Anyone today can make music, then jack into the Matrix and upload their creation–along with a video–for the world to see.
If they can find it.
I scoured YouTube and found this thing, so let’s take a peek before we talk smack.
First, I have to say the music is fine. Don’t hate it, don’t love it, but perfectly listenable. Nothing super strange or unique about it.
The video is what interests me, because they obviously (a) had a decent CGI budget and (b) put some real thought into a storyline that’s (c) pretty funny and effective.
Who doesn’t like monster movies, and a bit of Godzilla-like smashing of a metropolis or three?
And who won’t enjoy an unlikely hero, in this case a motorcycle-riding old man, riding in to fight the monster even though it’s suicidal?
My only quibble with this video is a longer fight would have been enjoyable. Also expected, which is probably why they subverted that by having the Ancient Biker Anti-Hero kill the monster in this unusual and non-heroic way.
VERDICT
Hey, this is art, and it is both interesting and different. Give us moar.
Creative types today need more than a typewriter or any old computer that can run Word.
You have to do social media, and maybe some video, which means having a computer that can run things like the Adobe Creative Suite, which wants you to have a supercomputer that can model nuclear explosions, even if all you want to do is add captions to Ice, Ice Baby.
If you haven’t read Part 1, which is about why this is smart, and how to pick out all the parts, go do that now, then come back to read this post while you wait for the Postal Service–which always, always delivers.
Once all of your precious, fragile, and magical parts have arrived, it’s time to unbox that stuff and build, right?
This is where things go wrong. Totally normal.
Keep the boxes and receipts in case (a) parts are broken or (b) you screwed up and there are incompatible bits.
The Case: You can’t have a Black Box of Doom without a black box
Retrieve all the wires they may have snaked all around. THERE ARE MANY.
These wires are actually Important, since they’re the ones that make the Evil Supercomputer turn on when you push the power button, or connect your USB ports and such to the actual computer bits that make them go. Those things are not wireless.
Thus the wires.
If you bought a bare case with no fans pre-installed, now is the time to screw some fans.
Your Motherboard is the Matriarch of All Power
Everything connects to the Motherboard, which has to corral all the random parts and make sure everybody gets fed power and data. She basically runs the world.
Treat your Motherboard right by having the correct number of Weird Little Bolts (I believe they are called stays, but who knows) to screw into your case to support the MotherBoard, which then is secured to your case with more normal-looking black screws through holes pre-drilled through the layers of silicon.
I say the word “pre-drilled” intentionally. You will not be drilling any holes today.
Double-check this step very, very carefully.
If you just put Weird Little Bolts wherever the hell, and not in the right spots for your size of Motherboard and case, things will not end well. Having random bits of metal poking in spots it’s not designed to poke can short your Motherboard, zap, goodbye, goodnight, game over.
Not having enough Weird Little Bolts can make it so your bendy and fragile MotherBoard isn’t fully supported. I made this mistake because the old components I took out were a little smaller and needed fewer bolts and screws. This could have been a disaster, as you need to press pretty damn hard to make the graphic card, sticks of RAM and such connect.
I got lucky. Nothing broke. But I should’ve gotten more Weird Little Bolts, which leads us to this pro-tip: No, do not order them online and wait two days for amazon.com.gov.org to deliver more tiny shebangs while your dining room table is covered in computer parts and half-opened cardboard boxes. Head on down to the hardware store, which will have them on that long aisle full of every screw, bolt, and nut ever invented.
Install the Hyperdrive
You are required by law to have bought one of those tiny and fancy M2 drives, the kind that connect directly to the Motherboard and make her extremely happy because now homework gets done A BILLION TIMES FASTER than connecting a stupid cable upstairs to the attic where an obsolete thing known as a Hard Drive lives, playing eight-track tapes of Billy Joel, who is fine and all, but please listen to something new because none of us can hear Uptown Girl on endless repeat, that is the torture.
There is a trick with these M2 drives. They come with a tiny, tiny screw–get a microscope, seriously–that is insanely easy to drop and lose. Also, this screw didn’t seem to fit in the hole.
I finally read the instructions again, and found a Silver Weird Little Bolt hanging out on the Motherboard, asking strangers if they’d buy him some beer, I’ve got money, come on, man, a six pack of whatever, please. Put him in the right spot, dropped the tiny screw for you know, six hours, and finally secured the Hyperdrive.
Other drives, they are optional
If you are smart, and starting from scratch, using an M2 Hyperdrive means two fewer cables to worry about: one for power and one for data.
This becomes important.
Since I saved money by reusing the same Black Box of Doom and FOUR DIFFERENT DRIVES (optical, SSD, then two big fat spinny hard drives), that means wrestling eight different cables. It worked, eventually, but it was not fun.
Try to connect the power cables first, then the smaller data ones are a lot easier because of the orientation of cases and drives. I had the data ones all hooked up, making me happy, and had to undo them all from not being able to see a damned thing when trying to shove power cables into tight spots.
Learn from my stupidity, and thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
Has the moon lost her memory?
She is smiling alone.
Sticks of memory–RAM, build Dodge tough–do not like being alone. They also hate dust and cat hair, so be aware.
You gotta install RAM in identical pairs, like junior high kids who synchronize outfits and go everywhere together, even the bathroom.
If you’re only putting in two sticks of RAM, they gotta go in specific slots. Listen to the Motherboard and re-read her patient instructions.
I put in four sticks of 16 gigs apiece. If you want to upgrade later, you gotta use identical sticks again.
Pinky and the Brain
Your CPU is itty bitty. A little square. Make sure you do all the things and put it in correctly, given the fact that bending the pins is a sin against the tech gods, who will punish you with the Slowness, the Black Screen of Death, or the eternal damnation of This Thing Won’t Even Turn On.
Put it in the right way. Read the damn instructions, for brand new CPUs cost many dollars.
CPU’s have sidekicks called coolers. Your own Brain may have come with a Pinky cooler, with the manufacturer designing them to get along. Maybe these things got ordered separately, and you’re hoping this arranged marriage will work out.
The CPU is easy, as long as you don’t flippantly put it in the wrong way and bend all the pins.
Coolers these days are like oversized carburetors on muscle cars, giant air-breathing contraptions with metal tubes running everywhere. I will bet you the deed to my house that the the people who design CPU coolers drive muscle cars, or have posters of them on their wall.
You gotta have thermal paste between the Brain and its cooler. Read the instructions. Do not cook Brain or you’ll be eating the cost of a replacement.
All the random non-power cables
I would suggest this as the time to put the funky cables coming from various parts of the case, along with any cables you might need for drives and such.
Manufacturers, hear my plaintive cry: this part does not have to be so hard.
Connecting fans isn’t bad. Same deal with the cables that make your USB ports talk to the Motherboard without pissing her off.
What’s truly awful, and The Stupid, is a set of cables every case seems to have that ends in a nightmare of a rat’s nest. Some need to get plugged into single pins, others double, except they all go into the same array of pins and there’s no room to see what you’re doing and whether it worked and OMGWTFBBQ.
If you do this wrong, pushing the power button and such will do nothing.
Please, please, manufacturers of cases and Motherboards, pick a standard configuration of pins and that Rat’s Nest Cable from Hell, and make it so it’s all together and you simply plug it into the right spot instead of wanting to drive to whoever designed and engineered this and put a flaming bag of donkey doo-doo on their porch.
The Graphics Card
These things are pretty big. Get that sucker in there before you go wild with the power cables, which will totally get in the way.
That’s it. I’m not even making jokes here. Pretty simple.
Power Station
Nothing runs without the power supply, and it knows. Oh yes.
When you order one of these bad boys, the photos are deceiving. A square box, no big deal. Except when you take it out, there are all these fat cables coming out of the end. Tons of them. And they are long.
If you only have one M2 Hyperdrive, and maybe a big old obsolete spinny hard drive as your storage, the number of power cables you need is way down.
Since I had four–FOUR–different drives already in the case to hook up, my cause was lost. Cable management? Hah! We were shooting for Yes, This Looks Messy, But the Evil Supercomputer is Happy and Turns On.
The instructions here are a little tough. Be careful. There are what seems like 25 different types of power plugs. I will not go into it here except to say a giant plug goes into your Motherboard, another feeds the CPU, and your graphics card may get TWO plugs, because he is a selfish dweeb who drinks straight from the milk carton no matter how many times you tell him that’s gross and will tell you he plans on going pro playing Call of Duty when really that’s an excuse to spend all day wearing a headset and talking smack when he should be not failing Pre-Calculus already when the school year is only a month old.
Will it turn on?
Unless I’ve forgotten steps, which is possible, all the parts should be installed and fed a steady supply of power and data.
This is where you hook it up to your monitor, keyboard, and such, and get out the USB drive of Windows 10 to install. You pretty much buy the DVD for the product activation key, then stash that thing in a shoebox full of CD’s from way back that you plan on converting to MP3’s someday.
And the magical moment arrives: you hit the power button.
It will not turn on.
I mean that literally. Unless you are lucky, and smart, and have spent the time to locate and sacrifice a TRS-80 to the tech gods, your Evil Supercomputer will sit there and laugh at you while you swear in languages you did not know until now.
This always happens.
Unplug it all and open the thing back up. Check every single cable and plug.
Did it happen to me this time? Oh yes.
I checked every data cable and power plug. Nope. Then I considered the unthinkable: unplugging that rat’s nest of connectors, the ones that go to the power button and such. Except getting to that was impossible with all the power cables and data cables clogging up the works. Couldn’t see a thing.
After talking to my brother, who is an actual Tech God, I figured out one stick of RAM was rebelling and poking out. Once that thing was fully connected to the Motherboard and listening like a good stick of memory, the Evil Supercomputer came alive and asked me if I wanted to play a game. You know, tic-tack-toe or Global Thermonuclear War.
Final thoughts
Though the hour or so the new computer would not come alive was maddening, overall this time wasn’t that bad and I could not be happier with how much faster this thing is than the old Black Box of Doom.
It’s not even close. Most of that is because of the M2 Hyperdive, but doubling the RAM and having a modern CPU and graphics card doesn’t hurt a bit.
Economically, building your own is smart, and having thought about and researched trying to upgrade the old one, building a new one every three years or so makes sense–but only if the current one can’t handle the latest requirements of Adobe and such.
If you’re not focused on creative things, and are more concerned about hitting 140 frames-per-second as you play Call of Duty on a 4k monitor that takes up an entire wall of your house, that’s a different deal.
I hope you find this useful, and if you do go down this path, please remember me when your 3D-printed army of robots designed on an Evil Supercomputer starts taking over the world.
Everybody uses computers these days, unless they work with their hands, making things out of wood, or ride a horse as they bring a herd of cattle from dusty Texas to the stockyards of Kansas City with only a harmonica and a fifth of Jim Beam for entertainment.
And all of us who use PC’s–or bang on a keyboard connected to a Mac, which cost more than many automobiles I have owned–encounter the Slowness.
Maybe when you’re surfing the web. Maybe when you’re opening applications, or editing photos. And if you try to edit audio or video, God help you, the Slowness will drive you to dark thoughts and homicide.
So: this thing will have TWO PARTS.
In Part 1, this here post will go into how to do the blueprints and pick the parts for a Black Box of Doom, one that lets you design a robot army to crank out with 3D printers in your garage.
Then in Part 2: The Reckoning, we will dive into actually putting the parts together. But first you have to use the Series of Tubes to order such parts, and give your friendly and competent unionized U.S. Postal Worker a nod and a wave and a smile as he or she delivers all these boxes to your front porch with gentle care. Some private companies tend to chuck boxes, which will ruin the precious, fragile, and expensive things you paid for with real monies. I will not name these companies. You know the deal. Try to get this stuff delivered by your postal worker, especially if they know your name and go to the same church on Sunday, or drink coffee at the same diner. Better yet, try to marry a postal worker before you start this journey. They look amazing in shorts, right? Because they walk all day. Public servants, too–god bless ’em.
Why building an Evil Supercomputer is better than buying some boring pre-built box at Best Buy or whatever
Buying a pre-built thing, something that can actually blow through the Slowness, will cost you far more than Any Old Thing that Will Surf the Web and Run MS Word.
Building your own evil supercomputer, now, is far, far cheaper. Crazily so. Plus, who wants to own a pre-built computer where some corporate person decided what you wanted and needed, when they don’t even know you, and five million other people have the same exact thing on their desk?
So yes, build one if you can.
Hear me know and believe me later in the week: I am the perfect person to talk you through this, standing before you not as a total expert who’s built zillions of computers, a gear-head who will make you all confused with jargon, skipping basic steps you ARE SUPPOSED TO KNOW while expecting you to spend $5,000 on a liquid-cooled, overclocked monster with LED lights. No. I’ve done this three times now, and therefore have hit the sweet spot where (a) I know enough to be dangerous while (b) still happily making common mistakes, the same mistakes you will, and therefore (c) know how to solve some common stupid mistakes.
And no, it’s not completely easy. There are tricky bits. But nothing worth doing is easy.
How to pick the components of your own Black Box of Doom
Do not jump on over to amazon.gov.com.org or whatever to start ordering parts based on how cheap they are. That will not work. There are crazy technical reasons for that.
It could also take you days, or weeks, to sort through which CPU’s are compatible with which motherboards and memory sticks and such. You will go insane and I will not visit you at the mental hospital, because we may be internet friends, even good ones, yet driving 1,500 miles during this apocalypse to show up and sign a visitor log is not going to happen. My wife will wonder where I went, and why our VISA has charges at gas stations from here to Kansas.
The way to avoid wasting all sorts of hours doing research online, then learning Japanese to read the technical manual, is simple: hop on over to a site like pcpartpicker.com, which is what I did.
First thing: Choose your CPU, which is the most important decision, I kid you not. If you’re a creative type like me and want to edit photos, edit video, and do cool stuff with Adobe Creative Suite, the CPU is everything.
I know, that seems weird. My previous Supercomputer had 32 gigs of RAM and a solid-state drive (way faster than your traditional Hard Drive, which spins around), yet the CPU was about five years old and Adobe did not give one single tiny poop about how much RAM was there, or how fast the hard drive was, or whether my graphics card could render five billion triangles per second or whatever.
Adobe only cared about the CPU, and told me Adobe Premiere would not render more than one frame per century until I got a new one. Maybe there’s some kind of dark alliance between Adobe, Intel, and AMD, or the graphics card people totally hit on Adobe’s girlfriend at that wine tasting last month, the one where Tyler thought he was being funny for bringing boxed wine and everyone told him that joke hasn’t been funny for years, please buy a real bottle, twist-offs are fine, and bringing a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos also does not make you a comedian, either, it just means you are cheap bastard who spent zero time on this while Heather over here baked a pecan pie from scratch and brought a bottle of sake she picked up in Tokyo and saved for this very night, you nitwit.
So: the CPU is everything.
Also, you don’t need to spend time researching the best CPUs, because I found folks who ran tests on video editing, using all sorts of the latest AMD and Intel CPUs at various price points. IT WAS EDUCATIONAL. Go read it.
The TL;DR of those tests is pretty damn simple. Yes, if I was a Hollywood film editor, it would be worth the extra $1,500 to splurge for the top chip and another $1,000 the Largest SSD on Planet Earch plus $1,600 for a graphics card that weighs more than my house. Yet spending way, way less–$339 on an AMD Ryzen 7 3800X–would totally do the job.
Say goodbye to those old spinny hard drives
Physical hard drives that spin aren’t really the thing anymore. They’re not quite eight-tracks, but getting there.
I thought SSD’s were still the king, since they’re tiny and way faster than traditional hard drives with spinning disks and such.
HOWEVER: the breaking news is SSD’s are old and busted. The new hotness are itty bitty drives that attach directly to the motherboard. These suckers are so new, nobody has figured out a single name for them. You might hear them referred to as M2’s or NVME internal drives. And yes, you gotta have a motherboard (I can’t say mobo more than once, too weird) that can get hitched to a fancy M2, which are little sticks.
You would think these suckers would be expensive. Not really. I bought a 1TB shebang for $99, and though it’s not as fast as more expensive ones, this thing will talk to the CPU and transfer data up to 2 gigs per second.
Is that fast?
OMGWTFBBQ, you have no idea. If you’ve ever copied a ton of files, like photos and video, you’ve seen Windows tell you it’s gonna be five hours with that little chart showing how many megabytes per second are getting copied. Just did that last night before building the new Evil Supercomputer, and my old hard drives were averaging maaaaybe 100 megs a second. Even the SSD one.
Two gigs a second is so fast is should be illegal.
Which means you MUST pick a CPU and motherboard than can use these beasts. Not doing so is malpractice.
Fire up pcpartspicker or whatever. If your CPU and motherboard can’t do M.2 drives, choose a different kind. It may be an Intel vs AMD thing, and that used to matter. Since AMD chips are better at editing video, I divorced Intel this time and have no regrets.
You can, and should, think about a super M2 drive with a cheap sidekick, maybe an old obsolete 4TB spinny hard drive that costs you tiny amounts of paper decorated with dead presidents. That’s smart. Run everything from the M2 superdrive and use that big, old, slow fellow as your sidekick and backup drive. Stick your docs, photos, music, and videos on that sucker.
I sorta did this on steroids by re-using my old case along with four drives: the optical drive, an SSD, and two spinny hard drives with lots of space. This was both brilliant (saving tons of money!) and stupid, since it upped the difficulty, which I’ll get into in the next post, Part 2: The Reckoning.
The RAM, it is important
You can never have too much memory.
It’s pretty standard to have at least 8 gigs these days, and 16 gigs for higher end, and 32 gigs if your going all muscle car with flames on the sides.
So I went with 64 gigs, because I plan on keeping this thing running for years and absolutely hate opening it up and doing open heart surgery, seeing how things can go wrong, and wires can get knocked loose, making you spend hours trying to connect some tiny cable back to the motherboard except you put it in backwards because you can’t see a thing in there. My hands are big, and the space is small, and the pain is real.
Graphics cards are meh
Sure, they matter if you want to play Call of Duty on a 4k monitor at 140 frames a second or whatever. Not interested in that. If you’re a creative type like me, and are looking at editing photos and video and such, the graphics card doesn’t mean much. Get something, sure, but don’t break the bank. There are tons of good options. TONS.
I did a Radeon 570 with 8 gigs of RAM that was $160, and I probably could have done way cheaper without Adobe looking sideways at me–unless I was running After Effects, which will use your graphics card some. Might be some other apps that tap the graphics card. Be safe on this one. And don’t listen to anyone who tries to talk you into the latest, greatest graphics cards, which can cost more than what I spent on this entire Evil Supercomputer and require adding extra concrete under your house to handle the weight and cooling demands.
Everything else is up to you
Once you pick a CPU, motherboard, RAM, drives, and graphics card, everything else is pretty basic and a matter of taste, as long as pcpartpicker or whatever says it’s all compatible.
A few tips:
Get a full-size case. Itty bitty cases would be a pain, because it’s hard enough to do all the wires and such in a big case. Don’t go for one of those cases with transparent panels or whatever, since despite your best intentions, the cables will not look nice and neat, and your Black Box of Doom will not get its own centerfold in Custom Computers Monthly. You will be thrilled–THRILLED–if all the cables are plugged into the right spots and this thing works. Save the cable management OCD for your second or third shebang.
If you’re not sure about a certain random items–cooling fans, power supplies, and such–look for one that has tons of positive reviews and doesn’t cost much.
Splurge on some extra fans. They’re super quiet these days, and modern motherboards let you control the fans if you do it right. I got two extra fans (case already had two) which means there are four case fans, a power supply fan, a CPU fan and fans on the graphics card. Not gonna count those up because you and I know that’s a lot of fans. Expected it to be crazy loud. Nope. Quiet as a mouse.
There will be blood
Maybe not literal blood, though you can cut yourself on the inside of the case and such. But you will run into problems, and frustrations, and want to smash things.
I will not lie to you and say actually taking all these parts out of the box and making your first Evil Supercomputer is no big deal.
Read all the instructions. Twice.
Then read them again.
Keep a phone or laptop handy to look up things online, including YouTube videos on how to do certain parts. Because it is not abnormal, especially on your first try, to have a shiny and freshly built computer not turn on and work.
There will be a plug that you knocked loose, or a part that isn’t fully seated in the motherboard. Something won’t be right.
And that’s the joy of doing this. It isn’t successful right off. You have to learn to do it, and figure out how to fix problems.
Next post: actually building an Evil Supercomputer, and then finding out, Will it turn on?
What if I told you there was a movie starring Batman (Ben Affleck), The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal), the dude from Sons of Anarchy (Charlie Hunnam) along with Poe Dameron from the Star Wars movies?
You’d say “Nuh-uh,” and I’d say, “Yeah-huh” and we’d argue about who was drunk until I fired up Netflix and started showing THIS ACTUAL MOVIE THAT EXISTS.
Here is the trailer. Watch it, then we’ll talk smack.
The immediate question is, “Who is that other blonde dude who I sorta recognize?” and the answer is Garrett Hedlund, who played the lead in the TRON remake and is in other motion pictures I will not list right now because you know how to use the googles, if you care that much.
But there is more to talk about, and yes, this will involve spoilery spoilers.
The big issue is, “Did our dream team of ex-special forces experts make nightmarishly stupid mistakes?”
Yes. Yes, they did.
Let’s go into the Top Four Mistakes made by our superteam.
Mistake No. 4: Not splitting up
After they found all the money and took it from the drug cartel boss, they took the cash in a single van.
Then they tried to exit the country in a helicopter, with most of the cash carried in a cargo net dangling beneath. A long list of bad things then happens, based on this single decision, with their pile of cash shrinking each time.
All of the Bad Things could have been avoided if they split up, right away. Have each team member take their share of the cash and go in different directions, alone or in pairs, by sea or by train. Whatever.
Mistake No. 3: Not hiding the money
Hey, what’s in all those bags hanging underneath the helicopter flying low and under the radar? Any farmer, police officers, soldier, or drug cartel member who saw their chopper would not think “Basmati rice” or “every known VHS tape of The Star Wars Christmas Special.” They would hear that helicopter from far away, then see it, then notice all the bags, and think “scads of drugs” or “mountains of cash.”
And word would spread, like it did, making it hard for the team to escape.
The first rule of heists and capers is simple: Don’t get caught with the loot.
The second rule of heists and capers is: Don’t get caught with the loot.
The third rule of heists and capers is: Hide the loot in multiple places, you ding dong.
Another smart idea is to transfer or hide your precious stolen treasures immediately, so there’s nothing on you that’s incriminating, and the loot is safe even if you get detained, arrested, or thrown in jail for a year. Because when you get out, the first thing you’re doing is safely retrieving ALL THE CASH from a storage unit or whatever, then living a nice life as you sail around the South Pacific in that sweet sailboat Kevin Costner had in WATERWORLD or drink mojitos on a white sand beach with Red and Andy Defrusne.
Mistake No. 2: An exit route over ginormous mountains
Yes, it may have been the shortest route to the sea. However, big helicopters and little airplanes both have trouble getting over towering mountain ranges, especially when carrying too much weight.
This was the Stupid, and also led to many other problems, like crashing the chopper (bad), getting into a shoot-out with local villagers (very bad!), and eventually going over the ginormous mountains by foot (terrible).
If you avoid Mistake No. 3 and hide the money, you can put away the guns and body armor and also avoid Mistake No. 1 (not splitting up) and have folks leave the country by train, plane, car, truck, or whatever. You’re a normal person going home. There will be food and warmth and no need to get into firefights, or freeze your hiney off in the mountains while villagers track you down and KILL BATMAN because he shot their villager father and such.
Mistake No. 1: Not wearing masks
This may seem silly. What a small thing, wearing masks? How could this be the biggest mistake?
Except wearing masks is everything.
How does the drug cartel know to look for them, specifically? Because they left witnesses, being unwilling to kill women and children, the family members of the cartel boss. That’s honorable and good.
HOWEVER: If they wore masks, and stuck to the rest of their plan, there would be no witness description. They did kill the guards and the cartel boss, so nobody would know what their voices sounded like. Plus, it’s pretty hard to tell all your cartel minions with guns to be on the lookout for a guy who sounds like Batman, another guy who sounds like he was on that biker show, plus a dude sorta sounds like The Mandalorian.
Wearing masks means even if the family members got a glimpse as they passed each other on the road, they wouldn’t know who hit them. Was it an inside job? Did another cartel come after them, or police officers? Those would be the first three logical suspects. A superteam of American ex-special forces folks would be last on the list.
VERDICT
Wear masks. Don’t go over stupid deadly mountains in a helicopter. Hide the money, or at least get it out of the country five different ways when the team splits up after the job.
Seems pretty simple, right?
HOWEVER: This isn’t really a traditional caper or heist. It’s almost an anti-war movie, like PLATOON. The closest thing I can think of is the damned excellent Chris Pine-Jeff Bridges bank robbery caper, HELL OR HIGH WATER, with a similarly mixed ending. They successfully pull off the heist. But it comes at a high price, due to hubris.
TRIPLE FRONTIER is actually a cautionary tale of the downfalls of greed and violence. Unlike most action movies, where the heroes blow stuff up and show the glorious thrills of killing bad guys with abandon, this movie is meant to make people question those decisions. Because people do die. Was it really worth it?
Your average action movie doesn’t pause to consider this question at all. Though I’m a giant fan of thrillers and action movies, there comes a point where most of these movies jump the shark on this issue. So many bad guys, zombies, or alien invaders get shot, stabbed, and blown to hell that you lose count. And it loses meaning.
This is why movies like JAWS, ALIEN, and PREDATOR are so memorable. There isn’t a sea of bad guys dying left and right. There is one Very Bad Guy, who seems invincible, and he’s winning until there’s one hero left.
Which means my armchair quarterbacking of the big mistakes made by our superteam isn’t casting aspersions at the screenwriter or director. They totally intended for the characters to make all kinds of mistakes, based on their greed and character flaws. Batman wanted all the monies, despite the fact that it made them spend too much time at the drug cartel house, and that it made the helicopter overweight. So if you really wanted to pin the blame on a single character, he’s most at fault, and he gets punished the worst for his sins, seeing how a villager shoots him in the head from long range as revenge for Batman killing poor villagers who wanted some of the money they found after it fell from the sky. Don’t blame them for that at all.
Back to the verdict: it is the apocalypse, and you have watched Every Possible Thing on the Televisions Already, which means tes, you should fire up the Netflix and watch TRIPLE FRONTIER.
And if you haven’t watched it, do HELL OR HIGH WATER while you’re at it. 11/10 would recommend.
This is not one of his more famous roles–it’s kind of an obscure movie. A hidden treasure. And because this week is where we pay tribute to the King, there’s no better way than to talk up movies he made that people may not know about. Especially this one.
Here’s the trailer, then we’ll chat.
What makes this so good?
I mean, Chadwick Boseman could have gone grocery shopping in Safeway with a short list, and I’d still watch 40 minutes of film about him talking to the woman at the seafood counter about sea scallops and clams.
MESSAGE FROM THE KING isn’t a big-budget movie. I doubt there’s a single frame of CGI in this film. More and more, I appreciate films that rock without an ounce of CGI.
What makes this so special isn’t just Boseman’s acting, which is always stellar. I like how this thriller sets up our hero as being badly outnumbered and outgunned, in a foreign land, and still winning–not because he’s faster and tougher than the bad guys, which is the typical path of any action movie. On occasion, they’ll mix it up and have the hero win by being more brutal and bloodthirsty. You know, DEATH WISH or DIRTY HARRY style.
This movie shows our hero do clever thing after clever thing. And yes, he gets into fights, but he does it smart. In the final confrontation, instead of taking on all the bad guys on a rainy rooftop, outnumbered 10-to-1, minimum, he uses the greed of the villains against them. It’s so well done.
Chadwick Boseman was an amazing talent and it still hits me that he’s gone.
Note: If you like the accent he used when playing Black Panther, his character in this movie is from South Africa, and he does the accent so damn well I freaked out when seeing him speak at the MTV Awards show, kinda like hearing Christian Bale’s natural Welsh accent for the first time and your brain is completely befuddled.
It’s worth watching the clip for what he does during his acceptance speech for Best Hero–what a decent, honorable, good-hearted man.
VERDICT
Fire up Netflix, watch this film, and raise your glass in Boseman’s memory.
Usually, I will do one of three things with a music video: (a) find an obscure and bizarre treasure to share, (b) dissect something terrible, or (c) decipher the lyrics to an amazing song.
Today, I’m listening to ALL THE STARS on repeat, and there’s a good chance this may be a weeklong tribute to Chadwick Boseman, because the man was amazing. Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, James Brown, Black Panther–the man could play anybody. Boundless talent and a bottomless heart. He visited kids in cancer wards for years and never let on that he was sick himself. Not once.
We’re talking snakes. One of the deadliest snakes on the planet, the death adder.
Thus the name. These snakes aren’t sneaky and trying to bamboozle anybody. I appreciate that. A manipulative snake might try to tell you, “Hey, I’m just your friendly neighborhood legless reptile, using my pointed eating instruments and anti-pest chemicals to rid your home and yard of rodents. That bucket over in the corner is if you want to contribute to the cause, but only if you’re happy with my services. Good day to you and the family!”
This snake is honest. “Hello there, good sir, I’m a death adder. Don’t want to bite you, but if I did, yes, you would die within six hours. Quite sorry about that.”
And for some reason, all the death adders for miles keep showing up in this poor couple’s house in Cape York, which is like Cape Fear, except no Robert DeNiro, and it’s on a different continent, and I don’t remember deadly snakes in that movie.
The story says they haven’t had a handful of these snakes show up, which would be plenty. Twenty of these snakes have slithered into their home, which is some kind of Australian ranch in the middle of the bush.
That’s crazy. A normal human being would pack up and drive away.
However, this is Australia, which is another planet, except Elon Musk hasn’t sent rockets to it yet.
This couple is pretty cool with it. The snakes aren’t aggressive–the couple describes them as docile–their dog is really got at sniffing them out, and they’ve got a system of scooting them into a bag with a broomstick and such.
They don’t kill the snakes. I kid you not. These folks drive them far away, let them back out into the wild, and wish them well, when normal humans would do the opposite and go all ALIENS 2.
The final detail that slayed me was experts quoted in the story, trying to figure out why the death adders were showing up.
Apparently, the population of these snakes is recovering, and maybe booming, after they went on a cane-toad binge. See, the cane toads are poisonous, and the poisonous snakes biting and eating them would later die of the toad poison. Which is karmic payback, if you think about it. The scientist think surviving death adders figured it out. Maybe mother and father death adders started reading their baby sneks new bedtime stories, like the book, “An Afternoon Tea with Cane Toads–Our Non-Tasty, Poisonous Cousins.”
There’s a key lesson in here for writers of any sort, whether you’re doing journalism in Papers of News, writing one-act plays that begin and end with ten minutes of silence, or banging on the keyboard for the next Great American Novel, except you’re in New Zealand, and think the whole concept of the Great American Novel is sillypants.
Pam sums it up like this: “Less is more.”
She’s right. Also, bonus points for the assignment at the end of this video. Too funny.
P.S. Yes, I know the first trailer for THE BATMAN is out. No, I will not dissect it, because 94,230 superfans have already watched it, frame by frame, to look for specific pixels that might give them an easter egg or theory that nobody else thought about yet. But yeah, I liked it. Looking forward to seeing that, and other movies, in actual movie theaters next year with overpriced popcorn and sticky floors and all the things that I miss.
You can make all sorts of academic arguments about how many stories there are. One: the hero’s journey. Two: tragedies and comedies. Ten, if you read SAVE THE CAT and see what primeval stories ring true. Plus plenty of other books and storytelling gurus and academics who will happily explain why there are actually 36 stories, or 100.
With action movies, I’d argue there are clearly some distinct types:
Monster in the House–You’re trapped in an enclosed space with a monster, and either it’s gonna kill you or you’re gonna kill it. There’s no escape, no calling the cops, no trickery. This is a great situation and I’d argue ALIEN (supposedly sci-fi), FATAL ATTRACTION (pigeon-holed as domestic drama), and JAWS (mislabeled horror) are all actually Monster in the House.
A key difference between these stories and horror: the monster dies. In true horror stories, the monster is actually punishing everybody for their sins (teenagers drinking, doing drugs, having sex, or scientists playing God) and everybody dies in the end. Only the monster returns for the sequels.
Disaster–A volcano is about to go off, a giant asteroid will hit the planet, or a climate change means Kevin Costner’s movie WATERWORLD is a prophecy. This type of movie ends one of three ways: (a) the hero stops the disaster (ARMAGEDDON), (b) the hero can’t stop it but gets everybody out of the burning lava, or (c) this is really a horror movie and the disaster can’t be stopped because we’re being punished for our sins.
War–You can’t get a setting with more conflict and action than a war zone, though war movies are often actually about other things with the war truly being the setting and backdrop. Pure war movies are about fighting the good fight and punching Nazis in the nose, or defeating an invasion of aliens by flying your F-16 straight up into the death beam after the president gives an amazing speech. Anti-war movies (PLATOON) are about making people cautious about getting dragged into a mistake, or fighting wars for the wrong reasons.
Rescue–I don’t know who you are. I don’t have any money. What I do have is a certain set of skills.
Betrayal–This is beating heart of thrillers, especially ones that don’t rely on Jason Statham finding creative ways of kicking people in the face. Betrayal from within is a tough, tough story, and there’s plenty of tension and storytelling goodness involved. Using betrayal in an action movie is a wonderful way to spice up the typically predictable plots of most action stories.
Which brings us to THE MECHANIC, an under-rated action movie directed by Simon West, who also helmed WILD CARD, perhaps Statham’s most interesting movie.
What this film does so well is piling up layer upon layer of betrayals.
Your average action film has zero.
A decent one may have a big betrayal right before the climax, something you really did not see coming.
THE MECHANIC shows us how smart storytelling, with early setups, can matter far more than a film’s CGI budget.
This movie starts with a betrayal that leads to Statham being tricked into killing his mentor. And that leads the dead man’s son to Statham, seeking solace and revenge, not knowing it was Statham who pulled the trigger. What’s great is we don’t know until late that the mentor was set up, the evidence against him faked, so Statham genuinely felt remorse. That guilt doesn’t go away when he learns the truth, because it doesn’t change the fact he shot his friend, false pretenses or not.
So it’s beautiful in the end that the son, after helping take out the bad guys, still can’t let go of the fact that his new friend killed his father, and tries to take him out by blowing up his truck when they stop for gas. Even better are the setups–and they are plural, for they are legion–of how the son goes back to Statham’s house, full of dead bad guys, and does everything Statham told him to never do: turn on his fancy record player and drive the red sports car he’s always fixing up and never using.
The car and house blow up, along with the son, and all of this feels about right. Statham didn’t go out of his way to kill the son, not even after the attempt on his life. Wouldn’t seem correct since he did take the man’s father. The son only dies through hubris.
There are more betrayals in this movie, I kid you not, and they’re all set up correctly. None of that nonsense where a film shows a payoff, then explains the setup with a flashback scene THAT YOU NEVER SAW BEFORE.
VERDICT
11/10, an excellent movie that starts strong and ends stronger, with deautiful twists you do not see coming.
You may ask yourself, “Is that really a hard question?” And you may tell yourself, “The first was VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR, everybody knows MTV played that when it went live right after the Civil War, because Abraham Lincoln sent a telegram requesting it.”
Except all of that is wrong.
Some say the first real music videos were made in this place called Oz, a mystical land where every animal is poisonous. And there is good evidence for this, with Australian TV news staffer Russell Mulcahy shooting videos for local bands like AC/DC back in the ’70s, years before MTV went live.
So here’s a good contender:
However, there’s another video released around the same time–1975–that is a far better song, a song that’s massively famous and universally beloved. We’re talking BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY by Queen, and I could die happy if we settle on this epic as the First Music Video Ever.
Case closed.
Queen also had the first music video banned by MTV, which gives them 150,000,000 rebellious rock points, so let’s go with Queen.
Except that’s not really the first music video, not even close, because Bob Dylan was doing black-and-white music videos while inventing memes long before neckbeard edgelords were spending all their time learning the Adobe Creative Suite to make it to the front page of reddit with their HQ gifs. How do you pronounce gifs, with a G like it’s spelled or J like we’re talking peanut butter? I know the answer. Come closer and I’ll whisper it to you: “Gif is officially pronounced HOWEVER THE HELL YOU LIKE, because this is the dumbest controversy ever and I do not care one itty bitty bit.”
Here’s Bob Dylan doing his thing ten years earlier than Queen.
Okay then, we have a winner. Right?
Maybe.
Not really.
It all depends on what your definition of musical video is, and how far you want to (a) stretch it and (b) go back in time and technology. Wikipedia lists all sorts of musical short films in the 1920s, along with musical shorts / teasers that ran before the film you paid a full nickel to watch. There were Soundies in the WWII years with short dance sequences set to music and stuff happening with jazz and funky things going on in France with alien jukebox video technology (actually not really making that up, go check it out).
I mean, you could go crazy going down this rabbit hole, which I will not do, because who will pay for my therapy?
HOWEVER: What we all should agree on is that VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR is not really the first music video. At all.
The Red Pen of Doom 