Yes, it’s a tragedy, and yes, it’s sillypants to abandon the Best Business Model Ever: musicians and studios sent you free content (music videos) that you play all day and night while MONEY ROLLS IN from advertising. RIP to MTV, 1981-2025.
It’s a license to print money. But no, highly paid executives with MBA’s from Ivy League schools decided it was smarter to spend money on lame content (reality shows), as if every other TV channel didn’t also have lame reality shows.
So: as a public service, I’ll be playing music videos here until I run out of videos or years. First up: 1981.
Why does this work so damn well? Here’s my theory: tension.
First, the car has to be lame. The lamer the thing you’re selling, the more creative room you get to hype it to the moon.
If you did this with an old Mustang, or anything remotely good, it would crash and burn. You’re piling cool on top of cool. Too much. No tension at all.
Second, the better the hype job, the more tension you create. In this case, it’s a little understated and Miami Vice, and all we need are Crocket and Tubbs driving around with In the Air Tonight blasting.
Now, the text that goes with the Geo Metro video is not as amazing, which made me sad. It’s okay.
But hey, the text does the job. Reliable if not hilarious. Just like a Geo Metro.
I have experience with this art form. The blog started when I needed to sell a Hyundia Elantra and found out craiglist ads expire. Needed home for it.
Yes, I should have shot a video with that car, which was a classic beater. Cheap but reliable. Never let me down.
Here’s the truth: I bought a second black Hyundai Elantra in 2013 after a failed experiment with a black Ford Fiesta that leaked despite being new. Compared to the 2003 version, Epic Black Car II was a step up: sunroof, leather seats, cruise control. Not Corinthian leather, but close. Pleather.
After I sold that Elantra, we bought a third Elantra, a hybrid and a freaking spaceship compared to the first two. Not intentional. Test drove other things. So that dealership can just set their calendar, because every ten years, the prophecy requires this Swede to walk in and buy the latest Elantra.
IT HAS BEEN FORETOLD.
This is a whole genre of ads and videos: “Buy this thing that’s so lame, it circles back to cool.”
Here’s a classic.
And this is my favorite, the highest production value example of thE genre. It’s like they hired Michael Bay for this thing.
VERDICT: 11/10, I love all of these things. Give us more.
Have you ever found a song and just replayed the living hell out of it?
I don’t know why this thing hits me like a sledgehammer from the special personal collection of Peter Gabriel.
But I keep replaying the thing, over and over. Here, watch this thing we called a “music video” a hundred years ago when this cable channel appeared that showed music videos ALL DAY LONG. Brilliant business model. People send you videos, you play them, you sell ads–it’s a license to print money.
The only way this could go wrong is if you stopped playing free music videos and started paying money to produce stupid reality shows.
Here’s the music video, which I hadn’t seen until I wore out this song on Spotify or whatever:
It smacks you upside the feelings, doesn’t it? That twist in the end makes M. Night Shyamalan jealous. Super rare to have in a song. As a writer, I could not love the lyrics more. The repetition with a purpose, and the twists each time–beautiful.
This is why I love the genre Angry Acoustic: songs are stripped down, lyrics actually matter, and they tell stories instead of the usual pop song that repeats the same lyric 3,423 times until you bring out the shot glasses and down some Draino.
I have replayed this song again. I’ll play it more today. And I hope other people find this song, and that each time it gets hit on Spotify or YouTube, she gets paid, because Lizzy, you deserve it.
VERDICT: 11/10, give is more of this. MORE MORE MORE.
SPECIAL BONUS: Acoustic version, which also rocks. If you search the series of tubes, there’s also a sped-up version, very Alvin and the Chipmunks, but I will not link to it, because that is sacrilege.
I adore cheesy action movies, and BOSS LEVEL with Frank Grillo is amazing and perfect and wonderful.
So when I saw the trailer for KING OF KILLERS, sure, it’s on Netflix, I’m not blowing three hours of my life and $50 on tickets and popcorn to see the thing. Let’s give it a go.
Here’s the trailer. Push the buttons.
Not gonna win any Oscars but fun trash, right? Which is what we all need sometimes. I don’t come home from work looking to have my brain challenged, my world-view changed, and my body drained of tears after watching a three-hour masterpiece of pain and misery.
Here’s the problem: you don’t see a glimpse of Frank Grillo until way, way into the film. What you get instead is a dude who looks enough like Grillo to confuse you, and this man is obviously the hero.
Which is a big, big problem.
First, the whole setup of the movie is Grillo vs everyone, and the narrative questions are simple: will Grillo live or die? If he dies, by who’s hand, and why? If everyone else dies, are they paying for their sins?
Second, there’s no way the audience is getting all this time with the Grillo-ish character for him to die first, or ever. This main character also gets the most cliched motivations possible: his wife dies in a shootout when she’s at one of his jobs randomly, and he only takes the new job vs. Grillo because his daughter is in the hospital and needs expensive care.
A half hour or whatever into this thing, a room full of killers finally gets introduced to their client and their target: Grillo, who wants the challenge of taking on the best.
The only actor I recognize in the room is Georges St. Pierre, an amazing UFC champ and a good action-movie choice. Like in this clip, which has a special bonus: Frank Grillo!
And here we get the third fatal storytelling mistake: each assassin randomly goes to face Grillo, and one of the first to head out and die is…the best actor, George St. Pierre.
Does he get a beautiful fight scene? No. He displays zero hand-to-hand skills and uses a shotgun for some reason. The poor man dies like a chump. You could’ve hired any random actor to play this bit, and it’s a waste.
You can guess how the rest goes. The other killers die while the main character lives in the end, gets his money, and saves his daughter.
No surprises. 0/10, do not recommend. HOWEVER: this movie contrasts directly and completely with the brilliant movie THE HUNT starring Betty Gilpin, who is a natural treasure and also star of AMERICAN PRIMEVAL, which is freaking amazing, go watch it.
The audience is constantly surprised in THE HUNT from the start. Just when you think oh, this is the main character, and follow them around for a bit with the other characters in the background, that character dies and gets replaced by another. And another. We finally wind up with Betty Gilpin’s character as the focus, and she keeps on surprising us–with her actions, her dialogue, and her backstory.
My acid test for a movie isn’t, “Did I enjoy that?” It’s “Would I happily watch it again, and again, or would you have to hand me a paper bag stuffed with purple euros to sit through that sucker once more?”
I have watched THE HUNT many times and would see it again tonight. You could not pay me enough to watch KING OF KILLERS again.
Also: here’s the trailer for AMERICAN PRIMEVAL, which is raw and brutal and seven separate flavors of awesomesauce.
Listen: unless you live in an ice cave, you listen to music and have seen 5,923 music videos. Most of those are forgettable.
There are reasons for that.
Your typical Generic Music Video features shots of the band pretending to play their instruments as the lead singer pretends to sing. They’ll shoot in an alley, to pretend to be gritty and real. They’ll shoot on a beach while looking pretentiously at the sunset. They’ll shoot on a rooftop, thinking they’re The Beatles.
For variety, an ambitious band will try a music video that tells a story. This is hard, and expensive, like filming a short movie. Instead of a zillion-dollar budget for a big band doing the alley-rooftop-beach thing, we’re talking a bazillion-dollar budget. Thriller was not easy or cheap.
If you clicked that link, yes, professional music videos run from $20k at the absolute lowest end to $500,000 or more. It’s a joke (except true) in Hollywood that rich men with girlfriends who think they should be a singer will spend far more than this to hire a producer, cut a single, and get a real director and crew to shoot one music video. And yeah, there’s a chance that singer makes it, simply because a talented band back in Des Moines, Iowa doesn’t have that money supporting them.
HOWEVER: I come here to praise Jungle, a fun band that did something that entertained the hell out of me. It’s not a lame video of the band playing, or a pretentious short film that flails. You don’t even see the band, not once.
Here’s the video I saw. Watch it, then we’ll talk smack.
How can you not love that song and video? It’s full of joy, with interesting choreography, constant shifts, always something new.
Here’s what blew me away: they didn’t just make one video. They did an entire movie of this based on their album Volcano.
And it rocks. The thing just works.
Sure, musicals aren’t new, and actors have danced on Broadway since forever. I’m just happy to see this come back, hard, to give us something fresh again with music videos. We don’t need more pop stars singing “baby baby baby” or rappers bragging about their Lambos and boats. I am not surprised or impressed by country singers driving beat-up pickups while singing about beer and duck hunting.
Jungle has impressed the hell out of me. Here’s the movie, and all I have to say is 11/10, give us more.
There are two kinds of people: those who doomscroll and those who lie about it.
Maybe you doomscroll about an election or the next Seahawks game.
You might be obsessed with something that will never happen (zombie apocalypse) or a thing nobody talks about that is terrible and inevitable (Yellowstone supervolcano waking up, or the Iceland mega-eruption that happens every 300 years).
So you read story after story, watch endless Tiktoks, or scan tweet after tweet on the platform Elon Muskrat paid $44 billion to set on fire.
Here’s why you do it, why it’s so hard to quit, and what to do about it.
Why you do it
You read all you can find, right?
Because you care. The more you’re invested in a topic, the more you want to read.
I don’t give a frog’s whisker about the Kardashians, so I read ABSOLUTELY NOTHING written about them unless it’s a headline telling me the Kardashians have changed their names and gone into hiding. That I would check out.
I care about the Seahawks, so I consume all kinds of stories about our new coach, trades, upcoming games, and sports brainiacs explaining Coach Mike’s shifty and nifty defensive scheme until we lose the next game and LOSE OUR MINDS.
And I care about elections, and the war in Ukraine.
You probably have a similar list. Maybe three things you’re passionate / terrified about and one that you are HARD CORE about. Those are your doomscrolling monsters hiding in your pantry. Yeah, the closet is a myth. What can a monster eat in your closet, socks? The need some nutrients like anybody else. Cashews, chocolate chips, brown sugar, Rice Krispy Treats–real stuff.
Why it’s so hard to quit
You might feel like an addict, unable to quit doomscrolling.
I believe that’s normal. You do it because you care, deeply, about an issue. Maybe because the stakes are so high, or because it affects your neighborhood or family. Or maybe because you can’t remember the last time the Seahawks won a playoff game.
Unless you’re willing to chuck your phone in the ocean and cancel internet services, chances are you’ll keep doomscrolling until the thing either happens or doesn’t.
The other non-solution is simple: stop caring about that issue or topic. Wipe your brain of it.
Yeah, that’s not an answer.
What to do about it
Just for a day or two, track the time you spend doomscrolling. Roughly, not by the minute.
Maybe you stay up late at night, in bed, reading story after story about the election on your phone until the clock reads 2 a.m. and you can’t get back to sleep. Or you find yourself refreshing some favorite news sites multiple times a day, hungry for a fix.
Track that time and add up the minutes, or the hours.
Here’s what you do the next day: find ways to DO something about the thing you’re doomscrolling.
If it’s the offensive line of the Seahawks, get a side gig, hustle, and save up money for tickets. Because there are only two practical things that would actually help the cause: (1) training full time to become a stellar starting Left Guard or (2) showing up at home games to yell loud enough that San Francisco commits seven false start penalties.
If it’s an election or local issue, get in touch with people out there doing the work and use your doomscrolling time to DO SOMETHING.
If you’re obsessed with some kind of apocalyptic scenario, spend your previous doomscrolling hours lifting weights, learning bushcraft, and building your catamaran of the apocalypse, because WATERWORLD is a prophecy.
You get the idea. Because reading and thinking about a thing, relentlessly, feels like taking action. It takes energy and brainpower. But it doesn’t actually do anything.
Professional animal trainers understand this. They don’t try to directly correct animals when they misbehave. Instead, they train the animal to do something that’s physically incompatible with the bad behavior. Can’t do two contrary things at once.
That’s why the real solution to doomscrolling is DO-scrolling.
Do something positive and real about your obsession or worry.
After spending your normal doomscrolling time on actual labor that helps the problem, you’re going to actually feel better. And it’ll free up your attention for other important parts of your life, like going to the gym or taking that oil painting class you keep talking about.
Yes, this is a music video, and we will play it because MTV resolutely refuses to do their damn job. Have a look and listen, then we will TALK ABOUT ALL THE THINGS.
First off, I come here to talk smack about lyrics, not the actual music video. The video is fine. It’s not blowing my mind and it’s not making me close my eyes and chant a lullaby to make it go away.
The words are what we are here for, and the words are GOOD.
Dissecting the lyrics, but not in an icky dead frog way like biology class
Let’s go after the first few lines:
Half of my high school got too drunk Half of my high school fell in love With the girl next door In their daddy’s Ford Half of my main street’s mini skirts Half of my main street’s dressed for church It could use some rain And a fresh coat of paint
Such a great way of painting a picture of her hometown and the people who live there without giving everyone the same hues and textures.
Because let’s be honest: half of all pop songs are about getting drunk, and half of all pop songs are about falling in love, but few pop or country songs dare to have a lot of nuance or subtlety. They’re more likely to hit you over the head with a single message, like, “I’m on a BOAT!” then repeat that message six hundred times.
Now, the chorus:
Half of my hometown’s still hangin’ around Still talkin’ about that one touchdown They’re still wearin’ red and black Go Bobcats, while the other half Of my hometown they all got out Some went north Some went south Still lookin’ for a feelin’ half of us ain’t found So stay or leave Part of me will always be Half of my hometown
Oh, here we go. I don’t really have a home town, being born on a military base we left after a year. Kept on hopping around bases in the Germany and the Holland and the New York–so if you put a Glock to my noggin and asked me for a single detail about my hometown, couldn’t tell you a damn thing. Throw a blindfold on me and ask me whether an F-15 or F-16 is flying overhead and I’m you’re man.
However: we now live in a one-stoplight logging town, where half the town does show up to wear maroon and gray every Friday night and is still talking about that one touchdown. So I feel these lyrics in a way that Justin Bieber could never reach me with the lyrics of his masterpiece, “Baby, Baby, Baby.”
Half of our prom queens cut their hair Half of them think that it ain’t fair The quarterback moved away and never came back Half of my family is happy I left The other half worries I’ll just forget Where I came from Same place where they came from
I could not love this more. Beautiful lyrics and they do touch on the touch choice facing anyone from a small town: stay for family and neighbors and friends, or leave for opportunities and dreams. Totally get that.
Now we get the chorus again, so I’ll delete that chunk and give you the next real bit. Say hello to the bridge and the closing:
Backroads raise us Highways they take us Memories make us wanna go back
To our hometown, settle down Talk about that one touchdown Raise some kids in red and black Go Bobcats, while the other half Of my hometown was in the crowd They knew the words They sang them loud And all I wanna do is make them proud Cause half of me will always be Knoxville, Tennessee My hometown My hometown
Heard this song again and again, making the ending anything but a surprise. I know exactly what is coming. And the last lines still hit hard.
VERDICT
Here’s the deal: I enjoy pop songs and Angry Indie Acoustic stuff far, far more than country music. However: country and rap songs tend to tell this thing we call a story. They also get more inventive with lyrics, echoes, and reversals with wording.
The Chicks song, TRAVELING SOLDIER, is a freaking masterpiece.
Do the lyrics to MY HOMETOWN do the job? Paula Abdul would say, “Yes, yes, a thousand times, YES!” but she’d mean it and Emelio Estevez would mean it this time and they’d still be married today. Ben Affleck and J. Lo, do not listen to this song, move to a small town, and get married to each other or another human being again. Hold off for a decade or two.
Kelsea Ballerini nails it in a few hundred words. Seriously, count them up. If you don’t count the repeated chorus, it is shocking how few words she uses to do a complicated job of making us see her hometown and feel all these choices and people.
I come to praise OpenAI, not to bury it. Yet many experts are saying reality is catching up to the hype train.
It didn’t take a server farm full of NVIDIA cards for me to come up with seven reasons to agree with the skeptics. Unless they invent Skynet (Artificial General Intelligence) and take over the world, I believe OpenAI will get bought out or buried by the competition.
7. Live by the Hype Train, die by the Hype Train
Startups need buzz more than anything. More than money and more than talent. Because without free press and hype, a startup can’t attract investors, brainy employees, and clients.
OpenAI got billions worth of buzz once it released ChatGPT.
Now the Hype Train is turning on it. You want proof? Here’s proof: the godfather of AI, when he recently received his Nobel Prize, took the time to dunk on the company’s CEO.
The other part of buzz is risk versus reward, dream versus nightmare. The dream of OpenAI is Artificial General Intelligence, an AI as smart as humans that then becomes exponentially smarter.
The nightmare of OpenAI critics is … Artificial General Intelligence, since it could grow out of control, Skynet style.
Many AI experts say reaching this point means the machines take over and either enslave us or end humanity. Some experts don’t say this is hypothetical, but inevitable.
Not cool, do not like, 0/10.
OpenAI did not help counter this messaging when all kinds of employees and co-founders left, saying they worried about the guardrails at OpenAI coming off.
What happens when two Hype Trains, one positive and one negative, collide at high speed? I believe it’s how Scotty powers the warp engines and it is not pretty.
6. No longer unique
A year ago, if you said OpenAI would switch from non-profit to profit, I would line up with everybody else to buy stock.
Today, everybody and their Golden Lab has competing products. Google has Gemini and Gemma. There’s Falcon, Claude, Phi-3, and DBRX.
Facebook (aka Meta) has I Have No Idea What Silly Name Zuck Chose.
I could throw out two dozen random names and you wouldn’t know which ones I’m making up, not because I’m a genius at inventing tech-bro names, but because THERE ARE SO DAMN MANY.
Plus, there are all kinds of open models and non-profit efforts. The barrier to entry is so low, college kids with a spare weekend can make their own AI shebang and share it with the world on GitHub or whatever. A random man just created a free AI that takes your resume and applies to jobs for you.
There is no secret sauce. OpenAI doesn’t have a patent or monopoly on this tech and never will.
And these competitors aren’t universally obsessed with Artificial General Intelligence, so they don’t have natural opposition from people and institutions that are kinda sorta worried about our robot overlords, Skynet, or the next bad Matrix sequel starring us instead of Keanu Reeves.
5. High costs, low profits.
It takes the energy of a thousand suns to train these AI’s, then the energy of ten thousand suns to run them. They’re talking about restarting a reactor at Three Mile Island to help power this stuff, I kid you not.
Even after raising billions of dollars, OpenAI needs to raise billions more to keep going. They haven’t turned a profit and won’t for years, if ever, unless something big changes.
Here are the numbers: they’re expected to burn $7 billion in 2024. The company expects to run up $44 billion in losses between 2023 and 2028 before turning a profit in 2029.
That’s a long time to wait. A lot of things can happen before then.
4. Massive competition
Until they turn a profit or go public, OpenAI will spend all kinds of time and energy keeping the lights on, giving scrappy competitors and tech giant alike a big fat opening to swoop down and eat their lunch. You know, like a bird spotting a man trying to each a sandwich on the beach.
Already, you have dozens of alternatives to OpenAI’s products, and new ones will keep popping up. There’s no incentive to go small here. People will swing hard, looking for home runs.
How do you win the AI race? Money, creativity, and products that people actually spend cash to use. But mostly money, because you need piles AI cards and mountains of electricity to train new AI’s and run them.
Money is also how you pay the salaries of the most brilliant AI talent on the talent. There’s a limited supply, and these brilliant people are not magically stupid when it comes to comparing two numbers and figuring out which one has more zeroes behind it.
The brain drain already started, with key people who founded OpenAI already gone, and many already working for competitors.
3. Swallowed by a tech shark
Microsoft and NVIDIA have multiple avenues to dominate AI, if they want. And they do want it.
One method: pour an overwhelming amount of money and talent into the AI arms race, swamping OpenAI.
Or they could do the simpler thing: Write checks to buy every startup they can.
Microsoft already partners with OpenAI and provides a ton of funding and server time.
NVIDIA makes the essential tech that fuels AI, and they recently announced their own AI model, fueled by the high-end cards that run most of this tech. Cards that are in short supply.
Microsoft’s market cap is $2.3 trillion, while NVIDIA is worth $3 trillion.
OpenAI feels great when it raises $6 or $7 billion from investors to continue operating.
NVIDIA or Microsoft could go hard and spend $100 billion or more to scoop up the top talent, then buy every AI card and server farm in sight. Do you think Wall Street would punish them for that? Nah. Their stock would go up, not down. You could plan ahead and sneakily finance the effort on the stock bounce, if you wanted to flex the size of your evil financial brain.
Also, people respond to incentives. What are the incentives here?
As CEO of a for-profit, Sam Altman will get all kinds of stock options and ways to cash out if the company (a) goes public or (b) gets bought out. He isn’t incentivized for a long, hard battle with deep-pocketed competitors. The natural thing is to cash out, take his billions, and buy his own tropical island. Get a tan and draw up his dream for a new startup on cocktail napkins as they bring him endless strawberry margaritas on the beach.
Same thing with other bigshots at OpenAI who’ll get equity. What outsiders will see as a big loss and the end of the old independent company won’t be losses for them at all. It’ll be like winning the lottery times ten.
2. Better avenues for profits
Getting corporations and regular people to pay monthly fees for the latest and greatest OpenAI products isn’t a license to print money. Users are down after the hype wore off, and it’s not paying the bills.
There are better, bigger markets that other companies will dominate.
Every country in the world has a military and sees what’s happening in Ukraine, and they will spend more and more cash for drones. Not just quadcopters like you can buy from Costco, but water-based drones, ground drones, long-range drones, and seven things we can’t imagine today.
All kinds of AI will keep getting integrated into all kinds of drones and phones and tech built by all kinds of corporations, and they’re all going to make bank. Neural chips are getting cheap and getting into everything from PC’s to refrigerators.
And there’s a huge market for using AI in health care and industries that don’t involve typing words into a chat box. Analyzing MRIs and ultrasounds, checking geological samples for signs of gold or oil, unfolding proteins that might be the next big drug. You name it, there’s probably a version of AI that can make things better, faster, and/or cheaper. This is the good side, the non-Skynet/Matrix hope for this tech.
It’s just that OpenAI isn’t big enough, or diverse enough, to get into all these markets. It’s not like Microsoft where everybody’s using the same operating system, or Google dominates the search engine market, and they can use that to leverage other products.
1. Superior products keep popping up
Every week, new AI products show up. Some are direct competitors to flavors of ChatGPT, and others are quite different.
Here’s just one example: NotebookLM is probably the best application of AI that I’ve seen, and I’m using it far more than ChatGPT now, because I ran out of ideas for silly poems about my dog.
All the chatbot AI’s have trouble interacting with specific material, which is what a lot of folks want and need. Some can now surf the web, live, for material and new info. Others are limited to the internet as of 2022 and such. If you want an AI to analyze your material, there are wonky plug-ins and such, but they all pretty much stink.
NotebookLM goes right at this problem.
Want to analyze a 300-page book as a PDF? Go wild.
How about an image and a link to a website and up to 50 total things? Yes. You heard me. Up to 50 bits of material, including links and books. Go for it.
People keep worrying about AI taking away the jobs of writers, and I don’t see that yet, because AI’s are meh at writing. What they are great at is analyzing and summarizing things, which is where NotebookLM blew my mind.
It’ll create a timeline, a FAQ, a study guide, whatever you like from the material you provice.
It’ll even create a full podcast, with the push of a button. I kid you not. These podcasts don’t feel like AI at all.
Here’s a podcast based on a single paragraph of text. OMGWTFBBQ.
This kind of thing is the future. I mean, ChatGPT is a neat trick, and can do interesting things like compose silly poems about my two dogs after I told it a few facts. Not profitable.
I believe new, fresh takes on AI, like NotebookLM, will be far more useful and aimed at specific needs than flavors of ChatGPT. They’re popping up every day and won’t stop for years.
And that’s the top reason why I think OpenAI will get bought up—by Microsoft or maybe Google—if it’s not buried by the competition first.
Listen, I know you have seven different subscriptions to Netflix and Hulu and all that, yet struggle to find things of real value to watch and maybe binge the last season of Great British Bakeoff once again because the new season hasn’t dropped yet.
I have been there. Am plowing through clips of Justified on the youtube because I don’t have whatever subscription is necessary to watch entire episodes of that thing. And yes, all these subs are costing us the same or more as the old cable bundles we hate. Say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss.
HOWEVER: There is hope in the form of great movies, little gems hiding in the vast archives of places like Netflix, and this is about one such glittery diamond with subtitles and a rocking soundtrack. It’s getting remastered and re-released on its 25th anniversary or whatever.
Here, watch the trailer.
Somehow, I never saw this movie until yesterday, which is tragic. Who will pay for my therapy?
I’m going to lay out all the reason you need to fire up the interwebs and watch this thing.
Reason No. 1: A great story
It’s common to find movies with one cool idea that they (a) completely pound to death like it’s a SNL skit, or (b) abandon halfway through because they don’t know how to stick the landing. We also run into (c) action movies and superhero blockbusters that flop because they shoeved seven different screenwriters in the kitchen and the studio edits turned it into a lifeless $350 million mess.
RUN LOLA RUN has a beautiful story that’s surprising and interesting. You want to know what happens times three, because that’s how many times the story loops back.
Reason No. 2: Re-watchable like hell
My acid test of whether a movie or novel is good cannot be simpler. Would I watch it again, or read it again?
Then I have an even more acidic test, like the blood of those monsters in Alien that can eat through deck after deck of a starship: would I pay money to watch it again, or read it again, or would you have to pay ME a pile of monies to suffer through it?
I would pay monies to watch RUN LOLA RUN again.
Time-loop movies like this are rare but not unique. You can certainly do them wrong. However, this one is like GROUNDHOG DAY and EDGE OF TOMORROW in how repeated viewings reward you with new little details.
Reason No. 3: You do NOT have to pay monies to watch it again
I cannot tell you the number of times I’ve paid an insane amount to rent a new-ish movie online, only to regret that choice about 10 minutes into the stinker.
Sure, you may not have HBO Max or Disney+, but I bet $20 you have Netflix, and this sucker is free on there. Don’t need to rent it, buy it, lease it, or whisper sweet words to it whenever you want to fire this thing up again. Make some popcorn and go wild.
Reason No. 4: It’s in German, with subtitles, and you WILL NOT CARE
Remember when you watched black-and-white French existentialist movies, maybe in college after taking your first philosophy classes? Subtitles can be a pain, especially when people talk fast.
This movie does subtitles exactly right, and nobody really talks too fast, or gets into silly complicated pretentious nonsense about the malleability of reality and the illusion of choice and the artificial construct of laws when they are simply an exercise of the monopoly on force.
RUN LOLA RUN gets into cool ideas and conflicts by showing you them. You could turn the subtitles off, listen to the German dialogue, and still figure out 99 percent of the movie. (Note: I lived in the Germany as a pookie, and the Holland, and took German both as a pookie and in HS, and yes, it’s a complex and interesting language, and yes, I’m impressed that you know what schadenfreude is, but you will not need any of that to enjoy this movie, and I’ve forgotten all my German except the buying of things and the swearing.)
Reason No. 5: Reality shows are probably more scripted than this movie, which is pure and good
Reality shows are not real. Even the ones that are somewhat connected to reality and not the script wishes of producers are so heavily edited that it’s a deceptive depiction of what actually happened. Back to the Great British Bakeoff–do you really think the footage they show five seconds before “time’s up” was shot five seconds before the deadline. Bahahahaha!
RUN LOLA RUN does not cheat, like Chrisopher Nolan in THE DARK KNIGHT RISES and MEMENTO and every other movie he does that is not historical Oscar bait.
RUN LOLA RUN is gritty and pure and has no CGI green screen nonsense, no artificial sweeteners, and no silly tricks. It does what it says on the tin. Go watch it.
Listen: Let’s say you and I went back in time–I mean way back, like 1989, when parachute pants where a thing–nobody would believe us if we told them about this Magical Box Full of Interwebs.
Random person in this thing we used to call The Mall: “So I plug into this box–“
“Plugging in is optional. You can do it wirelessly, too.”
Person: “Sure, Jan, sure. Okay, I have this box, and it connects me to anyplace else on the planet, like Japan and Sweden and Iceland?”
“Yes. And you can watch videos of cats knocking things off counters, read personal diaries of random people, and check out libraries of priceless knowledge like Knitting Hats for Cats.”
At this point, the Random Person would say this is a scam, and we’d have to admit their 1989 Mac or Dell couldn’t actually connect to all that stuff yet, because the internet didn’t quite exist. But soon it would, and they’d be so so so far ahead of their neighbors it wouldn’t even be funny.
Today, the internet grows exponentially fast, just like space-time, so quickly that unless your Not-So-Magical box can keep up, funny cat videos will take forever to load and whatever online game you enjoy will lag so hard that it’s like you’re standing still and everybody else has super-speed, and it’ll be even more annoying than a Flash episode, though not as annoying as a Flash movie.
If you want slow internet, head to the garage and open random boxes until you find a dial-up modem, connect that thing to what they called a telephone line (they lived in walls) and start making the sounds: bee-bop, bee-BOOP-doo-doo doo, screech, SCREECH, ka-boing ka boing ka-booooinggggg.
You think I’m making that up. Nope. Totally accurate.
Or give that dial-up modem to the Museum of Dead Technology and buy this Magical Box Full of Interwebs, because reasons. Here, I have many.
It is brand new and still in the box. Never touched, caressed, or even gone on a date. It is the virgin olive oil of technology.
Despite it’s power and purity, this box is on sale, because I am not a giant corporation, and somewhat kind, and already have my own Magical Box Full of Interwebs that’s working just fine.
Economists have a term of buying new products at a discount: “The Principle of This Fell Off the Back of a Truck.” Except it did not fall off a truck, and was not liberated, or misappropriated, or stolen. It’s simply surplus.
You do not have an unlimited supply of money. It is finite, and keeps shrinking when you do silly things like pay the mortgage or the rent or buy the little ones shoes and such. Saving money rocks. Have no monies stinks. You like to rock.
Slow internet is painful and wrong. It is a sin against the sky gods, who the Magical Box of Full of Interwebs communicates with when bored, and you don’t want to anger them, because they will fly down from orbit and swap your semi-fast box of internet with a dialup modem if you piss them off.
You probably have other human beings in your household, people that you love or at least tolerate, and they may use up all your bandwidth watching Friends reruns or obscure anime stuff with subtitles while all you want to do is find more funny cat videos, and this could prevent that bandwidth logjam. Or you all could turn off the screens and hang out together playing Exploding Kittens with the kiddos downing juice boxes and the grownups having a little wine tasting. Go wild.
This is a Nighthawk AC1900 WiFi Cable Modem Router with 24×8 channel bonding and speeds up to 960 Mbps. If that’s what you want, I have it, let’s make a deal. If you want a MorningSparrow DC200 Sluggy Slug Dialup Modem with speeds of 26 kilobytes per second and such, I do not have it and would not sell it.
Nobody writes checks anymore, and if you want to pay the bills and not get evicted to live in your Toyota Sienna swagger wagon, you gotta pay for physical things virtually via your bank’s app plus Venmo, Paypal, and ten other stupid things with ten other stupid passwords and usernames you WILL forget but can’t save in a Word file because some hacker in Moscow will find that thing and steal all your monies.
PRICE
This thing costs $194, new, in physical stores or online.
I will take $90 in U.S. dollars OR accept trade for things that would be useful in any sort of apocalypse, like food with a 25-year-old shelf life, but not cans of dog food, because I don’t believe Mel Gibson ate real dog food in Road Warrior, and even if he did, I’m still not down with that.
The Red Pen of Doom 