This post is like X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST, except with printing presses and the web instead of Hugh Jackman.
We’ll go back in time, return to the present and into the future. Here’s how it started: for eons, news only traveled as fast as you could run, unless you had a horse or an army of trained pigeons. (Yes, this was a thing. Rather brilliant, really.)
Back in the 1700s, newspapers from London and Paris were put on sailing ships that crossed the Atlantic, and people lined up and paid real money to read news that was months old. Didn’t matter. It was new to them. Continue reading “The past, present and future of news”→
In my sacred quest to watch Every Decent Thing on Netflix, I’ve seen a lot of quirky movies that make fun of the action and superhero genres.
All good, right?
Well, no.
Let’s watch three trailers, then take apart two movies with huge promise that both fall flat and one film that nails it.
Spoiler Alert: This entire post is one giant spoiler. Sorry. Can’t help it. Palpatine told me, “Do what must be done.”
First up: TURBO KID
Good trailer, right? And it seems like it’s not trash, since critics apparently blessed it.
SUPER
Rainn Wilson and Ellen Page are the best. Come on. This should be amazing.
KUNG FURY
This is a production with no-name actors and virtually no budget. But the trailer looks funny.
Dissecting all three movies
TURBO KID and SUPER both suffer from trying to be two things: they both want to be cartoonish and child-like while subverting the whole comic-book genre with massive amounts of gore, violence, nudity and profanity.
You expect blood, bullets and every one of the FCC’s Seven Dirty Words in an R-rated action movie. No big deal.
These two movies are trying to be two things at once, though. You can be innocent and fun or you can be gritty and gross. Pick one.
The worst B movies splatter you with f-bombs and blood. The best pick their shots.
How you end a movie also kinda sorta matters, if you care about the audience.
TURBO KID jumps the shark in the end when it turns out not only is his sidekick / girlfriend a robot, but so it the bad guy, despite there being no hint of this at all. The bad guy just isn’t believable as an evil machine. I can completely buy a friendly robot that’s programmed and designed to be a companion. I can’t buy a bizarre, twisted villain actually being a robot beneath all that flesh. How did he get to be that way? It doesn’t fly as a last-minute revelation with no setup.
SUPER lost me in the climax when Ellen Page, playing the sidekick, Boltie, gets shot in the face and killed. She was the heart and soul of the movie, the best part. This film felt like a French existentialist number, with the hero killing the bad guys and saving his wife, but not really winning. It’s not a true a tragedy, either.
You can do stories with mixed endings, if you do them right. A hero can get what he wants, then decide he doesn’t want it. A boxer can lose the championship while earning self-respect and a girlfriend named Adrian.
You can do it. But it has to be carefully constructed.
TURBO KID and SUPER both felt weird for the sake of weird.
KUNG FURY is happily retro, cheesy and creative. There’s still swear words and nuttiness, but it remains fun instead of weird or sad.
With TURBO KID and SUPER, there was a mix of cartoonish surrealism and gritty realism, as if the writers and directors couldn’t choose which direction to take. KUNG FURY has the same tone throughout, but it still surprises you again and again.
VERDICT: Go ahead and fast-forward through the boring bits of TURBO KID and SUPER, if you’re curious about either, but skip the stupid endings so you don’t throw things at the screen. Watch all of KUNG FURY.
Now, this fake Japanese commercial for Trump is spot-on and hilarious. But the seriousness and inevitably silliness of a campaign that started out with 20+ candidates and now has our first reality TV star as a nominee, well, you’re going to get more than one video from that.
Here’s Obama singing Rihanna’s WORK.
And here’s brother Bernie belting out POWER by Kanye.
Hillary and Barack team up for TIMBER by Pitbull.
It takes skill to create these videos. I think they work because of the high contrast between the highest politicians in the land and low-brow pop songs. The more banal the pop song, and the harder it is to figure out the lyrics (love Rihanna, but nobody understands what she’s singing in WORK), the more funny the video is.
The original Serious Footage Turned Into Song, though, is still the best: Brian Williams absolutely nails RAPPER’S DELIGHT.
The first murderer I ever met was tall and awkward, with curly hair. But this was sixth grade, and we were all a bit awkward. Every one of us.
This kid didn’t grow up to stalk the streets and slay prostitutes until the TV stations gave him a nickname.
He didn’t buy an AR-15 and shoot up a lecture hall or a nightclub.
This boy became a killer that same year.
One day he was in school. The next day he didn’t show up, and the next, and the next, until we finally learned the truth: he’d been charged with murder. Continue reading “The killer beside you”→
This is the video that has the internet, and the mainstream media, losing their minds.
It’s like The Dress, except whether a bit of fashionable fabric is blue or gold didn’t really matter to anyone, while the existence of massive alligators roaming golf courses could, in fact, matter a great deal to ALL THE PEOPLE IT GOBBLES UP.
So yeah, this is exciting and fun. Let’s break it down.
Evidence pointing toward fakery and prankery
1) Nothing screams “green screen” like a green background
We all know how you make a fake video, or do special effects in movies. It starts with a green screen.
Adding a moving object that goes straight across, left to right, on the same plane? Piece of cake.
2) Terrible audio
Audio that’s all chopped up points to film that got edited to bits.
3) No closeup
With most footage of real-life craziness, the person shooting it has a choice: (a) run far, far away from Things That Can Kill You, like tornadoes, great white sharks, zombies or alligators the size of garbage trucks, (b) risk your life to see it, but only from a safe distance, (c) get as close as you can for a real look at the thing and a chance for YouTube infamy or (d) be smart and use the magic of zooming to get a closer look without turning into lunch.
Why is the shot so static? Anybody with two brain cells to knock together would zoom in on this monster.
Evidence making me think it’s real
1) The shadow knows
No, not that Shadow.
Check out the shadow of the gator as it crosses the sand trap. Pretty hard to fake that.
2) Alligators this size are rare, but not insanely rare
If you’ve ever watched National Geographic, The Crocodile Hunter or any other show dealing with nature, you’ve seen crocodiles and alligators. And yeah, they get big.
It’s a reptile thing. I believe reptiles keep growing and growing until they die.
Could be wrong. Not a scientist. Wait, I’m right. They grow forever.
3) This is Florida
If you told me this video was shot in Georgia, Michigan or California, I’d be 149 percent more skeptical.
But we’re talking about Florida, the only state with it’s own Fark tag.
Weird news and Florida go together like chocolate and peanut butter, Han Solo and Chewbecca, coffee and milk.
There’s so much weird news coming out of this state, there’s a Twitter account dedicated to insane headlines that all start with “Florida Man,” as in “Florida man dresses like ninja to rob 7-Elevens” or “Florida man hides from cops in pond, gets eaten by alligators.”
As a huge fan of action movies, hear me now and believe me later in the week: the Era of Epic Explosions is over.
Stick a fork it in.
It’s kaput. Done. Dead and buried.
X-MEN: OSCAR ISAAC WEARING 30 POUNDS OF MAKEUP is only the latest nail in the cinematic coffin, though it’s a nail that cost more than the domestic product of Paraguay.
Now, I liked the movie more than I expected after all those bad reviews. HOWEVER: the big action set pieces where the villain started destroying the world?
Big shrug. Didn’t care.
Here’s why explosions were once movie magic and now make people sneakily check Twitter on their magical phones.
1) In the old days, big explosions meant big budgets and big stars
Way back, only the biggest productions could afford to blow things up.
Those same movies also had the best directors, best actors and biggest budgets.
Meanwhile, B movies had incredibly cheesy explosions and effects that looked like Ed, president of the AV club, cooked them up on his Macintosh during a long weekend fueled by two-liter bottles of Orange Crush and two over-sized bags of Cheeto’s, which should be spelled Cheetoh’s but isn’t. Not sure why.
This is why the following compilation of great movie explosions skews toward old action movies. Because they actually blew things up, using real explosives, instead of spending millions of dollars on fake pixels.
2) Explosions were rare and therefore precious
In the Golden Age of Things Going Boom in the Movies, directors and producers had much smaller budgets, which meant you couldn’t have things explode on screen every two minutes.
You had to (a) find an abandoned building that fit your script, (b) file permits with the city for permission to blow it up and (c) hire professional people to blow them up on time and on schedule, while cameras rolled.
If the things went wrong, you were out millions of dollars and needed to find a new abandoned building.
Therefore, action movies of yore couldn’t go overboard with fire, smoke and debris. They had to use explosions when it mattered most.
This was a good thing, for movie budgets and for people sitting in dark rooms while they munched on overpriced kernels of exploded corn.
3) Today, everybody can afford special effects and explosions
It was epic when Bruce Willis sent the office chair down the elevator shaft in DIE HARD.
And I be you can remember the first time you saw the Death Star explode in STAR WARS. (The second and third times, not so much.)
Directors making movies today grew up watching those cool, big-budget movies with amazing explosions. Even if they’re working on a cheesy TV show, now they can afford to blow up anything they want, as big as they want.
So yeah, they do it.
All. The. Time.
It goes deeper: people making fan movies or YouTube parodies have the technology to blow up New York City, the West Coast or the entire solar system, if they’re truly ambitious. Check out the insanely detailed fan-made movies about Star Wars with excellent lightsaber effects. Amazing.
With giant budgets and armies of CGI people, it’s insanely easy these days to spice up a bad scene with explosions. Except it’s used so often, it’s a cliché.
Michael Bay has created an entire career out of blowing things up in slow motion. Here’s a montage:
4) Easy CGI means explosions aren’t believable
Audiences today grew up watching real explosions in action movies. We know what they look like.
Even big movies with big budgets struggle to get CGI right.
When you know it’s fake, you don’t care.
5) We’re numb to ka-booms by now, and we know the villain will lose
It’s a staple of every action movie, comic-book movie or thriller that (a) the Bad Guy Wants to Destroy the World and (b) the Bad Guy Gets to Start Blowing Up the World because (c) it wouldn’t be any fun if the audience didn’t get to see six blocks of Manhattan get demolished for the 2,874th time.
The old rule of storytelling was to always, always raise the stakes. If saving your wife and daughter from terrorists was good, then saving an entire city from a stolen nuclear warhead was better and stopping a villain from destroying Earth had to be the ultimate.
Except we expect this now. We’re numb to it.
And audiences know how it ends. The villain never, ever gets to truly destroy Gotham, New York City or the Earth.
The dice are loaded. The villain is going to lose.
Which means there’s zero suspense.
Oh, we’ll get a little look at the Big Bad Guy stomping on a few blocks, or a glimpse of how his doomsday device will flatten New Zealand, but no, the villain never gets to actually win.
So as I sat there watching the X-Men head off to stop Apocalypse from destroying civilization, what should have been the most exciting part of the movie had zero thrills whatsoever.
Because you knew the villain would lose. No question.
This is part of the reason why CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR worked so well. The story is smaller and the stakes are lower. The villain isn’t trying to destroy the third rock from the sun. He’s simply trying to get revenge by turning the Avengers against each other. Yet you care far more about CIVIL WAR than BATMAN VS SUPES or X-MEN: COME SEE WOLVERINE FOR TWO MINUTES. And the reason why is simple: audience will always, always care more about living, breathing characters than bits of concrete and rebar.
TL;DR: Blowing up things isn’t shocking or thrilling anymore, not when it’s CGI pixel nonsense. Also: Villains with evil plans to destroy Gotham, D.C. or Earth never get to actually do it, so stop making that the plot of every action thriller and comic book movie.
Bonus video: Expectation vs reality – action movies
This is another solid music video by Macklemore, who’s smart for (a) giving Ryan Lewis co-billing, (b) constantly trying new things with music videos and (c) now experimenting with a different kind of tour.
Instead of doing the smart thing in terms of economics, which is to tour giant cities playing in giant arenas to maximize profits, Macklemore’s latest tour is completely local, with gigs in tiny venues around his home state of Washington.
He’s coming to my little county, to Olympia, Spokane, all over.
And tickets are cheap ($21 or so) instead of the usual $100+ for a big name like Macklemore.
This is pure fan service, in the best way possible.
There aren’t many international music stars who’d chose to make less money by playing to small crowds in small towns.
Thank you, Macklemore—though the concerts in my backyard are sold out (they all sold out, statewide), I know my friends and neighbors are excited that you’re doing this.
Yes, I kid you not: this isn’t a pet duck with a uniform grandma knitted as a joke.
These are real ducks with real jobs. And they take it seriously.
First up: the army of 900 Indian Runner ducks who work in a vineyard, and yes, it’s real work. They’re not eye candy for tourists who stopped by to sip on Chianti.
These ducks perform a hugely important task: keeping the vineyard free of pests, and they do it so well, the vineyard doesn’t need to use pesticides, which you DO NOT WANT in your Chianti.
They also seem insanely happy to do this, don’t they?
Think about it: you’re a wild duck, scrambling around for food and shelter, and your vineyard duck cousin tells you about his life, living in a sweet vineyard full of yummy food, sleeping in a great shelter, no predators to worry about and 900 other chill ducks to hang out with when you’re not feasting on bugs and worms.
Not too shabby. Not shabby at all.
Then there’s these ducks with the same kind of gig in Thailand, working at a rice fam.
Let’s break down why this is amusing and touching.
First, the ducks are cute. They seem eager and happy, and they’re far more elegant than chickens.
My neighbor has chickens and ducks. I feed them leftover veggies and such, and have learned things. The chickens are like feathered dinosaurs, and they do talk. But they also move in jerks and look at you with one eye at a time.
The ducks seem more evolved and intelligent. Instead of doing the chicken walk, they stroll. So with ducks, you’ve got a sympathetic subject.
Second, it’s surprising that ducks can do a job.
Monkeys? Sure. You expect monkeys, elephants, dogs and dolphins to be the type of animal with a job. They’re trainable.
Ducks are a shock.
Third, it’s crazy how happy the ducks are do these jobs. They aren’t on a chain gang. The owner doesn’t have to loom over them with a whistle and a whip. Sure, eating bugs is natural, but working as a team, and doing it on schedule without causing other shenanigans?
It’s hard to get 900 humans to work together without shenanigans. Five or more humans in a group won’t even agree on how to SPELL shenanigins.
We live in the Golden Age of comic book movies, with Marvel and DC pumping them out as faster than you can swipe your VISA for $14 tickets to IMAX 3D and $9 bags of popcorn.
Here’s the secret recipe for mediocre superhero movies and its two sequels, each of which will costs at least $250 bazillion to make and $150 gazillion to market, and no, those insanely high numbers are not why you have to pay so much for tickets and kernels of dried corn that have been exploded. That’s a coincidence.
Note: I strongly deny the theory that this post is suggesting movie studios spend more than 1 percent of the budget on the actual story, because diverting that amount of money would eliminate the CGI budget for the skyscraper that explodes and falls down in the middle of the seventh fight scene, the one in that city that sort of looks like Vancouver, B.C. after the villain kidnaps the love interest and has a creepy dinner with her in his lair, but not the explode-y fight scene where the villain crashes the mayor’s birthday party to announce his plans for doomsday.
Secret Ingredient #1: A hero is born, which means Mom and Dad better have life insurance
Sorry, moms and dads of the world: if your son or daughter is destined to put on a mask and cape to fight evil, there’s a price to pay. Which means you’ve got to go.
Superheroes with dead parents are incredibly common, for these good reasons.
Here are those reasons: (a) any villain with a brain in their noggin could simply kidnap mom and dad whenever they wanted something, forcing (b) every movie or comic book starring a superhero with actual parents to spend precious time explaining exactly how mom and dad are hiding and surviving, (c) dead parents are an easy way for writers to give their superhero their motivation to fight crime and evil and (d) how else would you get Superman to fight Batman except by leveraging his human step-mom?
The list of superheroes with dead parents is so long I don’t even have to start, but I will: Batman, Superman (his real parents, not Martha), Iron Man, Captain America, Black Panther—you get the picture.
Secret Ingredient #2: Our hero is a total loser
This is a necessary step to the first movie, which tells the hero’s origin story.
You have to show how lame the hero is before he gets his powers. The bigger the contrast, the better the story.
Peter Parker is a nerdy little high school kid who gets bullied.
Steve Rogers is so small and scrawny, they won’t even accept him as a volunteer to fight in World War II.
Tony Stark is a billionaire playboy who invents and sells weapons when he’s not busy trying to poison his liver and catch every STD known to man.
Finally, here’s an example that shows how going halfway doesn’t work AT ALL.
Oliver Queen (Green Arrow) is a billionaire playboy who’s totally not a copy of Batman, and though Arrow’s rich father is dead, his mom is still alive, and living with him (?) and his kid sister (??) in the same mansion, even though he’s a grown man. Yeah, that’s the setup. It is as soap-opera-ish and stinky as you could imagine.
Secret Ingredient #3: Power up
A superhero needs talents and powers, whether they come from (a) a science experiment gone wrong (Spiderman, Hulk), (b) a science experiment gone right (Captain America, Ant Man), (c) years of training and (Black Widow, Falcon, Arrow) or (d) being a playboy billionaire genius who invents his own suit and arsenal of gadgets (Batman, Iron Man and a dozen other copycats not named Arrow).
Then there are weird powers that we do not, cannot and will not accept, like gills to breathe underwater combined with the ability to get whales to act like underwater taxis whenever Batman and his buddies in the Justice League don’t feel like using in the Batsub or Wonder Woman’s invisible plane.
Secret Ingredient #4: An old mentor who eventually MUST DIE
Sorry. It’s a thing.
The same clause in Sean Bean’s contract that requires him to die in every role is included for any actor playing the mentor to our superhero.
This is also necessary, because eventually (a) the screenwriters will write themselves into a corner and need the ultimate motivation for the hero to go beserk or the aging actor playing the mentor will (b) get sick of being a glorified sidekick and do other roles or (c) demand insane amounts of money to be in the sequels.
Before he dies, the mentor needs to be wise, charming, helpful and funny.
This is almost always a male role, whether we’re talking about a hero or heroine. Sorry. That’s how the Bad Superhero Blockbuster rolls.
Our old and grizzled mentor also needs to own many hats, because he’ll be wearing them all: sidekick, martial arts trainer, tech support and father figure.
But his death serves another purpose, because it opens up the way for five different sidekicks to pick up those hats, dust them off and put them on in the sequels.
Secret Ingredient #5: A dash of young love
Didn’t expect this in a movie with capes and explosions, did you? But it always happens.
Captain America had Agent Carter and now her niece.
Iron Man has Pepper Potts when they can afford Gwyneth Paltrow.
Thor has Princess Leia’s mom.
Batman has Rachel, or he did for a while, though I’ve always said it’s a lot like Harry Potter winding up with his best friend’s sister instead of Hermione: wrong, wrong, wrong. Batman should be forever linked to Catwoman, who rocks.
The new Wonder Woman will have Captain Kirk, which is pretty cool. Great actor. Good choice.
Arrow has–actually, I don’t really care about Arrow’s paramour, and don’t even make me think about what Aquaman does on Friday nights.
Back to our recipe: Preferably, this relationship should (a) start as early as possible, maybe even childhood, and (b) it should be a love triangle, with the third person also a friend from childhood.
That third person, ideally, should be our next ingredient.
Secret Ingredient #6: A delicious nemesis
Not a villain.
No, a villain is common and boring.
A nemesis last. He or she endures.
But this takes time. Like fine wine and good whiskey, a nemesis must ferment. Because they start out good before turning sour.
The hero and nemesis were once friends, if not best friends. Maybe they both wanted the same girl, the same achievements, the same powers and status.
A true nemesis is the flip side of the hero, showing what happens if you take the path less travelled.
Or you could take the easy way out and cast an aging Hollywood has-been as the villain, somebody who used to be box office gold. Give them a terrible foreign accent, a little backstory and let them chew up the scenery until the hero punches them into oblivion and locks them inside a chamber that gets flooded with radiation from the superweapon our big baddie intended to use to nuke LA.
Also: a quick, Cheaty McCheatypants way of creating your nemesis is to give him or her the same powers or power source as the hero.
This so lazy and bad, it rarely happens except for Iron Man 1, Iron Man 2, Thor, Man of Steel, Batman Begins, Arrow and fifteen other movies and TV shows I won’t look up right now.
It’s not enough for your villain or nemesis to steal every bar of gold from Fort Knox or crown himself Lord of Canada after unleashing his army of mind-controlled badgers with steel-tipped claws and industrial lasers strapped to their heads.
To be a truly clichéd superhero movie, the villain must threaten to destroy planet Earth, or at least nuke Gotham or Metropolis, which is the same thing for DC movies.
You can blow things up however you like, though nuclear warheads were only used as a plot device in every other Bond movie, spy film and TV show since 1953.
What gives you enough pop to make the third rock from the sun go bye-bye? Here are your choices: (a) an bio-engineered super virus, (b) alien invaders, (c) an army of killer robots / sharks / zombies or (d) manipulating or mind-controlling a hero so the other heroes have to fight them, especially if the hero is somebody unstoppable like Superman.
Secret ingredient #7: Clean up the kitchen and start prepping for sequels
To be a truly Bad Superhero Movie, you must follow the recipe exactly. To the letter.
That means Movie #2 has two villains, two sidekicks and two love interests.
It also costs twice as much. Batman Returns, Spiderman 2 and The Dark Knight all follow this formula.
Movie # 3 has three villains and three sidekicks. The number of love interests is your choice. Spiderman 3 and The Dark Knight Rises are good examples. We’re not even going to talk about the Batman movies starring Val Kilmer and George Clooney. Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.
The budget for Movie # 3 is also triple the original.
Despite all the big name stars and big budget for explosions, the story is a mess and entire thing collapses under its own weight, with the only hope of bringing it back being a reboot with a new actor and director.
I love advice columns, especially when the questions are incredibly minor, quirky or insane.
Across the pond, they call these advice columnists Agony Aunts, which is perfect.
Dear Abby has gotten a lot more exciting with her daughter now writing it, and we have an amazing columnist in my backyard with Savage Love by Dan Savage, who’s unafraid to tackle anything and famous enough to be on the glowing tube all the time.
HOWEVER: What if you wrote Dear Abby-style questions of etiquette and manners, but had them answered by literary tough guys and diabolical villains?
The Red Pen of Doom 