The End is Nigh

I have a substantial post sitting in my drafts that I was planning to put up today, but it's a tad rambly, and sporadically on topic, so here's something (hopefully) a little more concise.

GET THE TORIES OUT!

Don't be fooled; Brexit is an element of this election, without question, but it is neither the most pressing concern, nor the reason this all happened in the first place.  Theresa May wants unfettered control, saw an opportunity to get rid of Labour once and for all, and took it.

And in her arrogance, she's barely been coy about what will come as a result of a Tory win tomorrow: the NHS will continue to stagnate and crumble, until it can be sold off at a pittance; police cuts will continue to put all of our lives at risk - something she now plans to offset, not by putting more bobbies on the beat, but stripping away our human rights!

The burden of austerity will continue to be heaped upon those who can't bare it, while the best off in this country will continue to reap the rewards.

No, Theresa, there are not 'any number of reasons' why nurses use food-banks.  Nurses use food-banks because they can't afford food!

Nurses!

Where once, paid-for care in your old age would leave you with at least your final £23,000 of savings - not including your house - the cap will be raised to £100,000, including your house.  In other words, if your house is worth more than £100,000, you'll be left with nothing but a roof over your head by the time your care's paid for, and that roof then goes to the government once you croak.

Free, healthy lunches will be taken from infants, and replaced (in part) with 7p breakfasts.

If the Brexit negotiations don't go her way (and given the rag-tag team of Brexiteers she's put together to handle the negotiations, they won't), then she's promised to just 'walk away'.

"No deal is better than a bad deal."

Bullshit.  The only thing worse than a bad deal, is no deal.

'Strong and stable'?  She's a coward!  While Corbyn was facing down six of his opponents (well, five and a sub), she was in a factory with (pre-vetted) Joe Public, while a woman who'd lost her father that week got laughed at in her stead.

"I've debated him every week at PMQs."

No you haven't.  You've avoided every question he's ever asked, instead spouting soundbites and taking swipes at New Labour, who haven't been in power for almost a decade, and haven't existed (outside of a few misguided and failed rebellions) since Corbyn took over.

And regardless of what happens, she'll be bending us all over in front of Trump (assuming he's still there by the end of the week) in a desperate bid to secure at least one trade deal that isn't too much worse than the one we have already.

"But never mind all that: the Sun, Mail and Express are all running (long ago disproved) headlines about Corbyn being a terrorist sympathiser, and coming from them it must be true...!"

I'm not saying everyone should vote Labour tomorrow, but if they've got the best chance of beating the Tory in your constituancy, then do!  If it's the Lib Dems, vote Lib Dem.  SNP.  Greens.  Whoever it is who will take a seat from May!

Because that's what's important this election: putting an end to this regime, that started with Cameron, and has descended into deepening despair with May.  She claims this election was about a stronger footing at the negotiating table, and if the Tories are down just one seat when the count is done, she will, by her own measure, have weakened the country for the sake of her ego.

Just one seat, and the weak, wobbly, detrimental, arrogant, egotistical, homophobic, greedy, self-righteous...person (fought so hard against typing something else), will be out come the end of the Brexit negotiations, if not sooner.

...

That was considerably longer and ramblier than I intended... Sorry.

Hate to Say I Told You So

It has been well established by now by every review out there - whether positive or negative (and I’ve seen plenty of both) - that Suicide Squad is a mess.  Personally, I had fun with it, but the issues are far too jarring for me to recommend it, or argue with anyone who thought it was utter dog-shit.

The issues are glaring from the off, with the film opening with not one, but two scenes of Amanda Waller explaining her plan to a room of military officials; with the first interspersed with a few quick character bios almost as clumsy and forced as Batman’s Justice League email in BvS.  The trailer featured a line from Rick Flag describing the characters - “Shoots people; burns people; eats people… Crazy person” - that does a far better job of establishing the characters than the opening ten minutes of the actual film.

This clumsiness is prevalent throughout film, with poorly placed and repetitive flashbacks, nonsensical character beats there purely for the sake of plot movement, lazy exposition, terrible pacing...and so on (it’s like a bad Arrow episode).

The list of problems is long and, as I said, already well-established, but I’d like to highlight one in particular.  It’s something I’ve previously mentioned, that I’ve been concerned about since the film was first announced, and a prime example of which we saw in BvS: Who are these people?

Way back in the days when The Dark Knight had just been released, and Marvel’s Avengers experiment was just starting to come together, Warner Bros. announced they would be making a Justice League movie: not kicking off a Justice League cinematic universe - establishing the characters and the world they inhabit - but jumping straight in with Justice League, complete with new versions of all your favourite characters.

It was a terrible idea, and it wasn’t long before internet backlash seemingly made WB see sense, shelve the project and instead allow Christopher Nolan to finish off his Dark Knight trilogy, before bringing him on to oversee a new Superman film that would set the stage for the rest of the Justice League, just as Iron Man did for the Avengers.

Unfortunately, under the hamfisted fan-boy direction of Zack Snyder - that had served him and us surprisingly well on Watchman and 300 - Man of Steel was a dour, tedious, inconsistent, underwhelming mess.

Rather than scratch this off as a false start and hope for better from new Wonder Woman, Flash and Aquaman origins, WB panicked and jumped straight ahead with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

And we all know how that turned out.

One of the few highlights (and possibly the biggest surprise) of BvS was Ben Affleck as Batman - contrary to fan-boy fears the world over (including my own), he proved a good fit for the roles - but that didn’t mean the character himself wasn’t weakly established and poorly represented.  This was a bitter, angry Batman, pushing his violent nature to the extreme, to the point of no longer caring whether he kills.  In one scene, we’re shown a Robin suit, apparently graffitied by the Joker, suggesting Batman’s anger and bitterness stem from the death of the Boy Wonder, as in Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns - an idea confirmed (to some extent) by the presence of the anti-Superman Batsuit from said book - but even in that, when Batman is at his most detached, desperate and willfully violent, he never crosses that line.

Not that you can’t have Batman killing people - if anything, showing the Dark Knight pushed over the edge to a point where he’s perfectly willing to break his one golden rule is an interesting piece of character development - but the issue in BvS is it is not shown.  Yes, we’re given a glimpse of the reason behind his mindset, but how much did that event really change him?  Has this always been a more violent Batman?  Was he closer to Tim Burton’s version, Joel Schumacher’s or Christopher Nolan’s?  Did Robin’s apparent death push him just an inch too far, or completely flip his personality?

The same is true for every character in Suicide Squad.  Amanda Waller calls them ‘The worst of the worst’, but that doesn’t hold up.  All we see of them in the movie is Deadshot is an assassin-for-hire who loves his daughter, and never kills women or children, Killer Croc lives in the sewers, and seemingly only attacks people who attack him, El Diablo is a pacifist,Captain Boomerang is a bank robber and Harley Quinn is a mentally-ill gymnast with Stockholm syndrome.  Hardly the worst humanity has to offer.

In fact, other than Enchantress - an evil spirit awakened from a 2,000 year imprisonment, so understanderbly miffed - the only character who truly shows themselves to be a cold, calculating sociopath is Waller.

The most glaring example of this lack of background, however, is Jared Leto’s much-touted Joker.  After all of the behind-the-scenes reports of how scarily ‘method’ he got with the role, the Joker’s entire on-screen character is that of a violent, but strategic gang boss with a weird growl and an obsession with Quinn.  The elements are all there for this to be an interesting new take on the character - how did he establish himself?  what’s he done to earn his reputation?  why is he so obsessed with Quinn far beyond the simple pleasure the character’s previously taken in having a loyal attractive pet around to play with and abuse as he fancies? - but we get none of this, and as a result, he’s little more than a caricature.

Leto has stated that a lot of his scenes wound up on the cutting-room floor, but no matter what’s in them, I struggle to see how a few deleted scenes would cover the gaping holes in the character.

Again, this isn’t just an issue with Suicide Squad.  We’re now three movies into the DC Cinematic Universe, and the only character with a true origin story is the one character who, not only everyone knows - comic-book fan or not - but whose entire character relies on being consistent and immovable.  In other words, the only character in this whole enterprise who doesn’t need an origin story.*

*I realise we also get Batman’s (wholly unnecessary by now) origin story, but that’s just

why he became Batman, not what turned him into this version of Batman.

In WB’s rush to catch up with Marvel, they’ve completely missed what has made the MCU so successful: namely the balance struck between staying true to the characters’ comic-book origins, while making them accessible enough to a new, cinema-going audience.

That said, at least Suicide Squad has added a sorely-lacking element of fun to the franchise.

Filler

Agents of SHIELD is apparently tanking in the States, thanks to an already flagging viewership, causing its creators to sideline interesting plot in favour of uninteresting relationships in an attempt to at least hold on to the lowest common denominator, thus ensuring numbers flag further.

Full disclosure at this point: this is another post inspired by ol' MovieBob (but isn't all about this):



It's a shame because, slow as it was to start, I still enjoyed season 1 from the get-go thanks to the characters and general set-up. Once it really got going and went all-out in season 2, it was genuinely great, and I was excited to see where it all went in season 3 (though because I live in the UK, and didn't realise till last week it was on E4, I've been awaiting the opportunity to binge it elsewhere).

That said, I was perhaps fortunate in the fact I watched it on Netflix: I didn't have to wait a week at a time to see the overarching plot slowly develop amidst all of the slow, less interesting stuff. This is yet another in a long line of American series that are far too long. 24, Lost, Arrow, Dexter, House, Breaking Bad, even Buffy the Vampire Slayer: in the best of them, the characters and eagerness to see the plot develop keep you hooked, even during the many filler episodes, while the worst of them are an endurance test, if you stick with them at all (looking at you, Heroes).

I get it: the whole point of a 'season' is that it runs for a season, and there's less pressure on the various networks to keep coming up with new things to fill the airwaves, but when was the last time any show had enough plot to remain interesting over its entire 24 episode run? Even season 2 of Daredevil had to pad its run-time with the tedious and ill-conceived Elektra stuff, and that was only 13 episodes!

And the issue extends beyond drawing out a potentially interesting narrative until it becomes too thin for a Michael Bay movie. Though there's less pressure on the networks themselves, there's a lot more on the shows' creators to keep things interesting, and if interest flags just a bit, then the network will be less willing to commit another 24 weeks of scheduling to a follow-up season.

I'm not saying American shows should go the way of British shows, that only stick around for 6 episodes a year (or 3 every 2 years, in the case of Sherlock), but there's surely a happy medium.  

Take Game of Thrones: while not without filler (how many people watched the first 3 seasons eager to see what happened next to Sansa?), nor is it long enough to out-stay its welcome. At only 10 episodes a season, it's required by design to stay on point, without too often meandering into needless sub-plots (Dorn notwithstanding), or pulling the inane trick of having characters act completely out of character just to create conflict and drag a small idea out to a whole episode (Dear Arrow, there's a big difference between layering or evolving a character, and having them randomly act like a douche just to force an artificial epiphany later in the episode).

Another advantage is it opens up the schedule to more shows. How many ideas fall by the wayside because networks are handing out 24-week slots, rather than 10 or 12? How many shows could have been given a second chance? How many shows wouldn't have seen a dramatic drop-off if they weren't dragging on for the better part of 6 months?

Boy Scout Blues

I've never been a big fan of Superman.  I enjoyed the Christopher Reeve films as a kid, but beyond that, I found the more-or-less omnipotent boy scout thing dull, especially next to more complex superheroes like Spider-Man and Batman.

The problem is, Superman was a character of his time, and although he evolved significantly from his conceptual beginnings, and enjoyed something of a reboot with the Richard Donner film, his relevancy dropped off a cliff shortly after Superman II, and has never really recovered, as evidenced by DC's repeated and increasingly desperate attempts to recapture people's imagination:



I bring this up because, Bob Chipman - aka MovieBob - just released an insightful little piece on why the aforementioned Richard Donner film worked, and why it (mostly) holds up to this day:



Now I don't entirely agree - certainly not on the point of how well it holds up today (taken out of the context of its time, I find it slow, clunky, cheesy and a bit silly-looking) - but he does make a particularly good point on how a character like Superman needs to be adapted for the screen, highlighting why recent interpretations since that whole mess in the 90s - not just in terms of the Zack Snyder films, but from DC in general - have failed:

"People are bored of him because he's invincible, so we'll kill him."
"Kids like Rambo-esque action heroes, so we'll give him a mullet and guns."
"People miss the old Superman, so we'll do the old Superman."
"Oh, people don't like the old Superman, so we'll put him in jeans and a t-shirt."
"Batman's still popular, so we'll also make Superman brooding and gritty."
"Okay, we've no idea what people want...so we'll make Superman lost and clueless too!"

While Donner and crew were focused on presenting Superman as everyone needed and expected to see him, both DC's comic-book and cinematic arms have since tried to present him as they think the audience thinks they want to see him.  The result being...



Personally, I think Superman has had his day.  There's still a place for him, but I don't believe that place is as a protagonist in his own stories.

Superman is an ideal: incorruptible, indestructible and insurmountable.  Even amongst his fellow superheroes, he's a higher presence; there for the rest to aspire to.  He long ago reached a point where, to have him flying around punching bad-guys in the face - how ever powerful those bad-guys might be - was to undermine the character.

Better now to either make a genuine martyr of him - without the usual resurrection cop-out - or to have him acknowledge his own status and remove himself from the day-to-day goings on, only to return when the stakes become universal.

A More Positive Outlook

I originally scribbled this down a few months back, while pondering the sorry state we're currently in as a species.  I often find it difficult to remain optimistic in our present global climate of ignorance, greed and distrust, but every now and then, a light shines through and I think, Y'know, we might not be so buggered, after all.

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The Earth formed four and a half billion years ago.  For more than half of its existence, it was bereft of life, but as it cooled, circumstances - temperature; atmosphere; chemical compounds; water - were just right for life to form.  The formation of that life immediately changed the circumstances - using up resources; expelling different compounds - the new circumstances gave rise to new life, which resulted in new circumstances...and so on.

By the time the Earth was four billion years old, the ever-changing combination of life and environment came together to cause the Cambrian explosion: a sudden rush of evolution that gave rise to more complex and diverse lifeforms, which spent the next hundred million years or so growing and expanding and dealing with an ice-age, until the Devonian period of fish, plant life and the earliest land animals.  That lot lasted a good two-hundred million years, before a dramatic climate shift, and second ice-age, all but wiped the slate clean and paved the way for the dinosaurs.

Things settled down again for the next hundred and fifty million years-ish, with some of the dinosaurs holding on to their reptilian roots, while others took on more avian attributes, until a meteorite hit and the whole thing required a rethink.  The larger animals couldn’t survive.  The rest either went to ground or took to the air.  Some primates, however, simply got smarter.

Over the next sixty-five million years, the primates’ intelligence grew - thinking their way to survival - and a certain branch learned to not only adapt to their environment, but to adapt their environment to them.  Tools; shelters; clothing.  They learned to grow crops; they learned to hunt rather than simply relying on the land.

A mere two hundred millennia ago, we finally emerged.  A mere two hundred thousand years, after more than two billion of evolution.

In a time when our species is so at odds with itself, I’m comforted by the fact we’re still so young.  Our capacity to learn has afforded us a great advantage over previous species: where evolution once took thousands of generations and millions of years, our thirst  for understanding, and powers of empathy and self-awareness accelerated our own.  Physically, little has changed over the last two hundred thousand years, but our ever-expanding intellect has taken us from seeing the sun as a deity to understanding it is in fact a big ball of burning gas; from thinking of the Earth as a flat plain several thousand years old to (most of us) knowing it’s a four and half billion year-old sphere; from being locked firmly to the ground to crossing the oceans by air and sea, and even walking on the moon.

While in recent millennia, we have stumbled - morality was replaced with religion; empathy with a distrust of people beyond our artificial borders; our thirst for knowledge with the desired comfort of ignorance - these things are fleeting and cannot sustain themselves.  They weaken us as a species and hold us back, but in the end, those clinging to these dying attitudes will themselves die out; left behind while the rest of us come together to seek out the next unreachable horizon...and reach for it.

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The latest inspiration for this somewhat-rosier-than-usual outlook comes from China's drive to be a significant global player in the world of science.

While chasing a dominant footing, there appears to be a prevailing attitude of global cooperation in China's scientific community: an acceptance that, without that cooperation, any advancement will only get so far, and will be soon outstripped.

On the world stage, science is tragically unique - or, at least, in very limited company - in this regard.  While national leaders squabble like children over who owns what, who has the biggest and best toys, and who's omnipotent ghost could deck anyone else's omnipotent ghost, scientists the world over are united in their goal to advance the knowledge and understanding of everyone.  Whether it be the various teams at CERN or on the International Space Station, there's an acknowledgement that the best thing for everyone is to work together.

And if even a regressive, constrictive and skittish government like China's can see the benefit of international cooperation, then there's yet hope for the rest.

Where it ALL Began?

I'm not a physicist.

Just wanted to get that out of the way before I launch into this, so you know I claim no qualified scientific backing to anything I'm about to say.  Then again, what I'm about say probably makes that opening statement redundant anyway:

I don't entirely buy the Big Bang theory.

No, I'm not about to argue the case for Genesis: I spent 12 years going to Catholic schools, and the main thing I took from all of those Religious Studies classes was that it was all bollocks (but that's a rant for another day).

My lack of conviction with regard to the birth of our universe stems from two questions:

1. What came before?
2. What happens when a galaxy dies?

There are several theories concerning what lies beyond our universe and where it all may have come from.  These are too numerous and complicated to get into in any great detail here (not least because I barely understand most of them), but as far as I'm aware, one of the most mathematically sound (or, at least, broadly accepted) at the moment suggests vast sheets of...stuff, flapping around out there, beyond our particular plane of existence.  As these sheets ripple, they will occasionally touch, and the result is a singularity that spawns a universe, much like our own.

The issue I have with these theories - aside from their unfathomability to my scientifically illiterate little brain - is they seem predicated on the assumption that our universe is not all there is, and that there must be something grander out there, beyond its borders.

But what if there isn't?  What if our universe is all there is?  What if the Big Bang was actually just a Big Bang?

Two of the biggest clues backing up the theory of the Big Bang are the motion of the galaxies in the observable universe - everything appears to be moving away from a central point (the singularity) - and background radiation, said to be left over from the initial expansion.

So, I got to thinking about that singularity.  Essentially, it's a Black Hole: a single point in space in which everything is condensed into one, solid thing, even down to an atomic level (blow up an atom's nucleus to the size of a football, and its protons and electrons will be orbiting miles away - in a singularity, even atoms' component parts are squished into a single point).

A particularly big (Super Massive, you might say) Black Hole lies at the heart of every spiral galaxy: it's what gives such galaxies - including our own - their shape.  We're effectively water going down a plughole, which means our precious Milky Way won't last forever.  Eventually, everything that makes up a spiral galaxy will be devoured by the Black Hole at its heart, or the Black Hole itself will reach a point where it can no longer contain itself.  Either way, the time will come when it explodes, throwing all that made up that galaxy out into the cosmos, to be picked up in the wake of other galaxies, or clump together to form new nebulae and, eventually, new galaxies.

If that's the case, then couldn't the effects we attribute to the birth of the universe not simply be from the death of a galaxy?  What if 14 billion years ago, a galaxy reached the end of its life, went the way of Thunder in Big Trouble in Little China, and spread its guts out into the deep, dark infinite, to continue the universe's eternal evolution?

Feverishly Elective: an update!

Well, who'd have thunk?!  A mere two months after announcing that all schools were being forced to become academies - after a mere two months of a feckless halfwit failing to convince people who know far better than her that, 'no, really, it's a great idea!' - the government has yanked up the handbrake and swung a 180 that would make Ken Block fill his helmet with yesterday's Frosties.

"This is about being a listening government..." says the twit in question.  "Better to have reforms than have none at all."

And what are those reforms?  "We absolutely support those strong local authorities where schools are good and outstanding - they can make the choice to convert," while those that are failing or can't be supported by the local authority will be 'compelled' to convert.

Soooo they're scrapping the whole idea and going back to Labour's plan.  Way to stamp your authority, Nick.

In other election news, bugger-all has changed.  Oh, everyone's claiming some kind of victory: the Tories are now top of the lowly pile being sniggered at from on high by the SNP; Labour have held on, despite everyone assuming they'd lose big; UKIP and the LibDems have actually made some gains; and Sadiq Khan looks set to become the new Boris, despite once spending a brief evening in the same building as someone with extremist views, clearly marking him out as a terrorist sympathiser (though, when Zac Goldsmith did exactly the same thing, it was meaningless).

However, to look at these 'victories' another way: it doesn't matter who has the most of the measly number of seats left open by the SNP--being the second party in Scotland right now is like being the biggest of five field mice arguing with the farm's angry tabby; given the shit the Tories have been pulling, and their deepening well of failures, Labour should be stomping on their bacon-smelling bollocks, not merely holding on; the LibDems have risen from the doldrums of insignificance to become a protest vote for people who can't bring themselves to be racist; and the best London can hope for from a new mayor is him talking slightly less gibberish than the last one.

 

Democracy.

Yay.

First Impressions

Last night I finally got around to watching this...


...and it was awesome.  Fast, funny, fearless, and staggering performances from not only Dicaprio as Jordan Belfort (seriously, Academy, you must've been sampling some of the substances on display to have chosen McConaughey over him), but from the entire cast.  Jona Hill, in particular, was a revelation!

I immediately gave it 5 stars on Netflix.

This morning, however, I found myself questioning if it really was that good.

The performances I still cannot fault - there wasn't a single weak link, with almost the entirety of the main cast being asked to play comedy, tragedy, quiet drama and balls-to-the-wall outlandishness at the drop of a hat - but the more I thought about it, the more holes I found elsewhere.

For a start, it's predictable.  As outlandish as the characters behave from scene to scene, the plot is so by-the-numbers you can chart it from the most generic of generic synopses: It's a decadent rags-to-riches, rise-and-fall story.  Scarface, Wall Street, Goodfellas; if you've seen any of them (or a hundred others) you know exactly how it goes.

Then there's the timeline: We're given musical cues throughout to represent the period, but the timing often suggests we've been in this particular year for some unknown time.

There's also little character closure beyond Belfort.  Yes, it's his story (and a 'true' one, so any extraneous info is, presumably, out there somewhere), but I was still left questioning what happened to the supporting characters: How did they deal with the crash of '87?  What happened to her?  What happened to him? Who was charged, what with and what punishment was dished out?

Even an Animal House-style blurb ahead of the closing credits would've been welcomed: "Rugrat was indicted on 600 charges of market manipulation, 300 charges of substance abuse and 1 charge of fraudulent hair.  He served 4 years as a McDonald's scrubber, before being promoted to fries and dying of a salt overdose."

But here's the thing: Should I judge the film on my immediate reaction, or mark it down because of the problems I've thought of after the fact?  Is my initial enjoyment more important than analytical hindsight?

Looking at it from the other side, when I first saw The Dark Knight Rises, I was underwhelmed.  No, it was never going to live up to The Dark Knight, but it was more than that: the film felt bloated and ponderous, the plot was silly, the tone was a mess and the ending as crap.

However, I did enjoy it a lot more the second time around.  Already being aware of the issues, I was able to ignore them and enjoy the spectacle: the airborne heist; the bat-pod chase; Hathaway's Catwoman; the climactic battle; Hathaway's Catwoman...

Did any of that make it a better film?  I'm inclined to say no, because all of that was there before, but was undermined by its issues.

So does noticing Wolf of Wall Street's issues after the fact make it a worse film?  That, I find more difficult to answer.  On the one hand, those issues were already there, but I didn't notice because of how much I was enjoying the rest.  If anything, this elevates the quality of what did work.  On the other hand, when those issues do come to mind, it means that enjoyment can be lessened over time, reducing its lasting appeal.

Maybe it's more of a scale thing.  I thoroughly enjoyed Die Another Day when I first saw it; now I see it as a depressing piece of shit.  I didn't get The Life Aquatic when I first saw it; now I adore it!

You see, none of this is to say I now consider Wolf of Wall Street to be a bad film - issues or not, it's a tremendous and highly entertaining piece of work - it's just that it did get me thinking about how I judge films.