There's something sweet in there, but it ain't cake

So I watched Million Dollar Baby because it was recommended by the Netflix algorithm after the credits rolled on the by-the-numbers Rocky spin-off Creed 2, the second film in a franchise about a man "forging his own legacy" by becoming famous for doing the same thing his dad did, and while I usually think the Netflix recommendations algorithm might be broken because it rarely recommends films explaining how white people are being replaced with Jews and Muslims like the Youtube algorithm does, with Million Dollar Baby coming hot on the heels of a movie about a black man attaining success and legitimacy, Netflix might finally be catching up with YT in normalising reactionary right-wing responses to minorities.
Don't get me wrong, I was actually quite enjoying Million Dollar Baby... until the comedy hillbillies showed up, grasping for benefits and sneering at the idea of getting a job, but after this it became a bit hard not to attempt a read of the film's politics, especially when not long after that it abandoned its cliched rags-to-riches boxing fable plot arc to become a film with deeply odd opinions about disability and then resolved its hillbilly arc with a scene in which the sneering rednecks fresh from a visit to the sights of Las Vegas attempt to rob a quadriplegic as they lay in their hospital bed.
Leaving its highly conservative class politics aside, instead of a counterpoint to Creed 2, Million Dollar Baby felt a lot like a continuation, as both are predictable movies traveling well-worn paths, it's just that Million Dollar Baby swerves to become a different kind of predictable movie plot in its final third that lets the cast and crew make a grab for some Oscar glory, but up until then it is indistinguishable from countless low-budget "learning to fight and learning to grow" pupil/sensei dramas from the 80s and 90s.  And now I have a hankering to watch American Shaolin again.

I don't kiss, honey, but for another fifty you can spank me

As someone who grew up in a Spurs household, I naturally despise football and all it stands for, so I was delighted to have dedicated a portion of the paltry span of increasingly-cursed days I have left upon this venom-drenched hell-sphere to playing a footy vidyagame for "research", so here I am like a total chump playing FIFA 17, an experience which is slightly - but not predominantly - an affirmation that I wasn't entirely wrong to keep away from sporting games.

Let me briefly sidetrack - don't worry, I'm going somewhere with it - to explain how "trophies" work on a Playstation: within modern games, there are token rewards granted to the player for reaching milestones in the game like driving a total of 5000 miles or shooting 100 enemies with a particular gun or collecting 20 of a particular kind of gem or coin - that kind of thing.  These token rewards are called Trophies on the Playstation family of consoles (and "achievements" on the Xbox series of machines) and they have no actual value, being virtual tokens or medals that grant nothing but bragging rights to prove you've done something in a game (the trophies are displayed on your gaming profile/account and so can be seen by anyone online).  On the list of trophies for each game, right next to each trophy is a little number giving you the percentage of how many of the game's players across the entire globe have won that trophy, and the three rarest trophies in FIFA 17, obtained by less than one percent of the estimated 24 million FIFA 17 players* on the entire planet are gained by "playing a match as a woman's team", "finishing a match as a woman's team", and "playing a tournament as a woman's team", so even before your old buddy Mr B started to play this game, he was getting some serious confirmation bias vibes about the sensibilities of its target audience.

I find this virtual world sexism germane because what interested me about this game is the inclusion of a secondary play mode called "Journey",  which is a story-driven add-on which presents a recreation of the world of a professional footballer in which women are notable only by their absence.  The idea of a story you played through in a game whose only play mechanics are a replication of a sport was intriguing to me, as... well, what exactly is this story going to be about?**  Using your football skills to fight terrorists?  A detective story in which you uncover corruption in monolithic sporting organisations?  Or will it be you playing as a young lad who wants to do football in Wembley Stadium so has to play loads of football games and training minigames and then does football in Wembley?
Go on, have a guess which it turned out to be.

Journey is basically a moron-proof ultra-lite RPG made by someone who played Mass Effect and thought "you know what, this is a bit complicated", and being part of an officially-licensed product with a mandate not to portray the organisation or sport in a bad light, it has little in the way of dramatic bite or gritty realism - for instance there's no struggling with drugs or navigating your character through a Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney-style minigame in a courtroom fending off allegations of sexually assaulting a minor - and instead we get an indulgent football legacy storyline with your fictional character chasing fame while trying to stay true to his fam.  It's very much invested in the romantic notion of football as every young lad's fantasy career and a route for them out of poverty, not that the game goes much into the depiction of poverty.  You accrue followers on social media the better you do in matches, but a nice touch is that you get far more followers if you act like a complete and utter prick, which was of course exactly how I was playing the role, going so far as to choose to play for Chelsea.  At some point I realised, though, that not all footballers are pricks and I was in fact confusing them with Formula 1 drivers, so I started playing the character a little more level-headed to stop the manager riding my ass and keeping me on the benches because I'm acting like a boor - presumably this is a game feature because FIFA is very concerned about the conduct of those of its members in the public eye and want to make sure the game's image is always presented as beyond reproach and spotless and I don't follow football so you'll have to insert your own joke here about whatever a Sepp Blatter is - and for the trouble of winding my neck in got banished to Newcastle.
I mean, I got a choice of clubs to transfer to, but I'd actually heard of Newcastle - the city - and I remain unconvinced that "Norwich" is a real thing.  Anyway

I like how you can change the game camera to something closer to the pitch/players so you can actually line up a tackle (though mostly I just try to hack the legs off opposing players***), and it gets pretty exciting when the camera closes in like it's chasing you when you make a run for the goal, though finding the actual ball on the pitch seems to be an arbitrary experience.  I have some vague recollection of playing soccer games Back In The Day and am used to the whole player-switching thing where you always control the player on your team in possession of the ball, so I was pleasantly surprised to see there's an option to play the entire match as a single player, and while this was good fun and reminiscent of having a kickabout with your mates, rather a lot of it seemed to be a man on the side of the pitch waving a flag at me because I had broken football law.

I'd like it if there was an option to better highlight the ball and your current player more prominently as the current visual cues are pretty weedy and lead to constant confusion as to who I'm currently controlling or where the ball is, but I suppose after two decades of making these things, Electronic Arts know the wants of their audience a bit better than I do.

I have been playing this a lot, so as research projects go it's been pretty enjoyable even with the nagging to sign up for an online account so that EA can nag you into micro-transactions, but I think I can get along just fine without either, thanks.

Good game.  Good game.

* FYI, I - like a fair few other people I imagine - bought this game second hand for the princely sum of one UK pound, so I imagine the actual number of players when you include second hand sales and borrowed copies is far higher than the number of units sold would suggest.

** The fact that there is not an Escape To Victory videogame is a crime.

*** SURPRISINGLY DIFFICULT to foul other players, at least in the story mode.  I played a woman's match and those bitches are vicious because I got red-carded within five minutes.

When I'm online, I'm looking at sloths

The Star Trek reboot movies engaged in performative stupidity - that is, they pretended to be dumber than they were in order not to frighten anyone away who might have got the impression that Star Trek was a thing that brain scientists watched - but Blood and Treasure is the other kind of stupidity: the kind that's real.  It covers the same ground as a video game series called Uncharted in which a square-jawed white dude travels the world looking  for treasure while things explode and then he has a fight with a rich guy who is also a terrorist who plans to use an ancient McGuffin as a weapon of mass destruction and long story short, this is the setup for Blood and Treasure, only not as well written as a video game whose script is nothing more than a contextualisation for your gunning down literally hundreds of pirates and bandits.
Blood and Treasure - AKA Nathan Drake and Chloe Frazer: The Series - is offensively stupid is what I am saying.
It introduces its main female character by showing her trying to seduce a man in order to rob him, its lead male is a square-jawed white boy fighting Arab terrorists, there's flashbacks to the Nazis, secret conspiracies - you know what, fuck this stupid show, just go on Youtube and watch a movie collection of the story scenes from Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, as at least you'll only have to sit through an hour or two of that.

Normally I don't drink in the afternoon, but it's still morning

Saw Disney's live-action remake of Aladdin, which is terrible because they haven't changed it enough from the original, and Disney's live-action remake of Dumbo which is terrible because they've changed it from the original.
Actually both of these remakes were fine and I don't know what people are complaining about.  I did think that I would have got much more out of Dumbo if I was about 8 years old, though, especially the plot about his mum and the utterly bizarre anti-elephant racist character who just seems really out of place to these adult eyes - how is he even in that circus family?  Danny DeVito at one point says everyone has to wear many hats in the circus to keep it running - the strongman also does the accounts and manages inventory, etc - but elephant racist just hangs about sneering at the elephants and cracking a whip, which somehow seem to be the only two things his job entails.
Aladdin was also fine apart from the bits they changed from the original film, which the fanboys are right about for once, just not for the reasons they claim, as the extra bits don't gel with the rest of the film for reasons other than the fact that they aren't in the original cartoon, ie: Will Smith playing a framing character much as Robin Williams did in the original, but they've changed him from a peddler of wares who just happens to be voiced by the same actor who does the Genie to a new character who is definitely the Genie as a human, and there's an arc in there about how he ends up where he is that isn't hard to follow, but it never pays off.  Likewise the new songs are dreadful - no tunes or hooks, they're just some people saying what they're thinking out loud while being autotuned, the songs about how it's tough to be a girl in a man's world being especially groan-worthy.
Its musical numbers/dance routines are also filmed at a distance that encompass the entire set on which the musical number is being shot, and the effect is like someone has recorded the daily renditions of popular songs from Disney movies that workers perform daily at a theme park - for the life of me, I just can't shake the idea that the intent is to manage expectations of visitors to DisneyWorld, especially when you clap eyes on Will Smith's Genie and the not-very-animated way he "walks" that amounts to just putting a CGI cloud where his legs are.  This is - I note - an effect that could rather easily be replicated by a minimum wage employee wearing a glittery skirt.
Anyway, the interesting thing - to me and absolutely no-one else - is seeing the common flaws in both films: added stuff that wasn't in the original movie that stands out because it doesn't gel with the rest of the remake for various reasons.  There's a lot of this kind of thing going on in Dumbo, and it's hard not to see most of it centering around Eve Green's character being shoehorned into a relationship with Colin Farrel's character which pushes all other character arcs to the side, particularly that of Farrel's kids.
It's often pretty glaring that the kid characters have nothing to do and exercise no agency, so instead there's a sort of "girls do science because that is an empowering thing in this oppressive patriarchal age" arc for the daughter which ignores that female scientists had already been making contributions for hundreds of years, and that the film is set post-war - there is literally an entire subplot about Colin Farrel's PTSD - and there was a perfect opportunity to examine how women had already tasted empowerment in the workplace, and oh yeah she literally lives in a circus where women have responsibilities beyond what might have been expected of the gender apartheid of the time.  The daughter seems to have been shortchanged somewhere in the script revisions and you can still see the shape of an arc about her building a relationship with her father after his absence in the war/the death of her mother, and her reticence to become involved in the circus which means so much to her father and which still seems to culminate in a moment where she mounts Dumbo and rides him around the Big Top as the main event, much as her father had once performed as a rodeo act but now cannot because of his war injuries (he returns from the war as an amputee).
I am probably thinking too much about these films for children, because they are films for children.  There's no reason they can't have depth and content to appeal beyond that demographic, of course, but they kind of don't, so their worth is more as an insight into the thought processes involved in adaptation from one form (animation) to another (live action), and from what I can see the process seems to involve a lot of script revisions until themes and arcs get discarded from one draft to another, but artifacts of earlier drafts somehow still remain in the final shooting scripts.  The makers seem to want to add another 30-40 minutes of material from the original animation's running time but can't quite nail down what should be there so the movies end up with a lot of flab.  Another common element seems to be the casting of actors who can't quite sing to be in musical films - why they don't just get someone else to do the singing bits for the actor I'm not quite sure.
But they were fine and perfectly entertaining films.  Do you think you could sit still for 120 minutes?  If yes, then these movies will not change or enrich you, but they are a competently-made and acceptable waste of two hours of your life.

You want that instant gratification of a knife attack

I done did see Avengers Endgame and Captain Marvel, in that order, and ah geez I sure wish the first big Marvel female superhero flick was a lot better than it was, but I didn't really like the character and the story was a weird mish-mash of tropes from 1980s cinema, only set in the 1990s and with a dreadful soundtrack.  The action scenes are also really flat, too, and some of the superpowered stuff later in the movie just seems nonsensical or perfunctory, like the aliens that fire enough missiles at a planet to raze its surface, but they fire them at the one spot rather than all over the planet at different places.
Avengers Endgame was much better, but I can't really tell you why as it's a movie about time travel and featuring evil doubles and zero new ideas.  I've got this sense that I should be feeling shortchanged by it, but it's the capstone on a decade-long run of good-to-great movies that have seen the superhero genre revitalised into a cultural juggernaut, so you know, I had a generous disposition towards it going in and it failed to annoy me even though I'm pretty sure its "nothing matters" approach to time travel is the height of laziness, not least because after establishing at length that nothing matters, it introduces a character who says actually what you're going to do does matter, and both versions of time travel rules are treated as equally valid.  Eeeeeeeghhhhhh
It delivers on the Big Ass Fights front, and at least one character who I have found utterly, bafflingly popular over the years the franchise has been running its course bought the farm in an underwhelming way, and for that I was quite grateful.  Although this is the second movie in a row where a lady gets chucked off a cliff and the movie compensates with a really contrived lady fight sequence in the CGI finale, which reminded me of those terrible tv shows and movies from the 1990s which thought they were breaking new ground with a lady protagonist doing kung fu on men and they'd introduce the character in a really obnoxious way with like a guitar riff or something while she jumps in from off-screen saying a painfully bad line containing the word "boys"*, even though female action stars were not only a staple of low-budget US action movies for years, but they were even regular draws in conservative territories like mainland China to the point they started importing them.  You do this kind of thing nowadays and apparently it's not cheap and tacky, it's a bold assertion of your creative vision, so basically the "overwrought female badass intro sequence" is the equivalent of having a synth score.
Oh fiddlesticks I'm rambling again - well anyway I did like Endgame but I suspect it was more to do with over a decade's worth of goodwill in the bank more than it was a perfectly acceptable entertainment product.

* which was - oddly enough - how they introduced Spider-Gwen in Into The Spider-Verse, a single duff note in an otherwise great flick.

A lady doesn't use her fists - that's what cars are for

My quest to consume as little media from this century as possible continues with the collected Black Hawk: The Intergalactic Gladiator, a mixed bag of strips collecting all the appearances of the titular character from the Tornado and 2000ad anthologies and their respective annuals and specials.
The first third - reprinting the strips from Tornado - is the most consistent stretch of material, sticking as it does to the military career of the main character as a Nubian inductee to the ranks of the Roman Empire's military during its Western expansion into the British Isles, and it's fine if you like that kind of breathless historical romp, with some great art by the late Alfonso Azpiri.  Just as it gets into its stride, however, the comic in which it appears collapses and is folded into its distant cousin, 2000ad, where the strip drastically changes direction and becomes a story about a star-hopping gladiatorial arena in which all shapes and sizes of alien - drawn by the late great Massimo Belardinelli -  are pitted against each other in battles to the death.  After that, it retools again, only this time gets really weird, with the main character turning into a zombie Conan on a planet inside a black hole which is ruled by Satan.
I know this isn't well thought-of by 2000ad's "real fans", but this was my first go-round and I liked it a lot and even thought the final stretch where it goes completely off the rails was in keeping with the sensibilities of some of the pulp sci-fi I've read from the 1960s-1970s (though I grant you I have not read a lot), particularly the works of Roger Zelazny and Lester Del Ray that I've come across.
Like most Rebellion reprints of 2000ad material at the Judge Dredd Casefiles size/format, the repro loses some of the finer detail on the art and about 1/5th of each page is blank space.  It'd be nice to see this reproduced at something approximating the original size rather than this squashed-down version, such as has been done with Bella At The Bar,  a collection of the first year or so of episodes of the long-running drama series from the UK's Tammy, a comic aimed at 8 year old girls but apparantly written by communists and illustrated in a photorealistic style rather than looking like a cartoon as almost all comics for children now are.  Ha ha yeah just ignore any work in progress screenshots you might come across in this post.
I didn't think I'd like this tosh at all seeing as it doesn't have robots or lasers in it, but you can't stop reading once you get into it: Bella is a budding gymnast in 1970s Britain, so naturally there are few outlets for her talents and she is treated like dirt by her scumbag guardians who look like Biffa Bacon's parents drawn in a more realistic style than usual, and who hand out wallopings just as much as Biffa's mum and dad do.  First they work her like a dog at their window cleaning business, then try to monetise her gymnastic ability by selling her to a burlesque show - YES REALLY - which utterly disgusts her gymnastics coach who blames here for her own predicament and cuts her loose and trust me, by this stage it hasn't even gotten remotely as bad for the main character as it's going to get, because SPOILERS I poop you not, the book's idea of a happy ending is when Bella is literally head-butted into a wheelchair by her evil Soviet gymnastic nemesis and is then wheeled off in the final panel.  Life conspires to kick Bella in the nuts at every opportunity in the best traditions of British children's comics, and it's compelling stuff.
The book's - rather militant and clearly angry - writer Jenny McDade later went on to film and television work, which makes me happy, as the usual career path for female creators in the UK comics industry was either through DC Thompson where they ended up in humor titles which didn't feature creative credits, or they passed through the only other game in town, 2000ad, where they were dismissed by the readership of aging white men and ended up buggering off out of the business altogether despite contributing genuinely interesting strips like Medivac or Tao De Moto that weren't just yet another go-round on the seemingly endless carousel of stories about Nazis In Space or unshaven anti-heroes uncovering a conspiracy.  Artist John Armstrong is great, too, especially the way he draws Bella as someone who just walks about with one of her legs tucked behind her head now and then as one presumably did in the 1970s, or with her bottom lip permanently jutting out to give her depiction a perpetually confused look in response to the constant stream of setbacks she encounters.
Anyway, God knows what contemporary kids would make of this catalogue of misery if they were expected to read it, but thankfully, they'll never have to be traumatised by it as it seems to be marketed exclusively towards those aging white men I mentioned.  Which is a shame, really, as stuff like this might tempt kids away from the likes of Take A Break, That's Life, and Chat!, which - from what I have observed in passing - seem to be the pulp horror magazines of choice for young female readers these days.

Yeah this is just like that but instead of depressing and terrible it's happy and good

Designated Survivor is yet another politics show that gives fantasy solutions to real-world problems, and I found it funny that the show's solution to "fake news" was for the main character to announce that he was going to censor the internet and then he was cheered for this by a bunch of millennials, so if nothing else the show makes no bones about how its writing room is full of aging and reactionary white men, a fact that still escapes the many fans of The West Wing.
Telling the story of Keifer Sutherland's drastic miscasting, Designated Survivor followed the last surviving member of the American government after the rest were killed off by terrorism in a plot setup that likely sounds very familiar to the many fans of King Ralph, but after two seasons, even ABC decided it could do better and canned the show only for it to be picked up by Netflix, who apparently have more money than sense now.  The Netflix-exclusive third season of the show is... surprisingly good.
I mean, it's still utter fluff, of course, there's no chance of it suddenly becoming The Wire at this stage, but there's some interesting things done with the idea of corruption in high office that I haven't seen in other shows, like a direct equivalence being drawn between political and moral compromise, and while he seemed like the last person who should be playing the part in seasons 1 and 2, here Sutherland's air of menace actually helps sell the idea of a man willing to compromise himself to retain power.  He played so toothless and guile-free a character up until now that his turn to the dark side actually carries a bit of weight, and I was surprised after watching one of the earlier episodes to find myself genuinely disappointed in an unconvincing fictional character for the decision they made.  The politics still straw-mans a lot of issues, and socialist ideas are obviously verboten in an American show, but I liked that many of the show's "no easy answers" cop-outs were for once at the expense of characters until now portrayed as Mary Sues*, and that copping out with the kind of resolution you'd expect to see in any US drama is actually something which damages the characters in the eyes of the audience.
Lots of effing and blinding in this season, too - there's one pre-credits sequence that's just Keifer Sutherland taking a dump while doing a Rubiks Cube and then giving up saying "these things are fucking impossible."  More money than sense, I tells you.



* Yes I said Mary Sues uncritically - it doesn't stop being a legitimate critical term just because some Star Wars fans want it removed from the lexicon after internet man-babies used it poorly.