There was an Australian show, airing on the commercial station Network Ten roughly around 2006-2009. I cannot recall its title, nor can I find it through internet searches, but that’s fine – you’re not gonna watch it and this story doesn’t require that. This show was very heavily advertised before its debut; at the time, Australian television was dominated largely by American productions, with much of our cultural questions being how to counteract that. This particular show advertised itself with the cast, out of character, explaining the premise of the show, interspersed with clips from it.
The show is built around its central character – let’s call him Callum, for simplicity’s sake – who is, according to the cast, a guy who wavers between free-spirited and selfish. The main plot point we’re given is that his girlfriend is angry at him for caring more about his car than anything else, and she’s driven to try and wreck it to get his attention in some way. So I was shocked when I watched the first episode and none of this accurately captured the show.
First of all – and I should have seen this coming – the show was very much an ensemble piece, with Callum not even really being the most important person in it. The actual plot of the first episode is that a friend of his is getting married. This leads into the major, extremely confusing problem: just going off the text, this isn’t the story of a slacker guy who needs to learn to grow the fuck up, this is the story of a guy with – and forgive me for this, but I’m accurately conveying the story they’re telling – a crazy girlfriend.
The story of the first episode is that Callum’s girlfriend is desperately needy; she nags at him constantly, and she hijacks the wedding to propose to Callum. Everyone around is visibly uncomfortable at this, and Callum looks extremely embarrassed as he tell her ‘no’, to which she responds by throwing a fit, going out to his car, and, if I recall correctly, trying to drive it into the ocean, claiming he loves it more than anything else, a claim fatally undermined by the fact that he let his friends borrow it for their honeymoon.
At the time, I found this horribly sexist; now I’ll throw in some nuance that there are actually women like this, but I’m suspicious of people who want to tell a story that’s just about how awful a woman is with no sincere diving into it. But more importantly: how did they get the idea of the story they were telling so horribly wrong? The fascinating thing is how the only three choices Callum made in the story were a) date the wrong woman, b) lend his car, and c) turn down a public marriage proposal.
I was thinking you wouldn’t have to do much to ‘fix’ the story, but actually you kind of have to take all the things he does and replace them with other things that actually convey the point you’re trying to make; you could keep the wedding, perhaps even keep Callum lending his car to his friends to convey that he’s not a total write-off, but he would have to actively undermine a reasonable request from his girlfriend. I dunno, picking up her parents from the airport? He misses that because he sees a chance to get a new part for his car? I’m spitballing here, but it doesn’t take much to actually tell the story of a selfish guy with a good heart. You’d definitely have to rewrite the girlfriend into someone sincerely responsible; probably taking care of everyone around her, running errands when she doesn’t really have to.
This kind of thinking is why I watch bad TV and bad movies and read bad books and bad comics and listen, sometimes, to bad music, by the way. Sometimes people question why I dedicate so much time and effort to looking at bad art; I’ve got an upcoming article on Atlas Shrugged that especially caused people to question my judgement when they heard I was reading it. It’s because I find the process of breaking down some bad art just as fulfilling as breaking down good art, and in some ways it’s better.
Great art always gives me great criticism, but it rarely directly gives me great art. Obviously, breaking down the masterworks like The Shield gives me an understanding of how to tell a good story, but now that I’ve got that basis, I’ve found it more productive to find bad art and ‘fix’ it through taking its good ideas and filtering them through better storytelling. I break down why it doesn’t work and I make it work, which is fun if nothing else.
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About the writer
Tristan J. Nankervis
Tristan J Nankervis (aka Drunk Napoleon) has been a writer, pop culture critic, dishwasher, standup comedian, waiter, potato cake factory worker, gamer, TV worker, and various other things. You can find him in Hobart, Tasmania.
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"Obi-Wan never told you about your father."
"I love you." / "I know."
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Department of
Conversation
What Did We Watch?
Justified, the end – yeah… it was fine. Pretty good, probably – I had just outstayed my level of interest in the show.
Twisters – yeah… it was fine. Decent blockbuster entertainment, not much more. Probably would have enjoyed it more on the big screen at high volume, but there are plenty of similar movies that hold up better on the small screen.
Live Music – multi-venue festival in another city… yeah, it was fine. I was too tired to stay the whole day so didn’t really get my money’s worth but I’m glad I got out for a few bands. Saw some local grunge kids, a synthpop band from Seattle and some indie-folk kinda stuff on the main stage.
Eurovision – yeah, I know, I probably should have boycotted this for political reasons. But I was tired and friends were chatting about it and it was nice to be involved. A few good songs and some very inventive staging, but at what cost?
Sorry, quite an unenthusiastic weekend.
Eh, live music.
Damn, you are at the opposite pole when it comes to Justified lol.
Season four was so good that I’m glad I watched the show but yeah, I just get impatient with “solidly pretty good TV”. My brain is far more happy to cope with the wild ups and downs of an X-Files etc. for whatever reason.
Wooooo fine live music!!
Final Destination: Bloodlines
A fun time at the movies. This basically fits both the formula and the pleasures of this franchise; it hits upon the brilliant idea that I can’t believe nobody hit on before of having an entire apparent death scene be a fakeout, with the guy seeming like he’ll choke to death then burn alive, only to be fine. There are a lot of moments where it fakes out the savvy viewer and comes at you from another angle; the followup of the protagonist predicting exactly how her cousin will die, only for those exact set of circumstances to play out with her other cousin in the background, is fantastic.
This also leads to the other pleasure: the oddly complicated plotting and oddly offbeat characterisation. Because he survives, the tattooed cousin ends up becoming a riff on the cynical nonbeliever, diving fully into protecting his little brother and willing to take serious, genuinely clever risks to do so, and there’s a very funny note where he’s the first and to an extent only one to completely and immediately believe everything Tony Todd says. The fact that the victims are all related also sets up the characters taking the deaths and potential deaths of the others much more seriously.
Obviously, the only real emotion I got was from Tony Todd’s final scene; the grief for the real Tony Todd, of course, but also the fact that a) the unavoidable emotions of my own father passing away recently, b) the fact that Todd Todd looked kind of like my dad in that final scene and c) specifically, Tony Todd looked old and frail in exactly the same way my Dad did towards the end. A tall and heavy-set guy who is bearded and shockingly thin and fragile-looking.
Red vs Blue, Season One, Episode Two
By this point, the original airing was actually about a dozen (five minute) episodes in, and they’d really found the rhythm and the characters. Caboose in particular is amazing, mainly through Joel Heyman’s amazing performance; not just completely innocent and enthusiastic, but finding so many nuances in it, and the writing upped to match him (“What about you, Caboose? You following any of this?” / “I think so. That guy Tex is really a robot. And you’re his boyfriend. So that makes you… a gay robot.”).
The writers have managed to get this perfect rhythm down on all levels, where it takes itself just seriously enough to have a plot to hang jokes on. There’s a very simple process where one character is genuinely trying to move the plot forward (usually Church on the Blues while the Reds have a habit of handballing the role to each other) while the others are either too lazy to go along with it or too stupid. It’s interesting that the plot – which mixes both revelations and plot turns – is largely movie and game cliches; Church gets killed and simply comes back as a ghost to warn the others about the incoming freelancer Command sent to replace him.
It extends down to the characters and their riffs on each other, with the rhythm of editing and performance mastered. Much of the humour here comes from the characters treating this high-stakes action like they’re working at Dairy Queen, where they’re trying to avoid doing any actual work and mostly look cool in front of each other and score points on each other. This is interspersed with more absurdist humour built around trying to use every part of the Halo engine, with my favourite being a joke using the skulls in the game (“Tex took Jimmy, ripped out his skull, and beat him to death with it.” / “[…] That doesn’t seem physically possible.” / “That’s exactly what Jimmy kept screaming.” / “This doesn’t seem physically possible!”).
It’s this mixture of simplicity and commitment that I find fascinating, and is obviously funny in the context of a show made with a video game. There’s a similar sense of “we took the minimum amount of ideas necessary to make this” that I respond to in Always Sunny and the commitment to wild creativity I respond to in The Simpsons. There’s also just basic farce writing that I love; one scene I particularly liked was Church getting increasingly exasperated with Caboose interrupting his attempts to explain what’s happening, which climaxes with a perfectly delivered interjection from Tucker that’s boring on paper: “Will you just let him talk?”
“I just want you to know… I always hated you. I always hated you the most.”
“Damn, man. We only ran about three hundred feet. You are really out of shape.”
“How come I never get the fucking sniper rifle?”
“It definitely seems like you killing Church has worked out for us.”
“Could you put that in a memo and entitle it SHIT I ALREADY KNOW?!”
“Are you sure Tex is a girl and not a guy? Or like, part-guy, part-shark?”
Lucky Number Slevin
This has a perfect title, conveying precisely how annoying the movie is going to be. Almost every choice in this movie annoys me, down to the dialogue and these weird jump cuts the movie does every now and again. The one exception is the casting; even Josh Hartnett is pretty awesome and easily charming in the central role, and he even gets the movie’s one sincere emotion with seemingly no effort (“Fuck you both.”).
Apparently, this is the last movie to feature Bruce Willis with hair. What a way to go out.
The pierced / tattooed cousin was a great character and agreed on that fake-out scene! Really fun twist to the formula and I liked how it informed his next decisions. Also the way he said that Tony Todd was obviously completely right because he was “weirdly charismatic”. Fun movie!
It feels like he mainly exists at first to be the obviously incorrect sceptic, and then as soon as he sees it happen in front of him, he becomes an audience identification figure; not just believing Tony Todd because he’s Tony Todd, but trying to outsmart Death the way people think they can.
Looool, I have long had that suspicion about Lucky Number Slevin (which I have not watched) and its title, glad to see it confirmed.
What’s really funny is that I got very far in the movie before I realised I’d mixed it up with Smokin’ Aces (which I also have not seen).
Urge to title rant… rising…
Hahaha, me too. Much like Tristan’s mention of Smokin’ Aces, it strikes me as a contrived title where a character is given a really stupid name just so there can be a pun in the title. Ain’t no motherfucker named “Slevin”!
(Smokin’ Aces is a less stupid title, but the logic of getting to the title might be even more contrived.)
Doctor Who, “Shada” – The so-called “lost episode” of classic Who has finally been added to the existing streams on Tubi and YouTube. It was lost in the sense that due to a strike at the BBC, it was only partially finished, not nearly as lost as those totally missing Second Doctor serials. And in fact, prior to the version at hand being made from a mix of the original footage and newly animated and voiced segments with the original cast, two other versions aired on the Beeb. So perhaps another example of misleading advertising.
Alas, the legend this was some lost classic is a lie. It’s very run of the mill, and also very muddled. Douglas Adams was right to dismiss his script back then. But as there is no such thing as a truly bad Tom Baker Doctor Who episode, this one is still worth my time, and has some good Adams dialogue, most notably the Doctor convincing the bad guy’s computer that he’s dead and therefore the computer’s orders not to take orders from him are null and void. The animation, from the same people who re-created those lost Second Doctor episodes, is quite good again, though it’s a bit jarring to go from live action to animation, and from the actors’ voices from the past to their older voices (Lala Ward especially sounds different). But we close with a nice little bit that puts older Tom Baker very briefly back in costume for one last time.
Frasier, “Roz’s Krantz & Gouldenstein Are Dead” – Roz, convinced by Frasier to do her community service for a speeding ticket at a nursing home, freaks when two residents drop dead on her. Frasier goes with Roz to help her get back on the horse, and of course both of them have interesting and life affirming conversations. Roz meets a bluntly honest but feisty old woman played by character actress Lois Smith (Minority Report). Frasier, who has been wondering how much of a difference he makes to his callers’ long term well-being, meets a blind widower who took Frasier’s advice to another widower to heart. James Earl Jones plays the blind man, and even if it would have been better to have an actual blind person, it’s hard to go wrong with the Great Voice. (There’s also a bit of silliness about Frasier breaking and fixing something that belongs to the blind man, but while it’s well done, it feels extraneous to the sweet humanity of the episode.)
M*A*S*H, “Aid Station” – An aid station at the front lines loses its doctor and nurse, plus a corpsman, so Hawkeye, Margaret, and Klinger are sent for a night to fill in. Not a stellar episode since there is not much to do with the rest of the cast, but this marks the start of Hawkeye and Margaret being actual friends, as when push comes to shove, they respect the hell out of each other and when Hawkeye turns off the irreverence and lust, he really does know how to treat Margaret. And it seems Margaret even starts to find some tolerance of Klinger, who leaves behind gowns and does his job as a corpsman seriously. Will be interesting to see how much these changes stick now, since it’s fair to say Margaret really doesn’t lose her antagonism for Hawkeye till she leaves Frank.
Babylon 5 — Team G’Kar! Poor guy, he gets horribly boned here and uhh the Narn themselves aren’t doing too great either. Beyond the extremely significant and fatal actions taking place, this has more Hot Alien Diplomacy, which is exactly what I want from the show instead of increasingly woo woo Earth-based conspiracies. But yeah, Andreas Katsulas is so damn good here, his recalibrating of tone into his usual plummy villainy takes on tragic undertones by the end.
Mitchell — with the bots of course. I forgot this is where the all-time throwaway “They arrested Harlan Ellison!” “GOOD!” comes from, he must have escaped at some point to get B5 off the ground. And I forgot how mean the crew is in terms of fat jokes (and Baker is husky but by no means obese) but good lord are they funny. How drunk was Hoyt Axton when they convinced him to do the theme to this?
Speedtrap — TUBI of course has the original Mitchell and other Joe Don Baker 70s fare and I wanted to pay proper tribute to the man; this was clearly dubbed from another VHS copy and has tracking issues throughout, never change TUBI. The middle of this bogs down in crime conspiracy stuff, not bad but a bit poky, but the first and final thirds are wonderful trash, unpretentious gearhead stunts and crashes with that goofy 70s tone — it’s like a corny Disney movie where multiple cars get crashed in half and Joe Don Baker gets laid. Also, there are several wokka-chikka songs about speed traps and how cool Joe Don Baker is. A dopey joy, and per discussions the other day about heroes dispatching villains by shooting first, Baker and girlfriend Tyne Daly face off against the bad guy (who to be fair has shot at them), and when the bad guy runs away they shoot him in the back. Then his car blows up. You know what to do, folks.
I can’t G’Kar is easily my favourite character – that’s Delenn – but he’s easily my second-favourite. Katsulas absolutely refuses to drop his inherent dignity no matter how silly G’Kar can get.
I am overdue to re-watch MST3K Mitchell if I forgot the Harlan Ellison line.
I re-watched it on Friday as well–Damn funny stuff!!
Knife + Heart – Introduced by movie club. With a violent stabbing bathed in magenta light, this announced itself as a giallo thing right off the bat, so I knew I was probably never going to be totally on board since that’s a corner of film I’m only passingly familiar with and do not have the bloody passion it engenders in the filmmakers inspired to add to its canon. I like the moments better that more resembled a traditional horror movie moments, a terrifying mask and a couple clever kills like one where the screen keeps cutting to black while the killer approaches in a strobe light. But in its deep enthusiasm for giallo, the gay porn community, and French psychodrama, it’s too far afield of my watching to say what I disliked due to unfamiliarity and what I disliked because it was mishandled in execution. I hate to totally shrug something off as Not My Thing but I can’t have everything be My Thing.
I enjoyed this more than some of the other recent giallo homages, it has an interesting mix of sweetness and sleaze going on and plenty of style. But yeah if you’re not into the style, it doesn’t have a ton else going for it – apart from maybe a really good Vanessa Paradis performance, if memory serves.
While I sensed a valiant effort to provide more emotional substance to a genre homage, The giallo elements tended, I think, to undercut its ambition, particularly with regards to the supporting performances. A more direct romantic drama involving the porn production family might have been more rewarding.
Hacks S2E2, 3 & 4 – “OF COURSE IT’S GOING TO SERIES!” A very funny drama that happens to have brutal ownage, and it’s actually speeding through plot fairly quickly because it’s true to character – of course Ava would tell Deborah about the email early on and of course Jimmy would sacrifice for an outcome he does not get even when it costs him, and of course Deborah would fucking suck on a lesbian cruise, having had to live in a man’s world and not really feeling much actual solidarity with other women. (And Ava is a hit there, of course, though god the withering glare Jean Smart gives her when she nods along with the hot couple about sexual binaries is great. I am Deborah’s contempt for Ava’s performative goodness.)
Ownage: Ava’s cruel, not entirely incorrect email, and Deborah’s stinging observation that Ava is in fact a good writer for her because she is also selfish and cruel – note that Deborah doesn’t deny her own evil, but perceives Ava has the same careerist, judgmental, and venal instincts. The vet showing Marcus he cannot take care of a dog right now.
I think you really hit on something here with Deborah-Ava, and why Ava’s performative goodness is so annoying. I mean, sure, it’s understandable in that way young people are still trying to construct themselves and their identities, but it’s also so clear when she’s mentally contorting to say the thing A Good Person would say or to prove she has Good Values instead of having her natural reaction– and Deborah has picked up that Ava is much more naturally like her than she would admit. (Even the original joke that got Ava “cancelled,” as tame as it was, is absolutely a mean joke at someone else’s expense.)
Mad Men
Season 6, Episode 6. “For Immediate Release”. First time.
I must say, I didn’t expect this to turn into one of the show’s patented “SCDP walks right into a hole and pulls themselves out at the last moment though lateral thinking” episodes, with the crucial difference being that here Don does it pretty much on his own (with an assist from Roger in full subterfuge mode), twice. First by breaking off with Jaguar and inadvertedly scuttling the public offer the others have been working on, then by conspiring with Ted Chaough to merge their firms and get the Chevy account. It really disrupts the office, Joan rightly takes it as a slap to the face, and it sends Pete reeling. Pete also has to deal with his father-in-law pulling the Vicks account after they find each other at a whorehouse, both acting outraged at the other through their own hypocrisy. In the end, Pete takes it out on Trudy, perhaps finally breaking whatever tenous bond they had. And yet, as bad as Pete has it at the moment, I wonder if him and Trudy finally calling it quits might be for the best in the long run. Terrific acting rom Allison Brie in their confrontation scene.
Back to the merger plot, this was a great “oh no” episode, as Don and company go from one quick decision to another without quite consider all the ramifications. It makes sense that it falls on Peggy, perhaps the show’s most sensible and empathetic character, to really take stock on what all of these decisions really mean, once she processes the shock of finding herself working under Don again.
Great scene between Don and Ted too. Ted is an interesting guy, brilliant but perhaps too sensitive for a cutthroat business like this. I don’t think there’s a single other advertising head out there who would have gone for this move, and I’m fascinated to see how SCDP and CGC mesh after the honeymoon wears off.
Also, Megan is never better as a character than when she shares an episode with her mother, and that bears out here.
Face/Off
First time. Fun and oozing in 90’s aesthetic and vibes, but not quite as wild an freewheeling as I expected. It’s interesting to watch a movie like this in the old mode where short bursts of urban warfare/dystopic grime are separated by long sections of crazed melodrama, especially as we’re now on the other end of the Fury Road/John Wick/Mission: Impossible mode of wall-to-wall action storytelling. It made me a bit anxious, but there’s pleasures to be had all through the movie, from the famous sci-prison to Cage and Travolta literally outdoing each other, to the quietly demented plot and tone. And I must say, the final story beat comes from a different, much more sentimental and sappy movie, but it worked on me all the same.
Momma with Wishy at the Marquis Theatre – Fuck yeah live music! This was at a club downtown, which was a real flashback to younger days when I’d be at indie-rock club shows and also to a time when I might have been one of the youths arriving to the party district around the time the show let out. But now I am old and went straight home. Anyway, I’d been looking forward to this for weeks, and Momma delivered, even if they didn’t play personal favorite “Rockstar,” but since this was a tour for the new album (go check out Welcome to My Blue Sky now!), I wasn’t terribly surprised, either, and the show was great. After watching her play, Etta Friedman may be entering my list of celebrity crushes. Wishy played some really good 90s-flavored rock (complimentary version), too.
Celebrity Jeopardy, Jackass Edition – This is on YouTube and it’s really funny. Steve Harvey cannot with these people. Johnny Knoxville has a couple of great bits, like wearing the exact same suit Steve is wearing, and bringing a taser to tase his teammates when they give a bad answer. The Bonus Round was so easy I figure the questions had some element of “all these guys definitely have multiple concussions” baked into it.
What Did We Play?
Strahd was mainly a battle against needleblights, and as these things go, it was pretty fun. Interestingly, those things, which are fairly easy to kill since they are basically trees, can be fatal. Our DM told us that one of the main NPCs in the game was killed her in her last Strahd campaign. Wow.
The needleblights managed to kill my character when I played in Strahd. Some bad rolls mixed with getting overwhelmed.
Did you manage to get healed or did you need to bid farewell to your character?
Oh, he very much died – we were too low level to raise anyone from the dead, though we tried when later characters died. I accept it as part of the tension though – you play enough and it’s like switching out characters on Law & Order, just an expected part of the process.
That’s actually my one dislike of D and D I haven’t gotten past. When my character nearly died, I was all “if he’s dead, I am gone, this is not fun anymore.” I understand it’s not a bug, it’s a feature, and I have seen people’s glee at getting to start over fresh with new character ideas, but for me it would just be confirmation that the game is the wrong sort of dark for me.
Citizen Sleeper – feel like I’m pretty deep into this now, it’s all basically resource management but with good enough writing to make it compelling. I quite often get hung up on Difficult Choices in video games but I’m not finding this one too bad on that front – maybe because it’s mostly text and I don’t feel as integrated into the story? Not entirely sure, but enjoying it very much all the same.
My D&D friends and I have taken a break, first with a Lancer run, and now with a game called Eat The Reich, a simple tabletop game where you’re one of six vampires dropped in Nazi-occupied Paris to hunt down and kill Hitler. It’s a game based around trying to justify rolling as many dice as possible to complete a task; when you’re trying to do something, you roll one d6 for every point you have in a relevant skill, then another d6 for every item you use in the thing you’re doing, and then extra dice if you manage to incorporate the item in a specific way associated with the item, with the goal of each rolling high enough to count as a ‘success’. As you’d imagine, it’s very silly and mainly around building ridiculous setpieces; I managed to string together enough to roll sixteen dice on a single action, and the record was eighteen. We eventually killed Hitler by flushing him down a toilet in his zeppelin floating above Paris.
Marvelous idea for a game. Even if historically speaking Hitler was in Paris only once. But what’s a better setting for a general audience, the city of lights or Berlin? Does Berlin has catacombs full of skeletons?
We actually went into the French catacombs, and I was extremely annoyed that nobody got my Victor Hugo sewer joke.
Portal Reloaded – Coming back to this one, the community-made free extension to Portal 2 that adds a time portal to allow you to move to a point 20 years in the future. It’s not quite as exquisitely perfect an object as the regular Portals – the rules of moving cubes back and forth through time has a couple exceptions invented to prevent easier puzzle solutions – but it has the same gently guided visual experience of solving as the other games. Considering this game is free, comes with a cooperative mode, and there’s another free community-made set of levels available that I haven’t touched yet, purchasing Portal 2 might be the best game deal of all time.
I really need to play Portal 2 still, the old laptop I used to game on basically hit a performance limit at the first Portal and it’s only now that I have a suitable console. But with an overdue upgrade comes a long backlog…
Killer Instinct Gold – Nintendo 64 on Nintendo Switch Online
They uploaded this last week and I’d never played it so I gave it a try. Very good, responsive and fluid for an early 2.5 N64 fighting game. The controls are tighter than I expected but for some reason I just can’t get blocking to work right, which really limits how well I can play it. Might give it another try later but at this point I think I’d rather replay the SNES Killer Instinct.
Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter – Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics on Nintendo Switch
Got a new controller over the weekend so I try it out with this and it’s so responsive and precise it makes me feel like I’ve playing fighting games on Switch wrong with my old controllers. The game itself is very good, more constrained than future MvC games but in a good way. I’ll try to beat Arcade Mode during the week.
Legacy of the Wizard (NES) – Putting down The Lost Crown for now and not wanting to spend money on another new game (although if Clair Obscur goes on sale I may have to pick that up). Anyway, I haven’t played this in an extremely long time, and it’s one of those games I remember having fun playing as a kid but never really beating because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. So I fired it up yesterday.
I got the first crown with Pochi but then struggled with Xemn’s section (the block-moving with the glove is annoyingly imprecise and the kind of mechanic that would work better on a controller with more buttons). So I decided to check if my emulator was up to date; the auto-check in the software itself always told me it was the latest version. Turns out I was running 0.9.9 and the newest version is 2.1.0. Whoops.
Unfortunately, the newest version is not compatible with the old save states, so I had to play through that section all over again. But I did get through the part I was struggling with (albeit not in the fashion the guide I was using recommended), so I left off somewhere in Xemn’s section, and I gotta decide whether to press through and get his crown, or go back and switch to someone else for now. (Each time you get a crown, you fight a boss, but the bosses get increasingly stronger based on how many crowns you’ve found; there’s not one tied to each individual crown. Xemn is the strongest character, so the guide recommends backing out and getting Lyll and Meyna’s crowns first, especially once you use Xemn to get the mattock for Lyll.)
As opposed to this, I sometimes like trailers for movies that outright lie about the premise of the film, so long as I like the new direction they chose better. For example, Inception’s trailer explains the concept for inception –
incorrectly. They say it’s stealing from peoples’ dreams, which is cool enough, but imagine my delight when they play out that idea in the first fifteen minutes and then spend the rest of the movie with the even cooler concept of planting ideas in dreams. The flip side is something like last year’s Civil War, a movie where I would like see the version of the film the trailer editor was making.
I think engagement with bad art can be instructive in the right circumstances. Atlas Shrugged, while arguably a colossal waste of time for being so long and leaden, is an earnest expression of an idea and mapping the ways the shortcomings in the text play with the shortcomings in the ideas can be rewarding (to a point). As opposed to engaging with, say, a bad Illumination animated movie which has no ideas beyond making a heap of money.
Will co-sign the controversial but correct take that the Sing movies are significantly worse than anything Rand ever cooked up.
At least Rand has a point of view. The fuck am I going to argue with Sing about? That the children of incarcerated gorillas shouldn’t earn their father’s love by covering Elton John?
There is plenty to argue! For one, that gorilla should’ve gotten the death penalty.
A world where a crooning mouse voiced by Seth MacFarlane lives has no death penalty.
I *loved* Sing and I’ve spent the past few years trying to figure out what the hell is wrong with me.
What a degenerate! *goes back to watching movies that have running gags of buxom students and randy driving instructors crashing through multiple giant 70s automobiles*
Cori does too! At some point I have to check it out just to see what side of it I’ll fall on.
I do like that whole ‘let’s put on a show’ idea, that might be one of the factors.
Yeah that might be a factor – I’ve been thoroughly conditioned to love that kind of plot by the Muppets! I haven’t revisited it or watched the sequel because it feels like a strange anomaly in my tastes that I’m content to leave alone, haha.
It’s a charming idea for a plot! And the Muppets (via Jim Henson and Frank Oz etc) make it personal even while they’re engaging in the hoary old tropes (reveling in these tropes, nobody had packed a cardboard suitcase for at least fifteen years before that movie). Sing, to me, does not have that personal note, it only knows what those beats sound like and plugs them in like everything else. Not that I’m judging your terrible, indefensible tastes, of course! (Sincerely, the guy who preferred the sequel to the original Look Who’s Talking last week)
In my head I know you’re right about it being formulaic and lacking the personal touch but my heart said “give it five stars!” and I was powerless to resist.
I haven’t seen the Look Who’s Talkings since childhood but I think I’m happy to listen to the Blank Check episodes based on those distant memories rather than revisiting them in 2025…
To somewhat tie it to the article, it has a couple of weird factors that makes it possible to engage while still disposable. Like it has a single credited writer/director (and Garth Jennings had some early indie and studio promise) which is unusual in studio animation. So some of my pushback is knowing this and then seeing it applied to a dozen derivative stories hitched to the parent company’s catalog of songs and I fear is this what auteurism will look like to kids in the future. Like Reese Witherspoon is a pig who sings “Shake It Off” is some Mad Libs-level decision-making, and this type of fill in the blank with A-list star, animal and radio pop hit is repeated ad nauseum for two hours.
It’s just so bland! I did a legit double take seeing McConaghuey’s name in the credits, the guy has a very distinctive voice but you wouldn’t know that from this garbage.
Thinking of how Suicide Squad was famously recut by the trailer editors but either way the film is a disaster (have rarely been ANGRIER watching a movie).
Year of the Month update!
This June, we’ll be moving on to 1983, including all these movies, albums, books, et al!
Jun. 23rd: Sam Scott: El Sur
Jun. 24th: John Bruni: Legendary Hearts
Jun. 30th: Tristan Nankervis: The Big Chill
And there’s still time to sign up towrite about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
May 23rd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Almost Angels
May 30th: Gillian Rose Nelson: In Search of the Castaways
I think there’s another, quicker way you could have solved the problem of that unnamed TV show, and that’s to have the clear subtext that the lead character is dating someone immature and difficult because he’ll be able to blame everything on her and have an obvious excuse to never get married and settled down.
(You’re right, playing the ‘fix this’ game is one of the great pleasures of bad media.)
Yeah, I like that a lot better actually, to the point that I’d probably make it text to put less narrative weight on the woman being awful.
Well, you ever heard the saying “The things you put in your head are there forever”?
Oh, wow, the chazzwozzer thing is real.
It bothers me sooooo much not to be able to identify this show!
As of 2025, I bear the weight of sole responsibility in remembering this show for the rest of us.
I’m annoyed that I even went to the Wikipedia page to look up shows previously broadcast by Network Ten, and I didn’t even come close to finding a plausible guess.
I find it weirdly enjoyable to track stuff like this down, and I think I found it!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderland_season_1