearly as important as short term quarterly gains

Quite why I still watch the centrist and often overtly racist trash show Madam Secretary is beyond me.  Best described as The West Wing For People Who Hit The Wine 90 Minutes Ago, Madame Secretary follows the ex-head of the CIA as she fulfills her new role as Secretary Of State, and most stories revolve around the problems caused by her simply being too good a person for her role despite the fact she used to run the CIA and Jeez, I don't know what to tell you if you think running the CIA is a morally neutral occupation.  Along the way, she creates fictional solutions to real world problems and at some point Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright show up as themselves to talk about the importance of representing the entirety of the American political spectrum and this is a thing that really happened in the show it's actually quite amazing.
The Enemy Within is also trash, but it is a handsome production with a handsome cast often terribly under-served by the material they have to work with - Morris Chestnut played the smug private coroner (sure, why not?) at the heart of Rosewood, aka Capitalist Quincy, and he's a charismatic guy, he can absolutely pull off better material than this.  Ditto Jennifer Carpenter, aka Dexter's sister, but also a pretty good co-lead in the Limitless tv spin-off.  TEW is rote stuff that some salaried scriptwriters clearly knocked out in their sleep, but it fulfills the role of animated wallpaper most capably for those of us watching at work.
I also watched Rise: Blood Hunter, which is a movie about vampires starring Lucy Liu and Michael Chiklis.  That's it, that's the entirety of my review - whatever conclusions you have drawn from my description, trust me: you're right.