Tag: cartoon

What I'm Watching: Harley Quinn

HoboMax delivers a mostly-adult-oriented cartoon about recently-separted-from-Mistah-J Harlequinn/Harley Quinn.

Voice-actor is Kaley Cuoco (the annoying chick from the more annoying Big Bang Laugh Track Show), who is better than I expected, but doesn't really hit the shrill Joisey girl accent I expect; Poison Ivy, her slightly but not too overtly lesbian (well, you'd think, but they do throw in lines about Kite Man) roommate is the surprisingly competent Lake Bell (who has been acting for 20 years but her IMDB page is just a list of trash roles; did you see Surface? Be glad if you didn't.); Alan Tudyk does the Joker, which he's not really fit for, I miss Mark Hammill as the Joker, but he also does Clayface, which really fits his over-the-top thespian tone just like Mr Nobody in Doom Patrol.

"You helped me. I can be around people now. You know, I mean, I hate it, but I can do it without vomiting."

Some of it's well-written, there's a lot of snarky lines, and the plots and tone are similar to the '90s Tick cartoons. But I do find it odd and annoying that A) There's 3 main writers, all of them dudes, B) The art is very male-gazey/Striperella, which hey, I like cartoon porn as much as anyone but it's not a good way to build Harley up as a self-respecting villain. In fact, of the 30 names listed for writing on all 15 episodes, 7 are women, all with 4 eps or less to their names. And it shows over and over again. When they try to "talk about women", it's slightly better than the Rick & Morty Bechdel Test gag, but only very slightly.

"This guy's such a douche."
"I'm sorry, but none of the charming supervillains with great personalities were holding seminars today."

Occasionally manages some social commentary, but at the same time exactly reinforces the stereotypes it's gossiping about.

"I had to make my own [crew] by believing in stupid little things like Mark. No offense, Mark."

SIGH. The curse of the generic name.

Well, I'm rarely bored by it, and I do laugh.

★★★½☆

What I'm Watching: Adventure Time: Distant Lands: BMO

Available on the HoboMax.

BMO, especially delusional BMO being a hero, is generally my favorite character of AT, even tho I skip all those awful Grables eps. So I was looking forward to this. Not happy about the result.

No way to talk about this without spoilers:












BMO and their potatoes are going to Mars. But then they're redirected to an ancient space station made of little environment pods, like blown-up Xandar (in the comics, not the boring planet in the Guardians movies), or Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky, and BMO sets off to save everyone!

Unfortunately everyone in the station sucks. The bunny kid sidekick is useless, spineless, and nigh-treacherous (but too spineless to be an effective traitor), the repair drone is just a follower, the adults are all villains or parasites who should be broken down for scrap. The character designs, other than a few sight gag characters in street scenes, are very plain, either blobs, the laziest-drawn humanoid bunnies ever, or a few alien/elf hybrids. Literally the only sympathetic characters in the entire show, besides BMO, are two thieving bugs, and a scrap robot (voiced by Simone Giertz! So there's like one good thing about this!)

There's an amazing environment, a setup perfect for a long series, which is wasted on a very stupid plot and a trite non-Adventure Time ending. Brute force or reason shouldn't get you out of trouble in AT, only insanity, lateral thinking, or coincidence should. Pen Ward hasn't written or directed since S8, everyone still involved is like 3rd-hand hires from when it was good, so tone drifting towards Hollywood garbage writing is inevitable, but tragic.

Well. That was, I guess not surprising after S10, but disappointing. Will any further eps be better?

★★☆☆☆

What I'm Watching: Adventure Time

HoboMax has Adventure Time, and soon to have some spinoff specials "Distant Lands", so I watched seasons 8-10 which I hadn't previously seen, and I'm now rewatching 6-7 which I apparently don't remember at all. Who needs linear time?

  • Season 8: Mostly episodic, often great adventure episodes. This is what I liked the show for originally. "I Am a Sword" seems to be adventure, but then introduces a real tragedy, which turns into the Fern sub-plot for the next 2 seasons. "Preboot" and "Reboot" activate Susan's origin story, and "The Invitation" starts a very long 8-part story about the last of the Humans; individual parts of this were good, but continuity is annoying in a show like this. 11-minute episodes are perfect for delivering the science-fantasy parody, 2-parters are a little long, 8 is (if you'll forgive the '80s sitcom reference) enough.

  • Season 9: Immediately starts with another 8-part quest about elemental (Candy, Slime, Ice, Fire) corruption. While I like Ice King/Simon and Weird Lady/Betty in small doses, an entire series about two amnesiac obsessives is excruciating. Since all the elemental princesses and inhabitants are reduced to insanity, there's really only Jake & Finn to have any sane dialog, and Jake's just a dog. The last few eps resolve Finn & his weird grass clone.

  • Season 10: Almost all of these were terrible. "The First Investigation" was good, a nice self-contained story. "Jake the Starchild" and "Temple of Mars" are decent science-fantasy stories, but almost not Adventure Time. "Gumbaldia" and "Come Along With Me" (44-minute finale story) set up a final Ooo War between PBub and her insane Uncle/offspring, and halfway delivers on it. But then they ran out of plot, and were unwilling to go all the way and let the Candy Kingdoms nuke each other, so just added a new dumb monster for them to half-ass their way out of. BMO at the end of time with an almost empty world was interesting, and they failed utterly to deliver on it.

I loved classic Adventure Time, but the writers really got wound up too much in continuity and making sense of a senseless idea later on. It's Thundarr on E, Mad Max with candy characters. That's fun. A little "oh living in this vale of tears is kinda hard yo" goes a very long ways. Long plots ruin it.

★★★★★ for the single adventures, ★★★★☆ for the first serial, ★★★☆☆ for the second serial, ★★☆☆☆ for the finale.

The Far Side: Cow Tools as a Web Service

Remember back in the 1980s (technically, 1979-1995), for those of you alive then, The Far Side was the best comic in newspapers. Uh, see, they printed blogs and Florida Man stories on paper… Uh, cut down the Amazon rain forest and pulped the wood, rolled it into sheets, dyed it white, and put ink on it. Well, not everyone had computers, OK? No, their phones didn't have displays, either. Sometimes didn't even have buttons, just a rotary dial you kids can't operate. I'm getting off topic.

So. After 25 years of fucking around, Gary's finally got someone to make him a website and publish his comics, a few every day. Here's the thing: It sucks. There's no RSS feed. Little indiction of when a comic was first printed; the year is shown in copyright, but some were probably held over months or years from when first copyrighted to when they were printed. And most ridiculously, it hammers the Disqus server, which I have blocked by both /etc/hosts and Ghostery, so the page just fills up the console complaining, and eventually crashes; happily Safari sandboxes pages now, but in the old days this would've crashed the browser. The page source is 2000 lines, and a bunch of loaded libraries, most of which are there for loading & showing ads. I don't see ads, because they're all loaded at runtime and I block everything, but I assume it's just a wall of popups and autoplay video for the handful of suckers who don't have blockers yet.

Oh, and there's an attempt to stop people from right-clicking & saving images, but you can just drag the image out in Safari, or screenshot it on any computer. Idiots who don't understand how computers work shouldn't try making "security" choices like that.

The whole thing competently written would just be an RSS feed in the header, a banner, a single on-server static image ad, a cartoon, and forward/back buttons. Less than 20 lines, take a programmer an afternoon to write it including a script to generate each day's cartoon and update the RSS XML file.

So now it sits in my "daily bookmarks folder" which I don't hit every day, of shitty sites I have to open manually, look at, then close because they're garbage sites written by garbage people.

Cartoons

BoJack Horseman is a deep, well-written work about self-sabotage and depression. It might be the best show ever made for getting people into some kind of therapy or self-improvement; or at least to stop downing a fifth of Jack every day. But it's miserable, incredibly unpleasant to watch sometimes, and I'll almost certainly never rewatch it, with the exception of a few non-depressing episodes ("Fish Out of Water", for instance).

Rick & Morty is exactly what I want from a cartoon: A bunch of science and fart jokes with parodies of Doc Brown & Marty McFly, with an unhealthy dose of cosmic nihilism, and I can watch it anytime I need a laugh or cry at the futility of life. "Nobody belongs anywhere, nobody exists on purpose, everybody's going to die. Come watch TV?"

The Simpsons hasn't been funny past season 2 other than some Treehouse eps and guest-artist couch gags, and the characters are the blandest stereotypes possible. It's extruded cartoon product. I have no subscription that would let me watch it, and I don't care, but I do see clips and even complete episodes sometimes on the Youtubes or such. It's Seinfeld without the observational "humor" or asshole New Yorkers, it's every awful sitcom with a whiny family, just flavorless pablum. It'll probably outlive us all. The Terminators will sit around after exterminating Humanity and watch their new Simpsons episodes, chuckle robotically, and complain that earlier seasons were better.

Groening's (well, to the extent he's involved; producer & they imitate his old style?) medieval fantasy cartoon Disenchantment is equally dire, which is ridiculous since they've taken a genre where there's unlimited possibilities, and made it into a Simpsons style sitcom. I'm dis-enchanted.

Archer, man, I miss Archer. Seasons 1-4 were fun but standard Adult Swim-type nonsense. Season 5 Archer Vice was the peak, with the coke smuggling, Smokey & the Bandit, Pam's habit. Season 6 was dull, trying to recapture 1-4 but you can't go backwards. Season 7 Hollywood was great, film noir done by lunatics; it reminds me excessively of every time I've run or played in a modern/espionage RPG. I've only seen the first eps of S8-10 in this "dreamland" saga where Sterling's in a coma fantasizing, and they sure didn't persuade me to find some way to watch it. S11's supposed to be back to "reality"? Dunno.

Is there anything good I'm missing?

What I'm Watching: Green Eggs & Ham

"I'm not great with kids."
"Ha! Oh, you're not so great with adults, either. Or Chickeraffes. Or really anyone."
—Guy Am-I & Sam I-Am

Yes, the Netflix cartoon of the Dr Seuss book. And this time, it's properly animated, and not infested with Mike Myers.

The book was just a short journey into madness with Sam-I-Am inexplicably tormenting Guy-Am-I who gets run over or flees into cars, trains, darkness, rain, boats… until he gives in and eats the green eggs and ham.

The show turns them into characters and a plot. Sam I-Am is either a sad delusional lonely little man, or an elite ninja animal liberator who frees the Chickeraffe, which is a giant terror-bird that can be squished down to fit in a briefcase. Guy Am-I (Michael Douglas) is a pathetic inventor whose inventions all explode. Pursued by Bad Guys (they have a card) old-timer Snerz (Eddie Izzard) and rookie Glutz, they keep running into single mom Michellee (Diane Keaton playing very very dull and safe) and bored kid EB.

Each episode is more or less a page from the book. "Would you, could you, on a train?" So there's a long train journey and every sight gag they can extract from it. I'm especially impressed by the miniature train car. "With a fox?" And the Fox (Tracy Morgan) is insane, one of the better characters and subplots. "With a mouse?" And there's a mouse in their prison cell who sings Les Mouserables and then it turns into the Shawshank Redemption. Most of the references are pretty good; subtle but on point.

The one part where the show falls down is "Boss", who's ordered this caper, trying to impress his "Cronies". They're all boring and loathesome, and utterly disconnected from the main plot. Delete Boss, make the Bad Guys have some motivation of their own, and this would be a better show. If I'm annoyed by him, I bet kids watching this have a screaming tantrum every time Boss appears.

The green eggs and ham do look tasty, but full of cholesterol. Michellee's tofu version might be safer.

★★★★☆

Lester Bangs Sunday Music

So the playlist:

So I was thinking about Lester Bangs, who basically taught me how to write with his reviews (which explains a lot, you know? I had higher ambitions but some rambling reviews with moments of clarity and profanity are what I can manage), then remembered Bruce Sterling wrote an alt-history biography "Dori Bangs" about him and Dori Seda hooking up, reread it. Fucking fantastic and a little heartbreaking, highly recommend it.

What I'm Watching: Undercover, L4yer Cake, Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse

Undercover S1: A Belgian/Dutch crime drama, based very loosely on a real case, with Anna Drijver as a Dutch woman cop (and rather sexy when she cleans up, or if you like dirty biker chicks), and Tom Waes as a Belgian asshole man cop, setting up an undercover observation of a drug kingpin. Except the drugs are mostly ecstasy, the action is mostly in a campground trailer park, and everyone is just pathetic and low-rent. It's barely above reality TV at times, the filmmaking is not excellent, and the plot is glacially slow. The tension between these cops who have to pretend to be a couple, and the shitty crime boss, his pathetic wife, and ever-changing roster of idiot henchmen, is much better than you'd expect. Watch it in the original Dutch/Flemish. Don't expect a fast burner, this is one to watch a bit, go on with your life, watch a bit more…

★★★½☆

L4yer Cake: Great crime book, if a little heavy on the "oo eck 'e're so 'ery English wot wot" shit. Movie's about 50% of the book, plus 25% new shit out of the writer's ass, not always seamless. Movie ending is bullshit—in the book the same asshole shoots him but he lives and then delivers his "if you knew my name" line.

Never said in the book or movie, but his name is Bond, James Bond. Thus XXXX and the fake posing as Bond, sudden development of Navy Seals level murder skills, and fucking another man's wife (which is rarely brought up in the Bond movies, but in the books it's a common theme, also common to Ian Fleming himself—adultery made philandering without consequences easier for him/them).

I don't especially like Daniel Craig as XXXX or Bond, but if you're gonna do both, he barely passes. Book XXXX is just short of 30, Craig was 36 at the time, but looked 40+, a dried-up ballsack face already. Bloated tub of lard Colm Meany will always and only be sad, pathetic Transporter Chief O'Brien to me; he just looks constipated and confused when he's trying to be menacing, or really all the time. George Harris as Mortimer is too pleasant much of the time to be the borderline personality of the book; it's legitimately shocking when he does snap. The girl, Sienna Miller (named for the shittiest color crayon), is about a 7 or 7.5, not the perfect femme fatale of the book; tho the English have a lower scale of hotness so she's probably as good as they've ever seen; and she has few scenes to even establish the adultery subplot.

Funniest moment of the show was the "Serbian" gangsters speaking Romanian; I couldn't tell everything they were saying with my half-assed Spanish and quarter-assed French, but all Romance languages are recognizable. The English filmmakers probably didn't know the difference; anywhere east of Germany is Poland, eh, limey?

★★★☆☆ — aggressively mediocre interpretation of better but not amazing source material.

Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse: So, up front: I don't especially like Spiders, or Men, or Spider-Men, and as noted in The Boys, I don't trust anyone with super-powers not to be a super-jerk. I grew up with the Electric Company Spider-Man, but by the '80s that motherfucking bug had his own live-action TV show, cartoon, cereal, toys, Japanese sentai show, and more, raking in $millions a year. Plus the police, military, and civilian applications of his web-shooter goop must be worth $billions. If he's married to MJ she's worth at least as much as an actress. The poor white boy from Queens act is offensive.

But I needed something light and dumb after the hash they made of L4yer Cake.

Miles Morales is certainly a more humble protagonist than '60s-era Peter Parker; less Hardy Boys and more Boyz n the Hood. But it's taken 20 minutes to get him bitten and plot to start. How are there not thousands or millions of Spider-People in a world where every radioactive spider produces the same powers? As usual in the movies and TV shows, with limited rights and limited creative people of their own, they only acknowledge the existence of Spidey's "rogues gallery", not any of the hundreds of other supers placed in New York in the comics.

I'm not a big fan of urban graffiti; it's mostly criminals marking territory they extort protection money from, or vandals damaging property they don't own. Buy a fucking canvas to paint on.

Mama Morales speaks like two lines of Spanish ever, then switches back to English for the honky audience. NYPD Cop Dad is the stern-but-fair bullshit they'd like to sell; I expect he's all Training Day on the streets.

Even in cartoons, Stan Lee got his cameo. But not Steve Ditko. They can't spare one fucking scene in this Russian-epic-length film for the man who created classic Spider-Man and drew the comic until Stan stiffed him on money (as he did to everyone)? There's a passing mention of him in the credits, which is sadly better than most do.

I did genuinely laugh at one joke: "Hey, maybe you guys can go around? OK, thanks, New York."

Spider-Gwen and Noir SM are good takes on the idea; I'm familiar with SG from the comics. Has-Been SM and Spider-Ham are awful, jokes carried way past their sell-by date. Old Aunt May with a baseball bat is good and strong, as fits a potential Herald of Galactus. Mary Jane as slightly frumpy Jessica Rabbit is weird, but she has little screen time, she's just a trophy for various Peters.

Kingpin's a perfect villain as always and chews the scenery less than in the Daredevil TV show. But for someone so obsessed with family, he isn't very understanding of others' familial conflicts. Still, he halfway saves this flick.

Doc Ock is interesting, but I don't see how the relationship with Aunt May can work after this. Prowler's given a surprisingly good background (but a very Huntress-like outfit with nipple patches). The other villains are just big mooks, zero personality.

There's no plot or conflict except "can Miles survive 3d6 random fight scenes and then push a button?" You will be shocked to learn the answer is yes, he pushes the button.

By 1 hour 20 minutes in, I'm ready for the end of the movie, but there's 40 minutes of this to go. Brevity is the soul of wit, but alas. This just drags out the "kid can't fight" part before the moment of heroism schtick. Then a very long neon Jackson Pollock screensaver with Doc Ock taking an improbable amount of abuse, instead of using a bruiser villain or fighting with the tentacles. All the villain fights get dumber and more punchy as the film progresses. The collider's said to be making a black hole, which means it has at least the mass of a planet, possibly a star; but happily magic dimension shit just reverses itself and there's no lasting apocalyptic results like a city vaporizing even if you do shut it down. Consequence-free adventuring.

"Anyone can wear the mask", moralizes (oh, "Morales", I get why he's so preachy now, "Miles" of it even) a kid who is faster and stronger than any athlete, can recover from almost any injury, swings by his arms from tiny spider strings, and can be invisible (and what man could be good with that power?!) and shoot lasers from his hands. You know, like a SPIDER. If a normal kid wears a SM mask and leaps off a building, they'd just die horribly.

★★☆☆☆ — massively overstayed its welcome, shitty final sequence, too many underdeveloped characters.