Hot Fuzzy

 

Avatar: Fire and Ash

starring Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldaña, Oona Chaplin, Kate Winslet, Sam Worthington, Britain Dalton, Stephen Lang, Jack Champion, Trinity Bliss, Baily Bass, Cliff Curtis, David Thewlis, Jemaine Clement and Edie Falco

directed by James Cameron (Aliens, the only good Terminator movies, True Lies, the one about the boat, Avatar 1, Avatar 2, plenty of other stuff)

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THIS IS NORMALLY WHERE I WOULD PUT A SPOILER WARNING, BUT LITERALLY NOTHING HAPPENS IN THIS FILM

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OK, I'm not trying to be a snob here. There is something inherently irritating about the way James Cameron talks about this whole Avatar project and the unique message he thinks he's trying to convey through it, but if you aren't all caught up, we're just three films in now to the exact same story Kevin Costner told in Dances with Wolves like 35 years ago. Or Edward Zwick and Tom Cruise told again 15-ish years after that with The Last Samurai. If you haven't seen those films, the message is basically this: the problem is white people. The solution? Adopt a white person to lead the rebellion against the white people, which ultimately fails, underscoring the tragedy of the western colonial mindset but also reaffirming "well, there's really nothing you can do about it ultimately..." I guess the main difference is in those two examples a) the resistance was led by two charismatic movie stars and in these, they're led by Sam Worthington,* and b) it's taken three very long movies already and Jake Sully refuses to get around to dying tragically yet heroically in an act of futile defiance.

Again, not a snob dismissing these films out of hand, it would just be easier to take if James Cameron just said he was out to make a big dumb shooty popcorn movie and not trying to inspire people to save the world or whatever. There are of course major elements of this film and its two predecessors as a whole that work on that first level, but the more of the story we learn about, the only real-world translatable questions its going to raise will have to do with how we spend our increasingly precious disposable income on things that are kind of shit.

So there were a couple of strikes against it. Not prejudices necessarily, because I've earned my skepticism over, what, seven-ish hours of movies so far? Also, this is the third Avatar film and they seem to have made NO SERIOUS ATTEMPT to work the number 3 into the spelling of the title, like Fant4stic or F8 of the Furious or F1. Hm, in retrospect, maybe only movies that start with F are allowed to do that? Plus there's no obvious place to stick a 3 in Avatar, like maybe Avat3r, but that looks dumb. Best I can do is Avatar: Fir3 and Ash, but also, not great. OK, you get a pass on this one, James Cameron, but the other skepticism is valid.

The other thing Cameron talks about incessantly is how hard it is to make these movies and how intent they are on pushing the envelope in terms of what is possible in film with CGI and motion capture and... OK, I gotta hand it to him there. Although the overall visual impact is undermined by the excessive length of these films (this is not the last time I will mention this, almost certainly. These are long!) which makes the parade of UBER-GRANDE visual-scapes become overwhelming, like white noise for the eyeballs. There isn't a single frame that looks bad or out of place, per se, but they still have the problem of emotional detachment from all the grandeur, as the cartoon CG of it all is still a bit most-expensive-Lego-set-ever, with all the limits on investment in any of its survival implied therein. So when these giant things are all exploding or catching on fire or being harpooned (again), there's no real sense of loss or shock. You feel like they could just to go back to the previous save game and reload, try the level again. Astoundingly pretty, but in a weirdly forgettable way.

This is not the case, however, for the motion capture, specifically with the facial performances. Zoe Saldaña and Oona Chaplin specifically, holy shit, these are legitimately great performances. My son and I talked some shit after walking out of the theater, but I also said Chaplin was on some Oscar-level shit. She speaks no English in this role, so it's all raw emotion and she's absolutely riveting, genuinely scary. That was necessary because the main antagonist played by Stephen Lang has been neutered by his own nonsensical actions in the plot and mustache-twirling so as to be a non-threat. Chaplin's character, almost tragically, gets relegated to being his girlfriend, but she still pops off. That is not a joke about having had to see it in 3D.

Is there a plot? Well, yes, but it's literally (and I'm using that correctly here: literally) the same plot as the last movie. The Sullys are in danger and have to move around but in the end they have to fight against the military and the company hunting whales, which they resist by rallying the locals and getting the animals to help them. The kids also get kidnapped by Stephen Lang again, who neglects to kill any of them before their parents have an opportunity to affect a rescue. At least in the last movie one of the kids died! But he threatened them like four different sequences in that film alone, plus the ones here! I'd have more respect for the character if he would just murder a child, that's all I'm asking.

Otherwise, this all feels like a placeholder for some larger arc's grand denouement that we will possibly never get to see. That means nothing gets resolved, in terms of plot (see above) or character. This is supposed to be about a family, but this family spends the whole movie so mad at each other, you find yourself pondering the idea of space-divorce among these cat people. The only bonding that gets done is when they're out there murdering gringos, and that only starts happening because the run-time of the film said it was time to do that. Sure, I'd like to trust that this is all going somewhere, but I'm also going somewhere every time I leave my telework-disallowed job to come home. It would be a bad idea to do 400 circuits of the office parking lot before I decided it was time to head in the actual direction I needed to go.

Yeah, if I had to describe this film in one TL;DR log line: it's 400 circuits of your office parking lot. Just with better scenery.

PS: also I didn't realize Kate Winslet was in this until I read the credits at the end of the film. Normally I'd give an actor praise for disappearing into her role, but it's harder to do when they literally disappear.

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*OK, this was kind of mean, but it's not fully Sam Worthington, it's a cartoon version of him. I've honestly forgotten what actual Sam Worthington looks like.

Likely Story

It's the time of year where we find the best in one another. We also take the time and energy to make ourselves available to friends and family, to cleave unto our loved ones as they cleave unto us, giving of ourselves in ways above and beyond the everyday.

That feeling is pretty much the only way I was going to end up in an IMAX theater watching a 3D showing of Avatar: Fire and Ash this holiday season. Having seen the first two Avatar films, there is no force social or spiritual that was likely to soften my soul to the idea of 3-plus hours of James Cameron's embarrassing cowboys-and-indians non-parable parable about environmental something-or-other. 

No force of course except my youngest (adult) kid asking me to. For even bad movies, we're a good time. We set the precedent way back when we excitedly saw the predictably predictable Dwayne Johnson struggle-fest Skyscraper when he was like 15. It was awful in a way we both really wanted it to be, which led to an animated discussion in the drive home. It's the kind of bonding kids only do now in the Discord chat during co-op gaming.

More about this movie later, but I wanted to pass along this message of family and fellowship and the unifying power of Jim Cameron's pretentiousness in the form of a popcorn movie. Let's all try to carry that warm feeling of togetherness through the new year. We'll fashion our own upsides out of the slow-motion explosion of the post-Cold War international settlement, in this lull before the Great Venezuela War of 2026.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

We Will Not Be Mentioning Dean Cain

 

Superman

starring David Corenswet, Rachel Brosnahan, Edi Gathegi, Isabela Merced, Anthony Carrigan, Nathan Fillion, Wendell Pierce, Skyler Gisondo, Sara Sampaio, Neva Howell, Pruitt Taylor Vince and Nicholas Hoult

directed by James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy [all volumes], Peacemaker, The Suicide Squad)

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THIS IS WHERE THE SPOILER WARNING WOULD NORMALLY GO. But this is a 100 year old story, what am I going to spoil for you at this point? OH MY GOD, HE CAN FLY?! Get over yourselves

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There was a time when I used to collect comic books. Luckily for me, that was back when your hobbies defined not only your entire personality but also carried with them a certain amount of social determinism. What you consumed and how you consumed it still had weight, it was related still to your choices, your discernment, where the things you curated by exclusion (comics? yes. organized sports? yuck, no) ended up sorting and excluding you from certain life paths at the exact same time. That's right, I collected comics back when meant something, primarily that you were several years away from the possibility of getting laid.

Speaking of that, let's just get this out of the way, so you know: this Superman fucks. They don't show it or anything (though we're all still curious about the logistics, or at least we have been for at least 56 years), and they even show it less than did back in Superman II with that weird silver beanbag thing, but as movies have become more and more sexless in the 21st century, explicitly (no pun intended) pushed aside by more action and quippy dialogue in the now-ubiquitous Comic Book IP Cinematic Universii peopled entirely by de-genital-ed men and women who spend a lot of time really violently working through a lot of pent-up pent-up-ed-ness by punching through whole buildings and shit, it's established very clearly that Clark Kent and Lois Lane are definitely smashing. On the scale of things about the re-emergence of this beloved cultural icon to concern ourselves with, should this be the first thing, straight out of the gate? Well, name a more important one, I'll wait.

That's what I thought.

Here's the point I'm making:* the hardest thing to do with Superman is to make him a person in a world and not a weird, stoic avatar of a selected basket of virtues in a stretchy suit who also sometimes punches through whole buildings. The challenge of Superman is a problem of scale. How do you bring a demigod down onto the plane of squishy, puny mortals? Of course there's a way to make a good and decent Superman movie that explores his otherness, but that's only really been tried in earnest once, by Bryan Singer, and what you got is a final shot of Superman creeping on his ex and her happy family from afar, like a lion pondering a frolicking clutch of baby gazelles. Yes, they took pains to establish that that Superman fucked as well, even producing a child, but it was way before the story started and in the end you couldn't help but feel like it had been an experiment or maybe an accident. Also that had Kevin Spacey in it, so the whole thing had the ick on it in retrospect.

And I did like Henry Cavill in the role. He was purpose-built from scratch to wear the suit, but Zack Snyder's default mode is stoic avatar of a selected basket of virtues in a stretchy suit who also sometimes punches through whole buildings. I have inexplicably seen almost every piece he's created, none of which are ultimately necessary but even the really unnecessary ones I've seen, and he has yet to actually produce a piece with a single recognizable human character.

Shout out to local Inland Empire homie Tyler Hoechlin doing his dang best on TV, but cinematically, it's been a lot of misses. The closer we've tried to get to movie Superman, the farther and farther he's drifted away from us, arguably since Richard Donner got replaced most of the way through directing Superman II. It's like we are the comic book collectors and the character is all the girls I knew in high school: aloof, inaccessible, inscrutable, and SUPER busy on--sorry, what night did you say again?--yes, that night.

I never collected any of the Superman titles directly, but for some reason or another, this character in film has always been important to me. Probably because early-days HBO showed Superman II on a goddamned loop with, like, Beastmaster and 9 to 5 and a few others. I can't tell you why I'm less emotionally invested in subsequent expansions of the Beastmaster cinematic representations, but the first Superman I knew was Movie Superman. That's where he fits. That's what I want.

If you've read any other reviews, it won't surprise you to know this is... really good. I'm relieved as much as I am happy about it. I'll say if I have to critique anything, it's that James Gunn understands the Superman Problem exactly the same way I do and makes that the center of the entire film, scene after scene, in every interaction with every character. The grand denouement follows a thunking, heavy re-set of Superman Is An Earth Person Too involving his excellent human adoptive parents, crescendo-ing into him literally screaming this at the antagonist.

All of this comes out in a very human performance by David Corenswet, more grounded by his use of the word "dude" in a few select scenes than by any philosophical soliloquy. The line between Superman and Clark Kent is kept deliberately wobbly to the point of almost not existing (Clark playing Clark where not everyone knows he's Superman exists for exactly one scene). He doesn't change who he is, he just has magic glasses (seriously) so people can't tell. Superman is a great big goob, un-self-consciously uncool in a way that makes him cool again. He definitely could have gotten away with collecting comic books in the 1990s.

Hoult's Lex Luthor is... trickier. I'll be honest, I don't know what I want from my Lex Luthor anymore. We've had goofy schemer (Gene Hackman), boring bumbling dumb creep (Kevin Spacey) and guy-in-manic-episode (Jesse Eisenberg). This is a better, larger, scarier version. He's obviously and overwhelmingly a mad scientist, he has the quiet bitterness and rage you want, the Javert-ian obsessiveness, acts of wanton and outright, unmistakeable malice. He's cool without trying, even though he's trying so hard, which is a weird space to be in. At the end, I think he gets a bit too much of a comeuppance as I think I like my Lex a little oilier, a little better at hiding the raging monster from the public, but for what they were going for here (Superman is more humane and thus more human than the Earthborn Lex), it worked. And I don't think the performance of Nicholas Hoult can be faulted in any respect.

As for who carries this thing, it's Hoult or Edi Gathegi. Corenswet is up there the most (literally! Two separate roles!) and he holds both the screen and the emotional center of the story, but he does get upstaged a tiny bit by The Theme (the stuff I said before about Superman being "human"). Gathegi just sneaks out from behind a flashy and funny part by Nathan Fillion (Isabela Merced is grossly under-used) and makes a supporting role a co-starring one every time he's on screen.

Also the CG dog is good.

If you saw any Guardians of the Galaxy, you know James Gunn does fun and funny and joy and sentiment, visually and story-wise, and that happens here in a long overdue counterweight to the infestation of grimdark that has lingered on DC properties since 1989 Batman gloomed it up to fight the lingering image of 1966 TV goofin' that was the Adam West Batman. Comic books are basically science fiction. The stories only need to be "grounded" if you lack the confidence to try. This is bright. It does its share of goofin'. And all to entertaining effect. If I would have ever read any Superman comics when I was a kid, I would have been just as satisfied.

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*100% meant to make it and am definitely not now improvising to cover. This is in print, so there's no way for you to prove any lack of pre-meditation, sorry. Except maybe my entire previous body of work, yes, that may give something away... 

There Is No Veil Between Me and the Wheel of Fire

I feel like I've been very clear about this the whole way: I would prefer not to pay any attention to politics this presidential cycle. But right now I'm starting to feel like those people who told themselves they could just opt out of the whole COVID pandemic, including refusing from availing themselves of the available prophylaxis and, well, it turns out sometimes the problem is bigger than your intention, whatever you imagine your willpower to be. It really doesn't matter how hard I plant my feet or clench my core or grit my teeth, a tornado (for example) is windspeed and airborne debris; it doesn't want to shred your skin with gravel, impale you with the bumper of a 1986 Toyota Tercel and carry you 12 miles away into a Del Taco parking lot, it's just how it works, how it is. So you considering your level of determination when attempting to defy it is a simple category error. The right response to physics is other physics (like a storm cellar), not proving your depth of feeling, in any particular direction.

Of course politics is not a natural disaster, but it sure is starting to take on the contours of one. There's a tsunami-esque feeling of both inevitability and impending ruin that you can only ruefully nod your head at and annoy your loved ones and coworkers with "you know, I knew this was going to happen" right before you're all under 40 feet of rushing ocean brine where there used to be a Walgreen's like 10 seconds ago. There's almost nothing to be actually done. All of the institutions and protections are under threat, things like environmental regulation, medical privacy, reproductive rights, basic Fourth Amendment guarantees against a police state, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and yeah, not to freak you out, but even the actual, non-metaphorical Walgreen's. It's dire.

Everything is a 24-hour news cycle except, apparently, this idea that Joe Biden has to quit the race for president. It started as a sniffle and gentle cough amongst TV and print media types who have whatever the opposite of an immune system is to this type of content, but it started to metastasize into something genuinely scary when it spread to the donor class. And from their positions lodged tightly in their patrons' colons, it was the easiest thing in the world to transmit the bug to select panic-prone Democratic politicians, who started to openly coalesce around the idea that maybe it really should be Joe-ver.

I've tried and tried to pretend this didn't affect me. Then some fucking dingus tried to shoot Trump.* Nobody cares that he appointed a suckling hypocritical avatar of nihilism JD Vance as his running mate, probably not even Trump. Campaign seasons are usually boiled down to one or two events and they have already happened: Biden shorting out during the debate and Trump getting shot at. And it's barely mid-July. This is officially Too Much History. I keep trying to offer my polite no-thank-yous, but apparently the space that exists outside of news cycles now is down to just those parts of the Amazon where the low-contact indigenous peoples still hide out. But I'm not even sure about that, I mean, what are intra-tribal politics even like? These are regular humans after all. It's probably way harder to start a whisper campaign about your opponents being secret pedophiles or whatever when everyone literally knows everyone else, but I'm sure someone has given it a shot.

And this Biden thing, I said to myself in the beginning I wouldn't take it seriously unless/until Obama got involved and um... uh-oh. And also Biden got COVID this week, just to bring us all the way back full-circle to the stupid points I was making back the first paragraph, which feels like it was 186 years ago, because that's just how time works now. I want all this to be over, but we already know some other goddamned Momentous Thing is going to happen. The Democratic convention isn't even here yet. Tonight Trump makes his own convention speech, which I'm sure will be measured and conciliatory, which for him means only calling for the forcible internment of his perceived enemies, not their outright deaths.

I don't know, man. I try to be hopeful, but that will only get you so far. At some point, you actually have to do something to protect yourself. I guess we could all consider moving to Canada. We know they have room, but eh, I'm not sure the longterm prospects are a whole lot better. They get twitter up there too, you know.

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*if you imagine this is the part where I make a joke about his aim, I want to very seriously point out that not only am I an anti-violence absolutist, but if Trump had been seriously harmed or worse, it would have been a disaster. The conspiracy-theory worm-brained redpills are already having a gross field day with events as they actually went. We avoided by inches an extended period of retaliatory injury and death amongst entirely imagined foes and an even more chaotic election, probably more violence and death on election day. Trump is a dangerous idiot deserving of a lot of things, but being shot in any part of his body is absolutely not one of them.

The Wolfman of Frankensteins

 

Barbenheimer

starring Margot Robbie, Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Florence Pugh, America Ferrera, Ryan Gosling, Ariana Greenblatt, Kate McKinnon, Matt Damon, Issa Rae, Simu Liu, Michael Cera, Will Ferrell and Robert Downey Jr. and and Rhea Perlman

directed by Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, Little Women) and also Christopher Nolan (Memento, some Batman thing). Some unholy union between the two. Call it Gretstopher Nolwig

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AT THIS POINT, YOU CAN'T MAKE ME GIVE A SHIT ABOUT SPOILERS. BESIDES, YOU ALREADY KNOW HOW HIROSHIMA TURNED OUT, DON'T PLAY COY

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I should point out that circumstances ended up dictating that I saw these films in the wrong order. Because of some illness and the fact that I'm now forced to try to coordinate goings-out to event movies with my adult children who thoughtlessly sometimes insist on having other things to do, we pushed up seeing Barbenheimer Part II: Oppenheimer because we were afraid it wasn't going to be in IMAX for another week. It was important to us to see the cataclysmic fireball and the subsequent moral angst in retina-distorting side-of-a-building proportions. That was never a consideration for Barbenheimer Part I: Barbie because it never got a shot in the IMAX out here. Strike one, patriarchy. Strike one.

Luckily for us we weren't too lost going in to Oppenheimer because it turns out the two parts of Barenheimer aren't really that connected, narratively speaking. It took me a while after seeing both to put together how or why they were related at all, but the best I can figure it: a child's toy is imbued with life by demonic forces (capitalism, misogyny) and charged with judging the human race. In the end the only just solution she can arrive at is to set the Scarecrow on a course to blow up the entire world with one bomb and kill all the men. It would end up taking all the women with it as well, but it seems a small price to pay to ensure all the people who can't properly contextualize Joe Rogan get ashed.

NO BUT SERIOUSLY, I know they are different movies and there isn't really a "phenomenon" here past people who schedule movie releases for studios not really seeming to know what they're doing at all. To be fair, the coincidence of releasing both of these films on the same day turning into a doofy meme isn't really something studio flunkies can predict, but even absent that, as "counterprogramming" this is super fucking weird. Sure, Oppenheimer is a Christopher Nolan film, one of the few directors whose name means box office to some degree, but this has looked from the jump like a slick-but-dour period piece with a bunch of rumination on the Big Question like "should we just because we can?" It's as present and relevant a question as ever with looming similar potential disasters like profit-captured AI, or recently realized ones like that big ole country boy doing a cover of "Fast Car" by Tracy Chapman. Heavy stuff.

Both movies do kind of ask the same question: can we live with what is? The main difference is in Barbie, there's a built-in obliviousness in a bespoke fantasy world peopled by literal playthings and the reckoning starts with an existential jolt (in this case a pretty funny literal one, Barbie contemplating the idea of death). In Oppenheimer, it's the most knowing humans who ever knowed seeing what is coming and still willing it into being, with full pre-existing knowledge about what was on the other side: a world defined by the explicit threat of humans finally having a weapon large enough to kill themselves with. And also, sneakily, consequences they couldn't foresee in the form or Robert Downey Jr.

In terms of conflict, both of these movies are defined by their antagonists, Ryan Gosling's semi-red-pilled, awakened (but never "woke") Ken and Junior's simmering death-ray of resentment in a tailored suit Lewis Strauss. It's great, great tribute to the direction of Greta Gerwig and the screenplay by her and Noah Baumbach that the obvious shallow, defensive, hurt-feelings expectation of gratification is the underpinning of all the desperate defensiveness that is patriarchy. It's petty and punitive in an irreducibly Republican way, a zero-sum calculation built around a hoarding (of resources, of status trophies, of political leverage) designed not to glorify but to deny the enemy they see in women, making up a very dangerous 50% of any population. The real-world backlash from the obvious quarters echoed the exact same message without irony: my god, what if these women ever realize they're not actually the minority we treat them like? We told you chicks not to see this movie, what business does it have making a literal billion dollars? But that's as deep as patriarchy really goes. The fact that Ken conflates it with horses as an idea is as brilliant and concise a summation as I can think of.

Robert Downey Jr. shows up in just a few scenes, in a role both on the page and in any director's note on set was probably simply "Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture," in what seems like should be a B-plot considering there's a literal atom bomb over there to consider, but turns out to be the thing around which the whole narrative turns. Like Barbie, it's pettiness and resentment that ends in frustration for him and some level of defeat, which feels almost as much like a fantasy as the denouement of Barbie. The fact that the "bad guy" gets served some level of comeuppance in such a real-world setting in a fact-based film almost feels pretend or at least at odds with reality in the last 7-8 years.

One of my first impressions of Barbie overall was that Margot Robbie got stuck playing the straight-lady to a bunch of goobs and dinguses in Barbieland and in the Real World, but after sitting with it for a while, she's the entire emotional pivot of the thing, working closely in concert with America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt. Emoting something real and making all the plastic and doll features mean something is a feat. The film even directly comments on the irony of an uncommonly beautiful person like Robbie undoing an ecosystem built on fabulousness and pretty things. It's a high-wire act, but she does the thing, less in her few monologues and more in a subtle expression, a softening of the eyes here and there, a dip in a smile's full wattage registering unexpected hurt or dissonance. It's not Laurie Metcalf in Lady Bird, but few things are. Considering she starts off as an avatar of a literal inanimate object, it's a whole-ass journey, definitionally a transformation.

Cillian Murphy conversely gets asked to be in virtually every scene of a very long film, the center around which everything else revolves, in a movie that is unironically at least partially about self-regard. He's the most problematic of problematic men, stuffing down reservations and ideals in favor of the conquest of a thing, even if in this case the thing conquered is just about the tiniest thing imaginable. At one point a slightly miscast Matt Damon has to yell at another scientist about "the most important thing in the history of the fucking world" (the one off-note line delivery of the whole movie) when contextualizing the work at Los Alamos, but nobody had to cajole ole Oppie. He believes that from Frame 1. Hell, he's even got some feel-bad poetry quotes ready to go when the Big Bang happens and creates the Cold War military industrial complex in a magaton fireball of both human tragedy and apotheosis.

After the opening in the traditional Nolan-esque style of a mini-avalanche of fast-cutting exposition scenelets, it settles in and becomes by far his most conventional film. He can't help but fuck with timelines, but even then they just feel like flashbacks more than anything novel and twee, like he did with Dunkirk. He takes some swings with some art-house flourishes, mostly involving a naked Florence Pugh, that don't really land and then at the end with a few short, clunky scenes with ICBMs. Given that this is the guy who trapped Matthew McConaughey in a multiverse behind a bookcase and did whatever the fuck he was going for in Tenet, considering a Cold War planet-wide holocaust from the sky that never came has the benefit of at least being graspable as an idea. 

I loved Barbie but going to graduate school means it just kept firing in my brain "there is no space for resistance in hegemonic systems of control," which skewed my ability to embrace the sociocultural pushback in it. I can cynically get stuck considering that "girl movies" are really about developing a marketplace in a system that will tolerate anything, even something as radical as real anti-patriarchal feminism, as long as it can sell it as advertising down the line. But I remind myself these aren't the roles of mass market studio films. You sneak in what you can sneak in. Mostly both were an opportunity to talk to my GenZ boy children about the complicated legacy of Barbie or what it was like to live in a period where nuclear annihilation was as prevalent an everyday threat/consideration as climate change is now. Anything done well is about building context and altering perspective. Both of these are brilliantly made films by filmmakers absolutely in their pomp, but Barbie does way more of that than Oppenheimer, which, to be fair, wasn't made as a companion or comparison piece on purpose and also does have some really good explosions in it.

Big in Japan

I've never really taken a moment to do so, but: hello, Singaporeans! Singaporese? Singaporites? I'm really not sure. What does the CIA World Factbook say, hang on... oh! Singaporeans, I got it first try. The CIA World Factbook is a great reference resource I used to be wary about using on my home computer given, you know, it's the CIA and everything. But I've worked in a government-adjacent capacity long enough now to know if the CIA really wanted to know something about me, the people at Amazon, Starbucks, Google, Apple and Meta/Facebook/Instagram would laugh at them and the effort it would take for them to learn all the things I sign away immediately and voluntarily, over and over again, just because I want to pre-order my coffee or buy a novelty T-shirt with the logo of a defunct ABA team or find out what kind of a sound a ruffed grouse makes. It's enough information to either recreate a whole online version of me based just on my purchasing habits (the only measure of true citizenship in a globalized economy anyway) or to really fuck me over with a bunch of dork-tastic cringe taken out of context (or worse: not) and congealed into one completely unloveable avatar birthed into being only to be immediately pilloried, publicly shamed and probably ultimately cancelled. What's the CIA going to do, look up my Social Security number? An Eritrean tween with a 2005 Dell plugged into a 56k dialup modem could have that inside five minutes. Governments are so passé.

My very delicious and benevolent (benevolicious? I'll work on it) overlords at Blogger, presented by Google, do have SOME of their analytics they don't mind sharing with me. For those of you who don't know, which seems likely to be everybody-inclusive seeing as no one has created a new Blogger account since the first Obama administration, every blog owner has access to site stats for their blog. I haven't really looked at the ones for this one in a long time, since I'm kind of too cool for such prosaic and bourgeois worries as "views" and "clicks" and "wondering what the point of this is," because of how post-ironic I am and because my therapist says I'm not allowed. There was a time when the mostly flat line graph bouncing off the horizontal X-axis over and over was sort of low-key collapsing my entire personality in on itself and nobody wants to go back there, at least not if there aren't any plans to figure out how to make it into content.

The Blogger stats have been re-jiggered a bit in the last several years, at least in terms of what they present. Layout aside, it's still the basics: view numbers, what the referring websites are, where the traffic comes from, that sort of thing. I still get a weirdly outsize number of views from time to time, by factors of several hundred, spiking for no reason attached to content or posting frequency or anything recreateable or exploitable. Either it's some kind of automated bot swarm or I become incredibly fashionable at unpredictable intervals and then immediately fall out of the public eye again. I'm like the Birkenstocks of zero-cost internet writers.

I'm not typically a glass-half-full guy, mostly because a half-full glass left out is just one more thing for the cat to knock over when she gets bored, but I guess I should at least embrace the possibility that maybe the geometric multiplicatives are real, eyeball-having humans and not code-bots sent out to scour the internet for content, just happening to stop by the blog for the nanosecond long enough to sniff it, generate a measurable trace, and move on? What does it say about my self-esteem that I can't imagine the possibility that you're all really out there and you like me, you really like me?

Is it unlikely that this Schrödinger's Readership just materializes out of nowhere--or more very specifically, Singapore--once or twice a month? I won't know until I address them head-on. It's a non-zero chance, but that's still definitionally not zero! We'll call this an exercise in grace and humility. Or, from another point of view, an utter lack of both of those things.

What are the odds I get 948 readers from Singapore and 15 from the USA over the same space of time? What am I, a goddamned physicist? I can't know everything! If David Hasselhoff can be a huge pop star in Germany, I can be the blog-toast of a sophisticated island nation in Asia. I've put in the time. A lot of people know English there, I think!

So I'll say it again: hello Singaporeans! Forgive my ignorance of your customs and manners, your food, language, government, climate, holidays or history. You seem really cool to me! I've decided to accept your existence as human people (not all Singaporeans, I'm relatively certain they are not fictional, I mean the Singapore-based readership spikes I'm seeing). You are welcome. Would it be easier to accept/prove you were real if some or all of you signed up to become Patreon supporters and sent me... whatever it is the currency is you use? I'm almost certain it can translate them into American dollars! What a way to bring us together. If I'm about anything, I'm about the harmony of humankind. Or if you really are just clouds of code sweeping indiscriminately across all of blog-space, if you have access to some credit card numbers, I can also be about the harmony of human and botkind. I think you'll find my buy-in price to promote the Singularity and ultimately the rise of the Cybermen is pretty shockingly reasonable.

Speed Run, Any %

Things here have gotten a little movie-heavy recently, but what can I say, it's that time of year. The January-February block really, really did not used to be "that time of year" at all. These used to be the dark doldrums where studios dumped the films that tested so poorly, they couldn't risk releasing them in a time when movies would expect to be profitable normally at the expense of some other bullshit they had on their docket (in terms of precious, precious calendar real estate in the summer or holiday season) but had already sunk too much cost that the logic fallacy had to be shepherded through its endpoint. Near zero return is superior to zero return, if only in a strictly numerical (not mathematical, as there will be no factoring or scaling) sense. Everyone knows I'm looking at you A Good Day to Die Hard.

January and February releases were for action movies with unlikely action stars or comedies starring people you forgot used to be on Saturday Night Live. The right response typically was not to go out and seek these movies, but to note their existence with the one TV spot you might happen across, register the correct amount of sadness/secondhand embarrassment and then not think of them again until you come across them at 3 am on TNT because the flu has turned your digestive system against you and sleep is an asphyxiation hazard, probably also ironically in a subsequent January.

That system has died out, of course, as fewer and fewer stinker movies are being made with theatrical release in mind at all. Those all live on streaming services now, where they can be absentmindedly silent-farted into the pop cultural ecosystem with no risk since total vertical integration of the production process means distribution by the same company that conceived of this bad idea also gets to birth it via a method that costs them approximately zero extra dollars. No expense means no risk to Netflix or Paramount or whatever, no obligation to advertise it even, counting entirely on people finding it naturally in the revolutionary way that has long-since DISRUPTED the broadcast/pay cable model, by scrolling around the menus at 3 am with the flu. But TNT doesn't see a fucking dime! Eat shit, boomer-ass paradigm!

Among the bullshit detritus, you used to also get the limited-release prestige pictures in slightly wider release, which typically meant instead of just one screen each in LA and New York ahead of the December deadline for awards eligibility, you could see it at the weird place in your state near a college that still raises a curtain before every showing, just like it never stopped being 1978. I would normally take advantage, even as a young dad, to get out and see 2-3 films in a day to take them in before the Oscars showed up and all the heady, vamping cultural currency around these films was all spent. Also my kids would have to stay home, an almost opiatic incentive in itself.

And of course now, the time gap between the theatrical "release" fig leaf for award eligibility and streaming availability is negligible so as to be functionally zero, plus even a lot of the art houses or industry-friendly venues have dried up and blown away (RIP, Arclight Hollywood), so even I just hang out and watch them at home these days. The fact that my kids no longer require my constant supervision at home has even blown up my most powerful drive to get out.

All of that is preamble* to say I've semi-binged a bunch of nominated movies in the last month or so. Instead of separate reviews, I'm going to shotgun all right at your face right now, hopefully with no spoilers:

All Quiet on the Western Front: These Germans sure love a world war! Beautifully shot and composed film, but I think I'm just getting old and have seen enough anti-war war films to not be particularly moved. It delivers its message about the futility and madness of it all with brutality and graphic violence and utter bleakness at points. Great, but also just fine.

To Leslie: I mostly knew about this because I listen to Marc Maron's podcast and he's in it. Then there was controversy! because people did an Oscar campaign for Andrea Riseborough, which apparently was an idea just invented this year? Anyway, kind of same as above, a story you've seen, but with an ending that was maybe not dark enough for what it felt like it was trying to earn, emotionally. Other supporting cast of real heavy hitters, Stephen Root, Allison Janney, Andre Royo... Would be more to it if they had more to do. But Riseborough really is good, if a bit showy.

Avatar 2: Already covered! Saw this one in public with strangers.

Black Panther Wakanda Forever: Just Angela Bassett is nominated, which is, like Andrea Riseborough, a bit of a showy and full-throttle performance, but this is a different kind of melodrama, a comic-book kind, so somebody has to chew some goddamned scenery. The movie itself feels very much like how it was made (after the unexpected death of its star and during COVID). Similar inessentialist vibes as I got with Ant-Man.

The Banshees of Inisherin: Pretty fucking dark, but deeply Irish, so humor and blood are the same thing. The motivations of the characters start off and remain steadfastly inscrutable, but that's a feature rather than a bug, in my opinion. The one I liked the most. The Barry Keoghan-Kerry Condon scene is already a buzzy all-timer, for good reason. Good shit, and I didn't even mention either of the leads.

Tár: Very polarizing. Two hours of nothing really happening. A lot of exposition and a kind of wooden performance by Cate Blanchett in the beginning as she has to speechify and sell the movie a lot. But she warms up and earns what she's earned. In the end, it's an attempt to comment or reflect on a social movement that has evolved in the time it took to produce and release the film, so it comes across as sort of out of step if not... accidentally right wing? The whole ending is weird.

Nope: I don't like horror movies. Daniel Kaluuya and Keke Palmer are so good, with entirely different approaches and with entirely different effect, they almost sold it to me. The chimpanzee bits are riveting and unforgettable. The rest is occasionally fun but overall uneven. In the war for my affections between satire (delicious) and horror (yuck), the former isn't quite enough to rescue it from the latter for me.

Everything Everywhere All at Once: Lauded as the Greatest Movie Of Its Generation when it came out, the buzz was fucking palpable. We all got palped by buzz and you know it. A mild backlash at the moment, but eh, I don't have much time for that pop culture reflex shit. The movie is kinetic and weird and very, very sure of itself. The ending and the message will not surprise you, but the brisk walk to get there will leave you the right amount of winded. Michelle Yeoh is infallible to me, which is cheating. Also best use of a Goonie in film since Avengers: Endgame.

Top Gun: Maverick: Also already covered! Unrelated point: Scientology can eat a dick.

The only real forward-leaning contenders I haven't seen are The Fabelmans and The Whale, but I'm not sure I can handle Spielbergian family-ness or the raw-nerve intensity of Brendan Fraser. That whole latter movie just feels like it was designed to fuck you up, and I'm not sure I'm good with that at the moment.

I should point out that, for the 14th year running, the Oscars will not be making an appearance on my viewing screens of any type this year. You all can cringe through that scripted banter shit all you want. I'll be looking at slideshows about dresses and feeling smug/outraged at the validation/repudiation of my tastes the next Monday online like the rest of you casuals.

---

*my writing style has evolved almost entirely to like six paragraphs of "preamble" to what I initially intend to write about, which I get to either in the last few sentences or avoid altogether, you know, for time.

Spooky Action at a Distance

 

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Evangeline Lilly, Kathryn Newton, Jonathan Majors, Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas, Katy O'Brian, Corey Stoll, a bunch of floppy cartoon people and (for some reason, and very briefly) Bill Murray

directed by Peyton Reed (Bring It On, Yes Man, previous Ant-Men)

---

LOOK, I'M NOT TRYING TO SPOILER YOU SPECIFICALLY ON PURPOSE, I'M JUST TRYING TO TALK ABOUT THE MOVIE. WHATEVER HAPPENS BEYOND HERE IS ON YOU, MAN

---

I understand the appeal of writing certain types of genre fiction. The rules of actual physics or logic are time consuming and paralyzing to account for and write around. If you're writing a screenplay about a soccer team trying to climb down from a mountain after a plane crash or the slow disillusionment of German enlistees during World War I, you're committing to the idea that things are going to happen in a ways that are relatable, human and bound by space, time and the basic parameters of both general and special relativity, with all caveats therein implied. This is super good news, if you're a giant fucking nerd.

Sometimes, on the other hand, you just go all in on the idea that the dog can play basketball. And everyone has a great time while learning nothing. Some people might call that the primary failing of western mass culture and the slow slumping toward an undifferentiated monoculture of two-dimensional ideas whose primary value is in consumability over engagement (mind, body... soul, if you're some kind of hippie) until the last thing consumed is ourselves, by ourselves. But you've heard of twitter, you've seen this critique of Marvel films before, so we will neither rehash nor indulge it here. Suffice it to say, I paid an electronically transferrable amount of fiat money to see the third Ant-Man movie in a theater, so you know I'm either not sold on the corrosivity of Marvel-Disney on the American mind OR I'm already corroded past the point of knowing the difference.

Am I still part of the fandom? Sure, for what that's worth. Was I counting the days until this one came out? Reader, I was not. I don't have a lot of time for reviews that elect to watch a thing (the non-professionals, like me) and then pretend to be too good for it, so I'm not leaning in that direction, to be clear. I do think it's important to catalogue at this cultural moment, I've lost some of the edge I had in the pointy, swirling hype matrix leading up to, say, Infinity War or even Captain Marvel. At some point in there, I've lost the primary ability to be marveled (I know, just leave it...) by these things and instead am content enough when I walk out pleasantly surprised, like with Shang-Chi. The bar is lower, but it's still not on the ground. We're not at Avatar levels here yet.

The dialogue isn't laughable and the performances by deeply talented people are still creditable and fun. And the benefit of this being a sort-of sci-fi/fantasy piece is you sure can get away with a lot if you get to make up your own rules. It's almost refreshing the way Peyton Reed and screenwriter-stand-in-for-the-probably-two-dozen-people-who-worked-on-this Jeff Loveness really lean in to the bullshit of it all.

My favorite recurring bit in all of Star Wars, especially the first one,* is that shooting door controls with a laser gun does exactly what you need it to every time you do it. Bad guys chasing you and you need to open a locked door? Shoot the door controls! Door opens. Bad guys chasing you and you need to keep the bad guys from opening a closed door? Shoot the door controls! Door locks. Somehow the projectile from a blaster rifle is infused with the intent of the shooter, delivering only desirable outcomes. Which is impressive considering they were mostly stolen stormtrooper blasters being used on Imperial doors, so these guns were total traitors. But as a viewer, you don't get too hung up on it** because considering the door issue (does it work on all door models? are these bespoke Empire design or off-the-shelf third-party door controls?) means you also have to consider that these are space doors in a space hallway on a space station made out of metal, toting a space laser that blows up planets. And we haven't even started to consider the brain-magic space monks. Better to just leave it, or leave the theater. You're either on board or you're not, both of which are OK.

The Ant-Man franchise has its own brands of hokum it demands you not think too deeply about. In the first one, Ant-Man II (the man, not the movie title... meaning the one that looks like Paul Rudd) accidentally shrank himself dangerously past the normal booger-sized limits of the hooey-tech, but remember at the LAST SECOND! that he had him some hooey-tech ninja stars tucked into his super-belt which made him grow back to just under average height for an American male in the 21st century. Victory!

This movie, the third iteration, is absolutely lousy with these little Pym-particle throwables. In the first movie, they were the miraculous answer to how one escapes the limbo of the Quantum Realm. A breakthrough! Now we can save Michelle Pfeiffer! Always a worthwhile goal! In this movie, five normies get stuck in the Quantum Realm, but these little tchotchkes (even though they have MANY super belts filled with MANY of them) are never really considered as a solution. Instead they can be used, as needed by the plot: a) to make things really big (but only relative to the sub-microscopic things around, not in human-relative terms), b) make things really small, c) blow up a space ship battery?, d) fix the same space ship battery, and e) only choice D when used with several other ones in a big ole fistful because just one by itself in the exact same application will fizzle for some reason.

I don't know. It's all kind of a lot. They got Michelle Pfeiffer from the Quantum Realm in the second movie (you remember the second one... oh you don't? Well, that's not that weird I guess. Laurence Fishburne was in it! Morpheus is cool!), then immediately went about making a Quantum Realm Express Tunnel machine in a van. Now in this one, Ant-Man II's six year old daughter (who, after five years of Thanos-blip is somehow like 23) makes a Quantum Realm radio and Michelle Pfeiffer (who was both there and on board with the Express Tunnel idea) is like "NO, YOU CAN'T, DON'T, NO QUANTUM ANYTHING, AAAAAAAggh...." and then the plot kicks off.

It doesn't make a lot of sense. But if you went into a movie called Ant-Man expecting that, well, that's a misjudgment on your part and I'm sorry for it.

Is it a good movie? It. Was. Decidedly. Fine.

Paul Rudd is charming and lopsided-smirky. Michelle Pfeiffer is super good in parts, especially when she's a Michelle Pfeiffer stunt double reminding us her character used to be The Wasp and beats people's quantum asses. Evangeline Lilly gets to be the muscle really, which is exciting and interesting enough as Paul Rudd and Kathryn Newton as his daughter kind of take turns being damsel-in-distress. All of this takes place under the heel of still-frustratingly-under-defined Kang, bolstered totally unfairly by the effortless intrinsic charisma of Jonathan Majors. His power capability bobs up and down on the Deadliness Scale as needed by the plot (single handedly destroying planets in one sequence, punched out by a 57-year-old guy wearing a leather unitard in another), but that's to be expected. Power scaling in super-hero sci-fi is the only trope more prevalent than the beam of light going into the sky for no reason in the finale.

Michael Douglas gets to be ANT-man against Paul Rudd's ant-MAN, which you have to appreciate about these films. The character has two power sets: growing/shrinking and... talking to ants. The second one is so relentlessly stupid as powers go, the only way to make it work is to lean all the way into it and they do. In 120 minutes of "oh, huh, that's interesting" it gives a good 90 seconds of "ha, fucking rad, you get 'em, Mr. Zeta-Jones."

It looks great, all of it. It feels like a Star Wars movie in some ways, basically from a character design point of view, a film-length version of the alien cantina scene if they could have made it in 2023. Everything is colorful and blobby and borderline gross, which is great.

In the end, it's borderline whether to recommend it or not. I don't know there's much here on its own for non-Marvelites. If you haven't started, this is not your first stop, no. For Marvel people, some important world-building, but that's a trick to some degree. If I'm wishy-washy about it, I guess there is a tipping point that makes me land on: do no recommend. No exclamation point after QUANTUMANIA! in the title is the act of a diseased mind. It deserves the punishment of your cold indifference for that alone.

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*Chronologically by release, not Roman-numerically

**Unless mentioning makes one of your kids laugh, then it's suddenly The Most Important Thing

Glub Glub Glub

 

Avatar: The Way of Water

starring Sigourney Weaver, Zoe Saldaña, Sam Worthington, Britain Dalton, Stephen Lang, Jamie Flatters, Trinity Bliss, Baily Bass, Cliff Curtis and Edie Falco.

directed by James Cameron (the first Avatar, a few other small independent things I think)

---

I don't often do these review-type posts two weeks in a row as they tend to end up being the longest things that I write. It turns out I can really get going if I have something to actually talk about. This is in stark contrast to literally every other week when I'm fucking winging it and drawing out 300 words seems almost as hard as creating a public life as a fake genius. It's a lot to keep straight and in the end, you just get booed at a Dave Chappelle show. Or whatever your local equivalent of that might be. This is not my best metaphor.

But I was working today, my last day before a two-week break for the holidays, and I ran right through my normal quitting time trying to get loose ends tied up so I would maintain the option to not think about literally anything over these next two weeks. When I finally logged off, I found myself here, on a regular Thursday, mentally and emotionally spent, but obligated by habit to consider making something for the benefit of between two and seven of you out there (depending on the week according to my analytics). So I thought: why try to come up with something when I just saw this dang movie last night? Especially when any relevant topic of the day is just going to end in darkness, like an episode of Last Week Tonight, but without the professional jokes as a leavener. I mean, you saw the metaphor I tried up in the previous paragraph. This could get grim.

Not only is it a handy writing prompt, but it turns out if you opt to sit and think about Avatar: The Way of Water? Not really that taxing. I saw it with two of my adult children and one of the first things I asked them: was there anything in that movie that you'll quote or think about a year from now? A month? A week? And we all had a good laugh at the absurdity of the question and proceeded to lightly mock the end result of what looked like a lot of production effort, mostly by using quotes and jokes from other, better movies.

I can't be the first person to note that for a movie about oceans, it's all pretty shallow. My indifference for the first Avatar movie was intense and profound. It provoked roughly the same resultant feeling of an absence of experience as this one did. Cameron has swapped out the vaguely American Indian blue cat people who like trees for a slightly more turquoise vaguely Polynesian blue cat people who like water. They have face tattoos, they pull some haka faces when they're gearing up for war... it's all a bit more embarrassing than offensive. There's an earnestness to it that protects it from sliding too far into self-parody, but any attempt at profundity is undercut by a meandering, action-only plot with beats cobbled together from a quorum of other, equally unoriginal action movies.

The idea was likely that the look was the thing, not the characters or the story, was going to be the main draw. And it is incredibly impressive visually, luckily especially in the water sequences, a full three-quarters of the movie. There's no denying the innovation and unparalleled absolute triumph of the look of the thing. It's a celebration of the limits of what animation can do, making the line between what can be captured and what can be created that much more fuzzy as, ironically, the resolution gets higher and higher. That said, the last third or so of the film there are some pretty jarring sequences when live action intrudes on what you might have forgotten was essentially a cartoon for the previous two hours. The realities clash a bit, especially in the area of frame rates.

And that's the other thing: after two hours, you still have a whole-ass hour to go. It's not a subtle point to say it's just too fucking long. It's a simultaneous a failure and a celebration of editing. The fact that they are able to concoct a rigorously (almost oppressively) followable plot out of what had to be a mess of storyboards and animation assignments and tons of shot footage (a tiny amount of which would have been immediately useable without several VFX passes) was genuinely impressive. Like a paint-by-numbers that still gets you a creditable Mona Lisa. But holy shit, it is repetitive. The blue cat children get captured, like five different times. One of the cat boys becomes friends with a space whale, over what felt like five repeated versions of the same sequence. Evil humans hunt space whales in exactly the same way over I think three different sequences? I'm OK with a three hour movie, but it should be three hours of different ideas building to something. This is about 40 minutes of ideas with the ending of Titanic stapled to the end of it. Hell, Kate Winslet's even there.

And in the end, that's one of the problems. Kate Winslet was in it, but I didn't even know until I checked the cast list in preparation for this. In these thin action-first pieces, you need the actors to make it more than the sum of its parts, but this is all parts. Blue, animated, werecat parts. As far as the animation technology has come, especially for motion capture, there's still a layer of distance between real human expression and what comes out of a rubber-faced CGI marionette. Zoe Saldaña especially works her ass off to emote some truly deep human things, but it's blunted by the digital makeup and the fact that she spends most of the movie relegated to cooking. She breaks out in a big way at the end, motivated by grief and blood vengeance, in one of the only sequences that lands with any feeling at all, but it's all too brief and mostly just cool because she kills mech warriors with giant-ass arrows.

Some of the rest of the cast struggles from some mis-casting. Edie Falco could probably be a believable military presence, but she's exposition in a uniform here. Jemaine Clement doing an American accent alongside a guy doing an Australian one made him sound more Kiwi than ever, weirdly. There's no Laurence Fishburne or Hugo Weaving doing for this movie what they did for The Matrix, but to be fair to the cast here, there's really no opportunity for them to do so either. Stephen Lang gets to sneer (virtually) and chew some scenery as a one-dimensional silent-film-serial villain with no plan and less follow through (good god, stop threatening to kill your child hostages over and over and just kill one already!), but that's as big as it gets.

Making stars out of the stars is not the intent of an endeavor like this. It's to make you go "ooh, pretty," and I did. It made sense to pay a little extra per ticket to see it in the fancy Dolby theater near the mall out here, with the leather recliners and everything. The picture was sharp, even in 3D, with my 3D specs over my regular progressives, and it all felt alive and fully rendered, but unfortunately, only in the very literal use of the word.

à l'infini et au-delà

I don't think the waiting queue at the Buzz Lightyear Astro-Blasters was designed specifically to stimulate contemplation of mortality and the insignificance of humanity, but I know a lot of market data goes into presentation at a corporate level to maximize engagement, so I can't say definitively that it wasn't.

There's nothing especially dark or foreboding about any of it. If you haven't been to Disneyland (this is in California, not that bloated abomination in Florida with the Jovian gravity that holds you there for days and alligators that will eat your children), the Buzz Lightyear ride is a fairly new-ish addition for old-timers like me, even though it's got to be about 20 years on by now. It's bright, it's goofy,* it's interactive. It's an immersive ride-along arcade game you only have to pay the $140 entry fee to get a crack at.

I'm definitely not one of the Disney cultists that are so common out here (something like 85% of the visitors to Disneyland are locals, and all are prone to pushing whilst in a crowd, for some reason), but I have had family working at Disneyland in some capacity since about 1968, so we've been able to get in for free pretty regularly.

Not this time though, as I only have one cousin left working there (in one of the hotels) and it feels kind of shitty to make no effort to stay in touch only to show up and beg for something free. The good news is when your kids all have jobs, you can make them buy their own tickets. Which I did.

The (actually) new-ish Star Wars rides I hadn't seen, since it had been six years since my last visit (a record by a factor of five or so), so that was novel. The old FastPass line-wait-reduction system was gone, replaced surprisingly by the exact same thing, except now you had to pay $20 for the option. But you can get your place in line on a phone app. Technology makes everything better.

The not-new stuff was where the real head-trip was. In six years, my kids had become the type of people who have beards and W-2s. We'd spent a lot of time there when they were smaller, even before they had the capacity to make memories, as lots of misguided and bored parents do. After the initial rush of the new things (not just meaning attractions but the full-speed mobility of doing a theme park with three young adults, all of whom had the absolute freedom to wander off and get lost any time they felt like it), the rounds working through the older attractions started to feel a bit... well, they started to feel a bit.

I'm not sure why it hit all at once when the stand-by line at the Buzz Lightyear Astro-Blasters stalled out. Maybe it was the ache in the feet from standing, or the dehydration caused by the last-gasp-of-summer Orange County sun and the pace we were keeping, or just a moment of stillness in the sensory bombardment of a full 12 hour immersion; maybe it was the lime-green-hued space-and-time theming of the indoor section of the queue, but a sense of settling, congealing something crept in.

It was a kind of unromantic timelessness, the kind you can only find in sufficient amounts of molded plastic. Part of it was the repetition, having been so many times, like repeating a word over and over out loud until it becomes an audible absurdity. It wasn't nostalgia, it was a reminder it would all be here churning and churning long after you're dead and gone. There's an all-smiling, unblinking eternity to it, the kind one could usually only get from contemplating something impossibly immense or remote, like a Giza pyramid, or the ocean all at once, or a star. The existential can really sneak up on you in the prosaic-but-undying, the cold indifference of forever staring right through you, penetrating and surrounding you all at once, without anything recognizable as intent, or even acknowledgment. To intend it would have to know you, and who by themselves is really known by the great undying pillars of our society: non-biodegradable fiberglass and capitalism?

Nobody probably. Not even Walt Disney. There's a statue of him there, right in the middle of the park, holding hands with a fictional avatar of corporate intellectual property, beckoning us all (but none of us in particular) to come forward. Or go back. Or die where we stand, whatever. It's a statue, man.

---

*But definitely not Goofy.

When Bill and Joyce Get Through with You, You Won't Know Whether to Shit or Go Sailing.

We've lived through a lot of stuff we didn't expect in the last several years, like Texas freezing to death, worldwide bat pox and a four-year hostage-taking by the ascendancy of boomer nihilism in its most distilled form, which was totally unsurprising except maybe in how unexpectedly orange-tinted it turned out to be.

The most frustrating thing about human calamity is the more-human tendency to try to make it worse by inventing new sub-crises within it. Maybe it's an attempt to cope with the intractable by making up a problem that is obviously solvable because its contours are limited by the imaginations of the people who invented them, helped all the moreso as these engineers tend to be fucking stupid.

This is how you arrive at a social movement dedicated to the defeat of vaccines, the single most beneficial public health advance in the history of human civilization. The tightening fingercuffs of a problem here of course is that a problem invented by fucking stupid people also tends to be impervious to any serious-minded attempt to solve it or--and this is more important--any logical attempt to demonstrate that the problem simply never existed in the first place.

This is also how you arrive at the idea that there's a crisis of "cancel culture," that is somehow a threat to... people who are racist in public? Ideas born in eras where gay panic was a legitimate defense to murder a homosexual? Serial rapists? I'm not really sold on the downside here.

The idea that we've invented the idea of shouting at people until they go away is ludicrous on its face, but "ludicrous" is not a sufficient grounds for dismissal in 2021. The pushback of course is centered around the old, the white, the privileged... the classic Fox News demographic, now in a panic with their id-avatar defeated and sent away in the last election, leaving them exposed to the whims of the horde.*

I'm in my mid-late 40s now, I own a house, I've got college-aged kids, I've got a 401k and a gas grill in my back yard. I'm a cis-hetero-white dude with cis-hetero-white dude children. I've got gray hair and high cholesterol. I definitely look like I'm ripe for recruiting into the army reactionary hate-patriots. And I know this because the Murdoch press is actively trying to recruit me. 

Not me specifically, but my generational cohort, your formerly lamented, mostly forgotten Generation X. The full-court press by the home-court press only lasted about a quarter of the news cycle because, as we've proven over and over again, Generation X is practically impervious to giving a fuck about the noise-only scrum of the culture wars. We haven't proven to be the wealthiest or the healthiest or the smartest or most accomplished, but above any other demographic subset, we've proven to be the most allergic to bullshit.

It's been our job to quietly clean up after the chaos caused by the neglect and narcissism and cultural blindness (tacit, implicit, stated, shouted, all the variants) of our parents. We're the unattended raised by the unexamined, a tragic social irony given the boomers' over-earned reputation for only being interested in themselves. Every childhood in some ways is a collection of PTSDs as the formative brain accepts the deepest impressions from the pressures implied, better or worse. Collectively ours were formed, more than any other group, by a group of sellouts, drunks and liars investing 18 years gaslightling us into believing the best thing for them was coincidentally in every single instance also the best thing for the family, for the country and all of human society at the same time.

We know the boomers have fucked this all up. And the fallout seems to be getting worse down the generations past us. The worst thing about Gen X is we know by now that nothing we do is going to fix any of it. Any of it. And the absolute worst, most galling, most unintentionally hilarious thing to try would be to try to gaslight us again into trying to defend the world they broke for us, and on terms they dictate. We've been to enough terrible Thanksgivings to fucking know better.

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*People who vote.

A Second Front Door

My third son was supposed to be a daughter. So was my second one, come to think of it, but by the time we decided to have a third kid, we had transitioned from "oh, wouldn't it be lovely..." to a weirdly compulsive socio-genetic imperative. I was married to a driven, forceful Type-A woman making her way and her name in an industry dominated by men, including several recruited from places oversees where women regularly get lit on fire. It seemed incredibly important that our family included a representative of the XX set, for crafting into a feminist super soldier in the mold of her mother, but without the limiting baggage of having had to come of age in the virulent sexism of the 1990s.

I'm obligated (and happy to) say here that I couldn't imagine my life without the three boy-monsters I've been voluntarily saddled with, but neither am I going to say "I'm glad I never had a daughter" because that's not strictly true. I spoiled (and still spoil a bit... go on, lean in, you can smell it a little) to throw what punches I could in the fights she'd fight to carve out a space for herself in what I imagined would be an increasingly egalitarian future.

But see how I even manage to make my pretend daughter's struggle about me. Despite the screeching voice internet trolls and sports talk radio have tried to give it, patriarchy is subtle, pernicious, persistent. It's an infection endemic to all westerners, man and woman, one we all carry silently like HPV, that nobody really notices until it occasional flares up into, if you're a guy, the mild embarrassment of genital warts or, if you're a lady-person, often-fatal cervical cancer. What I'm getting at is I'm glad I never even have the option to be tempted with starting a sentence with "As a father of daughters..."

The tenor and timbre of the Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation struggle can't help but call back the yucky leitmotif of the Clarence Thomas debacle from more than a quarter century ago. A lot of what we thought we'd have by 2018 as markers of a futuristic society have yet to come to pass. This week I can't help but think of how gender equality is jetpacks. A perpetual un-promise trapped in the minds of fantasists, madmen, liars and salesmen.

I couldn't watch all of it, partly because I was at work and partly because I didn't want to. I didn't see any of the direct testimony of Christine Blasey Ford. I skimmed over the transcript of her prepared remarks and some summaries of her testimony and knew I'd best not risk breaking anything company-owned as she was subjected to questioning funneled through the gender-swapped avatar of the GOP Senate Judicial Committee brigade out there bravely defending the rights of people just like them: Christian, white, old as fuck and almost all 100% straight.*

I did watch a little of the nominee's remarks and I have to say, it's been a while since I've seen an adult launch into a full-fledged temper tantrum in public. I can tell you with absolute certainty that every single time I have seen that phenomenon occur, it's been a white man pulling it off. That was the face, voice, posture and whine of a person who has never been denied a single thing in his entire, wonderful, safe life. For Brett Kavanaugh, there is no such thing as cost. Cost is what everyone else pays once you leave the room. Once you're done with them and you never have to be inconvenienced with the sight of them again.

The sad thing is, I have almost no doubt that an obvious liar like Brett Kavanaugh will be confirmed to the Supreme Court, maybe before you even read this. And in the celebratory group photo with the other sitting justices that ensues, I hope they position him right next to Clarence Thomas so we can really see how little space there is between them.

Maybe I'm old and cynical and so very wrong, but nah, I doubt it. Very rarely rarely do historical forces align to produce a single moment where we can see so clearly how far we haven't come.

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*I'd never use the suggestion of homosexuality as a slur. Lindsey Graham can be closeted if he wants to be. And maybe he isn't, I don't know. Maybe all his bullshit righteous indignation today was an involuntary self-defense response when he recognized a fellow poon-hound. But I'm going to bet he's a hypocrite in more than just the ways he's public about. I call it the Newt Gingrich Theory of Congressional Behavior.

Jury Duty, Part V: The Judgening

Now that I'm a non-alternate juror, given (I assume) the power of life and death over every other human in the courtroom, I'm at the brink of exercising the full awesome weight of my decision-making authority. I've got the other 11 people with me, all my adorable and plucky Assistant Jurors, to offer me probably moral support and tension-breaking comic relief as I contemplate the fates of the litigant parties, but in the end, as in all things, it's all going to come down to the capricious, insistent force-of-will of a lone white man. That's how government works. That's how international diplomacy works. That's how justice works. It's a lot to bear, but I take it upon myself even though nobody has asked me to or even indicated that it's appropriate. I'm pretty sure that's the definition of altruism.

The only downside to approaching the end of the court proceeding is that I'm an anxiety-riddle security-junkie, meaning I don't like transitions. It takes me a long time to get used to a new set of circumstances, but when I do, emphatically, those are now my circumstances, changes to which will not be welcomed, thank you. How granular is this? Am I avoidant of any alteration of schedule? Well, let's test it: hey, would I like to come with you to an event I would definitely like but occurs on the day I usually watch back episodes of Elementary on DVR? NO I WOULD NOT. And believe me, I'm aware of how DVRs work, wherein I can watch my show at any time. And I'm also aware it's Elementary, the most formulaic of formula shows in a format formulated by formulae, the spiritual successor to the departed and lamented* House. My children know whodunit by the first commercial break. I like to pretend it's not obviously the one credited guest star character actor I recognize from that other thing they were in. It's always the guy from the commercial you saw. It's possible I'll warm to your plans given enough lead time (four to eight months typically), but otherwise, no, it's me and Jonny Lee and you can please fuck all the way off.

When I got selected as a juror in a monthlong trial, my entire world collapsed into a swirling maelstrom of razor-sharp anxiety shards. You with your compassionate heart are probably thinking: "wow, I didn't realize you were such a drama queen." To which I can only reply: yes you fucking did.

But over the course of a month, the new becomes the normal and the former becomes just another threat to upend the new normal. Only in this case, unlike all the other threats,** this one looms the way only a once-and-future status quo can loom.

Let it loom. In the meantime, I'm all in on my current state of being: avatar of Lady Justice. It sounds odd, but the toga is pretty unisex and roomy as garments go. It's the blindfold that's a problem. It's murder on a marble staircase.

I'm sure the case has all kinds of ins and outs and he-said-who-said something, whatever. It wouldn't make much sense to suddenly start worrying about that stuff now. I'm not sure what sort of precedent exists for death sentences being meted out in civil cases, but look, all precedents were not precedents until they became precedents. You can't argue with that logic. If they'e going to give me all this responsibility, there's almost no way all of this doesn't end in the ultimate sanction, ideally death by smiting. Watch your news tickers.


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*Lamented by Hugh Laurie's kids since he's home all the time. No dad, we don't want to hear more improvised jazz piano. Nobody does. Ever.

**Armed robbers. Earthquake. Bees. An actual maelstrom. Anything really.

Christmas Wrapping

I would like to make the point clear that this post is not a day late because I've taken some time off work and thus got distracted and forgot, NO! It's that this particular blogpost was going to be so awesome that I needed a full extra day to emotionally and mentally prepare myself for having eventually written it.

But then in the course of that extra day, I spent way longer than is justifiable or proper for an adult man to play Super Mario Land 3D on the Wii U and sort of totally forgot what that mindgasm of a post was supposed to be about.

Now I'm tapping this out with my thumbs on my iPhone in a bed not my own, trying to concentrate on crafting a quality word picture for you, but failing as I craft new strategies for defeating an oversized kleptomaniac lizard-king with rage issues with a limited arsenal of fireballs and jumping. Well, not real jumping, but pressing the buttons in the correct sequence to affect the jump animation of the digital avatar doubling for the deepest Jungian wants of my human soul.

Oh! That's what I was going to write about: my end of the year wrap-up. Mostly it was going to be about what books I read, but do you really want to hear me bitch about "Gravity's Rainbow" some more? Just to briefly summarize, I've been reading a lot of classic mostly 20th century literature and if I could, standing outside of it now with the perspective-making arbitrary lever of the calendar year, I'd say the main takeaway is that I should probably seek preemptive professional help ahead of the onset of a crippling depression. At a certain point, enough Dickens and Orwell can only be a cry for help.

Let's see if we can't make 2014 the year of taking ourselves less seriously.

Except still: fuck Thomas Pynchon.

Magical Realism

It's been a good week to be English. And not just for the regular reasons it's preferable to be English every other week, like free health care and all the drizzle you can eat. This week, our trans-Atlantic cousins are holding us up and demanding our filthy colonial shekels, like highwaymen of old, but in the particularly English idiom with so much politeness that you end up just sort of acquiescing to spare them any further embarrassment.

Not only is there going to be a royal wedding, but it's also finally time for the first half of the beginning of the end of Harry Potter.

I think of all the money pouring into that feisty little downtrodden third of an island, scraping by all these centuries with the right combination of pluck, blind good luck and the subjugation of peoples of varying shades of brown the world over, and it gives me some hope. Between the flood of tourists pouring in to try to experience something they would be shot trying to actually attend or reveling in the soap-opera antics of teenagers inhabiting a world cobbled together from other worlds already written about but could never actually exist, it looks like they've stumbled on to a formula whereby they are able to spin money from quite literally nothing. And that is an encouraging feat in this still-struggling economy.

As Americans, we should take note. If anything screams out the soul of American genius, it's the ability to bastardize someone else's idea and then sell the inferior product for twice the cost.

All we need to do is:

1) Start a royal family. We tried it with the Kennedys for a bit in the 1960s, but with all the sex and disease and adultery and divorce and murder and untimely death... well, OK, that's all pretty good for a royal family, honestly. But back then, I'm not so sure. As a cultural embarrassment incapable of governing itself and existing at a level of cognitive dissonance between what they are projected to be and what they actually were, they were just too far ahead of their time. Hm. Maybe this just isn't our bag.

2) Multi-film fantasy franchise to capture the hearts and minds of children and shut-ins the world over. Again, we did this already with Star Wars, but considering the quality of the last three, I'm not sure it actually counts. I'm not exactly in a big hurry for another Indiana Jones movie either. And now that I think about it, the more I catch snippets of Avatar on HBO (which is not hard considering they run it more than GoDaddy.com ads run during a Super Bowl), the more that shit just makes me angry.

OK, so maybe this isn't the answer. But the only other economic "plan" going is banning budgetary earmarks for Congressional pet projects. Really, that's all. This is your Tea Party Revolution.

Frankly, I have more faith in the Kennedys. But then all the attractive ones are dead. The only ones left are all toothy and bony, with that grievous overbite, like Habsburgs in reverse. Nobody's buying a commemorative mug if Joe Kennedy II decides to get married a third time.

You Can Tell When He's Speaking Because It's All Printed in Red

I don't get to a lot of movies, but I did see Avatar. The hooded men in the windowless white van and armed with the cattle prods were very clear on our instructions when they shoved us out in front of the Galleria AMC with $22 and a voucher for a free small popcorn (with purchase of a medium or larger soda). I don't remember such a culture of compulsory viewing existing in this country since Schindler's List.

If I had to see it, I decided I was going to do it all the way, in IMAX 3D, the way God intended. And by "God," yes, I do mean Jim Cameron.

See, since I saw Jaws 2 at an altogether inappropriately young age, I have an irrational fear of boats, so if I want a debilitating case of motion sickness and a headache that lasts for four days, it's either movies in IMAX 3D or attend a NASCAR race. And since I am inclined to neither wear a "Sarah '012" button nor a frontal lobotomy, IMAX it is.

Plus, I don't know if you know this, but at NASCAR races, they can smell higher education on you like dogs smell fear. If they find out I have a master's degree, I'm instantly the star of something akin to a zombie movie set at a state fair, which is to say a lot of flannel and grasping, two-syllable vowels and mortal peril.

Just to be clear, I don't hate Jim Cameron. Loved Terminator, was happy with T2, worshipped at the feet of Aliens. True Lies was overcooked, but not unpleasant. And The Abyss... well, yes, that was a ponderous, terrible, self-important crock of watery shit. But the water people were cool.

I think we all know where the turning point was. My four-word review of Titanic, if I recall, was "JUST FUCKING SINK ALREADY!" Stupid boat. Stupid people. The only characters worth rooting for in that whole mess were Billy Zane and the iceberg.

Then there was the infamous Oscars moment of silence for people who had been dead a hundred years and I was out. It was easy to be out what with the 10-year gap for him to go off and make hippie movies about jellyfish fucking at 8,000 feet below the surface, but the point is, had our man JC been out there trying, I was totally prepared to reject him.

All that said, I did see Avatar. You know what else I've seen? Dances with Wolves. And The Last Samurai. And every other movie about cynical Westerners who go native and thus learn a Very Important Lesson, usually about the inherent evil of the society that spawned the people sitting in the theater watching the movie. Which, of course, they cheer for. Because yes, strip mining and cultural insensitivity and genocide in the name of profit, those things happen. But it's not us doing it. Not personally. Do people get blown up in the name of mineral rights in real life? Maybe. But you have to remember, where they live, they were going to die of cholera or scurvy or impetigo or sectarian violence pretty soon anyway probably. It's not the same.

Plus, everything would have been fine if it weren't for that Giovanni Ribisi being such a dick to the nice blue people. But really what do you expect from a guy named "Paul Reiser's Character From Aliens"? Any kid named that is bound to get his ass kicked once or twice on a playground. Obviously some deep-seated unresolved psychological issues there. I thought he played it really well, all hammy and twitchy like that.

All this, I guess, is just to express shock and dismay at Avatar's win for Best Picture at the Golden Globes last night. With 10 movies in at the Oscars this year, it's sure to at least be nominated (and if it draws a record number of Oscar viewers like Titanic did, meh, happy coincidence). But I will be damned if I'm observing a moment of silence for CGI blue people and their glowy brain tree. Unless they are represented by Zoe Saldana. Then yeah, OK, I can see the logic there.