I made a joke over the weekend that when I come to power, I’m going to force people to go through every western and digitally replace every poker or blackjack scene with Magic the Gathering. It was supposed to be a funny joke about the juxtaposition of a nerdy game vs the toughness and manliness of the wild west. But then I thought that there must be other replacements for poker.
Board games were a definitive out. It’s hard enough to keep track of all of the pieces while you’re living in a house. Imagine trying to find the top hat for your Monopoly game while you’re on the dusty trail fighting outlaws and trying to maintain law.
Thus we must consider portability. It has to fit in the saddlebag and be able to be kept together easily enough. So, Dungeons and Dragons is straight out. All those clanking miniatures, books, maps, the thousands of dice and such. No way that a cowboy can herd cattle with that. This also ties into knowing how to play. Everyone knows how to play poker but what if you have someone that plays pathfinder instead of DND? What then?
Finally, we have to think about what could cause the most tension when playing it. How many people have died over particularly vexing hands of poker. We know that Bill Hickok was killed holding a hand of black aces and eights. So, that means that you need to have some tension. That leads me to figuring out what the ultimate replacer to poker would be for the cowboys and cowgirls.
Thats right, it’s Jenga. Portable? Yes, sir. Instead of carrying 52 cards, you’re carrying 54 little pieces of wood. It can easily be made again, what carpenter can’t make 54 tiny little rectangles? Plus, if you’re truly desperate, you can use them as fire starters. Tension?
“Son, you topple that tower, you’ll be eating a bullet.”
Boom. Both me proving my point with an onomatopoeia and what’s going to happen to the kid when he topples that tower. Then we got Jenga, where the rules are so simple. Remove block put on top. Done. Plus, you can’t cheat as well at Jenga as when you’re playing poker.
There, I think I’ve proven that card games should be replaced by Jenga in westerns. No one asked for this but there it is.
The Predator movies have always been goofy as fuck. I mean, who could forget this?
That’s dumb in the best way. Now, I’ve seen a lot of people online pointing out how much they hate the new predator movie for the fact that it has comedy and features *gasp* a woman as an actual character! You know what I have to say to that? Those people hate fun. Remember that? Fun? That thing we desperately need more of in this world?
I’m a casual predator fan to be fair. I haven’t read the vast amount of comics where they fight just about everyone in the universe. Especially the multiple times he went up against Archie and didn’t win.
Our plot concerns with the runt rookie predator, Dek, seeing his father kill his brother and swearing revenge. To do so, he has to prove himself and thus arrives on a planet known for its lethality, Genna. There he meets Thia, played by the wonderful Elle Fanning, a bright and cheerful android who has lost her legs. Dek straps her to his back and she spends her time bouncing bright and sunny dialogue off of the misanthropic and brunt Dek. Their interactions are all amazing, you can feel the chemistry despite the CGI. Dek is trying to kill this beast the Kalisk, which is known for its immortality.
I was riveted the entire time. The movie balances the darker parts of Dek watching his brother die with the more comedic moments throughout the rest of the movie. The action sequences are imaginative and fun. The planet feels alive and like it actually works, which is something that most alien worlds don’t. I still remember in the first J. J. Abrams’ Star Trek movie where Kirk lands on an ice planet and gets immediately attacked by two horrible monsters. But then old Spock and him are able to walk across the planet without incident.
Mike and Kevin from Rifftrax summed it up:
Mike: Man, I’m sure glad we didn’t run into any wolf things or horrible bug monsters.
Kevin: Based on how quickly I ran into both of them initially I thought this planet was crawling with them.
Mike: I know right, apparently not.
It also feels like it could be a legitimate threat to the predators.
To sum it up, go check out this movie. It’s super fun and really well made. Everyone is giving it their all and it’s just a good time. I’ll be telling you about Running Man next week.
We mentioned Tim Meadows on the podcast this week and I want to just say that he and Judy Greer are the two best supporting character actors working today. Every time I see that they’re in the cast, I get pumped. They’re liked whipped cream to an ice cream sundae. They’re just going to improve it.
I mean, who can forget Judy on Arrested Development flashing Michael and screeching at him to “say goodbye to these, Michael!”. She also killed it in Halloween(2018). I’ve put the scene below but she has to pretend to be scared to attract Michael Myers into her killzone. The immediate switch from being helpless to shooting him in the face is tremendous.
Then we have Tim Meadows who killed it in Dewey Cox by being the main supplier and tempter of Dewey for his drug journey. Even today, my friends will just say to each other “And you never paid for drugs… not once.” Despite being for the most part all straight edge. Two of my friends drink but we always make sure to get written permission from their parents before they do so.
You know I say that as a joke but I’m sure there are parents that are puritanical that that is something people have to do.
He was also incredible on the Office, Pop Star and Brooklyn 99. He just enhances everything. The scene I was talking about before is below:
Once on reddit, someone asked who has the most staying power. I answered at the time Judy Greer but I would say that Tim Meadows exists in that world as well. They’re just going to get better with age. Someone needs to pick up the crown of the Golden Girls and I think Judy has the ability to do so. Tim Meadows proved himself in SNL and he continues to do so.
I was at the gym today getting my swell on and I thought about Neon Genesis Evangelion for some reason. Maybe it was the fact that I was getting gains but it made me think about the way that Evangelion handles bodies both of its young protagonists and their mechas.
For those that don’t know, Neon Genesis Evangelion is a show about Shinji Ikari and his two… I am legit unable to think what term would best fit for their relationships, friends doesn’t work, allies kind of works, coworkers fits a bit more. As they pilot giant mechs called Evangelions to do battle against the angels. Here’s a screenshot that sums up the show but isn’t actually from the show.
That purple thing in the foreground is called an Evangelion hence the title and that big white thing is an angel. That is one of the more straight forward angel designs because they can vary from geometric shapes, kind of bird looking dudes and literally just a young boy. They’re looking to bring about something called Third Impact that I will get into at a different time. Here it is from the front:
Let’s set our stage. The Evangelions stand about 200 meters tall. They are insanely powerful and powered by what’s called an umbilical cable that literally is just a giant power cord that even plugs into the back of the Evangelion. You can see one in the above picture that’s not featured in the show. They’re equipped with various weapons like spears, knives and guns. They also have heavy armor but their main protection is the AT(Absolute Terror) Field. It’s a field that the pilot projects from inside the Eva. We’ll get into that in a moment.
Now where is the pilot in all of this? They’re inside what’s called an entry plug, which is then inserted into the back of Eva’s neck. Like so:
The entry plug has the piloting chair and controls and is then filled with an orange breathable liquid called LCL. Like so:
Now that we have all of this out of the way, it’s time to get into spoiler territory for my discussion. If you don’t want to be spoiled, leave now.
Okay, so the thing is with Evangelions is that they aren’t just giant machines. That metallic thing around them isn’t their whole body, it’s just what’s protecting the body. You can somewhat see what they look like with it in this picture:
They are giant humans in armor and can occasionally just go nuts and attack things? Why would they do that? How could they do that? Well, it’s because inside of those giant humans is a soul. For Shinji who is the one in the LCL, his Evangelion is powered by his mother’s soul. She died in an accident and was absorbed by the giant robot that he pilots.
This is where we start getting the way that Evangelion fucks with the concept of mecha in general but more specifically the male power fantasy. In one of these animes, normally getting your mecha becomes this grand thing and showcases the young boy into becoming a man. He becomes that much more capable and beloved for it. Just look at the way that Amaro in the original Mobile Suit Gundam is respected. Many of them have some trouble with piloting but eventually start feeling jubilant towards it.
Shinji doesn’t get that and part of it is the difference between Evangelions and other mechas. Other mechas are shells that protect their pilot from all danger. Not so the Evangelion, who requires the pilot to sync with it to pilot. Hence, why Shinji pilots the Evangelion with his mother’s soul in it. But the thing is that because of this synchronization Shinji feels everything that happens to it. This becomes horrific in the movie End of Evangelion, where another pilot, Asuka gets stabbed in the eye by a spear. We cut to the inside of the plug and blood is pouring out of her eye socket. The enemies then eat her Evangelion and she feels every part of it.
From this example, we can see that the power fantasy doesn’t quite match up to the expectation. Shinji just can’t go nuts in his Evangelion without getting badly hurt. Furthermore comes what I mentioned before, the umbilical cable. It’s not just a limiter by making sure that if it gets cut he only has about five minutes before the Evangelion deactivates. From the name, it ties Shinji and the other pilots in a parental fashion to the base. Speaking of umbilical and pregnancy, it’s no coincidence that the LCL fluid looks like amniotic fluid in a womb.
So, you have this child in the womb being sent out into the world to fight against an unknown enemy. It reminds me a lot of Kurt Vonnegut’s first part of Slaughterhouse Five where he talks about writing his book to his friend and his wife. That she complained that he’s going to make war sound good when they were really just children, babies being sent out to fight. This has different meaning for me now that I’m an adult and could comfortably have a child Shinji’s age. It breaks my heart in a way that it didn’t when I was a kid.
This show has stuck with me since I was a kid. Part of the reason, I think is because unlike other shows I watched where there was just violence for violence’s sake, Evangelion used violence as a means to emphasize the amazing dialogue and characters. Half the time, the fights just became brutalization and animalistic screams. When I was a teenager, I related to Shinji. Now that I’m an adult, my heart bleeds for him. I’ll get more into him later this week.
I think that Daniel Craig is one of the best James Bonds because he hates the character and that comes through his performance of it. But there is one thing that suddenly bothered me about his appearance in Casino Royale, which I think overall is a good movie.
There’s a scene where the bad guy played by Mads Mikkelson tricks him into losing everything. Bond stares at the cards for a long time then gets up, grabs a knife and starts stalking after Mads. He tells his associate to get Eva Green out of the hotel.
This is because he plans to messily murder Mads with that knife. Blowing their cover and the entire mission. He’s only stopped by the CIA agent who tells him that he has not just English money but American money for him to lose.
This can only be seen as James Bond having a giant sulk and deciding to throw a tantrum. The only problem is that his tantrum would have probably ended up with him killed because he decided to slice up a man instead of use his gun. And Mads would have probably still ended up with the money.
Also at the end of the movie, James slides the dealer one of his big old betting tablets that equals about 500 thousand or one million dollars. I am all for tipping service workers but that money was supposed to go somewhere else. That could have put money in the mouths of a lot of different people.
And you might be saying “Frank, Taylor Swift gave her crew over 178 million dollars in bonuses during the Eras Tour.” My response to that is that is money she earned, to do with as she liked. It was not money that was going to go to the public, which is what the money James Bond had just won was going to do.
It just feels a little irresponsible. Both to give away one million dollars and to send this giant crybaby on a mission.
Here’s Victoria Coren Mitchell also dog piling on what an asshole James Bond is. Unlike James she didn’t need her opponent to bleed from his eyes to win several poker championships.
The new John Wick movie came out but it’s not starring Keanu Reeves as John Wick. He’s there but he’s more of a supporting character. It’s still a tale of revenge but instead of it being about a cute puppy and cool car, it’s the more generic “my name is Eve Macarro you killed my father prepare to die” variety. I think as a John Wick movie it stands up to the rest of them but just like the fourth one, I found myself a little fatigued by the end of it. There’s just so much violence.
You might be saying, that’s the point, it’s a John Wick film, that’s kind of the point. But the first John Wick film had very clean violence. They’ve become more brutal as they’ve gone on and I think it’s all for the worst.
I was admittedly coming into this film with a rather negative outlook. I didn’t enjoy the fourth John Wick film, mostly because it had the problems of being way too long and there was a twenty minute sequence where people just won’t let John Wick walk up some stairs to get to the end of the film. It was slow and boring. It didn’t have any of the style that the other parts did.
The plot of Ballerina is that Ana de Armas’ character, Eve, is trying to avenge her father’s murder at the hands of group of killers. She joins a criminal organization pretending to be a ballerina she’s trained to become a killer-protector. She runs into a former member of this group whose trying to protect his daughter and when he’s incapacitated and his daughter taken, Eve sets out to find the girl and get revenge.
Ballerina didn’t really surprise me except in a few points, though it did improve my feelings towards the series on a whole. Firstly, I think Ana de Armas carries this film throughout and works as an action star. They don’t sexualize her character that much, she’s wearing a dress with a long slit in her first mission but after that she’s completely covered. They make a point that she’s smaller and weaker than most of the male opponents she’s going to have to face. They adapt her fighting style to that and she manages quite well.
It also does something fun with a lot of tried and true concepts in action films. She’s leaving a mission and we get a long shot of her car pulling away. Suddenly, her car is T-boned and pushed backwards and the camera pans down to show the gunfight. It’s an amazing shot.
Secondly, we’re so used to gun shop scenes where someone is showing off the hardware that the character is going to use throughout the rest of the film. This is usually a safe space but suddenly, Eve and the gun shop owner are attacked. I thought that was a good undermining of stereotypes and trope. The fight is one of the more brutal ones considering it’s mostly made up of grenade kills.
Then comes the flamethrower, which I was not a fan of. Watching people flail around burning is not fun. There’s a reason that these weapons are considered war crimes by the Geneva convention. There’s a point where her opponent who also has a flamethrower, his leg catches on fire and he uses his flaming leg to kick at her. It’s so goofy but kind of fun. Then we get a fire hose vs flamethrower fight and there’s no other way I can put this but it’s a Dragonball Z beam struggle.
The thing is, I think that this movie missed a big chance to have her father’s killer be John Wick. I think it would fit into the concept of the world that John Wick has to suffer for the things that he’s done. The two could come to terms with the lives they both live. I understand why they did it this way, is because they need to have Eve have an enemy that they can build a franchise around.
It also shows that Eve is not that good of a person. She doesn’t particularly care about the girl instead focusing on her own mission. I think that that’s a fun characterization for her as an assassination and adds a new depth to her character’s worldview.
Overall, I think it was a pretty good film that deserves a watch. Maybe do a double feature with Sinners.
I went to go see the movie, Sinners and it was phenomenal. Expertly shot, directed, paced and acted. Everyone is bringing their A game in this. This is the spoiler free part of the review, so go see it. Stop reading and go see it.
***SPOILERS***
The opening monologue talks about spirit singers who were able to converse with the voices of the past and future. That this has gone on through a variety of cultures. We then see a young man walking into a church holding a broken guitar neck. His father is preaching and tells him to accept the word of God. It is a harrowing scene and Sammie(Miles Caton) easily sells how broken and desperate he is.
We flashback to a day before and we see that our primary focus is going to be three men, a pair of twin brothers who are veterans and gangsters by the name of Smoke and Stack(played by Michael B. Jordan). They’re returning to their hometown to open up a juke joint for the local population based out of an abandoned saw mill owned by a racist white man. They know that Sammie is a whiz on a guitar and recruit him first. From there, we see the two brothers’ reputation both personal and professional. A pair of young men try to rob their truck. Smoke shoots both of them non-lethally to make sure that people know what happens when you try and rob the brothers. They hire a pianist named Delta Slim(Delroy Lindo) and Sammie becomes infatuated with a singer named Pearline(Jayme Lawson) who he invites to the juke joint’s opening night.
The personal is that Stack had abandoned a young woman named Mary(played by Hailee Steinfeld) who passes for white. This leads to a lot of possibly dangerous scenarios when she oversteps the boundaries of normal race relations. She is none too happy with him. Smoke on the other hand, visits his estranged wife. They have a confrontation over his departure and how they both still love each other. Annie(Wunmi Mosaku) is a practitioner of Hoodoo and herbalism. She’s signed on as a cook for the juke joint. The lesser lights are Bo and Grace Chow(Yao and Li Jun Li respectively) who are suppliers for the joint and run the gambling tables and Cornbread(Omar Miller) to act as a bouncer.
From there, the movie kicks it into high gear. We see our villain, Remmick(Jack O’Connell) arrive at the house of a pair of KKK members being pursued by some Choctaw vampire hunters. He turns the couple after they rid him of his pursuers.
Our board is set and if you know anything about history, you know that black people in the south aren’t safe. There is always violence or the threat of violence. We got that in the beginning of the day when Smoke and Stack bought the saw mill. The racist white man they bought the saw mill from was clearly awful. We’ll get back to him soon.
The party looks like it’s rocking. We got a career defining long take shot of Sammie’s performance as he summons the spirits of past, present and future. Music is life and it fills the saw mill with it.
However, vampires feed off and destroy life and that draws Remmick and his cohorts in. They begin to turn the crowd in drips and drabs and then a flood leading only a few patrons left to defend the bar. The movie at this point feels like we’re seeing a thunderstorm flowing in. When the lightning hits, it fucking hits. The battle is bloody and brutal. But you feel some kind of relaxation at finally getting into it. It’s almost a relief.
In the end, there are only about four survivors, Mary and Stack both turned into vampires and Smoke and Sammie. Smoke sends Sammie away because he learned from Remmick that the Klan is coming to kill all of them. We’re brought to the beginning of the movie and Sammie flees the church as much as he fled the vampires.
Smoke kills the entirety of the Klan easily but one of those assholes gets off a lucky shot and mortally wounds our hero. The audience cheered at this part of the movie and this is how I believe every movie should end.
I was light with the details because I want anyone to read this to go and make their own decisions about it. What you’re getting if you watch this film is a skilled hand in Coogler directing a cast that is bursting with talent. There are few movies I’ve ever seen where it feels like nothing was excessive. Where it felt so airtight and effortless. Go see this as soon as you can.
Somewhere someone is making a terrible youtube video about wokeness and other bullshit regarding the fact that the new Silver Surfer is a woman. It’s really stupid.
My thoughts, it doesn’t matter if the Silver Surfer is male or female, the character just has to wrestle with the moral conundrum of bringing the big purple dude to planets to munch.
But really, we all know the reason for the Silver Surfer to be female. It’s so that the Human Torch can date her. The Human Torch has a habit of dating women from space so it makes sense for him to be into her. Besides look at this photo.
That’s a, “I saw her across the room” look. I’m calling it. Let’s see if I’m right.
So, the movie Gremlins, showed us creatures known as Mogwai and their offshoots known as Gremlins. The rules are simple, don’t get them wet or they’ll multiply and don’t feed them after midnight.
A lot of people don’t know what constitutes after midnight. I believe it’s the time between midnight and four am. Four am to eight am is dawn. Eight to noon is morning. Noon to five is afternoon. Five to nine is evening. Nine to midnight is night. That’s the concept I’m working with.
But these things aren’t furbies, they have minds of their own. They are ready to come over here and break all the rules.
The question though is why did that racial stereotype give Randall the Mogwai in the first place? Simple, he was a mercenary. He was hired by America’s enemies to test out a new weapon on our shores. We were in the middle of the Cold War. What better than an enemy that would destroy everything without a thought?
Look at them. They’re designed to make you want to take care of them. That’s perfect for infiltrating populations particularly through children. That’s insidious. Billy fell in love with the stupid thing.
How do you get more of them? You pour water on them. The most plentiful substance on the planet. Get them near a shore, say New York City and suddenly you have an army ready to go.
That brings me to another thought, do Mogwai follow Doctor Who rules? For those that don’t know, when the Doctor is fatally injured but not dead, he regenerates into a new form. However, if he’s killed before regenerating. He’s dead permanently.
I wonder if you drowned a Mogwai could you stop the multiplication or would they just burst from the body to go forth.
Anyway, you have these creatures that find ways to eat after midnight. Once they do so, they become the horrible monsters and they’re ready to destroy.
I was terrified of Gremlins as a child. Now I know why. I saw their true face.
Franklin Cota, an author and podcaster 