Dang-Blasted

5.11: Battle Royale

--I see it all now. The first five seasons of AHS were merely an extended pretense to stick a ghost, a witch, and a vampire in a room together and have them fight. Well played.

--I was oddly stunned when I made the very recent discovery that Hotel only has twelve episodes. Why, I’m not sure. Some might call it a warning sign, but maybe they just didn’t have enough story to fill thirteen hours, and didn’t want to stretch. I’m okay with that; hell, if Freak Show had done twelve eps, we wouldn’t have gotten the stupid Alligator Girl subplot. So, because the season finale is next week, “Battle Royale” had to huff and puff all over the place, knocking off characters and tying up loose ends. Was it satisfying? Yes. Was it all a bit muddled? Also yes. But we finally (fucking FINALLY) got some more Sally backstory, and that’s all I was really hoping for.

--Time to thin the ranks! We began with a rehash of Iris and Liz’s gunslinging, which came to a premature halt when Iris realized she was pumping lead into her own sweet baboo. A tool to the end, Donovan shielded The Countess with his body. His dying wish: to be hauled out of the Cortez and spared from eternal ghost-life. Thus, Donovan’s arc ended on a cliché, the deathbed reconciliation with an estranged parent. But the actors sold it. And we got the Kathy Bates Emmy Award moment when Iris communed with her son’s ashes. And then, of course, she smeared Donovan all over herself like a spice rub and ascended to the roof so the breeze could distribute him across the West Coast. Beautiful. Weird. Inappropriate. American Horror Story.

--All this allowed the wounded Countess to slither off into the hotel’s depths, where Sally tended to her. Not out of goodness, of course. This week, the characters all placed bids on who would kill The Countess, and Sally just wanted to ensure a sweet bargaining chip. With a captive audience, Sally revealed her tale of woe: back in 1993, she was in tight with a pair of grunge rockers. During a sexy, drug-soaked night at the Cortez, Sally hit on the great idea of sewing her body to those of her lovers, so they could be together forever. This is your brain on drugs! The rockers both died from overdose (Miss Evers’ burbly cackles were the ickiest part of the scene), and Sally spent five days tethered to their corpses. Her misery and suffering provided enough negative juujuu to summon the Addiction Demon, I guess. Now we know why she sews people into mattresses: like the other ghosts, she’s stuck in a holding pattern. The Demon remains obtuse. I have a new theory that it’s really March in disguise, and Sally’s been his victim this whole time. We’ll see.

--The Lowes went home, all together again! Awwww! Scarlett seemed mostly exasperated by the knowledge that her entire family were vampires and/or serial killers. I seriously wouldn’t be surprised if she’s removing and wearing Grandma’s skin by the end. This is your brain on monstrous parental neglect and copious emotional trauma! Lowe kidnapped a dude to feed to his wife and son, only to find that all the other Lowes had been abducted (by The Countess, I guess?). Back to the Cortez he went, where Sally ordered him to commit the final Ten Commandments killing -- her own goal being to kill John and have him forever. Did he just leave the dude in the trunk of his car or what?

--For Countess-hunting, Iris and Liz brought in the big guns and sprung Ramona from her prison. In the process, we learned that Ramona killed and ate all the nouveaux vampire kids. I guess that’s one way to end a subplot, though I would have preferred something more ballsy. Stricken with measles, Ramona needed a pick-me-up, and who should come strolling into the Cortez but QUEENIE FROM COVEN! Outstanding! I can’t help it -- I love these surprise seasonal crossovers. Sadly, our beloved sassy witch was a bit oblivious to the danger. But we got to see Queenie fight Ramona (probably thinking, “This bitch looks weirdly like an immortal voodoo queen I used to know”) and it looked like she’d win, until March dropped in to add a new rule to the great book of nerdy debate topics: a witch’s powers don’t work on a ghost. March stabbed Queenie and Ramona ate her, which SUCKED (no pun intended). I wish the show wouldn’t bring back old characters just to snuff them, but seeing Queenie was still great.

--All fired up, Ramona strutted into the penthouse suite and found The Countess newly refreshed, thanks to the sacrifice of her last two blonde vampire boys. We were spared another catfight, because Ramona, to her own disgust, found that her hatred for The Countess masked the same old helpless desire. Alas...with her sexual allure, The Countess could have had all the happiness she wanted, but she blew her chances and wasted the best lovers. She asked if she could take little piranha-faced Bartholomew and leave to make a fresh start. Ramona couldn’t quite say no. So they had sex, because why not, and then The Countess packed her bags and skedaddled. She almost, almost got away. But Lowe was waiting in the elevator, and unlike certain front desk clerks, he knows where to aim. Goodbye, Countess. Her startled-looking head became the final trophy of the Ten Commandments Killer, reminding us all that Thou Shalt Not Commit Murder and Thou Certainly Shalt Not Commit Enough Goddamn Murders to Fill A Fleet of Dump Trucks. March denied Sally the right to claim John’s life. I doubt she’ll give up that easily.

--So March got his happy ending? Well, maybe. Someone got a happy ending, but not who you’d expect. March was all aflutter when The Countess’s ghost turned up, massive wads of black silk erupting from her décolletage (one more costume commentary! Ha!). Eternity with his bride! But The Countess herself was wooden, stripped of any remaining happiness or peace. She’s lost all her lovers, leaving only chipped beef on toast with a man she loathes. Then Miss Evers spilled the beans: it was she and not The Countess who betrayed March to the cops way back when. She had hoped that death and afterlife together would show March her lovestruck devotion. March coldly gave her the boot instead. But this moment of heartbreak for Miss Evers became her triumph. Freed from any delusion that March cared for her, she shed her apron and left the room with dignity, her business finished. Off to a proper afterlife where her son is waiting, where endless stained bedsheets cry out for the sponge of a true professional. Miss Evers gets to go, while The Countess is pinned under March’s oily leer. Which she probably deserves.

--I guess Ramona owns the hotel now, but something tells me Iris and Liz will really be in charge. Time to turn the old dump around, clean the corpses from the mattresses, tear out March’s mousetrap-maze of traps and disposal chutes, smother Bartholomew with a pillow, feed some kale to the hipsters to shut them up, and user in a new wave of guests who can be reasonably sure they won’t get impromptu tracheotomies in their sleep! Oh, and hire a new maid who can handle Miss Evers’ legacy. HA! Can’t be done.

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens

Picture me in 1999. The Phantom Menace is coming out and I’m so pumped. Everyone is. The world holds its breath. I refuse to believe the long, bitter Newsweek review which savagely disses the film, pointing out a litany of flaws we now know by heart, from Jar Jar to “Yippeeee!” It’s a new Star Wars movie made by George Lucas. It can’t suck. It can’t. My youthful, desperate enthusiasm lasts through multiple viewings of The Phantom Menace, and over the next six years, I dutifully plunk my butt down in theater seats to suffer through Episodes II and III. Maybe this one will be good. Maybe this one. Our cultural adoration of Star Wars fueled us through the prequels, but by the end, we were wrung out and left to dry. At least we’d have the original trilogy, if Lucas could stop fucking tinkering with it. But the thought of any more Star Wars movies left a queasy taste in our mouths.

Then Disney bought the world.

So here we are. A Star Wars film for the age of cynicism. The age of nitpicky social media. The age of ginormous cinematic universes, which probably wouldn’t exist without Lucas’s original trilogy. Star Wars is back, to be placed under a suspicious lens. Disney, who we still vaguely associate with princesses and cartoons? J.J. Abrams, who either saved or spat upon the Star Trek brand, depending on who you ask? Can the gee-whiz freshness of A New Hope be replicated in 2015? Well, no, not really. Those who expect such will not embrace The Force Awakens. As the credits rolled, a stranger sitting near me and my boyfriend loudly honked, “Pretty mediocre, huh?” while staring at us in the hope of instant validation. But here’s the thing. When I heard new Star Wars movies were on the way, I was kind of amused, cautiously enthusiastic, only mildly excited. But as the release date drew near (and then passed, because no way am I battling opening night hordes), my eagerness grew to encompass much of my waking thought. I was that excited kid all over again. There is nothing, nothing, like seeing those legendary words appear on the screen -- “A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...” -- followed by the brassy explosion of John William’s score and the trapezoids of school-bus-yellow text ascending against a curtain of stars. Star Wars is just that big in our minds, and may it always be so.

The plot? Do I really need to get into it? You’ve already seen The Force Awakens, or you’re never going to, or you still live in dread of spoilers. Besides, we’ve all heard the one huge criticism: it’s just A New Hope all over again. No point in disagreeing. The parallels between the first Star Wars film and this one are continuous, blatant, and impossible to ignore. But they don’t particularly diminish the sheer entertainment, and I can see what Abrams and his team were up to. They needed to prove they could make a Star Wars film, period, so they made one we’d all recognize. The Force Awakens is just so eager, bursting with endorphins at its own existence. It moves at breakneck pace, sprinting from one action scene and character introduction to the next. Too fast, in my opinion. I missed the quiet, focused moments from the originals. On the other hand, remember the infamous politicking of the prequels, the dreary dialogue spew, the endless reiteration of the same fucking plot points? The Force Awakens likes to show rather than tell. There’s still an Empire, still a Rebellion (they just have different names), and decades after the “victory” in Return of the Jedi, nothing has improved. Hell, it’s gotten worse: the galaxy exists in fractured factions and most people barely remember. The wishy-washy “Republic” exists offscreen somewhere, and (SPOILER ALERT) is wiped out with barely a sniffle. In other words, the sedate, passive world of the prequels, with its endless marble columns and sleepwalking bureaucrats, is over forever. Raise a glass.

The heroes and villains of The Force Awakens are defined, not by their backstories (which are mostly mysterious, to be unpacked in later films), but by their immediate actions. And it works, because the actors catapult themselves into their roles with the exuberance of...well, of someone who was cast in a Star Wars film. Luke, Han, and Leia (not to mention Chewie, Artoo, Threepio, and even Admiral Ackbar) are as beloved as ever, but they don’t hog the spotlight. They’ve become the mentors, the wise ones, the torch-passers. The galaxy’s new generation is personified by fierce desert scavenger Rey (Daisy Ridley) and AWOL Stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega), who also represent the cultural paradigm shift that has so many idiots terrified. Yeah, the main protagonist of a Star Wars film is a woman, the secondary hero is black, and these two facts are utterly beside the point. Ridley and Boyega weren’t cast because of their race/gender, as part of some sinister politically-correct conspiracy, but in blindness to it. Already, we can’t imagine anyone else in these roles, can we?

The film is refreshing in how it shakes off the rust of ancient film stereotypes. Rey and Finn reach the point where they’d die for each other, but there is no hint of romance between them. Rey is never made to play second fiddle to a dude (there’s an early running gag where Finn thinks Rey needs rescuing, and is wrong over and over). The film opens with the introduction of a “traditional” hero, hotshot pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac), but then gives him the boot so Finn and Rey can take over. When Finn lied to Rey about his identity, I rolled my eyes, figuring there’d be a later bit where Finn was exposed, Rey tearfully banished him from her sight, and they reconciled for the climax. Not so! Finn tells her the truth, and she understands and forgives him. In the midst of sci-fi craziness, they face a problem like real adults and not the pawns of a lazy screenwriter. Meanwhile, Adam Driver gives a very interesting performance as corrupted dark knight Kylo Ren. Surrounded by more archetypal villains (the implacable officer, the frothing-at-the-mouth general, the cryptic overlord), Kylo Ren is a cauldron of confused emotions, hero-worshipping Darth Vader but unable to tap into that same level of cold, easy cruelty. He’s an uncertain villain (I can’t say more without major spoilers) and that’s what makes him riveting.

The action of The Force Awakens is never subpar, as our heroes and baddies chase each other through the usual series of weirdly homogeneous planets (this time around, the sequence is desert/forest/snow). It can’t entirely avoid the J.J. Abrams effect. Abrams likes to include action that ignores all logic and spatial physics. Remember the ridiculous train crash in Super 8? Similar over-the-top set pieces occur here, most notably a dorky bit with angry tentacle monsters. Abrams also has a knack for the glaring plot hole. Explain to me how Finn, a Stormtrooper from infancy, trained and conditioned all his life to have no emotion and robotically follow orders, can go AWOL at the drop of a hat. Explain how the Republic has learned jack-shit from past experience and utilizes an ill-equipped guerilla force instead of, y’know, a MILITARY. Or how entire planets are reduced to the single square mile where all the characters find themselves. But, y’know, the original trilogy was no more logical or coherent. Like I always say, Star Wars isn’t really science fiction -- it’s fantasy that happens to be set in space. And if Leia can get over the destruction of her home planet so quickly, I guess the cool-looking, throwaway “tragedies” in a J.J. Abrams movie are no more sinful. The personal tragedies still hit home. I had the Big Shocker spoiled in advance thanks to internet trolls, but it still got to me. As Big Shockers go, it wasn’t too surprising when taken in the on- and off-camera context. But its Big Shocker shockwaves will reverberate through Episodes VIII and IX.

Ahh, yes, the next two. How I ache for them already. The Force Awakens is not life-changing. It doesn’t redefine Star Wars. But did we really want it to? I’d wondered if they would try adapting something from the Expanded Universe of books, comics, and games, which covers many decades following Return of the Jedi. Did I want to see Star Wars movies based on stories that already existed? By tossing out the EU, Disney may have pissed off the religious fans, but anything would have pissed off the religious fans. They complain that The Force Awakens cribs most of its plot from A New Hope, but if it had gone in a drastically different direction, they would have whinged equally hard. They have their pedestal and they’re going to stand on it. Taken in the context of modern blockbusters, The Force Awakens is terrific entertainment, well-acted and exciting, funny and poignant and never too arch. The biggest franchise in American history is in capable hands, which is more than we could have hoped for, admit it.

We would have accepted “better than the prequels” and left it at that. But the new era of Star Wars films isn’t content to settle for less. They want to show us how many more stars remain in that galaxy far far away, and how our enthusiasm will always be unsullied. The prequels couldn’t kill Star Wars; it rises from the ashes. Mediocre, my ass. Let’s take this journey.

5.12: Be Our Guest

--Part of me was hoping the finale of Hotel would go thusly: we see Liz Taylor and Iris behind the front desk, beaming. All loose ends have been tied, all ghosts have been defeated and/or placated, all is well. The Hotel Cortez is ready for its rebirth! The main doors swing open. Liz and Iris beam wider. And in barge eight thousand police officers brandishing nine thousand search warrants. Close-up on Liz as he utters a pitch-perfect “Well, ffffffuuuuuuuu--” And cut to black.

--But, no, in the end, it seems the Cortez emits a magical reality-altering field which ensures anyone murdered within its confines will vanish from the consciousness of the outside world, never to be sought after or mourned. I guess we must accept this as some sort of skewed internal logic. Anyway, a bigger part of me was hoping for a happier ending. Which we got! AHS has a tendency to focus its season finales on strong emotional payoffs, often at the expense of dangling subplots, but it mostly works. This worked, all right, despite some odd creative choices, like replacing Sarah Paulson with a different Sarah Paulson. Mind you, things didn’t look good at the outset: we opened with a mournful VO from Liz and a closeup of him getting his throat slit by a sequined finger that could only belong to The Countess. I was not eager for another downbeat finale, after Freak Show slaughtered its freak show. But much was in store.

--Initially, Liz and Iris’s plan to revolutionize the Cortez hit some snags, because all the Egyptian cotton and Star Trek toilets in the world can’t help when a wrathful Sally and a pouty Will Drake are still murdering away. Liz and Iris called a ghost meeting, summoning such guest-stars as Marcy, the Swedes, that bearded dude Tristan killed...and Miss Evers, who is apparently sticking around after all. Dammit, Miss Evers, did you not read the awesome send-off I gave you last week! Now I look like a doof! Anyway, March dropped by to explain his new agenda: he’s murdered enough to satisfy and now wants the Cortez immortalized. That means keeping its doors open until 2026, its centennial, when it can became an historic landmark. Sally and Drake were all like, “Fuck you, pedostache!” Time for an exorcism, maybe?

--Actually, Iris and Liz decided to help their haunts instead, which was kind of cool. Iris hooked Sally up with a smartphone and showed her the wonders of the internet, a heavenly realm where a trapped ghost can float free, exploring at will -- and, more importantly, accruing bushels of likes, faves, upvotes, and e-friends who don’t care who you really are, only who you present yourself as. Blissed out by her newfound freedom, Sally ditched her drugs. Did this satisfy? I’m glad Sally got a happy ending, but it seemed too easy for a character so angry and tortured -- plus, the Addiction Demon remains maddeningly undefined. Another one of this show’s cool monsters who never got the proper amount of curation. Sally’s early deliverance also left her with nothing to do for the rest of the episode. I’ve come to suspect that, after pulling a double shift as conjoined twins last season, Paulson asked for a lighter workload in Hotel. Then they shouldn’t have given her a character I enjoyed so much!

--Meanwhile, Liz consoled Drake, who was bitter at the disintegration of his fashion empire. Liz broke through Drake’s malaise and got his creative juices flowing again, making him into a mysterious, quasi-mythical recluse that the public ate right up, while Liz rose to dominate Drake’s boardroom. Drake happily presided over ultra-exclusive fashion shows at the Cortez, with Ramona and the ghosts serving as models. (Guess Ramona didn’t want to rule the Cortez. Can’t say I blame her.) Liz remained melancholy, and I was quite pleased when they addressed a big loose end: what happened to Tristan? Liz had been wondering this himself. Bad enough to see your lover killed, but when you expect him to reappear as a ghost and he doesn’t? Agony. To suss out Tristan’s whereabouts, Iris brought in none other than suave psychic Billie Dean Howard, Sarah Paulson’s very first AHS character. Billie Dean reached into the Beyond and produced A) a touching message from Donovan, and B) stubborn silence from Tristan. Oh, he was there, but he wasn’t talking. Liz felt broken.

--Can we all agree that Liz Taylor had the best character arc? Such a great role, such a great performance from Denis O’Hare. The real heart of the hotel. Liz kept in touch with his son and witnessed the arrival of his granddaughter, and then came the prostate cancer. Liz wasn’t interested in Drake’s doctors or Ramona’s offer of vampirism. He summoned all the ghosts for a going-away party, providing them various weapons to take his life in the most overdramatic and grisly fashion, a team effort. The show made this seem unbelievably touching, and that kind of zany emotional back-and-forth is why I adore AHS so much. However, one ghost had dibs on Liz’s mortal coil: The Countess. Yes, it was she who killed Liz, but the act was not cruel or horrific, but tender. I approve of this; liberating Liz was the one act of pure good The Countess did in her lifetime. No sooner had Liz risen as a ghost than Tristan appeared. Yes, he still loved Liz, and simply hadn’t wanted to distract him while he still had mortal work to do. Awwwwwwww! While I do think the Liz/Tristan romance was badly introduced (i.e., not foreshadowed or allowed to develop in any natural way), it’s still so cute and cuddly. What a well-deserved happy ending.

--But the introduction of Billie Dean Howard into the Cortez’s soup of paranormality had consequences. Flash forward to Devil’s Night, 2020: the Cortez is swarming with annoying wannabe ghost-hunters, thanks to Billie Dean’s Lifetime specials. (“Mr. Wu doesn’t pay for what?”) How can it ever be a respectable establishment? Enter John Lowe. The prodigal returns to his true home...a home that is now closed to him, save for one night. It took me a bit to realize Lowe was dead. How? Why? Lowe lured Billie Dean in for a private interview and gave her the...heh...lowdown (this was the season of bad puns, I guess). After the Ten Commandment killings, he went on the run with the family in tow, murdering criminals to feed Alex and Holden. Eventually, he returned them to the Cortez, all save for Scarlett, who didn’t belong and never would. Off she went to the same private school as Lachlan Drake. Can we see a spinoff starring those two? It’d be pretty interesting. The police caught up with Lowe, and his final seconds were spent on the pavement right outside the Cortez, riddled with bullets, trying and failing to cross the threshold. He didn’t get his family after all, and I dunno if he deserves them, frankly.

--Lowe then took Billie Dean to March’s little serial killer party. Billie Dean’s reaction to Gacy, Dahmer, Wournos, and the rest was more orgasmic than terrified; she was probably already composing her next big TV event. However, she soon found herself cuffed to a chair while the ghosts menaced her with power tools. Oh, they didn’t kill her, they just put the true fear of God in her. Ramona appeared as well, promising to hunt Billie Dean down if she continued to sensationalize the Cortez. Billie Dean got the point. She fled, and Lowe went to his family. Alex and Holden slept, watched over by Scarlett, now a young woman. Lowe climbed into bed with his vampire wife and son and slept the sleep of a sad man. An eternity of distance from his equally eternal loved ones, the rules of the afterlife prohibiting any sort of real contact. If Liz Taylor got the perfect happy ending, I’d say John Lowe got the perfect unhappy ending.

--And I guess that’s it. The Cortez thrives. The ghosts are all happy. The rooms and hallways of that cursed edifice keep their secrets. And, of course, the season ended with The Countess, elegant at the hotel bar, her sights set on a handsome young man with dark hair, a silent film star profile, and......cheekbones for days. Will The Countess rise again? Will the evil that infects the Cortez overwhelm any good intentions, or has it been tamed? That, children, is a story for another day.

--AHS: Hotel was pretty bodacious. And despite its excess, it grounded itself better than Freak Show or Asylum and waaaayyyyy better than Coven. It couldn’t touch all its bases -- Angela Bassett was badly underused from start to finish, and one or two elements, most notably little Bartholomew and the Addiction Demon, never truly came to fruition. But none of it felt pointless. Nothing made me bored or impatient. It was a streamlined season that, once again, felt distinct from each AHS tale that has come before. And the emotional arcs of its characters satisfied me, gaining more resonance as the season went on. As for Lady Gaga, well...I can’t believe she got a Golden Globe nod for Hotel, and fucking won. Her performance was good -- she nailed The Countess’s sexual allure and pulled off the trickier emotional moments too -- but the way everything revolved around her, on- and offscreen, still seems like a big fat gimmick. I don’t think AHS needs to rely on such attention grabs going forward. Because they still have mojo. Blood still pumps through the show’s veins. I’m still in love with it, am I not? Let’s ring out this bizarre, glorious season. A-one and a-two and...

Be our guest! Be our guest!
Let us butterfly your chest!
Throats are slit, you’re in the shit,
Miss Evers waits to swab your mess!
Hipster ghosts, horny Swedes!
We’ll exceed your every need!
Our facade is rather arty --
Just steer clear of little Barty!
Here a vamp, there a slut!
Sarah Paulson’s extra-nuts!
How could anyone expect a full night’s rest?
Just let your clothes go flying,
Blow your load, start crying!
Be our guest! Don’t be stressed!
Calm your tits -- it’s AHS!
Be our guest! Be our guest!
Be our guesssssssssssssssssssssst!

Tri: Of Friendship and Madness -- The Fox Went Out on a Trippy Night

Advance spoiler alert: this blog post does not have a happy ending. So don’t read it if, say, you hated seeing Selma get hanged to death at the end of Dancer in the Dark. OH, SHIT, SORRY. Ignore that last bit! Spoilers! Spoilers!

For some reason, the Myst games are often compared to Portal, often along the lines of, “If you loved X, try Y!” If you loved solving cryptic, vaguely steampunk-themed puzzles inside a magical book, try bouncing around with wormhole technology while an insane A.I. makes catty comments about your weight! If Portal is a puzzle/exploration game set entirely in the realm of sci-fi, and the Myst games exist in a nifty little no man’s land between sci-fi and fantasy, then there must be something on the far end of the seesaw, a Myst-like, Portal-like game that is one hundred percent fantasy. Well, stop digging, because I found one!

Tri: Of Friendship and Madness has a stupid title but is not at all a stupid game. I could recommend it, but there’s this glaring asterisk that I’ll get to later. It’s a game that instantly piqued my interest on Steam. Yes, a lot of the reviews compared it to Portal. With reason: you’re a silent protagonist, apparently female (judging by the timbre of your grunts of exertion), exploring a series of disorienting levels, armed with a device that generates a particular mechanic which you can exploit in various ways. But it’s all magic and mysticism. You arrive at a cliffside temple and encounter a friendly masked priest who gives you the lowdown: there are two playful fox gods, red and blue, who were once carefree best friends. Some undefined malady caused Red to go insane, and Blue ran away in fright. Now the priest hopes you can track down Red and calm his madness so Blue can return and rekindle the foxes’ friendship. Get it?

You chase the red fox into a dream-realm where physics is not welcome, and you quickly equip yourself with the Tri, an artifact that enables you to create solid triangles on most available surfaces. This seems simplistic -- it’s like you’re MS Painting shit into the game -- but it fucks with your head in all manner of ways. The triangles serve as makeshift platforms to reach new areas, but then you get a gravity-defying power, allowing you to scuttle like a spider across walls and ceilings, laying down pathways of triangles like an infestation of viral cheddar cheese. The game comes to life at this point, as you must let go of the notion that you’re limited by what’s up and what’s down. It’s important to grasp Tri’s M.C. Escher logic, because each level contains three fox statues that must be recovered to open the way forward. And the levels get progressively more massive. Each is expertly designed, coiling in and around itself, utilizing architectural space in surprising ways. The game’s aesthetic is reminiscent of origami, with bold colors, complex angles, folds and creases and countless hidden nooks. It’s psychedelic and awesome.

Tri is all about patient exploration. The later levels may take hours. The fox statues are tricky enough, but there are also dozens of small totems, the collecting of which unlocks bonus content. Some of these totems are so challenging to find and/or snatch that even a major completionist like me can’t be arsed. There are pools of acid, bottomless drops, areas where your triangles don’t stick, you name it. Many of the puzzles are familiar: dropping crates onto switches and redirecting beams of light gave me flashbacks to The Talos Principle. However, even the unoriginal stuff is made less so by the addition of those crazy triangles. Can’t reach something? Walk straight up the wall! Acid pools got you down? Build a triangle bridge! You’ve got time! Despite the constant presence of the red fox god, who flits tauntingly about, the pace of Tri is leisurely indeed, with scant story elements. And (possible spoiler alert) the whereabouts of the blue fox god are easy to guess, given the paucity of options. There’s no sense of urgency, no feeling that some sort of fantasy-GLaDOS is going to murder you...a nice evocation of the similarly chill Myst series.

So. All the things I’ve said about Tri have been positive. But I didn’t finish the game. Because Tri has one horrible flaw: its gameplay mechanics kinda suck. I can deal with that TO A POINT. Yes, first-person platforming will always be wonky. You’ll jump, land on a narrow platform, and skid off it to fall fifty feet. Walking on walls is fun, until your invisible foot touches down on the wrong few inches, gravity violently corrects itself, and you fall another fifty feet. Now try doing the same thing while carrying a wobbly crate that seems barely glued to your pinky finger. Prepare to do a lot of falling, climbing, falling, climbing, falling, and climbing. Again, I can live with that if the game is interesting, as Tri is. But from a certain point onward, you are required to use your triangles to redirect light beams. This mechanic is so badly implemented, so frustrating, so tedious, that it ruined me. I spent what felt like hours fiddling with triangles, nudging each vertex here and there, trying to get the beam to point at a tiny target. I created zig-zaggy spiderwebs of light without making any progress. In desperation, I watched a Let’s Play, but the player was just as stuck on those fucking light beams as I was. That was when I forced myself to utter the sentence that kills a game:

This isn’t fun any more.

And I feel terrible. Because Tri really, really tries hard (no pun intended), and it won my heart with its early levels, and I was gonna put it on my games-of-the-year list. I wanted to finish it and I still do. But I am not willing to struggle with its lousy light-bending nightmare any longer. Who the hell test-played Tri and gave that a thumbs-up? It brings everything to a screeching halt. The game smashes into a brick wall and totals itself. Puzzles can take time, but it should be because they challenge the intellect, not because the goal is obvious but the means to get there is next to impossible. All the fun drained from Tri, and I gave up with a couple levels left to go. The end.

Thus, I can’t recommend this game, unless you are divinely patient. It has plenty going for it. I love its unique fantasy world, which combines different mythologies (mostly Japanese, but I noticed Hindu, Tibetan, and Inuit elements as well). I love how the triangle-building completely overturns and deconstructs traditional level design. I love the quirky music. I love how the protagonist just happens to be a woman. I love foxes. I mean, I really love foxes. But I do not love how Tri sucked me in and then stabbed me in the back with infuriating, poorly realized mechanics. A game that starts out great and turns rotten can be worse than a game that’s crap from start to finish. When I abandoned the horribly-designed Albedo: Eyes from Outer Space after playing for three minutes, I felt sweet relief. But when I gave up on Tri after nearly making it all the way, I felt disappointment and melancholy.

There’s my unhappy ending. The next entry in the Myst review series is probably gonna be The Witness, and, GOD, do I hope I have a better experience with it. I failed to help the cute fox gods become friends again, and it will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Well, maybe that’s overdramatic. But it FUCKING SUCKS, okay?

Myst Review Series

Myst• Riven• Myst III: Exile• Myst IV: Revelation• Submachine• Kairo• The Talos Principle• The Dig• Daymare Town• Fez• Tri: Of Friendship and Madness • The Witness

The Witness -- Draw a Line in the Sand and Then Make a Stand

It would have been appropriate to begin this post with a deeply profound quote from someone like Thomas Edison or Voltaire, or at least Kurt Vonnegut. I have chosen instead to begin with lyrics from Rent. If that makes no sense, neither does The Witness. Har har.

This is technically a Cautious Enthusiasm post, but I’m sticking it in my Myst review series because...well, come on. I’ve been eagerly awaiting The Witness for some time, because A) it’s made by Jonathan Blow, whose first game, Braid, was awesome, and B) it looked exceptionally Myst-like. Oh, is it ever. In fact, it could serve as the finale to my Myst review series (even though it won’t be), for it incorporates elements from many of the previous entries. As with Myst, you are an anonymous explorer plunked down on a peaceful island covered in puzzles. You will glide through pristine, beautifully-rendered desolation (The Talos Principle!) and perform obscure acts of archaeology (The Dig!) with the strong sense that this is some sort of ancient repository of knowledge (Submachine!) and the growing suspicion that the obtuse mysteries of the landscape have no real solutions (Kairo!). And, just like in Fez, you’ll probably tear your hair in anguish once you realize that you’d need to be the lovechild of Buddha and Alan Turing in order to unlock each and every secret. None of this is a bad thing...mostly.

See, Jonathan Blow makes games that have Deep, Profound Meanings and subvert the very definition of the medium. Braid took the most primeval elements of gaming -- you’re basically Mario fighting Goombas -- then turned it upside-down with time manipulation, then introduced another layer -- the Princess you’re trying to save actually needs saving from you -- and then stirred in an even deeper layer with a bunch of allusions to the Manhattan Project. “Layer” -- that’s a buzzword we’ll return to soon. The Witness bears no obvious resemblance to Braid, but there are a couple parallels: the teasing of very simple puzzle mechanics into complex and unexpected forms, and a subversion of the idea that you, the player, are merely a passive observer pushing buttons with no emotional investment. A witness. Braid toyed with your expectations about the main character, and The Witness has no main character at all, just you. Who are you?

Well, you might be someone who hates The Witness and finds it inane and tedious. You’ll know within the first few minutes. As the game begins, you emerge into the daylight, utterly alone. The first puzzle you face couldn’t be simpler: draw a line on an electronic panel, connecting a start point and an end point. In the second puzzle, the line bends. Then it branches. It becomes a grid, then a maze. Each panel unlocks something, and each is a little trickier than the one before. And that’s all you’re gonna get -- it’s panels all the way down. The beautiful setting is bigger than many islands from the Myst games but small enough that hiking around never becomes boring. The island is divided into obvious temperate zones, and scarred by the remains of industry. You obviously aren’t the first visitor, but as you explore, you’ll find...well, they’re either people who turned to stone or they were statues to begin with, but their appearance and frozen poses hint at a great deal. There’s a desert and a swamp, the ruins of temples, castles, and factories. And panels.

I can easily enjoy a game that’s fun to explore, and The Witness is wonderful to explore. The graphics have a painted-in quality -- soft at the edges with a slight oversaturation of color -- which adds more to the experience than if they were simply realistic. There’s no music and plenty of ambient sounds. You won’t want to be distracted, because the initial simplicity of the puzzles is an illusion. At its core, each panel is the same: draw the line from A to B. But new variations, new themes, appear constantly. You might need to draw the line so it touches certain points, or creates Tetris-block shapes. Many puzzles combine with the environment around them. Often, you must look carefully, listen keenly, or be standing in a certain spot. I don’t want to spoil too many specifics; this game is better when you discover it for yourself. But I was delighted by the innovations. The Witness is very nonlinear; you’ll often find puzzles that you can’t understand, as their solutions lie elsewhere on the island. Each zone -- desert, castle, swamp, etc. -- is a classroom lesson that you can apply to the game as a whole. Layers.

The what and the how can be untangled, but everyone who plays The Witness will be asking why. Why are you doing this? What’s the ultimate goal? Well, without revealing too much, each section of the island sticks another key in a lock. There’s an obvious endgame. But if you’re looking for a story, a point beyond zen-like ambiguity, I have to break the bad news to you. The Witness is a very, very, very pretentious game. It’s high-minded and arsty-fartsy. It takes you to task for daring to expect a plot and characters and such. There is plenty of dialogue, but it all takes the form of obtuse quotes from famous deep thinkers, read by actors with soothing voices. Likewise, if you solve the extra-tricky vault puzzles and find the hexagonal keys, what they unlock is murky and yawn-inducing. Many critics will heap praise on The Witness for being profound. I don’t believe that a bunch of flowery wisdom and self-help platitudes equal profundity. But maybe that’s part of it? Maybe it’s subtly satirizing the recent trend for “deep” games that showcase style over substance? More likely Jonathan Blow is a Jonathan Blowhard.

Layers. The Witness contains layers upon layers, for better or worse. As I implied earlier, I didn’t come close to discovering all it had to offer. I guess I beat the “main” game. I appreciated how the central village is like the island’s final exam. I wasn’t a big fan of the endgame, which seemed determined to annoy me with esoteric puzzle handicaps. I liked the ending I got, but it’s probably not the only ending, because I left a shitload of stones unturned. Beneath the panels and their many variations lies at least one more layer of puzzles. They’re insidious. Puzzles are literally woven into the landscape, the ground, air, and water. Once I realized they were there, I found myself noticing more and more of them. But finding every single one? It’d take an age. My eyes would fall from my skull. I wouldn’t be surprised if no one has gotten one hundred percent completion on The Witness yet. I think, the more we discover, the more impressed we’ll be. The wait was long, but Blow didn’t give us a half-assed result. In fact, he went farther than I ever imagined.

Is The Witness saying something incredibly profound, or does it have nothing to say at all? People will disagree. The biggest thing I got from it was satisfaction. Not from grasping its elusive “meaning” but from simply solving puzzles. Making the connections. Hearing the lightsaber-hum of a completed panel, an electrical line lighting up, connecting me to the next panel, and the next. Progressing. I refuse to offer any wishy-washy interpretations of The Witness, but one credo I detected within its many layers was that there is great human pleasure in the act of creating something. Especially if it’s something that lingers, remaining for others to appreciate. Like a game. In The Witness, others have come before you and left their mark. They remain in stone, silent witnesses to you, the latest contributor. They provided the puzzles, you’re providing the solutions. It feels good. If a game makes you feel good, it has succeeded, and hopefully you can forgive it for certain traces of artistic arrogance.

Do me a favor. Google Andy Goldsworthy. He’s one of my favorite artists, and you should quickly see why. I bet he and Jonathan Blow would agree on a lot of things. You don’t always need pages and pages of academic interpretation. You don’t need to stand before a work of art, sipping champagne and endlessly debating its themes and subtext. Sometimes it’s just beautiful.

Draw a line in the sand. Look: you made something.

Myst Review Series

Myst• Riven• Myst III: Exile• Myst IV: Revelation• Submachine• Kairo• The Talos Principle• The Dig• Daymare Town• Fez• Tri: Of Friendship and Madness• The Witness

I hear the call of the sirens. It’s time to return to a theme I can’t seem to stay away from, and scribble down a third list of crazy, brilliant plot twists that electrified my poor little brain. (Here are the first and second such lists for reference.) Do I really need to include a spoiler warning this time? We know the routine. Speaking of which, I always mention Game of Thrones in my intro, and this year will bring us the first season that is not based on the original novels...which means I have no goddamn clue what’s going to happen and can no longer react with insufferable superiority to each shocking development. So maybe Sansa is having Drogon’s baby and maybe Melisandre will resurrect Jon Snow but he’ll believe he’s a Mexican street performer and charge into battle wielding dual maracas, who the fuck knows? Let’s talk about some epic twists that have happened already.

OH, FINE, HERE’S YOUR DAMN SPOILER WARNING. PROCEED WITH CAUTION AND SUCH.

DANG-BLASTED’S TOP TEN PLOT TWISTS, PART THE THIRD

Black Mirror: Cruel and Unusual Punishment
Fucking Black Mirror, guys...I can’t think of a recent sci-fi show that’s so well-executed and also so pessimistic about human nature. Each episode shows a future where we’ve fucked up somehow. I’d say the nastiest (in a good way) is “White Bear,” in which an amnesiac named Victoria awakens to find that civilization has crumbled and most people have either turned into murderous psychos à la The Purge, or silent, passive zombies who film everything on their phones. Victoria runs. The psychos chase her. The zombies film away. Is it a commentary on our chronic disconnection from violence? Yes and no. In the end, we learn that Victoria is a convicted child murderer. Her punishment is to experience the same “horror movie” every day and have her memory wiped each evening. The psychos are actors and the zombies are normal tourists enjoying their day in a theme park devoted to Victoria’s suffering. “We’d never be so cruel, even to a child killer!” you protest. Oh yes we fucking would, and Black Mirror has the balls to show us.

Bloom County: Rosebud is Female, Just Because
Berkeley Breathed’s Bloom County is my favorite newspaper comic of all time, and (despite the reboot) we shall not see its like again. A stellar example of its bonkers meta-humor: in response to complaints that the strip lacked women, Breathed sent his talking animals into a tizzy when Spuds MacKenzie (yes, that Spuds MacKenzie) revealed that one of them was secretly female. Could it be Opus the notably effete penguin? Portnoy and Hodgepodge the douchey woodland brobags? Bill the Cat?! Nope, it turned out to be Rosebud the phlegmatic basselope, a character whose Eeyore-like asexuality made “him” the perfect pick. What I found funniest was how arbitrary it all seemed; Rosebud’s abrupt gender-swap could only be Breathed’s middle finger to his overly PC critics. Then Rosebud hooked up with Hodgepodge the rabbit and they had creepy hybrid babies together. God, why do female characters always need a love interest?

The Cabin in the Woods: Unleash ALL the Monsters!
Speaking of meta! If you haven’t seen The Cabin in the Woods, you may still know the gist: young folks are trapped in your typical horror movie scenario, only the slashes and shocks are orchestrated by a gang of Dilberts in an underground control center. That’s the first twist of many. I won’t spoil all the details, but the film reaches a level of ironic brilliance toward the end, when the Final Girl and the Lovable Stoner find their way backstage and discover an entire caged zoo of horror movie baddies, any and every monster you can think of, all awaiting their turn to shine. So what do our heroes do? They open all the cages, of course. And the resulting carnage is too wonderful to put into words. Seeing somebody get impaled by a pissed-off unicorn? Priceless. Witnessing the icky payoff to one man’s mermaid fetish? Even more priceless. If I told you the film ends with additional plot twists and a last-minute celebrity cameo, would you just go watch the damn thing already?

Countdown: The Wrong Chosen One
In the 90s, we sure did love dark, brooding YA series. One example is Daniel Parker’s Countdown, which pounced on our Y2K fears: a virus kills off everyone on Earth except teens, who find themselves in a biblical End-of-Days scenario. Crucial among the subplots is a girl named Sarah who possesses a mystical scroll which prophesizes everything that’s going on. The scroll describes the exploits of a “Chosen One” and her enemy, the Demon Lilith. Sarah realizes the prophecies refer to her and she’s the Chosen One, while another girl, Jezebel, appears to be the Demon. In the end, Sarah and Jezebel kill each other...only it’s not the end, because there’s still a couple books to go. Huh? Turns out a completely different protagonist, Ariel, was the Chosen One the whole time, her BFF Leslie was the Demon, and all the prophesies, with their conveniently vague phrasing, referred to them just as easily. Is it contrived? Yes. Did it make me beat myself up for missing all the obvious clues and foreshadowing? Absolutely yes.

Final Destination 5: The Plane! The Plane! It’s the Plane!
I wasn’t expecting a cool last-minute twist from the fifth entry in a series about people getting murdered by weight machines and laundry cords. Not only was 2011’s Final Destination 5 surprisingly awesome, it brought the series full circle. We have our alleged happy ending, with the hero and his girlfriend hopping a plane to Paris. Only, who are those idiots having a fight several rows down? Why is that kid yelling about a crash? Is that...Devon Sawa? You bet your boots. The final stinger is that FD5 takes place in the year 2000 and ends with the same plane crash we witnessed in the very first Final Destination film. And it’s not a sloppy or nonsensical twist: watch the movie carefully and you’ll see that all the technology is over a decade old. The truth was right there, but we were too busy laughing at the guy getting skewered on the rotisserie spit. I guess if you’re gonna snuff your leads at the last minute, you find a way to do it with flair.

Hannibal: Dr. du Maurier’s Fateful Referral
Hannibal is chock full of shocking plot developments. I had to base my choice on which twist really dazzled me, and since I found Dr. Bedelia du Maurier (Gillian Anderson) such a fascinating character, I was most enamored with her arc. Why is she drawn to Hannibal Lecter, like a moth darting close to an inferno? We learn early on that she once killed a patient in self-defense -- a patient who had previously been Lecter’s, and who Lecter deliberately infected with madness to see what du Maurier would do. And we sense that du Maurier, on some level, enjoyed killing, or at least found it intriguing. She’s such an enigma, and over the course of the show, we get one puzzle piece after another. But we don’t see the big picture until the final fragment slots into place. The defining flashback, which all others have teasingly circled. That’s when we learn that it was never self-defense. Du Maurier’s patient never attacked her at all. She straight-up murdered him in cold blood. This revelation made me immediately want to go back and study her calm face, her hint of a smirk, her every soft intake of breath. Knowing that she’s not Hannibal Lecter’s victim, but a member of his tribe.

Monsters: Beginning at the (Unhappy) End
The skillful Monsters wastes no time in catching our attention. A strip of North America has been invaded by towering, octopoid alien creatures, and in the film’s opening scene, we witness a squad of soldiers assaulted by said aliens while civilians scream and bodies litter the ground. It’s just a meaningless hook, right? After all, most of the film is a slow-paced, meditative affair, as a man and a woman hike through the Infected Zone and develop a gradual bond. They discover the aliens are hardly mindless, and by the end, the idea of returning to their boring old lives holds little joy. They’re sharing a secret that most of us are too afraid to see. A squad of soldiers comes to rescue them, we hear one dude’s annoying, familiar riff on “Ride of the Valkyries,” and we realize we’ve looped back to the beginning. The first scene was the last scene, and those were our protagonists lying dead and screaming in the middle of the carnage. Because happy endings are for the weak, especially when We Are The Real Monsters. See what they did there?

Nostalgia Critic: Don’t Fuck With Mara Wilson
Once again, I should enlighten the non-internet-addicts who have no idea what happened to Mara Wilson. After her stint as a precocious child star in Matilda and others, she pretty much quit acting and has since leveled up to an awesome blogger, tweeter, and fame-deconstructor. I learned about her coolness upgrade in the best possible way, when e-comedian Doug Walker, aka The Nostalgia Critic, did a scathing video review of 1997’s A Simple Wish. Yeah, it was a lousy movie, but it’s still pretty juvenile to single out one actress -- a kid, no less! -- and trash her entire body of work. However, it set up one of the best unexpected payoffs I’ve ever seen, as Mara Wilson her actual self appeared onscreen to get revenge on Walker by showing a montage of his hideously embarrassing teenage home movies. She not only proved that she can still act, but that she’s got an A-one sense of humor and is in no way hung up on her child star days. Who could have seen this “celebrity cameo” coming? It didn’t make my day, it made my year.

A Perfect Getaway: Our Heroes are Murderous Lying Murderers Who Lie and Murder
A skillful twist can elevate mediocre material. Don’t get me wrong, A Perfect Getaway is a tense and competent thriller, but I wouldn’t remember much about it if not for its climactic switcheroo. It’s about a derpy honeymooning couple (Milla Jovovich and Steve Zahn) who befriend a far edgier, more badass duo (Timothy Olyphant and Kiele Sanchez) in the Hawaiian wilderness, right when some psycho is murdering in the area. There’s also a third couple, but they’re so sketchy and suspicious that they’re obviously a red herring. However, the truth is staring us in the gob the whole time. There’s nothing like seeing horror dawn on someone’s face (Kiele Sanchez’s, as she studies the photos on Milla Jovovich’s camera) and realizing how misled you were. Yes, the killers are Jovovich and Zahn, who murdered the real honeymooners and assumed their identities. First you get mad, then you go back through the film and realize that the clues were always there, that certain lines of dialogue had more than one meaning, and that even the opening wedding footage was edited to point you in the wrong direction. That, dear readers, is how you make a thriller thrill.

Singularity: One Short Night Equals One Long-Ass Year
Well, here’s another good example of terrible YA cover art. Based on this cover, you’d think you were about to read “James Marsden and His Clone vs. Demon Pac-Man.” Instead, William Sleator’s Singularity is an intelligent, fascinating little tale about a pair of twins who, while housesitting, discover that a backyard shed contains a wormhole to somewhere else. Time moves much faster inside, and one twin (the jerk) plots to rapidly age himself up so he won’t have to be a twin any more. However, his brother (the narrator) beats him to it. The second act of the book turns into an entirely different tale, a bizarro Hatchet in which our hero spends an entire year inside one small room while only a few hours pass in the outside world. We see his daily routine, his psychological turmoil, how he goes from a hapless teen to a muscular, zen-like survivor. That toothy golf ball on the cover barely features in the actual book; it’s really about something far cooler. Another twist that affected me as a kid and ensured I’d grow up to make lists like this one.

Cutthroat Kitchen has turned out to be one of those “just one more episode” shows where I could easily waste the entire day on it if I didn’t have the self-control of a saint (yeah, right). It’s a fun show, a tongue-in-cheek show, a show full of delicious and not-so-delicious culinary experiments. Lastly, it’s a show where I often have cause to yell at the screen. “Really? REALLY? You IDIOT!”

For those who don’t know, Cutthroat Kitchen is a reality competition in which chefs must prepare dishes within a time limit, under the watchful scowl of host Alton Brown. Each chef gets $25,000 in cash, which they can spend auction-style to sabotage their opponents in cruel and funny ways. The winner only keeps what money they haven’t bid away. This leads to some epic kitchen smackdowns and desperate, improvisational cooking. You just know that with this kind of pressure, people are bound to screw up. Sometimes, their whoopsies are worthy of the facepalmiest of facepalms. And I’ve been cataloguing them for you! Here are...

DANG-BLASTED’S TOP TEN BIGGEST ACTS OF STUPIDITY ON CUTTHROAT KITCHEN

10. BBQ, Where Are You?
(S1E13, “S’more Sabotage”)
The time limit is everything. As a professional chef, you better be capable of whipping off a quality dish in a brief period. That’s how restaurants operate and it’s how Cutthroat Kitchen operates. When faced with making a barbecue platter, Chef Rocco was delighted. He knows barbecue like nobody else! He’s gonna blow the judge away with a succulent selection of meats! And believe me, his little buffet looked absolutely amazing. Did it taste amazing? Probably, but we’ll never know, because when the clock hit zero, Chef Rocco had abso-fucking-lutely none of his food plated. And guess what? The judge can only go by what you present them on a plate! Them’s the rules! Luckily for Chef Rocco, they showed mercy and sampled his bean salad, which was technically in a dish...and delicious enough to keep him from elimination in that round. But the rest of his elaborate BBQ platter went in the garbage, as did my respect for a guy who’s so smitten with his own brilliance that he ignores the ticking clock.

9. Maybe You Should Stop Strokin’ Off
(S4E5, “Welcome to the Jungle”)
Don’t laugh too hard at the misfortunes of others. This ep came down to a grudge match between Chef Tom and Chef Matt, and during the second round (beef stroganoff), Tom hit Matt with a seemingly innocuous sabotage that turned his life into a living hell: he had to switch between different-sized pots while cooking. Poor Chef Matt...first he failed to boil water in a huge pot, then he kept spilling and losing his ingredients from a tiny pot. He was clearly miserable, convinced he was doomed...and while his opponents were busy chortling at his ordeal, they both fucked up. Chef Tom dumped parmesan on his dish at the last minute, ruining his flavors, and Chef Jessica undercooked her pasta and overwhelmed her meat in cognac -- after bragging about said cognac for the entire round. Oh, man, the looked of shocked relief on Chef Matt’s face when Chef Jessica was eliminated. I’ve never been happier to see someone survive a round. Karma.

8. Exclusively a Dumbass
(Various Episodes)
One recurring sabotage on Cutthroat Kitchen is when a chef gains an exclusive advantage. They might be the only chef in the kitchen who can cook a certain way, or they might swap their opponents’ choice ingredients for shitty alternatives. That sort of leg-up is not to be pissed away. However, I’ve noticed that again and again, the chef with the “advantage” will utterly blow it. Chefs have big egos by necessity, so the demons of hubris can strike hard. A chef has the exclusive right to use salt...and their final dish is under-seasoned. While making pea soup, only one chef wound up with good, fresh peas...and his soup was badly textured and pea-deficient. It’s kind of funny to see the look on the face of an eliminated chef who thought they had the high ground, but then you see the other chefs biting their tongues in outrage. You spent all that money to prop yourself up, then kicked away the crutch and hung yourself? YOU INCOMPETENT OAF OF A CLOD!

7. Don’t Be a Maverick
(S3E11, “Well, Hot Clam”)
I dunno where Chef Maverick got his name from -- hell, maybe he was born with it -- but it did him no favors, and neither did his doofus behavior in the first round. During the auction, Chef Maverick proved ready to blow all his money from the start (smart chefs save their moolah for when it really matters) and even tried to bid more than he actually had. Did he spend wisely? Well, when granted the power to assign heat sources, he bizarrely gave the best option, a barbecue grill, to someone else, and awarded himself a crappy little countertop grill because “I use these all the time!” So “skilled” was he that he finished his sliders and coleslaw ten minutes early, then aimlessly wandered around the kitchen, getting on everyone’s nerves, while his dish cooled and congealed. The final straw? Chef Maverick was eliminated for having overdone meat and a dry bun. How can you finish too early and still overcook? Meet the ditziest Maverick since Sarah Palin.

6. Self-Sabotage, Take Three
(S4E12, Chili’d to the Bone)
We’ve seen how chefs can be their own worst enemy. This was demonstrated in an episode where in all three rounds, the losing chef tasted defeat as a result of their own fuck-up. Taken in a row, they created a glorious parade of derp moments. First round: Chef TJ forgets to get cheese for her chili cheese dog. Buh-bye! Second round: Chef Nick sabotages the others with shitty pasta, but randomly opts to make Alfredo sauce without any milk or butter. Arrivederci! And in the final round, Chef Aaron, who was doing so well, deflects all sabotages. Problem is, they’re making Crêpe Suzette and Chef Aaron has no everloving clue how to craft proper crêpes. He does his best. He makes some very pretty...pancakes. Bonsoir! The winner, Chef Todd, did do a great job of rolling with the punches, but all he really needed was to sit back and let every one of his opponents shoot themselves in the foot.

5. Zoned Out
(S6E3, “In It to Twin It”)
Strategy is important, especially when faced with merciless Italian twins. In this twin-themed ep, Chef Sammy, along with brothers Nick and Nate, were forced to share a kitchen separated into three zones: prep, cooking, and equipment. One chef per zone. They could switch between zones, but only under mutual agreement. Chef Sammy began in the equipment zone, which would have been an advantage had he actually grabbed what he needed right away. Nope. With tragic foolishness, he returned to the equipment zone partway through the round and became trapped there: Nick and Nate could simply swap between prep and cooking while Sammy looked on, helpless, his time ticking away. And when Sammy finally escaped, what did he do? He forgot a fucking spatula. And back to the equipment zone he went to be trapped a second time. Dear lord, man! Do you not learn from your mistakes? I guess the other twin got all the foresight.

4. All and/or Nothing
(S6E13, “Alton and the Chocolate Factory”)
Chef Jackie from New Jersey could not be called endearing, what with her shrill voice and aggressive, trying-too-hard-to-be-witty schtick. However, her dishes were consistently delicious (if sloppy) and that propelled her to the final round. She was as type-A as they come, but her need to throw her weight around led to a ridiculous maneuver and a Cutthroat Kitchen first: she willingly spent all her money. In one single bid. Know how a pit bull will bite a stranger’s hand and then immediately look guilty? Chef Jackie’s horror came too late. She was headed for a purely symbolic victory, and, worse, her opponent didn’t even get the nastiest sabotage of the round. He merely had to stick chocolates in boxes for five minutes while Chef Jackie was elbow-deep in melted chocolate, clawing for various weird ingredients. She still pulled off a delicious dessert, but she didn’t win. Did she even want to at that point? Lose your cool on TV and you’ll lose every dollar, lose the match...lose at life.

3. The Black Egg of Doom
(S3E5, “Chain of Tools”)
Okay, so, there’s taking risks, and then there’s going out of your way to wreck a perfectly good dish. The challenge was cobb salad, and the sabotage was, Chef Nikos had to swap out three good ingredients for unpleasant substitutes. He could choose what he swapped, though...and he chose a fucking tactical nuke. Know what a century egg is? It’s an egg that has been buried and allowed to ferment for weeks, months, possibly years. You open its shell to reveal a black, slimy horror that gives off the fumes of Hades and...well, to call it an “acquired taste” is a fucking laugh. Keep in mind, Chef Nikos could easily have passed over this abomination and taken harmless Cheez Whiz instead. Nope! He opened that century egg and plunked it down whole on his salad like Smaug the dragon lurking atop his leafy green hoard. I’m pretty sure they skillfully edited out judge Antonia Lofaso’s projectile vomiting after she sampled Chef Nikos’ Cthulhu-approved terror plate. Farewell to her taste buds, farewell to Chef Nikos. Suicide by sulfur.

2. Letting Her Have It
(S2E12, “It’s Not Delivery”)
My boyfriend insists this is the stupidest thing he’s seen on the show, and while I don’t quite agree, I can understand the sheer hands-in-the-air retardation of Chef Athena’s final blunder. We’re in the third round, Chef Athena vs. Chef Rina. Athena has $19,300 remaining. Rina has bid her ass off and only has $3,000. So it should be a cinch for Chef Athena, right? She can hit Chef Rina with all the sabotages and still walk away with tons of cash! Only......she doesn’t. She fucking doesn’t. For reasons known only to Chef Athena, she allows Chef Rina to purchase the final sabotage, requiring Athena to salvage the tortillas from frozen enchiladas in order to make her fajitas. “I just let her have it,” Athena says with a shrug. WHYYYYYY??!! You had EVERY SINGLE advantage! So guess what? Chef Athena is eliminated and Chef Rina “wins” with a measly $1,400, which was, at the time, the lowest-ever Cutthroat Kitchen prize. I hope Chef Athena went home to a chorus of outrage from everyone she knew.

1. White Chocolate Lobster
(S1E3, “Porkchops and Sabotages”)
I refuse to not put this at number one. It looms huge in my mind, a monolith of stupidity. Meet Chef Taylor. Chef Taylor is young. A hotshot. He likes to push fine dining to the extreme and think outside the box. So the chefs are doing macaroni and cheese, and Chef Taylor gets hit with a great sabotage: he has to prepare dessert mac-n-cheese. And I was honestly rooting for him as he mixed mascarpone and white chocolate to create something that looked really, really yummy. A few minutes left on the clock and Chef Taylor’s golden...and then he utters the words of doom. “It’s missing something.” What does he toss in at the last second? Mother. Fucking. LOBSTER. I was stunned speechless. So was everybody on the show. LOBSTER? Judge Simon Majumdar looked at the plate in utter dread, and probably decided to boot Chef Taylor before he even tasted it. LOBSTER? If this is what Chef Taylor serves at his restaurant, stick its address on my GPS so I can maintain a fifty-mile radius. This was John Carpenter’s The Thing in a porcelain bowl. I do not like lobster, but I understand its culinary appeal...WHEN IT’S NOT INSIDE A FUCKING WHITE CHOCOLATE DESSERT! JESUS BARFED!

And that is the stupidest thing I have ever seen happen on Cutthroat Kitchen. And now do you see why this show is so great?

I deduce it’s time for Cautious Enthusiasm.

A very old man, recently abroad in Japan, returns to his private estate in the English countryside. The man is Sherlock Holmes. He is played by Sir Ian McKellen, and it’s hard to imagine a more delicious-sounding actor/character combination. But hold your saliva. This movie is going to be a bit different. When we think of Sherlock Holmes, we think of fireworks. Dazzling, snappy detection. Robert Downey Jr. punching thugs or Benedict Cumberbatch flicking clues around like a superhero savant. Mr. Holmes is too meditative for all that. In the movie’s world, Holmes is real and Arthur Conan Doyle isn’t; the entire literary canon was written by Dr. Watson. There was no deerstalker hat, no violin. 221B Baker Street was a ruse to mislead the tourists. People ask Holmes to do “the thing” where he eyeballs someone and deduces everything about them. He can do it, but (as he rather hurtfully demonstrates at one point) it’s not much fun to be put under a lens. This Holmes is a quiet, sad, wry old man. And full of fear.

The last time Sir Ian starred under director Bill Condon, they made Gods and Monsters, about the last days of gay horror director James Whale. I didn’t really like it. It was too melancholy, too much a dirge. I feared Mr. Holmes would be more of the same, would take all the fun out of a legendarily entertaining character. Luckily, for all its pathos, this is still a Sherlock Holmes movie. We expect clues, and we get them: a scattering of plaster, a box inscribed in Japanese, dead bees. We expect mysteries. The elderly Holmes has returned to his cottage, his apiary where he tends his bees. His Irish housekeeper, Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney), has a young son, Roger (Milo Parker), who regards the old detective with keen fascination. Holmes has a secret: his titanic brain is slipping into senile dementia -- for him, a fate worse than death. A mystery he can’t solve. As he develops a bond with Roger and they try to figure out why the bees are dying, two flashback stories are woven in. One is Holmes’ final case, involving a woman (Hattie Morahan) who uses a glass harmonica to speak to her miscarried children. The other sees Holmes in Japan, seeking the prickly ash, a plant which may cure his senility.

We have the building blocks of a good, meaty Holmes adventure: exotic locales, hints of the supernatural, hidden motives. What the movie does so well is show how the world of Holmes is slipping away. Holmes, the real man, is afraid his memories aren’t real -- or, perhaps, are becoming confused with the sensational penny dreadfuls Watson wrote about him. He fears that when he’s gone, the fictional Holmes will be all that remains. Lurking behind the entire story is the fallout from World War II, an event which broke our species. The boy, Roger Munro, lost his father and his innocence. The Japanese lost too much to quantify. Paranormal séances and brilliant detectives became trite playroom toys of the past. Holmes can feel himself, and what he represented, disappearing. But he’s still too brilliant, with too godly an ego, to give up, and that’s why Mr. Holmes is so much more pleasurable to watch than Gods and Monsters. Because why should Sherlock Motherfucking Holmes go down without a fight?

The film is beautiful -- in its portrayal of the time period, in its intercutting of mysteries as more revelations occur, in its acting. Sir Ian is just as Sherlockian as we’d want him to be, with that undercurrent of sadness he does so well. Milo Parker is outstanding as a boy whose impish face can reflect delighted curiosity or deep hurt, a child of war who learned about hardship before he had the facts of life. During the film, tension develops between Holmes and Mrs. Munro, who is far from comfortable when her son starts spending all his time with the detective and snottily correcting her grammar. Laura Linney transcends the “disapproving matron” stereotype. She fears Holmes, whose brain is so far beyond hers, and fears her son, who already has the gaze of a jaded adult man. Every major character in the film, including the woman from Holmes’ fateful final case and the Japanese man (Hiroyuki Sanada) who helped find the prickly ash, fears something. Some unsolved mystery. The film is about coming to understand that mere clues aren’t everything. Except when they are. If that doesn’t make sense, well, that’s life, first and last of all mysteries.

The idea of an elderly Sherlock Holmes has inspired many; I can think of Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution and Neil Gaiman’s “The Case of Death and Honey,” and Mr. Holmes itself was based on A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullen. The story came to Condon, a director with an oddball filmography that includes historical dramas, horror, Disney, even Twilight movies. (The idea, I’d guess, was to elevate the material; all it did was prove that not even a pedigree director can salvage Twilight.) Both Mr. Holmes and Gods and Monsters star Ian McKellen as an elderly and lonely man, famous in his prime, raging against his mortality. But Mr. Holmes, by incorporating the crafty puzzles of a Sherlockian mystery or two, succeeds far better as a eulogy. It’s about bitterness, yes, and heartbreak, and hurtful consequences. But it’s also about how to celebrate a life lived, rather than letting it rot. It’s about what can rise from the ashes, and if you’ve seen Mr. Holmes, you’ll know the significance of that statement. I recommend you see Mr. Holmes if you have not already. It’s wonderful.

VERDICT: Squee!

A Dang-Blasted Theory: Disney’s Talking Animal Universe

I don’t often hit upon really good fan theories. When I do, it’s best to scribble them down before they dissolve into a puddle of mental stroganoff.

Zootopia was great. I loved it. Definitely my favorite Disney animated feature in quite some time. It was funny, smart, driven by characters and dialogue rather than farts and slang, and had some surprisingly pointed stuff to say about our own society. You can unpack this colorful romp about talking animals, deconstruct its themes of social equality and prejudice, argue whether or not it succeeds in having a coherent message. (For a film decrying racism, it sure does lean heavily on obvious animal-based stereotypes.) I’m not really gonna do that here, because I had a whimsical notion that led me to formulate a theory, not only about Zootopia, but about a ton of other Disney movies.

My whimsical notion was this: Nick Wilde, the jaded, charismatic fox who serves as Zootopia’s secondary hero, is the descendant of Robin Hood -- the jaded, charismatic fox who starred in Disney’s 1973 adaptation. They’re both lawless knaves with their hearts in the right place. They even look very similar, which I’m positive was deliberate. Once I realized that Robin begat Nick, my brain formed the next logical conclusion: Robin Hood and Zootopia take place in the same universe, at different historic periods. A world devoid of humans, where animals function as fully sentient beings with their own society. And then I began wondering if the same could be said of other Disney movies too. A ton of them involve talking animals. But many have humans too, so that doesn’t work. Or DOES it...?

I believe it works, and I’ll explain why. My theory encompasses all Disney animated films that involve talking animals but not magic or fantasy elements. So, for instance, Cinderella may feature those cute mice, but it’s also got magic, so it’s off the table. Science fiction is also not allowed (piss off, Chicken Little). Films that mix live action and animation don’t count (goodbye, Song of the South...you awkwardly racist little thing, you). I’m gonna ignore TV cartoons, and I’m excluding Pixar, which already has its own awesome fan theory. This leaves all the films that ostensibly take place in the “real world.” These films, in chronological order, are...deep breath...Dumbo, Bambi, Lady and the Tramp, 101 Dalmatians, The Jungle Book, The Aristocats, Robin Hood, The Rescuers, The Fox and the Hound, The Great Mouse Detective, Oliver and Company, The Rescuers Down Under, The Lion King, Tarzan, Dinosaur, Home on the Range, and Zootopia. Crappy-ass sequels also count, if you really care.

Put together, these films show us a kind of alternate universe -- let’s simply call it the Talking Animal Universe, or TAU. For whatever reason, animals are sentient here. They coexist with humans, sometimes peacefully, sometimes not. Communication between humans and animals is rare; they might not be speaking the same language. Wild animals generally consider humans to be dangerous and frightening (see: Bambi), while domesticated animals are content to serve humans as pets in return for security, food, etc. Children, as is often the case, are better at communicating than adults, as seen with Mowgli from The Jungle Book and the imperiled kids from the Rescuers movies. Hell, Tarzan is raised by apes from infancy. However, to most adults, animals are just...animals. For better or for worse. Keep them and love them, hunt them and eat them. Whatever. Humans may willfully blind themselves to animals’ sentiency, because acknowledging they can think and feel would force us to face how we’ve treated them.

DISCLAIMER: I am not an animal rights activist. I eat meat. I approve of zoos. I don’t like seeing chimps in science labs but I’m okay with mice being used to cure cancer. I hate the fur industry and I also think PETA is evil and disgusting. It’s called being moderate. Moving on!

From the list above, I want to single out four movies in particular: Dinosaur, The Lion King, Robin Hood, and Zootopia. I put them in that particular order on purpose. What distinguishes them from the others? They are the only films on the list with absolutely no human presence. Dinosaur, that CGI romp from Disney’s experimental phase, is (apparently) set long before mankind. The Lion King seems to exist far from human influence. Robin Hood and Zootopia are supposed to take place in a made-up world where humans never happened. That’s if you take these films at face value. But I believe they’re part of the TAU, and they reveal what ultimately happened to the human race.

So. At some point in our alt-verse, humans realize and/or admit that animals are sentient. Our awakening probably springs from advances in technology and social awareness. As the TAU enters the new millennium, as we stop treating animals cruelly by nature, as political correctness rears its head, we see: our pets can think like us and speak their own language. The wild animals we hunt have minds and souls. What do we, the human race, do with this knowledge? How can we atone for centuries of killing and exploiting sentient creatures? And, from a scientific standpoint, we’re curious. How did animals evolve sentiency, and what might they have accomplished if humans hadn’t been there, blocking the way?

We create a massive experiment that also serves as an apology. We designate a small continent, clear it of all human life, allow it to return to nature. Working together with the animals, we seed this mini-Pangea with life. We rewind all the way back to the first complex beasts, the first vertebrates. We accelerate their evolution so we can watch them develop. Having created this human-free paradise, we sit back to see what happens. The result? Dinosaur. The beginnings of a world where sentient animals evolve without humans and don’t even know humans exist, because we, on the outside, keep them in a bubble. Then, at some point, we destroy ourselves. Human society crumbles. It goes up in flames. Dinosaur shows this: its inciting incident occurs when fire rains from the sky, forcing Aladar and his lemur family to find a new home. Meteors? No. Human satellites, crashing down from space, signaling the Big Death for our species.

(Note: I said I wasn’t going to allow films that mixed live action and animation. But since Dinosaur uses live action as a scenic backdrop only, I give it a pass.)

With humans gone from the TAU, the animals on that isolated continent can go on peacefully evolving with no idea that humans ever existed. Next stop: The Lion King, in which we see the beginnings of true society. Predators still hunt and eat prey, but they rationalize it. All part of the Circle of Life, Simba. I’ll use my anthropology degree here and mention that primitive cultures generally begin with Animism (the belief that everything is alive) before progressing to organized religion. From its early stages, this animal civilization keeps right on evolving. Predators figure out that they don’t need to eat prey at all. How can this be? Well, perhaps humans altered predator DNA to allow them to subsist on some other food source. It just took them awhile to realize this on their own. By the time we reach Robin Hood, animals have learned to walk upright, wear clothes, build towns and castles. Just as humans did. Their evolution mirrors ours. Finally, Zootopia, an ultra-modern culture where animals use smartphones and live in harmony with only the occasional racial hiccup. Our experiment succeeded beautifully; we’re just too extinct to appreciate it.

One big issue is that Zootopia only contains mammals. What about the sentient reptiles, birds, saurians, and even insects we saw in all the other movies? I can imagine some explanations. Sentient bugs might never have been introduced to the experiment. The saurians would have evolved into birds and/or reptiles, and then...perhaps disease killed everything but the mammals. Perhaps Robin Hood took place right before some horrible Black Plague scenario. Alas for Lady Kluck! Or maybe all the birds moved elsewhere in the world and that explains DuckTales. Did I just blow your mind?

You gotta admit, it all works pretty well. Zootopia glosses over what the predators eat, so why not imagine they were genetically altered by long-dead human scientists. Also, we never see a hyena in Zootopia, and I imagine that after being so thoroughly shat upon in The Lion King, the hyenas would want nothing more to do with anybody, ever. But why does Zootopia include foxes, lions, koalas, otters, camels, moose, jaguars, snow leopards, polar bears, gazelles -- a mishmash of species from all over the world? Because we, the humans, planted the DNA for all those species to develop together on a single landmass. They lived in their preferred temperate zones until all of it, from desert to tundra, smashed together into one metropolis.

And that is my theory. It links Disney’s talking-animal films together and demonstrates how, in a sense, they all culminated in Zootopia. The beasts inherited the earth, and good for them! I can’t wait till Zootopia 2 comes along and we can perhaps gain more insight on whether or not Nick and Judy have romantic feelings for each other, and what sort of weird DNA-based shenanigans could lead to sexytimes between a fox and a rabbit. Y’know?

I slept and dreamt of Cautious Enthusiasm....

Sandman Overture begins with a carnivorous plant having a bad dream. It ends with two siblings abruptly forgetting what they were talking about. Believe me, I am understating the fuck out of this...but, then, understatement is one of the things Neil Gaiman does best. He’s a titan of fantasy literature, and there are many reasons why he’s so good at it, including his knack for dry British restraint. He can describe a cosmic battle between godlike beings with the same inflection you’d use to speak to the vicar at Mrs. Cumberfarthing’s tea social. All the while, his imagination is running at the speed of light. Look at American Gods, or Coraline. Better yet, look at The Sandman.

For it was Sandman that put Neil Gaiman on the map, and helped usher in a wave of adult-oriented comics under DC’s Vertigo imprint. Sandman is 75 issues of storytelling magic. And now, years and years later, Gaiman has returned to give us Sandman Overture, a prequel miniseries that’s now available as a single graphic novel. And that’s so, so awesome, and a little nerve-wracking, because in order to write about it, I somehow have to summarize Sandman. Can’t be done. I lose. So let’s be as brief as possible. Sandman is a comic about many, many things, but at its center are the Endless: seven siblings who aren’t mortals or gods, but personifications of certain aspects of our psyche. The Endless have been around since everything began. If one dies, a replacement is found to assume not only their duties, but their very persona. The names of the Endless are Destiny, Death, Dream, Destruction, Desire, Despair, and Delirium. Dream is the important one. He’s the tall, gaunt, raven-haired guy in the ragged cloak, also known as Morpheus...or The Sandman. At the very beginning of the original comic, Dream was returning to his realm after fighting a battle, the details of which we were never told. Weakened and distracted, he was captured by a bunch of dopey occultists. What manner of sturm und drang could leave such a powerful being so vulnerable?

Sandman Overture has the answers, although I was concerned that Gaiman couldn’t easily slip back into his old storytelling voice. He was a relatively young man when he began Sandman, and the early issues of the comic read more like pulp horror than epic fantasy; even the art style was reminiscent of Tales of the Crypt. Gaiman has come so far, and as an author, I know how shitty one’s older work can seem. I really shouldn’t have worried. Gaiman isn’t going for pulp horror. Why was Dream so bruised and battered when first we met him? Short answer: he was saving the universe. Long answer: don’t even ask me to summarize everything Gaiman crams into six issues. Basically, Dream learns that one aspect of himself -- an alternate Dream from a far-distant world -- has suffered permadeath, which is supposed to be impossible. He sets out to investigate, and discovers...badness. Cosmic unrest, which leads to cosmic war. Much of Sandman Overture is sort of science fiction, which is like saying that Mozart sort of wrote melodies. Sandman Overture is epic, operatic, mind-bending, and utterly glorious. It’s one of Gaiman’s greatest Sandman tales. Better late than never!

There are a couple of ways to make a lousy prequel. There’s the Star Wars thing where you fuck up your own continuity. Then there’s the “Who cares?” route where the prequel does not contain a single piece of new information. Sandman Overture avoids these traps admirably. Nothing in it contradicts Sandman, and more so, it sheds a new light on, well, everything. I plan to revisit Sandman with the knowledge that Dream is, from start to finish, numbingly tired. All too aware of his own mortality. His flaws. At one point, faced with a crowd of alternate-world Dreams, he asks, “Am I always like this?...Self-satisfied. Irritating.” Indeed, Dream always was unapproachable. We didn’t get inside his head enough. This new tale humanizes Dream to a surprising extent and, again, implies that his ordeal renders him a tired, jaded shell of his former self. Yeah, it’s a top-notch prequel. Its one (minor) sin is that Gaiman can’t resist bringing back a lot of the Sandman supporting cast for cameos, some of which contribute nothing to the story. (Hey, it’s the Corinthian! So what!) But he’s able to flesh out a few folks (Dream’s feline version, who only appeared once in Sandman, plays a huge role here) and introduce some intriguing newcomers. We meet the Endless’ parents, and I won’t spoil who or what they are, but they slot perfectly into the mythos.

Okay, let’s talk about the artwork, because holy shit. The comic is drawn by J.H. Williams III and colored by Dave Stewart, and they are an absolute dream team, no pun intended. Once it got past the pulp horror phase, Sandman featured a constantly shifting series of artists and a wide variety of styles, depending on the story arc of the moment. Sandman Overture sticks to one art style, but it’s...well, to call it “psychedelic” is a start, but not enough. It blazes across each page in great, grandiose whorls. Its eye-popping colors are a proud Fuck You to any grim, gritty aesthetic. At times it utilizes clear lines, and at other times the edges soften like watercolor. The layout of the panels and even the speech bubbles become part of the madness. I could compare it to Dr. Strange, or perhaps to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen once Alan Moore went completely insane. But it’s in a league of its own, perfect for visualizing such an epic tale. Anchored, of course, by that dry Neil Gaiman understatement. Certain double-page spreads contain so much goddamn detail that you could pore over them for an hour or more. This massive a story, coupled with such boundless artwork, would form the climax of many comics.

Here, though, it’s an overture. What’s an overture? An introduction that foreshadows what is to come. Yes, Sandman Overture answers some leftover questions from the original Sandman comic. The motives of certain characters. The placement of a key object or two. Old fans can appreciate each easter egg, while newcomers shouldn’t be scared off. But everyone will be a little lost, because Sandman never was straightforward. Reading it, you must understand that the Endless exist outside of regular time and space. They aren’t entirely linear, and although they appear tangible, they’ll always be misty around the edges. You can’t take them at face value. Who or what is Dream? Why, he’s dreams. All of them. And he’s a person, yes, and a figment of our imagination. He’s real, but he’s not. There’s only one of him, and there are a trillion trillion of him. He’s beyond human thought, but he’s also deeply human at heart. Sandman Overture hints that maybe, after many years, Neil Gaiman has come to understand Dream a little better. Enough to rewind the clock and tell a story that remixes the entire Sandman universe. That’s pretty damn impressive. And I hope Gaiman never leaves this Dream behind.

VERDICT: Endless squee!

I wasn’t going to review this, but then my dad said he was looking forward to it. Looking forward, presumably, to me waxing poetic about a film in which evil aliens give Planet Earth a good spanking for a couple hours before we spank back at the last minute. A film not unlike 1996’s original Independence Day, which crystallized the “disaster porn” genre and established director Roland Emmerich as its playful hack emperor. It wasn’t the first time the world got destroyed on film, but it was probably the first time modern special effects created a sense of real shock and awe as cities crumbled and Nothing Would Ever Be the Same. Twenty years later, we’ve seen plenty of ID4’s spiritual children, several helmed by Emmerich. And now a sequel. Independence Day: Resurgence would be the worst title in years if Terminator: Genisys didn’t have the category locked forever. Since I have such a nostalgic fondness for ID4, am I gonna be down on its successor?

I mean, I know it got awful reviews. And I pity anyone going into this expecting a “good” movie. Can it overcome sheer, waste-of-time wretchedness and at least be entertainingly goofy and fun? Well, I think I did, more or less. It takes itself far, far less seriously than the first one. It kinda has to, because modern blockbusters are different. ID4 was most effective when it was building dread: portents, everyday life about to be upended, the feeling that something unspeakable was creeping up on our planet. In the 2010s, ain’t nobody got time for that. Resurgence briskly uncorks an alt-history where we recovered from the first alien attack, assimilated their advanced technology, and became a better species as a result. We have solar system outposts, a planetary defense system, tons of neat gadgets. This leads to the same dilemma I had with Pacific Rim: I’m more interested in the backstory than the current situation. I want to know more about the nuts and bolts. Hell, one of the film’s throwaway ideas -- Congolese guerillas fought a bitter ground war with alien troops in ’96 -- would make a damn compelling film all on its own. But Resurgence whips through its establishing scenes with hardly a glance. The new Star Wars had the same problem: too much momentum, not enough worldbuilding.

At least Resurgence loves to show off. The film contains wall-to-wall special effects and they all look absolutely groovy. There’s a decent variation from all the dark brown, tractor-tire surfaces we got last time. For instance, a misty wormhole opens near the moon and snorts up a large, cryptic alien sphere. The Clinton-esque President Lanford (Sela Ward) errs on the side of caution and has us blast the sphere with moon lasers, despite speculation from Prof. David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum, yay!) that these ain’t the same aliens as before. Very soon, who should show up but the same aliens as before, in a far huger ship. It’s big enough to straddle the Atlantic Ocean, and does, and let me just say that what befalls the White House this time around made me giggle unreasonably. The new ship has its own gravity field, which vacuums up Singapore and Dubai, then drops them on London. I love how Emmerich constantly strives to outdo himself in city-destruction mayhem -- though here, it’s kind of token. A ship that big should damage Earth irreparably, yet once it arrives, it just kinda sits there, preparing to extract the planet’s molten core and thereby providing the obligatory Ticking Doomsday Clock.

The relative passivity of the aliens allows for another battle, that of the old salts from the first film vs. the sexy young commandos who are onboard to appeal to kids. The old salts win. Goldblum is easily the best player here, delivering every moment with a sly wink. Bill Pullman, Vivica H. Fox, Brent Spiner, and others slip right back into their old roles. The new kids suffer, I’m afraid, because of how thinly they’re all defined. Jake is a cocky pilot. Patricia is engaged to Jake. Patricia is buddies with Dylan. Jake and Dylan are on the outs due to past baggage. That’s about all we get. Oh, and Patricia (Maika Monroe) is the daughter of traumatized ex-president Whitmore (Pullman), and Dylan (Jessie Usher) is the son of the late Steven Hiller (Will Smith, killed off between films due to his high price tag). As for Jake (Liam Hemsworth), he’s supposed to be the main hero and is reasonably bland, but I found him a lot more bearable than in the Hunger Games movies, so that’s something. All these dudes and dudettes form humanity’s last hope -- so we’re fine, because Jeff Goldblum can do anything.

I needn’t bother describing much more of the plot. You probably remember the first film well enough. Having had twenty years to prepare for the second wave of aliens, we are, of course, utterly unprepared, and soon enough, it all comes down to frantic, makeshift plans concocted in dim strategy rooms. There’s time for the usual random subplots, the shittiest of which involves Judd Hirsch and a carload of whiny teens. There are slots for offbeat supporting characters, like DeObia Oparei as a badass African warlord and Charlotte Gainsbourg (no, seriously) as an eccentric linguist who apparently exists because someone asked, “What if there was a second Jeff Goldblum but he was a French lady?” There’s way more room for Dr. Okun (Spiner), who didn’t die in the first film after all and has been retconned into a gay superhero. Some characters perish, but none of the deaths are especially surprising and only one took me by surprise with its sadness (and it’s not at all who you’d expect). The final act seems to be taking a familiar route: pilots infiltrate the alien ship and somebody has to sacrifice themselves à la Randy Quaid. But then the climax goes in an unexpected direction. And it was pretty cool! If only for injecting some novelty.

After helping define the modern blockbuster, Independence Day now looks derivative of all the movies it spawned. I could have used a real dose of character development (poor Vivica H. Fox is onscreen for about two minutes, and her fictional son, Jessie Usher, is almost insultingly boring) -- and, yeah, I wanted more disaster porn. I’m way too into that stuff. Resurgence wasn’t really a disaster movie like ID4. It was a science fiction action something-or-other with a lot of discordant ideas and performances. Only Jeff Goldblum and Brent Spiner hit the perfect balance of doom-laden gravitas and tongue-in-cheek jollity. The question is, did this film even need to exist? I mean, everything has to be a franchise now. Resurgence introduces those two words that make movie scholars scream in anguish -- Expanded Universe -- and teases at least one more sequel. Does the studio care about this property beyond forcibly squeezing forth more revenue? I have no idea, but at least some of the actors care. And I think Roland Emmerich cares; I think he had a whole lot of fun returning to that which gained him his unique reputation. Me, I got what I wanted: a stupid summer movie that was a blast to watch.

Also, I’m relieved that Colorado hasn’t been attacked by those aliens yet. We don’t really have any famous, signature buildings or bridges, you see. To quote Dr. Levinson, “They like to get the landmarks.” Yes, they do. I like to watch.

I don’t tend to wax political on this blog. It’s for movies and video games and being nerdy. However, I can be a bit topical now and then. For instance, while recapping American Horror Story: Hotel, I had the opportunity to make some bitter comments about the state of America’s youth. To whit: I believe we coddle and shelter our children far too much, leaving them A) hideously ill-prepared for the real world, and B) toxified with entitlement, with the belief that life will be a series of blue ribbons just for existing. It makes me very angry. But y’know what’s better than anger? Antidotes. Today, I’m not here to rant and rave. I’m here to examine children’s entertainment...not as it is today, but as it once was. Let’s visit a place where kids are allowed to fly free, yet still held accountable. A place where adventure means ADVENTURE and not a heavily chaperoned Easter egg hunt where Daddy finds all the eggs for you. Let’s talk about Swallows and Amazons.

I feel like a ton of people have at least heard of this book series. Swallows and Amazons was written by Arthur Ransome in the 1930s and ’40s, and read to me by my parents when I was a tyke. Lately, I’ve been revisiting the series and have just finished the fourth book. Imagine my amazement when I abruptly discovered that they just made a freakin’ Swallows and Amazons movie and it’ll be released this very month. What a coincidence, because rereading them, I feel like they represent a very good, very important mindset in regards to children. They were written for kids and represent a world of adventures and discoveries that lacks any Harry Potter-style trappings. Most of the books contain nothing that couldn’t plausibly happen in real life. There’s no fantasy or magic. An antagonist here and there, but no real villains. The young heroes have some scrapes but are never in actual danger. And they succeed, not because they’re the Chosen One or the son of Zeus or whatever, but because they are smart, resourceful, learned, brave, and commonsensical. And, most of all, because they are allowed to be kids.

The first book, Swallows and Amazons, takes place during the summer holidays in Britain’s lake district. The Walker siblings are chilling by a gorgeous lake, praising heaven that jet skis haven’t been invented yet, when they find a little sailboat, the Swallow, and make it their own. John Walker is the stalwart (if insecure) eldest. Susan is the mother figure, cook, and voice of reason. Titty (yes, Titty; stop snickering, assholes) is the dreamer and schemer whose imagination fuels the others. And Roger is the hyperactive little brother who can’t wait to show you his airplane impression, his loose tooth, and the fact that he’s maybe possibly almost able to swim. Aboard the Swallow, the four kids quickly brand themselves explorers. Their mother (a badass Australian) and father (an absent military man) give their blessings, and the “Swallows” are soon camping on their very own island. Turns out they’re sharing space with Nancy and Peggy Blackett, aka the Amazons, a pair of local sisters who cheerfully despise all things feminine and would rather be pirates. Then there’s the Amazons’ uncle, known as Captain Flint (and based on Ransome himself), who owns a houseboat, a parrot, and a lifetime of cool stories. There’s buried treasure too. There’s everything a child could dream of.

The Swallows and Amazons books are clearly set during a particular period, yet have a timelessness; the kids don’t really seem to age, and Ransome is always vague on what year it is. What’s important is that the books fall between the World Wars, a period when England had realized just how bad things could get, and responded with appropriate brio. Kids didn’t need to be pampered; they could be handed adult responsibilities early. They could be trusted and encouraged. Throughout the twelve books in the series, the Swallows and the Amazons experience one awesome holiday after another. They shipwreck and climb mountains, dig mines and build igloos and accidentally sail across the North Sea. In the fourth book, Winter Holiday, they’re joined by two new friends, Dick and Dorothea Callum, who represent the nerd demographic; they’re bookish and ditzy and their extensive knowledge of astrology proves mighty useful. Ransome clearly wanted his young heroes to be every child, every boy and girl with a spirit. He wanted all kids to read his books and go, Wow, I could do that! I should do that!

This, I think, is what we need more of. I’m not saying kids shouldn’t happily hope for a letter from Hogwarts. But if they go out and explore, build, create, and imagine, they’ll have their very own Hogwarts, Narnia, Terabithia, you name it. The kids in the Swallows and Amazons books make their own world and inhabit it with only minimal chaperoning. Oh, they’re always under the benevolent eye of adults, but never in a stifling way. The character of Captain Flint is crucial; he pops up to mentor the kids and occasionally save their bacon, but he’s still an honorary kid himself. Two of the books, Peter Duck and Missee Lee, feature less plausible stories, with actual danger and high-seas swashbuckling and evil characters (some racism, too...but we must forgive this as a product of its time). We’re meant to believe the Swallows and Amazons themselves “wrote” these two books, an act of metafiction that allows them even more imaginative freedom as characters. Their world is just as cool as Harry Potter’s, but nobody dies and everything is always perfectly fine in the end. That’s what’s great: Ransome isn’t arguing that we should just let kids do whatever they want...but he does insist that they be handed the keys to their own kingdom.

I was thinking the books would make a great movie, but I wondered if it’d ever come to pass in this day and age. Some modern kids would, alas, certainly find Swallows and Amazons boring compared with the usual stuff they read. And Hollywood producers would likely feel the same way. “How can this be a movie? Nothing happens in it!” Stories aren’t allowed to take their time any more. The new movie’s made by the Brits, which is good, but still feels it has to shoehorn in some “cinematic” elements. We have the Swallows, the Amazons, the sailboats, the island. But now Captain Flint is an ex-spy being chased by bad guys, or something, and certain parts of the trailer look like a throwback to the 1990s when most kids’ movies were riffing on Home Alone and/or Free Willy. Also, Captain Flint has gone from a big fat guy in his late middle age to the modestly hunky Rafe Spall. And Titty is now named “Tatty,” for obvious reasons. I guess I’ll reserve judgement, because this is better than nothing, and it does capture the right sort of time and place. I wish they could have preserved the innocence of the book and avoided having adult villains, but concessions must be made.

After all, the movie might lead more kids to the books. And if they can get past the books’ lack of “modern” story elements, they may find themselves inspired. Every one of the young heroes is a fine role model for some age demographic or other. And let’s talk about gender! Not only are there more girl characters than boys (a major rarity in kids’ books with coed casts!), but none of the girls are any weaker or less capable than the boys; they may have flaws (Peggy’s afraid of thunder), but nothing ever stems from gender stereotypes. Susan is the most “girly” girl character, but she’s not portrayed as a wet blanket, a nag, or a scaredy-cat. She can tie nautical knots with the best of them, and then make wholesome rice pudding and afternoon tea. The highly tomboyish Nancy and Peggy, the quixotic Titty, and the scholarly Dorothea likewise avoid typecasting. When combined with the boy characters, this group of pals form a perfect cross-section of childhood, leaving no one out, sharing that unique sense of daring and discovery.

I’ve seen what kids are like when they explore. I’ve watched kids build shelters from tree branches, or take apart computers, or turn over rocks to reveal gross, slimy glory. I’ve been a kid like that. And, yeah, I also see kids lost in iPhones and banality, their parents too listless to nurture their minds, or too paranoid to allow their progeny off a short leash. A lot of what you see in the Swallows and Amazons series has gone dormant. But not extinct. You can’t kill a particular mindset. It’s still there, waiting to emerge from its cocoon. The notion that kids’ lives need a little more wonder, a lot more hands-on discovery and practical application of skills. Teach a kid to cook. Or to identify constellations. Hell, teach a kid to program their own computer game. It’s one step away from the death of the imagination, and one step closer to a group of young friends sailing their own little boats, camping on an island, never out of sight of their parents, but free just the same. If you like, take out the boats and the lake and substitute your own preferred adventure.

The Swallows and Amazons series won’t solve any societal problems on its own. But it might help. It could ignite a spark in the right child’s mind, or (just as crucial) the right parent’s mind. So when I say “A great series of books for all ages,” that is what I mean. When my parents read it to me, we all gained something from it. Now, lacking kids of my own, I pass on the spark to you, reader. Begin Swallows and Amazons and note what happens. How you surprise yourself. Then read it to a child, or give it to a child to read, and watch their face.

There. See it?

Loads of films are obscure for a very good reason. Browse through Netflix and you’ll find an endless supply, most of which have names like Alien Terror Train and star some poor motherfucker like James Van Der Beek. Death metal screeches on the soundtrack as James battles CGI aliens that look like they were created on a Lite Brite, and...is it any wonder my boyfriend and I just watch Top Gear over and over?

Anyway. Some films don’t deserve to be obscure. I once made a list in order to draw attention to lesser-known cinema of real quality. Time to add to the museum! Try out the following films; each one’s a modest little gem.

DANG-BLASTED’S TOP 10 AWESOME MOVIES YOU MAY NOT KNOW EXIST (pt. 2)

Delicatessen (1991)
The whole world fell in love with Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie in 2001, but a full decade earlier, he was fine-turning his unique brand of clockwork whimsy, and wasn’t afraid to weird people out. Delicatessen is a film in which every aspect -- characters, setting, plot -- seems to function as a piece in a twisted game of Mousetrap. Set in some vague, post-apocalyptic hinterland, the film concerns the inhabitants of a ramshackle boarding house, most of whom have resorted to murdering and eating new tenants. But they’re French, so they’re at least somewhat polite about it. Jeunet’s invaluable collaborator, Dominique Pinon, plays the latest victim-to-be, who turns the tables on les cannibales in a mix of pitch-black comedy and Terry Gilliam-style surrealism. It’s a hoot. It’s far from Jeunet’s best work (that’d be A Very Long Engagement, with Amélie as a close second), but as a debut, it could hardly be juicier.

Dirty Pretty Things (2002)
Let’s do a test. I’m going to give you a list of names: Chiwetel Ejiofor, Audrey Tautou, Sophie Okonedo, Benedict Wong, Zlatko Buric, Sergi López. If you recognize at least two of these people, there’s hope for you yet. If you just went, “All those guys are in a film together? Hot damn!” then you’re one of the tribe. This global cast of awesome character actors join forces to play London immigrants who discover a sinister, gruesome conspiracy within the hotel where some of them work. (Hint: Human organs come into play.) Stick “traditional” actors in this scenario and it might be a good thriller...but when it stars refugees, vagabonds, the forgotten and ignored, it gains a fascinating resonance. I love when a film’s genre is merely an excuse to dive into a deeper issue. This grim little caper has a lot to say. Tautou leaves behind her adorable pixie schtick (see Amélie, above), and as for Ejiofor, well...long before 12 Years a Slave, some of us knew how great a career he had coming. Just saying.

Dog Soldiers (2002)
Dog Soldiers is the sickest, dirtiest, grungiest, and meanest werewolf movie I’ve ever seen. All of which is intended as high praise. Right now we’re enjoying a high-minded horror trend with films like The Babadook and It Follows, but let us not forget that good horror doesn’t need underlying themes and symbolism. It doesn’t need to be discussed in film studies classes. Dog Soldiers is about a squad of British troops training in Scotland, who find themselves utterly besieged by vicious lycanthropes. That is all the plot we need or expect. Director Neil Marshall would later make The Descent, a truly great horror movie, and Dog Soldiers was his gore-drenched warmup routine. The werewolves -- bodybuilders with fake wolf heads -- look and feel so much realer than any CGI could accomplish; I stuck them on my Top 10 Movie Monsters list so long ago, and they haven’t gotten any less awesome. Wanna see Liam “Davos Seaworth” Cunningham turn into a hairy, fangy murder machine? Of course you do. All horror buffs should have this in their archive.

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997)
The best documentaries conduct their images like an orchestra, each new movement composed of an intricate array of different elements. Director Errol Morris is a helluva conductor. He’s made plenty of films, but I’m always mesmerized by this one, which stars four men: a lion tamer, a topiary gardener, a robot scientist, and a mole-rat expert. What’s a mole-rat expert? Only he can say for sure. Morris doesn’t just intercut these eccentric dudes’ testimonials, he interweaves and overlaps them until they become a single story: the endless struggle of humankind to tame chaos. These four guys are compelled to take something that doesn’t make sense -- a shrub shaped like a giraffe, a rodent that lives like an insect -- and construct their own little microcosm, their garden or circus ring or museum exhibit, where they may impose order. That sort of insecure god-play is what drives our species, for better or for worse, and Morris’s collage of stock footage, Super 8 mm, old Clyde Beatty serials, and tipsy circus music demonstrates his own controlled chaos. Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is a universal, provocative theme disguised as a documentary.

Help! (1965)
I fucking adore this movie. It is so stupid, so ridiculous, so lacking in brain cells, and I’ve loved it since childhood. Yes, it stars the Beatles at the height of their fame. Someone decided it’d be cute to stick the Fab Four in a James Bond spoof, and cobbled together a plot in which Ringo gets a sacred Hindu ring stuck on his finger, and is chased across the globe by a sacrificial cult and a mad scientist. John, Paul, and George just kinda tag along, pausing now and then for musical numbers (they do “Ticket to Ride” on skis!), and once I reached adulthood, I came to appreciate how utterly, cripplingly stoned all four Beatles were during the entire shoot. You can smell the roiling waves of Mary Jane seeping from every cranny of the film. And that makes it even more endearing. Rife with kooky humor and unfocused one-liners (“Hey, it’s a thingy! A fiendish thingy!”), not to mention timeless pop music, Help! is all I really need to appreciate the glorious stupidity of the 1960s. Pure fun.

Ma Vie en Rose (1997)
Next up, two films that examine the innocence of children in a hard world -- and do so with great poise. Ma Vie en Rose translates to “My Life in Pink,” and it’s a sorta sweet, sorta cynical tale about a young French boy named Ludovic who believes he’s a girl. That’s it. Too young to be gay or trans, to wear any sort of political or social label, he simply knows, with cute tenacity, that he’s a girl trapped in a boy’s body, and that one day the universe will correct this oversight. We watch, wincing somewhat, as the adults in little Ludovic’s world react with all the offended bluster and close-minded bafflement you’d expect. If that sounds too depressing, don’t worry. The film uses the visual language of a sitcom -- cozy suburbs, 50s colors -- to paint its hero(ine)’s dilemma with comedic love. When Ludovic schemes to marry the boy next door (his father’s boss’s son...cue laugh track), we chuckle and then feel melancholy. But it’s not a hurtful film. It inspires thought.

Mysterious Skin (2004)
This one is hard to watch. Very hard. But its sheer power deserves notice. Based on the equally unflinching novel by Scott Heim, it stares straight into the abyss of pedophilia -- not by draping it in horror-movie slime, but by unpacking the psychology of its victims. Thus, when two young Kansas boys are sexually preyed upon by their Little League coach, one of them thinks he likes it and grows up to be a gay hooker, while the other is so traumatized that his brain flips an emergency kill switch and he becomes convinced he was abducted by aliens. The boys turn into damaged young men, as the film moves from the dreamy expanse of the Midwest to New York City during the AIDS crisis. Yeah, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (who plays the gay one) is quite fine, but the story’s “sexy” elements are like a wound. You may not find a better argument against sexual abuse; it doesn’t rant and rave, but merely follows the abused down their quiet, broken path. We all know someone on that road.

Rivers and Tides (2001)
Now for a gentler film...one which relaxes the viewer with zen. Art is subjective, and the worst kind (in my opinion) feels it has to make some sort of wannabe-profound statement, some political or social claptrap that only makes sense in the artist’s ego. However, Scottish artist Andy Goldsworthy merely...creates. This dreamy documentary shows off the man and his work. He wanders the wilderness -- forests and beaches, placid rivers and snowy mountaintops -- and crafts amazing sculptures with the materials he finds at hand. Stones become a mystical dolmen; ice turns serpentine; trees are woven and leaves are blended like paint, all from Goldsworthy’s patient and skillful fingers. The “message” of his art is that beauty is all around us and nothing feels more beautiful than to create, even if your creation vanishes within the hour. The movie drifts along, showing us all manner of visual poetry, and as I watched it, I felt the pleasant urge to make something myself. So I wove a potholder. My fingers pulled and teased the loops of fabric, and I felt a little of the pleasure Andy Goldsworthy must feel. Try it sometime.

Sita Sings the Blues (2008)
For the best animated film you’ve never seen, we can thank Nina Paley, who made Sita Sings the Blues after her husband moved to India and dumped her. Heartbroken, Paley found a spiritual sister in Sita, heroine of the Hindu epic, The Ramayana, who was similarly done wrong by her man. From this ancient tale, Paley creates a kaleidoscopic visual marvel, utilizing five or six different animation styles, each of which has more character than ten thousand Minion sequels. Sita’s ordeals take the form of Bollywood musical numbers, paired with old recordings by Jazz Age crooner Annette Hanshaw, intercut with droll nitpicking from a trio of shadow puppets and snippets of Paley’s personal ordeal. It’s all a big revenge fantasy, but it’s beyond entertaining. Paley seems to have been inspired by everything from Monty Python to “End of Ze World,” and the result is that the animation itself becomes an endless source of deadpan comedy. Sita Sings the Blues laughs at genre. It’s gorgeous to look at, it’s educational, it’s feminist. It’s on YouTube. Watch it. That’s all!

So Dear to My Heart (1949)
Let’s end on the warmest, coziest note. Disney’s Song of the South, with its archaic racial attitudes, is considered an embarrassment. However, at around the same time, they made So Dear to My Heart, a guileless buried gem. It’s about a young Indiana boy (Bobby Driscoll) who adopts a black lamb and raises it with aspirations of winning blue ribbons. G-rated tribulations and life lessons follow, as our hero receives guidance from a conspiratorial uncle (Burl Ives) and a pragmatic granny (Beulah Bondi) whose role is to say no, then immediately relent. The plot is punctuated by delightful, impressionistic animated sequences -- an example of Walt Disney’s boundless need to experiment with the medium. Is it sentimental? Pious? Simplistic? Yes to all three, and don’t you feel like we need that more and more these days? So Dear to My Heart gives me the warm fuzzies, and not just because of Burl Ives, whose singing voice could have ended wars. It represents an innocence that no longer exists (more so if you consider what happened to Driscoll), and that kind of nostalgia should never become obscure. I’ll keep fighting the good fight. Help me out and spread these films around.

It’s another one from the Cautious Enthusiasm backlog! And before anyone says anything...yes, I incorrectly stated that Mads Mikkelsen and Rebel Wilson were in this movie, but only because, at the time I made the initial post, they fucking were. Blame fickle acting schedules.

Now. Let me make a confession for which I’m not at all sorry. I don’t like pandas. I don’t find them appealing. Yeah, they’re cute, but they’re also stupid, belligerent creatures that natural evolution does not favor. When you only eat one plant as food, when you can barely figure out how to fuck and tend to eat your own newborn cub because you don’t know otherwise...you’re at a dead end. And now we’re pouring oodles of time and resources into trying to save the wretched species from extinction, China is cheerfully bartering panda cubs to other countries in return for uranium (seriously. Look it up), and it’s all because we’re stupidly in love with pandas even though they are NOT WORTHY OF OUR LOVE. I don’t care who hates me for this. I don’t like pandas at all.

That said, I like the Kung Fu Panda movies a whole lot. Dreamworks doesn’t always produce winners, but with this franchise, they’ve got a really good formula and the boundless opportunity to produce gorgeous, exciting animation. The setting, a highly stylized version of ancient China, allows for every cherry blossom, lily pond, phallic mountain peak, and swooshy martial arts move to be given the attention it deserves. The KFP series follows Po (Jack Black), a corpulent panda who is chosen to be the Dragon Warrior and protect his valley from the forces of evil. Though he may seem a terrible champion, Po has his own unique brand of floppy, improvisational, oddly effective kung fu; one of his greatest strengths is that he can’t believe all the awesome stuff he gets to do. Assisting him are the Furious Five: Tigress (Angelina Jolie), Monkey (Jackie Chan), Mantis (Seth Rogen), Viper (Lucy Liu), and Crane (David Cross). Their mentor is the cranky, wisdom-filled, occasionally insecure Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman).

But you knew all that already. Recapping the premise is tedious, I know. The first two movies weren’t just beautiful and reasonably funny, they achieved a surprising amount of emotional resonance here and there. Po is the only panda in the world, as far as he knows -- raised from infancy by a loving duck named Ping (James Hong), who runs a noodle shop. Eventually, he learns the truth, and Kung Fu Panda 2 has one scene, in which Po remembers what happened to his mother, that actually makes me cry a little. Which is not what I expected from a movie full of fat jokes. The question is, could KFP3 possibly be as good or profound, given the tendency of animated sequels to get progressively lazier? Well...no. It’s not as good as the first two movies. But I figured. This time around, Po’s valley’ s period of peacetime is broken by the arrival of undead bad guy General Kai (J.K. Simmons), who looks like a horned and hoofed Genghis Khan, who dual-wields swords on chains like he’s freakin’ Kratos, and who has a habit of vacuuming up the chi of other kung fu masters and turning them into skittering jade golems.

That’s all sorta cool, but Kai is not as compelling a foe as Tai Lung or Lord Shen from the previous films. He has a very perfunctory vendetta indeed, and Simmons voices him like a douchey college football jock. (The running gag is that Kai expects everyone to know who he is, and no one does.) Po and co. are all that can stand between Kai and blah blah blah. But, in the meantime, who should turn up but Po’s biological dad, Li Shan (Bryan Cranston), who reveals the existence of a secret panda village. Why, pandas are known for their ability to manipulate chi! Po can learn how to defeat Kai and reconnect with his species! Thus, a huge chunk of the film takes place in the hidden village, and...ugh. After three films, I have come to like Po. And Cranston is very good as Li. But we didn’t need an entire mob of goddamn pandas. They’re presented as genial, roly-poly nincompoops who live in their own private eden of gluttony, and they are not as funny or lovable as the filmmakers seem to think they are. At times, the endless fat/dumb/lazy jokes border on grotesque. Kate Hudson pops up as a she-panda who wants into Po’s pants; luckily, the KFP team seem to have realized what a terrible subplot that was and written most of it out.

A big issue with this series is that each movie’s plot is more or less the same. Po doubts himself, everyone else doubts Po, and then Po unlocks some new level of kung fu coolness to defeat the latest baddie. I was okay with KFP2 rehashing Po’s journey because of the time and respect given to the darker elements of his past. But...now what? Isn’t Po already the Dragon Warrior? What the hell else does he need to learn about himself? How to be a panda? Pandas suck, and this film doesn’t make me like them any more. The character I really relate to is Po’s adoptive father, Ping, who plays a prominent role here but doesn’t get enough real emotion. In the earlier films, we saw how devastated Ping was at the thought of losing Po. Here, he’s too often reduced to a comical worrywart. Still, they avoided making Ping and Li into rivals, which was nice, and by the time the film got to the line, “Po needs his two dads!” I realized how subversive things had become. Yeah, they went there. Sort of. Good for them!

Anyway, I should make it clear that this is still a really fun movie. It’s no less beautifully-animated than the first two, and by throwing in supernatural elements, they’ve taken their visuals to new, eye-popping heights. And the cast do a great job, when they can. The Furious Five are still given very little to do, sadly. But Hoffman’s Master Shifu has a meatier role here than in KFP2, and Jolie’s Tigress is still in a league of her own. Seriously, I fucking love Tigress. I love how subtle the animators make her, how she leaves things unsaid, how she shows her fondness for Po in tiny ways and knows exactly when he needs a pep talk or a kick in the ass. I bet these actors really enjoy returning to voice their characters.

I just hope their interest doesn’t wane. Because I’ve heard Dreamworks wants to make three more KFP movies. Why? Didn’t I just say that KFP3 doesn’t really add much to Po’s personal journey? Okay, yeah...it does bring his Dragon Warrior arc to a sweeping pinnacle. There is grandeur and emotional power to be found here...but practically every serious moment is interrupted by a lame joke or pratfall in short order. It’s an insult to our intelligence. We do get a pretty awesome climax (well, two climaxes -- the real one and the dumb, slapsticky one), and an ending that seems extremely definitive in terms of where Po stands and how happy everyone is. Three more films? How could they not seem forced? Just as the Shrek series should have ended after the second one, Kung Fu Panda really ought to be a trilogy and not a damn sextology. But it’s not up to me, it’s up to box office receipts, as usual.

But Kung Fu Panda 3 is good. It’s not quite on par with its predecessors, but it’s perfectly entertaining, visually outstanding, well-voiced, and not too lazy. And if, like me, you find its overuse of chubby, mentally deficient pandas to be obnoxious, keep in mind that I’m a bitter party pooper who wishes he wasn’t about to turn thirty. Ugh. At least kids these days have quality stuff like Kung Fu Panda as well as pandering, lowbrow shit like Angry Birds. It could always be worse.

VERDICT: The third squee in a series isn’t the loudest, but it’ll do.

Episode 1

--Worst season of American Horror Story ever, am I right, guys?

--Hah. Not likely. But since hating on this batshit little show is probably more trendy than ever before, I figured I might as well throw a bone to the haters before making any serious effort to discuss the Season Six premiere. There is much to discuss, mainly because we had little to no idea what was coming. Like, at all. You may have heard: this year, the AHS showrunners decided to play a different gambit. Last time, it was all about the shameless stunt-casting of Lady Gaga. For Season Six, they went the other way, into the shadows. The great unknown, which is what scares us most, right?

--Yes, Season Six came shrouded in mystery, only slightly spoiled by leaked set photos and the online multitudes squalling, “It is Roanoke? IT’S ROANOKE! IT TOTALLY IS!” The posters and teasers hit us with a creative mishmash of red herrings, artsy doses of micro-horror that paid homage to the entire genre. We had spiders crawling from eyeballs, demon rednecks, amateur surgery, scarecrows, monsters, possessed dolls, Leatherface, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Children of the Corn, and Gordy, the talking pig from the ill-received 1995 family film of the same name. I may be misremembering that last one. But it was all intended to mislead and to get the hype machine a-chuggin’. What would Season Six really be about? And are we invested?

--Well. I’ve long said this show needed to really reinvent itself hard, and this may be the closest we get. The premiere felt pretty bare-bones compared to the blood- and sex-fluid-drenched spectacle of AHS: Hotel. Yeah, fine, this year it’s Roanoke. If you suck at history, Roanoke was an English colony established on a North Carolina island in the 1500s. The entire colony vanished without a trace, save for the word “CROATOAN” carved in a tree. It’s one of those mysteries that has more or less been solved (the colonists most likely moved elsewhere and intermingled with Native Americans), but enthusiasts of the paranormal love to speculate about aliens, time travel, etc. Roanoke is beloved by hack documentarians, which is quite appropriate...

--...because this season is a freakin’ mockumentary! Titled My Roanoke Nightmare, it provides a pitch-perfect homage to/parody of shows like Paranormal Witness, in which ostensibly real people recount their ghostly encounters and actors reenact the events they describe. I like it. It’s different. And I totally, sort of, a little bit, predicted that AHS might try this approach! So. Season Six (so far) is about the series of unfortunate events befalling Shelby and Matt Miller, played in the reenactments by Sarah Paulson and Cuba Gooding Jr. We also see interview footage with the “real” Shelby and Matt, played by Lily Rabe and André Holland. Confused yet? Shelby and Matt were happy as clams until a terrible gang attack and a miscarriage. Broken and reeling, they sought to reboot their lives.

--Thus, the Millers came to inhabit this season’s evil edifice, a very old colonial manse in the middle of a vast North Carolina forest. Nature! Peace and quiet! Shelby can do her yoga in the light of the pancreas-shaped windows and indulge her gluten-free diet in the way-too-huge kitchen! Buildings like this can’t not be haunted, and the Millers -- but mostly Shelby -- were soon experiencing spooky shit. Items moved by themselves. Something outside squealed and shrieked and flung garbage cans. In a very cool and freaky scene, human teeth rained from the sky. Unless Shelby was just off her rocker. She drinks a lot of wine, after all. And Matt was more inclined to suspect the gang of hillbilly stereotypes who’d also wanted to buy the house. Were he and Shelby being targeted because they’re an interracial couple? Maybe. Can AHS leave race issues alone for five seconds? Of course not! I did like how they nailed the subtle daggers of modern racism (that cop never would have drawled, “You her husband?” at a white man) while also making Matt a bit of a douche who was quick to take umbrage. The world of today, huh.

--Matt wanted someone to look after Shelby while he was on business, so he installed his sister, Lee, an ex-cop who got fired for her painkiller and booze addictions. How I smiled when Angela Bassett appeared. All is well in AHS land. Bassett is Lee in the reenactment and “real” Lee is Adina Porter, last seen all the way back in Murder House. Lee thought Shelby was a bit of a dumb honky. But she was more than reliable when dudes with torches started breaking into the house late at night. They, or somebody, left a video playing in the basement; it depicted a man hunting a humanoid creature with a pig’s head. Or was it just a pig mask? Ultimately, the torch club didn’t harm Shelby or Lee, but they did leave Blair Witch stick figurines hanging all over the house, as one does.

--Suitably hysterical, Shelby tore off in her car, only to run over Kathy Bates. We only caught a glimpse, but it was definitely Kathy Bates. Shelby chased Kathy into the woods and found more stick figures, then witnessed the ground itself breathing like it was blanketing some vast, slumbering giant. I dunno what to make of that, but it’s bizarre and neat, so I’ll roll with it. The torch club reappeared (one of them looked a lot like Wes Bentley), and the ep ended with Shelby screaming her butt off at a guy with his scalp missing and his brain exposed.

--So here we are with an inkling as to what Season Six is about, and a multitude of questions. My big concerns have to do with this mockumentary format and if it can last a whole season. Will they stick with it? Drop it after a bit? Weave in the stories of other rubes who tried to live in that remote colonial armpit? Shit, will we even get real opening titles? No clue. But the teasing, cryptic build-up to Season Six seems to have worked, because I had no idea what to expect and I really liked each new surprise and familiar face. Compared to the last, like, three seasons, this is bold. And scary-fun. Whether it will stay bold and scary-fun remains to be seen. I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

--I need a name for the haunted colonial house. I’m gonna call it “Terrorbithia.” Heh.

Chapter 2

--Dafuq are you doing, Cuba Gooding Jr.? You find a flaming effigy made of boughs and pig parts, and your response is to flail at it with a baseball bat? Do you want forest fires? Because that’s how you get forest fires. This isn’t Rat Race 2, guy.

--This season of AHS is my dream in terms of casting choices. Sarah Paulson is basically the main character, Angela Bassett’s finally playing somebody who fucking matters to the plot, and Lily Rabe is back full-time! (Though all she’s done so far is mumble in front of a gray backdrop. Lame.) As for Kathy Bates, she’s truly the queen of impossible-to-place dialects. Was that, like, Welsh or something? Kathy seems to be some type of tribal/colonial cult leader babbling about the mire and muck...or, as she put it, the MYRRRR and MOOOK. Picking up from last week, Shelby lurked in the bushes while Kathy and her torch club stuck a pig’s head on a dude and burned him alive. There’s the pigman from Murder House and the human/animal magic from Coven, so if you’re playing an AHS drinking game, knock a couple back.

--Funnily enough, our two main ladies switched roles this week. Shelby’s resolve hardened; the hauntings must be that dreadful redneck family playing pranks, and she’s not gonna turn tail. Good thing, because the Millers are stuck: they sunk everything into Terrorbithia and reselling would leave them destitute. Meanwhile, Lee has gone off the deep end. The trouble began when Lee’s daughter, Flora (Saniyya Sidney), came to visit. Kids in haunted houses, yikes. Sure enough, Flora began spending her free time in a closet under the stairs and talking to an invisible girl named Priscilla who claims that everyone in the house will soon be horribly slaughtered. Eh, I’m sure she’s just an energy-based life form struggling to understand us. Witnessing this, Lee’s ex-husband angrily dragged Flora away, and a despairing Lee hit the bottle hard. Cue the sad trombone.

--Lee also suffered some fresh scares, including bloody, squirming pig tails nailed to the wall, and a pair of unsettling nurses. Matt saw the nurses murdering an old woman. Mysteries abound! But not for long. A ghostly girl (Priscilla?) led Shelby and Matt to a root cellar in the backyard where they found a fresh VHS tape. On the tape: Denis O’Hare, bearded and babbling. He is Dr. Elias Cunningham, an author who moved into Terrorbithia to research past crimes. If you could follow his mile-a-minute exposition, you’d learn all about Miranda and Bridget Jane (Maya Rose Berko and Kristen Rakes), sisters who made Terrorbithia an assisted living home. Their true goal: to snuff residents in such an order that the first letters of their names spelled the word “murder.” That is such a bizarrely specific act of crazy that I really hope there’s an explanation for it. The Janes vanished, done in by a force even darker, and Dr. Cunningham’s video ended with him venturing back into the house and getting maybe killed by something-or-other. Matt tore down some wallpaper and found “M-U-R-D-E” inscribed on the wall. Key foreshadowing: the final R is missing. Has anyone with an R-name turned up yet? They dead.

--It would seem that every episode of Roanoke will end with a cliffhanger, which I like because it’s perfectly appropriate for the lurid TV documentary it aspires to ape. Fearful of losing custody of Flora, Lee essentially kidnapped her daughter and brought her back to Terrorbithia. Shelby and Matt did their best to clean up this hot mess, but Flora had enough time to vanish in the woods. Our three stooges went searching, and found Flora’s sweater hanging from the top of a very, very, very, very tall tree. Custody rights are now the least of Lee’s worries.

--Two eps in, and still going strong, though I’m getting a little sick of repetitive scenes in which people creep through hallways after strange noises. I’m glad they’re trying to have a logical reason for why Shelby and Matt don’t just move the fuck out (actual reason: they’re characters in a horror story). And, gosh, we still haven’t seen hide nor hair of Cheyenne Jackson or Evan Peters. It’d be funny if Jackson was the “real” Dr. Elias Cunningham in interviews. “Wait, I’m a bronze archangel of handsomeness and you have me played by Denis O’Hare the human ferret? Libel!”

--In the end credits, I noticed “special guest star” Lady Gaga. Apparently she was the crazed, antler-wearing person who scalped the guy in the first scene. Eh, she’s done weirder shit at the VMAs.

Chapter 3

--Sorry for the delay. I had a houseguest. AHS is hard to explain to houseguests out of context. “Yeah, that’s Lady Gaga getting fucked doggie-style by the guy from Jerry Maguire, and...hmm? A raw pig’s heart? Yes, I do believe you are correct, but lemme try and fill in the narrative gaps...wait, come back!”

--Anyway, I’m sure we’re all very excited and not at all exasperated by Ryan Murphy’s recent, puckish announcement that partway through AHS: Roanoke there will be a HUGE and MASSIVE twist that will redefine the entire season and make our fragile brainmeats go kablooey. Place your bets. Maybe we’ll go behind the scenes of the “reenactments” and meet, for example, the actress who is playing Shelby Miller and is played by Sarah Paulson (kablooey). Or maybe it’s all a book being written by Dr. Cunningham from last week. Or it’s happening inside somebody’s head. Or the real Shelby, Matt, and Lee are in prison after a shitload of murders were laid at their feet.

--This ep pleased me: it left behind the haunted house scares for a meatier story and the right amount of exposition. Flora still hasn’t turned up, alive or dead. For some reason, the cops let Lee wander around looking for Flora despite the whole kidnapping thing. She and the Millers found the homestead of those darn-tootin’ hillbillies, who were gone, save for a couple feral ginger kids suckling on a pig’s teats. Pigs, pigs, everywhere pigs. The kids only knew to yowl one word: Croatoan. Flora’s dad, Mason, was highly displeased with the entire situation and accused Lee of spiriting Flora away. Wouldn’t you know, that very night, Mason was found hideously burned to death. And Lee had been absent from Terrorbithia at the exact same time, and had no alibi. This rather significant hiccup was interrupted when the unholy love child of Andy Warhol and Zelda Rubinstein strolled in.

--Cricket. We need to talk about Cricket. I’m not sure how I feel about him, because A) he’s doing the “kooky psychic” archetype in a manner that edges past knowing homage and into the realm of the ridiculous, and B) he’s a cartoon character in a story that has been reasonably serious thus far. The sudden tonal shift was not entirely welcome, though I’d never ding this show for surprising me, I guess. As played by Leslie Jordan, Cricket is a fey, androgynous little gnome who you definitely wouldn’t want to share a train compartment with, but he looked capable of reading the aether and locating poor Flora. His candlelit séance was intended to conjure up Flora’s ghostly BFF, Priscilla; instead, it brought forth a window-smashing Kathy Bates, and, again, that word: Croatoan. Cricket figured out where Flora’d gone and was willing to help further...to the tune of 25,000 dollars. Lee and the Millers were livid; Lee even pulled a gun on Cricket before common sense intervened. But when Cricket...

--Quick aside. This ep was a tour de force for Adina Porter as the real Lee (“ActuaLee”). Holy shit, where has she been? Her brief turn as a cripplingly boring psych patient in Murder House did NOT showcase her talent. Also, when ActuaLee had a meltdown, we got a glimpse behind the scenes of My Roanoke Nightmare. Foreshadowing? Who was the male voice asking the questions?

--Cricket made a reference to Lee’s first daughter, who vanished at age four (more foreshadowing?), and that convinced Lee to pony up the dough. Thus it was Cricket who finally tied this season to the lost colony of Roanoke. We now know the weird tale of Thomasin White, aka The Butcher, whose husband initially led the Roanoke colonists. In his stead, Thomasin ruled with an iron fist, and, well, the time period was unkind to independent women. The menfolk -- including Thomasin’s son, Ambrose (Wes Bentley) -- exiled Thomasin and left her to die in the wilds. She was saved by Gaga of the Woods, kickstarting some sort of unholy communion and exacting revenge with a meat cleaver. So Gaga’s the ultimate origin of evil this season? Sure, why not? The Butcher led the remaining colonists inland, hence their ghostly presence around Terrorbithia.

--His palms greased, Cricket contacted The Butcher and promised to keep future mortals away from Terrorbithia if Flora would be safely returned. Meanwhile, Matt wandered off, and Shelby found him balls-deep in Gaga of the Woods while some pervy rednecks looked on. He didn’t remember this event later (just as Lee didn’t remember possibly roasting Mason like a goose?), but Shelby threw down the next hand by calling the cops and having Lee arrested. Shelby’s a bit of a shithead, but can you blame her at this point?

--The shifting between serious horror and quasi-parody is an issue, but still, these awesome episodes feel way too short. I find myself scanning them for clues as to what might really be going on. Is anything as it seems? How many layers does the story have, or am I giving AHS too much credit? I’m ready for big twists, all right. Make them epic.

Chapter 4

--“Only men with full bellies have the luxury of conscience.”

--“Honestly, I’d murder for a Coke Zero.”

--These two lines, both spoken in last night’s episode of Roanoke, seem to perfectly sum up the human condition, don’t they? Especially when you consider that the first speaker ends up savagely eviscerating the second speaker. The philosophers would surely cheer.

--I’ve noticed that these episodes are building toward a very obvious climax that should be arriving very soon. Like, next week. Which makes it all the more likely that Roanoke is going to massively redefine itself somehow. Here’s an interesting theory: What if it’s all fake? What if My Roanoke Nightmare is entirely fiction (within the fiction of AHS, I mean), and even the “real” interviewees are hired actors? But then, when they all head out to the North Carolina woods to film fake scares for their fake documentary, a bunch of real spooks descend? And one of them is Evan Peters and he’s naked? Eh?

--More on Thomasin White and her merry band. The word “Croatoan,” it seems, has magical power; it’s like a verbal talisman. The Roanoke folk carved it into a tree at the site of the original colony, apparently just to confuse future generations (and it worked!), before moving deeper into the island and establishing a far more successful colony. Fields of corn! Bountiful feasts! And all it took was the occasional human sacrifice. Poor little Priscilla getting her skull caved in was surely a small price to pay. Hey, didn’t Shirley Jackson write a short story about this? Anyway, Ambrose eventually got sick and tired of the murder and turned the colonists against Thomasin a second time. But then she was all like, “I’ve totally seen the true light of God!” and they were all like, “We believe you without question even though you’re obviously evil and insane!” and then Thomasin fed them all poisoned apples, hacked them to death (Ambrose first), and offered her own life up to her mentor, Gaga of the Woods. More on Gaga of the Woods in a sec.

--Back in the present, Matt and Shelby snuggled and made up after last week’s strife, but Terrorbithia’s haunts were about to ramp it up. The Pigman appeared and chased them around with a knife, but was foiled by none other than Dr. Elias Cunningham, still alive. He’d maintained ownership of Terrorbithia for years, trying to keep innocent people away, but then...something about tax fees...and it wound up for sale. Cunningham showed the Millers some examples of the house’s past victims: hunters who’d shot themselves; a family of Asian immigrants (who got way too much screen time...guess a show needs its filler); the psycho Jane sisters. All done in by The Butcher’s band. One very noteworthy fact: the house was originally built by a man named Mott. Yes, fucking MOTT. As in, those rich inbred psycho assholes from Freak Show. More key trivia: there’s a six-day period in October when the moon turns red and the ghosts, usually reduced to scampering around acting scary, can kill. And guess what, Matt and Shelby? The maraschino cherry moon is nigh!

--I have a sneaking theory about Dr. Cunningham. It occurred to me when he and the Millers were in the woods, looking for Flora. They did find her, playing and/or being tormented by various specters. During this confrontation, Cunningham was shot with arrows by some ghost or other -- not the first time we’ve seen him get maybe-killed. Okay. My theory is that Cunningham is already dead. He’s a ghost. After all, if he’s trying to keep people away from Terrorbithia, why the hell didn’t he turn up to warn Shelby and Matt sooner? He’s a good ghost, more or less, but trapped on the property just like the rest. I’m not sure how the “red moon” thing ties into the overall AHS rulebook about ghosts. I thought they could kill you whenever they felt like it. Could Cunningham be full of shit? Regardless, he was full of arrows, prompting the Millers to flee back to the house, where they were greeted by the hybrid spawn of Edna Mode and the grandma from the Addams Family. By which I mean Cricket.

--One popular theory about ghosts is that they desperately want their stories told. Gaga of the Woods certainly does, though she might be a magically enhanced immortal, not a ghost. Gaga took Cricket on a tour through history, and later, as night fell, she lured Matt out to the root cellar and magic-roofied him. Then we learned Gaga’s story: she was a Druidic lass from the British Isles who stowed away on an ill-fated voyage to the Americas back in, I dunno, the 1500s or something. After murdering everybody else (as usual), Gaga embraced the wilderness, and her own Druid faith combined with the natural, organic, GMO-free magic of the New World to form a brand-new flavor of vaguely-defined spirituality. And then she founded the hidden wizarding school of Ilvermorny, but that’s a screenplay for another day.

--In the present, Gaga’s goal was to have awesome sex with Matt, but he managed to stay faithful this time. He returned to Shelby’s side and they watched as The Butcher emerged with her torch club...and prepared to sacrifice Flora. Luckily, Priscilla was all like, “This is for killing me with a rock that one time!” and little-girl-punched The Butcher, allowing Flora to escape. So Flora’s safe, only not really, because she, Shelby, and Matt are still trapped in the house. The episode ended with the horrific death-by-disembowelment of Cricket, who, in the end, was a decent man who really wanted to save Flora. Not bad for a guy who looks like if Lucius Malfoy suffered a transporter malfunction with a cockapoo. Cricket’s death was one of this show’s cruelest ever, but just remember: under the laws of ghostdom, his spirit might still stick around, hitting on Uber drivers for years to come.

--So next week is apparently going to be very action-packed, and then...who the hell knows? Chapter Six is when we’ll find out what’s actually going on, maybe...and it’ll be directed by Angela Bassett! Recompense, perhaps, for giving her lame, pointless roles for the past two seasons. I know I wouldn’t want to be on Angela’s Bassett’s bad side. She can kill people with her upper lip.

Chapter 5

--Here’s your daily linguistic lesson. According to official sources, Gaga of the Woods’ name is actually “Scathach,” after a warrior figure from Celtic mythology. However, it’s surely no coincidence that the name is so similar to “Shachath,” the Angel of Death played by Frances Conroy in Asylum. Don’t ask for pronunciation; the internet can’t even agree on the correct spelling of “Thomasin.” But Frances Conroy (Frances Conroy Frances Conroy FRANCES CONROY) returned to AHS this week. And if you connect all these dots, they form a picture of a rubber duck!

--Seriously, though, Roanoke is aiming to be all seasons at once. There’s a Reddit theory that each episode chronicles the show thus far. Chapter 1 was Murder House: Fraught couple moves into a haunted mansion. Chapter 2 was Asylum: Creepy nurses and their ill-fated patients. Chapter 3 was Coven, with the introduction of witchy magic and the return of Leslie Jordan as a “magic user” of sorts. Next came Freak Show, tying Terrorbithia to the Mott family. And this week?

--Fucking brutal. The conclusion(?) to the Millers’ tale of woe was cruel, nasty, grungy, and brutal. And it wasn’t the stylized, borderline-goofy brutality this show often depicts. Horrible, vicious things happened to innocent people. Less Dario Argento, more Eli Roth. First, however, the Hotel allusion: we met the weirdo who built this year’s edifice of evil, and once again, he’s played by Evan Peters with a funky accent!

--Yes, Edward Phillipe Mott loved art, disliked human contact, and wanted a remote, isolated haven, a monument to himself, where he could enjoy his collection of priceless paintings -- and the attentions of his swarthy black lover. (“Let’s rouge each other’s nipples!”) So we did get Evan Peters naked, but we didn’t see his butt, so this season of AHS is not yet complete. When The Butcher and co. began their pranks, they targeted Edward’s art collection, and his resulting violent tantrum foreshadowed the lineage of shrill, entitled psychosis that would eventually culminate in Dandy Mott. That night, The Butcher sacrificed Edward in her usual over-the-top manner (impaled and burned alive), while the household staff starved to death, locked in the root cellar. Mean!

--We weren’t done with Edward yet, however. Still trapped, Shelby, Matt, and Flora had to fend off assaults from various phantoms, including a spidery little Asian girl in full-blown Ju-On mode. Shout-outs to specific horror genres are always welcome! Luckily for the Millers, Edward appeared in the basement and led them through some hidden tunnels, out of the worst danger. Briefly. In the woods, the Millers stumbled into the clutches of those damn dirty rednecks, the Polks. Remember them? Mama Polk made her appearance and was Frances Conroy! Hallelujah! She was only absent for one season, but it felt like an eternity! Also in attendance was Dr. Cunningham, who the Polks had kept alive just so they could eat segments of him. Mama ended his misery with a hammer to the face (mean!), so there goes my theory that he was a ghost. Mama also explained how her family had a deal with The Butcher...and sometimes brought her sacrifices. Well, FUCK.

--Yes, that’s Chaz Bono as the chubby, cognitively-impaired Polk. Proving that it’s possible to put a transgendered person onscreen without them being a cold, beautiful mannequin played by a Swinton or a Cumberbatch. Get a clue, Hollywood.

--Meanwhile, Lee spent 48 hours being grilled by her former fellow cops -- the span required to charge someone with a crime, and also a convenient time-delay for when you need a character to be offscreen for awhile. Free once more, Lee found a bajillion panicked messages from Matt on her phone. Here she comes to save the daaaayyyyy!

--Meanwhile meanwhile, Matt tried to escape the Polks’ clutches and killed one of them. In retaliation, Mama Polk obliterated Shelby’s fibula with a sledgehammer (MEAN!) before taking the Millers right back to Terrorbithia and the blazing bonfires and torture racks The Butcher had built for them. Alas, The Butcher did not comment on Mama Polk’s magical, ill-smelling horseless carriage emblazoned with the sigil of the god they call Chevrolet. Shelby, Matt, and Flora certainly looked doomed...and I even wondered if the big twist is that they did die, and the “real” Shelby and Matt are actually ghosts, telling their tale to a very ballsy documentarian. Nope! This time around, it was Ambrose who revolted, tackling his evil mother into the bonfire while Edward untied our heroes and Lee ran over the Pigman with a car. Badass. A flaming Butcher chased the Millers from Terrorbithia...and they never looked back. They got away with their mortal lives intact, and all that remains are the memories. And the nightmares.

--The End. But not really.

--I have not seen any promos for next week. And I don’t want to. I wanna be unspoiled, and therefore delightfully surprised (or disappointed) by whatever Roanoke throws at us next. I mean, this was definitively the finale to the Millers’ story, wasn’t it? What comes next? Hell, what’s even real? Keep in mind that we’ve been watching “re-enactments,” which means that everyone within them is a merely an actor, playing a role. A version of Shelby and Matt Miller’s tale, but not the real thing. So...all bets are off. Heh heh heh.

--PS: That lady historian at the beginning of the ep is an actual person, Doris Kearns Goodwin. No wonder she couldn’t act.

I began this blog as a college student in 2010, just for fun. Six years later, I’m still just doing it for fun and have no delusions that it’s ever gonna take off and make me into an internet celeb. As for my Cautious Enthusiasm series, it began as an excuse to write more lists (I’m way too addicted to writing lists), while providing future blog fodder. Again, nothing’s changed, but maybe I find comfort in the familiar act of blogging about nerdy stuff. Sorry to be so reflective; today’s my birthday, and let’s just say my age has a zero on the end.

Yeah. Anyway. Here are a parcel of things I’m rather excited about, though not without reservations.

CAUTIOUS ENTHUSIASM: REBOOTED, REVAMPED, REUPHOLSTERED

The Great Wall
WHAT IT IS: A monster movie, but with some exotic spices sprinkled in the recipe. Set in ancient-ish China, this blockbuster stars Matt Damon and Pedro Pascal as armored mercs who arrive to discover that, in this version of history, the Great Wall was built to keep out hordes of giant reptiles, or something. Sing with me: Let’s get down to business! To defeat! This shit! Did they send Matt Damon...when I asked...for Pitt?
WHY I’M EXCITED: Uh, I adore modern monster movies? I drooled on Pacific Rim and continue to defend the new Godzilla? However, what actually matters more to me is that The Great Wall is directed by Zhang Yimou, who makes unbelievably gorgeous movies. Drink in the wonder of Raise the Red Lantern, Hero, or House of Flying Daggers. Based on trailers, The Great Wall should be sumptuous and grandiose, again proving that you can mix high art with popcorn entertainment. Even if it’s a bad movie, it’ll be a sensory delight.
WHY I’M SKEPTICAL: When venerable directors take a more mainstream approach, it doesn’t always go well. Especially when your number one goal is to appeal to Chinese and American audiences hooked on Michael Bay. In other words, The Great Wall could represent Yimou compromising his usual flair in favor of mass appeal. Plus, everyone’s already mad about the main character being white, because we all have the luxury of being offended over shit that doesn’t matter. Yes, I’m getting more conservative in my doddering old age. I expect to have fun watching this, but given how high Yimou has set his own directorial bar, I really hope he hasn’t sold out.
SQUEE FACTOR: 7
DANGER LEVEL: 5

Yooka-Laylee
WHAT IT IS: Long, long ago, the Banjo-Kazooie games delighted us on the N64, before Rare defected to Microsoft and the franchise dissolved into a puddle of knockoff Legos and bitter tears. Now some of the original creative minds have crowdfunded their way to this spiritual successor, which follows the adventures of a chameleon and a bat as they attempt to save whimsical worlds contained inside books. So...it’s also a Myst sequel?
WHY I’M EXCITED: I’d say that the first Banjo-Kazooie might be the most perfect example of the “cartoony platformer” genre. And Yooka-Laylee simply and literally IS a Banjo-Kazooie game, just with new characters swapped in. Since I still like to power up the ol’ N64 and revisit the classics now and then, I’m so goddamned happy that shameless nostalgia has hopped into bed with gleaming modern graphics to produce this love letter. Thanks to this, we can just forget that repulsive Nuts & Bolts thing ever happened. I hope someone at Rare is really mad right now.
WHY I’M SKEPTICAL: First off, modern platformers never seem to recapture what made the genre so special in the 1990s. Worse, gamers tend to scoff, insisting that the medium has long since evolved past cute, furry heroes collecting golden thingummies. (I dream of an alternate universe where the blueprint for today’s games is Conker’s Bad Fur Day.) The crowdfunding success of Yooka-Laylee bodes well...but, even so, the whole Broken Age letdown (see below) has made me highly disillusioned. It can’t just look and sound like Banjo-Kazooie. It needs cartoony-platformer soul. What does that mean? I’ll know when I play Yooka-Laylee and see if it has it or not.
SQUEE FACTOR: 9
DANGER LEVEL: 7

Furi
WHAT IT IS: This game is already out, but the more I’ve heard about it, the more I rub my palms together. It’s a very well-received indie hybrid of hack-n-slash and bullet hell, in which an archetypal Lone Warrior must carve and fillet his way through a string of powerful foes to unlock his memories, avenge somebody, regain his honor, or whatever cliché they’ve gone with this time.
WHY I’M EXCITED: Look, any game that consists entirely of boss fights broken up by peaceful treks through gorgeous scenery is going to remind me of Shadow of the Colossus. Which is my favorite game of all time. Have I not mentioned that in a while? Boss fights are often my favorite part of a game, and Furi’s showdowns look outstanding and unique. Plus the visuals remind me a bit of Killer7, another of my all-time faves. Was this tailor-made for weird, artsy little me?
WHY I’M SKEPTICAL: This is gonna make me sound like the world’s biggest twerp, but...I tend to abandon really challenging games partway through. And not just because they have terrible gameplay elements. If playing a game starts to feel like beating my head against an Easter Island statue, it doesn’t maintain my interest. I was gonna put Bloodborne in the last Cautious Enthusiasm list, until I realized I’d likely give up after its first half-hour. Everything I’ve read about Furi confirms it’s quite challenging even for hack-n-slash experts. Of which I am not one. I so want to play this and my fingers are so tightly crossed that I won’t be utterly, wretchedly defeated by its difficulty. Sigh.
SQUEE FACTOR: 7
DANGER LEVEL: 9

Seasons 3 and 4 of Black Mirror
WHAT IT IS: Black Mirror emerged from Britain and quietly embedded itself in our collective consciousness with a mere seven episodes. It’s been compared to The Twilight Zone, but rather than dealing in aliens or the supernatural, it imagines different futures in which our relationship with technology and social media has evolved in strange ways. It’s bleak, satirical, and smart -- and Netflix has gobbled up the rights to make two more six-episode seasons.
WHY I’M EXCITED: I really enjoyed the original Black Mirror, and I’m pretty confident that the folks at Netflix are equally adoring of the property and will treat it with respect. It’s obviously calculated to hook the Stranger Things fanbase...but, hey, Stranger Things rocks just as hard. Thoughtful sci-fi and social satire are hot right now. And check out some of the cast: Bryce Dallas Howard, Kelly MacDonald, Michael Kelly, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and that’s just for Season 3!
WHY I’M SKEPTICAL: I am definitely not one of those pop culture hipsters who insist that Americanized remakes always suck. However, I will admit that Americanized remakes can suck. The first seasons of Black Mirror had that unique British mix of manners and outrageousness; will Netflix’s continuation have the guts to show, say, a major political figure fucking a pig? Will they maintain the trademark dark cynicism? (Every original episode of Black Mirror ends unhappily.) Or will producers and marketing departments insist that us fragile Yanks can’t handle that much feel-bad storytelling? Black Mirror has teeth; don’t pull ’em!
SQUEE FACTOR: 6
DANGER LEVEL: 5

Psychonauts 2
WHAT IT IS: Somehow I’ve never written much about Psychonauts despite the fact that it’s a fucking amazing game. It didn’t sell well, in part because of the aforementioned bias against platformers. But there’s nothing quite like it: a wacky, hilarious, and innovative adventure centering around a summer camp for kids with psychic powers. Creator Tim Schafer has turned once again to crowdfunding, and the sequel should hit us in 2018.
WHY I’M EXCITED: What a world we live in! My favorite games are getting new incarnations (Yooka-Laylee, Obduction, The Last Guardian, Silent Hills...wait, scratch that last one), but this isn’t a spiritual cousin or reboot, it’s a REAL SEQUEL. The first game ended with a cheeky cliffhanger and we never thought we’d see it resolved. There’s some sort of VR thing coming out as well, but I’m simply eager to step back into the heroic young Rasputin’s shoes, coast around on that awesome levitation bubble, set things on fire with my brain, uncover more evil conspiracies...aww, yeah. Trust me, there are a lot of cult gamers jizzing themselves over Psychonauts 2, and I am proud to be among those who require a change of underwear.
WHY I’M SKEPTICAL: Because of Broken Age, that’s why. Tim Schafer and Double Fine Productions already got everyone’s fervor whipped up for a crowdfunded game, and then they apparently spent most of that money on Twizzlers or something. Broken Age wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t anything special, either. Which was somehow worse. And Psychonauts 2 has even more riding on it, because the first game has such a rabid following. Imagine if they made a new season of Firefly but Adam Baldwin was the only returning actor. Broken Age gave us the kiddie-table version of a classic point-and-click adventure game. If Psychonauts 2 is similarly dumbed down, I’ll just be fucking done with crowdfunded dream projects. For a few months, anyway.
SQUEE FACTOR: 10
DANGER LEVEL: 8

There. That should give me a smattering of blog posts down the road. Not that I’ve become sick of writing this blog or anything. I may be aging but I’m no less nerdy, and hallelujah for that!

American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 11

Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens

American Horror Story: Hotel--Episode 12

Myst Series, pt. 11

Myst Series, pt. 12

Top 10 Plot Twists (pt. 3)

Top 10 Cutthroat Kitchen Fails

To Squee Or Not to Squee: Mr. Holmes

A Dang-Blasted Theory: Disney's Talking Animal Universe

To Squee Or Not to Squee: Sandman Overture

Independence Day: Resurgence

Swallows and Amazons

Top 10 Obscure Films (pt. 2)

To Squee Or Not to Squee: Kung Fu Panda 3

American Horror Story 6--Episode 1

American Horror Story: Roanoke--Episode 2

American Horror Story: Roanoke--Episode 3

American Horror Story: Roanoke--Episode 4

American Horror Story: Roanoke--Episode 5

To Squee Or Not to Squee, vol. 6