12 Days of TERRIBLE GIFTS

A pause in my deep dive into the furiously fast to talk about something that plagues us every holiday season.

I do like Christmas. I really do. The sense of togetherness, gathering with friends and family to make the coldest, darkest days of the year* into the warmest and brightest. I say this because it’s kind of obfuscated by two factors: a) I don’t really get into the Christmas spirit until the third week of December, and b) I hate the music.

*Unless you live in the southern hemisphere, in which case enjoy summer, dick**.

**That was mean, I’m sorry. It’s just really cold this week.

Just… never got into Christmas carols. I would theorize that it’s because of my brief time in my elementary school choir, which from September until December was nearly exclusively Christmas carol-based, but that seems like poppycock. Aside from one somewhat embarrassing mishap singing on a department store escalator and one incident of fainting at a gig, something I had to be told happened later that day because it made so little impact on me, the sole trauma of my one semester in choir was giving up my lunch breaks. Not exactly deep wounds there. No, I’m pretty sure I just didn’t care for carols much to begin with, and being drowned in them for two solid months doesn’t help.

But there’s one carol in particular that takes way too damn long, and when you look at it, doesn’t make a lick of sense. No, not Jingle Bell Rock, though you could be excused for thinking so. Jingle Bell “Rock?” Maybe in the 50s it could be considered “rock,” but in 2015 it should be legally required to be called “Jingle Bell Old-Time Country Jamboree.” Unless it’s played by a death metal band. I’d allow that.

No, I’m taking about the 12 Days of Christmas. And if you follow along with me, you’ll see exactly why this “true love” giving you all these presents is a bad gift-giver at best, and a war criminal at worst.

“On the first day of Christmas–“

Gonna stop you right there, actually. How many of you out there actually understood what the hell “first day of Christmas” meant when you first heard this song? I couldn’t have been the only six year old saying “No, wait, back up, there’s only one day of Christmas, or at least only one when I’m getting any presents.” Okay, sure, in the UK, the Twelve Days of Christmas, or Twelvetide, is still a thing for some people. Some people. But in North America the whole idea was slowly killed by secular Christmas and Santa, and the rise of New Year’s Eve as a more popular holiday than 12th Night. Maybe the 12 Days thing was a big deal in 1780, when this bizarre pile of presents was first theorized, but today?

I get that we haven’t come up with a particularly iconic Christmas song since the Kennedy administration, but maybe if the traditions they refer to are dying, we can let a few of these go, is what I’m about to take a long time to say.

Now… what exactly has your true love decided to hand you between Dec. 25th and January 5th?

A partridge in a pear tree

Okay. Not super weird. A pet bird and a tree to keep it in. Although… it is winter. Like, super deep into winter. Not a great time to plant a tree, and that partridge isn’t going to want to sit in it right now. But assuming you have a lawn for the pear tree, and that it doesn’t die before it has a chance to sprout a pear, this… isn’t awful.

Let’s just establish something before we move on. There are two ways to take what’s about to happen. You can assume that this is the only partridge and pear tree combo that will be given out, or you can assume that every single day means a new partridge in a new pear tree, and that 11 out of 12 days will have fresh pairs of turtle doves, etc. I’m choosing to believe the former: that each item is only given once. First of all, because I think this list of gifts is weird and troubling enough as it is, and second, because the merciless pop culture critics over at Cracked have already broken down the financially crippling, feather-encrusted nightmare scenario that comes with assuming that each day you re-receive a fresh set of all of the gifts from the previous day, plus something new.

So this is your only partridge and your only pear tree. Just off the top of my head, partridges aren’t a very common pet bird, and pear trees are apparently hard to maintain and more than a little pungent, so I’d have some serious questions about this true love who assumed he/she had nailed the perfect gift.

Two turtle doves

Turtle doves aren’t exactly a low-maintenance pet. They need a diet of seed mix, fruits, vegetables, and gravel (for digestion). They need a bird bath and a well-designed cage. They need thirty minutes of exercise per day outside of the cage, which needs to be disinfected once per week. And they’re not even the prettier dove. If you’re picturing white doves, you’re way off.

This true love of yours better be damned sure you like birds, because they’ve just given you chores for Christmas. Well, for Boxing Day.

Three french hens

More birds. Great. Thanks.

According to my research, french hens are, in fact, the best chickens to keep as pets. If that’s what you’re into. And hey, free eggs? If you want? People might react oddly to being offered a partridge-egg omelette or a turtle dove frittata, but french hen eggs just sound fancy.

Still… still though. That’s six birds in three days. And weird birds. No parakeets, no parrots, but the uglier doves and chickens. Still, as long as we move on to proper presents soon, it’s not so–

Four calling birds

No? We’re still doing this? Okay. Four more birds. But at least these are songbirds. One could almost consider this a proper pet. Four at once seems like diving in with both feet, though. Ever cared for a songbird before? I hope so, because here’s four of them, on top of the hens, doves, and the partridge you already got.

At this point you’re going to need a full on aviary to keep all of these birds in. Probably a heated one, since not all of these are cold-weather birds. Certainly not the turtle doves. Not to mention it would be a place to keep your foul-smelling pear tree alive in late December. Why is this happening? Did you get, like, a bird statue from your grandmother, and then you put in on your mantle because it’s started to sink in that she’s not going to be around forever so you’d better start appreciating the hell out of her now? Then everyone saw it and assumed you’re totes into birds?

Five golden rings

Now we’re talking. Rings! Golden rings! Admittedly a lot of them. I mean, I probably wouldn’t wear five golden rings all the time. I once considered wearing a grad ring and a wedding band, then as a result had a dream where Liberace accused me of being a little too flashy, but hey, you do you. I know several people, male and female, who make multiple rings work, and it is your true love giving them to you, so it’s not horribly forward or anything.

And even if you only wear one or two of them at a time, at least your true love has stopped giving you birds.

Six geese a-laying

Oh god damn it. Come on now, when are you going to sit your true love down and ask them who could possibly need, or even want, this many fucking birds? Or this many types of bird?

And we have moved on from cute, small birds, too. Geese? Fucking geese? Geese can be aggressive, you know. These are not pretty birds to keep around the house. Or let into it. If you weren’t building an aviary before, you are now, and it had better have pens for the geese. And good luck hiring someone to build it for you on December 30th.

Before you suggest that you now have access to free fois gras, I’d ask you to consider whether killing and slaughtering your own geese, then dealing with judgemental glares from every vegetarian you know, is actually worth not just buying some in a store. Assuming you even know how to get proper foie gras out of a living, honking, hissing goose that your bird-crazy true love has dropped on your doorstep the day before New Year’s Eve.

Oh yes, and there’s all these goose eggs to deal with. Which means that these six geese might be extra aggressive, since they all just laid eggs and now here you are getting all up in their nests.

Seven swans a-swimming

SWANS? Swans. Forget what I said about geese being aggressive, because we’ve entered a new thing here. Swans will fucking fight you. Swans will knock you out of your boat, then make sure you never find land. Rowing races have been called off because of swan aggression, and rowing crews are basically tree trunks with smaller tree trunks for limbs.

Oh, and since swans are sometimes used to keep geese away from a property, it’s safe to assume that these seven swans a-swimming are going to have beef with your six geese a-laying, and that’s just going to agitate those delicate flower turtle doves, which–

No no wait, stop, shut up… seven swans a-swimming? What are they swimming in? There’s no way seven swans fit in any bathtub. I hope you have a pool, because if not, your Hitchcock-recreating “true love” just flooded something in your house. Your basement, your garage, your newly-built aviary, something just got turned into a swan habitat, and I’m willing to bet it’s not something you’d intended to be a small pond. But too late, everything you’d kept in your storage room is now under water and covered in swan shit. The good news is, you’ll be able to recover what’s left fairly easily, because the swans should be relatively cool until nesting season. The bad news is, it’s New Year’s Eve, and instead of getting ready to party, you’re dealing with a flood and twenty three pissed off birds because this psychopath you’re dating couldn’t be bothered to just get you The Flash on Blu-ray like a sensible person.

And it actually gets weirder from here.

Eight maids a-milking

Eight maids. Your true love has given you eight women. As a gift. Not to clean your house or anything… they haven’t signed you up for a cleaning service to deal with all the bird crap or the water damage from the swan habitat you didn’t ask for. No, these are milk maids. They milk cows, and according to the song (which we’ve probably been singing for five minutes by now), that is exactly what they’re doing. These eight maids are a-milking.

Your true love did not give you any cows.

Putting aside the person-as-gift problem for now (but oh will we ever come back to it), you have been handed criminals. These eight ladies are out there, in the countryside, sneaking onto farms and milking things, then presumably bringing their unpasteurized spoils back to you in your bird-infested house that I have to believe has been the subject of some noise complaints by now.

Happy new year. You are now running a gang of milk thieves. And since there isn’t a lot of overlap between “people qualified to milk cows” and “skilled cat burglars,” I don’t love your chances of getting away with this. A rancher, or worse, a factory farm is about to press charges against you.

Nine ladies dancing

So… now your true love has handed you nine dancers. We have dancers… being given as gifts. This… Your true love’s unorthodox gift plan has gone from a wacky, feathery nightmare to something horrible.

Let’s stop beating around the bush here. Your “true love” has stopped handing you increasingly large and potentially angry birds, and is instead giving you human beings as gifts. As pets. SLAVES. Your true love is a human trafficker. First, eight women who spend their nights stealing you milk, now nine women to dance for your amusement. Which, I guess, as far as women (probably eastern European or Asian) being offered “dance scholarships” in the west go, is less horrific than the usual. They may be slaves in a house overrun with birds and unpasteurized milk, but they actually do get to dance. That’s… something?

Oh, wait… is that why they gave you the rings? The five golden rings? Were they… were they supposed to be your pimp bling? Your true love was dressing you to be a pimp. Marinate on that. The only genuinely positive gift on this list is tainted forever.

Ten lords a-leaping

Oh no. No no no. It’s all becoming clear. I thought maybe your true love was just tapped into a terrible, terrible black market of human slaves and… mildly exotic birds, but it’s so much worse than that.

It is terribly, horribly, tragically easy to buy women. I assume there’s a way to do that on the dark web, something I hope to never, ever have to confirm.

This is going to a dark place. Let's take a baby otter break. — This is going to a dark place. Let’s take a baby otter break.

Your true love didn’t just grab ten poncy-looking brits. No, these are ten lords. Noblemen. People who actually govern (when they choose to) in the UK. People with security and staff, people who would look for them if they went missing and turned up in somebody’s sour-milk-reeking slave mill and birdhouse. Kidnapping one noble takes work, and attracts attention. Grabbing ten? They’re either Kilgrave from Jessica Jones, controlling minds, or else your true love conquered a country. They marched in, seized power, rounded up ten of the ruling class, slapped them in chains, and shipped them to your house to jump around. Jump around. Jump up, jump up, and get down.

That may have been an inappropriate time for the House of Pain (they’re far from plain), but I thought maybe a touch of levity would help, given that you’re slowly learning that your true love is a goddamn monster.

Eleven pipers piping

Of course. Of course that’s next. What took so long, really? Surely those nine enslaved dancers and ten leaping lords could use some musical accompaniment. Let’s just kidnap a jazz band. Why not at this point.

Twelve drummers drumming

Sure. Come the fuck in. Drum up a storm. Somehow we’ve made it all the way to January 5th and the cops aren’t here, so bring in a drumline. It’s like a bird-poop-crusted Burning Man.

So let’s recap. What exactly has this true love of yours thrust into your home over the last twelve days?

Twenty-three birds, some of which are fighting, all of which are pooping, some of which have cages you’ve been neglecting to clean because of the chaos that followed, so I bet people are starting to get sick.

One hastily-constructed aviary to hold said birds. Hopefully. Which spared you nothing, thanks to…

One aquatic swan habitat, somewhere in your house.

No less than fifty slaves. Eight of whom are constantly stealing fresh, raw milk and stuffing it anywhere that has less than five birds. Nine of whom are dancing to the music played by eleven enslaved pipers and twelve involuntary drummers, making enough of a racket to draw the attention of the authorities. And let’s not forget the ten lords who were taken either as part of a war crime, or as part of a series of kidnappings that are probably bringing someone’s special forces crashing through your window.

Merry Christmas. You have the bird flu, some sort of milk-borne infection, and you’re on your way to the Hague to face prosecution for crimes against humanity. All because you fell in love with a monster who thought paying for a year of your Netflix subscription wasn’t “flashy” enough. And every year, you get to hear people sing about how you ended up in this mess with smiles on their faces, because somehow they don’t see that none of this is okay.

I mean Little Saint Nick is a bad song, but god damn.

Fasts and Furiouses 4: Mulligan!

Previously in the tales of people who are sometimes fast and sometimes furious about how they’re not being fast right now… Foghorn Leghorn impersonator/World’s Oldest High School Student flees to Japan to avoid prosecution for moving violations, and learns that his overwhelming narcissism, near-absolute lack of impulse control, and habit of solving all of his problems through illegal racing are, in fact, what life’s all about, and not massive personality flaws. Also the most interesting character is killed.

But you know what? Forget about all of that. Because the franchise sure did its best to do exactly that.

“New Model. Original Parts,” proclaimed the poster/teaser trailer, because eight years after the original sped through… theatres… come on, me, you’re better than that…

Eight years after a film crew attempted to remake Point Break but got, just, you know, super tired part way through and just filmed people driving in straight lines, all four of the original leads decided they didn’t have enough going on to keep turning down F&F sequels, and we kicked things back off with the numberless, stripped down “Fast and Furious.” Or as I came to see it, “The movie 2 Fast was supposed to be.”

We open with another highway truck heist, but in the spirit of franchise escalation, a slightly more active one. Instead of just driving next to/in front of the truck, then shooting out the windshield so as to hijack it, Dom and Letty (accompanied by Han from Tokyo Drift, who isn’t dead yet, and two Latino henchmen who only speak Spanish and whose names I never caught) pull up behind a truck carrying trailers of gasoline, which we’re assured is super valuable in Mexico, so that Letty can hook them to the crew’s cars, then separate them from the target truck by using liquid nitrogen to freeze and shatter the links.

This is where we began using the phrase “physics-nopes,” which were any moment in which Dom’s vehicular murder of the laws of physics caused a swift and angry “NOPE” from Daniel. Or a shout of “No… NO… NO! NO! NO!” which was elicited by Dom gunning the engine just so in order to drive under the last truck trailer as it bounced its way down the road.

In the wake of the mostly successful heist, the crew hits the beach, where they talk of the growing heat surrounding Dom. The cops north and, presumably, south of the Mexican border were trying pretty hard to track Dom down, which might seem weird for someone whose crimes were stealing low-end electronics nearly a decade ago, but I guess he never actually stopped stealing stuff, so sure. Han decides it’s time to move on. He says “I hear there’s crazy stuff happening in Tokyo,” to suggest that he’s off to meet his previously-seen drift-fate in Tokyo Drift. The two Latinos… do something. I don’t know. I wasn’t aware these were guys I needed to pay attention to. And Dom? He decides that with all these cops after him, he’s too dangerous to be around, so he sneaks off in the middle of the night, leaving Letty behind in order to keep her safe.

She is almost immediately killed off-screen.

So… good call there, Dom. Way to keep her safe by keeping your distance.

Also, I guess “New model, original parts, but don’t take too long buying popcorn if you want to see all four” wouldn’t have been as catchy a tagline.

But before that happens, we catch up with Brian. I guess the arrest in Miami six years back went really well, because Brian’s no longer doing street races to make rent and/or payments for his ridiculously pimped-out UK import racing car: he’s now been “reinstated” to the FBI. Well, they say “reinstated,” even though he was LAPD before he turned out to be hilariously bad at catching criminals. I’m pretty sure you don’t get “reinstated” to a whole other agency, but whatever.

Anyhoo, now we have a plot. Dom heads back to LA to find out how Letty died, which he does by eyeballing the scene of her accident Sherlock-style. Despite not having previously been a human forensic computer, Dom’s encyclopedic knowledge of fast cars (apparently) allows him to magically deduce that she was run off the road by a green car using a specific and (I’ll have to take his word for this) largely inferior type of nitrous oxide.

Which should be super easy to find in all of Los Angeles.

Word also reaches Brian that Letty’s been killed, causing him to reconnect with Dom’s sister Mia, and begin his own search for her killer, which involves infiltrating a criminal organization by winning a street race. Because of course it does. This is Fast and Furious, there is always a street race attended by scantily clad women at some point in the movie. Weirdly nobody at the FBI says “Whoa now, I’m not sure this is a safe environment for Brian, who has at best a 50/50 track record on these things.”

Dom and Brian end up working together to infiltrate to cartel of Mexican drug runner Artruo Braga, whom Letty had been working with, and the FBI has no photos of. They report to one of his henchmen, Campos, and his assistant Gisele (future Wonder Woman Gal Gadot). Dom’s smouldering intensity and car-based flirtation (everything Dom does is car-based) wins Gisele over to his side, and she warns him that their first job is supposed to end in both him and Brian being killed.

That first job? Driving a shipment from Mexico to California, avoiding federal helicopters by driving through a mountain tunnel. But they have to do it fast: getting to the other end of the tunnel before the helicopter can get there to see them emerge. Or, you know, waiting in the tunnel for it to leave, but that’s poppycock.

Okay, let’s… let’s speed through this, because the plot is only sort of there anyway. Dom confronts Letty’s killer (who confesses right away despite Dom’s evidence being hilariously flimsy… I guess that’s what happens when you’re accused by people who can’t arrest you and you’re planning to kill), he and Brian escape back to LA, it turns out Letty was working undercover for Brian in an attempt to get Dom a pardon, Campos the henchman turns out to have been Braga the whole time in a twist I didn’t know I was supposed to be looking for, and when he escapes back to Mexico, Brian and Dom team up to illegally extradite him back to the US, drag race style.

And then none of this gets Dom out of being convicted to 25 years in jail for all that stuff he did, so Brian, Mia, and those Latino henchmen I’d already forgotten about break him out of the prison truck as the credits roll. Brian is not good at being a cop. He goes native so easily. But Mia likes him again, and I’d consider committing several crimes for Jordana Brewster, so okay.

General reactions

It’s hard for me to not see this as the franchise calling a mulligan on 2 Fast 2 Furious. I mean, that movie still happened, because Brian managed a brief return to law enforcement (which would not have seemed likely post-F&F1), and two of his supporting cast are about to make a comeback, but aside from Brian’s FBI status this feels exactly like what the second movie would have been if they’d been able to get more than Paul Walker and Agent Bilkins to come back. Brian’s awkward reunion with Mia, who he loves but whose life he did kind of ruin; Dom and Brian needing to team up to take down an Even Worse Bad Guy (though less comically evil than 2 Fast’s torture-happy drug runner); having the finale be based around, for all intents and purposes, a race through Mexico. Capturing Braga was easy, because the real climax had to be outrunning his henchman back to Mexico.

Also worth noting, Braga went to the “cocky villain” place when they were extraordinary-rendition-ing him back to the US, right until he realized his henchmen were shooting at the car he was in. That shut him up pretty fast.

It’s a little commendable that, thus far, Brian’s been kind of okay at not killing people. Sure, Johnny Tran got killed in F&F1, but it wasn’t Brian’s idea to have a driving gun battle through LA. Wannabe Yakuza probably didn’t survive his car crash in Tokyo Drift, no, but that’s on him more than Methusa-brah. And yes, in the end, Dom does kill the guy who killed Letty, sure. But they went out of their way to not kill Vince, the biggest asshole from Dom’s crew, Brian only shot 2 Fast’s Carter Verone in the shoulder and didn’t kill any henchmen, and Braga gets to American prison alive and intact. So, 50/50? About that? That’s a better track record at not murdering bad guys than all of the Avengers combined.

It’s weird that Gisele is set up as Dom’s romantic interest, despite the fact that Letty just died like five minutes ago, but to their credit, that never actually goes anywhere. Gisele is willing to betray her boss for Dom, but that’s about it.

Overall? It’s… okay. Much like the first movie, it’s not actively bad, it’s just a little forgettable. I’d been paying attention (and live-tweeting) the whole time, but one point I noticed there was only half an hour left in the movie and I still wasn’t sure what it was about.

At this point in the franchise it would be easy to say “Well, it’s really just a bunch of barely-connected movies centred around street racers. They haven’t been world-building. This isn’t going anywhere.” And at the time? Maybe you’d have been right. Brian went from cop, to fugitive working undercover for US Customs, to not in the movie, to FBI agent. Han was, in theory, only in Fast and Furious to cement his connection to Dom and justify Vin Diesel’s cameo in Tokyo Drift, before heading off to, presumably, that part of the timeline. The entire supporting cast of 2 Fast vanished.

And then they flipped all of that on its ear in the next instalment, in which they bring the ruckus… and the Rock. Which we’ll look at soon.

Fasts and Furiouses 3: Drifting Franchise

Previously: some people were fast, others were furious, and it doesn’t really matter because this movie isn’t about any of them.

Three years after 2 Fast 2 Furious proved 2 silly for any of the stars to come back*, but 2 lucrative for Universal to stop making sequels, they took a chance and hoped that the name “The Fast and the Furious” would be all they’d need to keep the magic (for a very liberal definition of the word “magic”) going.

Did it? Well… that is a very qualified yes at best.

An associate and I watched this, along with the next three movies, while live tweeting our reactions. I’ll sprinkle that in as I go.

*Okay one, but only really briefly.

Tokyo Drift

As F&F:TD opens, we meet a new protagonist (if that’s the word I want), a supposedly 16-17-year-old high school student who looks to be about 38. I know Hollywood doesn’t like to cast actual teenagers as teenagers, but come on, there comes a point when it just gets silly. As this was the first (and so far only) F&F movie where I couldn’t be bothered to learn the characters’ names, we simply referred to this withered husk of a high schooler as “Methusa-brah.”

After an opening credits sequence that indicates Methusa-brah’s school is full of assholes facing very little in the way of consequences for their actions…

Also, concerns that the F&F set in Japan might be a little racist kicked in early.

…the douchiest douche bro jock to ever douche it up bro-style (played by the oldest son from Home Improvement. Wouldn’t have guessed that) is picking a fight with Methusa-brah for daring to speak to his girlfriend. I want to complain about the level of alpha-male possessiveness that is soaked into the franchise so far, but the sad thing is I need to wait because there’s more. This being a movie based on furious people being fast, before long they’re challenging each other to a street race. Which said girlfriend is swift to encourage.

The drag race through a residential construction site that is weirdly deserted for 4:00 on a weekday goes badly, with both cars having disastrous crashes and the law ending up involved. Doucheking and his girlfriend will skate, because of their rich parents (naturally), but Methusa-brah is risking being tried as an adult.

And so, his mother comes up with a solution, one that the local cops who were weirdly gleeful to lock Methusa-brah up a minute ago seem weirdly okay with: she’ll send him to live with his father. In Japan. Pretty sure the cops are supposed to be against fleeing the country to avoid trial, but okay, let’s get away from the baseball captain/future serial killer and towards the actual plot.

Arriving in Tokyo, Methusa-brah is quickly sent off to a local school by his military father (who forgets to pick him up at the airport, with the excuse “I thought you were coming yesterday,” and upon answering the door has to quickly clean up his, well, prostitute) despite the fact that he seems to speak zero words of Japanese. Honestly, I don’t know how this was supposed to work, but it’s clear that Methusa-brah’s dad (or slightly older brother) does not care nearly enough to get him a private tutor.

At his new school, Methusa-brah meets a few people of interest, and no, I still don’t care what their actual character names are: the only non-Japanese (but to the franchise’s credit, non-white) girl in the school, Trophy Girlfriend; second-hand electronics pawner and soon-to-be-sidekick Bow Wow; and the one-dimensional combo of Wannabe Yakuza, the wannabe-gangster nephew of an actual Yakuza boss, and his bleach-blonde henchman. Bow Wow leads Methusa-brah to the one constant across this entire franchise: an illegal street race filled with custom racing cars and scantily-clad women.

Seriously. Every time.

In a completely unexpected and unprecedented turn of events, Methusa-brah chats up Trophy Girlfriend, angering Wannabe. Because God forbid even one movie in this series not have one or more in this case of the villains decide they hate the… (hero? No. Protagonist? Still too positive…) main character for reasons other than “eyeballed my woman.” And every time they act amazed that being psychotically jealous and aggressively possessive isn’t a big turn-on.

Can we start teaching girls to hate that sort of macho possessive bullshit so that we can finally breed these assholes out of my species? Sorry, where was I…

Anyway, getting all in the face of Wannabe (and in his face he gets, despite not having money, cars, friends, or basic knowledge of the culture he’s been thrust into) gets Methusa-brah into a race with the frosty-haired henchman, because that is how Methusa-brah solves all of his problems. Sadly, here in Japan, people don’t just race… they drift race. Customized cars designed to “drift” around the tightest of corners.

Seriously, that’s all they do. These people can’t go for a romantic drive in the mountains without drifting along the highway. I know I give F&F1 a hard time for having most of its car sequences involve driving in a straight line, but once this movie hits Japan, nobody gets into a car if there aren’t corners they can drift around. This movie is obsessed with drifting to a point I’ve only seen in one other place: Mario Kart. Once Nintendo developed the mechanics for belt turns (and ultimately the blue sparks of Double Dash), they became such an intrinsic part of the game that it was basically impossible to win without them. As it is here.

Anyhoo, a local named Han (who makes a more convincing American than Methusa-brah, who is doing a southern drawl so thick it could stop a bullet) backs Methusa-brah in his race, but given his inability to drift, he not only loses the race to the top of the parking garage, but basically destroys the car Han lent him. As such, he now owes Han a car, and must join his criminal crew, where he learns to race properly.

In essence, exactly what happened with Dom and Brian two movies ago, only Methusa-brah’s not a cop.

Methusa-brah’s dad objects to him racing again, threatening to kick him out and send him back to American jail. In one scene. That’s it. This never becomes an issue. Methusa-brah immediately starts spending his nights learning to race and collecting money/driving for Han, and his father never objects again. He starts winning races, and the heart of Trophy Girlfriend (because that’s how trophy girlfriends work).

Thanks to Han he’s living the high life. Until Wannabe finds out Han has been skimming from his legit-Yakuza uncle, at which point all Hell breaks lose.

Han is killed in a drift-based car chase, Wannabe reclaims Trophy Girlfriend basically at gunpoint, and Methusa-brah knows he’s living on borrowed time, so he does the only thing he can… he goes to Legit-Yakuza uncle to make amends, return the money Han skimmed, and suggest a peaceful solution for him and Wannabe: they settle their differences in a race.

Because that is how Methusa-brah solves all of his problems. Literally all of them.

They meet in the mountains, for a high-stakes drift race down the hill that a whole crowd of people are watching on their flip phones… despite that fact that no one is or could be filming the race. They drift, they run each other, but eventually Wannabe’s hate pushes him too far, and he flips off the road to his probable death.

Which everyone’s basically fine with. Even his Yakuza uncle shrugs and walks off as if to say “Yeah, he basically had that coming, it’s all cool.”

Methusa-brah becomes the new king of Tokyo street racing, his father presumably being too buried in beer and hookers to notice, or having just stopped caring at some point. But as the movie wraps up he gets a challenge: someone claiming to have known Han, saying he was “family.” Vin Diesel, returning as Dominic Torreto, in exchange for the film rights to the Riddick character. They race off, and we, mercifully, go to the credits.

General reactions

Where do I even start with this turd biscuit of a movie.

Methusa-brah made me miss Paul Walker. Brian O’Connor wasn’t the strongest protagonist the first two times through, and while Walker’s passing was a tragedy, he wasn’t exactly Olivier, but next to the 40-year-old teenager poncing around Tokyo Drift, he’s the love child of Indiana Jones and Laurence of Arabia.

There’s never really a moment when Methusa-brah becomes someone worth rooting for. He just trundles around the movie, flirting with the worst people’s girlfriends and challenging them to races when they take offense. I don’t know what he wanted other than to race people and generally not try very hard at life. Dom had his speech about feeling free, Brian had the conflict between his responsibilities as a cop and his growing connection to the Torretos, Roman was torn between his hate of cops and his desire for a clean record, and none of those were really super well done, but at least they were something. Methusa-brah has nothing. No greater motivation, no arc, no reason to care about anything that happens to him. He is the worst.

And as far as the story goes… is there one? Really? Methusa-brah and Wannabe hate each other because they both like Trophy Girlfriend, who barely exists beyond being, as I said, a trophy girlfriend. So a protagonist we don’t like, an antagonist who feels like the least interesting henchman of a proper villain who never emerges, and a love interest who isn’t lovable or interesting.

Plus, and I know I mentioned this before but it bears repeating, it is so obsessed with drifting that when Methusa-brah and Trophy Girlfriend go driving for their first date (much as Brian and Mia did), they don’t just go driving, they go drifting. In the hills. With like six other cars.

What in the name of Zeus, Buddha, and the King in Yellow did having all the other cars there add? And could they just spend five minutes in a car without belt turning? No. No they can’t. Because if they can’t bother with characters, story, or emotion, they may as well stay on their ridiculous theme. If you can’t do something well, do something bad super thoroughly.

It made money. Less than the first two, but enough that, despite all logic, they decided the franchise was worth keeping alive. Still, the studio did have one moment of clarity and decided that the only way they could make another Fast and Furious is if the original cast could be lured back. Which, as it turns out, they really, really could.

We’ll talk about how that went next time.

Fasts and Furiouses 2: Drag Racing for Justice!

So when we last left those fast, furious, or a combination of the two, Brian O’Connor (Paul Walker) had (presumably) thrown away his law enforcement career in order to allow Dom Toretto (Vin Diesel) to escape, rather than arresting him and his surviving associates for stealing a bunch of televisions in the most unnecessarily dangerous manner possible. I mean, I assume the one guy from the crew got arrested, the one who needed medical evac after getting shot by the trucker they were trying to rob.

It was like if somebody was asked to sum up Point Break in fifty words, so they got the basic plot points, but had to leave out at the details and motivation.

Now, Vin Diesel had moved on to XXX, and was thinking his career was 2 hot, 2 lucrative (see what I did there?) to be doing sequels. Paul Walker was under no such illusions. So when Universal came calling for more furious fasting, he was game.

Let’s look at how he did.

(Think I might skip the live commentary from here, it doesn’t make much sense if you’re not watching along)

Brian’s back

We open with a Miami street race, because of course we do. Where was the movie going to start, a complicated chess game? Actually, we begin with the Universal logo as some sort of hydraulic bouncing rim. And this people prefer to Scott Pilgrim’s 8-bit Universal logo. Where’s the alternate universe where MY movie tastes win out?

Anyway racing. Through this we meet Ludacris’ Tej, who will be important later in the franchise, and Devon Aoki’s Suki, who sadly will not. She’s here to play a less hostile version of Michelle Rodriguez’ Letty from the first film: drive well, look good, don’t wear too much, be acceptably badass (though less than Letty, because she’s not involved in crimes worse than street racing).

Brian didn’t just leave the LAPD after his, objectively speaking, disastrous undercover operation against the Toretto gang. In fact, he’s a wanted fugitive for just how badly he bungled it. But we don’t learn that until after an opening race that, in this movie’s defense, is more exciting than basically any car-based action setpiece in the first movie. It has tight corners, four combatants, and a raised bridge, whereas only two out of seven of the first movie’s car scenes even had turns.

So it seems clear that going into the sequel they decided “If this franchise is about pimped-out import cars being used in dynamic ways, maybe we should put any effort at all into that.” F&F1’s drag races were deemed 2 short, 2 simple (Boom!), so this time we have a little more action than “Two people drive straight, one of them does it faster.”

Anyhoo, Brian gets arrested post-race, only to be greeted by literally the only other actor from the first movie they could talk into this: Agent Bilkins, the FBI agent who was a dick to him. Seems Bilkins has changed his tune since last we saw him, as he wants Brian’s help with another undercover operation. They need a wheelman to go undercover with a drug trader, and he thinks Brian’s the man for the job.

Which… why? Why, though? Did he forget everything that happened? Because it seems to me that based on the events of F&F1 Brian O’Connor is woefully unqualified for this job. He lost his only street race so badly that he broke the car, and when he managed to infiltrate the gang anyway he ended up siding with the criminals. Why would you trust your high-end drug money sting to a disgraced former officer with a history of being bad at his cover story and letting criminals escape? I don’t know, maybe he’s realized that he was kind of a jerk to Brian last time. Maybe he beat cancer or something between movies, developed a new outlook on life, and became a believer in second chances. Whatever the reason, he’s Brian’s new best friend, offering to clean up his record if he does this job. But’s a two man job, and Brian’s quick to dismiss the Customs officer they intend to partner him with, pointing out how ill-equipped he is to blend in.

Brian O’Conner says this. The man who blended in with the LA street racing community about as well as Donald Trump at a Black Lives Matter rally is telling someone they can’t pull off an undercover role. But okay, that’s fine, it gets us moving towards the plot… because there’s only one man that Brian can think of to partner with: his old friend ~~Dominic Toretto~~ Roman Pearce (Tyrese Gibson).

Not Vin

For the bulk of this movie it was impossible for me to see Roman as anything but a quickly-written substitute for Dom Toretto. Turns out Universal commissioned two scripts: one with Dom and one without. And it’s really clear that they only did some minor tweaks for the “Vin’s out” script. Because it’s hard to believe they thought “And for this version we’ll have a completely new character, who also has trouble with the law, who also feels betrayed by Brian because of it, and who also happens to be a world-class street racer.” Well, okay, Brian’s better, and that probably wasn’t in the “Vin’s in” version.

Regardless, Roman brings us to what someone decided was the next step for the Fasts and Furiouses. Last time around, the thing that bonded Brian and Dom (other than mutual affection for Dom’s sister Mia) was their mutual dislike for the even-worse bad guy Johnny Tran. Dom and his crew were the bad guys, sure, but Tran and his crew were the BAD bad guys, and teaming up to get him justified Brian letting Dom escape.

In theory.

Also, let’s remember, Dom was stealing and fencing low-end electronics and not even killing people. He wasn’t exactly Alec Trevelyan.

But Tran was sort of tacked on to the main plot. This time, the plan was clearly to abandon “will Brian betray Dom” and just have ~~Dom~~ Roman and Brian team up against an Even Worse Bad Guy in the form of drug trafficker Carter Verone. A criminal 2 mean, 2 nasty (okay, I’ll stop) for Brian to be seduced by the lifestyle.

There is, however, someone else who might have that problem.

Let’s have a woman, I guess?

Eva Mendes turns up as an undercover Customs agent, key to recruiting Brian. Somehow. And let’s get this out of the way: she is given even less to do than Michelle Rodriguez was in F&F1. Devon Aoki has more to do in this movie, and after the first race she mostly just stands next to Tej looking pretty. (Which she excels at but that’s not the point.)

Eva first appears at Brian’s big race at the beginning of the movie. Brian spots her in the crowd after his big win in a moment so infused with significance that I had to assume they knew each other.

They did not.

No, he just happened to lock eyes with the one person out to recruit him for a redemption quest. Sure, okay, if that’s… yes, I get it, Eva Mendes is pretty spectacularly attractive, but this was in a crowd filled with great-looking women in skimpier outfits standing next to racing cars.

There is just an endless supply of good looking women willing to dress sexy and hang around street races in these movies. I picked the wrong hobbies, I tell you what.

Anyway, she’s their inside woman, the person getting Brian and Roman close to Verone. The problem is, she herself is a little uncomfortably close to Verone, leading Roman to suspect she’s compromised. Brian disagrees, because she’s a fine looking woman, and if F&F1 teaches us anything, it’s that dangle a fine looking woman in front of Brian, and he not only won’t believe she’s up to anything, he’s probably looking for a way to help her brother escape the law.

So we’ve got an ex-cop with a history of going native while undercover; his ex-con buddy who hates everyone he sees with a badge; an inside woman who appears to be literally sleeping with the enemy; and a senior Customs officer so convinced Brian and Roman can’t be trusted that he almost blows their cover 15 minutes into the operation.

I changed my mind. I think Agent Bilkins is just trying to get fired.

Overall thoughts?

Not as bad as I expected. Not good, but not as bad as I expected.

First of all, having Brian and Roman team up to bring down worse criminals is, I’ll admit, the jump-off point for the world-travelling terrorist-battling mega-franchise this becomes. It’s like the American Dr. Who pilot: yes, it’s bad, but contains a prototype version of a lot of what makes the franchise good down the road.

A friend and I had a long-term argument back in 2005 regarding the ill-advised sequel to XXX. John was convinced that XXX: State of the Union could not, as I claimed, be a step down from the first XXX, because XXX was way too stupid to be superior to anything, even its own sequel. However, based on my own observations and the box office for the Ice Cube-led State of the Union, I feel I was correct. It was possible to be worse than XXX. I say this as context for my next sentence, which otherwise would seem like a nonsense statement to many people.

The movie does suffer from Vin Diesel’s absence.

Walker and Gibson are a little 2 bland, 2 unengaging (I lied about stopping) to carry the movie. Walker is still capping out as a slightly better version of Keanu Reeves in Point Break. It took an hour of movie before I saw Roman as anything other than a jive-talking Dom clone, because that’s how long it took for his and Brian’s backstory to have any sort of traction. Until then, it was simply a rapper working his way through Vin Diesel’s story beats. Brian says “bro” about 50 million times in this movie, and every time it sounds about as natural as it would coming out of Dick Cheney.

They did their best to up the car-based action (to the point of having the final boss fight be simply landing a car on his boat… you heard… and then shooting him once in the shoulder) but there’s still way more closeups of speedometers and gear shifting than actually exciting visuals. That’s what turned me against this franchise when I was running it at the Moviedome: 2 Fast 2 Furious had a lot of gear-shifting, while two hour Mini Cooper advertisement The Italian Job just showed cars driving super fast.

On the one hand, there are the seeds for the F&F franchise-to-be. On the other, there are also a lot of reasons why maybe it should have been put down. The only thing that separates it from any other fairly generic action movie is the street racing and weird surplus of customized racing cars. And if I had to name a strength of this movie, all the street-racing (and in one case jetskis) ka foofaraw wouldn’t be it.

Actually if I had to name a strength of this movie I’d claim to need the washroom and sneak out of the window.

It… kind of has a story, I guess? I just finished it a few hours ago and I’m having trouble naming what it was about. What the struggles were, what the arcs were. They had a job, the bad guy proved (extensively) he was bad, and then they foiled him and the movie was over. I don’t know what else I expected, but it’s starting to feel even more hollow than F&F1.

Very much a film franchise that would need redemption just as much as the careers of its original stars. But first, they had to go Tokyo Drifting.

Random thoughts

Ludacris starts out with an afro that would put half the cast of a 70s blacksploitation movie to shame, then ends up with cornrows the next time we see him. Who told him that was okay?
I wondered why Brian’s racing car in the first scene was British, all steering wheel on the right. Turns out that was actually Paul Walker’s car. He was huge into street racing and actually a skilled driver. He even did some of his own driving stunts. Respect. (Reminder: yes, he died in a car accident, but no, he wasn’t driving)
Brian still fits in around mostly POC street racers about as well Carrot Top at a TED talk.
In the second big driving action scene, neither lead is wearing a seatbelt. They are driving OBSCENELY fast. SEATBELTS, PEOPLE.
I don’t know that I’ve seen as many tricked-out import cars in my life as seem to be wandering around Miami. Although I suppose I’ve never been to Miami.
Racing for pink slips remains a key plot point. I mean, eventually they have to face enemies who can’t be defeated by drag racing, right?
Another repeated plot trick: have the BAD bad guys torture somebody in front of Brian. The difference is a) the torture’s WAY worse this time, and b) the BAD bad guys aren’t some tacked on bonus characters there to create a bond between Brian and the LESS bad bad guys.

See you next time, as the studio pins its hopes to the franchise name being enough of a draw to not need its stars.

An Overthinking of the Fasts and Furiouses

Way back when, The Fast and the Furious happened. And I ignored it. I hadn’t seen Pitch Black or Iron Giant so I didn’t really care about Vin Diesel. I cared less about 2 Fast 2 Furious, the one Vin Diesel skipped for the seemingly more lucrative XXX franchise. I assumed the world agreed with me that the 100 minute Mini-commerical The Italian Job was the superior car-based movie that summer. And when none of the stars returned for Tokyo Drift, I assumed we were done with these movies.

Then something weird happened. Everyone came back for Fast & Furious, and then the whole franchise shifted: gone was the blatant, blatant I say, Point Break knock-off. Instead, with Fast 5, it went from “series of second-rate car-based heist movies” to “series of car-based action movies so ridiculous they became awesome,” to the point that internationally Furious 7 beat out Avengers: Age of Ultron at the box office. And I missed all of it. So, let’s get caught up before And The 8 comes out.

And while I’m doing that, let’s put them under a narrative microscope.

The Fast and the Furious

Some films are timeless. No matter how old they’ve become, they still resonate just as much with audiences. But then some films ask me to recall a time when combination TV/VCRs were considered high-end merchandise. It’s like when Vincent in Pulp Fiction complains about a milkshake costing five dollars, and I struggle to remember a time when that was an unreasonable price to pay for a full-sized milkshake.
Okay, yes, that stevedore clearly just sold the truck full of TVs (from fancy to “fits in your dorm room”) to the thieves. But if the second season of The Wire teaches us anything, it’s that life for stevedores has gone downhill. The unions struggle, the hours aren’t always there, and sometimes crime is the way you get food for your family. Unless I’m allowing life at the port of Baltimore to unfairly colour how it is at the probably-busier Port of LA. That might be it. In fact, asking these movies to live up to the “painful reality of life” narrative that was The Wire might be unrealistic.
Doesn’t mean I’m gonna stop.
The opening car-based heist felt like a lot of work to steal a bunch of $300 televisions. I’m just saying. The truck wasn’t even that full.
Paul Walker is introduced. And at some point the director just pointed a shaky camera at a green car driving a visually dull track, with no real sense of speed, and said “Nailed it. Don’t need any more footage for those eight seconds.”
You get the feeling that Brian (Paul Walker) is trying to show off to Mia (Jordana Brewster) by ordering the dullest sandwich possible for two weeks straight. Tuna on white with no crusts? It’s amazing she remembers you’re a person long enough to make the sandwich.
It’s hard to imagine that these four people driving their extensively customized racing cars through a relatively poor LA neighbourhood might be up to something illegal.
Paul Walker is doing his very best to emulate Keanu Reeves in Point Break. Which is… not a good choice. Ever.
“Here we are at the meeting point for the illegal street race. How many songs can you fit into the background? We’re trying to sell soundtracks here.” -An executive at some point.
Is this movie the reason NOS energy drinks exist? Because I’m starting to think it is. And that is not a positive.
Brian is supposed to infiltrate this gang of street racers, but so far he blends in about as well as Lady Gaga in Amish country, and I’m not super convinced he’s that good at driving. This plan has some serious flaws. I mean, having Keanu Reeves infiltrate surfers? That at least made sense.
One million dollars worth of cameras and DVD players? Let me see… I guess that’s only 2,000 of them, but that still feels like it would take all four of the recent hijackings they mention. There HAS to be something more lucrative they could be doing.
So, Vince, the dick who keeps trying to fight Brian because he hasn’t noticed that being super territorial is not one of Mia’s turn-ons… he betrays Dom (Vin Diesel) at some point, right? After he notices everyone is sick of his shit? Can that be soon?
You know, I’d heard that these movies tended to have a huge lull in the middle where the action stops and everyone just talks about family, honour, and cars. That seems to be the case. But maybe we’ll have another action beat while Brian tries to prove that the Latino gang are the bad guys and not the 50% lovable band of street racers he’s hanging with. Given that he clearly hasn’t seen Point Break and doesn’t know where this is going.
“We can’t let the Chinese gang know we’re in their territory. Get our whitest, flashiest car and we’ll sneak over there.” -Dom, being bad at plans.
Dramatic irony is achieved when the audience knows something the character doesn’t. When Oedipus calls out to find the man who murdered his wife’s former husband? Dramatic irony. When Cat Grant talks to her employees about Supergirl, not knowing that Supergirl herself is in the room? Dramatic irony. Is that what they’re going for here by having Brian be the last person to realize Dom’s gang are the car-based thieves? Because they can’t imagine the audience doesn’t know.
Crazy thought. If you’re only mostly sure you’ve found the right gang, maybe don’t take the undercover guy on the raid. Just in case.
How obvious has it been who the thieves are? Brian’s boss just tells him. “It’s Dom. Deal with it.” No revelations, no new evidence, just “We’re running out of movie, time to decide who you betray.”
No, yeah, you’re right Brian. In the middle of a quasi-legal racing festival filled with criminals is the exact place to confess to your girlfriend that you’re a cop after her brother. Smooth.
And for the climactic heist, everyone just gives up on disguises. Or the cover of darkness. Sensible.
Oh, that wasn’t the climax? Odd…

Wrap-up thoughts

It’s not that the first Fast/Furious is bad, per se, it’s that it’s hollow. No, wait, hollow isn’t good. I guess it is bad. Sorry, my mistake.

It’s Point Break with half the action and a third of the story, and Point Break is not a good enough film that you can afford to strip away anything. Point Break at least tried to build a bond between Bodhi and Johnny Utah (Jesus Christ that movie was ridiculous) that would explain why Utah is so unwilling to accept that Bodhi is robbing banks to fund his surfing, and why he’s conflicted about bringing Bodhi in. Where Fast/Furious is concerned, Dom’s okay, I guess, but the motivation for Brian not thinking Dom’s crew are the thieves rests entirely on Dom’s sister Mia and Brian’s desire to get with that.

And Jordana Brewster does her best. I’ve also kind of bought Chuck Bartowski being willing to commit some mild treason for her, so… I guess? Sure? This makes a little sense? Also all the people Brian works for are demonstrably jerks, and let’s face it, Dom was stealing electronics and not killing anyone. This ain’t exactly the James Gang here.

Also, the writers can barely make themselves car about the car-facilitated heists. There’s one at the beginning, one that goes bad towards the end, and that’s not even the climax. The actual climax is Brian and Dom chasing down the Chinese gangsters that have been the Worse Gang for the last hour and a half. Point Break had a Worse Gang too, but they were shuffled off the mortal coil at the halfway point.

As far as the “extreme sports” hook that any Point Break knockoff or remake requires, car racing is, in theory, more exciting than surfing. But it also seems to be more expensive, because there are only, like, four races, and they’re all straight lines. Cars go fast, one car tries to go more fast, then other car goes much more fast, race over. Not exactly high-octane thrills.

There is no hint of the larger franchise in this movie. No sense that eventually these people are going to be travelling the world fighting terrorists in cars that make the Batmobile look like a beat-up Yugo. Frankly, I’m not stunned that it took a few movies to get Diesel back in, since I don’t know where he’d have thought there was to go with the character. Of course he’d have thought Xander Cage and Riddick would be more fun, and there’d be no need for anyone to come back to these characters.

If only he’d known. If only any of us had known. But as I said, I don’t see how anyone could have.

Next time… the Fast/Furious universe expands as Paul Walker picks up a new crew. It’s 2 silly, 2 pointless, but if I’m gonna deep-dive this franchise, I’m-a do it right.

Also they solve mysteries!

Three new series this season struck me as odd ideas, with one central theme: take a property from a few years ago, and re-purpose it as a mismatched-duo crime procedural. You know, when someone with a unique skillset teams with a no-nonsense cop or agent to solve murders? Of course you do, they’re everydamnedwhere.

Minority Report the movie was about a society where three psychic siblings spend their lives hooked up to a machine so that the police can use them to predict crimes, arresting people before they have a chance to commit them. The title, “Minority Report,” refers to incidents where one of the psychics (if I recall correctly, often if not always the sister, who was the most powerful) has a differing view of the future. These “minority reports” were discarded, when in fact they were evidence that the entire system was flawed and needed to be discarded. Minority Report the TV show, which would have been the title of Larry Wilmore’s “Nightly Show” if these assholes hadn’t bogarted it, conveniently forgets that last part, and has one of the two brothers start working with a no-nonsense cop to prevent murders.

Limitless was a Bradley Cooper vehicle based around that stupid “We only use 10% of our brains” myth, but the TV show mostly ducks around it so whatevs. Basically, Cooper’s character Eddie Morra takes a pill called NZT that turns him hyper-intelligent, and uses it to… do stuff? Except there are side effects? I honestly don’t know. Been meaning to watch that movie for like a month. Anyhoo, the series takes place some time later, when Eddie Morra is a Senator who everyone assumes is planning a run at the White House. Brian Finch is a slacker musician whose father is sick, but gets a chance to turn his life around when, while working a mind-numbing temp job, an ex-bandmate gives him a hit of NZT, which allows him to easily access every memory from his entire life, processing information like a human computer. Said ex-bandmate is murdered shortly thereafter, and Brian finds himself on the run from the FBI while using his old friend’s NZT stash to solve the crime, diagnose his father, and other issues. When the withdrawal starts getting bad, and the real murderer manages to shoot Brian in the leg, Senator Morra turns up, offering Brian an injection that will let him use NZT free of side effects, provided he do two things: 1) work with the FBI, and 2) never, ever tell anyone about this meeting or the injections. Anyone. Ever. So he and an FBI agent solve murders. Which is weird because murders typically aren’t FBI jurisdiction (barring hitmen and serial killers), but whatever.

The comic book Lucifer follows the adventures of fallen angel Lucifer Morningstar as he tries to make a life on Earth after abandoning his post as ruler of Hell in the pages of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. The Fox series Lucifer assumes that his life on Earth involves solving crimes with the LAPD, why not.

Now, I could complain here. I could ask “Why are you digging up old movies (and Lucifer) and trying to turn them into The Mentalist?” But frankly Minority Report (and, in all probability, Lucifer) will be gone soon, and I actually kinda like Limitless. So instead, let’s go nuts with it. Here’s some other properties that weren’t at all about solving crimes that I’ve forcibly and illogically reinvented as Castle clones.

Networks looking to hire me, I’m on Twitter and Instagram but not Snapchat. Should I get Snapchat? I feel like I should. Sorry, got distracted. Onwards!

Short Circuit

The Movie: a military robot is struck by lightning, becoming self-aware. When his sudden sentience is seen as a glitch, he hides out with Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy) until he can convince his programmer (Steve Guttenberg, someone younger readers might be surprised to learn was once a legitimate movie star) he is now truly alive.

The Show: Number Five is alive… and he’s looking for justice! The first true AI, granted official citizenship last time we saw him, realizes that human police can’t be trusted to investigate crimes which may involve other emerging AIs on their own. So he teams up with computer-hating NYPD detective David Prescott (Brooklyn 99’s Vulture, Dean Winters) to solve murders involving high-tech. Number Five is hungry for input, Detective Prescott is hungry to fight crime, and together they’ll chart a path. Hell, you could probably get Guttenberg and Sheedy to pop up now and again. Neither of them seem busy.

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventurers

The Movie: Bill S. Preston Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan are destined to found a band (The Wyld Stallyns) that ushers in a golden age of world peace and harmony. Unless they fail history class, in which case Ted’s father will send him to military school in Alaska. Thus, in the far future, The Most Important People in The World send a man named Rufus back in time so that he can lend Bill and Ted a time machine with which to ace their history project. So begins Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure!

The Show: Not everyone wants to see the Wyld Stallyns’ utopia come to fruition. Someone is messing with history, trying to ensure that the future is changed. As such, Bill and Ted recruit a few people to protect the time stream: rock-hating jazz-loving FBI agent Nora Dawson (Alcatraz/Vegas’ Sarah Jones), historian Vivian Thorn (Leverage’s Beth Riesgraf), and the founders of Drag Me Away, the number one Wyld Stallyns cover band. With frequent guidance from Bill and infrequent help from Ted (during sweeps, if Keanu’s not busy filming John Wick sequels, which he should absolutely keep doing), Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventurers track temporal anomalies while seeking whoever is trying to undo Utopia.

Zero Effect

Darryl Zero is… no, wait, Zero Effect was just a modernization of Sherlock Holmes. There are already two different TV shows about that. Moving on.

I Heart Huckabees

The Movie: Albert Markovski (Jason Schwartzman) hires existentialist detectives Bernard (Dustin Hoffman) and Vivian (Lily Tomlin) to figure out if sleazy corporate stooge Brad Stand (Jude Law) is out to get him. In the process, Bernard and Vivian (and seemingly rival existentialist detective Caterine Vauban) trick Albert and Brad into facing deep, unsettling truths about themselves. And a bunch of other stuff. It’s a hella weird movie. I impulse purchased it on DVD, I should really watch it a second time one of these days…

The Show: LAPD officer Jill Quinn (Summer Glau) has a gift for identifying probable murderers, but her aggressive investigation style often keeps her from closing cases. As such, she starts working with Bernard and Vivian’s proteges Alec and Tamlin (Agents of SHIELD’s B.J. Britt and Arrow’s Rila Fukushima) to identify murderers and trick them into confessing through existentially making them confront their guilt.

Cross About Crossovers

That’s enough of a break from blogging, don’t you think?

Later this season, the forensic-science-based crime procedural Bones will do a crossover with Sleepy Hollow, the show in which time-displaced Ichabod Crane works with the police to battle the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse and other magic-based menaces. It’s like Murder She Wrote crossing over with The X-Files. It makes no sense. But the network clearly liked the idea, so now that is a real thing that is going to happen.

And yet Supergirl is still forbidden from crossing over with fellow DC shows Flash and Arrow. Thanks, television. Way to make sense.

So with that in mind, here are some other TV crossovers that would make at least as much sense as, and I would rather see than, the impending Bones/Sleepy Hollow team-up. Hopefully they’re all as entertaining as this one (forgive the Quiznos product integration):

Resisting the urge to just slap Doctor Who into each of them.

Arrow of Interest

Arrow is about Oliver Queen’s evolution from brutal vigilante the Hood to Justice Leaguer Green Arrow as he fights to protect his city with the help of his team. Over on Person of Interest, reclusive billionaire Eric Finch (not his real name) teams with presumed-dead ex-special forces operative John Reese (probably also not his real name) to stop murders before they happen with the help of Finch’s slightly-alive supercomputer, which can predict violent crimes and feed Finch the social security number of either the victim or the perpetrator.

Yes, they’re on separate networks, but the street-level superheroics of Arrow would mesh surprisingly well with the cyber-paranoia of Person of Interest. Both combine the brutal combat skills of one (or several) team members (Oliver, Reese) with the improbable hacking skills of another (Felicity Smoak, Finch). Both have an ally they can never really trust, but not until their third seasons, so I won’t name them. So here’s how I see it going down…

On Person of Interest, Finch receives a new number: that of computer expert Felicity Smoak, visiting New York from Star City. Reese initially assumes from her awkward and dorky manner that she must be the victim, but Finch is less certain when he uncovers her connection to hacker group Brother Eye, also recently arrived in New York. Reese begins to agree when his attempts to tail Felicity lead him not only to Brother Eye’s founder, her ex-boyfriend, but also into a confrontation with Star City’s vigilante, the Arrow. However, by the end of the first hour, it becomes clear that the Arrow and Reese have a mutual enemy in Brother Eye, who are attempting to expose and revive a super-soldier program called OMAC. Over on Arrow, Felicity and Finch attack Brother Eye electronically while Oliver and Reese must deal with the awakened OMAC soldier, a combination of digitally-inserted fighting skills and chemically enhanced strength and speed, alarmingly similar to that of Oliver’s frenemy Slade Wilson. In the end, they part as… well, not friends per se, but not enemies.

If the network thing is an issue, swap out Arrow for Supergirl.

iSuperZombie

Supernatural is about the ongoing struggles of Sam and Dean Winchester to defend the world from whatever supernatural menaces they can find. On iZombie, recently deceased surgeon Liv Moore takes a job in the city morgue in order to a) get access to the brains she needs to stay mostly human, and b) solve murders by accessing the memories and personalities of the victims through eating their brains. There’s a fair amount of brain eating, is what I’m saying.

They seem an obvious match-up, but there’s one twist… despite having an undead lead character, there’s not much supernatural about iZombie. The zombie outbreak facing Seattle (and beyond?) is believed to be caused by either a tainted batch of ecstasy-style drug Utopium, or by energy drink Max Rager. But the addition of Supernatural elements might be a neat twist, and wouldn’t be totally out of place, which is not something Bones can say.

Liv’s SPD colleague, Detective Babineaux, has a tricky case on his hands: a victim who died in inexplicable circumstances. When Liv eats his brain, she receives a vision of something horrible: a humanoid figure that is clearly not human. Liv has discovered the existence of monsters. Her partner and confidant Ravi assures her there’s no such thing as monsters (while finding an awkward yet witty way of addressing the fact that he is technically talking to a monster), but when she looks into it further, she discovers that the victim was a Hunter, a person who hunts demons, ghosts, and monsters. Like zombies. When two men claiming to be FBI agents named after classic rock band members arrive to investigate the murder, she realizes they, too, are Hunters: the Winchester brothers.

Liv uses her brain-transferred memories and personality traits to impersonate a hunter in order to help the Winchesters must find the monster. She is also torn: if she can tell the Winchesters about zombies, maybe they can help curb their growing numbers. But they might also realize that she’s one of them, and decide she has to go too. She also tries to hide the truth of the crime from Ravi, lest discovering the existence of magic deter him from his efforts to cure her condition through science. Liv has discovered a larger world she can’t tell anyone about, whereas Sam figures out the truth, but worries that Dean will see Liv as simply a monster rather than an ally.

Writes itself, people.

Modern Muppet Family

No, too easy. Frankly, I’d be amazed if this didn’t happen in some way or another by next year’s Emmys. Nope, moving on.

Elementary 99

Elementary is a modern-day retelling of Sherlock Holmes set in New York. Brooklyn 99 is a workplace comedy about police detectives in Brooklyn’s 99th district.

One’s a drama, one’s a single-camera sitcom. But both have, as their central character, a spectacular egotist who defines himself by his ability to solve crimes. So this shouldn’t be hard.

Detective Jake Peralta is not having a good day. A consultant from Manhattan, Sherlock Holmes, has been called in to help with a rash of homicides. Jake refuses to acknowledge that anyone in New York can out-solve him, while Sherlock refuses to acknowledge Jake’s presence in anything but condescending tones. Captain Holt doesn’t much care for Holmes’ presence either, being largely against outside consultants, but nonetheless orders Jake to work with him, having been encouraged to do so by Manhattan’s Captain Gregson. But when the case proves tough to crack, and… Wunch? No… the Vulture? No, he doesn’t steal tough cases… the federal agents who Jake made enemies of in Windbreaker City threaten to steal the case, Jake and Sherlock must join forces to solve the crime. Also Boyle has a crush on Watson. Seems like something he’d do.

Halt and Catch Doctor

So I folded.

If you read this blog, you know what Doctor Who is. Halt and Catch Fire is a cable drama about five people in the early to mid-80s trying to stake their claim in the growing computer market: manipulative would-be visionary Joe MacMillan, married hardware engineers Gordon and Donna Clark, punk programmer protege Cameron Howe, and John Bosworth, a lifelong salesman whose life is upended by exposure to Joe but redeemed by friendship with Cameron.

One’s a high-energy science-fantasy show about a brilliant, undying space wizard and his human companion; one is about broken people hurting each other while trying to create something worthwhile, be it an IBM clone, a video game company, or an early version of the internet. These two shows have no business even touching each other. But therein lies the game.

Your average episode of Halt and Catch Fire involves the team facing as many crises to their current project as can fit inside of an hour, while finding ways to hate each other. So we’ll give them a big ol’ doomsday crisis. While trying to design a new interface for her company, Mutiny, Cameron encounters a weird rash of setbacks. Viruses, hardware failures, sudden power outages, all of which are leaving the whole staff scrambling, especially Cameron, Donna, and Clara, their new hire from England. Cameron suspects interference by Joe MacMillan (because every goddamn thing that happens to you must be Joe’s fault, right, Cameron?) or a screw-up by Gordon (historically plausible), but despite both of them having meetings with the same Scottish venture capitalist, there’s no proof they’re involved. Cameron turns on Donna, Donna turns on Gordon, Cameron and Donna both turn on Joe who delivers a great if condescending speech about their need to blame him for every problem they have, but by the time Bosworth pieces together that Clara and that venture capitalist who kept calling himself “The Doctor” were responsible, they’ve both vanished, and Cameron has to ditch the entire program in order to keep the lights on at Mutiny. Everyone scrapes by, but learns new ways to be angry at each other, because that’s Halt and Catch Fire for you. It’s better than I’m describing it.

Meanwhile, on Doctor Who, the exact same story happens, but this time it’s a screwball comedy about The Doctor and Clara trying to prevent five kinda jerky people from developing a piece of code that will eventually become part of an unstoppable Cyberman OS. It’s all fun and games until Clara realizes they’re actively crushing Cameron’s dreams of reinventing computers and how we interact with them, leading to a powerful but heartbreaking rant from The Doctor about how one woman’s dream has to be measured against countless lives, and that in the end he can’t ever really prevent the Cybermen. The Cybermen are inevitable. All he can do is try to delay them, to reduce the damage they’ll do when they finally arrive. If forcing Cameron to compromise on her vision (something reality makes her do once a year, minimum) saves even one planet from the Cybermen… don’t they have to at least try? This is the burden of the Time Lords… to know the outcomes, and the price for achieving them.

Shit. I’d watch the hell out of that one.

Next time… a weird trend in the new TV season.

So long, Mr. Stewart

I remember watching Jon Stewart as the final guest of The Daily Show with Craig Kilborn, a show I’d only recently become aware of. Craig made his share of short jokes, but it seemed like a heartfelt handoff. Jon had a charm to him, and I wondered how the series would do under new leadership, with a new cast of correspondents.

I remember Indecision 2000, when the Daily Show with Jon Stewart really took off. The live election coverage, the confused frustration that they didn’t have a result to announce, and best of all, the next day’s episode, based around the idea that everyone had been covering the election for 24 hours straight without a break, and were nearing (or past) the breakout point.

I don’t recall what the segment was supposed to have started as (or what they claimed), but I remember Beth Littleford, one of the few remaining Kilborn correspondents, getting Jon and us hooked on Iron Chef with her coverage of Morimoto’s thrilling victory.

In 2001, I recall Topher Grace blowing off plugging Traffic to tell Jon all about this movie he watched last night, the Wild Wild West.

When Even Stev/phen, the Carrell/Colbert point counterpoint segment, did the best coverage of Elian Gonzalez. A role-play session into Steve Carrell’s issues with his own father leads to a powerful breakthrough, causing Steve to reverse his position and say Elian should be with his father, only for Colbert to turn on him, embody the angry father, and break his spirit completely. Even Stev/phen was always the best.

I remember being sad that Colbert wouldn’t be appearing on the Daily Show anymore, because he’d be busy on the Colbert Report, but loving his new show all the same.

Or the time when Jon Stewart got Crossfire cancelled by pointing out how it was toxic. Demanding to know why a CNN anchor wasn’t holding himself to a higher standard of journalism than a guy whose lead in was puppets making prank phone calls, only to be told “Well, you’re not very funny.” And replying, from his own show, “On Monday I’ll be funny again, and you’ll still be an asshole.

For years, when I worked down the road from home, I’d spend my lunch hours watching the Daily Show and as much Colbert as I could before I had to go back to work. I thrived on Jon Stewart’s take on the week’s events.

I remember the writers’ strike, when Jon (like many talk show hosts) reluctantly came back to work sans-writing staff so that the crew could still earn a living. Jon Oliver became his main correspondent, possibly (as he jokingly, but maybe seriously claimed) because if he walked the picket line with the rest of the writers, he could be deported. That may have been when Jon Oliver began to eclipse such past favourite correspondents as Mo Rocca, Vance deGeneres, Steve Carrell, Ed Helms, and others.

And I will always remember having the privilege of watching a live taping back in September of 2006: Jon talking about the time his older brother had to fire him from a department store before the show, asking Pat Buchanan how he can possibly believe latino immigration is a plot for Mexicans to take back New Mexico, or talking about the Shofar horn with Stephen Colbert. (“It’s made from the horn of a yak, did you know that?” “Tastes like it, Jon. Must be Jewish illegal to clean all of the yak out of that thing.”)

I haven’t watched the Daily Show on a regular basis in a while. But I always liked knowing that I could. That’s over now.

So long, Jon. Thanks for everything.

And we’re back: How’s Marvel doing?

If you ever start a blog, there are some productivity-sucking pitfalls you should avoid. I may, in the past, have mentioned how long stretches of depression can make it hard to write anything: slightly more problematic than that is when you have way more writing projects than you have time for, meaning keeping up a blog becomes challenging as you have to pour your energy in another direction. Also it doesn’t help when Netflix drops Sense8 and the second season of BoJack Horseman in rapid succession. “I’ll just watch one Sense8 while I eat lunch,” you say. Poor fool.

Oh, Riley the Icelandic DJ. Could you be more adorable?

Got lost for a second there, where was I?

Right. Anyhoo, with the first draft of my first ever pantomime script submitted for review, and the first few scripts of Writers Circle‘s second season knocked off (that is to say, the easy-to-write ones), I finally return here.

So, what’s been happening? Right, yes, superhero movies.

Marvel’s first flaws?

Critics everywhere were eagerly watching Ant-Man’s performance, because between the obscure character and the late-hour firing of Edgar Wright, everyone was champing at the bit to write their “Marvel’s first bomb!” articles.

Not me, though. First off, I’m not a critic, I’m some guy with a blog. But mostly I maintain their first bomb was Incredible Hulk; it’s just that when Marvel Studios was only two movies in, and two years away from their next release, critics didn’t care. This was 2008, and the big news in comic book movies swiftly became The Dark Knight.

Ant-Man is making Phase One (ie. Iron Man through to the first Avengers) money, which is fair, because it’s a Phase One movie: a perfunctory origin story. Its domestic gross will likely end up around the first Thor’s. Lower than Captain America: The Winter Soldier, higher than Captain America: The First Avenger. Respectable, if on the low end for the studio, certainly lower than anything else in Phase Two (Iron Man 3 to Ant-Man), but by no means a bomb. Ant-Man’s grosses aren’t a sign of Marvel’s inevitable collapse: they’re a preview of Marvel’s business strategy going into Phase Three. A big movie to earn the serious coin (as Age of Ultron did and Captain America: Civil War almost certainly will), a smaller movie to introduce a new character (like Ant-Man or next year’s Doctor Strange). The sequels and team-up movies will earn Marvel their big paydays, allowing for more modest hits featuring new characters. Even if Doctor Strange does bomb worse than Incredible Hulk, Civil War and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 will keep the studio running.

So no, Ant-Man’s grosses don’t spell trouble for the Marvel machine. It’s Ant-Man’s villain that does that.

The Justin Hammer test

Following Ant-Man, I came up with a new way to express my distaste in Marvel’s ability to write villains: the Justin Hammer test. It’s similar to the Bechdel test, which judges female representation by asking if a movie a) has at least two female characters, who b) have a conversation that c) is not about a man. It’s similar in that passing the Justin Hammer test does not mean you have a good villain, just like passing the Bechdel test doesn’t magically result in positive female representation. It’s about setting the bar drastically low in order to call attention to how many films still can’t clear it.

The test is this: if you replaced the villain of this Marvel movie with Justin Hammer, the evil industrialist played by Sam Rockwell in Iron Man 2, would it affect the plot?

The success rate is not good.

Every Iron Man movie fails the test, because their villains are so similar as to be basically interchangeable (I could have called it the Ezekiel Stane test, but chose Hammer because he’s the shallowest of the evil arms dealers who hate Iron Man). Iron Man 3’s big “twist” was to reveal that the villain wasn’t Tony Stark’s comic book nemesis the Mandarin, but instead yet another evil arms dealer who wanted to steal Tony Stark’s innovations and sell weapons, and… that’s about the entire depth of their characters.

Loki passes, as no amount of scheming is likely to place Justin Hammer on the throne of Asgard, nor is Thanos likely to loan him the Mind Gem and an army of Chitauri to conquer the Earth. Dude probably has trouble even getting government contracts these days.

Winter Soldier’s Alexander Pierce… gray area. I could buy Justin Hammer as a high-ranking Hydra agent, certainly one who could get access to their Winter Soldier. Don’t buy him being given control of SHIELD, but then the idea that anyone but Nick Fury was in charge was new information at that point.

Guardians of the Galaxy passes. Justin Hammer has no opinion on the planet of Xandar, and as established, isn’t exactly on Thanos’ speed dial.

Thor: the Dark World passes, but only proves that passing the test doesn’t get you a good villain. Malekith was shit.

Ant-Man fails completely. Darren Cross is trying to steal Hank Pym’s creation in order to sell it as a weapon. Take out “Hank Pym” and plug in “Tony Stark” and it’s literally any Iron Man plot. Darren Cross isn’t just a bland, generic villain; he’s a bland, generic villain that we’ve already seen in at least three of their earlier movies. And with arms dealer Ulysses Klau being set up as the potential villain of Black Panther, they seem weirdly committed to trotting out the exact same villain plot at least one more time.

This is what spells trouble for future Marvel movies. They’ve almost never been good at writing villains, but Ant-Man can make you wonder how hard they’re even trying.

Ultron show cracks

Let’s be clear: Age of Ultron did not fail. It made a crap-ton of money and most people who watched it liked it plenty. So nobody is talking about why Age of Ultron failed. But it did earn less than the original, and was less universally beloved, so people are talking about why it was a little disappointing. How after Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy, it was a bit of a letdown. Part of that has to do with the fact that it can’t regain the “holy crap, they’re really doing this” sensation of bringing the characters from these five very different movies together for one adventure. But that being said, getting to skip the first movie’s second act of “Boy howdy, they surely don’t get along” and very little else, and go straight to the Avengers running around Avenging together should have carried us through that. The problem is, Age of Ultron was missing something else kind of key.

The first Avengers movie was the capstone of Phase One. It was the victory lap. Not only did the characters of the first five movies come together (albeit with a new actor playing Bruce Banner), the plot points and supporting casts of several films also played a role. Iron Man’s arc reactor, Captain America’s Tesseract, and Thor’s jerk brother Loki all came together to create the big crisis of the third act. It really was the culmination point of everything Marvel Studios had done that far, with the mid-credits reveal showing that something bigger was still to come.

The problem is that “still to come” is taking a little longer than we expected.

The mid-credit reveal of Thanos as Loki’s benefactor, as we now know, was not to set up the next Avengers movie, but to set up 2018/2019’s two-part Avengers: Infinity War, which will serve as the big payoff for a decade’s worth of Marvel Studios movies, as everyone who’s dealt with a kind of bland villain trying to rule/destroy their world with an army of faceless minions and a magical space rock come together to fight Thanos, who will have an army of no-doubt faceless minions and six magical space rocks. So that is the big plan, as we’ve known since last year when they laid out their entire Phase Three roadmap at a special panel.

Which, you know, wasn’t necessarily because Warner Bros. had just revealed their plan for DC movies and was dominating the geek news, but, well, the timing is suspect.

But to return to my point, this puts Age of Ultron in an awkward position. How can it be the capstone of Phase Two when we now know that the real narrative push is leading to Infinity War? It can’t, not really. And a lot of its drama and tension is drained by knowing that most of these people will be back in a year for Civil War. Age of Ultron wasn’t a victory lap for Marvel Studios: it was just another cog. Forced to spend a chunk of its screen time setting up future movies by revealing that Loki’s sceptre was another Infinity Stone (which just adds to the appearance that Thanos is really, really bad at his job, but that’s another rant), creating the Vision to wield it, and having Thor go on a vision quest to make it super clear that Thor: Ragnarok is going to be super important in setting up Infinity War, seriously you guys, don’t skip Thor: Ragnarok even though the Thor movies are the weakest ones.

At least that’s how I read the whole “Thor needs to go stand in a pool and have a vision” thing that ate up a surprising amount of the second act.

To conclude

Marvel Studios is unquestionably popular, and the most consistently successful movie studio on the planet. They made themselves this by adhering to a formula, a formula that reliably produces hits ranging from “adequate” to “massive.” Some critics have become so enamoured with the Marvel formula that they lash out at any comic book movie that dares to break from it. Yes, okay, the Amazing Spider-man films deserve every dis they receive, and I have no reason to believe that Fantastic Four (or Fant-four-stic, as the title reads) is in any way good (a full hour before they get their powers? BOOOOOO), but the X-Men films have still been more hit than miss (and if they pull off Deadpool and Apocalypse, that shifts the needle considerably), Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy didn’t quite stick the landing but still holds up, and when you’re so enamoured with Marvel properties you actually believe Agents of SHIELD is better than Arrow or its superior spin-off The Flash, you need to step back and reassess.

Drifted from my point.

Fox is trying to keep the X-Men gravy train going, and based on First Class and Days of Future Past they’re not doing terribly, except when they give Wolverine his own movie.

Warner Bros. is trying their own thing, with a more serious tone (ugh) and less rigid control over their filmmakers. They have some rules, sure (or else why would they be on their second Wonder Woman director), but still less micro-managing. They’re aiming to be the studio of “auteur” superhero movies, like Nolan’s Batman trilogy. “Here’s our sandbox,” they say, “Come play in it.” Hidden message: “We wouldn’t have fired Edgar Wright.” Which, come on guys, we don’t know that, you fired Joss Whedon off Wonder Woman back when, we haven’t forgotten.

There are those who say the only “auteur” superhero movie in recent memory is Guardians of the Galaxy, which… maybe, but it still fit the formula a little too much to give it full credit.

Will it work? We don’t know. Their only entry thus far was the divisive Man of Steel, a qualified success at best. We’ll need to get through Zach Snyder’s Batman V. Superman and David Ayer’s Suicide Squad (by which point there’ll likely be a Comicon trailer for Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman to dissect) before we can begin to judge.

Yes, it’s true: DC’s approach removes the safety net Marvel’s formula has provided them (“I’ve never heard of the Guardians of the Galaxy, but hey, Marvel movies rarely disappoint”), in that liking Suicide Squad is no guarantee that you’ll enjoy Wonder Woman. But on the flip side… Marvel’s formula is showing its cracks. If they can’t start writing better villains, or at least stop writing the same villain, and make some more movies that stand alone rather than as prelude to something else… I can envision people starting to get tired of it.

But I am often wrong.

Writers Circle Confidential: Decisions and Denouements

And so our first season comes to an end. Team post-production has been mourning the lack of new episodes to cut together for days. But it’s time for one last look behind the curtain. If you haven’t seen our double-and-a-half length season finale yet, check it out, and I’ll wait for you in the next section.

Building a climax

Yes, fine, I heard it as soon as I said it, maybe we could just get our minds out of the gutter.

When we were breaking the season, one of the questions was what balance to strike between, as they’d say on Supernatural, “mythology episodes” and “filler episodes,” or in our terms, which episodes will contribute to longer character arcs (say, Love is Blind or Deconstructing Phil) and which will be simple one-offs (In the Depths or Night Moves). We decided that for season one, we’d stick to primarily one-offs. But I still wanted a finale that represented some sort of closure for what arcs we had. Which meant that the first thing that I had to do when writing it was establish what those arcs were: Becky’s rocky relationship with Ted, Jeff’s trainwreck relationship with Claire, Phil’s inability to act on an attraction (with the exception of Zoe). Which I felt was also a great opportunity to bring back Duane Jones as Brent.

It gave us a chance to see the impact Brent had on Phil, Jeff, and Becky before his death. Which also let me underline a key difference between Becky and the lads. Phil and Jeff both need guidance in their flashbacks: they need advice on what to do about Olivia (a character from the original play that may well turn up in future seasons) and Claire. Becky just needs acceptance. She knows who she is and what she wants, she just wants to say it out loud and not be judged, and that’s what Brent gives her. That’s what he always gave her. You can see the same thing in episode two.

Which is what spurs her to begin confronting her relationship with Ted, just as Brent’s advice spurs Phil and Jeff into action.

Now… I mostly write plays. Ending a play is a whole different thing. You need a complete, definitive ending. Well, to a point. In a lot of cases, the original Writers Circle included, I steered away from the big, rainbow-wipe, happily-ever-after ending, instead crafting a conclusion where the protagonist(s) doesn’t necessarily get everything he/she wants, but instead overcomes something and allows him/herself to attempt to be happy. Which is initially what I went for here, including one sequence where Zoe snaps and lays out everyone’s issues in full.

It was determined to be a little too much closure, because unlike a play, in a TV series you want to leave some threads open for next season. So I had to tone that down some. Zoe’s still the one calling people out on stuff (especially Becky, after all the private sniping she’s been doing in Keith’s episodes), but she’s not providing a series-ending monologue.

Sound wizardry

The facts are these. We are, all of us behind the camera, fairly new at all this. So, mistakes get made. One of them is particularly bizarre. Every shot in the season finale that reached take five, the fifth take has no sound. What’s bizarre about that, other than the consistency? This never came up before. No other episode had this weird problem. And the finale was not the last thing we shot. In fact, it was shot on ten different days scattered between August and a couple of weeks ago (did some pick-up shots of Becky). The scene with all four leads in the writers’ room was, of course, shot during August’s Super Fun Happy Good Times Week (literally the only time that could happen). The airport scene was shot over a month later, and in between there were other shooting days, including nearly all of Night Moves. So it’s honestly beyond me how this take five issue only affected scenes from this episode.

But there’s more.

Some key sound recordings also went missing from the airport scene. Most notably, the sound from every take we’d picked for the rough cut. Every. Single. Take. Using the camera audio, filled with nonsense from the surrounding airport, wasn’t an option. We tried that, and Ian actually threw his headphones away in disgust hearing the result. Ian tried putting together a new cut based around the takes we knew had sound, but… it was not as good. Missing all the touches that made the original work, including an ad lib from Ryan that turned out much funnier than what I’d written.

I hate it when that happens. There is one thing on this show I do well, and I do not need Ryan doing it better than me.

Anyway. We weren’t happy with the new take, but we couldn’t use the camera audio, and given that Ryan was out of the country for another month, ADR was out of the question. As was waiting a month to release the finale, given that it was already two weeks late. Three if you count the blooper reel. Which I don’t, as we planned on using that as a buffer. As such, it looked like we were going to have to use the new, lesser cut, as much as it killed us to do so.

And then our sound designer, Pat “DJ Murr-mur” Murray, did a thing.

He spent gods only know how long pouring through the sound takes we did have, cutting them apart and then patching them back together, often one word at a time, to match the original cut. He rebuilt the missing sound takes out of scraps and made the new franken-cut sync up with the footage.

We don’t often like to say nice things about Pat in public, as he is a monster in the form of a man, but that… that’s pretty impressive right there.

Fun at the Airport

We had expected to have to get creative about finding a way to put the team in an airport. Like, sneak ourselves an establishing shot by filming the airport without permission (you know, like a crime), then film the actual scene at the Greyhound station. But it turns out the Calgary International Airport is actually super cool about filming there if you ask them nicely. Hell, they didn’t even charge us, just picked a relatively out-of-the-way spot for us to shoot in, and… well, there was one catch… told us we could shoot there at 6:00 AM. Which, in theory, was going to be a low-traffic time. In theory. there was still a decent amount of people checking in to fly between six and eight, and a (possibly) homeless woman nesting in the back corner, who had questions about launching a web series of her own. Questions I was more than happy to let Ian field. I’m the best friend anyone has ever had.

Within a couple of weeks of shooting this, I flew to Prince George for my grandmother’s 90th birthday. Looking around the nigh-deserted airport, I couldn’t help but think “Forget 6 AM, we should have shot this at 7:30 on a Thursday night.”

Now, the arrangement with the airport meant that we were locked into our shooting date. So it didn’t matter if my birthday party was that night and 22 hours of consciousness didn’t really appeal (I don’t nap). It also didn’t matter if one of our cast happened to have a severe case of either food poisoning or the flu. Try to guess which one.

You can’t, can you? No, you can’t. You know why?

Because Stephanie Morris is a goddamn champ, that’s why.

If the cameras weren’t rolling, Steph was down. Like, collapsed. Pale, weak, and if she wasn’t sprinting for the washroom she was lying half-dead in a nearby chair. But one we got set up, and Steph was in place, something a little magical happened. Sick Steph vanished, and ready-to-party Becky emerged. As long as the cameras were rolling, she was in peak form. Soon as Keith said “Cut,” she collapsed.

But damn, that was some dedication right there. Well, okay, I did have some suspicions… I may have suggested that her supposed illness was an elaborate ruse to bail on my birthday party. But either she was fine, and pretending to be that sick, or really was sick and pretending to be healthy on camera, and either way, that was some talent.

Random Observations

We didn’t do the most thorough job of transforming my main floor into Becky’s apartment. Aside from some mess (which I think actually helps sell the transition into flashback), we didn’t clear any of my posters from the hallway. As such, there are no less than four Doctor Who related prints or posters visible in Becky’s hall. So I guess Becky likes Doctor Who. Because why wouldn’t she? It’s great.

On that note… everyone’s final words as they leave for the check-in desk are a reference to one of my favourite episodes, the 50th Anniversary special, Day of the Doctor. The episode teams up David Tennant’s 10th Doctor with Matt Smith’s 11th, as well as a previously unknown incarnation known as the War Doctor, who served an interesting purpose. He spoke for Hartnell, Pertwee, McCoy, all of the Doctors from the original run. The War Doctor reacted to 10 and 11 the way any of them would have. That is, with confused annoyance at things the new series introduced, such as wielding sonic screwdrivers like weapons or saying things like “Timey-wimey.” So in the climax, as the three of them fly their Tardises into battle, 10 and 11 shout their catchphrases, and the War Doctor responds appropriately:

11: “GERONIMO!”
10: “Allons-y!”
War: “Oh, for God’s sake!”

So I went ahead and gave that exchange to Phil, Zoe, and Jeff. Because I’ve gotta be me.

Also visible in Becky’s apartment: a box reading “Pastoral Paranoia.” Pastoral Paranoia is a play by American playwright Jeff Carter that my company, Scorpio Theatre, put up in the fall of 2013. Both Duane and I were in it. The box was something that our Jimmy-Dave/Douche/one-time 1st AD/man of 13 titles Matt Pickering built as a silent auction item for the play’s opening night gala, which I ended up buying. He’d brewed some beers that came with the box. I wanted those beers.

From her conversation with Ted, we also see that Becky’s a fan of Shortpacked!, the (now ended) comic from David Willis, in that she also bought one of the limited edition posters Willis sold as a vacation fundraiser. It’s not impossible that Becky would enjoy Shortpacked!, but I suspect she’d be more of a fan of Willis’ current strip, Dumbing of Age, in which Willis took all of the characters from his four previous comics and rebooted them as freshmen (mostly) at the University of Indiana. DoA, as it’s known, focuses more on the ladies, and thoughtfully tackles a large number of race, LGBT, and feminist issues for a comedy strip written by a straight white dude in the flyover states. Maybe Becky liked Dumbing of Age enough that she bought a Shortpacked! poster to support the artist. Or maybe she has a secret love of Transformers: the Movie (the 80s cartoon, I doubt Becky’s a Michael Bay fan), which the poster homages.

The omelette Jeff’s eating in his flashback was disgusting. I mean, I find all omelettes disgusting, something about the texture of eggs makes me gag, but this one was especially bad. Most film food is. When you watch Cracked: After Hours, nobody is eating fresh, warm, food. It doesn’t even come from the diner where they shoot. Ask Daniel O’Brien, he’ll tell you. So it was with Brent’s “ham and cheese omelette with hot sauce.” It’s actually just eggs in omelette shape that Ian cooked up before we started shooting, covered in whatever Ben (whose home we were shooting in) had that resembled hot sauce. So Aaron is eating a cold, spongy, nada-omelette covered in thousand island dressing. Which Keith finished in the name of solidarity.

Dinner at Ted’s Mom’s house was actually shot ridiculously early, and at the home of Cynthia/our lead costumer, the almost supernaturally delightful Tawni Barton. Which meant asking her neighbour to please stop practising the saxophone for a few hours. At one point, Ian needed to adjust the lights, and Tawni was busy elsewhere in the building, so left to our own devices, our Production Manager Daisy Pond and I alphabetized her movie collection. Because we’re those sorts of people.

I like a good gag credit. By way of a for instance, every single episode of Robot Chicken has gag credits for both Mila Kunis and Sarah Michelle Gellar. I decided to do something similar, and add a gag credit to our YouTube credits.

So for those who don’t read the full descriptions on YouTube, I present… the Many Titles of Matt Pickering.

The Vicious Circle: “Little known fact, also dope on the mic”
Funeral for a Friend: “Records in VHS”
Brent’s Non-Replacement: “Wants to build a snowman*”
“*It doesn’t HAVE to be a snowman”
Origin Stories: “Must become someone else… must become someTHING else”
Deconstructing Phil: “Georgia peach”
In the Depths: “Otherkin Consultant”
Love is Blind: “Grinding your Tinder”
Night Moves: “Workin’ on mysteries without any clues”
Favour For a Friend: “Yaris Wrangler”
Stonebluff Road: “Auteur of atrocities”
Jeff’s Head: “Needs an adult”
Who You Gonna Call: “Ready to believe you”
Decisions and Denouements: “Shot JR”

That’s… that’s about all I can think of to tell you about this episode. Which brings us to the end of the season. I’m quite sad to have no new episodes to review, to post, to write about… but it’ll be a while. In the meantime, I’ve watched 21 episodes of the Flash in two days, so… that helped.

Here’s to season two. Hurry along, now.

I have a band of wonderful weirdos to reunite, after all.