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.

Readers Request - Prophecies, Boys In Skirts, Philosophy

It's time again, folks. The Q&A has been rebranded as Readers Request, and you all as presumable readers have requested my take on various things.

Without further ado, and with names removed to protect the innocent...

Favourite version of a Unicorn you've ever come across - Dresden Files. Because you know what They are very much not the pure, white, wonderful creatures we would wish them to be. They look kind of like this...

Favourite prophecy - The Prophecy II. Christopher Walken is stellar as always.

Favourite accompaniment to a rice dish - Butter chicken curry.

Favourite fighters: real, fictional, semi-fictional (like wrestling)... fighting can be metaphorical. - Real? Muhammad Ali. Fictional? Butch from Pulp Fiction. Semi-Fictional? Bruce Lee (the guy is so mythical that it's sometimes hard to separate fact FROM fiction). Real metaphorical? Sun Tzu, I think...

Food that most surprised you - Sushi - insofar as I tried it a couple of times and really disliked it, and then one day woke up absolutely craving it. I've loved it ever since.

Wtf is Disney feeding kids today? Watch Gravity Falls and see if you can understand - I have watched it, and...honestly I found it very entertaining. I can see why some people wouldn't. But like...it's nice that Disney is producing stuff that isn't just their standard of kiddy-level? Like I appreciate that it has expanded its range a little bit. I mean that does mean that we won't always like what they put out, where usually just the name alone would be enough reassurance that what we are watching is within certain parameters.

Bill and Ted - MOST TRIUMPHANT. Seriously these guys are the reason why I use the word Dude so much. I don't think I ever really left the early nineties in a lot of ways.

Boys in skirts - I care far less about what a kid wears (as long as it is within reasonable uniform standards, and I disagree with uniforms being gender-locked too) than I do about some people's backward thought processes and hiding their bigotry behind religion. And worse, using that to fiscally punish a SCHOOL. Yeah, because THEY have a lot of money, don't they? Fuck.

Men in Tights! - MANLY men! TIGHT tights! We travel round the forest looking for fights!

Why the idea that tax breaks for the rich will stimulate economic growth (it doesn't) still exists. Why people allow the 1% to control darn near every facet of their lives via political policy, and haven't put systems in place to prevent career politicians.  Also, how we're rapidly rushing heading into a dystopian hellscape bit nobody seems to give a damn about stopping it. - ...honestly, there's a few reasons. But a combination of apathy, lack of unbiased political and economic education, and half the world believing that they aren't poor but are temporarily embarrassed millionaires pretty much does it.

And that's...kind of a depressing set of topics... - ...yeah it is...

What game you are currently big on, and why. (I felt like there was a need to include a bit lighter of suggestions...) - Right now, a lot of modded Minecraft, and channelling my natural attention problems to also play a bunch of other games on a casual basis. Sonic Mania rules, looking forward to the Stellaris expansion, Warhammer Total War II and the Mini-SNES.

Killjoys tv show 🤔 - Wait what?

You never saw it :O? Something to add to your watchlist, John! - Shit yeah, I'll look it up!

Trivialized cultural aspects. ex. People wearing clothes they don't know origin of as a fashion statement, from the mild of gamer shirts to particular wearing this type of clothes means this. (The Homer Simpson with reggae hat springs to mind) - I'm not going to do as good a job as dozens of better people than I have already done, in terms of talking about cultural appropriation. Here's an article for ThoughtCo on the topic. But in short - the culture of gaming isn't hurt by someone wearing a Halo shirt if they're not really into video games, while the culture of the Lakȟóta is hurt quite a lot by their entire culture being compacted into rubbish Halloween costumes for mass consumers.

If an alien race evolved without sight, what is the most likely way the'd record their history once sentient. - Depends on their other senses. They might be a story-based culture, mind you. It's a really hard thing to imagine, given how reliant we are on our sight.

What Rick and Morty character are you? - ...I have...honestly gone off Rick & Morty quite a lot. If forced to pick? I am probably Morty - constantly in a state of shock and vague surprise at the mad extremes that this boozy twat is taking us to.

Obligatory boobs. - SOMEONE SAID IT WE CAN GO HOME

Who in human history would you choose to handle first contact with an alien race? - ...that's..a really difficult choice. Um. Maybe the Dalai Lama? Martin Luther King Jr?

What 3 things need to happen In the next five years to steer humanity away from its current trajectory? - ONE: Total switch-over to renewable power sources, electric vehicles and regulation of polluting/destructive industries. TWO: Redistribution of wealth and taxation, complete with closing of tax loopholes and a significant minimum wage or universal income payment. THREE: Political reform, actual representative democracy complete with alternative vote and solid options for recalling failed representatives.

Can religion ever be eradicated successfully (not including extinction) - I don't necessarily think it needs to be, it just needs to be unable to ruin lives of those that don't want to participate. That said, the human condition is one of insecurity, and insecurity begs that every worry or uncertainty be filled with something. As long as people doubt or fear, there will be religion, or something like it.

What philosophy holds back human development the most? - I'm not sure if I'd call ignorance and greed a philosophy.

Mogg - man or multi-celluar malevolence? - If we refer to Jacob Rees-Mogg, then I would suggest that the chinless spineless dickless brainless Edwardian needs to go back to his own time. I don't care if he's a man, a mouse or a mastodon. He can fuck off.

What are you looking forward to? - ...well...I dunno. There's a lot of stuff coming along that I'm quite looking forward to seeing or hearing or playing. Some video games are listed above. Looking forward to Thor, and...outside of that, I'm not sure. ...which isn't a good sign, but...

What do you make to the cable announcements? - He's my favourite Marvel character. I am doing my best to just...accept that everything is going to be good. Josh Brolin is a good choice. A very good choice. It all comes down to writing. And as much as I liked Deadpool I hope they up their game. But then I would. He's my favourite.

Will vs reality. - ...oh this one. ...see I have problems with this stuff. Because I am often told that I can do anything I set my mind to, which is a lovely thought, but then I set my mind to being able to breathe normally and you know what, it just doesn't happen. But still I value my willpower, or my weaponised stubbornness as I call it. It helps me out when life is a drag.

That awful prick on the crystal maze this evening. - I didn't see it or catch it on catch-up...but then...I find that a lot of TV these days seems specifically designed to show us unpleasant things. A lot of sitcoms are based around mutual hatred or people being shitty to each other. It's ugly. Ugly, ugly stuff. Kind of shit that rots your soul. So I don't mind that we don't have access to TV at the house. All I miss is old gameshows, the cooking and music channels, and the occasional documentary.

I would like a blog discussing why on earth Stevie Wonder wears a watch. - It was pointed out that it might be a braille watch? But...mostly cos he wants to? And dammit it's Stevie Wonder, he can do what he wants.

Hope - I'm not sure how good I am at it. As mentioned before - it's a stubbornness thing. The odd thing that happens makes me hopeful, though. I mean that's how it works, right? You have something to have hope in, rather than just...generalised hope.

New Hellboy yay? or nay? - Doesn't look unlike Hellboy. The attitude is more important. The writing will be important too. The director...I mean...Dog Soldiers was really good?

So there we have it. Another selection of Readers Requests, for your delectation.

Do stick around, won't you? And feel free to share with your friends if this tickled you.

The Last Shite

Oh god, it's Bayformers time again.

If one forgets, I posted a fairly lengthy shredding of Age of Extinction three years ago, way back here. You might wish to glance at for your delectation if you share my opinion that the only good Transformers movie was released in the 80s.

Let's just say that this one doesn't exactly offer any redemption.

There will be spoilers. But that won't make much difference because the story is, frankly, a garbled fucking mess at the best of times and a desecration of cinematic process at the worst. Here is one of the spoilers: Mark Wahlberg's racist hero man is apparently a good guy because he gets given Excalibur.

Oh yeah, here we go.

As before, I will list the things that were actually positive.

• The score was quite good.
• There's approximately thirty seconds of bot-on-bot combat that doesn't look like garbage.
• One scene was actually better and more entertaining than the rest of the movie.

...we good? Okay, we good.

Don't watch this movie.

It reeks. It reeks to high heaven. Almost every aspect of it is a drudgery, a sham of a film, an ill-conceived thousand-monkey thousand-typewriter farce that didn't deserve to break even at the box office.

Where do I even begin to pick it apart? Well - let's begin at the beginning.

We are treated to a laddish sham of an introduction, involving the so-called Knights of the Round Table - yes, King Arthur and all. Puerile comedy, demonstrating Merlin as a charlatan, the Saxons as being mindless savages intent on razing England to the ground, and a three-headed Cybertronian dragon summoned by a staff given to Merlin by Transformers that were totally hear in 400AD, yo.

That's the intro. I hated myself for sitting through it, let alone for the rest of this agonising 149-minute debacle.

The entire Arthurian aspect of the plot is tacky and badly done, as you might expect. Honestly, most of it could be cut out and would leave the film just as coherent and competent as before. It's an excuse to make Mark Wahlberg into something more than what he is - grumpy mechanic. A walking Bud Light product placement. (There's an actually horribly tasteless Bud Light product placement in the movie, too, but eh.)

Speaking of plot aspects. This plot is beyond shaky. It requires multiple maguffins, most of which are delivered from seemingly nowhere via confusing and ill-defined means, in order to facilitate a standard destroy-the-earth-in-ten-minutes storyline. It would probably, realistically speaking, only require an hour-long TV special to actually convey the story were it not for the amount of junk filler that is put in for no apparent reason. That would even be if it made any damn sense. I even invented a term for this film: maguffinception. We need to get the maguffin to get another maguffin!

So Quintessa was some kind of bad woman who was apparently Prime's "creator", and apparently the "creator" of all the Cybertronians. She is all hanging out on the ruin of Cybertron - torn apart in the events of the third shitheap movie - waiting for a staff that was taken from her by a dozen Cybertronians at least sixteen hundred years ago (probably more) to be brought back to her. And how lucky she is that Optimus Prime shows up, here and now!

We have no idea if any of that is true, who she is, what she is, what actually happened to Cybertron, what powers she has shy of doing a number on Optimus Prime's personality (more on that later), or why the Knights of Iacon took her staff in the first place. Short of the fact that she is some kind of betrayer and not to be trusted. All of the action seems to kick off now because - coinciding with Optimus Prime's crash-landing in the ruins of Cybertron - Male Hero is given a mystical maguffin by a crashed ancient knight, presumably having landed not so long ago and been shot down by Earth's Transformer Reaction Force.

The TRF. Let's focus on them for a minute. Yet again there is an elite anti-Transformer military/police/surveillance force kicking about, and this one has literal skulls on its iconography. You aren't the good guys if your symbol is a skull. That's not about defending. That's the film-maker being lazy in trying to advertise these folks as bad guys. In truth, that's not hard to do - they're pretty fucking unbearable.

In fairness. Every character in this movie is fucking unbearable. The two that you hate the least, in the end, are Bumblebee (can't talk) and Barricade (despite problematic imagery, just doing his job). They're all just unpleasant to everyone else, and needlessly so, too. Two thirds of the characters are written as walking punchlines and they just deliver that punchline over and over and over again. It wasn't funny the first time around, let alone the thirty-first. The rest? Just awful in general. Horrible to watch interact with each other. The kind of people that you'd avoid in real life.

There's a bit of The Room in this, because whoever wrote this script - like Tommy Wiseau - knows very little about how people actually talk to each other or interact. Mark Wahlberg's character is a hideous parody of your average American. Laura Haddock is treated as you might expect any woman to be treated in a Michael Bay movie: pretty fucking poorly. I feel as much pity for her as I do frustration at the shit script she got handed. She literally gets abducted at one point, for no fucking reason at all.

A significant proportion of the characters are pretty unnecessary, too. John Turturro's neurotic, borderline pedophilic, distinctly deranged conspiracy theorist is a primary example. He is in it to deliver a second maguffin. He could have been replaced by Anthony Hopkins' character merely owning a copy of a book. That could have saved a lot of screen time. It would make sense for him, too - being that he is very wealthy, possesses a significant amount of historical material relating to the Transformers, and is actually part of the Order of Witwicca who dealt with keeping the secret throughout history.

Oh yeah. Here's a new bit of Transformers history. They love fucking with it, and now, we have the apparent involvement of this order having helped conceal and also involve Transformers in the history of the world ever since Arthurian legend. One of the apparent members of the Order of Witwicca is Harriet Tubman. That's right. One of the most racist movie franchises in history decided to co-opt Harriet Tubman.

It's unfortunate that the one, single good scene in this entire film is set in the middle of this big revelation - which is a fifteen-minute exposition exercise, framed on both sides by half an hour of Human Beings Running Away, a staple of Transformers. It is also very controversial.

Turns out that Bumblebee has been on earth for a fair while. He was involved in the Second World War - helped the Allied war effort. He joined in with an attack on one of Hitler's strongholds, and the scene in which it happens is pretty visually stunning. It's like there could have been a World War 2 Transformers movie, and it could have been so much better - but I think the scene was made better because hardly anyone talks, no sympathy is forced upon us, and Bumblebee is just being Bumblebee. Helping out his friends.

It's a shame that in order to shoot that, they had to drape massive Nazi party banners with swastikas all over Winston Churchill's family home. But then, that is one shining glorious moment in this movie where the awful distasteful crassness is kept behind the camera - which I suppose, in a sick way, is praise. Though I fail to see how you could fuck something like that up. I mean did nobody think to check? ...I suppose they probably actually didn't.

I mentioned that Bumblebee was being Bumblebee.

Every single Autobot in this film is just super-aggressive for no apparent reason. Perhaps because they are being cast as the leading support characters in a big macho movie for big macho men, with toxicity running through its veins like blood and steroids. They can't be smart or safe. They have to be reckless and willing to shoot each other and angry and always ALWAYS ready to kill. The Autobots are the good guys, remember. I've commented on this before - even Optimus Prime seems to become a bloodthirsty asshole in the Bayverse. His first instinct the moment he sees his creator is to try and murder her. He charges her with a sword - and she hasn't even done anything yet, outside of confirming her identity. Later, he single-handedly attacks a six-part combiner (who is actually pretty fucking cool and doesn't get anywhere near enough attention) and kills every last one of the consistent 'bots, declaring "Don't you know who I am? I AM OPTIMUS PRIME."

Turning Prime into someone willing to murder innocents in order to get what he wants wasn't that difficult for Quintessa, surely. Bay's Prime seems to become a righteous killer with very little justification or prompting, and takes more and more pride in his ability to maim and mangle his opponents with apparent ease. His opposite number, Megatron, gets even less screen time than the standard Bayformer restriction - anyone that isn't a mascot robot gets minimal. It's not exactly revealed how Megs survived, but he's apparently gone kind of mad, taking to setting light to the floor when angry and becoming a complete coward.

The Decepticons aren't immune to the bullshit spraypaint, it bears mention. Megatron negotiates with "the humans" - yes, the almighty maniacal Megatron, negotiating for the location of Mark Wahlberg Hero Man - to have several of his people released to get the maguffin back from aforementioned Hero Man. Each of these ridiculously named and zero-developed Decepticons is given a little intro splash ripped straight out of Suicide Squad, and just like Suicide Squad, every last one of them are terrible. Onslaught, Mohawk, Dreadbot and Nitro Zeus - and the Berzerker but apparently he isn't fit for release - all get this little splash, and every last one of them was locked up despite both the TRF and Cemetery Wind in the last film being kill-everything task forces rather than take-prisoners task forces.

We can't care about any of these people. We're prodded and forced to have a degree of empathy for characters that the film itself can't make us give a shit about, because they're inherently unlikable. As I said before - Barricade and Bumblebee are the only two that don't suck.

Also present is the standard casual racism you'd expect from Michael Bay films - people of colour chronically under-represented and given pretty shitty roles. Hero Man's assistant at his junkyard is black, and has a constant refrain of "I can't go to jail", cracks about not paying taxes, and is literally described by Mark Wahlberg as "My Little Crimey". Yes, really. Wahlberg also constantly calls the local law enforcement Chief, because guess what - he's Native American. This guy actually calls Wahlberg out on it, too. Too late though. We're meant to like him, so it's okay.

In fact we are forced to recognise him as being the protagonist because the movie literally straps Excalibur to him and makes him the Last Knight of the Round Table. We're told this is because he displays knightly qualities, which must apparently happen off-screen, and we're also told that the scriptwriters don't understand what chaste means. I've seen Wahlberg actually act in movies, he's pretty good, so I can only assume that Cade Yeager (THAT'S HIS NAME OH FUCK) is actually written to be this dumpster fire of a person. In the end, he helps save the day in zero-gravity by grabbing British-lady's hand and LITERALLY shooting a gun at nothing at all. Propelling them across the space in between. Cade Yeager, drinks bud light, threatens to punch kids in the head (he does that), doesn't understand sarcasm, saves the world via celebratory gunfire.

I will repeat for emphasis, before I continue with random bullshit:

Mark Wahlberg's character is given Excalibur, and is made the Last Knight of the Round Table.

There's the puzzle that is Hot Rod. Hot Rod, who has a ridiculous French accent, and apparently hates it, despite Anthony Hopkins insisting that he likes it and puts it on. This is a cause for chortling and tee-heeing. Silly robot with an accent. Fucking come on, really? Earlier in the film, another Autobot mocks Drift for having a Japanese accent. I know I have rallied pretty hard against Drift being turned from potentially interesting concept character into a lol-samurai Japanese caricature, but come on, really? Picking on accents? I guess it's just in line with the expectations of a series of movies wherein cheap laughs are gained from a giant combiner having big swinging metal testicles. The effects are expensive, but the comedy is cheap. Desperately cheap.

Whoever planned this has total disdain for geography, claiming that the Horns of Unicron - yes, apparently Earth is Unicron, that storyline is stolen from the vastly superior Transformers Prime animated series - were once a perfect circle, back when Pangaea was a thing. And in the middle of this circle was apparently Stonehenge. This has to be basic ignorance, just hoping that nobody will look it up, or realise that the centre of Pangaea actually formed the African continent. Which it did. Meaning Stonehenge should be somewhere in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Once every twenty minutes I found myself asking, where the fuck are they now? There's a chase through London which is embarrassingly inconsistent as to where in London it is actually taking place. Following this chase the characters take a submarine down the Thames, but don't actually come out of the Thames Estuary - we're not actually fucking sure where that submarine was coming out of, but it's about as close to the Thames Valley as it is to Addis Ababa.

The film makers also show as much respect for physics as one of the members of the White House staff show to a physicist in the movie, too. We have a large mass, very large, the ruin of Cybertron, approaching Earth at 10% of lightspeed. It was guided, by Quintessa, somehow - and when it shows up, it's impact time. It collides with part of the moon, destroying one of our lunar landers and the ship that Sentinel Prime arrived on the moon in. Apparently the moon's surface is okay, despite the obviously huge amount of force enacted on it in direct impact. Then, Cybertron just...fucking...squats over Stonehenge. Yes, something with about the third of the mass of a metal planet parks directly over Somerset.

I don't need to tell you just how badly fucked we would be if that happened. If the moon was fifty miles closer, we'd be pretty boned. Cybertron? Dragging fucking dredges of itself across the surface of the planet, presumably killing tens of millions? Tidal waves the likes of which you can't imagine. Our magnetosphere fucked to death, long before the evil plan can be carried out. Continents disrupted. Land masses shifted. The devastation would be incredible, not to mention the subsequent nuclear winter - Krakatoa erupted in 1883 and caused record snowfalls for four years, how much shit would be kicked into the atmosphere if a planet just rocked up into our own?

I have no idea what the folks who made this were really thinking as they went about their business. Like it is clear to me that at least one of them watched The Abyss sometime during production, as there's an extended and unnecessary undersea scene. There's three baby Dinobots, and nobody can explain how they happened, unless Slag and Grimlock are a mating pair. There's Izabella, whose random teenage rebelliousness is required in a Bay movie - and there's her love for these baby Dinobots, and her own little pet robot, Squeaks. Squeaks is essentially just a shit BB-8. These things are all taken straight from the Lucas school of CGI Gopher. There's your standard "omg the military is so hawt" selection of shots, which in most things I find interesting, but in this seems crowbarred in to put a couple minutes between shots of the main characters being awful to each other. Every Transformers movie features a huge amount of military porn, if only because I know every movie features at least one military vehicle, and probably the creators of such wouldn't allow this unless they were shown in a good light. The cinematography was at times embarrassingly basic, with shaky-cam shots thrown in because rendering things accurately is apparently bad times, and getting a good clean look at anyone but the Mascotbots is asking for trouble.

I can't cover absolutely everything wrong with this tripe. So what follows is a series of notes I jotted down as I watched it, which you may find fun without any context.

- Mark Wahlberg Is Terrible
- Every Transformer Is Terrible
- LOL ENGLAND
- BUD LIGHT PRODUCT PLACEMENT
- More Racism
- Everyone Is Terrible
- Wahldaughter's primary concern is her dad's lovelife
- Megatron???
- EXPLOSIONSSSSOMGOMGOMG
- What Even Is Physics
- "Over The Pond Right Now"
- NOT TURTURRO NOT AGAIN FUCK OFF
- Every Plot Element Delivered Via WhoKnows
- English Ladies Aren't Like That
- "JE M'APELLE 'OTROD"
- Cool Reformat Cut Out Because Probably Too Cool
- "FNYAHAHA THE WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER"
- WELCOME TO EXPOSITION MANOR
- ANTHONY HOPKINS IS...FUCKING...MAD
- Everyone Is Fucking Terrible
- They Are Made To Hate Each Other Obviously
- "That's the watch that killed Hitler, don't screw with it."
- TRANSFORMERS THROUGH TIIIIIIIME
- Of course the sarcy English professor is Merlin's descendant.
- More Humans Running
- Oooh Yay A Sex Joke
- UGH GEOGRAPHY
- We Couldn't Wiki Pangaea
- "Move Bitch Get Out Of My Way"
- THAT ISN'T HOW LONDON WORKS
- HMS Alliance Is A Transformer?????
- I Hate Myself
- WHY IS ANY OF THIS HAPPENING
- ISS just goes away just like that
- THAT ISN'T HOW PLANETARY MASSES WORK
- Yep, they're all unbearable again
- "SHE PUT YOU UNDER A SPELL"
- Oh God No Why Fucking No UGH
- Casual Slaughter Of Millions
- No, Soldiers Aren't Arthurian Knights
- Xenophobia Is Only Cool If They're Not Optimus Prime
- "Are we the bad guys!?"
- PHYSICS
- WHY SQUEAKS
- NO NUKES AREN'T A GOOD CHOICE
- Now We Must Believe In Myth
- "DID YOU FORGET WHO I AM" - apparently you did
- "I AM OPTIMUS PRIME" we know you say it every movie
- Planetary Mass Crash Landing Is Fine Apparently

It is setting up for a sequel. I don't know what they want out of it. I don't care. All I know is that the sooner Bay gets his hands off this, the sooner they get some better scriptwriters in, the sooner they start making this about the bots rather than Hero Man and Lol-People, the sooner we'll get the Transformers movie that we really want.

Even if, just maybe, humanity is such a junkyard that this is the Transformers we deserve.

Don't watch this. If you do watch this, please, please feel better. Talk to someone. Don't suffer in silence.

And for fuck's sake, people. Stop doing this to the franchise I love.

You Suggest, I Digress

So with only a smattering of ideas in terms of what to write this week I turned to the smartest bunch of people I know to suggest topics for the blog.

Last time I suggested I might only do one but ended up doing them all. Frankly there's not even gonna be a shadow of a doubt this time, I'm just straight up doing all of them.

So with some names removed to protect the innocent (HAH)...

Mighty Max playsets - Mighty Max was AWESOME. I had a bunch of the playsets, a lot of the smaller ones, one or two of the bigger ones. The cartoon was the absolute bomb, too. Just check out this intro. It should tell you everything you need to know. It's METAL AS FUCK.

Boobs - Yes, they're very lovely.

Kittens - Yes, they too are very lovely. BUT - controversial opinion - having had more elderly cats as pets, I prefer them, honestly. Especially the big sloppy ones that don't really care about going outside, they just want to sit on your lap. Love them.

Roses - I get hayfever. Overpriced sex organs that die very quickly. Not a big fan of flowers. Succulents, however - cacti - that's my shit. If only I was actually good with plants, I'd keep some.

A gadget you don't have but want - Oh lord there are so many. See I love gadgets, I love little bits of technowizardry. If I lived by myself I'd love one of those speaker systems that you can stream to anywhere in the house - a 3D printer would be kick-ass - one of those super-expensive but very stable drones with really high definition cameras - a set of those exoskeleton legs so that walking around wouldn't fuck my knees and ruin my joints - god, the list is endless.

Boobies - They are very lovely. (Okay are you folks noticing a pattern here?)

Tory Manifesto Promises - Said it time and again. What a politician says and what a politician does are two different things. You can always trust the Conservatives to make cuts and to help big business. That's not just an opinion. Look at history, and look at the voting records of those in parliament right now and previously. If anyone took their manifesto promises as being at all believable - The Party Of The NHS, don't make me laugh - then it shows a general lack of political acumen. This isn't limited to Tories I will bear mention. Manifesto promises are all well and good, but before you put any stock in them, see if the MPs of that party have actually ever voted for or supported those promises previously. You CAN do that. They DO keep records. No matter how non-connected a politician will tell you they are with the fracking industry, there is a record on how they have voted in connection to it - and that, they can't make up. (If anyone DOESN'T know how to check voting records, TheyWorkForYou and The Public Whip are two great places to start.)

The Art Of War - I read this fairly regularly. It's not such a great guide as people think it is, but it does contain several little nuggets of wisdom, which can be applied to a wide spread of daily experience and general life. I play a lot of games, many of them involving strategy or conflict, and so I perhaps get more out of it than most would. One of my favourite sayings originates from the Art of War: "If you know your enemy and you know yourself, you will not be defeated in a hundred battles."

Staffs/Staves in a fight - The problem is room to work with. The same as two-handed swords, which I actually have a little training in. If you've got empty space, like at least twelve feet, then they will do the job. They give you reach and are a flexible way to do damage to someone and stop yourself from being stabbed to death. The way they are presented in movies, though, well. People spin them around like they weigh nothing, yet they hit like they're made of lead. Most weapon fight scenes in films don't do justice to the techniques and items in question. Don't get me wrong, I love watching it happen - the Neo vs Agent Smiths fight in the park in Matrix: Reloaded is a great staff fight scene for all of its ridiculousness - but it just doesn't reflect the usability in the real world. Again, same is said with swords. If you're still fighting with a sword after like three minutes, you've done it wrong.

The trans bathroom debate - In my eyes there isn't a debate. There's just people that want to use the bathroom, and other people making ridiculous demands of them. I don't mean to attack the person that suggested this as a topic, it's one that needs talking about. It's just that calling it a debate implies that both sides approach with equanimity - and I don't think that's true.

Trumpton - My views summed up here. (Content Warning: Dank Rave Music.)

Thoughts on narratives told using multiple mediums (Transmedia storytelling) - So in terms of a franchise I like this idea. Like, playing Halo tells you a lot about the story, and is a self-contained story in and of itself; but the expanded media, novels and such, present a far more textured and interesting world for the games to exist in. However...if I am playing a video game but need to pause it and watch a movie to get the whole story, like the narrative has a hole in it if I don't do this thing, then - well I dislike that. I dislike that quite keenly. "It makes more sense if you've read the book", that I can be slightly more forgiving about - hell, I like some films that are kind of incomprehensible compared to their books. (And films whose books are almost incomprehensible, too.) It just...you know. If you can't tell the story, try a different story, and don't make me go out and buy something new to fill in the holes.

The weird subtext of Kong: Skull Island - I haven't seen it yet. I want to. When I am mobile I will. But to me, from just the trailers and such, it looks a lot like a Vietnam war film with big monsters in it, which suits me just fine. Like down to the colour choices of shots and the way people talk, the way it is written. Again - just from the trailers, this may change when I watch the movie. Now I like movies about Vietnam, and I like monster movies, but do the two great flavours taste great together? Remains to be seen. By the way. Why isn't this film called Viet Kong?

Boobs - Okay see that's the third person on my Facebook friends list to suggest I write about boobs. All ladies, no less. I have no idea why. I will make no secret of the fact that I am a big fan! But like...that's kind of problematic, 'cos that's a very short step away from objectification. So suffice to say this: however much I love boobs, people that may or may not have them are more important to me. Just please lord don't test that statement. My spirit is strong, my flesh is very, very weak.

Insomnia seems appropriate - I asked for these suggestions at 00:30, I was still checking them at 04:00. Insomnia used to rule my life, now it is more of a background character trait than a primary thing - it's often primarily driven by pain anyhow. But yes. Sleep is not easy for me. Until I fall asleep, and then, half the time it is very very easy indeed. The other half of the time it just doesn't last anywhere near long enough. I've kind of learned to cope without the standard 6-8 hours, though if I do look wild around the eyes any time before noon, that's why.

Go all meta and blog about your blogging - Hah, well. I've been doing this blog for a while now. The first entry was on the 8th of July 2012, and talked about me dropping my previous blog. There weren't even any labels that far back. I should fix that really. Spend an afternoon tagging up all my old entries. I've found it a great way to get things out of my skull and into a more legible format; it's helped me deal with things I am thinking and feeling in a way that feels constructive. Also I sometimes get audience participation which is really entertaining in its own way. I used to worry about viewership, but then I stopped. I shouldn't care how many people read this. I'm writing it for my benefit primarily, even if other people reading it may get something from it (and I hope they do!). So honestly, it's a great thing to have in my life. I enjoy my little slice of the blogverse.

Though, that said - if any of you think that anything I've said would be of interest to other folks you know? Do feel free to distribute. Even if they just want a snide laugh at my overly-optimistic Leftie principles or how I feel about Transformers.

So there you have it. Another job lot of suggested topics done. I always enjoy this - I can never guarantee what I will get asked about...

...though perhaps I can guarantee one politics post and one post about boobs?

Thanks for tuning in, folks. Have a better one.

Like A Disney Movie

So the other day I was talking to someone about relationships, and people staying in relationships that are bad for them, and the mentality of it. I've even done a blog on the topic right here, and a blog on a semi-related topic right here.

As we were talking it occured to me that, throughout my childhood and my teenage years, very few of the relationships I was presented with in the media I consumed were what I, in later life, would consider to be a healthy one.

That is, perhaps, because such things aren't exciting. They aren't what we all thirst to read about or see or hear about - but then, perhaps our idea of a fairytale romance is informed by the fairytales we were subjected to.

We all love a good Disney movie, right?

Well here's the shit - we grew up with princesses and princes and love's true kiss, none of which prepares you for, you know, relationships. They are profligate with shitty messages about love and trust. A quote that I borrowed from Stephen Colbert a few years ago:

“So, Disney, I demand that you drop this two mommies plot & go back to delivering wholesome messages. Like teaching our children that they can be a princess if they let a man make out with them while drugged, or that there's nothing wrong with bestiality if a candle says it’s OK.”

Change yourself and you will have value because a man will want you, says The Little Mermaid and Cinderella. Relationships are something that happen to you rather than something you do, says Sleeping Beauty. They want you, and that's enough, says Snow White. Any level of deception is acceptable once they see the REAL you, says Aladdin. Stay in your lane and accept what you have, says Wreck-It Ralph. You can change them to make them into something you want, says Beauty and the Beast.

Disney isn't the only culprit, of course. The very notion of True Love, of the kind of love that you know full well happens to you and that you can't resist and that you should pursue at all costs et cetera - that notion is implanted into us real young, and is...well...dangerous.

Imagine you are taught from a very early age that needing to urinate is what a healthy relationship is, and nothing deviates from this reinforced teaching. (It's ridiculous, I know - but it's meant to be.)

I will state at this point that I am probably very biased. I'm socially a little malformed, and have had social anxiety for a long-ass time. So perhaps my word shouldn't be taken as academically sound - but then this blog is all opinion anyway, just sometimes backed with statistics.

So if we are raised in a world in which love is a thing that scares you rather than comforts you, and something that you can't ever give up on no matter how bad it is for you, and something that you MUST pursue in every aspect of your life, and that a life without love isn't worth living...well...

...okay, does anyone actually believe this is true? Like, really?

Is anyone going to truly claim that the best relationships they have in their lives aren't about comfort and trust and knowing each other and being able to exist in each other's company for basically years without going crazy? That they are based on mindless devotion and anxiety?

My mother once told me that before you can go out with someone, before someone can be your girlfriend, they have to be your friend. I scoffed at this. Film and television teach us that you fall in love with someone you meet out of the blue and charm and woo and then they love you and this is symbolised with a kiss which is obviously the desired result.

It took me a long time to realise what she meant. That to have a sexual and romantic relationship with someone that I can't be friends with is...well it's idiotic. If I can't hang out with someone and just be okay with them, how am I meant to be their other half? If we can't goof around with each other and laugh at dumb stuff, then...how complete and happy will our relationship really be?

It's easy to believe that relationships that are objectively harmful are the right way to do things, because all through our lives they always have been. We dismiss feeling like we are being mistreated because "shrug, well, that's the way love goes". We have all heard the story of "we're from the era when you fixed things rather than threw them out". That is held up as a virtue while we ignore the fact that domestic abuse was absolutely rife, and the notion of leaving that relationship was stigmatised to the point that you'd take the beating rather than the sidelong looks.

It does not have to be like this. It never had to be. We can change - and we can change the media that teaches people.

Steven Universe is something I come back to time and again. It has very healthy examples of relationships working, and examples of people resolving problems in a safe, smart way. It's just the tip of what needs to be an iceberg, though.

Creators - put healthy relationships in your books. Let them be friends first. Let people not be obsessed. Let people recognise that Romeo & Juliet is actually harmful, that infatuation is a form of obsession which is also harmful. Let people recognise that loving someone is an ongoing friendship, not a cycle of abuse.

Because my fairytale romance isn't a fairytale. It's a friendship. Just more.

2 of 7 - The Left Leg Phenomenon

(Day 2 of the one-blog-a-day fun fest!)

In the IDW Transformers comics, there is an Autobot named Ambulon.

He's the one tending to the wounded chap.

We run into him in a storyline centred around the morality of medicine and medical study. It turns out that he was once a Decepticon, who defected to the Autobots when the experiment he was part of went awry. As his name kind of implies, he's a doctor.

Except - and here is where the IDW series demonstrates some of its pure genius - that's not why he was called Ambulon. He was called Ambulon, from the latin Ambulate - to walk.

He was part of a Decepticon experiment to create a combiner, and he was a leg. Not a leg and a car. Just a leg.

When I got to that part of the comic I burst out laughing, like aloud. I couldn't help myself. The entire thing about combiners in the IDW series - it's a big plot point, so it actually has some weight, but - Ambulon? Because he's a leg!? Amazing!

...but then that got me to thinking.

Warning. It gets nerdier from here.

Later that day we were watching Voltron,, the new series. It's really good, it bears mention. True to the original in all the best ways but updated for the now, with great character design and animation. We were talking about the characterisation, and I opined that my favourite was - and always will be - Hunk. The strong left foot.

Other combiners were brought up, and I started to notice a pattern:

I always like the left foot.

Anyone remember the original series of Power Rangers? Left foot was Billy in the blue Triceratops-zord. He was my favourite power ranger! What's not to like about Billy?

Back to the Transformers universe. Devastator's left leg is Mixmaster, who was an unsung hero of the Constructicons - a chemistry genius that mixed his own stuff on demand. He was central to all their key engineering tasks. Predaking's left leg is Headstrong, who is stubborn when pushed, just like me - and just like me, insists that he will get there when he gets there, and woe betide if you rush him.

Menasor's left leg is Wildrider, who is the very essence of the Stunticons - savage and brutal, a psychotic speed freak who is a danger to anything on wheels. Abominus's leftie is Sinnertwin - tell me that name isn't metal as FUCK - and Sinnertwin's jam is dismemberment with his two monster heads. The left leg of the Combaticon team is Brawl. BRAWL. The super-angry damn-near-unstoppable fury tank. BRAWL.

The Autobots get love too. Superion's left leg is Fireflight, a take-no-prisoners arrogant son-of-a-bitch of a jet. Defensor sports Streetwise, who is basically Prowl but with added John McLean. Computron's left leg is Nosecone, who is a drill tank. So is (Decepticon) Liokaiser's - bonus points if you know who THAT is, and who Drillhorn is. Nosecone and Drillhorn are both perfectionist strategists, taking their time to concoct the ideal approach to any situation. No wonder I like them.

Left legs RULE. Even the One Piece crew forms a combiner at one point, and "Black Leg" Sanji is - let's face it - a badass. He's like my fourth favourite member of the crew.

So...who cares if they don't have the edgy panache of the Sixth Team Member (Devastator and Liokaiser nonwithstanding), or the brave badassness of the Red Guy, or the head. Who cares.

The left leg is where it's at, people. The left leg is the strong foot, the stable leg that you lead with when you box, that you plant when delivering a kick or a strike. The left leg is your best friend.

Ambulon - from Ambulate.

Dirty Casual, Filthy Tryhard

Remember when we used to play games for fun?

I'm not saying games aren't fun. They are. Well, some of them. Everyone finds fun in different places after all. It shows in how the games market has - in the past thirty years - broadened itself massively, and crept into every single aspect of life in some small way or other.

Remember when you could play Beehive Bedlam on your Sky box? Hell, maybe you still can. I burned literally hours on that game at my mate Josh's house. Imagine - I had my very own PC at home, a Sega Megadrive and - after a point - a Sony Playstation; and yet, we still ended up playing Beehive Bedlam.

I'm not sure how or if that ties into the point I am going on to make. It's just a memory I wanted to evoke. What it shows is this: games were already available in all sorts of places, in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Never has that been more true than today, this very moment.

There's the very obvious Triple A market, with its third-person adventure-action style games and first-person shooter shennanigans. There's the race-driving market, the RPG market, and the strategy market, both of which are vaguely niche, both of which are absolutely huge and possess incredible amounts of variety in and of themselves. Then there's the smaller games, the more indie titles that run the gamut from fairly-short-visual-novel to lovingly-crafted-farm-simulator. Looking at games specifically for mobile phones, there's subgenres a-plenty. There's crossovers all over the place.

No wonder, then, that as a community - as gamers - we are internally divided.

I'm not very good at video games. There, I said it. I'm not. I am usually surrounded by people who are better than me. I mean, I have my talents; I like a good turtle in a strategy game, and I'm fairly convinced that my unholy lust for sniping has led to some practice (as a self-deprecating and yet vaguely honorific nickname I sometimes refer to myself as Sniper X, usually just before I miss three body shots in a row).

If a game is too hard, it will take something very special to make me come back to it time and again. Because of this, a lot of games that are classically considered hard - Binding of Isaac, Dark Souls - don't draw me in at all. I'll give them a run, find them very unforgiving, not have much fun, and put them down again. Also, my attention span isn't great; I'll often find myself playing three or four different games of an afternoon, unless I really sink my teeth into one of them.

I think that makes me a casual gamer - but then, honestly...where's the shame in that?

Then there's the tryhards. Oh yes. The tryhards. I have tryharded myself, more than once; often playing something I consider myself quite good at, let's say Supreme Commander or Civ. Running at the higher difficulties, throwing in additional challenges because something something challenge, discarding fun strategies for efficiency and lethality.

...but where's the shame in that?

Honestly it seems to come down to a damned-if-you-do damned-if-you-don't scenario. It's not like both echelons of gamer aren't catered to, in the wide world of video games.

You want to talk about division, though - what's your favourite shooting game?

I can predict some of the camps for this one. If I had to set up several different camping fields at FPS-Fest 2016, they'd probably be BattleField, CODField, HaloField, DoomQuakeUnrealField, OtherField and I Don't Play Shooters (parking only).

The savagery of the rivalry there is something to behold, which I think is summed up quite succinctly by this remarkable bit of roasting in regard to the COD Infinity / Battlefield One trailer piss-off. (In terms of the roast, this is actually fucking art. Like even if I was a COD fan I'd have to appreciate it.)

MOBA? DOTA? LOL? SM...ite? MMORPG? WOW? FFXIV? ESO?

Boundaries everywhere, but...here's the thing. The way I see it, it works the same way with metal fans.

Now I'm not a HUGE Pantera fan. Nor am I massively enamoured with Megadeth. If I can't read the name of the band in the logo then I may make a noise through my teeth before giving them a listen. I'm no fan of Cradle Of Filth, Marilyn Manson post-Mechanical Animals leaves me cold, and I may get shot for this but I don't think Iron Maiden will ever top Flight Of Icarus.

However. If I see someone in the street wearing a Megadeth shirt, I know that - in one regard at least - we are on a level. We like different flavours of sonic apocalypse, but we like the apocalypse nonetheless.

Got a Green Lantern shirt on? I'm a Marvel man myself but - ay. We COMIC people. So you're more into Gundam SEED than, well, any OTHER Gundam. That's fine, cos we're Gundamaniacs or whatever the term is for us. Vampire the Masquerade? Roleplayer. Bard? Adventurer. Sebastian Vettel? F1.

I see you, Decepticon fans. I see you, Trekkies who are more into Voyager and Enterprise than DS9. I see you, Lexx lovers. I see you, folks who prefer Scotch to Bourbon. I see you, anyone who would pick a Pokemon that ISN'T Psyduck.

I see you, gamers.

There's a saying that I picked up an age ago. Nobody Beats Up My Brother But Me. I think it holds true. Like I'll lightly grill anyone that swears down that Call Of Duty is the pinnacle of gaming (and that you should only ever play it on a PS4), but I'll stand phalanx-fashion with them the moment the anti-gaming brigade roll out their lawsuits.

All too often we focus on that which makes us different. We dismiss people because we like to feel superior, we like to feel that the thing we are part of is exclusive, and that is a weakness; it's a hollow satisfaction that we gain from putting others down.

So the me that spent an entire afternoon playing Bee Bedlam rather than studying for his A-levels isn't that different to the me that was once called a "good shield guy" for sterling turtle play on SupCom, and the Terran in me isn't so different to the Protoss and Zerg in my buddies Tom and Chris. We're gamers. Different flavours, but gamers nonetheless - and if everybody looked the same, we'd get tired of looking at each other.

...now if only we could get the industry to be more inclusive in and of itself...but that's for another blog.

You Choose, I Muse

So I asked you folks what I should blog about on my facebook. I got a bevy of interesting answers, including some very kind words - so by way of anouncing which topic I have picked...

...I'm going to do ALL of them!

1) SQUIRRELS. Nutty bastards. But funny. Living in a place with a protected red squirrel population, it was very interesting for me to be in Washington DC and to have a red squirrel casually have a crack at the stitching of my jeans while sat in a park. I know a few people that remind me of squirrels. It's a charming personality, if not a little tiring - I find it hard to keep up with...well most things really.

2) REMAKES. Now I don't think that every remake - whatever the media - is bad. I have, however, seen enough remakes that are absolute trash to know that it is something of a warning sign. Like the number of good remakes is pretty low. In that number I would count Gone In Sixty Seconds (though the original is still better). Re-imaginings...that's a different thing. I'm a fan of remix culture. Modern interpretations of Shakespeare, the gap between Hidden Fortress and Star Wars, samples in hip hop. A prime example of goodness is Kung Faux - a show wherein old kung fu movies are redubbed, given wicked soundtrack backing, and overlaid with classic video game special effects. It isn't the act of remake or remix in itself which makes something better or worse. It is the direction the vision takes us in. Sometimes...that direction just plain sucks, pure and simple.

3) BLACK BINS. A one-size-fits-all approach is a bad approach. I live in a house with four other grown adults (mostly) and the amount of rubbish we generate isn't insignificant. If we had one other person in the house we'd be entitled to a marginally larger bin. Now...I agree with recycling. Better to recycle than to dump. Slapping a big restriction on waste collection, however...that's going to cause problems. I guarantee there will be a significant amount of angry people and uncollected rubbish the moment the new refuse collection laws become...well...law.

4) POWER RANGERS OUTFITS - DRAGONBALL EVOLUTION APOLOGY. This kind of ties into the remake thing. The new Power Rangers costumes look awesome. Halfway between the originals and Iron Man. I like that. In terms of the writer of Dragonball Evolution, Ben Ramsey, apologising for it? ...well in his letter talking about it, he hits the nail on the head. It's not often that the people who get the paychecks actually express remorse for trashing things that other people are fans of. I mean Michael Bay hasn't said shit about Transformers and he's made FOUR of the fucking things. So you know what, Ramsey? You fucked up seven years ago but big up your bad self for taking responsibility for it. (I didn't give a damn about it, it bears mention. I hate Dragonball.)

5) THE RISE OF THE FAR RIGHT IN SWEDEN. So apparently a full fifth of the Swedish population support the Swedish Democrat party (SD), which are troublingly right-wing and anti-immigrant. Almost thirty years old, and formed out of nationalists and racists, I must admit that until writing this blog I wasn't much aware of them. I suppose this is what happens - if your government does the right thing, there's always the bunch of thugs lurking in the bottom of the barrel that wants to spoil things - and sometimes that bunch of thugs will be unified enough to vote for a bunch of political thugs. This is why we need to make it to the polls, people like you and I - because the thugs always will, if they smell blood in the water.

6) TEA BAGS. I don't drink tea. I know. However, I fully believe that tea bags are a wonderful invention that makes the lives of millions easier every day, and we don't give their inventor (the Tang Dynasty in the 7th Century, though it was widely popularised and marketed by Thomas Sullivan in the early 1900s) anywhere near enough credit.

7) PIERS YOUNG. This guy. This fucking guy. I swear down. This fucking guy.

...there you have it! Everyone is a winner. This was actually a lot of fun, I think I should ask for blog prompts more often... I hope you have as much fun reading as I did writing!

Tune in next week for a return to our usual programming!

There Has Been An Awakening

So. I saw Star Wars Episode 7: The Force Awakens.

This blog is about aforementioned movie. It will involve spoilers. By this time I am not sure very many people care but in the spirit of the community that has been SO GOOD at keeping the movie's secrets for the joy of those slower to see it, I feel the need to state this plainly.

Right? Right. So.

It's no secret that I think the prequels are dire. It's not that they aren't watchable - even Episode 2 has that cool 2-minute sequence where you see the Clone Troopers actually get stuck in - but by god, they are actually terrible films. OBJECTIVELY terrible from a cinematic point of view, let alone from a "liking star wars" perspective.

So imagine my joy when I sat down to watch TFA and found it to be a million miles away from the fumbling dirge that was the previous offerings. In fact - as I remarked to the group of folks I'd been to the cinema with, it was almost as if this latest work was a deliberate, measured attempt to put right what the prequels had done wrong.

I've given that some thought, and as I am often wont to do, hammered that thought into words; so here's a list of things the prequels did wrong, that TFA did right - as if Abrams himself made a list and set out to fix it.

• Characters. Who's the main character of the prequels? Anakin? Obi-Wan? Who should we be rooting for, or following? Ultimately, a lack of a solid lead means the movies are something that happens to us, rather than something we watch and engage with. Too many characters, most of them handled really poorly. TFA provides solid characters with memorable and clever dialogue, that resonate with us almost immediately, and leave us wanting more. They are believable, they are relatable, and they each have their moments.
• Relationships. In the prequels, we had to basically be told how people felt about each other - actually showing it in the film was apparently too much. Anakin and Obi-Wan's friendship, for example - there's precisely zero warmth or camaraderie between them, despite exposition insisting that there's friendship there. On the flipside - Rey and Finn develop a mutual respect and admiration for each other, Finn and Poe are instantly super-bros, how each character reacts to the next is something that evolves and is genuinely felt through the script and the actions of the character alike.
• Plot. The schemes of the dark side are interesting and in-depth but honestly, they felt like they were hanging around the prequels to tie together a bunch of other scenes. Ep2 in particular feels like an exercise in mashing together unrelated footage with a thin veneer of plot. TFA, however, follows a very similar plot arc to Ep4 - which means it has a plot arc. Each scene flows into the next in natural progression, and the overall story, when viewed as a whole, is contigious and fulfilling.
• Pointlessness. So much of the screen time of the prequels is occupied with, frankly, faff. Spam. Visual nothingness. Shit that is happening for no reason other than it happening - Jar-Jar Binks, the gungan/droid and space battles during the end of Ep1, the entirety of the middle of Ep2, all of it could be cut from the whole and not detract. In comparison, even clocking in at 2h15m, TFA is lean. It conveys the plot, without a bunch of nonsense distractions happening to fill the time between General Greivous and Order 66. The stylistic touches are applied effectively, quality over quantity.
• Antagonists. The prequels had a serious case of monster of the week (anyone who has watched Buffy and Doctor Who understands what I mean). A different bad guy with next to zero development in each movie. Who else was crying out for more of Darth Maul, or General Greivous, or for Count Dooku to even have a point? In TFA we are given FOUR antagonists - each of them different, each of them developed, each of them with their own interests and character. Kylo Ren's pure rage, General Hux' fanaticism, Captain Phasma's cold militarism and Supreme Leader Snoke's dark and brooding malevolence - what foes we face. In Kylo Ren we have something new and interesting, too; a force still growing, a character in development that gives us the perfect reason to hate him and want him to fall.
• Cinematography. I'm not even going to talk about the prequels. In terms of TFA? It's just beautiful. It's shot so well, with such artistry, with so many calls back to the original series that you can't help but absorb almost subconsciously. Everyone has a favourite shot. Who goes to a sci fi action movie and comes away with admiration for the set-up of a single shot? (My personal favourite was Han and Kylo Ren facing each other on the bridge, the long shot with the diagonal shaft of light coming down from Rey and Finn's doorway.)

There's more, probably...but that's my initial thoughts. I am very happy to discuss the film with just about anyone, really. It's been a wonderful couple of trips to the cinema at the very least, and I really can't wait to see it again.

Only two years until the sequel.

I can wait that long.

Right?

Lessons Learned, Pages Turned

Herein is the latest installation of my series about learning lessons from various media. If you're playing the home game, drink if you agree. This is a sequel to my previous posts on this topic - Part 1 and Part 2.

Wreck-It Ralph taught me that I need to stay in my lane. Don't try and be better or anything other than what you are - the moment you try, you've fucked it. ...that's a double-edged sword.

Say Anything taught me that music can convey just about anything better than regular old words can. Especially when delivered personally. Via nineties-era boom-box.

Dog Day Afternoon taught me that love can drive people to extraordinary lengths. And body counts.

Gremlins taught me that stairlifts are very, very dangerous.

Civilization V taught me that as long as you are charismatic enough, anyone will help you, unless you CURSE YOU GHANDIIIIIIII

Die Hard taught me a great way to deal with jet alg and various other minor discomforts and maladies. Seriously, try the grabbing-the-floor thing. It genuinely works.

Inception taught me that I should ignore all of those ridiculous motivational posters telling me to Follow Your Dreams.

Pokemon: The First Movie taught me that all it takes for people to realise that conflict is wrong is to notice the effect it has on two people.

Gone In Sixty Seconds taught me that there is literally no car on earth sexier than a 1967 Mustang with a V8 engine.

The Great Dictator taught me that it's not the people that talk a lot that really deserve listening to - it's the ones that talk so rarely that you know they have something to say.

The Star Wars Prequels taught me that you should just watch the original trilogy. Also that it's far more okay to murder Sand People babies than non-Sand People kids.

Mad Max: Fury Road taught me who killed the world. It also taught me that being witnessed can be very important.

Terminator 2 taught me that even carrying a minigun won't make a white man seem as threatening as an unarmed black man to the authorities.

Pixels taught me to never trust Adam Sandler, and also to just watch Wreck-It Ralph again.

Yet again...more will follow in the future.

Rage Of Extinction

As many of you may know...I am a Transformers fan.

An Autobot from an early age you might say. I owned the original movie, and half of the original series, on VHS; I even had several episodes on Betamax. I could at one point name every single Autobot in seasons 1 and 2, and almost all the Decepticons, and this was before Wikipedia was even conceived of.

I watched a lot of cartoons. A lot. I watched almost the entire US run, two thirds of the JP run, all of Beast Wars that I could stand, somewhat less of Beast Machines, the entire US runs of Armada, Energon and Cybertron, the JP run of Robots In Disguise, almost all of Transformers: The Animated Series, and all of Transformers Prime. I read a significant proportion of the classic comics, most of the modern ones, and I played every Transformers game I could lay hands on.

When I heard of a live-action Transformers film - back in 2005 or so - I was so terribly excited, you have no idea. I was boiling over with excitement. Then I was invited to a wedding in the US around the time that the movie was due to be released - and as it was being released in the US long before the UK, I was totally psyched. I damn near exploded with joy.

I went to see it with my buddy Dan and several of his compadres. It was amazing, a great night, and even all of us getting ditched at a garage in the middle of butt fuck nowhere MD couldn't dampen my spirits. Dan and I went back to see it again two days later. Then when back on UK soil I went to see it twice more.

I was so in love with the idea that what was actually wrong with it passed me by. For a while.

It was when the second film came out that I started to ask questions. The Bay-isms started to become apparent. Despite going back to see it again, I had my doubts. Where before I had defended the Bayformers movies blindly, I started hearing some of the criticisms levelled, and recognising them as being far too valid.

The third film cemented the cold, hard truth of the matter.

Objectively, the live-action Transformers movies are terrible.

There's some action scenes that we can all approve of, some dumb comedy that we can appreciate. The robot fights - what few of them we see - are generally well-choreographed, and the soundtracking is on the whole not so bad.

None of that can save the trilogy from actually being awful.

And then, out of nowhere, we are treated to the announcement of Age Of Extinction, and we wait with baited breath to see who is directing it; and then we exhale, because yet again, it's Michael Bay.

Having just been to see this movie, I am not confident that I can sum up absolutely everything that is wrong with it from memory; but I am unwilling to see it again to find out so you will have to trust me. I know full well the only bits worth watching will be on YouTube the moment a DVD release happens, so I don't think I will be missing much.

Before the tear-down occurs, I will touch upon its several good points, because I believe in credit where it is due.

• Shia LeBouef, Megan Fox, John Turturro and The Twins aren't in it.
• Some of the soundtrack was pretty good.
• What little 'bot action one actually saw was, on the whole, fairly well done.
• There's several moments where Bumblebee makes a funny noise.

Now that's over with...

The plot is dire. It's just dire. It is littered with inconsistencies, poorly developed, and makes precious little sense. It seems to be an excuse to convey the characters from action scene to action scene, and it doesn't even do this particularly well. Fully half of the movie is totally unnecessary. It can be cut and nothing will be lost, the plot will remain whole. Equally bad, just shorter, which would be a plus.

The movie is about the wrong characters. It, like all of Bay's other efforts, chooses to follow several generic humans who are forcibly mixed up in the machinations of the Transformers the franchise is named after. I do mean forcibly. The term contrived was invented for moments like this. This is a criticism of both plot and focus - and that focus is, likewise, misplaced. At least half a dozen times, the Transformers in question are doing something interesting off-screen - and we are watching human beings running away. Again, and again, and again. Human beings doing things that should make no difference to the plot of a movie named Transformers, being shown to the viewer rather than the Transformers in question.

That focus is an issue. We're forced to sympathise with ultimately unlikeable and hollow characters that are all forgettable (I don't even remember their names), to the point that the film-makers can't stand the idea of us watching them actually get hurt (despite at least half-a-dozen high-velocity impacts that would shatter bones like dry twigs, let alone scratch Mark Wahlberg's chiselled face) - but they will happily make us watch the Transformers be literally torn to pieces without mercy. The Transformers that, I remind you again, the movie is named after. Humans existed in the cartoons and comics as very distinctly side characters - though RID and the Minicon trilogy had the Irritating Child Sidekick issue - and that works just fine, because the actual Transformers themselves are developed characters with personalities, empathy, urges, drives, and depth. They SHOULD be the characters the movie is about, and if you can't make them the main characters, then you SHOULDN'T be making the movie at all.

Those Transformers are another problem. The already established characters - Bumblebee and Optimus Prime - don't seem to have anything in common with their previous incarnations. Optimus veers wildly between hyper-aggressive and vaguely philosophical, like if Dr Jeckyl took a course in ethics. He utters several lines that speak of vicious intentions, that simply aren't something that he would say. Bee seems to have had a personality transplant; we're not witnessing the actions of a veteran of several wars and a capable infiltration and evasion artist, we're watching a teenager that transforms into a muscle car. Entertaining for cheap laughs, yes. Good character writing? No.

Then there's the new hires. We won't go into the Decepticon side of things (HAH! HAH! OH JESUS!), and ignoring the Dinobots as thoroughly as the film-makers seem to have, we'll just deal with the Autobots.

Hound is an overweight bearded gun-toting militaristic soldier-type who seems to veer wildly between competent and idiotic. He drops his entire compliment of guns (which is at least eight) several times. Somehow he survived the Cybertronian wars. Another surprise survivor is Crosshairs, who is a mercenary dickweed that enjoys a bit of a scrap but complains ceaselessly about "what's in it for me", leading one to wonder why he's actually an Autobot.

Then we have Drift.

Originally in the comics, Drift is a superbly competent fighter who used to be a Decepticon - back when being so was a statement of martial pride rather than being actually evil. As such, when the intent of the Decepticons became clear, he defected. He is a swordsman, as many Transformers are, and his earth-mode car form is a Japanese drift racer. Despite this, he is not a samurai...

...in Age of Extinction, he speaks with a heavy Japanese accent, is clearly modelled after samurai armour, fights in a similar fashion, speaks in koans and haiku - and transforms into a Bugatti Veyron. Thus turning the entire character into a bad Japanese racial caricature, whilst removing the one thing from the character that was actually Japanese.

Which leads us onto racism, which this movie has plenty of. The two Chinese characters on-screen for longer than ten seconds demonstrate world-class martial arts skills. The Black American robot is the "old cantankerous black man" stereotype (who is on Death Row at one point, his words, not mine), the Black African robot is a pitiless mercenary bounty hunter with a pack of wild dogs, and of the four or so black human beings that the movie deigns it necessary to show us - one is horrifyingly stereotypical, and two more are members of an apparently evil CIA division. Needless to say all of the important fleshy good-guy characters are white folks. Though one of them is allegedly Irish.

One thing that a friend of mine I saw it with said that actually stuck with me - "I forgot it was a Transformers movie". You'd be forgiven for doing so. When the giant robots are on the screen, sometimes, they are doing things you want to see them do. Sometimes. They are on the screen for between one half and one third of the movie's run time. This isn't a horror movie in which less is more. This is an action movie with big colourful stars that transform into cars. We can take it, Bay. Show us what we paid to see.

Speaking of what we paid to see, we paid to see a movie written by a scriptwriter. I am unsure if the entity that arranged letters in a document that was later mislabelled "script" qualifies, in much the same reason as I am not sure if a goldfish can count as a brain surgeon. The script contains several lines that were actually so bad that I almost left. I actually moved to get up. The dialogue is stilted and cliche'd at best, and at worst, actually criminaly incompetent. So bad is it that I am actually surprised that old staples like Optimus Prime saying "Roll Out" even happened, as that would imply an IQ of greater than 40 being behind the fingers that wrote that script - an implication that is rubbished by 95% of the movie.

The product placement is sickeningly overt. Putting aside the fact that the Transformers franchise is here to sell toys, the advertisements for Bud Light, Beats By Dre and even My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic are so in-your-face and down-your-throat that you feel somewhat dirty afterwards. I can't remember what kind of car Crosshairs transforms into, but I do remember the CEO of a multi-billion dollar technology company apparently being overjoyed by the fact that he can make endless amounts of Pill speakers. Perhaps this is because the movie is so busy trying to sell me Bud Light that they didn't have time to show me any Transformers. (Which it's meant to be about, remember.)

At the very beginning of the movie we are treated to watching the enforced extinction of the dinosaurs, which I suppose is why this movie is called Age of Extinction (that and the forthcoming imminent extinction of Transformerkind, while somehow managing to magic new Autobots out of seemingly nowhere). There is no temporal transition between 65 million years ago, and the following shot, which is the present day. Literally none. It is simply one shot followed by another. It's not that I found this hard to follow - it's just grossly poor film-making, it's literally bad technique.

The worst thing? The very worst thing? The ending. But I won't discuss that here. If you want it to be spoiled, just message me on Facebook and I'll tell you all about it.

In summary:

This movie is very, very bad, and you shouldn't watch it unless you feel you have to.