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.

Eye Contact

Halloween is almost here, one of my favourite times of year, and that means horror movies. So there's a lot of horror tropes which have been done so much that they just aren't scary any more. Right?

One of the examples that comes up a lot is "It's Behind You". Now the moment that you are presented with a panning shot or a shot of someone or something blocking out a chunk of the background, you are almost certain there's gonna be something icky back there.

It's such a common trope that Scream troped it while troping it.

Then there's the "Medicine Cabinet" shot. A combination of the "It's In The Mirror" shot and the "Check The Door" shot. You know full well in a movie like this that if you have a close shot of someone opening a medicine cabinet, when it closes, there's gonna be the beastie or whatever stood there in the reflection.

Another trope is the "It's Right There" trope, which I think Alien and Aliens uses real well - wherein the monster is placed in the shot in such a way that you don't quite understand what it is until it moves.

Like here.

"Maybe they don't show up on infrared at all." Yeah, maybe.

You know the one trope that stuck with me, though? The one trope that I have never, ever managed to shake as something that genuinely kind of freaks me out?

The beastie looking at the camera.

And this is mostly because of the Amityville Horror.

This is one of the horror movies that I watched when I was a kid. I doubt my parents knew about it at the time. I know I know, badness. But hey, it didn't do ME any - wait what am I talking about, of course it did me harm, I'm talking about the harm it did me.

Anyway.

There's this one scene wherein the kid is talking to their imaginary friend, Jody. They're playing int he kid's room. And the mom is like - oh, what're you talking to Jody about? And the kid is talking about how Jody just fled from the room because the mom scared her. Mom's like, oh well, okay, guess I will just close this window -

Looks out and sees THIS.

The whole scene is here.

That. FUCKED. Me. UP.

I don't even know why. It's just two lights. Just two lights out of a window. Except that is all you see, and yet you know that thing was looking inside, at you. You were observed. You are not safe.

That's always stuck with me, it's always a thing I like to see in a horror movie because even if it is a trope that has been done a lot, it breaks the barrier of the screen and the worlds on either side. Literally, the beast is looking out of your movie and into your soul.

Like this motherfucker here.

Or in this short by Mike Diva, called Thresher.

Anyway. Just my thoughts on something horrible.

Sweet dreams.

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 Good Old Days

The Goonies was a formative movie of my childhood.

I mean, why wouldn't it be? Adventure! Mystery! Kids having fun! A fat kid that still gets to join in despite everyone treating him like shit! (Okay it hasn't necessarily aged well.) It's my Sean Astin movie - Lord Of The Rings just borrowed him.

What it leaves, though - the thing it left with me, that it has always left with me, ever since I first saw it - was this sense of nostalgia that it immediately provoked in me. A yearning for specific elements of a childhood that also included a bunch of really shitty elements - to just be running through the woods, chatting nonsense with people I know and trust, or going off and doing whatever for a whole day and having nothing to care about in the intervening hours.

What movies like The Goonies and its peers really do is sell us a childhood we really wish we had, by framing itself in terms and tropes that we actually experienced.

That's not a criticism. It's the nature of fantasy/adventure films of a certain age aimed at kids. Because they were shot when we were kids, they were made back then, so everything is redolent of the era. Using bikes to get everywhere and needing to come up with creative ways to stay in touch because, hey, we didn't have mobile phones.

It calls back to the time when that was the concern. When the biggest worry of any kind was managing to get the crew together to do some stupid stuff, like ride around on bikes for hours arguing about if Tommy from Power Rangers was rubbish or brilliant.

It was before we went through the awkward phases of partial knowledge of world events, where we sought for simple answers as to why things were hard for certain people but not for others. Before we started realising how things really work.

Wanting to be back in that space, wanting to be in a position wherein the primary concerns are small ones, is hardly a sin. It says more about the world as it stands right now than it does about us as people and what we want out of life. That there are so many things today - anxiety-inducing things which are made difficult for no reason other than to change them would be just slightly more difficult and would disadvantage those more important than us - which we accept as just being normal, and never seem to question.

"That's just the way it is," is the answer you get given. Which is dangerously close to "That's just the way it has always been," which echoes the warning from the (fictional) five monkeys experiment. I'm sure you know of that one: five monkeys in a cage with a ladder leading up to food, and whenever one monkey goes up the ladder all the rest got soaked in cold water, so they start beating up any monkey that goes for the ladder. Then when they substitute out one of the monkeys for a new one, the new one immediately goes for the ladder, and gets beaten up for it, and without even knowing the original reason why, is encouraged to not go up the ladder by societal pressure.

(As an aside, the actual experiment is kind of more interesting. Monkeys, when manipulating an object that had previously appealed to them, were punished with several blasts of pressurised air - enough to alarm but not harm. After a while they stopped manipulating the object when by themselves, but upon mixing with other monkeys who did manipulate the object, they themselves did it too. Thus, the actual experiment proves the complete opposite of what the ladder bullshit tries to tell us: that we can be encouraged by others in positive ways rather than just negative.)

I don't think it is a contentious statement to say that there is a lot of nostalgia media around right now. Old video games becoming fashionable again, the iconography of an entire decade becoming people's standard aesthetic, neon and grid lines and synthwave and fake VHS lines. Stranger Things and stuff like it. Awesome musical acts like Robots With Rayguns literally evoking the era with their imagery, their samples and their songwriting. Tim Capello - the sexy sax man from Lost Boys, Tina Turner's tour saxophonist, the man that taught me I was bisexual - has an album out, and is recording synthwave music with other bands. This guy.

The people who grew up with The Goonies are now the people consuming most of the media - and the people making a lot of it, too. There's still a lot of influence from the older folks, because hey, there's money in the industry and they want it. The nostalgia train is loaded with cash. We just hanker for that time - that time back when things were simpler, and not necessarily for good reasons. Like, things still sucked back then for a lot of people - living standards by several metrics were objectively worse.

On a personal scale - that is where things were better. Less existential dread. Less worry. Less fear of the future. Life wasn't better because the world was better, life was better because we were kids and we didn't know any better.

We must take care to pay attention to that - and it is perhaps something we might mention to those who talk about the past as a mythical better place. Like everything back in the seventies, sixties, fifties, forties, thirties, was better than things are today.

Our childhood wasn't better because it was the past. It was better because we were children.

Be kind to yourself. Life is hard enough.

Trash Movies, Terrible Movies, Awful Movies

So as I was trotting through Gosport High Street yesterday with my better half, we come across some DVDs on sale, which leads to a discussion about movies - specifically, about the grades of bad movies.

Now we can all acknowledge that there are movies that are objectively good, right? Like you can't claim the Godfather is a bad film. You just can't. You can dislike it, and that's totally valid - but it isn't by any definition a bad film.

We all want different things out of a film, however. So quite often we can admit that our favourite film ever is not the best film ever made. My favourite film ever is Aliens, followed by Blade Runner, Transformers: The Movie, the original Alien, Donnie Darko, Collateral, When We Were Kings - but out of them, I believe that Blade Runner is the actual best film I have ever seen.

And let's face it - we all like some movies that we have to admit are kind of trash. Commando? Gone In Sixty Seconds (yes, the Nic Cage one)? Any Rambo after the first one? Any Jean Claude Van Damme movie? Top Gun? Pacific Rim?

But then, there are also some movies that are only good because they are trash. Movies like the three scientifically proven worst movies of all time. Of course there are a lot of truly bad movies that are also great to watch because they suck, rather than in defiance of how much they suck - but the difference is that a lot of them were made knowing full well that they sucked.

No, a movie can only be truly horrible if it was made with the honest belief that it isn't horrible. The filmmaker is putting together something that he genuinely believes is good, or at least, worthy of actually being watched, consumed by other human beings as a non-ironic and non-awful piece of media.

Those three movies - Plan Nine From Outer Space, Manos The Hands Of Fate and The Room - were all made with the best intentions, and I love them a little for it.

Like, sure, Ed Wood probably didn't believe that he was going to be the next Eisenstein - but he didn't think he was taking a huge shit on the pages of cinematic history. Tommy Wiseau, though? In his head he was ALREADY the next Eisenstein, and the next James Dean or Marlon Brando to boot. Harold P. Warren made Manos because he was trying to prove to someone - over a coffee shop bet - that he could make a horror movie pretty much by himself.

Now something like Sharknado or Birdemic is awful but the person making it knew it was awful. That's an inescapable fact. You can't watch either of those movies without knowing full well that they were composed by someone effectively making a cinematic equivalent of a Twitter shitpost. They would fit into the trash movies that we enjoy despite them being trash, rather than BECAUSE they are trash. Lets face it, if The Room had any kind of competency applied to it, nobody would watch it.

So, we have trash movies, and we have terrible movies - but there is a third category.

Just as movies can be objectively good, movies can also be objectively bad, as previously discussed - but then, such movies can be bad and also entirely lacking any kind of merit. Any kind of saving grace, such as the unwitting hilarity of sex scenes involving the navels of the poor female star (I'm looking at you, Tommy), or an amazingly homoerotic volleyball scene, or one-liners that are worth watching the criminal misuse of Claymore mines ("Let off some steam, Bennett").

Some movies just...lack those. And those movies are just...bad movies.

Remember The Core?

If you've seen this movie then I bet you just made a face, and that face is the face you make when you think about movies as bad as The Core. It was truly a steaming pile of ass, a coprolithic gathering of moving images that made little sense and lacked any kind of artistic worth.

We can think of a few of those, right?

Like, it is no secret that I see the Bayformers movies as being truly disasterous. In the context of the fact that they came from a relatively rich universe with actual developed characters, the criminals responsible made a shitty series of disaster movies with all the warmth and character of a contact lens. Racist, sexist, lazy bullshit that doesn't look good or sound good.

So. The three categories of bad movie.

We have Trash Movies, which we like despite their being sucky. We have Terrible Movies, which we like because they are sucky. And we have Awful Movies, which we can't like even if we'd want to, because they suck that much.

Now time to start making lists...

The Strangling Fruit

I had no idea who Jeff Vandermeer was when I first saw the Annihilation trailer.

It had been suggested to me because, hey, I like my sf and my weirdness. I might see some value in it. So I watch the very first trailer that came out, then I googled the name, and then I immediately bought and devoured the book - first in the Southern Reach trilogy.

Then I had to wait the interminable gap between that point and payday to get the next TWO books, because not reading them at this point wasn't an option. They thoroughly grasped me - the writing style, the flow of the story, the mythology spun out of it, everything formed an experience that I didn't even realise I had been waiting for.

Getting to the end of that third book left me so hungry for the movie that the wait for it reminded me of when I was seven and Christmas was still two weeks ago.

And now it's here, and I have to report that the movie - which is on Netflix right now for a lot of folks but got a cinematic release in the US - is excellent.

The acting is understated, the performances all very believable - which, given the content of the movie, only adds to the feel of it - and the casting is exceptional. The five women fronting the movie all put in excellent work, including Natalie Portman, who I am not terribly fond of usually. They all have depth - they feel like real people. How they deal with each other feels real, too - and how they change, as the situation around them falls apart.

And it does fall apart. Unlike every other horror movie, though - this one isn't their fault.

That's a very common trope, amongst horror movies - in movies in general, in fact. That the thing that goes wrong, the bad situation that has to be resolved by the characters in the piece, happens because someone fucked up. Either it is incompetence, or a literal flaw in character. Slasher flicks often happen because the victims dare to exhibit lust. The xenomorph wouldn't have ever become an issue for humanity were it not for pride and greed, in that order.

None of that happens, in Annihilation - because we don't know why this happened. The setup is very similar to The Thing. The why is so much less important than the result. It's also not very important that we understand every part of it, because - oh hey, get this - the problem isn't a human one. It's very much a black swan.

What follows is a journey into a part of the world in which everything is going wrong. Actually, not wrong - just different - but to us...very wrong. It's rare that I see cinematography, prop work, sound engineering, all come together to achieve this in such a complete way. Passing into Area X, it is incontrovertible that the five women of the expedition have entered a place that is unnatural and irregular. There's some very obvious visual cues but some not-so-obvious ones too. Little things, subtle things that play on your mind after the fact.

Portman's character is a biologist, so she can explain why some of the flora and fauna they find is wrong as hell - but you feel it, just looking at this stuff. Plants that have multiple different flowers, different types of flowers, different styles of growth. It should leave you with a degree of unease - and you may not even know why. Just that what you are looking at isn't right, isn't the way it should work.

And that's before you ever meet the deer, or the bear.

I'm not going into why they are wrong. You'll find out.

I like unanswered questions. I like open endings. I like not necessarily knowing why a thing has just happened, just that this is how the characters in the movie are dealing with it. I like gorgeous shots that show you things that upset you but you don't quite know why. I like diegetic and non-diegetic sound engineering that leaves you thinking.

I like all of those things, and that's why I liked Annihilation, an awful lot.

You might, too.

Killmonger (WARNING: Black Panther Spoilers)

So if the Marvel movies have one problem - narratively - it's their villains.

Non-recurring and vaguely uninspiring mwahaha-merchants are nothing new. Just look at Shakespeare (Don John from Much Ado About Nothing) or our current political situation (Zing). The movies have, in fairness, mostly been about the main characters - so the villains have taken a back seat, simply due to time constraints.

I mean...who even was the bad guy in Thor 2? What was the point of that?

That, however, is changing.

Be warned, below this line, there's gonna be a bunch of spoilers.

Now, my undying love of Black Panther has become obvious to anyone that has spoken to me since I went to see it. For which I feel the need to apologise. There's a lot of reasons for this.

The characters in this movie are just superb. They have presence, they are distinct individuals, they have strong looks. Without going into detail about all the African cultural touches - I mean dude's lip plate is amazing, you check that out, his lip plate is one of the coolest things I have ever seen in a semi-main character in a record-breaking movie - look at the four leading ladies.

The legendary Angela Bassett as Queen Mother Ramonda. Beautiful, resplendent and strong. Zulu head dress, covering white dreadlocks. A woman that carries herself with grace, dignity and wisdom. Letitia Wright playing Shuri, now officially the best Disney princess. Brilliant, warm, a technical genius, unashamed to be young, undyingly brave. Lupita Nyong'o putting in a sterling performance as Nakia. Spirited, vivacious, smart and competent. Like James Bond but actually interesting and not a horrible sexist boor. Danai Gurira playing Okoye of the Dora Milaje. A ferociously loyal and devoted warrior, whose skill with a spear and raw martial prowess would put most of the cast of Civil War to shame.

Not one of them sexualised. Not one of them tokenised. Not one of them objectivised. They all shine, in their various forms and ways. They all have their moments. The movie isn't afraid of showing them being better than those around them.

The titular character himself. King T'Challa, the Black Panther. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, and heavy is the burden of the secrets of those who came before. This story is a classic one - the trials and tribulations of the new ruler. I mentioned Shakespeare earlier, and let's face it, the actual plot of Black Panther wouldn't be out of place (in broad strokes) at the Globe four hundred years ago.

But of course, every good classic story of a ruler trying to make the right choice requires a sufficient foil.

Killmonger's first scene on screen is powerful in and of itself: a young black man in a museum, looking at looted African artefacts, asking a perpetually dismissive and presumptive white woman where they are from. He declares his intention of taking a particular item, and when told by the aforementioned white lady that it isn't for sale, he deploys some weapons-grade truth.

"How do you think your ancestors got these? Do you think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it, like they took everything else?"

Doesn't stop him taking a mask from the same case as the Wakandan item in question, but then - Erik Killmonger has been raised and trained to have little respect for any kind of authority except his own, since his father was snatched away from him.

What's his plan? He plans to buy his way into the Wakanda that he was denied by the previous king, with the body of Wakanda's most wanted criminal, a white man who thieved their natural resources under claims of their being savages. Once there, he plans on challenging the king of Wakanda for his rightful claim to the throne, being that he's the king's cousin - royal family severed from the line by his father's betrayal and the old king's murderous response.

Then when he claims this position - by right of ritual combat, an art that he has perfected over years of CIA-funded covert operations and regime destabilisation - he's going to take all that super-advanced Wakandan tech, and send it out to those struggling under the suppression of others.

Is he doing that because then he'll rule the world? Well, sort of. Because he is hoping that Wakanda will stop being a small secretive nation, and become something far bigger, far wider. A Wakandan empire, slaves throwing off their shackles and becoming their own masters. He literally states:

"The sun will never set on the Wakandan empire."

The means by which he won the throne become the means by which he will win the world - and whatever his intention, it becomes rapidly obvious that the driving force of justice and reparation has been pushed through a filter of the same imperialism that granted him his training.

It's a truth we all know, now. The dirty wars fought in other places using other lives as pawns, supplies and support thrown behind the side of the population we want to win. Iran-Contra was a scandal, but nowadays we are better informed. Hell - Rambo 3 is about the US literally funding, training and arming the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviet invaders.

No prizes if you can guess who that funding, that training and those weapons got used against in the early 2000s.

Why is he an excellent villain? Because we can partially sympathise with his motives and his methods. We understand why he's doing what he's doing, and he's not just evil for the sake of being evil. His entire life has led to the point in which he joins the film's narrative. We know that it can happen.

He could have set out on this journey to bring down King T'Chaka and his entire family, to burn Wakanda down around the royal family as a punishment. He could have had the goal of doubling down on Ulysses Klaue's initial foray into Wakanda, to steal as much Vibranium as possible and sell it to the highest bidder - probably making himself a billionaire.

Instead, he did the harder thing - the more admirable thing - the thing that a lot of us may have tried and failed to do. He decided to enforce change, to force the society that made him who he was different, so that people like him wouldn't have to exist any more.

How easily could he have been the protagonist?

In his final scene - as he is shown the sunset over Wakanda that he was promised as a child - he kneels on the ground, breathing ruined, thoroughly beaten by T'Challa in combat. T'Challa, who in Civil War showed that in victory he is both gracious and wise, suggests quietly to his cousin that he can still be saved. Erik's response is blunt and raw.

“Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships, 'cause they knew death was better than bondage.” 

Erik Killmonger - his bare chest covered with the ritual scarification of hundreds of kills - is a warning. The path of the righteous isn't just to do the right thing. It is to learn from your past, to strive toward your future, but to be mindful of where that future is leading you. To know the casualties that might arise from your actions.

And like any good hero - any real hero - T'Challa can take a lesson from this conflict. He learns. A thought he was forming before becomes a full-fledged plan, and the doubt he had in his ability to be king fades as he takes hold of his new drive and new responsibility.

And so Erik Killmonger, whose goal was to bring Wakanda into the world stage and to lift up those who need it most - achieves his goal, even in death.

There's your villain.

Are you taking notes, DC?

Popcorn And Plot

Do you watch movies or films?

This might seem like a semantic question. It sort of is, but not quite in the way it looks.

So you know when you watch something and it is pure popcorn but you love it anyway? Like, so much of it is cheese and fun and action scenes for no reason other than action? Ridiculous martial arts films, stuff like Top Gun or Rocky (specifically one of the sequels, the first one is brilliance). We know that logically there's no greater point to this, nothing done to push the capabilities of cinematic excellence, but - I mean, who doesn't like watching giant robots beating up giant monsters? Pacific Rim isn't an Oscar candidate and it's not going to win writing awards but it isn't FOR that - it's for showing you something that you just enjoy watching.

Then there's the stuff we watch that does have far more depth and greatness to it. Classics. Films with intelligence, superior writing and cinematography, that challenge us with their themes and their messages. Blade Runner, Citizen Kane, that infinitely cool short you saw on Channel 4 the other night - they're stuff that you watch when you want to engage yourself.

And there you have it, right? Blade Runner is a film - Pacific Rim is a movie.

The line does break down in the middle obviously. There's some big dumb martial arts movies that are actually heavily artistic, showing technical and thematic excellence at every turn. There's some films that aim for brilliance and fall very short, on both sides of the equation - but it's far easier to make a shoddy horror movie that is entertaining to watch than it is to make a shoddy examination of the nature of time and self in the way that Donnie Darko does.

Which is better?

Well that depends what you want. Somewhat. I mean there are films that are ACTUALLY bad, and then there are films that are only bad at providing you with the cinematic experience you are currently seeking.

I do not often want to watch something that is twee or cute or whatever. That's rarely a thing I am into. That doesn't make the film bad, and I have to admit that. There's a difference between "I dislike this" and "This is terrible". I like some objectively terrible films. Plan Nine From Outer Space, anyone?

If I want to think about what just happen, I can have that. If I want something soul-searing (or soul-searching) I can have that. If I need shooting, John Woo made a bunch of films in Hong Kong before the American movies he made, of which there is one that isn't just pure shite. (And that's Face/Off, before you ask.)

Where am I going with this? Not sure, really. Only in the general direction of loving both ends of the scale, from glossy sci-fi shooter, to fifteen-minute duologue about working class people in the eighties. It just depends what mood I am in.

I'm just...never in the mood for Bayformers.