A Soul To The Universe

The title of this blog is from a quote from Plato:

“Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.”

Stirring stuff.

What's your favourite piece of music from a movie?

Sometimes the right musical accompaniment can absolutely make a scene; and sometimes they can become absolutely iconic in their own right, even removed from the cinematic context they were originally presented in. I don't know a lot of people who wouldn't know Chariots of Fire, even if they haven't seen the film - and they will probably associate it with running in slow motion, at least.

Because I can, I'm gonna throw a bunch of different bits of movie score at you (with one honorable mention that isn't TECHNICALLY score but is CLOSE), and talk about why I like them. Where possible I will link you to the scene as it happens in the movie - otherwise, we'll have a nice little chat about it.

Fair warning: there will be spoilers for the movies below. If you haven't seen them, me talking about them may well clue you in on plot elements best left secret.

The Medbay (Alien Covenant, Jed Kurzel)

Well jesus this whole bit is literally horrible

So this anxiety-inducing collection of noises plays over an entire sequence of an infected member of the crew of the Covenant being brought about a shuttle, taken to the med bay, and then something awful happening to him. This awful thing explodes out of his back, kills the crewmate in the room with him, and leads the surviving crewmate to such terror that she accidentally blows up the fucking shuttle trying to kill the little bastard.

The way it all happens, the way it all pans out, is so tense - so frantic - I forgot to breathe for the entire scene. It's what horror is all about. The panic, the alarm, the wrongness. The entire thing having been okay if only the hundred things that went wrong didn't go wrong. If only the floor wasn't slippery. If only the door was tougher. If only, if only, if only.

Probably my favourite bit of the movie.

The Girl Who Fell From The Sky (Laputa / Castle In The Sky, Joe Hisaishi)

Just before this opening sequence, all we know is that the world of Castle In The Sky - my favourite Ghibli movie - has airships, air pirates, military spies, and a girl with a necklace who would rather fall from aforementioned airship than let the necklace fall into the hands of aforementioned air pirates.

Then you are treated to this gorgeous, glorious piece of music by the master Joe Hisaishi himself, and presented with the animation above - which not only sums up the history of the world you're about to inhabit for the next hour and a half, but also tells you the plot, if you're careful enough to pay attention.

The piece is masterful. Emotive, soaring and gentle by turns, touching, epic in scope. A constantly-descending chord structure that gently reminds you that this title sequence is playing out while a girl is, literally, falling from the sky.

Just breathtaking.

Anakin's Betrayal (Star Wars Episode III: Revenge Of The Sith, John Williams)

If any one good thing came out of the prequels, it was the music.

For two and a half movies, the watcher waits for the moment; the point wherein the Emperor seizes control of the Republic, takes over the Senate, and begins the destruction of the Jedi. We know it is coming. We all know it is coming, and god help us, we're ready for it by the time it rolls around.

And aside from a ropey moment involving Yoda (god I hate every prequel scene involving Yoda), what you witness is a total betrayal. The armed forces that the Jedi have been fighting alongside, become friends with, even been on first name terms with in several places, turning on them and cutting them down with absolute impunity.

It's more than the brutal murder of all a whole bunch of the Jedi. It's the moment that the tables turn. And front and centre is Anakin Skywalker who cements his place in this entire thing - just after helping Palpatine murder Mace Windu - by massacring all the kids in the temple. (He has past form in terms of kid-murder, it bears mention.)

That's how the piece feels. It's a fall from grace of the highest order, an act of awful brutality; this is the moment that the clouds roll in and everything goes dark. Sure, there's other bits of music from Star Wars that are more iconic and stand-out, but this is just... breathtaking.

New Dawn Fades (Heat, Moby / Joy Division)

This is technically a song in its own right (even the instrumental version of a cover of a song) but - hey, I did say there would be an honourable mention.

Cutting through the Los Angeles night, two men, one of them chasing the other, hounding him down toward an inevitable destructive conclusion. The tenacity with which these men pursue their goals, the total embrace of their lifestyle to the point of breakdown.

I love Michael Mann's film work, the way he paints the parts of a city that most people don't even think about. I love how the blasting guitars and the rhythm section is like a constant onslaught of noise; like a barrage on the senses, all things travelling towards the witness at high speed, a crash imminent.

And the scene that follows? The two of them drinking coffee together? Absolutely stellar.

Burn It All (Black Panther, Ludwig Goransson)

The king is dead. All hail the king. Killmonger has overthrown T'Challa and become both Black Panther and king of Wakanda - and he does the next thing in the playbook of the coup... he pulls up the ladder behind him, destroying the route to power. He will be the last king, or nobody will be. He burns the herb that grants the Black Panther his power, torching it in a symbolic demolition of the traditions that make Wakanda, Wakanda.

And then he walks to the throne, in a beautiful shot that starts upside down, the world gone horribly awry, twisting slowly into focus as the new reality settles in: Killmonger is king.

The mournful singing and traditional music undercut by the sharp trap beats, the instantiation of the new over the old, interweaving but not synchronising; a harsh visitor from a different tradition. A spear point in the heart of that which once was normal.

I really like this movie - oh, and the guy that composed the score? Also did The Mandalorian.

Sea Wall (Blade Runner 2049, Hans Zimmer / Benjamin Wallfisch)

This is what it comes down to; a last all-or-nothing scramble, not to save the world, not to save the revolution, not to protect the people you care about, but to do the thing that you believe you should be doing. To do the one right thing, that you know you can do, in that moment in time. To do the good thing, even if humanity sees you as being nothing but a tool that will do whatever it is told.

While the Vangelis-helmed score of Blade Runner was a sumptuously designed electronic ensemble, it still held together with a structure, much like the city of Los Angeles it was based in; it was broken, scattered, wired up and buzzing, but it still had edges and corners. The score of 2049 shows the world as falling apart, a degradation of those aforementioned structures, a distortion of everything that existed before; snarling angry synths and the constant, overpowering crush of oppression and mother nature alike.

Here the electronic noise of the city echoes in as if from far away; we start with the pounding pulse beats of a chase, and end up with this flowing, swelling reverberation, unstoppable as the tide as it sweeps in to wash away everything it touches. The savage subtonal growl of distortion sits below it, the violence that K and Luv inflict upon each other over the fate of Rick Deckard, beating each other half to death even as the ocean threatens to claim them both.

Moody, dark, insidious, angry. No wonder I like it so much, it reminds me of me when I first wake up in the morning.

The Alien (Annihilation, Ben Salisbury / Geoff Barrow)

There were so many good choices for this movie, but I had to go with this one.

Throughout the entire movie, the group move through The Shimmer, finding how it and everything within it has been changed. They, too, change. Move away from who and what they were, alter until they are not themselves, or are far enough removed that looking back on who they were is a gulf that can't be crossed again. It is about change, it is all about change.

Until an object is discovered - a being - an alien - that begins as nothing but noise and light, a concept more than anything. And it takes shape, and form, and copies that which it sees, until it has become a simulacra. While Lena (played superbly by Natalie Portman) has become a totally different entity to the person that agreed to enter The Shimmer, she finds that this being - in mere moments - becomes the person that she was all along. This bafflingly inhuman object, taking form as she watches.

There are no answers, here. There is no explanation. There is only this object, the changes wrought inside and out, and the promise that there will always be part of the universe that you will not understand.

There's a lot of others that don't make this list but really should - The Prowler from Spider-Verse, First Encounter from Arrival, Nightstalker from Ghost In The Shell (the original one not that rubbish one), Bishop's Countdown from Aliens, I Could Have Done More from Schindler's List, to name but a few.

It all comes down to this: sometimes the score makes the scene. Sometimes the score IS the scene.

Flight to the imagination, and life to everything.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Butts In Seats

I know I tread this ground quite a lot, but - I'm ill. I have various conditions that make doing things difficult or impossible. I feel like I talk about it often, but like, it's literally my life, so - my apologies. If me talking about my chronic illness is liable to upset you, feel free to check this out - it's a blog I did on Secret of Mana and video games in general.

It means that some days, my mobility is terrible, and getting out of the house is nigh on impossible. Can't usually predict which one of those days I am going to have, either; though sometimes I will wake up and the lack of mobility is obvious. Like, if you told me that there was a fifty pound note on the other side of my bedroom - there's days (and more of them than I'd like, like several a month) wherein I would probably have to just leave it there.

One of the downsides of this is that, well, doing stuff that isn't work becomes difficult. If I can't get out of the house, doing EVERYTHING becomes difficult; and even on a good day I have to be aware of energy levels, of how much what I am about to do will hurt after an hour, two hours, half a day.

This sucks, because I like doing things. Especially watching movies in the cinema.

I mean, you know I like them movies. I talk about them often enough. I do wish I could catch every release - there's so many movies in the past five years that I just haven't been able to see when they came out, so I've had to wait until they get a home or streaming release.

Or something.

It isn't even just those days wherein I can barely make it to the bathroom. At the end of a work day, I just don't have the energy to do much aside from get home again. It sucks. That's a big chunk of hours that are basically not usable for anything specific. After a decent week's work the weekend is kind of a waste; I spend most of it willing my joints to operate properly again, and that's all before the actual physical work of getting to the movies and being able to sit in a cinema seat for three hours without the subsequent pain and discomfort fucking the movie up.

So yeah. I missed a bunch.

More than a few of those movies, I wasn't too hard-bitten about. Like. Midway? I already know how that ends. Turned out to be a great film when I finally got to watch it, but there's nothing to ruin there, nothing to give away.

Sure, I know people are annoyed about spoiler culture and anti spoiler culture, but this is one of the big ones.

I really enjoy the new Star Wars movies; and thus, I was hyped to watch Rise Of Skywalker when it came out.

Except I didn't get to.

I spent Christmas basically crippled. I couldn't get out of the house; my knee literally wouldn't support my weight, and I had a chest infection that felt like I was dying slowly. It was pretty killer. Not much fun to be had. No opportunities came up to catch it. The few days I made it into work or was fit enough to walk around and do things while it was out, I got the things done I had to, and that was it. I was wiped out for the day. Sometimes barely even that - at one point I almost didn't make it home.

So I never saw it. It slipped out of movie theatres. I was still ill. Then I start pulling myself back together again, and then along comes pandemic season and everything is fucked again.

Not to mention the arthritis having another shot at me as the stay-at-home orders were signed, but that's another story.

The point is that there were certain large plot points in the movie that, after a certain point, just got talked about in public or hinted at strongly enough that anyone could piece them together. I don't want to crucify people that give out spoilers, but at the same time - I'm really hoping that the movie can tell me the story, rather than someone obliquely referring to a bit of it and outing that chunk so that when it comes along when I DO watch it, I just go "oh yeah that's what happens now".

I'm pretty sure that the crew that made the movie are a better storyteller than "angry man in front of greenscreen on youtube".

But that's just the way it is, right? You can't catch the movie when it comes out, then - well, get fucked, right? "It's been [arbitrary amount of time], you should have seen it already if you care so much about it," is often a defence for spoiler-friendly folks. Which. You know. Whatever. Perhaps there's a reason that a person hasn't seen a movie yet. Like, you know.

Imagine me gesturing at my body in general.

Just the way it is, though - but does it have to be?

Well, Universal didn't think so.

Yeah, see I'm not a fan of the franchise, BUT...

So one thing that is coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic is many wings of society are accidentally revealing that they can actually be more accessible than they currently are. The sheer amount of businesses that have made the shock discovery that many of their employees can actually work from home is astounding. Businesses providing contact-free or kerbside delivery. Sure, it's all being done in a very bootstrappy fashion and because there's no other option, but - for some of their consumers and employees, there already was no other option.

It seems that the movie market has caught on, too, because Universal decided that Trolls World Tour should be released on rental on-demand at the same time as its US cinematic release, seeing as the world was trying to stay indoors as much as possible. It isn't just Trolls either - several of their other releases saw a similar plan. It isn't a new idea, either; the Chinese cinema industry took several similar measures two months prior, allowing a bunch of movies to be released day-and-date at the same time in both theatres and at home. It also isn't the first time Universal has done this - it did the same thing with Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom.

They aren't the only business cashing in on the pandemic, either deliberately or accident of timing. Disney+ and Netflix have both had significant gains, and Disney+ has engaged directly in pandemic advertising; and lets face it, Animal Crossing came out at exactly the right time to get half the gaming world hooked just when they can't go to work.

Well - the Trolls thing seemed to work. It took $40 million in its opening weekend, in the onset of a pandemic. Sure, that doesn't cover the cost of production, but that is an opening weekend when people literally aren't allowed to go outside and cinemas are literally closed.

Like, that isn't shabby.

And nothing quite shows that you have succeeded at doing something that vaguely disrupts the status quo than...

The full article is here.

Of course there will be kickback. The model has worked this way for a long, LONG time, and people don't want to have to adjust to a different model - or a deviation from the current model. Just keep pouring the money in our pockets! Why do you have to make us think about things!? Just pay us and shut up!

The relevant section:

“This policy is not aimed solely at Universal out of pique or to be punitive in any way, it also extends to any movie maker who unilaterally abandons current windowing practices absent good faith negotiations between us, so that they as distributor and we as exhibitor both benefit and neither are hurt from such changes,” AMC chairman Adam Aron write in the letter. “Currently, with the press comment today, Universal is the only studio contemplating a wholesale change to the status quo. Hence, this immediate communication in response.”

Now... here's the thing.

When I was sat at home the entire time my knee was busted, I wasn't putting any money in the pockets of either my local cinema (which isn't a chain, it's mostly indie) OR Lucasfilm/Disney. It just wasn't happening, because I couldn't go to the movies, and I couldn't make the choice to pay on demand.

You know how free-market plebs often say that the market responds to demand? Well, it seems that Universal did that, without asking nicely; which is kind of a dick move, but at the same time, it showed that it can be done - and showed that it can rake in funds.

If the cinema chains are clever, and careful, then they can get a slice of the pie that companies like Universal are going to bake. If people act in good faith then this could be good for all of us, because I know that there is demand for such a service. From people like me, for one.

And there's so much cross-marketing that could be going on via the medium of a website. You want to watch a movie on release day? You click through to your local cinema, and from there, to their on-demand one-viewing rental website. You pay for a midnight viewing, which becomes available immediately after midnight. There could be reviews available, professional and user-based. A magazine section, to check out upcoming releases and read articles about the industry. Adverts for local food delivery places, that offer a slight discount on a click-through, as a partnership promotion. Synchronised viewing links so you can watch a movie at the same time as someone else, or "Viewing Rooms" like Twitch.

People have more and more complicated media setups at home; huge TVs, PCs and laptops with incredible screen resolutions and headsets with vast fidelity. I know it isn't the same as a big screen, but you know how it's better? You don't have to view it from the bottom corner, and you don't have to deal with that mob of teenagers throwing popcorn and being obnoxious, and the only person you need to move for is you. And even if they don't - Jesus Christ, I just want to see the movie. Don't give me shit because I can't afford a 4K TV. We've managed to watch films on VHS before the heady days of DVD and BluRay, I daresay I can enjoy one on a cheap laptop.

Imagine how good that could be. Imagine how good it would be, right now, to be able to have that, in this time when we have to stay inside; now imagine that all the time, for the people that find going to the movies difficult or impossible for whatever reason. Imagine having that available to you, and knowing that the money you pay for the viewing is going back to the industry, paying those that made the film you are watching. Knowing that if you stream Movie A, that it will be counted as the take for Movie A for the opening weekend, to prove that it performed better than Movie B.

Of course there's a million and one reasons it won't happen; and there's even more reasons why, if it happens, it will fuck someone over. We can't ever have a thing just work out. At a guess, if it does become an industry practice, then the cinema chains are going to suffer a lot for it and will start having to tighten their belts, which will lead to talk of the death of cinema - and who knows, from there?

And that's the sad, shit thing. With every potential innovation, with every method of making life easier or better, comes the innevitable question:

How will Capitalism make it awful?

People ask me why I'm a cynic.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

A Survivor Unclouded By Conscience

Today is Alien day; in the US, it's 4/26. As in LV-426, also known as Acheron, the ill-fated world that held Hadley's Hope colony.

So, today is the day that I choose to engage in the movie marathon. Running in chronological order, starting with Prometheus.

If I get as far as Alien 3, I'll be happy enough - Alien Resurrection isn't on deck for today. Maybe next week I will go into why I like that one the least.

What can I even say about the xenomorph that I haven't said before? It's beautiful in terms of how horrible it is. It's designed that way, and designed well.

It is unsettling - desperately unsettling. Its design and general body shape is close enough to human, but then takes several sharp left turns. The length of the head. The tail. The tentacle breathing tube things on its back. The way it moves around, which in the original 1979 classic was portrayed expertly by Bolaji Badejo, an artist and graphic designer who stood 6' 10" and could move like a monster. That secondary mouth - that horrible, awful secondary mouth.

You know what the worst thing is, though? I think?

No eyes.

You don't know how it hunts. You don't know how it sees you - but you know that it does. You know, because it knows where you are. Seemingly at all times. You can't run. You can't hide. It will find you. Sooner or later. You may hear it coming, but probably not. You don't see it until it wants you to see it.

There's certain books and comics in the expanded media that imply that the species can detect fear. Not just the secondary effects of that fear, but actually simply sense it. Which is useful if you are this kind of ultra-predator.

It is pure lethality. It is a distilled nightmare, the end result of both creation and evolution - first one and then the other and then the first one all over again. A pure killer.

One of the scariest things I had ever seen in my life, the first time I saw it, which was way younger than I really should have been. For a week I had nightmares - but then I stopped being afraid of the dark. I quite like it, now.

There was nothing quite like it, when it first came about in 1979. Then it was expanded in 1986 - because over and above the individual ant that caused so much damage on the Nostromo, we find the unity of the hive - and this hive has a queen. You thought the first one was bad? This one is smart. Maybe smarter than you. She can communicate mentally with her children, and she needs you to be their food as well as their crib.

The queen of Hell.

And why does this evil object exist? Why does this ultra-predator plague the universe? Why, specifically, does this branch of the hydra-like potential of the Engineer's black bioweapon plague humanity?

Because of Peter fucking Weyland and his stupid fucking quest to be a god, and the synthetic madman that he made to get him there.

Literally, a manifestation of our hubris and our greed, over and over again.

Appropriate.

Happy Alien Day.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

The Boogeyman In Three Parts

John Wick is one of the best action franchises that has ever existed, and I will prove it.

I'm aware of the irony of my last blog, calling for a cessation of murdering people and planet alike, being followed by one about an action movie trilogy with a three-figure body count. The incongruity of me not wanting real actual people to die, and yet capable of watching a movie wherein fictional people fictionally die. Yes. Thank you.

Now that that's out of the way.

I've mentioned John Wick in a previous blog about motivations, and you might recall I used the above picture in that very blog. It's a great picture, is why. Look at it.

I only recently got to watch the third instalment of the series. I have had a chance to consider it, think it through, listen to all three soundtracks a whole bunch, and here I am with opinions.

The first thing you have to respect is the work put in.

Like, I am a fan of those old, dumb action movies wherein you have Steven Seagal walking around like a mummy and occasionally doing little hand-slappy attacks. Wherein you have to cut away every half-second so it looks like he delivers an actual roundhouse kick. That kind of nonsense.

So when you see minute-long shots of Keanu Reeves just putting in the work, close combat stuff, rough work - when you see how much training he has done to make this whole thing look absolutely feasible, even as it becomes less and less so as the trilogy continues - you have to respect that. The stunt work, the attention to detail. He's renowned for doing that, for applying himself. The other actors that appear alongside him, fighting him, they deserve that respect too. Ruby Rose, Common, Halle Berry, Mark Dacascos. Yayan Ruhian and Cecep Arif Rahman, from the Raid movies. They put in WORK, and it shows on the screen.

The screen. Yeah, let's talk about cinematography.

Sometimes this trilogy is painfully ugly, deliberately so. It's warehouses, back alleys, trashy clubs. Sometimes, it is beautiful - art galleries, the grounds of a villa, various sites throughout New York City, a souk in Casablanca. One thing it is not is easily forgettable. What are you watching a movie for? Why isn't it a book? So you can watch it. So you can see it. There isn't a single shot in this -

Wait, that's a lie. There is one single shot in this trilogy that I dislike. I'm not going to show it to you. Just pay attention to the bit at the fountain with Wick and Cassian when he gets back to New York in Chapter 2. You'll see what I mean. I have no idea why it is there. One shot, perhaps two seconds long if that. I digress.

How it looks is important, because how it looks is telling you the story within the story. And yeah, there is one. Action movies don't have to be what they used to be. They don't have to be a bunch of goons with muscles and two outdated racial stereotypes shouting at each other until everyone but Arnie is dead.

The story isn't necessarily complex. The imagery is, though. The thematic. What the movie is about, as well as a man being the living embodiment of muder-death-kill.

Allow me to elaborate.

John Wick was a monster who stopped being a monster, and then the things that stopped him being a monster were taken away, one after the other, until he became a monster again. John Wick has no brakes. Those brakes were killed by 1) illness, 2) Alfie FUCKING Allen, and 3) the devil (his name is Santino, look at him).

This trilogy is a lethal exploration of what happens when two forces - the entire criminal underworld and one really angry Keanu Reeves - could back down, at any time, but don't. They literally do it to themselves, and they keep on doing it to themselves. At any point during this journey, one side or other - Viggo, Santino, the High Table - could have downed tools and said: Okay, enough. At any point, John could have put his gun down and gone to live somewhere in the country. Neither of them backed down or gave way, and so, the bodies just kept on stacking.

Time and again, the mythological nature of the entire concept comes up. In the first movie it begins with just a reputation, which steadily becomes proven to be 100% legitimate - but still within believable human boundaries. Boundaries that get stretched with each instalment. As John passes through purgatory, goes through the long walk across the desert and has his heart measured and has to give up everything he loves, as John has to fight through reflections of his own soul to reach the devil, as he has to trade trinkets for passage across the river. As John is tested by emperors and gods and kings and comes away bloodied but alive every time. As he begins the first movie falling out of an SUV half-dead, and ends having survived almost insurmountable odds and yet somehow, still in one piece.

It's a myth.

It's Ajax and Achilles. It's the Green Knight and Sir Lancelot.

So consider that a ringing endorsement.

Maybe skip it if you can't stand to see animals getting hurt - at least, skip the scene in the first one. (Weirdly enough outside of that, great pains are taken throughout the rest of the trilogy to prevent harm to any of the other animals present. This is especially obvious in the third one. I'm a fan.)

Maybe, also, skip it if you're not a fan of action movies - but then I doubt you needed me to tell you that.

Otherwise, get all three of them for a weekend and buckle up.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

It's Like We Finish Each Other's...

So who remembers this scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

The entire Shave And A Haircut bit.

As a joke that actually became a thing, we used the shave-and-a-haircut knock in several RPGs to test if the being on the other side of a door was sentient, because who doesn't know shave-and-a-haircut? It almost answers itself. It sounds so satisfying as a string of beats that it almost fills itself in even if you don't know what it is from or haven't heard it before.

Those of you who are following this from something I said on Facebook are probably nodding knowingly right now, and for good reason, for I've discussed this over there before now, and relatively recently:

The human brain fills in a bunch of stuff that you aren't necessarily perceiving.

Like you'd be amazed how little of what you think you are seeing right now is stuff you are actually seeing. A lot of it is just what the brain estimates is there, and it feeds you that instead of there just being grey fuzzy patches that you can't perceive at all.

So it's not so unlikely that something similar can happen with audio - and that this can be altered via conditioning. It's part of how we get used to talking, after all. How we learn how to communicate verbally. Our brain starts to connect things together, the language shapes our thoughts, and all of a sudden we have got these entire complex sentence structures inside our mind that inform us if something sounds right.

Which means that, sometimes, we can be conditioned into having a response to a partial sentence or even a single word.

And sometimes, that conditioning can come from something other than conversation.

Let's experiment.

If you are reading this blog there is a greater than zero chance that you watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I've got a theory.

Which verse did you just riff off that sentence with? My personal favourite is the first one - it could be demons - but I know this one is a crowdpleaser:

You start to see what I am talking about.

Now this can be a popular culture thing. It can be a way to identify if the people around you are into the same stuff as you, right? Like how long someone can draw out the word "anticipation" tells you that they have probably, at least once, also uttered the words Damn It Janet and meant them.

I mean, has anyone heard the words "Frankly My Dear" any time in the past twenty years and not known what the following line is? Has anyone not visualised a pair of San Dimas washouts playing air guitar when they hear the word Excellent? Are there, indeed, any spoons? I'm pretty sure everyone I know believes that there isn't, at least a little.

Is it ever game over, without it being Game Over?

Who can hear the word Witness, without...

It's not just movie and TV quotes though.

Song lyrics?

A brief round of experiments:

Tell Me Why.

Sweet Caroline.

Mama.

Help.

Stop.

Let's focus on that last one, shall we?

What song do you hear, when you think about the word, Stop?

1. ____! Hammertime!
2. ____! In the name of love! Before you break my heart!
3. ____! Collaborate and LISTEN!
4. ____, hey, what's that sound, everybody look what's going down!
5. You'd better ____ before you go and break my heart!
6. Don't ____ til you get enough!
7. ____ pressuring me, makes me want to scream!

There's a few, right?

I think that if we can compile the things that do this in our heads - the things that we have to finish, the quotes that we have to complete - then we can build an interesting picture of who we are. And hell, it will certainly point out that some of our sense of humour is wacky and weird.

Stuff like this spreads, too. People repeat things that are stated as a short sharp quote, when the situation calls for it, then don't know what it came from. A bunch of people I know have heard me quote the Goon Show without ever knowing it exists - after hearing any kind of clash or weird noise, following it up with a smug, upper-class, "And why not?"

You know what all this is, right?

This is why we know stuff like the Crazy Frog, despite hating it. This is why we all have a favourite moment from Only Fools And Horses, despite not having watched a full episode in a decade. This is why some people start laughing when they hear something that has no real humorous context, because it is so inherently tied to something in their minds that does.

This is all Memetics, people. Cultural information transfer. The communication of a shared culture through goofy jokes, memorable quotes, slapstick humour and song lyrics.

Just thought I would dwell on something vaguely fun and interesting, while my government guts the democracy it claims to be protecting and swears to break the law if it doesn't get what it wants.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

2019 Movie Time - #6 Godzilla King Of The Monsters

We're back at the flicks, and this time - it's for the monsters.

My earliest memories of the Godzilla franchise come from the Channel 4 showings of the Showa-era Godzilla movies. They were entertaining enough - I was a kid, I liked big monsters - and then, for the longest time, there was nothing...

...until along came this fucking thing.

Yeah just looking at that image...

It wasn't long after this shit-sluice of a movie came out that I started looking back into the franchise. I started from the very beginning. I saw the more modern era of movies wherein they started to take themselves somewhat more seriously again. It wasn't until 2006 that I saw the original Gojira from 1954 for the very first time - and I do mean the original, not the Americanised edit.

I was furious. Like, here I was, being spoon-fed kiddy films with Godzilla doing funny dances and doing this tail-slide drop-kick thing and here, HERE was the literal piece of art that had spawned it? And instead of seeing this, we got given a bastardised shitshow?

So my concerns when the Gareth Edwards film was announced were somewhat heightened. Another American Godzilla? I mean, how could it compare, now that my eyes have been opened to what could have been?

Pretty well actually.

It's not the same movie. You can't take it as the same movie - it's not meant to be. You have to take it on its own merits, and its own merits are significant. The cinematography, the sound engineering, the acting, the pacing, Ken Watanabe, Bryan Cranston, it was excellent.

Kong: Skull Island does another solid round of Beating The Snot Out Of Its Prior Western Adaptation too. The Jackson King Kong is garbage - Skull Island is a tour de force, what kind of movie can effectively combine the same beats from the beginning of the original King Kong story with the plot of Heart of Darkness?

So imagine my joy at hearing the words: Sequel.

Warning. Below, there are spoilers.

I have problems. Very few, but they exist - insofar as two of the leads have... very little charm, and very little reason to be in the movie aside from acting as dramatic tension points. Kyle Chandler and Vera Farmiga are just... bad decisions wrapped up in generic names and somehow end up being the parents to Millie Bobbie Brown, who is frankly a wondrous gift to humanity.

Also one of the Monarch tech heads has some annoying lines but I think that's because he is meant to be annoying.

Outside of that:

BRILLIANT.

Yes! Brilliant. Monsters! Monsters fighting monsters! We open with monsters. Yes. YES. The monsters are loose.

I mean... that's all I really need to say, right? That satisfies me. But there's more, it has a cogent plot, too. Yeah, it's a bit nonsense, but this is a Godzilla movie. Like, we have already accepted giant monsters that communicate with sonar and that eat radiation, none of what we see in King Of The Monsters is out of bounds.

The fights look great, too. Like there's very little Bayformers here. What is going on is usually quite clear (unless it deliberately isn't) and, well, we came here to watch them fight? So we let them fight.

There's a lot of nice nods to older Godzilla flicks too. Mothra gets awoken by two ladies. I mean that was nice and subtle - but then you actually have the twins from back in the day show up in old family pictures, so they really double down on that particular reference.

The sound engineering is, again, fantastic. Sound plays quite a big part in the movie - there was a lot of sonic action back and forth between G-man and the Mutos in the first one, so it's little surprise that this is explored as a thematic that ends up driving the plot. So having all the beasties sound right is very important.

They look right, too. If anything Godzilla looks more like the king of the monsters than ever, Rodan looks solid as fuck as this flaming bird-wing bastard, Mothra is, well, Mothra. The other Kaiju look pretty great too. But it was always, always going to be about this guy. Monster Zero. The Golden Devil.

King Ghidora.

He makes the movie, honestly. Look at him. Look at how ridiculous this shot is. It's brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. And that's what we're here for, isn't it? It's what we want. The cinematography is superb, not as dark and moody as the first one, much less serious and gritty - much more in line with the Heisei-era monster mash.

So all the monsters fight and everyone gets what they want. Fantastic. Sign me up. It's not smart, and it's not particularly deep - but it's true eye candy.

Can't wait for the next one!

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

Why Would They Do That?

I think that one of the key parts of fiction - and perhaps of life - is understanding motivation.

Part of enjoying a character is understanding them, grasping who they are - and following that, understanding why. Inigo Montoya, as demonstrated above, has who he is writ on his sleeve from the get-go. You learn more about him later, obviously. More depth is revealed. The important thing, though, is you know why he is doing what he is doing.

And a strong driving motivation is good. Right? Like, it helps a character move in life. It's hard for them to be dynamic and proactive if their main goal in life is Like Whatever. Why are you here, pal? Why are you doing what you are doing? Why should we care about you?

Consistency is important here, too. Like, if a character is going to have to change what they want or what they are doing, it should be for a good reason. The story should show you that. There should be little doubt - and if a change is sudden, it doesn't hurt to acknowledge the fact.

You know a movie that has a bunch of characters with easy-to-understand motivations that absolutely rocks?

John Wick.

Great film. If you can get past the, uh, reason why he is motivated to absolutely fucking end Alfie Allen's entire fucking existence. But once that happens, you totally grasp WHY he wants to murder the eternal shit out of Theon Greyjoy. In fact you are practically begging for it to happen, because Alfie Greyjoy is such a scumbag that I'm fairly convinced he'd run as a local UKIP candidate (OH SHIT POLITICS KLAXON).

You kind of understand why everyone does what they're doing, in this movie. Iosef (Alfie FUCKING Allen) is the exact kind of weak-ass pathetic shitweasel that would absolutely steal a mans car and do, uh, what he does, just because that guy stood up to him. His father Viggo is a Russian mob boss, torn between survival and familial duty. There's precious few moments where you are left confused.

That's just good writing. Combine that with the absurdly beautiful cinematography, the fight choreography that redefines an entire genre, the soundtrack oh god the soundtrack and one of the best performances ever put in by Keanu Criminally-Undervalued-As-An-Actual-Actor Reeves amongst others, and it makes John Wick one hell of a film.

...sorry, I got distracted.

Anyhow, it is part of - as best I can tell - why people feel Gang of Throne ended so poorly. The consistency. Or lack therein. A bunch of complicated characters with conflicting agendas all of a sudden forgetting several key parts of their motivation and how they feel about, well, anything. If only there was a character who could use some kind of mind control to manipulate how people acted, a thing that could be used to justify the personality transplants that several Thronefolks seem to undertake...

Okay, okay. Settle down, Kellogg's All Bran.

All this is about writing, of course. It's about making your characters either easy to understand, or making them compelling enough to stick around and find out why they are the way they are. If someone just shows up, and we have no idea why, and we have no reason to care - well, why? In fact, sometimes the only thing you need about a character is their motivation. We didn't know anything about what the Winter Soldier was, or who. All we got was how he locked, the music that played when he showed up, and the fact that he is 100% here to FUCK UP YOUR DAY.

This movie, dude.

All of this said... what is scarier than being totally lost on someone's motivations in real life?

Like, that's the thing, isn't it? Not knowing why someone does what they are doing? Why mass murderers mass murder, why war criminals think it's okay to use white phosphorous, why that guy at the bus stop says racist shit to the nice lady waiting for the next bus? Why anyone would put toilet paper on the roll the wrong way? (You know what I am talking about.)

Why would someone gleefully strike down equality legislation, make people's lives objectively worse, deport people that have every right to live here, make an environment hostile to people who are literally allowed to live here, and simply shrug over literal deaths on her watch...

...and then only cry when she announces her resignation?

Sometimes it isn't even that we don't understand a motivation. Sometimes we understand it just fine - and we hate it.

It's just easier in fiction.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

2019 Movie Time - #3 Captain Marvel / #4 Infinity War / #5 Endgame

Hard to believe that the last time I made it to a cinema was back in the beginning of January - but here we are. At least the days I go, I make it worth it, right?

And not satisfied with the double-feature of last time - in which I found what is probably my favourite Marvel movie, and new hope for the Transformers movie franchise - this time we have a triple header.

Yes yes.

Admittedly - this all happened on Wednesday the 24th, about a week and a half ago. I just didn't really want to do the reviews last week, if only for spoilery reasons. I think we're starting to get into the period wherein most people who care have seen it, now.

That said. If you haven't seen Endgame, and don't want a frank discussion of the plot? It's gonna happen in this blog. You have been warned.

Let us begin.

#3 Captain Marvel (2019)

A superhero movie about a badass lady set in the 90s? Someone read my Christmas list.

Captain Marvel isn't a complicated movie. It isn't meant to be. It does what it is trying to do, ties it up in a bow, and leaves the character of Carole Danvers for further adventures (some of which will definitely be handled below). What it is, is thoroughly enjoyable.

A soldier in an alien war machine, Vers (yeah there's a reason they call her that) is tasked with hunting down face-changing "insurgents" responsible for terrorist attacks - and finds herself questioning everything when it turns out that she might not even be who she thinks she is. In fact, she's been gaslit pretty hard.

For a movie so simple - bits of it are pretty subtle.

From the very beginning, you don't necessarily buy all the things she is being asked to buy into. There's an ongoing suspicious air around the activities of the Kree, which perhaps is more informed by our view of how the world works in the current age than anything. You'd have to be naive to not see obvious parallels between certain foreign policy decisions and the mission that Vers - under the stern gaze of her commanding officer, Yon-Rogg - is sent on in the beginning of the movie.

(If you can't see it - a small force of elite soldiers being sent into arid terrain in which the "natives" could be the "enemy" and should be treated as secondary to the "mission" to extract an "asset"?)

It isn't long after the mission goes south that we see Carole Danvers start to shine.

Yon-Rogg and the other Kree spend a lot of their time telling her to chill out and calm down, see. She's always, always being told that she needs to do things their way, that she has to rein herself in, that she's too emotional, so on, so on.

The first time she is out of their line of sight, she pretty much comes alive. She fights like a valkyrie. She smirks, she laughs, she's competent and powerful. You very quickly realise that the Vers that Yon-Rogg wants her to be isn't the person she really is... and that should be your first indication that the script was primarily written by women, who have first-hand experience of this. Having to lessen themselves so they don't make the menfolk mad.

Irony, given that one of the responses to this movie was:

sHe Is ToO pOwErFuL

Well for one thing, this is a superhero movie. I didn't hear any of these complaints when Hulk punched Surtr half to death in Ragnarok, or when Steve Rogers didn't die immediately when the plane crashed with him in the cockpit.

Could it be that she gets treated differently because she is... wait, wait... no. No. It COULDN'T be that she's not allowed to be strong or powerful or cocky or arrogant or sarcastic because she has the audacity to be...

...a WOMAN!?

Shock horror - but hey, there's a section of the internet that is never going to be happy until every character is a white cis-het male, so fuck them anyway. The movie's approval rating was review-bombed down to 28% on Rotten Tomatoes BEFORE its release, then rose back up to a 78% review score AFTER release; if that doesn't tell you everything about these people, nothing will. If you don't like a superhero being a superhero, you're in the wrong place. Go home.

I love Carole Danvers. She reminds me of a halfway mix between The Sentry and Daria. She's like the super-person you really wish Superman was capable of being, except he's too flat. She's a hero. She's a hero who whoops when she flies and sings bad karaoke because it's fun.

On the topic of music? The score for this film absolutely slaps. Not just the soundtrack - which features some of the good shit from the nineties, you know me - but the score. It's got a fantastic set of motifs which are unmistakable even when heard casually. Nick Fury's little "I'm Doing Stuff" motif is this wicked electric guitar riff. I've listened to that score like once every couple days since I saw the movie, that's how much I liked it.

I got out of that movie with a good feeling. I felt good watching it. It made me laugh, it made me cheer. I think the thing I liked the least was the noise of a cat horking up a hairball at the end. (Anyone who has had a cat will testify to this noise being the worst noise ever.) Outside of that, well - hell, it ended up pretty high on the List. It's top five. It was an enjoyable bit of cinema even without the greater MCU context.

Speaking of the greater MCU context...

#4 Avengers - Infinity War

We watched Infinity War / Endgame back-to-back as a double feature, and frankly - it actually made me like Infinity War more to see it presented as a part 1 to Endgame's part 2.

See I LIKED Infinity War - liked a lot of the things it did - but it felt a little... bitty. A little all-over-the-place in parts. I recognise it is difficult to tie together the threads of the MCU into a cogent ending but still, the problems gotta be recognised.

Seeing it again reminded me how funny I find some of it. The entire scene in Manhattan, Tony and Strange squabbling with each other, actually leaves me in stitches. Whenever Tom Holland's Peter Parker shows up - yes, I'm a fanboy of him, too. The fight scenes are predictably nicely put together, too. I mean, why wouldn't they be. They've been doing this for a while. My boy War Machine gets to put in some work in that final fight. Bruce Banner gets to be Bruce Banner. Thor gets to work through some truly holy rage.

I don't think I need to go into a lot of detail about this one. I'll just move on to the main event here. Which, obviously, entails spoilers. You've been warned, okay?

#5 Avengers - Endgame

I didn't know what I was expecting when I went in to watch this. Not really. I had some theories. Almost every expectation I had was blown away - this isn't the movie you think it is.

It becomes obvious that the two were filmed at the same time. The two are similar to the second and third movies of many modern trilogies - The Matrix and Pirates Of The Caribbean come to mind. The movies individually don't necessarily feel complete, don't fit within a neat arc, don't feel contained or resolved, don't seem to give good balance to aspects of character. Taken as pairs seen as a whole, they are a lot more balanced, a lot more fulfilling to watch.

(I mean I say that. I may personally like the Matrix trilogy, but nothing will convince me to rewatch the Pirates movies. Urgh. Anyway.)

While Infinity War was very compartmentalised, putting each of the Avengers in different places (and straight-up not featuring one of them at all), Endgame is literally an Avengers movie. It's about them. More specifically - it is mostly about Steve Rogers and Tony Stark.

I came into the movie with some theories as to what would happen. Only two came to pass - one was obvious, one was a joke.

The obvious one is that Dr Strange knew that everything had to pan out this way. HAD to. That's why, while everyone else was trying to stop Quill from slapping Thanos about, he did literally nothing. That had to happen. He saw the way it would all pan out. And that is why, when he gives the stone to Thanos, he apologises to Tony.

He's not saying, "I'm sorry I am giving him the stone because we fought hard to keep it from him". He's saying, "I'm sorry - but I am keeping my promise - because you WILL die at the end of the chain of events I have foreseen. I said I would sacrifice you to keep the stone safe. That is exactly what I am doing."

The joke I made was that - heh, wouldn't it be fucked up if they just went and murdered Thanos in the first fifteen minutes? ...which wasn't out by much, because Thor lops his head off with Stormbreaker in the nineteenth minute.

What follows is one of my two quibbles with this film.

Five years pass. During that time, Tony has made good on the vague statement he makes at the end of Age Of Ultron - "Maybe I should take a page out of Barton's book. Build Pepper a farm, hope nobody blows it up" - and the dream he had involving Pepper being pregnant. Steve Rogers has done what he always does, held together small groups with his natural warmth and leadership. Black Widow has slipped into a paranoid overwatch role in the remains of the Avengers head office. Hawkeye has gone full Ronin, and is busy killing his way across what remains of the world's criminal underworld. Bruce deals with Hulk by treating him as a cure rather than a disease, and in doing so becomes greater than the sum of his parts. And Thor...

Well Thor justifiably has a breakdown. He's lost his mother, his father, his hammer, the three buddies he used to pal around with, his best friend, and his brother - who he was just starting to get on with. Half of his people are dead. He throws himself into the task of murdering Thanos, because he has "nothing else to lose". He almost dies making a weapon that can kill a being that powerful. Then he shows up and he puts it to use - and through little fault of his own, doesn't get the job done before Thanos snaps half the universe into oblivion. (Presumably also including half of the remaining Asgardians.) He gets another chance and beheads the big purple bastard, and...

...and there's still a hole where his entire life was, and all the people that were gone are still gone. He failed. That is the only way he can see it. He failed his people, he failed the universe, and even finally going through with the killing didn't fix that. So he has a breakdown, and slips into a depression the likes of which are hard to imagine. Which is obviously represented by him... getting fat... and it being a joke? I don't like "he put on weight" being shorthand for "he had a serious fucking blow to his mental health and hasn't really recovered". Even if the scene in which you see him for the first time has one of the most incredible bits of face acting I've seen in any of these movies - when Bruce says Thanos' name. I didn't know Chris Hemsworth was capable of that level of pathos. The anguish that just... radiates from him in that one moment... is palpable. It hurts.

There's a few of those moments. They happen later though.

The midsection of the film - I say midsection, more like the middle hour and a half - is a time heist. Yeah. Time heist. I said it. And it is... actually fun. It's kind of a bit weird. Like in the face of this tragedy, we're engaged in hijinx to not go back in time to stop Thanos, but to just bring back everyone that was lost. In doing so it is almost like we are almost being shown the Avengers greatest hits - revisiting scenes from previous movies, seeing characters that aren't around any more, even dipping into the TV universe with Steve Rogers almost running into Peggy Carter and Tony Stark getting to have a talk with his own father.

It bears mention that the "rules of time travel" in the Marvel Cinematic Universe aren't actually very well defined at all, despite the amount of arguments I see about it online - there is only one rule, and that one rule is given by the Ancient One, to Bruce Banner.

The stones have to be where the stones are. If they aren't, everything goes wrong. Otherwise, everything is fine.

So as the past starts to seep into the in-movie present, we don't have to worry about paradox. And that's good, because the plans start to come good, and we get the stones back. The Soul Stone, of course, requiring a sacrifice.

My second quibble. I think Black Widow was sold short. Like, not just in this movie. In general. She gets to be support. Constantly. She helps everyone else achieve their objectives, and while that is a valuable contribution, I want her to shine. I want her to do things. I want her to have her Captain Marvel moments - and they just never seem to quite emerge. I know she is chalked in to get her own spin-off movie or series, but... well... it felt a little like fridging, like she'd died mostly because it would make other people suffer. I think she deserved more. I think she should have been there when A-Force happened.

Oh, you don't know about that yet? Well here comes.

So Bruce Banner gets the Stark-forged right-handed Infinity Gauntlet on, and Snaps, and really savagely fucks himself up doing so. But before we see any serious effect of this happening - short of Clint's phone buzzing, his previously-dusted wife calling him, and Scott seeing a sudden increase in the amount of birds outside - the bad shit happens. Thanos decides to take the fight across time, shows up over Avengers Compound circa 2023, and bombards it into a smoking crater. Which sets us up for the endgame of the title.

While several folks struggle with the smashed-apart structure of the building - and Clint tries to get the gauntlet out of the sewers - we get to see how much Thor, Tony and Steve have changed since that fight in the park in Avengers Assemble. It's one hell of a fight against Thanos, who - even without the stones - is an absolute monster. During that fight, one of the coolest moments in the Marvel universe happens, and I was not the only one in the cinema who cheered when they saw this:

Steve Rogers summons Mjolnir, proving himself worthy. And Thor isn't angry, or jealous - Thor is overjoyed. "I KNEW it!" he yells, grinning. That moment, that moment right there, is worth price of admission alone.

It's not enough, of course. Thanos brought his flagship, the Sanctuary-II. Thanos brought an army. The three amigos are left in the dust. And Steve Rogers, shield actually broken by Thanos' attack, stands up. He stands up, and squares his shoulders, because that's what he does. He can do this all day.

"On your left."

The hairs on the back of my neck go up when I think about that scene, when I hear the piece of music on the score. Of the lost people coming back through portals, brought back by Dr Strange. Of Tony Stark seeing Peter Parker again and grabbing him like a long-lost son. Okoye and T'Challa and Shuri, and half of Wakanda. Every wizard that Strange knows. Valkyrie, resplendent in her war plate and her fucking unicorn. The works. Everyone is here for this. This is how this fight is going to happen.

It does happen, too. It's a hell of a spectacle. Carole Danvers showing up and being a one-woman cavalry resulted in more cheers from the rest of the folks I was watching the movie with. She smashes Sanctuary-II like a matchstick model, takes the gauntlet from Peter, and then...

So A-Force is a period of the Avengers in which the team is all women. That's what you get. The badasses line up, and carve a path for Danvers to deliver the payload. I wish Black Widow had still been around for that moment, in which the majority of the MCU's women get to slap around Thanos' legion of dickheads, but I will settle for what we got - which probably prompted more squawking like

tHaT wAs So CoNtRiVeD

It's a superhero movie, go home.

Push comes to shove, and in the end, it is Tony Stark who does the deed: snapping his fingers to do away with Thanos and his legion. And here we come into character endings, because after 22 movies, these are important.

Tony Stark doesn't stop living - doesn't stop desperately clutching onto life, even after the side effects of snapping the gauntlet almost totally destroy him - until Pepper whispers to him that he did good, that everyone is okay. That they're safe. And then, and only then, does Tony Stark allow his own heart to stop beating. He is sent off with a touching funeral. Because even if he was an asshole at times, he was - when it came down to it - a hero.

Steve Rogers is tasked with the unenviable burden of getting all the stones back to where they were taken from. He does so, presumably - also presumably returning Mjolnir to Asgard halfway through Thor: The Dark World - and then... he goes to live the life that he didn't get the chance to have the first time round. He gets to dance with Peggy. He, this most worthy of heroes, gets his rest.

BuT tHe TiMeLiNe

Stones are back where they were because the world doesn't end. Go home. Sure, I'd like to see HOW he got the stones where they were going, but that's ultimately unimportant. Even if I know how I'd do it, were I him.

Thor isn't a leader. He's tried that. The one time he tried it, it didn't work out spectacularly well. He's just not cut out for it, which is frankly fine - he's seen that someone else being worthy doesn't make him unworthy - so he goes off with the friends he has left. The Asgardians of the Galaxy. Guardians 3 promises to be one hell of a ride with him aboard.

Bruce Banner presumably remains tech support for the Avengers. He's at peace with who he is, now. He's still a genius. He's still massively strong. He's just more comfortable doing what he does. If anything he's resolved the major thing he had wrong with his life. He just has to mourn the loss of Natasha Romanoff.

Clint Barton goes back to his family. Ronin is gone. He, too, is going to mourn Black Widow's loss. They all are, in their own ways. Clint, probably, the most. But he has his family, which is the most important thing to him, now.

We're left with a new Captain America in the form of Sam Wilson, a resurgent Wakanda, Peter Parker back in school, Strange back in his Sanctum. James Rhodes and Wanda Maximoff are still around. The Avengers still exist. A new phase can happen, with the old Avengers fading into the background.

That's how it is done.

Truth be told, if we never saw another Marvel movie, I'd be satisfied with what we got - what more can I ask for?

So you know what? 24th April 2019 was probably the best day of cinema I've ever had. It left me exhausted, emotionally, mentally and physically, and it was absolutely worth it.

I'm thinking the next cinematic experience that will crop up in this blog will probably be either... Spider-Man Far From Home, or Godzilla II, or - shudder - the new X-Men movie. We'll see.

Either way. Thank you for reading my ramblings. Especially all my Endgame nonsense.

See you soon.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.

The Marvel List - Why and How

Remember a time before half the journalism online was top ten lists of things that you didn't necessarily care about?

Guess who is about to contribute to the problem.

Yep, little old me.

Before we get into that. Who's your favourite superhero?

If you don't have one - you know what, this blog probably may not hold much interest for you. I won't be mad if you hit the Back button. A lot of everyone else probably thought of at least one specific superhero - and it is probably Batman or Spider-Man.

Mine's Cable.

Following that, of course - there's been a lot of movies released in the past... well, let's be honest, forty years... that have followed the antics of at least one superhero and their respective villain or foil. I can predict that, if you have a favourite superhero, you may well have a favourite superhero movie.

It might even be Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, like mine.

They are, after all, a billion-dollar business. Some of the biggest earning movies in decades - 7 of the top 20 grossing movies in the past ten years, all but one of which were Marvel movies. Even if you don't read comics or care about them much, you have to acknowledge their success.

I mean, they're successful enough that there is an entire personality sub-trait which is "sneering at superhero movies", because, you know. Why not.

So - those who are still on board - you have a favourite superhero movie. Probably you have several more, and if pressed, you could arrange them into a list of sorts. Right?

The List - the capitalisation is necessary - actually came about as I was trying to work out what movies one needed to watch before they went in to see Avengers: Endgame.

I've always been more of a Marvel fan than a DC fan. The selection just interests me more. In terms of comics, it isn't like the two companies are as vastly different as their movie releases have been. That's a real polarising agent, right there. The gulf is wide.

So The List started as the master list for Marvel movies that had to be seen before Endgame, which I was compiling in chronological order in-universe. It's not Star Wars - you don't need to skip around that order to find the best time to reveal certain things. You can just watch it as it happened in the timeline. 

Then when I had that list in front of me, I decided to do something different with it.

I decided to stick them in order of preference. Not order of quality, of objective film-making talent and skill, or anything like that - literally, in order of those that I would rather watch in an either-or situation.

So I shifted them around, I moved them into the places I felt comfortable with them being, and it was as I was looking at the top three that I realised there were films missing - and the only way to fix that, was to properly define what a Marvel movie is.

This is gonna get nerdy.

So technically speaking, Iron Man is the first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe - movies pretty much made by Marvel Studios. Iron Man being the first one, it was in production for a long time before Marvel Studios bought the rights back in the mid-2000s. But we all know full well that Tony Stark is a Marvel character, right? Like, Kirby and Lee concocted him in the mid-sixties. (A grossly simplified history, I know.)

Except those movies officially released by Marvel Studios aren't the only Marvel movies, those being, movies featuring characters that are part of Marvel comics. That throws the doors wide open, which necessitates a bit of a restriction - when we say "movies", we mean anything with a cinematic release. Not straight-to-DVD, not a TV movie.

That means we not only get to include the Main 22 - everything from Iron Man in 2008 forwards to Avengers: Endgame - but also the unexpected smash Spider-Verse, which as I mentioned was my favourite. It means we include the Ang Lee Hulk movie put out in 2003. It means including the rest of the Sony Spider-Man movies - the three featuring Tobey Maguire, and the two featuring Andrew Garfield. It means including all three Fantastic Four movies, the two cheesy ones featuring a pre-Captain America Chris Evans and the new darker DC-like one.

It means the X-Men movies. All of them. From the first one, through the weird reboot of First Class and Days Of Future Past, through to Logan and Apocalypse (and the forthcoming Dark Phoenix). It means including Deadpool and its sequel. It means Daredevil and Elektra. It means all three Blade movies. It means Ghost Rider and Punisher, and their respective sequels.

It means Big Hero 6, which is a Disney movie, but based on Marvel characters. It means the really rather bad Captain America movie from 1990, starring JD Salinger's son (no, really). It means the Dolph Lundgren Punisher movie from 1989, which is as bad as you might expect.

It means Howard the Duck.

Further surprises come in the form of the Kingsman and Kick-Ass movies, both of which were published under Icon Comics, an imprint of Marvel that seems mostly dedicated to letting Mark Millar publish whatever he wants. It also includes Men In Black - originally published by Aircel, which was bought out by Malibu, which was bought out by Marvel.

So what I have is a list of Marvel movies, sixty-one of them thus far, and they have been arranged in order from 1 to 61 - in order of which I would rather watch. That is as technical as the listing got, simple but effective, and utterly lacking in any kind of real objectivity. And still, at times, the fight between movies in consecutive spaces has been a little...

Acrimonious.

There's several I haven't seen yet. I am working on fixing that. What this list has given me is an appreciation for the Marvel movies which are actually well-made - you really don't have a true love for the superb fight choreography in Captain America: The Winter Soldier until you've had to watch Dolph Lundgren trying to be Frank Castle. You forget just how good a Spider-Man Tom Holland is until you watch Andrew Garfield. I mean, bless him, he tried, but. It's just no comparison.

I haven't seen Logan yet. Which is a sin, I know - but I intend on fixing that this weekend. It won't go on the list until I have seen it but I predict it will go in pretty high. I also haven't seen X-Men Apocalypse (ugh) or the sequel to Ghost Rider (UGH) but, again, I will fix that. I don't predict them being quite as high on the list as Logan.

I will spare you the entire list - though if anyone wants to see it, I will put it together and publish it in a comment here. What I will share with you, though, is a couple of the salient points. Remember, this is just my opinion.

• The top five are Spider-Verse, Homecoming, Black Panther, Captain Marvel and Thor: Ragnarok. There's not much I'd rather watch than Carole Danvers beating the piss out of literally anything, and those few things are mostly Spider-Man related.
• Infinity War comes in at 17 out of 61 - Endgame got in at 9. They were both better movies than I thought they were going to be, even if they have their structural problems.
• Only three actual MCU movies sit in the bottom third of the list. That bottom third is mostly composed of bad Fox movies.
• I really, really am not a fan of the X-Men or the Fantastic Four.

So... why does this list even get maintained? What's the point? Why do book-keeping on stuff which is meant to be fun and enjoyable escapism?

Because it has given me new eyes to look at media that had previously been taken for granted. It gave me a framework to enjoy this new batch of movies in. It reminded me of where we've come from, of places we can go. If you look at the sheer amount of improvement in actual film-making standards in between the 90s Captain America and Chris Evans' performance, it's like a whole different world. It's also a great excuse to go back and watch some old favourites that I haven't seen in a while.

And because - frankly - it gives us something to talk about.

...of course, that means that at some point, I'm going to need to do a DC list...

...but maybe I'll save that for a rainy month.

If you'd care to share my blog with your friends, I'd appreciate that! If you'd like to thank me in a fiscal form for entertaining you a little bit, I do have a Patreon right here, but please - no pressure. Thank you for reading, and check my social media to the right to keep in touch.