Heard Some Important Information On Twitter Today, And Thought I’d Post It Here For Anyone Who May

Ready Player One

The following review contains mild spoilers. None of the major set-pieces or sight gags after the first act are detailed, but charac...

My review of Ready Player One -- a fun film, though also a thin one with some problematic thematic issues.

I’m not sure if you guys know what’s happening in Sudan right now cause all I’m seeing are posts about raising awareness without giving a proper coverage in regards to what’s happening there or how it all started. The Sudanese people have been peacefully protesting for months to remove Omar Al-Bashir from office (a dictator and a human rights violator, a president who has been in power for 3 decades. Mind you, Sudan has been an independent country only for 63 years). The pro-democracy protests were lead by an organization called The Sudanese Professionals Association (تجمع المهنيين السودانيين), a group lead by doctors and local unions. The oppressed minorities in the country with the less oppressed Arab majority lead by the SPA came together to overthrow Al-Bashir by peacefully protesting. A large number of protestors were women in front rows of every single protest since last December. The Sudanese people succeeded in overthrowing the government on 11 April 2019 but the military stepped in to run the transitional government, they’re the ones causing the recent killings, rape and violations you’re hearing about right now. The military ruling right now is composed of people like general Hemediti, a man who has been accused of human rights violation years ago for arming militias and unleashing them on the rebels and civilian farmers in Darfur. He was recorded a few days ago threatening protestors who want to see civilian rule. The SPA is fighting back by calling for civil disobedience and nationwide strike. They’re still fighting for their fundamental demands which started all of the protests. They’re fighting for a civilian government, empowering women and ending the brutal militias. The peaceful protestors are being killed, raped and arrested. There has been an internet blackout and people are being silenced. Spreading awareness and making people pay attention to the current events will aid a lot in ending the terror Sudanese people are facing. People have been protesting for months to end the country’s suffering by overthrowing a dictator, their hard work can not end in them being ruled by militias and new dictators. This can’t be how it ends for them and we need to help in changing that. We have to be their voice now, they rely on us. 

Boy doesn’t give a damn, girl finds inspiration in correctly defining “tomorrow”, and all of us who love the movie put our hands in on ears going “la-la-la I can’t hear you” about the racism.

Spoil the ending of your favorite movie with no context.

He spins a top that may or may not have fallen over before reuniting with his children.

My latest cartoon for @GuardianBooks.

simongerman600

OKAY, WE ARE AT THE END OF JULY AND I’M STILL OBSESSING OVER MAD MAX : FUCKING FURY ROAD, HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE ? Tell me please i’m not the only one

My review of Time Heist.

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

• A question mark walks into a bar?

• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."

• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

• A synonym strolls into a tavern.

• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

• A dyslexic walks into a bra.

• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony

- Jill Thomas Doyle

Well, that and a very slow middle. And a very slow last part. And no ending.

If you're still taking GoT related asks - character progression you're most enthused for in Season 5, and why?

Daenerys and Tyrion, in a dead tie, because I think the question of how they will interact is fascinating, and the single biggest problem with A Dance with Dragons is that Martin flagrantly spends the whole book avoiding letting it happen so he can have time to fiddle with plots that literally nobody thinks are more interesting than that. 

Zach Snyder Sandwich

I originally posted this on the cracked forums in a discussion about the new Justice League movie, in particular the very mixed reaction to Man of Steel and Zach Snyder's work in general.

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I think the things that make Snyder both loved and reviled by such a variety of people can be explained in a metaphor. Movies are like sandwiches. There are basically three layers on which movies work:

Style. The visuals, the music, the pacing, the swell of emotion, etc. This is the bread – it won’t singlehandedly save a bad sandwich/movie, nor is it absolutely necessary that it’s brilliant, but it adds a lot to the experience, and some people experience a movie primarily like this. 

Text. What the characters actually say and do, the story itself, and so forth. This is the meat, cheese, vegetables, condiments, all the substance. The actual quality and depth of the dialogue belongs here. 

Subtext. What the writer/director is actually saying under the surface, whether intentional or not. This is the nutritional content. You usually have to be looking for it to properly appreciate this level of storytelling (or sandwich making), but it makes it a richer experience. 

Most people experience movies in a mix of the first two levels. But people who really love movies and take the time to examine them tend to appreciate the third level a lot more. And different people care about different things. The film critic known only as Vern is the guy who wrote Seagalogy, which examined the movies of Steven Seagal for their themes, both individually and running, and took them seriously and critically as art. (It’s one of the best and most entertaining works of criticism I’ve ever read.) Like many Zach Snyder fans, Vern tends to be most interested in Style and Subtext, and wrote both a positive review and a later counter-post about some of the common arguments against it. The same goes for Phil Sandifer, who wrote an interesting defense of Man of Steel primarily on subtextual ground.

These levels can mix together different ways. Steven Spielberg movies are very consistent: the Style, Text, and Subtext are all doing exactly the same thing, and the result is a very smooth experience, regardless of quality (which is generally excellent).

But you don’t have to be that consistent to make it work. Take the Somewhere Over the Rainbow scene from Face/Off. The Style is beautiful and magical, while the Text is a kid watching a bunch of people getting brutally murdered. Consequently, the subtext is about how the pervasive tragedy and horror of violence affect even those who aren’t involved and may not even understand what’s happening, and the jarring contrast makes this all the more provocative.

Paul Verhoeven is a master of this sort of thing. Robocop, on the surface, is one of the most badass action flicks of the ‘80s. The text strongly resembles an unusually well-done Superhero origin story, with strong characters, memorable dialogue, and taut plotting. But the Subtext is a rich and hilarious satire of American culture that’s constantly criticizing its own story. It's a terrific movie on any of those three levels, but put together they become something truly special. It's like Judge Dredd enacting the life of Christ.

So a Spielberg Sandwich tastes different every time, but it’s always a perfectly balanced mix of ingredients, and it tastes exactly as healthy as it is (which also varies). A Verhoeven Sandwich tastes like junk food, but is surprisingly nutritious. A Michael Bay Sandwich is actually an entire bag of Oreos. The first bite is so delicious, but by halfway through you start to feel sick, by the end you actually are sick, and Heaven help you if you try a Bay marathon.

On those three levels, Zach Snyder is brilliant at Style, very clever at Subtext, but utterly clueless about Text, and ignorant about how the three fit together. Take Watchmen. It’s a gorgeously stylized realization of the comic, and all the rich themes are intact. But the violence (for example) is all wrong; one of the main themes is the awful pointlessness and tragedy of violence, and in the comic, it’s horrifying. That theme is still there, but Snyder shoots it fetishistically, Rodriguez-style, reveling in long fight scenes and beautiful splashes of blood and gore. The result is less provocative than confounding. Like, are we supposed to be having fun, or not? Similarly, the casting seems spot-on, yet the acting is incredibly uneven, because Snyder doesn’t adapt the dialogue to the rhythms that work when spoken aloud, and doesn’t adjust the flaws in the comic. Malin Ackerman got a lot of crap for her performance, but she plays Silk Spectre II perfectly as written. SS2 is a poorly-written character in the comic, spouting comic-book style dialogue.

Or Sucker Punch. It looks great, and thematically it’s an angry and brilliant condemnation of misogyny and sexism, but the characters are one-dimensional, the plotting is video-game level, and it fetishizes the characters too much for the criticism to actually stick correctly.

There’s probably no better representative of the good and bad points of Man of Steel than Jonathan Kent. Stylistically, Snyder’s vision of this small-town Kansas farmer is beautifully realized, full of gorgeous imagery and inspiring-sounding speeches about hope, all climaxing in his mythic death by tornado while saving others. And Kevin Costner pours his heart and soul into the role. But textually, he’s a stubborn jackass who tries to convince Superman to not save people. He dies because he goes back to save the dog, while telling Superman not to save him for no damn reason whatsoever. Meanwhile, the subtext is a provocative condemnation of the concept of small-town middle America being the heartland of the country; it’s turned ultra-conservative, and conservatism has degenerated into moral bankruptcy while loudly proclaiming its morality. So either the American heart is deeply corrupt, or Kansas ain’t in Kansas in more, if you catch my drift. (I’m not sure I catch my drift)

For some people, that imagery combined with Costner’s soulful performance makes the character work. For others, that subtext is intriguing enough to make it worthwhile. For the rest, it’s absolutely infuriating for obvious reasons – you hate him for being awful, and you subconsciously hate him for making the story so slow and pointlessly grim.

And, more to the point, doing all three of those together just doesn’t work. He can’t be the inspirational heart of the movie, and one of the principal antagonists, and also a satirical take on American Conservatism, while having anything remotely to do with god-like aliens punching each other over whose genocide is the morally correct one. The other problems largely fall into that.

So some people eat their Man of Steel Sandwich and go, “Man, this bread is off the hook!” (or whatever you kids are saying these days) Others say, “For something with this much junk in it, it’s surprisingly nutritious, and wrapped in a crust that’s quite exquisite.” And everyone else is like, “This is a terrible sandwich! Sure, the bread is good, but it doesn’t go with these ingredients at all! The meat is month-old bologna! The cheese is great (the cheese is Russell Crowe), but it’s only on the first half. There’s way too much lettuce, the tomatoes are bad, and the jalapenos somehow aren’t even spicy! And even if, for some insane reason, you actually want mustard, ketchup, mayo, and salsa on the same sandwich, you don’t drown the entire thing in all of them. By the end, you can’t even taste the bread!”

But hey, at least it’s not a bag of oreos.