Author Archives: Erek

MAN OF STEEL NEEDS AN ENEMA

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Because MAN OF STEEL is kind of shitty.

I am going to do something different this time and talk about things I liked as well as the perpetual shit parade that pranced throughout my viewing of this movie.

I was okay with Superman killing Zod. I was okay with the destruction of Metropolis. At that point in the film Zod was–while wanting to pummel Kal-El into oblivion–still more interested in the annihilation of humanity. Had they pulled a SUPERMAN II move I am confident that this Zod would have simply erased Metropolis from the face of the planet, rather than flying after Superman to some remote location.

THINGS I LIKED:

  • Faora. She will be mine. Oh yes, she will be mine. I was also a big fan of how she fights. What, you thought I was just thinking with my penis here? Using super speed to traverse the extremely short distances between her and her enemies was fun to watch and a good use of her new-found powers.

  • Kevin Costner. He probably had the best performance out of anyone in the film.
  • Costume and set design, especially on Krypton. I even warmed up to Superman’s new suit.
  • When Thick Morpheus grabbed his compadres during the destruction of Metropolis and, instead of continuing to run along the path of a falling skyscraper a la PROMETHEUS, he ducked down the nearest side street.
  • Superman finding his inner …Superman and, despite the fifty-five billion tons of Kryptonian gravity bearing down on him, finds his can of spinach and manages to fly up and curb stomp the world machine.
  • Lois Lane making fun of Superman and informing him that it is, in fact, an S on his chest.

THINGS I DIDN’T LIKE:

  • You’re going to change the world x65. I didn’t actually count to see how many times Clark was told that he would change the world, but basing it on how annoyed I became with the line I am estimating it being uttered no less than sixty-five times.

  • Shaky cam. I hate American film makers with such unbridled fury that my rage could burn up the sun and blacken our solar system permanently. For once I would like to watch a new triple A movie that wasn’t filmed with a fucking GoPro or Handycam. I would also like to see a movie that doesn’t have scene cuts every four to six seconds, especially during climactic fight sequences. Anyone watch BULLET TO THE HEAD? I recommend students of film seeing it at least once so they can log it away as how fight scenes should never be done.
  • Lens flares. I know everyone in Hollywood seems to be infatuated with burning the collective retina of their audience with shiny bullshit. It ruins immersion. I’m supposed to BE THERE, right? Especially with all that camera being three inches from the faces of the actors, held by a man with late-stage Parkinson’s disease crap. I thought the point of shaky cam and “Is that a hair coming out of his nose?” cinematography was to help the audience feel immersed in the flick, then they go and ruin it by adding lens flare effects. If I were actually there, on Krypton, I WOULDN’T SEE LENS FLARES, JACKASSES! Jor-El doesn’t see lens flares, why should I be subjected to their headache inducing effects? You have multi-million dollar equipment and tens of thousands of dollars worth of education, some of which to teach you how to avoid real lens flares and other camera anomalies, and then you ask the guys in the visual effects department to add a metric ton of them back in? Fuck you.
  • Zod. I was in no way, shape or form, ever intimidated by this man. In fact, it seemed to me that he was doing far less acting and far more reading all of his lines from a cue card, and reading them poorly. I’m not saying we needed a different actor–although that may have helped–I’m just saying that maybe once or twice during production Zack Snyder could have taken him aside and, you know, politely asked him to do his job. The Zod from Superman II was way more scary than this guy, and he was practically a string bean!
  • Krypton’s “atmosphere” rendering Superman helpless. I almost wanted this to make sense, but then I realized that Zod and his henchmen were capable of super strength while still breathing in Krypton’s atmosphere by way of their respirators. Why are they still super strong but it strips Kal-El of his powers? I attempted to argue with myself that they’re so used to Krypton’s gravity that they merely appear to be super strong while on Earth. But that’s crap, because if their ship really simulated Krypton’s gravity how come Lois Lane’s frail, human body wasn’t instantaneously crushed when she boarded? You know, like how all the cars and buildings were reduced to two dimensions during the brief terraforming of the planet to mimic Kryptonian conditions. Woops?
  • Along the same lines, I wasn’t really cool with how it took Clark Kent 33 years to acquire, hone, and control his powers but it required Zod and his goons roughly forty-five seconds to do the same. Especially when the movie attempts to explain that over the course of those 33 years Superman has absorbed so much of the sun’s radiation that it has made him immensely strong. But somehow Zod’s cells can replicate that process in just a handful of minutes. Wut?
  • Finally… Flying in the infinite vaccuum of space where there exists no air or atmosphere: NO PROBLEM! Breathing “Kryptonian atmosphere” for fifteen seconds: OMG, WHERE ALL MY POWERS GO? Anyone else facepalming out there?

So really, to sum everything up, the entire problem with MAN OF STEEL wasn’t that Zack Snyder reinvented the character, loosely based on the previous seventy-five years of canon. The problem is that he wanted to turn Superman into a science fiction movie but neither he nor his writers were intelligent enough to make it happen. Which is, honestly, a major failing of just about all science fiction movies. So thank you, Mr. Snyder, for shitting all over nearly a century of canon in favor of creating something that managed to make even less sense than a man who uses a pair of eyeglasses as the primary element to his alter ego disguise.

Guns – Violence – Fuck Jim Carrey

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Well, maybe not fuck Jim. In case you haven’t heard, Mr. Carrey recently released a video parody of Hee Haw, poking fun at insecure, overcompensating dickwads who use firearms to prop up their failing masculinity. I realize his video wasn’t targeting people like me. It was targeting people like Alex Jones; crazy, uneducated motherfuckers, who love spreading hate. Of course you have the flip side of that insanity sandwich with people like Piers Morgan; someone who is equally crazy, equally uneducated, and equally a motherfucker.

I grew up around firearms. Guns are not evil to me. I was taught how to use them. I was taught how to care for them. But most importantly, I was taught how to respect them. And therein lies most of the problem when it comes to guns: people do not respect what they are capable of. A bandsaw does not go around cutting people’s fingers off, but every year in woodshop classes around the world students are losing digits because they failed to respect the equipment. Unloaded guns are responsible for more accidental deaths than loaded guns.

Wait, that doesn’t make any sense, right? It makes perfect sense. When someone perceives a gun to be unloaded, any respect they had for the firearm is thrown out the window. So you end up with idiots shooting their friends, themselves, their family, because they thought the gun was unloaded. When I was growing up, I was taught to treat a gun with respect regardless of whether it was or was not loaded. You pay attention to the business end and you make sure it is always pointing in a safe direction. Period.

We are a violent species. We have been glorifying violence for thousands of years. We always have been and always will be driven by violence. That’s not to say that we can’t do something about reducing it. Taking guns out of the equation doesn’t actually solve anything, because the underlying violence still remains. Yes, guns can dramatically alter the outcome of that violence, but without them violence is still prevalent. People are still getting mugged, people are still being threatened, the only difference is they’re being sent to the hospital with knife wounds and broken bones instead of gunshot wounds–you haven’t solved anything.

Improving our education is one step of many that may help to curb violence. Why are we spending so much time and money trying to demonize guns when we could be using it to improve Little Johnny’s education, to improve his home environment, to help educate his parents? Universal healthcare would certainly help poorer families care for their children and themselves, allowing them to take the money they would have used on that to instead provide a more stable environment for their offspring. Not everyone who is poor wants to be poor. Not everyone who is poor spends their paycheck on beer and cigarettes. Just like not everyone who owns a firearm is as much of a dipshit as Wayne LaPierre.

The final piece of advice I would like to offer to America is this: learn how to love and forget how to hate. Stop watching Fox news. Stop watching MSNBC. Stop reading Infowars. Stop reading Huffington Post. Pull your head out of your ass and begin thinking for yourself. Learn to have a meaningful discussion with someone of opposing views without yelling at them, and maybe you’ll learn from one another. Pull your head out of your ass. Pull your head out of your ass. Pull your head out of your ass.

Guns – Misinformation – Fuck Bob Costas

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Our lawmakers are failing us. Our country’s media has failed us. The knee-jerk reaction to the shooting in Sandy Hook is once again threatening to strip rights from law abiding citizens. I’m not going to talk about that, though. I’m not going to belittle their tragedy by putting myself on a soapbox for my own, personal agenda. What I will talk about is the media, firearms, and a general lack of understanding people like Bob Costas seem to have when it comes to the topic.

I’d like everyone to take a step back from mourning, pretending to care, from overreacting, and from spouting bullshit. If you can’t do that, stop reading right now. For the rest of you armed with common sense, we’re going to have a discussion and hopefully shed some light on some of the crap coming out of our media.

First, we need to stop demonizing firearms. They’re an inanimate object. The evil is found within the hearts of those who take the lives of innocents. They do it with guns in America, knives in China, homemade bombs in Ireland, etc, etc. The methods differ but the root of the problem remains the same: people. That is indisputable. If you feel like arguing that point just remember the part where you agreed to remove yourself from the personal and look at things objectively for once in your life.

Along with demonizing comes editorials about how automatic firearms should be illegal–they already are, and the people who can own them are not the problems. They’ll talk about how assault rifles are powerful killing machines. They’ll go so far as to quote the FPS at which a bullet is fired out of them as a testament to how dangerous the guns are …but hunting rifles are okay. Well, here’s some news: most hunting rifles are considerably more powerful than an assault rifle. They fire a much larger bullet. The amount of energy they create is easily double that of an assault rifle. They are designed to kill things much, much larger than a human being. The only difference here is they don’t come with a black stock and a pistol grip.

And that really is the problem. People see the matte black finish and they lose their mind. They freak out. IT’S GOING TO KILL US ALL, IT’S BLACK! If we were talking about people here we’d be racist. Here’s an example:

http://www.ruger.com/products/mini14RanchRifle/models.html

This is a Ruger mini-14. It’s a semiautomatic rifle. It comes in a variety of colors. Can you hunt with it? Sure! I know people who have used a mini-14 to hunt. Let’s take a look at another rifle.

http://www.ruger.com/products/mini14TacticalRifle/models.html

What’s that? If you said “assault rifle” here comes the mind fuck–THEY ARE THE SAME RIFLE. The only difference here is one comes with a black plastic stock that features a pistol grip. They fire the same cartridge at the same speed and can hold the same size magazine–again, THEY ARE THE SAME RIFLE.

The assault rifle you are so afraid of is not an assault rifle at all. It is not any more dangerous than a hunting rifle, or a handgun, or a shotgun–all of which are equally deadly in the hands of a lunatic. The news media are BRAINWASHING you to further their own political agenda. They want you to be afraid of the black plastic, because it somehow turns the firearm into a “killing machine”. Let’s quote a little from the good old Washington Post, shall we?

“THE BUSHMASTER .223-caliber semiautomatic rifle that Adam Lanza carried into Sandy Hook Elementary School on Friday is a frightful killing machine.”

Right off the bat you hate the rifle because it’s a “killing machine”. It’s now associated with a horrible massacre of school children (again, we’re taking a step back here, don’t get emotional on me now).

“A coroner said most of the victims were hit with at least three bullets — and some with up to 11 — that exploded with devastating lethality, tearing them apart from inside. The Bushmaster was a juggernaut of death.”

This is my favorite part. It’s like they hired Stephen King to write the editorial. It was a juggernaut of death–that’s gold. And people still don’t think the media have their own agenda? They’re using these tragedies to make you hate. They’re trying to fuel knee-jerk politics with these colorful, misleading anecdotes. I read another article the other day where they talked about how the “Bushmaster” rifle that was used could fire six shots a second. That’s more bullshit trying to sway your emotions. It’s a semiautomatic rifle. Let’s break it down:

The “automatic” from the phrase is referring to the gun’s action (the part that houses the firing mechanism, ejector, etc). Prior to machine guns, as they were originally called, we had manual action firearms. Once fired you had to manually eject the cartridge in order to load another into the firing chamber. Machine guns removed the manual part of the equation. When fired, it used some of the energy created by the explosion to automatically eject the empty and load a new round into the firing position so you didn’t have to.

Semiautomatic weapons stop there. One pull of the trigger fires one bullet, and the automatic action removes the empty and loads another cartridge. That’s it. If you want to shoot again you have to pull the trigger a second time. Fully automatic weapons will continue to fire as long as the trigger is held down. The rifle used in the Sandy Hook shooting was a semiautomatic. That hasn’t stopped the news media from telling you it’s a military rifle, an automatic rifle, can shoot X bullets per second, etc. All of these statements are false and are used to force you into an emotional response–to demonize the firearm.

I don’t care if you hate guns, the gun community, or even me. I really couldn’t give a shit. But at the very least you should know what you’re hating and why you’re hating it, and aren’t just repeating what the talking heads want you to think. Unfortunately, our representatives are spewing bullshit at the federal level. They want to ban things and they don’t even understand what they’re banning. Can we have a fucking intelligent discussion with our policy makers? I doubt it. How some of these people end up elected is beyond me.

The Dark Knight Rises & Falls On Its Ass

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The trilogy has ended. Batman has been immortalized in bronze at city hall while Bruce Wayne anonymously lives out the remainder of his years with Selina Kyle. Happy Ending?

Not quite. In all honesty, the film was pretty boring. Let’s ignore for a minute that Chris Nolan did to BATMAN what M. Night Shamalamadingdong did to THE LAST AIRBENDER–that would be to abandon established lore in favor of writing your own stripped down, anorexic bullshit–the only major difference being that Chris Nolan can actually direct actors. That has never been my problem with the new Batman; the actors generally deliver decent to good performances, my problem is that I just don’t care about them.

Mr. Nolan did his best to reboot the series into a dark, gritty world more akin to our own reality than it is to the comic books. The problem he forgot to address is that in reality life is fleeting and people die. In THE DARK KNIGHT RISES nobody of concern ends up getting killed. You never feel afraid for any of the primary characters. Again, that is not necessarily a problem with movies in general, but it is a problem in this film because of how they have tried to depict the world of Batman. Strip away the violent, dirty exoskeleton of Gotham and you’re left with a run of the mill super hero movie.

The movie, at first, appears to suffer from the trying to do too much in too little a time frame dilemma that many modern movies subscribe to. After closer examination you find that the movie does the opposite–it attempts to stretch the little it has too far and too thin. Here’s a quick timeline: Batman returns to the scene after eight years of absence, Batman has his ass handed to him by Bane, Bane threatens to blow up Gotham with a nuclear weapon, Batman returns (again) and this time manages to win with the help of Catwoman. You need three hours to tell that story? I suppose you should tack on an extra hour for all the whining Alfred ends up doing.

Speaking of Catwoman. I absolutely love (read: loathe) how Bruce Wayne keeps giving her the benefit of the doubt, despite the fact she’s burned him several times throughout the movie. She’s given him no reason to trust her, or even like her, but he still follows her around with puppy-dog eyes. In the comic Catwoman fights an internal conflict over her life as a cat burglar and helping people. She’s not inherently evil in the comic, she’s more indifferent than anything, but she does give Batman reasons to trust her from time to time other than flashing her finely manicured backyard so he begins following the Bat-cock instead of actually thinking.

There was also zero chemistry between the two actors. None. Maybe they just grazed over those scenes and did them in one take. Who knows? I don’t. We’re also constantly reminded throughout the film that Bruce Wayne could have gone anywhere, done anything, but instead he decided to put the cape back on and save the people. As if we needed the movie itself to tell us that we’re watching Batman, what the fuck else is he going to do if not save Gotham for the nth-hundredth time? In the end these scenes serve only one purpose: TO SHAVE PRECIOUS SECONDS OFF OF MY LIFE. Filler dialogue does not make for a good movie going experience.

The usual suspects continue to plague this movie: the “bat voice”, for one. Even when he’s in a scene involving characters who already know that he’s Bruce Wayne he feels it necessary to keep laryngitis bat going. Not to be outdone, the boys in post added so much shitty processing to Bane’s voice that it makes it difficult to not press STOP and EJECT on the DVD. Was there no one around when they were dicking with this shit? No one to say “Hey guys, his voice is coming in WAY louder than everyone else in the scene, and it’s in full stereo. Why don’t we pull our heads out of our asses?”

What do I mean by full stereo? When you watch the movie you’ll notice in scenes where Bane does any amount of talking that his voice seems to fill the entire room. The other actors in the scene have their voices mixed directional, so that if someone is on the left side of the screen their voice is coming out slightly more on the left speaker than on the right, but Bane’s voice fills the entire aural spectrum. It instantly ruins any amount of immersion you may have had in the movie up until that point.

All in all the movie floats somewhere between bad and average. I don’t understand the hype. I would only recommend it to fans of super hero movies. Everyone else should stay clear.

PROMETHEUS IS BAD, YEAH

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I’m not entirely sure what Mr. Scott wanted this movie to be, but I’m positive it didn’t turn out the way he envisioned. If anyone is unfamiliar with PROMETHEUS, he was a Greek God or titan who either helped mankind in spite of Zeus or was our original creator and molded us out of clay. It really depends on what myth you like the sound of the best. Either way, PROMETHEUS helped humanity become what it is today.

The first scene in the movie depicts a humanoid alien seeming to sacrifice himself in order to propogate what I assumed to be the Earth with his genetic code during the primordial stages of the planet, thus fulfilling the PROMETHEUS reference. So far, so good, the movie is taking a page out of the myth.

Afterward we, the audience, are informed that the ship is named PROMETHEUS for reasons that still escape me. They’re on an exploratory mission to find the original creators of man (aka PROMETHEUS) who they decided to refer to as engineers instead. No intelligent quips about the myth can be found anywhere in the movie. In fact, I’m fairly confident at this point that Ridley Scott has no idea who PROMETHEUS actually is and just liked the sound of the word; he branded the ship with it so he could hear his actors say it as many times as possible throughout the movie. In retrospect I suppose I took the title too literally and it’s my own fault for believing Hollywood could get anything right.

Much like James Cameron’s giant loogie to the face of quality film making named AVATAR, PROMETHEUS is one giant cliche from beginning to end. Scientific mission? Let’s get a couple of scientists together who abhor violence of any kind, then recruit some assholes who will be sure to fuck up somewhere along the line and end up getting people killed. First of all, any real scientist is going to understand and appreciate protection in an unknown and potentially hostile alien environment. Somehow, after all these years, Hollywood still believes all scientists to be as dipshitted as Timothy Treadwell.

Let’s also consider for a moment that this is a privately funded expedition by a trillionaire CEO of the largest and most important corporation in the galaxy, and they can’t seem to afford a disciplined crew? Instead they end up with the kind of retards you find hanging out and getting shitfaced at your seedy local bar. Self-righteous scientists, say hello to meatheaded asscans–how many times has this movie been made? Sixty? More? We can’t get a more intelligent premise than this out of Ridley Scott? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. After AVATAR I thought science fiction had nowhere to go but up, turns out Mr. Scott proved me wrong.

Anyway. Our troop of diverse stupidity runs into vats of alien DNA. Fast-forward and they’ve taken a 2,000 year old head of an “engineer” onto their ship, which somehow manages to explode. Apparently it was infected with alien DNA and the result was that it blows up. Seems fine, except that a few minutes later one of the primary characters ends up infected by the same DNA and it doesn’t cause him to explode. In fact, at some point later in the movie yet another crew member is infected by the DNA and it also doesn’t cause E.F.S.–explosive face syndrome–it just turns them into angry zombies with super strength. So you’re thinking, hey, the DNA must react in unique ways when combined with a different species–WRONG! You also find out during the movie that the engineers share the exact same genome as us, meaning they ARE us, meaning the alien DNA should react in a similar fashion BUT IT DOESN’T.

Okay, rewind. Why does Fassbender’s character put alien DNA in the drink of one of the self-righteous scientists? He’s supposed to be a cybernetic being, incapable of emotions, including malice. I guess it could be argued that he was under orders from his father figure to perform research, but to what end? He has already shown that he is capable of reading and understanding the engineers’ language, you’d think he already knew what was in those vats just by reading about it, but somehow he felt it necessary to infect one of the crew members with it, regardless of the fact that once exposed to the DNA the crew member could have, and very nearly did, become a danger to both himself and his father figure.

Cybernetic being, incapable of emotion, but not incapable of reason. In another scene he diagnoses the primary female character with pregnancy, is aware that what is inside of her is not human and displayed three months of growth in the span of ten hours, yet he seems entirely unconcerned with helping her to remove the entity and quarantining it for the safety of the entire ship. The character just doesn’t seem to have proper motivation for any of his actions.

Fast-forward again. It is discovered, or assumed, that the vats of alien DNA are a biological weapon and will be used to eradicate the population of Earth (and probably other planets along the way). However, like I touched on earlier, it doesn’t actually seem to do anything to humans other than turn them into violent zombies. What’s the point? My wife brought up an idea that the DNA is actually a parasite and it requires a variety of hosts in order to go through the many stages before it finally becomes -the- Alien. The problem I have with that is violent zombies don’t have sex with each other to create squid-huggers that then implant the seed of -the- Alien into someone’s body.

I ask again, what is the point of the DNA turning humans into violent zombies if it’s actually supposed to be a biological weapon? You haven’t performed genocide on the planet. You haven’t released -the- Alien en masse on the population. If anything you’ve made an even stronger enemy–they’re really hard to stop, they’re super strong, and they want to kill anything that moves. Turn the entire planet into that and your only accomplishment is making life more difficult for yourself, if a global cleansing was your goal in the first place. So that didn’t make any sense in the context of the movie either.

Most of the things that happen in PROMETHEUS don’t make sense in the context of the movie. Like the aforementioned meathead asscan who turns into a raging, violent zombie. He first shows up again crumpled over into what looks like a contorted scorpion pose, and then demonstrates that he is actually quite capable of bipedal locomotion when he proceeds to kill half the remaining crew. What was the point of him being in some awkward pose if he could move around like normal? It seems like Ridley Scott just wanted to see certain things and hear certain words and phrases in his movie, and he had no intention of actually putting any effort into the making of it.

The movie goes from making no sense to somehow managing to make even less sense. They introduce conflicts that shouldn’t have even existed and served no purpose. Take the cesarean section scene for example. Why, with all their apparent infinite knowledge of technology (they’re flying through space, have mastered putting people in, and taking people out of, stasis, manufactured an intelligent cybernetic being, etc) but their operating table/system is calibrated for men only? It also doesn’t serve any purpose, because the protagonist just puts it on manual mode and inputs a cesarean section anyway.

What was the point? To make her plight seem more frantic? Or to make the guys writing the script seem like uneducated jackasses? The machine was obviously capable of performing the operation just fine, which means it wasn’t a matter of hardware, it was a matter of software. In the future, when you’re zipping through space in your supermassive, I would think you could press a fucking button and BAM, software configuration switched from male to female. No problem.

The more I think about this movie the more I realize how terrible it really was. Scrape away the pretty special effects (minus Guy Pearce’s makeup job, which was shit balls) and you’re left with a story that isn’t so much confusing to us as it illuminates how confused Ridley Scott must have been while making it.

Throughout the film we see holograms of the engineers running from something, scared. One frightened to such a degree he manages to decapitate himself on a sliding door. Yet, later, when we actually meet an engineer, he doesn’t seem to remember/give a shit/is indifferent about the plight of his people two thousand years past and immediately picks up where he left off: destroy all humans. Whatever.

Was there anything I liked? The movie looked pretty. I enjoyed seeing Noomi Rapace half naked a couple of times. I liked Fassbender as David, even though the character was shit, lacked any sort of motivation, Fassbender still managed to be good. I was a fan of the selfless act of the captain as he rammed PROMETHEUS directly into the engineers’ ship.

I didn’t like the final scene where Vickers and Eli are running from the engineers’ ship as it crashes and rolls down hills like an overgrown metal doughnut. They run in a straight line, directly in the path of the ship. STRAIGHT LINE. I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt when Rapace’s character (Elizabeth) trips, falls down, and manages to roll TWICE which somehow magically moves her out of the radius of crush your face. If rolling twice is all that was required to save your ass from the path of the ship why did neither character think of running on a diagnal from it? Because Ridley Scott is an idiot, that’s the answer I’m going with.

So there you have it. PROMETHEUS is terrible.