BlackBerry, the 2023 film tracking the invention of the smartphone of the same name, reflects much of the action of history whilst getting the spirit of it all wrong. As I understand it, the real Mike Lazaridis (Jay Baruchel), while very smart, was also perfectly socially competent; the real Jim Balsillie (Glenn Howerton) was not a rampaging ballbusting asshole. But movies are not reflections of literal reality, and the story it tells is interesting, necessary, and part of an overall arc that the world itself has been going through: the puncturing of the nerd archetype.
There’s a phrase that’s been passed around for a while, that the rise in popularity of nerd culture (Star Wars, video games, tabletop games, anime, and especially Marvel comic books) has led to many nerds discovering that it wasn’t their tastes that got them ostracized, but their obnoxious personalities. This, I think, underestimates both the number of people needlessly and cruelly bullied as well as the ability for self-delusion many nerds are capable of, but there’s absolutely a core of truth to it for many people.
There’s a long history of nerds telling the story of their own persecution; I believe Stephen King is one of the oldest of these storytellers and that he is largely responsible for the proliferation of specific archetypes passed down through pop culture, but this is also a wide, apparently near-universal experience in American culture. Young, usually (but not always) white men who not only enjoy science fiction and fantasy like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, but derive meaning from it, and who work to mix pleasure with technological genius, only to be persecuted by people too thoughtless and stupid to appreciate either spirituality or intelligence.
BlackBerry never specifically outright says that this is foolish, but much of its underlining and humour comes from puncturing this imagery. The central story is that Mike and his friend Doug Fredin (Matthew Johnson, who was also director and co-writer) run their own little tech company, only for Balsillie to learn of their operation, and, sitting in the doldrums of his own career, chooses to invest and help operate, trying to shift the company to something more professional using aggressive, bullying tactics.
There are two nuances here, compared to how you might expect this kind of story to go. The first is that Balsillie really is invested in the company emotionally – he fully believes in the BlackBerry phone, at least as something that will make him money. The second and most wild is that, on some level, Mike also believes in Balsillie – at heart, he wants to be a professional, and he sees Balsillie as the professional he always wanted to be.
The turning point is a time skip, when we see Mike has started dressing and talking like Jim and going to meetings dropping aggressive language. But there’s quite a few hints about where this is going; the first scene where Mike and Jim meet, not only does Mike fix a technical issue that bothers him, but he has a moment where he essentially confesses to simply wanting to make a good product (and we see that Jim sees the honesty in him). This is followed up in a later scene, when Jim takes Mike to a meeting; in the car beforehand, Mike is visibly embarrassed about his messy clothes, his dorky tech, and above all, his shy, soft-spoken demeanor. Howerton sells that Jim sees all this, and that Mike sees him as what a ‘real adult’ looks like, and there’s a clear moment where they seem to bond over Mike being kind of pathetic and needing Jim’s help.
This is in sharp contrast to the other nerds of the movie, especially Doug. It becomes clear very quickly that few of them share Mike’s expertise and almost none of them have his discipline or goals; one cliche of the dot com bubble around which this story takes place is startups that were more concerned with being fun places to be as opposed to workplaces, and this uses a lot of those – pinball, video games, movie nights – to suggest that the workers are mostly slacking off.
Doug in particular manages to walk the line between the heart of the movie and its biggest clown. When he quotes Star Wars, it’s not with the soul and insight of Randall Graves – he’s a naive child who’s watched the same movie too many times. He is the one to correctly point out that Mike is heading down an evil path, but he’s also someone Mike is leaving behind when he grows up and joins the adult world of business meetings and stock options. In this, the movie is helped considerably by the context of the 2020’s; one thing I’ve seen pointed out in the past decade is that niche knowledge isn’t really an impressive skill anymore, because anybody can fact-check pretty much anything.
The story here isn’t about heroic champions with hearts of good questing against boring assholes looking to beat them down out of spite and envy for their talents; it’s of a guy trying to outgrow his childish, irresponsible friends. Admittedly, it’s a bit more complex than that; Doug remains the sole character correctly pointing out that Mike is selling out his sense of right and wrong for money, and if Mike had listened to him, he wouldn’t have been caught up in Balsillie’s illegal schemes (the banality of Balsillie’s goal – owning a particular sports team – is so fucking funny to me). Even in the last third of the movie, Mike looks like a boy wearing his father’s clothes, clearly wildly out of his element as his actions come down on his head.
But still, this movie taps into a nerd malaise the world has been going through the past decade. Let’s face it (and many have): the nerds won. The biggest movies and TV in the world are Marvel, Star Wars, Harry Potter, and other nerd shit. Video games vastly outgross every other industry by a country mile. Dungeons & Dragons, Pokemon, Lord of the Rings; these things are the cool mainstream. Even more, all these things are accessible; not only in that I can and have played the biggest first person shooter in the world on my mobile phone during my work-break, but in that I can talk about this shit with just about anyone without fear of harassment or bullying.
This has led to typical reflections and non-reflections that come with victory. The overwhelming cultural juggernaut of superheroes, cartoons, and video games has led to speculation that people are intentionally making themselves more infantile; shutting out any unpleasant experiences for a constant flow of nostalgia and hedonism. One can point to specific pop culture examples, with Ready Player One being the big one (where having enjoyed the biggest and most popular movies ever made makes one a superhero).
There’s also frequent noting of how many people have used the identity of ‘nerd’ as a way to avoid self-reflection; subsuming one’s sense of self in consumerism. It’s truly bizarre the number of people I’ve seen who think ‘have read comic books for twenty years’ is a reflection of some kind of skill on their part; much as I enjoy minutiae about nerd shit and as much as I myself try to be a database of movies and TV shows, it’s not something I would exactly flaunt on a resume (my ability to verbally express the soul of a work, on the other hand, I’m quite pleased with).
Further, success has revealed the fragility of people who obtained it; people who can’t stand even light criticism of extremely critically and especially commercially successful works, or who use their identification with pop culture as a weapon to bludgeon others with. Personally, I find it hard to work up the nerve to defend, say, Tarantino movies from insults, given both that he personally is a millionaire and, even more importantly, that there’s nothing anybody can do to stop me from watching his movies. Other people are more willing to fall back on a narrative of persecution when it comes up.
BlackBerry situates itself right within that criticism of nerd culture. It doesn’t fully buy into where Mike runs to instead; in a way, his running away from childish things only makes him look more childish, but you get why he was running away from it in the first place, because nerd culture looked ill-disciplined, self-important, and above all, constantly consuming the world rather than producing something. Productivity is something of a buzzword right now; even ardent anti-capitalists often define themselves by who is getting rewarded for producing something and who is a parasite. BlackBerry is another work considering the idea that nerd culture is parasitically consuming without giving something back.
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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Department of
Conversation
What Did We Watch?
Vice is Broke – a solid documentary about the rise and fall of Vice magazine (and the things it evolved into) made by disgruntled former employee / chef Eddie Huang. I enjoyed the story and Huang is an amiable host, also one of Vice’s contributors shares my name so it was fun having a documentary occasionally namecheck me. Nothing revelatory but an entertaining watch.
Live Music – played a gig supporting Lach, the guy who set up the first “Antifolk” festival and hence invented a subgenre, I guess. Weirdly he insisted we had met before, which we had not. There were not many people in the audience but the venue had set up in a way that it felt cosy and intimate rather than just under-attended, my set went well and Lach was very entertaining. I wasn’t really familiar with his stuff, his songwriting is more conventional than a lot of the other antifolk artists but he has a similar punk spirit, good stuff.
Seinfeld, to the end of season 2 – more consistently funny stuff, I think “The Heart Attack” was my favourite of this run: Stephen Tobolowsky always a welcome presence and the way it shoots into a crazy higher gear after George receives his “holistic” treatment is pretty amazing.
Woo, playing live music! I have a fondness for the Moldy Peaches and some anarchist folk punk bands but never got deep into anti-folk. (or antifolk?)
I like Jeffrey Lewis a lot and also still have a lot of fondness for the Moldy Peaches, I haven’t really investigated too much beyond that.
Is it possible the festival guy had actually met the Vice contributor?
Haha I like your thinking! But Lach was specifically convinced that I’d played with him before, and provided details of the venue and promoter where it happened. I had played there for that promoter but not with him! Very confusing. Glitch in the matrix.
Wooo live music! And apparently your real life name is William Wilson?
My namesake has joined a LOT more cults than I have.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/three-v13n10/
Woooooo live music and people you’ve met before!!
Live baseball! – Well, the game was live, but the Mets were at best asleep. One of the least fun games I’ve been to in ages, punctuated by the Mets now employing someone who is a cross between Waldo, a white Urkel, and Orville Reddenbacher leading chants of “Let’s Go Mets” and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” There’s just too much going on between innings, but hey, it keeps fans engaged, so I guess that is good. The high point of the day was Itzhak Perlman celebrating his 80th birthday by playing the National Anthem. No schlepped out vocals this time.
The Practice – So I skipped the one where Jimmy convinces a jury that power lines cause cancer. I was annoyed when this aired, and today I have no time for junk science in the least. So onto:
– “Ties that Bind” – A porn actress is accused of killing her porn actor hubby during a bondage scene. A tawdry case, with some unfortunate kink shaming, but underlying the DA’s aggressive prosecution is a quiet edict within the DA’s offices to go hard against Donnell and Associates. Richard Masur, doing something of a shambling Columbo riff, is the DA. Pretty good episode, with a great scene of Bobby and Helen trying not to react to watching porn, er, for work.
” The Trial” – Bobby is sadly not hired to defend K. (The episode titles just suck here). He is, however, hired to defend a well healed surgeon (Chris Sarandon) on murder charges, at the recommendation of a very high toned law firm. And the surgeon offers a $1 million retainer. So Bobby takes the case. Even though Helen is trying it for the state. The personal and the professional collide hard, but I don’t know if anyone was really invested in Bobby and Helen’s fling. The trial, however, promises to be a banger.
Slow Horses, “Boardroom Politics”/”Old Scores” – All the threads come together and everything that didn’t make much sense till the end makes sense. Very very propulsive, though some of that was the rather difficult tension of a “Code September” being declared and London coming into a state of panic briefly. But it’s all a feint, and ultimately Communism is a red herring. More about this season on Thursday.
Frasier, “When a Man Loves Two Women” – Frasier inexplicably starts to date – which is to say, sleeps with – both Virginia Madsen (the uncertain love interest from Valentine’s Day) and Amy Brenneman (the Jewish girlfriend from the Christmas episode). And now he has to pick. While there are some very funny moments, mostly in Niles’s reactions, once again Frasier’s improbable love life is a bit grating. But the high point is watching Martin and Daphne’s morning kitchen routine, as each knows the other’s motions to perfection, and as the actors do a wonderful job showing it.
Mind boggling, Lovecraftian-style, at the concept of a “white Urkel.”
I have been informed by another Metsball fan that this is a “kid influencer” – the very term makes me gag – named Blippi. (For some reason the sound system made me think he was called Clippy.) This was apparently a one day thing, part of efforts to make the games more kid friendly (since apparently asking kids to just watch a sporting event no longer works).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blippi
I have heard the name “Blippi” before and I would not click that link with a gun to my head.
The X-Files, Season Nine
A wet fart of a season, especially the ending. This is a show defined by giant ideas and sloppy discipline; the show at its worst and Mulder at his worst are near-identical in going on wild goose chases that turn up jack shit. You especially see this in this season when the show suggests a bunch of great ideas and doesn’t follow through on any of them. My favourite is rewiring the show around a bigger core cast, with Scully acting as a leader, mentor, and medical specialist to two investigators a la Law & Order (I do believe Fringe followed up on this). Towards the end, there’s suggestions of just burning the whole thing down, most spectacularly demonstrated through killing off the Lone Gunmen (apparently fans didn’t care for this, but I was moved), but also through the final MOTW apparently breaking through to the outside world.
There’s also the rare moments where they actually seem to at least try and evolve; I feel bad for Annabeth Gish because they never really find the right rhythm for her and Reyes. The best moments were actually small and funny, like her indulging occasionally in Seinfeld-like riffing on human nature, not in Mulder’s self-serious way but in a more lighthearted and easygoing sense, as opposed to her constant mode of intense professionalism. The worst moments are recreating the past, like their stupid new conspiracy that makes even less sense than usual.
This climaxes in the finale, which is essentially a redo of the Seinfeld finale – Mulder on trial, a recap of the series events, cameos from many people. This show never knew what the fuck it was talking about; older people claiming this for LOST makes sense now, in that they may have been projecting the experience of X-Files and Twin Peaks onto their conception of LOST.
Welp, that was the original run of The X-Files, something that took me, what, four years to get through? As with much popular scifi/fantasy television from the 90’s, I’m charmed by seeing its influence on Stargate: SG-1 (which was six seasons in by the time this season finished); it’s really been put into perspective how much that show was a blending of all the most popular scifi shows of the 90’s, with X-Files influencing its cinematic style, its long-form plotting, and of course its plots about shadowy government agencies and conspiracies, even if it flattens the general criticism of government into a ‘few bad apples’ kind of story.
I’m fascinated by the particular place X-Files has in the TV canon, to which its influence on Stargate points. This is a deeply flawed and wobbly work of television, even at its best; it’s not like Twin Peaks or Cowboy Bebop where things that would be flaws in other works are inextricably tied to the appeal. Other shows were influenced by those works, vastly improved on their plotting and dialogue, but never quite caught their sense of intense emotion. With X-Files, the arc basically lost its appeal after the second episode, with occasional spikes of vivid imagination but otherwise little emotional depth – that is to say, what other shows improved upon was the structure of incidents. But there’s definitely stuff here that made the journey worth it – mainly, Mulder, Scully, and the electric chemistry between the two on both an actor and writing level.
Many have imitated all three of these things but none have felt as intensely necessary or original. Their Socratic back-and-forth survives parody, criticism, and rejection; I’ve seen people criticise the show for prioritising Mulder’s paranormal interests and making him ‘always right’, but this misses how necessary Scully is at grounding him and forcing him to prove these theories (he may be right that something paranormal is happening, but usually wrong in his initial theories).
It also misses how necessary Mulder’s perspective is. The irrational and paranormal may or may not exist, but within the world of The X-Files, it’s a necessary way of keeping us moving forward rather than being reactive figures. In the personal journey I’ve gone through since starting this show – in which my father slowly died of Alzheimer’s and I got more in touch with the kind of storytelling I want to do – I’ve come to recognise the value of irrational drives beyond hard data. Western culture has been criticised for focusing on hard data over spiritual wellbeing (concrete example: large profit on a bottom line as opposed to providing a needed service or maintaining a stable business), and I know I’ve been guilty of that in my life.
Mulder reminds us that we don’t know everything and that we can’t calculate for all eventualities. There may not be aliens, ghosts, or God, but there are provably things we don’t know and don’t understand. The X-Files, especially at its worst, captures the feeling of paranoia and fear that comes with this, but what Duchovny embodies in Mulder is the flipside of this: awe. The positive emotion of X-Files is being overjoyed at being in a situation where you don’t know what the fuck is going on and will never find out. Yes, Scully’s rationality keeps us alive, but Mulder’s belief is what gives us direction. The truth is out there and I want to believe.
The Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear
Just like the first one, only moreso. Frank settles into being much more of a bumbler, and the story uses its theoretically stronger basis for story – with Frank’s relationship with Jane developing – for even more jokes. This series has always used real plotting as the underlining for what it does; in this case, it uses the normal action movie sequel story of the hero and his girlfriend splitting apart as another basis. This did also make me realise that Priscilla Presley is giving not only a comedic performance equal to Leslie Neilsen, and not only even the exact kind of performance and character comedy writers are trying to give female love interests in comedies, but the exact character a normal action movie love interest is trying to convey.
Biggest Laugh: Frank’s wetsuit pants flicking out into the water… onto a pile of them. He’s been at this a while.
The gag with George Kennedy trying to beat up some punk is such a good reversal of the old cliche.* “And how are the children?” “We never had any children, Frank,” “Ah, yes.”
*It’s so fun to see the new Naked Gun play with more 2000’s and 2010’s tropes and cliches like the big final fight , legacy characters with parent issues, and “Did you get all of that?”
The way he’s sprawled out on the floor when we cut to him kills me.
A more spoiler-averse person in my position would have just skimmed this, but 1) I don’t care, and 2) I’d already planned to trade “watch it all” for “watch the highlights” at some point before the ninth season anyway. It’s fascinating, if sad, to read about how much the show deteriorates by this point, but your retrospective on it as a whole is a beautiful look at its appeal.
Thanks. I can contribute good and good-ish episodes of season 9 when you get there.
I wonder if my more positive feelings towards late-era X-Files are a result of slogging through two seasons of Millennium even though I hated it. If so, hooray, finally a silver lining!
I think there is still a lot of magic here – the MOTW episodes tend to be good-to-great even without Mulder and even with me missing the Mulder/Scully dynamic. There’s still cool sick specially effects and fucked up concepts, there’s still the process of investigation, and Skinner is in the show a lot more. It’s just less spectacular than the show at its height.
For the full picture of the influence of The X-Files, I suggest you now track down every mini-arc or single episode of every mid-90s television show scrambling to appeal to the X-Files audience. This will take at least another four years because I’m pretty sure every TV show got a note to add aliens for at least one episode. Off the top of my head I can remember SeaQuest (the submarine gets transported to Venus), Chicago Hope (maybe? One of the medical shows of the time) and Daria.
“I’ve been swimming in raw sewage, and I love it!” pops into my head a lot. The ZAZ guys may not have the full fastball but they know enough that beating on George Bush would be mildly funny while beating on Barbara Bush is much, much funnier.
Thunderbolts
I’ll always take any kind of riff on The Dirty Dozen, and while this is less of one than Suicide Squad, it’s at least adjacent to it, with a seasoning of “ragtag bunch of misfits.” A weird proportion of the dialogue here felt too flat to me, in a “here’s the next obligatory line” kind of way, but sometimes it would land (John Walker’s almost-muttered aside that at least Yelena had the comfort of knowing she wasn’t really responsible for what she’d done; Bucky’s “I have a great past, so I’m fine” quip) or get sold by a strong performance (a lot of Yelena material–Florence Pugh is just so good). Very simple but cool visual effects on the Void. So–doesn’t entirely work, but it was the first MCU movie I’d been interested in watching for a while, and I had a generally good time with it.
The Death of Stalin:
Masterpiece, as always. This is obviously extremely funny in places–my favorite laugh beat is Khrushchev’s reaction to the idea of everlasting life (“Who the fuck in their right mind would want everlasting life? The endless fucking conversation”), but since this is top-tier Ianucci, there are a lot of options. But it’s even better as a drama than a comedy, rapidly giving preliminary definitions of its characters and then pressing them to act in ways that are consistent with who they are but also transform them. All the actual best lines are dramatic, not comedic: “I mean, I’m smiling, but I am very fucking furious,” “If he recovers, then we got a good doctor. If he doesn’t recover, then we didn’t, but he won’t know,” “Can you ever trust a weak man?”, and, of course, my favorite, “It’s too late! The only choice we have is between his death or his revenge.”
The Lion in Winter
I spent a little bit of time worrying this would feel overheated, like a somehow-even-more-intense Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and to be honest, it’s not like it ever gets less heated–it’s more like it grows into itself as the characters and their schemes and priorities become more familiar. By the time Henry confronts Philip in his bedchamber–with Richard, Geoffrey, and John all hiding behind tapestries–and the scene gloriously escalates to some years-in-the-making ownage (the cuts to Anthony Hopkins’s face during that!), I was completely sold. Sure, there’s not a lot of tonal variance here, but the passion, focus, and drama are all top-notch–with some iconic performances–and the dialogue is incredible (the barbs are sharp and funny as hell, so it can be easy to focus just on those, but it also musters up some genuine emotion that’s beautifully expressed). It always feels like writing, but it always feels like great writing, and the theatricality of it works for characters who are always performing themselves for each other or, in rare moments, defining their realities to themselves.
This was the kind of bitchy royal historical fiction my sister and I loved (it’s spirit is in The Favourite’s sense of anarchy), and we’ve occasionally watched it on Christmas. “Henry, did you ever love me?” “…No.” “Never?” “…Never.” “Good. This will make this much easier.”
That’s my favourite laugh line inDeath Of Stalin too. It’s the most effortlessly sincere Krushchev is all movie! Dramatically, I always liked Beria’s desperate flailing – “I’ve got files on all of you!”, something like that – because his smug facade drops pretty much instantly. It perfectly sells the insanity the real people must have gone through, where they were all hanging on by threads. Also a bit of a sucker for Molotov saying “Stalin would be loving this!”
Been a while since I’ve reported in, so might be missing a couple (or repeating)?
Saw Big Hero 6 in four pieces four different times. It’s an okay movie, honestly nothing special enough to assign in an eighth grade curriculum where students must learn the steps of the Hero’s Journey archetype, but I don’t make the rules.
Weapons – Been hearing some damning faint praise from these corridors, so let me add my full-throated praise because I thought this was a pretty terrific, somewhat unusual wide release. Few multiplex movies have this kind of visual interest and it includes what may be my favorite shot of the year to date, a weapon in the sky with a time on it. Great because it has the appearance of a clue but it never turns out to be one, just a dose of parental nightmare delivered with the uncanny obviousness of a David Lynch moment.
The Taking of Pelham 123 – Great movie. Had forgotten just how even-keeled Matthau keeps it even when he’s flustered. You can tell he knows the stakes of the situation and the only way he can deal with it is by acting like it’s a slightly more hectic day at the office. All-time great final moment.
I really wish I liked this more, and the visuals were by far the strongest element (though Julia Garner’s incredibly likeable and thorny here), with one bit bringing a bit of Junji Ito the mainstream movie. Weapons was clearly very personal but I never knew what Cregger wanted to say about any of it.
Guess I was vibing on his wavelength – our children are being used as see title toward somebody else’s ill-defined goals while the regular folk fight with each other about what’s really going on – anticipate the moment when this backfires. (My main criticism would be the choice of weird villain which is a lot of fun with a fun performance, but overlaps too much with my least-favorite aspect of Barbarian. It’s also been a while since I saw it and could probably use a refresher.)
Pulp Fiction – What’s “aged” the most for me is the use of the n-word – I’ve seen my Black friends react to the repetition, which feels more edgelord than necessary to the story, less “criminals are pieces of shit” after the third time and very much “I am going to BLOW their MINDS!” Would argue the second act is provocative with reason and a sense of one character’s affronted humanity, the dialogue Jimmy gives* is provocation without deeper thought than a shocked laugh. This is also the price of Tarantino being what Ebert aptly called “The Jerry Lee Lewis of cinema,” an incredibly playful and smart artist whose flaws and sheer arrogance are baked into whatever he is making. There is also obvious knowledge of mercy and grace, Butch wordlessly incapable of leaving Wallace to a horrible fate and Jules shepherding the weak with his pistol, and even Vincent, who is so hilariously graceless, knows when to blow a kiss.
*The sheer outrage in “You’re not going to make me forget I love my wife!” and “I don’t wanna get a divorce, gentlemen!” are immortal however.
Thunderbolts* — The first third of this was entirely pedestrian and I kept wondering what everyone said they saw in it. And as with Brave New World, they’re importing comics’ embarrassing ignorance of how law/government works, which is why these movies should stay away from that sphere. Also the Valentina character doesn’t really work, as they’ve been sticking her in various MCU projects without much rhyme or reason (although Louis-Dreyfus is good enough that you almost don’t notice). But once Harbour arrives they stop sniping at each other so much and actually start working as a team, and then it gets a lot better. And then once they get to New York the film really starts to fire on all cylinders, in particular because of the performance of Harbour, Russell, and of course Pugh. We’ve seen the moment where a character decides to become a hero many times — it’s a staple of this kind of movie as well as in the comic books that they’re adapting. But it’s exciting and (fairly) novel to see that moment for characters we already know.
Pump Up The Volume — a weird sequel to The Legend Of Billie Jean, in that Christian Slater takes the lead in a tale of teen rebellion (and an even weirder and considering the ending to this depressing prequel to Broken Arrow, where Slater and love interest Samantha Mathis team up again). This is jacked into the 90s Soundtrack collection on Criterion and that is a lie, you have Was (Not Was) on your soundtrack so you are an 80s movie, sir! (And the significant 60s and 70s music covers here point to some more confusion about revolution.) But more to the point, this is an 80s movie in spirit and that rules, the kids are all right and right to fuck up the bullshit school, with Annie Ross’ principal a truly hateful martinet, and the most interesting thing about this now is how it’s a parable of parasocialism, young people who feel alone reaching out across a medium to find connection and emotionally invest in a person they’ve never met. The movie ends with a thousand pirate radio stations blooming, and the line from that to where we are now with communication and connection seems to have zigzagged along the way.
Presumed Innocent — West Wing reunion! Always funny to see early Bradley Whitford in yuppie mode but John Spencer’s detective (and his loud-ass shirts) is the real hero here, along with Gordon Willis once again finding every shade of brown to bring out in his cinematography. It has been a long, long time since I read the book but I remembered whodunnit and the movie is very interesting to watch in that regard, but I think it whiffs hard at the very end — the book makes a certain compromise palpable and the film tells but does not show and it feels like a real “eh fuck that bitch” shrug. Unfortunately this did not lead to a spinoff of Raul Julia’s extremely boss defense attorney being debonair and owning dudes in a courtroom, money left on the table you schmucks.
The end of Presumed Innocent works better if you haven’t read the book, because then it’ a shocking twist, while the book, as you say, works through the angles. (Also, even better is when you read the book the second time and you realize that Rusty knew the score long before it is revealed to the reader.)
Yeah, I think this is because of the script/structure but Ford plays the reveal entirely wrong and the final voiceover doesn’t work either. It’s a choice that maybe made sense — I don’t think the movie and its legal thriller mode could handle this without having the same access to Rusty’s interior monologue — but then again, it does bring in that monologue at the beginning and the end, so the filmmakers clearly knew they needed something here.
Marvel’s Thunderbolts. Reasonably solid and basically competent until late in the third act. This is a step up from Deadpool and Wolverine and Ant-Man 3. David Harbour brings a lot of pathos and bathos to Red Guardian, and Pugh if of course great. There are things about the plot that don’t make a ton of sense. Yelena moves on way too fast from a death at the start, which the writers admittedly (but really Feige) added to the script last minute to raise the stakes, which is not how stakes work!. After this I read the original Sentry miniseries and they missed a golden opportunity to do a more faithful adaptation (
).
This also highlights how dumb the current approach to the interconnected universe is. So we’re supposed to have watched The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Black Widow, Ant Man 2, and Hawkeye to know how these characters got here. But this doesn’t pay off on any of Yelena’s character arc from BW and Hawkeye. Winter Soldier is a congressman now? How did someone lose to him? I will bet Kevin Feige 1 million dollars he cannot tell me anything Ghost’s character arc or what she wants or why she does anything.
other random thoughts:
– the visual effect for the Void is extremely simple and it’s so good. One of the best things they’ve done. It could have been very silly.
– You know who would crush playing the Sentry in a more faithful adaptation? A golden god who shines with the power of a million suns? A man who is untethered and his wrath knows no bounds. Glenn Howerton.
We disagree about which part of Thunderbolts* is good and which is bad, but I agree that the look for The Void is great and creepy.
What Did We Play?
Kinda spinning my heels until Silksong comes out – I went back to Ori and the Blind Forest in order to go back and collect things I hadn’t collected, reached 100% deck completion on Balatro and made the decision that was enough, uninstalled it from my phone. Tried a bit of The Rogue Prince of Persia which is kinda fun but also has some clunkiness that annoyed me a little, might play some more of that this week though while I wait.
The most accurate answer to question “Where You Been?” would be acclimating to my new and challenging job, but an only slightly less accurate answer would be “Playing Blue Prince”. My wife and I have become obsessed with unlocking the secrets of the game which skillfully doles them out in every play session, if not always in the order you anticipate. The randomize mechanic (maybe not so random as it first seems) risks frustration, but while we’ve had days where we failed to accomplish our stated objective, we’ve had no days where we’ve failed to discover something new.
The best compliment to it is that we found the “ending” to the game, but not nearly everything there is to find in the house, so we’re diving back in every time we have a couple hours to spare. Yesterday we spent literally hours trying to decipher one room’s puzzle (we are very bad at cryptics).
Interested to hear how far down the rabbit hole you go – I hit the “ending” on about day 29 I think and it kept delivering cool stuff for a long time after that. But beyond a certain point I felt like it was going to be a hell of a lot of work to keep going…
::spoiler::
I made it around that time also, Day 27 maybe? There’s a handful of specific goals we want to do for sure – the chess puzzle (know how to do it, just haven’t had luck getting the right rooms), open all the safes and find all the envelopes (four short), find all the classrooms (my daughter really wants to do that one), fill the grid (my wife, I could care less). I don’t think we’ll do the whole checklist (speed run stuff doesn’t usually interest me), but we’re still hazy on some details of the story. At the least we want to get back to Room 46 and look around.
That sounds like a sensible approach! The result of getting all the classrooms is pretty intense, I hope you’re writing EVERYTHING down, haha.
…we have 12-page spreadsheet going.
Burnout Paradise Remastered
Played a few more events, mostly Road Rages (take out a bunch of cars on a timer), and Burning Routes (finish time challenges with specific cars). I’m really starting to appreciate how when you beat the latter you nearly always get great cars with hilariously gaudy decals. And I just unlocked the F1 car, so now I only need to find it and take it down to add it to my garage and drive it for myself. Can’t wait.
Finished Lunar: The Silver Star last night. That was pretty fun. Good sense of humor and set of characters, I had a good time.
And now that that’s out of the way, my gaming slate is clear for Silksong!
Interesting to bring up King here, as you note he’s made bullied nerds a huge part of his fiction although I think the bullying is paramount, the victims are not always nerds (Carrie immediately comes to mind). To me the real King nerd is Harold Lauder, a person who feels like he has a lot of the young King in him and whose sense of persecution and hunger for power/respect damns him — he is a real cautionary tale of making ostracization a personality. But while it has been a long time I don’t recall him having too many signifiers other than maybe a general love of fantasy/sci-fi? It’s more about his mindset. I think your line here — “subsuming one’s sense of self in consumerism” — gets at the big change over the last several decades, how this stuff moved from a relatively niche market (or in the case of Star Wars, a market that was not expanded and exploited to the degree it could have been) to THE market. This puts the lie to any actual “persecution” and I think makes it more imperative for people who do believe in that to cling to the idea. And I think that feeds into the protectionist impulse, the need to claim and defend a culture against those who say it is dumb. You just finished watching the X-Files, famously the Friday night destination for nerds who weren’t going out — maybe sometimes it’s better for the culture and the people to enjoy a niche?