Category: movie

What I'm Watching: Man From Earth

This is up on 'zon prime, and written by Jerome Bixby, who (very relevantly) wrote the Star Trek TOS episode Requiem for Methuselah.

An apparently 30-something history professor (David Lee Smith) is leaving his job and town, and a few colleagues and friends (hey, the asshole biker professor is William Katt! He looks like shit 30 years since I last saw him, but he's still alive!) show up for a going-away party. They notice some oddities in his furnishings, and he tells them a story, that he's a 14,000 year old caveman, and the things he's seen, people he's met. They react with incredulity, get a shrink in…

The entire thing is shot in and just outside a little cabin, with a fireplace. Mostly one-camera, calm, long shots, actors mostly in character and reacting appropriately. I could wish for them to all speak a little more Howard Hawks, New Yorker speed instead of slow and laconic, I don't buy that some of these people are professors, but you work with what you can get on indie flicks.

The writing's not fantastic; he does question & answer, with often terse answers, not technical or detailed, and often interrupted by snarky people. There's one or two, where he's recalling scenery or people, that get something like actual SF writing. What I would like is long monologues about his people, about life in Sumeria, or Rome, or Paris. There's a Poul Anderson book, The Boat of a Million Years which covers a similar character, which has much longer expositions of the nature of living forever.

He has a story of meeting another unnamed immortal, which he puts in the 17th Century. It might possibly be a reference to Le Comte de Saint Germain, a reputed immortal and courtier, though he did eventually die. This is the kind of detail that would've improved the story.

And then there's a religious argument, with a devout true believer, because apparently one random decade in the Mideast 2000 years ago is more important than the other 14,000 years. I think this argument scene is defective in a few ways. First, the believer thinks the King James Version is a "recent" and "accurate" Bible, when in reality it's 400 years out of date and a known shitty translation, most modern Protestants (the theist here is openly anti-Catholic, which is hilarious if you're screaming "blasphemy!" at someone; a "religion" that splits into reformations every couple years is obviously not divinely inspired) use the New International Version, New Living Translation, or New American Standard Bible (for hardcore Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek literalists). I mostly quote KJV because it's poetic and used in so much English literature of the last 400 years, but I'm absolutely not trying to receive "truth" from it.

And while the voices of reason in the room explain the places where Christianity is copied from prior less-shitty religions, the theist is only capable of denying and crying, can't make any rational arguments. SIGH. Look, I'm an aggressive, mocking atheist, but we should be better about presenting the opposition argument than the Christian God's Not Dead idiots.

But I do like his 100-word New New Testament better than anything Christians have ever written in the last 2000 years. They would all be massively improved by switching to this belief.

★★★½☆

There is a sequel, Man From Earth: Holocene, written by the director of the first with no input from Jerome Bixby who was by this time dead, and the comments are harsh: "I've just finished watching Man From Earth: Holocene and this is less a review than a warning." Well. Maybe if I'm angry at myself I'll watch that for punishment.

There's also a movie on Netflix, He Never Died, starring Henry Rollins(!!!), about another immortal, though it's more religious/magical, if played for… not comedy, but funny horror? ★★★★☆ for that.

What I'm Watching: Bosch, Tales From the Loop

I have 'zon Prime for shipping, but the video channel's good sometimes.

Bosch, S6: Hieronymous Bosch (inexplicably, an ex-Marine LAPD pig detective, not a Dutch painter) continues to always be right, thug his way thru cases, and it's an agreeable enough crime drama. This season has 4 main stories:

  1. Sovereign Citizen group is suspected of domestic terrorism, extorting dangerous materials, and being rude to pigs, and so they're portrayed very badly. I can't tell if the writers are aware of how shitty the LAPD is and are using the "308s" to hold up a mirror, or if they actually believe the paramilitary bullshit. Bonus, the cute Feebee agent and some douchebag G-Men are kind of the anti-X-Files; they do not want to believe.
  2. Cold case of a street girl's death, daughter of one of the junkies from last season's drug camp.
  3. Chief Daniels or whatever he's called here running for Mayor but unwilling to play dirty which is an obvious career-limiting move AND is inconsistent with previous behavior.
  4. Jedgar (Marlo Stanfield's actor continuing to amuse me as a cop) spending an implausible amount on clothing for a supposedly clean LAPD pig and hunting down a war criminal from his native Haiti who's now killed cops here.

Which is all a little busy, and then every one of the major cast gets a half-ep or more B-story about them, and I really don't care about a lot of these. A serious editing pass would've cut half the content and treated what's left with twice the detail.

Jedgar's story is by far the most complex, but it gets the least screen time, and the conclusion's mess is going to have to be next season. Bosch's story is sordid, and mostly just him knocking on doors, few firefights like last season's adventure.

There is far less annoying jazz (but I repeat myself) than previous seasons, at home Bosch is mostly listening to lounge singers instead of the whiniest trumpets he can find, which is a great relief to those of us with hearing.

★★★½☆

Tales From the Loop

High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain.
It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak.
When the mountain has thus been worn away a single day of eternity will have passed.
—Hendrik Willem van Loon, History of Mankind (1922)

And that's what it feels like to watch this show. Nothing happens. Eternity passes. More nothing happens. A magical event is never explained. An old annoying man acts preachy for a moment. The episode ends with no meaning or purpose.

The premises range from "what if time travel, but boring?" to "Freaky Friday, but boring", and on and on ripping off Twilight Zone or Disney movies without the action.

☆☆☆☆☆

What I'm Watching: The Mandalorian

Bored by real life, and all done with ACNH until construction finishes tomorrow morning… so I wanted to watch something stupid. Signed up for Disney+ trial, even tho I loathe Disney. Gotta remember to cancel this in a week, giving them money is evil.

And they still don't have the last movie yet! I'll have to acquire it by other means. So instead I watch The Mandalorian, but I wanted something even dumber than space-trucker-and-green-monkey.

The musical themes are very obviously "Ennio Morricone but crappy Casio synth and plastic didgeridoo". And all the fake sets look like they're copied from Sergio Leone movies, but Sergio filmed in real dusty badlands, real worn-out mountains, and real poor shithole villages. This is all greenscreen cartoons around the actors, and I don't know why they bother doing anything "real". It's instantly obvious whenever scenes are fake, so all CGI cartoon would've at least been consistent. Or alternately they could've shot in real places for 1% of what this show costs. I fucking hate looking at this.

Sound editing is awful. They shoulda put a mic under Nota Fett's ("Mando" isn't a name, it's like calling a Human "Humie", so I gave him a new name!) helmet, because he is really hard to hear. Good thing for subtitles. They could've just redubbed in studio because you can't see his lips move. Sometimes the sets are live miced, maybe, or the foley is good; other times it's very obvious everything was muted and bad foley was added. I've rarely seen B-movies with sound design this bad.

The "shiny Mandalorians are the best" premise conflicts with Boba Fett, greatest of the Mandalorian bounty hunters, who was painted over in sort of camouflage, battle-scarred green armor over tan fatigues. The helmet really didn't make a lot of sense, you can't possibly see much. Here, Nota Fett quickly gets paid in a couple pounds of shiny steel which is apparently all he wants, and his helmet is even more useless than Boba's. It's especially obvious whenever he pulls out the little telescope, he's got no peripheral vision, no sight lines up or down. He glitters wherever he walks. I know Boba Fett also wore a cape, but it's stupid. "NO CAPES, DAHLING!" as another Disney-owned show (well, that narrows it down) says.

That all said, I like the Armorer and the Mandalorian survivor culture they're showing here. This is actually kind of good Star Wars mythology. I just wish the guy'd get a paint job.

Wernor Herzog is always entertaining. His Rick & Morty appearance gave real gravitas to a dick joke. Here, "The Client" (seriously what is Favreau's problem with giving characters names?) is a smarmy ex-Imperial jackass with filthy Stormtroopers (it's so hard to take them seriously after 40 years of fans cosplaying in white armor), and a whipped dog "doctor".

Carl Weathers as the bounty hunter boss is kind of decent. He's not a good actor, and his not-good acting is all on display here, but it's a thin, slightly menacing role which the guy can pull off. He's also the only black man in the Galaxy. Every other face in this except some villagers in E4 are so white, that vanilla yoghurt gets nervous they're gonna race-war it.

The bounty mission is inane, everyone has a "fob" (what? it's a radio receiver but somehow tracks the target without a transmitter?), and a replacement IG-88 shows up. The droids are as usual played for comedy, which is fine, but "Initiating Self-Destruct Sequence!" over and over isn't funny. Once is funny enough. I half expect a laugh track every time the droids come on.

It eventually gets to a long fight scene, and it's… long. There's a lot of blaster fire to little effect, nobody except Nota Fett can aim. Kills that should be violent and bloody just have people fall down or disintegrate, because Disney wants little kiddies watching imitation spaghetti westerns I guess. I loathe this Disneyfied "clean violence" as if murdering a bunch of people is just sterile fun where they vanish when shot.

An entire scene beat is wasted on figuring out that the giant cannon just used to kill everyone can open a door, too; but that's how all the direction and editing on this goes, very slow, dumb, deliberate. It's a master class in how to lose momentum and my interest by pandering to the slowest-witted children in the audience.

Baby Yoda (never actually named, again) is, as we all know, absurdly cute. Well, all baby muppets are cute! They only turn weird and pervy when they get old.

I just realized. John Favreau heard Clint Eastwood's role called "The Man With No Name" and that's why he doesn't name anyone. Except Fakero never watched these films, or he'd know Clint's character just goes by a nickname of "Joe", "Manco", or "Blondie", but everyone else does have a name.

The shitty-ass Jawas field-stripping a starship are great, and the crawler's a great junkpile tank. They deserve disintegration, of course. But then they have a ridiculous quest for Nota Fett to get his parts back, and the stupid CGI rhino, and hairy egg, and first plot reveal of Baby Yoda's amazing powers we never suspected except of course it looks like Yoda so waving his hand at things gives him telekinesis. Yoda needed hundreds of years of Force sensitivity training, but the baby can do it in just 50 years.

Then he turns in the bounty, has the usual double-cross, triple-cross shootouts, and again I'm disappointed in the clean cartoony violence on top of a show premise that's pretty grimdark. Pick one or the other, this is weird and dissonant.

So finally the show's hit the main plot, presumably "Lone Wolf and Cub" crossed with "The Incredible Hulk", a powerful warrior with a baby going town to town solving local problems. E4 goes right into that, with a beloved peasant village being attacked by Space Orc raiders, mercenaries hired all "Seven Samurai" like. Hey, it's "Angrier Rosie O'Donnell" from Deadpool! She also can't act, but she's the best pro wrestler-turned-actor in years.

Except, they cast the raiders as non-Human, so is it morally justifiable to exterminate them all because they're raiders, or because you're committing xenocide against the Space Orcs? The great village battle is incredibly badly staged, just charging masses, no maneuvering, no cool samurai fights (nobody even has swords, just pointy sticks), and then it's over because the Space Orcs are all dead or scared.

Why were the Space Orcs here? What's their deal? Is this their native planet, that these Human assholes "colonized" and took? Nobody bothers to ask, or tell us even a comforting lie. They're just bad because they look different and steal so they can brew skooma or whatever it's called. Just like Native Americans were "redskin savages" in old westerns and it was Good and Right for honkie cowboys & cavalry to mass-murder them when they fought back, or when they didn't fight back.

The AT-ST artillery is slow and kind of useless, extremely vulnerable as always; Star Wars has no wheels, but they do have some tracked vehicles, imagine an AT-ST on tracks, they could call it a Tank and it wouldn't fall over. I do kind of like the grubby, poorly-maintained, "monster eyes" Space Orc owned look of the thing, and the irony of them using xenophobic Imperial gear.

Well. I might watch a few more of these before my trial ends, but I'm not expecting much good from them. They have no fight choreography, no dramatic sense, it's just recycled stories told badly by an idiot, and it's a moral void. Once in a while there's a scene that makes me go "hey, that was all right!", but it's rare.

I have zero problem with "go hunt down bail jumpers, dead, alive, or frozen" as a job. I love crime dramas where people get beaten or killed in lots of interesting ways. What I do object to is showing sterile violence where it's just fun to shoot people and then you never have to worry about it again, there's no conscience, no blood, nobody has families who miss them or swear vengeance. Zap, dead. I really have a problem with the open xenocide being practiced here.

★★☆☆☆

(And yes, I'm aware of my hypocrisy, in that some of my games have sort of cartoony genocidal combat, only a little blood and dialogue sometimes; but few antagonists in them are "people". Umbra had hostile survivors and insane cultists, and even then killing them lowered your sanity, and killing innocent Humans drove you insane. Perilar has Orcs as part of the Harbinger Lord's armies, which may be genocidal but it's a fair war. PortalWorlds openly casts you as the villain/antihero, a thief & murderer.)

Serial Experiments: Lain

You know how so much of anime has a naïve teenage protagonist with a lot of school drama, who gets powers, and saves the world? Well, Lain starts there and then veers wildly off, into Internet Protocols, simulationism, UFO/Gaea/psionics conjectures, secret societies, radical home computer upgrades, and not only doesn't save the world but there may never have been a world to save. There's also a lot of really great music; the OST and Cyberia mixes are big parts of my Coding Soundtracks playlist.

What I'm Watching: Kingdom S2

After a brief flashback to the first use of the resurrection flower against the invading Japanese, S2 picks right back up with the zombies out in daylight, and a fantastic retreating battle, and heroic sacrifices winnowing the cast a bit.

There's more straightforward conflict this season, since we know who the villains are (anyone named Cho). A little of what they'd previously done fills in backstory, and desperate measures against the Japanese make sense, but not so much why they're still doing it; ambition, sure, but hitching yourself to the Queen's clan or using the plague as a weapon are not things sane people do.

A cop with an impressive feather hat tries to investigate the Queen, and gets further than I'd expect from feudal investigators, but politics makes that entire subplot pointless. She isn't especially cunning, her plots and tricks are very blunt and obvious, but nobody can call her on it, and her impossibly loyal guards and court ladies go along with it.

The Crown Prince does more swordfighting this season, though mostly it's hacking up zombies instead of duels. The "Tiger Hunter" peasant with a gun amuses me, and he finally gets one backstory flashback, but he's low on dialogue.

Nurse Seo-Bi in any other era would be a boss, with the most valuable medical/murder tool ever and the cure for the zombie plague, but in feudal Korea she's just pushed around as a pawn, and treats entirely the wrong person. Half the plot could be avoided if she just told the Crown Prince what she knows earlier, and doesn't help the villains.

By E3 & E4, I'm really missing the zombies; there's too much Human backstabbing and just chasing around the countryside which is zombie-free except at the surrounded fortress. And some of the death scenes last a very long time, many minutes of weeping and flashbacks.

Finally by E5, we get some zombie action again, but it's taken forever. Zombies vs guy in toilet is always a great set piece. The "camera following unseen action behind a wall" scenes get annoying quick; I prefer to see the combats.

"People aren't screaming. The screams have stopped."
"What's going on?"

The plan in E6 relies on zombies not being able to climb, which eventually they do, an ice lake breaking in a way that it doesn't (ice is bouyant, so breaking it in one place doesn't shatter the entire lake).

The "7 years later" setup for the next season is a little heavy on tell-not-showing, but we have a new villain teaser at least.

I did get bored mid-season. Zombies, ever since Night of the Living Dead, have existed to put pressure on people, and keep a plot advancing fast. Without the zombies, you just have people whining at each other, making too-elaborate plots, and they don't even have to stay in the house/castle. With zombies, you get desperation and quick, bad decisions in enclosed spaces.

★★★★½

What I'm Watching: BoJack Horseman

Finally finished BoJack Horseman's final sixth season, which could've been just 3 eps without any loss. Just endless character vamping; not even development, because they can't develop further and there's no arc, just everyone gets a pony and a birthday cake courtesy of the writers, except BoJack who continues to fuck up.

Season 3 was really the peak of the show, and would've been better if they'd wrapped up seasons 4-6 in season 4.

Disliked the supposedly emotional songs, which in previous seasons had been a little trite but fine, this one it's heavy-handed and mediocre lounge-pop.

The death dinner show, "The View From Halfway Down", was great, perfect, the kind of closure and horror of death we all need from this, except that it dragged on forever and I loathe BJ's family.

None of the people who get their lives together in S6 are capable of doing that, every one of them would be a terror to live with. OK, Mr Peanutbutter, sure, he's an oblivious narcissistic asshole so he's capable of happiness because of it. But Diane's not capable of not wrecking her life; control-freak Princess Carolyn's not capable of not overmanaging control-freak Judah, that'd last 10 days if they're lucky; Todd's attention span is slightly shorter than the lifespan of the little people he's supposed to be taking care of.

I honestly expected more of a "BJ is driven into the desert and digs his own grave" or just end the death dinner show in death. Maybe a funeral closer? But you can't put a dozen people pissing on his grave in an animated show, even one for adults. And killing him would prevent the inevitable revival series in 3 years.

★★★½☆ for the show as a whole, ★★★★½ for bits of it, please don't bring it back.
#BoJack

What I'm Watching: BLAME!

BLAME! was a manga by Tsutomu Nihei from the late '90s/early '00s, like the result of listening to the Terminator soundtrack and Front Line Assembly and drawing that. A weird loner named Killy with an overpowered gravity gun, wanders an infinitely large ruined city, infested with Exterminators that want to kill all the unauthorized Humans, as he searches for someone with the Net Terminal Gene which would allow Humans to connect to the city again. It's bitter and mostly silent, harsh industrial lines and weird kabuki-masked spidery bots and fake people.

It's not quite "cyberpunk", because it's not the street finding new uses for (military-corporate) technology, but techno-savages trying to survive the street killing them. Cyber-apocalyptic, like Terminator's future, Screamers, or Hardware.

What I didn't know is there was a movie made, available on Netflix!

And, uh, it's the manga. The point of view characters are Human survivors in a village, and why they were mostly safe (but dying out) until Killy shows up is the main plot. The city is as brutal and unliveable as the manga, and the technical scenes are fantastic. Killy is quiet and blank, because he knows they're screwed and they don't have what he wants, but he'll help as long as it's practical and he might get some advantage over Safeguard. Very slight nitpicks: There's only a couple of bot designs instead of the rampant cyberization of Human and near-Human and the whole environment of the manga. There's a plot twist I didn't see any clues for, but I might've spaced out at some run-and-scream bit. There's a lack of discussion of the nature and motives of Cibo, that I think was also needed. Maybe the Man in Black Rides Off Into the Sunset ending and denouement is a little trite for the manga which is so harsh and unforgiving. But for anime adaptation of an impossibly harsh and inhuman source material, I've never seen better.

★★★★★

What I'm Maybe Watching: Omniscient

Brazilian show about pervasive personal drone (annoying little robot bees that don't need to recharge?) surveillance and a murder that somehow isn't recorded, but the premises are so stupid it Black Mirrors itself:

  1. Surveillance footage is impossible for humans to watch and held by a trustworthy AI. What government would let that happen?
  2. AI is still somehow Human-programmed by 2 whole programmers & a couple interns. As opposed to the hundreds or thousands on less complex project teams IRL. That's convenient for the plot which has to obviously point at one of these programmers.

Girl protagonist (Carla Salle) is super cute, tho. Gidget/Amelie/Audrey Hepburn type.

So I may watch another to see if it sinks further into Black Mirror/The Scary Door territory.

What I'm Watching: What Did Jack Do?, Isekai Quartet, Overlord

What Did Jack Do?: David Lynch sits in a barren room and interviews a monkey (with terrible Conan O'Brien quality fake mouth dubbing). What eventually comes out is a broken heart sob story, a mediocre lounge song, and an arrest on motive but no evidence. Jack won't be serving hard time on this. Dialogue's pretty erratic, long pauses and non-sequiturs, so I suspect Lynch was either on something or doing a cut-up or some other non-rational writing process. The setting is supposed to be a train station, but it looks like a disused back room with a white light panel, which is what it is; there isn't even any foley to suggest location. The waitress with their coffee is the only other actor, and has barely two lines, and neither touch their coffee. If it wasn't Lynch, nobody would watch this.
★☆☆☆☆

I've been pretty bummed out by recent anime and Crunchyroll in particular for the last couple years, there just isn't much new except slice-of-life-kiddies-with-powers shows. Anime can draw and be anything, but in practice much of it is garbage for teenagers so dull-witted they can't picture anything except themselves.

Isekai Quartet is a mockery of that. Chibi versions of characters of four isekai (Narnia type secondary worlds) shows, KonoSuba and RE:Zero (which are all but indistinguishable), Saga of Tanya the Evil (a good but very grim show), and Overlord (which I had not previously been aware of), all find a shiny red button with no label. Idiots push buttons. And they find themselves in… something like our world, but not. With a creepy harlequin teacher who says they must "experience school life" and "it'll be fuuuuuun".

However inappropriate for the characters, the classroom is a good structure for making these weird dumb characters interact. Tanya is paranoid but smart, Ainz Ooal Gown is a creepy lich but actually quite reasonable, and the idiots of the two dumb isekai wreak havoc and fail to play nicely with their classmates. I loathed Aqua in KonuSuba, and she's the whipping boy (however much the paladin would prefer to be).

As a dozen 12-minute episodes a season, there's no room for sitting around whining or complex arcs, only A-plot and parody of each show's tropes. Light and stupid entertainment, but less stupid than some of the source material. I'm less impressed with the first 2 eps of S2, with almost straight, "sincere" takes on some kiddie videogame anime.
★★★½☆

Overlord: Based on the previous, I gave this a shot, and it's going well. The guildmaster of a VR MMO guild for monster players, formerly dozens but now there's just this one lich, plays with the artifacts and NPCs of their fortress on the final night before shutdown. I know the feeling, I always ride servers down if I'm playing on maintenance nights, and join the final night parties when servers are shut off.

And then… it doesn't log him out. The game world is real. And the NPCs are real, and so very needy.

There's some fantasy adventuring business, but pleasantly different being the antiheroes, which I prefer. And the psychological profile of a man slowly going nuts in a new body with different needs than Human. When he abandons his Human name, Momonga, and takes the name of his magic artifact Ainz Ooal Gown, he steps over a line.

★★★½☆ Early to say, but enjoyable.