Avengers Review - In Bullet Point Form!

So we saw The Avengers...

- I lost count of the amount of times people stopped using rifles during firefights because Pistols Is Better!

- Every time the characters started fighting, I wanted someone to pick Ryu so that the Marvel Vs Capcom feeling would be complete. Every big scene felt empty and flaccid to me, it had all the impact of watching someone else play a video game.

- Am, I only person who said "Tell me about the lambs" during the big tell me about the lambs scene?

- What military sky boat (a supremely stupid idea in the comics and worse in the movie) would have less failsafe and fall back precautions than a modern airliner?

- Does no one in New York City have any kind of self preservation sense at all? 15 minutes into a full blown alien attack and people are still gaping by windows hoping to get glass shards in the face.

- Those sky serpent things, were they some kind of left over design that Michael Bay decided not to use for the Transformers movies?

- A lot of the lines in this movie make no sense when you think about them. "They'll come." "How can you know?" "We'll need them." That's no kind of answer!

- I have a nifty shield! I have a magic hammer! I have super strength! I have a full blow Deus Ex Machina suit! I have a... 9mm pistol... I'm just here for T&A aren't I?

- So many of the jokes and quips fell flat for me that I started to resent the idea of laughing when one actually amused me. By the time Hulk punched Thor, I just sighed and looked away from the screen.

- And the guy who got Jossed was totally Jossed. That was not story supported, it was a cheap trick performed by a bad writer with no other way to make people care.

- Over all Joss Whedon remains a rather cheap hack with a rather shallow bag of tricks. If you like his bag of tricks, it's probably fine. I hate his bag of tricks and the movie was chock full of the things I don't like about his work.

Otherwise it was okay. I didn't want to kill anyone, I didn't want to ram chopsticks into my eyes, but Joss Whedon is still a shitty writer and I don't like his works, but this is the closest I've ever come to not hating every minute of it. If we'd been watching at home though, I would have walked out less than halfway through and not finished it.

Movie Review: Mobsters

Mobsters (1991/ Universal Pictures/ Dir. Michael Karbelnikoff)

We’ve probably talked about this before, but movies that took place before the fifties and featured guys in hats doing guys in hats things were very cool for about twelve minutes when I was a kid. For reasons I’ve never been quite clear on, I was very VERY into the time era that went from the 20s to the 40s when I was between the ages of 11 and 16. Maybe it was an obsession with old Warner Brothers Cartoons, maybe I got a taste of some really good Film Noir, maybe I just liked fedoras. Who can say? No, it’s probably not just the hats, I think it has to be the time period. You can’t just say “This has guys in hats” and get me interested, but you can say “It takes place in 1935” and I am THERE! Case in point, this movie. I pretty much have to put this thing into context, because without context it almost doesn’t/shouldn’t exist and in many ways it fails to make sense on its own. It’s not a good movie, but it’s too well made to be on any “So bad they’re good” lists, mostly it’s forgotten. Again, without context, you fail to understand why such talent would go to such wretched waste.

We can’t stop here Dave, this is Dalek Country.

We can’t stop here Dave, this is Dalek Country.

I was thinking of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey for a review, but I had a problem. Dr. Hunter S. Thompson dropped a seed into my brain, and I can’t think about the movie without dealing with that seed.

Allow me to quote from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas…

What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody - or at least some force - is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

Sci-Fi was basically mired in that self-same belief for decades. If you read all of the Space Odyssey books, you find that there are more Monoliths are more numerous than just the movie makes them seem. There are many monoliths and the reason for them is that a super-advanced race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings sent them to earth was to advance our evolution from one stage to another. Eventually they decide we’re cool and let us into their mouse club just like a Monty Python sketch!

Now, do me a favor and go read the bit about the acid culture again.

I can’t get this idea out of my head that Arthur C. Clarke fell into the same sort of trap along with a lot of other writers. Star Trek does it, B5 does it, Dr. Who does it. Asimov doesn’t do it as directly, but he does some. So many of the writers, names and stories I’ve mostly forgotten now, so many aliens and supercomputers playing as a stand in for God. There seems to be this need to reach out to a god, or a super-advanced race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings, or possibly just a really smart robot. Star Wars doesn’t, and I’ve noticed that’s one of the reasons some sci-fi fans hold it in contempt. You could argue that The Force is appealing, but I argue that it’s just a sort of unfocused spiritualism. More of a way to define the walls of the tunnel than any sort of light tender.

I have noticed though, that it happens a lot more with older sci-fi than the newer stuff. By newer I mean the mid 90s or so, because… you know. I remember some of Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick being very down on the idea of religion as a whole. English movies and TV shows were much more apt to say either there was no God, or we were alone in the universe during the 80s. Red Dwarf and Hitchhiker’s Guide come to mind. Rationalism came to Sci-Fi in the way the genre always pretended it subscribed to. A wave of atheism rolled in after a while, and then rolled back as people who should have embraced the idea of humanity doing it for itself drifted back into their deeply conservative ways while nominally holding liberal views. Gods and super-advanced races of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings were once again all the rage, lending a helping hand or leaving us in our purgatories with that unexplained polar bear.

So now, you can stand near a closed down book store, and with the right kind of eyes, you can almost see that high-water mark. The place where the wave broke and rolled back. Or maybe there was no wave, maybe it was just a small ripple of rationalism in an otherwise over-godded pond.

So yeah, Hunter S. Thompson and Arthur C. Clarke referenced in the same post. Not everyone does that. Next time I’ll talk about what My Little Pony and the Russian Revolution have to do with each other.