My New Favourite Thing: Grim television shows, apparently

I’ve never understood people who say “I can’t start a new television show, I’m already in the middle of three.” Okay, that’s not true, I understand that fine, otherwise I’d have started watching Breaking Bad by now instead of saying “But I haven’t finished The Wire.” But my threshold for “TV series I can follow” is much higher.

The problem is, I can’t just watch a TV show until I’ve run out of that TV show. Sometimes I can, I suppose, like last month when I managed to get through four seasons of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia in a week and a half, but that’s a rare exception. If I’m settling in for some TV, it’s usually based on mood. Sometimes I want something legitimately amazing, like the Wire or Justified. Sometimes I’d rather something light and funny, like the New Girl or Psych. Sometimes those cable dramedies with mismatched duos solving crimes or suing bad people (with some serial elements) are just the ticket: White Collar, Suits, Psych again I suppose, or Leverage (not a duo, but still in that genre). Sometimes I realize that Bruce Campbell has been on a TV show for six years and I haven’t been watching it, so it’s time to watch some Burn Notice. And sometimes an episode of Person of Interest or Arrow exists that I haven’t seen and, well, that can’t be allowed to continue.

And apparently I sometimes need to watch something great but incredibly grim.

There are shows out there with such an overwhelming atmosphere of gloom or dread that they make Game of Thrones seem sunny and hopeful, and when they’re well done enough, sometimes I can’t quite get enough of them. Well, to a point. There can come a point with any show I’m not watching on a weekly basis when the plotline becomes dark enough, uncomfortable enough, or so cloaked in ill portent that I have to take a break, because maybe watching the protagonists I’ve come to love get bitch-slapped for an hour feels taxing. But I come back. I always come back.

Here’s some examples of recent shows that are as addictive as particularly moody heroin.

House of Cards

What’s it about? When ruthless Congressman/House Whip Francis Underwood (Kevin Spacey) is passed over for Secretary of State, he and his equally conniving wife (Robin Wright) begin a campaign against the President he helped get elected, a campaign for revenge and power.

Why do you like it? Ever since the 90s, I’ve been a fan of Kevin Spacey and been kind of a fan of stories that dare you to root for someone thoroughly amoral by making him/her the central character of the story. The best example I can think of is the woefully short-lived and before-its-time series Profit, featuring Adrian Pasdar in a similar role to Kevin Spacey, only with corporate politics being the battlefield in place of Francis’ actual politics. Watching Francis carry out his plans, the glee he shares solely with us, the audience, as he manipulates his targets into his traps, it can be so much fun to watch that you occasionally forget you’re watching a monster toying with his prey.

What makes it grim? Francis’ enemies are many, and they are crafty. Multinational corporations and corrupt billionaires, the sorts of people with no problems taking on the White House. People I don’t like seeing get the upper hand.

When things get rough for Francis, and they do, I try to remind myself that he’s a terrible, terrible person who, honestly, could use a little comeuppance. And yet… who else am I supposed to root for? The few actually good people on this show just get chewed up and spat out in his wake, and the people challenging him are way worse than he is! If you’re not going to root for Francis, and he does not always make it easy to do so, the pickings are pretty slim.

When did you give it up/come back? Usually about two thirds of the way through a season, when things are going from bad to worse, I’ll decide I need a breather. This can last several months. But I’ll be back. I always come back.

Hannibal

What’s it about? FBI profiler Will Graham hunts serial killers with the help of his friend and therapist, Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Will Graham was the protagonist of the earlier and less-known Hannibal Lecter novel, Red Dragon, adapted twice into film (1986’s Manhunter, with CSI’s William Petersen as Graham and Brian Cox as Hannibal, and 2002’s Red Dragon, with Edward Norton as Graham and Anthony Hopkins reprising as Hannibal). In the novels, it was Will who caught Hannibal in the first place. In the TV series… he hasn’t made it that far yet.

Special Agent Jack Crawford (Lawrence Fishburne) recruits Will Graham for his ability to put himself in the mind of a serial killer, to read a crime scene and figure out what’s driving his quarry, summing up the method and the madness of the kill with the phrase “This is my design.” Crawford does this despite knowing that Will is on the spectrum of personality disorders, albeit closer to autistic than psychotic. Or so Will claims. Crawford also goes against the advice of Will’s friend and colleague Alana Bloom, who worries that Will’s mind may not be able to withstand so much time in the dark places Jack is dragging it. But Jack needs Will to catch the country’s worst and most brutal serial killers, including Jack’s own white whale, the Chesapeake Ripper, so to keep Will functioning, Jack asks for the help of psychiatrist and amateur gourmet cook Hannibal Lecter.

Of course Hannibal is the Chesapeake Ripper, but they don’t know that.

Soon Hannibal and Will are joining forces to hunt murderers, while Hannibal begins to play with Will’s mind, just to see what will happen.

Will Graham might sum up Bryan Fuller’s approach thusly: “I attract the curious with Hannibal’s name recognition. I lull networks and audiences into false security with the trappings of a crime procedural, only to find new ways to horrify each week. I parade beautifully-shot atrocities across the camera, erode hope by whittling away at the heroes, yet leave the viewer craving another taste.”

“This is my design.”

Why do you like it? It’s from Bryan Fuller, who’s quickly challenging Joss Whedon and Aaron Sorkin as my favourite TV writer. He’s the creator of my beloved Pushing Daisies, and is responsible for most of the good episodes of Heroes. So it’s incredibly well written. Hannibal’s cold calculations and Will’s descent into madness are hard to turn away from, even when you really, really want to.

Former Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale) makes for an exceptionally chilly Hannibal Lecter, warm and friendly when the situation calls for it, eerily calm and scarily brutal when he lets his true colours show (typically in front of rival killers, moments before removing them). Hugh Dancy is every bit his equal as the tormented Will Graham. And if those two and Lawrence Fishburne weren’t enough, the show’s attracted some pretty impressive guest stars, including former Kid in the Hall Scott Thompson making regular appearances as one of the forensic pathologists on Jack’s team, Gina Torres as Jack’s cancer-stricken wife, Gillian Anderson as Hannibal’s therapist, and most fun to watch is Eddie Izzard as Dr. Abel Gideon, a serial killer who attempts to claim the title of Chesapeake Ripper, putting him in the real Ripper’s sights.

The sequences in which Will puts himself in the killer’s mind are fascinating to watch, as he rewinds the crime, picks apart the technique, and finds the thing that drives the killer, often able to spot a copycat just from inconsistencies in how the victim is displayed.

It’s sharply written, beautifully shot, with a stellar cast. I’d be more surprised it isn’t hip-deep in Emmys if it weren’t so remorselessly bleak.

What makes it grim? Simply put, the world Hannibal and company inhabit seems terrifying. Every week they are hunting down another serial killer out of your darkest nightmares. And it’s never “He strangles blonde prostitutes to death and leaves them in dumpsters” serial killers, no. Never so gentle. Girls are left impaled on deer antlers. One used his victims’ intestines to make violin strings. Another used the bodies to grow mushrooms. Another stacked his victims into a totem pole. And throughout it all, Hannibal is still killing to keep his larder full for dinner parties.

This show will make you hungry. You know it shouldn’t. You know, deep down, that is not beef he’s cooking… but gods damn Hannibal’s dinner parties look amazing. That twisted bastard knows how to cook, and how to plate.

Plus, you know, the protagonist (the one who isn’t an unfeeling psychopath likely to serve your lungs to his guests with just the perfect selection of side dishes and garnish) is being slowly broken from the inside out, so there’s that.

It’s actually kind of hard to believe it’s on a network. If this is what NBC lets them get away with, I don’t want to think about what they could do on HBO.

When did you give up/come back? Last summer I started falling behind on Hannibal. Honestly it was Will’s torments that did it. I was scared of what Hannibal was doing to Will, and chose sunnier climes for my TV entertainment for a while. But when season two started, and I started getting close to having episodes auto-delete from my PVR, I jumped back in, and it was worth it. While not much cheerier, for reasons I shan’t spoil, season two might even be better than season one.

True Detective

Meanwhile, HBO decides it shan’t be outdone for disturbing serial killer stories.

What’s it about? In 1995, freshly partnered Louisiana state police detectives Rustin Cohle and Marty Hart are called in on the murder of a woman found posed in a ritualistic manner. In 2012, an older, sadder Hart and the burnt-out yet still sharp Cohle tell the story of the investigation that followed to two other detectives, who have questions about newer, similar murders. Rumours of someone called the Yellow King and a place called Carcosa point to a larger, darker truth behind it all than the simple answer Cohle and Hart are expected to find.

Why do you like it? Because it is goddamn mesmerizing.

While Carcosa and the Yellow King are clear references to Lovecraft-precursor Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow, this is not a story in which elder gods rise to consume the world. If you go in expecting aliens, gods, and monsters to appear, you’ll be disappointed. And yet it holds true to one aspect of The King in Yellow short stories and the works of H.P. Lovecraft they helped inspire: the idea of a protagonist driven mad by horrifying truths. They simply trade the cosmic horrors of Lovecraft and Chambers for staggering truths about how awful the world can be, and it’s clear from episode one that something about this case eventually broke Cohle in a way he’s yet to recover from in 2012.

At its heart, this is the story of the relationship between the nihilistic Rustin Cohle and the self-destructively hedonistic Martin Hart. The case connects them, divides them, and brings them back together years later as the new investigation unearths all they tried to leave behind. Along the way there are pulse-pounding chases and confrontations and a possible state-wide conspiracy, but it’s always truly about Cohle and Hart, and man they are worth watching. The series is anchored by a spellbinding performance by Matthew McConaughey, which is not a sentence I ever expected to say. Woody Harrelson more than holds his own as the less intellectual partner, constantly annoyed by Cohle’s pessimistic rants.

The writing is brilliant. The direction is amazing. They have one of the most impressive single-take long shots I’ve ever seen. It’s eight episodes, and while the second season is already green-lit, it will be a new story with new leads, so the first season is completely self-contained, with a firm end. And man does the final episode become more intense when you have no idea how it’s all going to end, or who will still be standing when it does.

If this doesn’t clean up at the Emmys this year, I would hope the voters have a hard time meeting their own gaze in the mirror.

What makes it grim? I mentioned the horrible truths about the world, right? Rustin Cohle sees a dark world infested with horrors, and it’s hard to not see his point, even beyond the crimes he and Hart uncover.

When did you give it up/come back? Never. I couldn’t stop. Once I started watching the show I needed it like a drug. It haunted my thoughts for over a month. Like the characters themselves, I may never truly leave Carcosa.

Corn Monkeys in the Mist: challenges of the trade

Right, my projectionist days. That’s a thing I was doing. Where was I?

Now, settling into my new job as a projectionist wasn’t simple. I’d studied the theory, knew how to thread and what to clean between shows, and could build a print in the recommended hour and a half. But there were still a few things that posed problems, and would until I got used to them. Let’s take a look.

Goop

I was unprepared for the amount of goop this job would require coming into contact with.

Let me explain. I have long had issues with what I suspect to be a mild case of OCD. Yes, I’m aware people say that to seem trendily quirky, no that’s not what I’m doing, yes I’m aware that’s what somebody who was just trying to seem quirky would say. When I was afraid I might have a kidney stone in Vegas (after years of worrying about said stones), I was right. When I thought I might have sleep apnea, I was right. I don’t think you can be called a hypochondriac when you’re right so damned often. Let’s move on.

This, I feel, is why I was a savagely picky eater for my first two decades, incredibly distrustful of sauce, unwilling to let two food items touch and cross-contaminate. It’s why I have to complete every single side-quest video games throw at me or, to quote Dan O’Brien, I get terrible headaches that no doctor can explain. And it’s why, back in 2001, I absolutely hated getting anything oily on my hands.

And just try to avoid that while working with large machinery. There is no way.

Booths I worked had anywhere from nine to sixteen projectors, each needing oil and grease to function, and it was basically a guarantee that at least one of them had a chronic leak. At least one of these projectors, somewhere in this building, was going to drip oil on me when I went to clean it. Early on, in what I called my “vagabond days” of going from theatre to theatre as a relief guy, my least favourite theatre to fill in at swiftly became Crowfoot Crossing. It wasn’t the largest I worked, with two less screens than Sunridge and four less than the Silver City. Maybe it was the fact that I was still relatively inexperienced, and their tight schedule (a movie started every five minutes, while Westhills had me more accustomed to ten) kept me running until the movies were all up and running. But what certainly didn’t help is that it had more leaks than average, and I was constantly getting oil on my hands, then freaking out about it and desperately trying to get it off before running to thread and start the next movie. Lather, rinse, repeat.

This was an issue I had to leave behind, because the goop got worse before it got better. Once I settled into the Moviedome, regular maintenance became part of my life, and it was time to move past simply topping up oil now and again and into greasing the gears. Once per month, I had to wipe off a layer of old grease, then apply a layer of new grease in its place. And this was clearly a necessary process, because the grease went on orange and came out black. The grease was think and gooey, and there was no simple way to get it all over the gears other than rub it in by hand. I went through a lot of paper towels getting that chore done, between wiping the old grease off and trying to keep my hands relatively un-gunked.

Relatively. It’s not like there was a point in washing them off before I was done, so gunk was still all over me. And one of my favourite shirts just seemed to attract oil like a magnet. That’s less related to the greasing process precisely, but there was no more natural place to slip that in. But seriously, every time. Took like two washings to get it out.

Bulb changes

When I was learning the trade, the single most intimidating part of the process was the lamp house. Every fact I learned about the lamp house made it sound more dangerous.

The bulb of a projector is filled with xenon gas to help it glow bright enough to project a small square of film onto a barn-sized screen dozens of metres away. The gas is crammed into it pretty tight: eight atmospheres of pressure when it’s cool, 30 atmospheres when it’s hot. And it gets hot.

When lit, the bulb is too bright to look at unshielded. Far too hot to touch, but that’s okay, because you can’t even touch a bulb when it’s cool, not with your bare hands. If you do, the oil from your skin will burn into the crystal when the bulb lights up, compromising the integrity and leading to an explosion.

And not a small explosion.

One night at Sunridge, a bulb exploded a few minutes into a screening of Harry Potter. I was down the hall in a separate room, and it sounded like someone had dropped a safe next to my head. When a hot crystal bulb explodes, it turns into thousands of razor-sharp flechettes that shred anything nearby; in this case, the lamp house. I was still just a permittee at that point, I had no idea what to do, and management wasn’t exactly quick to offer aid or tools or whatnot. Eventually, the reflector in the lamp house had to be replaced, since the surface had been shredded, but I was less involved in that.

Changing bulbs involved a welder’s apron, mask, and giant gloves to protect yourself from potential explosions. For the first year or so of my career, anything to do with the lamp house was like defusing a bomb, and typically involved a lot of panic-sweat (not aided by the super-warm mask/glove/apron combo). Only one thing helped relieve my fear of being maimed by an exploding bulb: an afternoon spent trying to deliberately explode several bulbs, and having to put some effort into it.

Each bulb has a shelf life: after a certain number of hours, the electrodes begin to erode and the light begins to flicker. You can extend their life by rotating the bulb, but eventually they come out. Most theatres will recommend a specific hour count to remove the bulb. If it was still in decent shape, you hang onto it as an emergency spare. But when the spare build up, you can afford to toss a few out.

But you can’t exactly throw a bulb under eight atmospheres of pressure into the trash, now can you? That’s a little too close to “unexploded munitions” for the average garbagemen. So before you throw them out, you need to blow up each bulb.

The first time I had to do this chore, my old friend Jason Garred was visiting my booth, so we had us a bulb-exploding party. This involved putting the bulb in its box, wrapping the box in something, and then throwing the box, allowing the impact to explode the bulb with no shrapnel escaping. And what was telling is that it wasn’t always enough. Sometimes I’d toss the box, kick the box, and would ultimately have to hit the box with a metal rod to get the bulb to explode so that I could toss it.

And nothing removes the fear that something is going to explode like spending five minutes trying to make it explode.

Next time: the weird clique structure of the Moviedome.

My New Favourite Thing: From Dusk Till Dawn

As an avid consumer of media, I’m often encountering things I consider neat, impressive, bizarre, amazing, and/or worth sharing with those around me. The problem is that I encounter these things way more often than I actually have opportunities to discuss them, between my lax social calendar and tendency to get interrupted by a topic shift. And so I’m introducing a new weekly feature (yes, I know that my update schedule as of late makes “weekly feature” seem hopelessly optimistic, I’m working on it) to share these things as they happen: My New Favourite Thing. And perhaps describing them here will save people having to hear me rant about True Detective or John Mulaney: New in Town until I’m not the only one referencing them in casual conversation.

I will still be the only one referencing them in casual conversation. I have a sickness.

Anyway, let’s kick this off.

From Dusk Till Dawn is a TV show now

Does everybody remember the 90s movie From Dusk Till Dawn? The first full-on collaboration between artistic soulmates Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez? It’s the story of Seth and Richie Gecko, fiercely violent bank robbers, who abduct the Fuller family (an ex-preacher and his two children) in order to use their RV to escape to Mexico. Once in Mexico, they head for a skeevy strip bar catering to bikers and truckers to wait for Seth’s contact Carlos so that the Gecko brothers can retire in El Rey, where Seth hopes his more psychotic brother will find some peace. Except it turns out the bar is an ancient Mayan vampire lair, and the Geckos, the Fullers, and their new pals Frost and Sex Machine have to spend the night fighting off wave after wave of vampires.

I would totally have watched a spin-off movie called “Frost and the Machine.”

What’s fascinating about the movie is how the plot turns on a dime. The first half of the movie is a tense thriller based around the frightened Fullers trying to deal with the hair-triggered Seth and the psychotically violent Richie, in the hopes that Seth will honour his word and release them once everyone reaches Mexico. And then out of goddamned nowhere suddenly there’s vampires all over the place.

Anyhoo, if you have seen the movie, did you ever think to yourself “That was pretty neat, but I wish it had been a little longer?” Like, eight hours longer? Because apparently Robert Rodriguez did. The movie has been turned into a ten episode TV show that’s currently running on Netflix. And I don’t mean Rodriguez has made a TV series set in that world, he has expanded the “Robbers escape to Mexico, oh no there’s vampires” story from the movie into a ten-hour series.

It’s a baffling experiment. On the one hand, I have yet to find anyone who thinks there was eight hours’ worth of story missing from that movie. On the other hand… there are some neat additions. Richie’s a far more interesting character now, and the vampire element is less random. Richie already has a creepy connection to a cult of Mayan snake vampires, and his killings are less a matter of being a creepy psychopath and more being driven by supernatural visions. Richie sees things others cannot, and it’s left him wise in ways but less than sane.

While here in Canada it’s a Netflix original, the series actually debuted on Rodriguez’ El Rey network (named after the Gecko brothers’ planned destination, no doubt), a US cable network targeting Latino audiences. As such, they’re only releasing one episode per week. As such, I’ve been popping an episode on while at work on Saturdays, and emailing a running commentary to my associate Keith, who just finished directing my theatre company’s production of Reservoir Dogs and is one of the biggest Tarantino fans I know. He claims these commentaries are a highlight of his week, so I’m opting to share some of them with you now.

Episodes one and two

In which the ten minute intro scene where the Gecko brothers kill a Texas Ranger and shoot up a convenience store gets stretched into a full hour, and then the Fullers are introduced as some vampire stuff begins to seep into the narrative.

  • I guess this is Salma Hayek’s character being sacrificed by the Mayans? I don’t recall death by snake being a cause of vampirism…
  • I certainly don’t know of any species of boa constrictor that crawls into its victim’s mouth while it’s alive. What the shit was that.
  • Oh good. Because the key to improving the gas station showdown is to make it an entire episode instead of a perfectly succinct action/character beat. And let us really get to know the ranger you showed us dying before the credits. Can’t wait to be given a list of reasons why I should be sad he’s dead. Guess this is how we’re rolling on this show. (note from the present: Texas Ranger Earl McGraw, originally played by Michael Parks, is now played by Don Johnson)
  • Dude playing Seth Gecko is trying to be 1990s George Clooney super hard. George Clooney doesn’t even try to be 1990s George Clooney anymore.
  • Well Richie Gecko is creepy as fuck, so they’ve got that going for them.
  • Did… did they just have a commercial break? On a Netflix original series? Ain’t no commercials, why did you cut as if there were? (I now understand this was designed to have commercial breaks, I did not at the time)
  • Well great. Richie’s insanity is being connected to the Mayan vampire whatnot.
  • And now we’re in episode two, and the family in the RV has arrived. I already like the kids more, although the daughter’s younger. Was the father always dragging his kids to Mexico basically against their will?
  • Still trying to figure out what exactly is going on with Richie. He’s not just crazy like in the movie, there’s something weird going on.
  • Oh. They’re snake vampires. Explains a thing or two.
  • Still not sure what I think. Some of the new stuff is interesting. Some of it is blatant padding. Seems like I’m-a keep watching for the nonce.

Episode three

Apparently I did keep watching, because the commentaries continue. In week three, we continue the trend of spending a whole episode on people who had two minutes of screen time before being killed by Richie in the movie. Also, meet Seth’s ex-wife, who exists in the movie as a reference in a one-liner.

  • Come now, Seth. What exactly about the rest of today suggests that Richie can be left alone with the female hostage?
  • Katie Fuller, the ex-preacher’s daughter, is way cuter than I’m comfortable with.
  • As foretold in the pilot, Big Kahuna Burger makes an appearance.
  • Adrienne Palicki! Yay! Jake Busey. Boo.
  • If you didn’t want to be creeped out by the crazy man’s sketch book, don’t ask to SEE the crazy man’s sketch book.
  • Again with the cuts for non-existent commercials! Did he make this for a network that turned it down? (Again, did not know about the El Rey network at the time)
  • Like his father, Jake Busey can’t act not crazy.
  • So Richie’s Cthulu-crazy, seeing horrible truths, not brain-chemical-crazy. Should probably still not leave him alone with hostages.
  • Be honest, Robert Rodriguez. Was this whole Mayan snake vampire cult/cartel something you always wished you’d included, or a way to make “and then they fight vampires” less jarring than it was in the movie?
  • Also at this rate that’s going to be like episode seven.
  • Oh my god did Jake Busey just try to Jedi Mind Trick the Marshall?
  • Okay, yes, he dumped some bullets on the counter. This is Texas. Is that something people in Texas get to freak out over?
  • 25 minutes. After three episodes we have covered almost exactly 25 minutes of the movie. Honestly, more than I thought.
  • We’ve had a lot of fun here tonight, mostly at the expense of this show, but damned if “The Geckos are being lured to the vampire bar for a larger purpose” doesn’t intrigue me a bit.

Episode four

At this point I think we can firmly declare that whatever complaints and nitpicks I’ve had, this is now a show I watch. I’m better at keeping up on this than half the shows I claim to be a fan of (really got to catch up on Hannibal and Supernatural soon…)

  • Tonight, on “From a Bit Before Dusk Till Slightly Closer to Dusk.”
  • I guess “Jacob Fuller is a drunk” is a better justification for stopping at a motel when you have an RV than “The guy who bought an RV doesn’t understand what they’re for.”
  • What kind of motels have maid service at sunset? That’s crazier than Richie.
  • Uh oh. Looks like the late Texas Ranger Earl McGraw’s protege might be going Cthulu-crazy like Richie…
  • Rest easy. The cantankerous old motel manager remains as vital a part of the story as ever.
  • STOP BREAKING FOR COMMERCIALS YOU ARE ON GOD DAMNED NETFLIX (Okay, look, if you put “Netflix original” at the beginning of the episode, I’m going to make some assumptions regarding format.)
  • I give this show a decent amount of grief, but it’s certainly well cast. I’m sure this statement is unrelated to Katie Fuller in a bikini.
  • Nnnnnnnngggggyyyyyaaa Richie has found Katie in the pool I am so uncomfortable right now
  • Seriously, try to watch Seth Gecko in action and not see it as a 90s Clooney impression.
  • Richie and Kate Fuller bonding is powerfully weird to see.
  • Sure, more Earl McGraw flashbacks. Let’s do that. Otherwise we might reach Mexico by the halfway point of this series.
  • I get it. You paid for Don Johnson, you want to use Don Johnson. But NOT paying for Don Johnson was an option.
  • Tune in next week for “Stuck in line at the border” on “From Pretty Close to Dusk Till It’s Almost Dusk, Honest.”

Episode five

The bank teller hostage and Texas Ranger Earl McGraw each got massively expanded stories for this series, and Seth’s contact Carlos has become a whole new presence, so if one of the next few episodes is NOT titled “Shooting From the Hip: the Life and Times of Sex Machine,” me and this show are having words.

  • Okay. Nearing the halfway point. Let’s rock.
  • Pastor Jacob Fuller is played by Robert Patrick. His ministerial ID is old enough that he still looks like the T-1000. This shouldn’t be a point of interest, yet I’m unable to ignore it.
  • I’ll give them this, the Jacob/Seth banter remains sharp, albeit tainted by being a conversation between Robert Patrick and a high-end George Clooney impersonator.
  • Nobody on the show seems to be having more fun than Wilmer Valderrama as Seth’s contact Carlos. This is more sinisterness than I expected out of Fes from That 70s Show playing Cheech Marin’s third least-threatening character from the movie.
  • Richie, if you want Seth to take you seriously as a strategist, stop acting like a spree-killer.
  • And the moral of tonight’s episode becomes clear early on: if you try to treat severe depression with prayer and positive attitude, don’t be surprised if your wife dies in a car wreck. I mean, getting kidnapped by violent fugitives and eaten by vampires seems like fifty pounds of punishment for five pounds of crime, but part of Jacob’s downfall seems predictable.
  • That said, at least Jacob’s demented determination to drag his kids to Mexico is making more sense.
  • The problem with being Cthulu crazy like Richie is that some of the things you spout might be prophetic (Jacob’s not a demon now, but there’s a long night ahead), but there is no way for any of them to sound not-crazy.
  • Huh. The RV reached the border before the end of the episode. I thought we’d have an extra half hour of RV-related cat-and-mouse to deal with before we got here.
  • Aaaaaand I spoke too soon. Clearly I underestimated how long all of the principal players in this little chase could be stuck in a border crossing traffic jam.
  • Oh, Katie. Asking someone to listen for the word of God is a lot easier when they’re not already being drowned in the word of Mayan Snake Vampire Goddess.
  • “What a fantastic idea, let’s bring another hostage on board.” Took the words right out of my mouth, Richie.
  • Okay, Rodriguez. Show me how the Gecko brothers and the Ranger chasing them can be in the same border queue without the series ending here.
  • Great plan, Jacob. Nothing attracts less attention from border guards than clearly anxious teenagers trying to get into Mexico.
  • Okay, BULLSHIT. That is TWICE that this show has violated one of the core concepts of the movie. First Carlos, now the border guard who inspects the RV? Someone better be played by Cheech Marin pretty damn fast!
  • How do we resolve this tense border standoff? Have we considered throwing some snake vampires at it?
  • Oh, Ranger Gonzalez. Will you ever win?
  • Gonna have to wait a few weeks before we know if snake vampires are bullet-proof or if border guards are just god-awful shots.
  • We reach the Titty Twister right at the half. Just like the movie. At long last dusk! Next week, more dusk!
  • Also: nearly an entire episode spent at the border crossing. CALLED IT.

Next week: a different favourite thing. Before then: hopefully another blog of some sort.

Five Sins of Decent Videogame Movies

It’s a good time to be a geek. Hollywood never stopped looking for fantasy epics to adapt after Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter each managed to earn more money than physically exists, we’re living in a golden age of comic book movies, Game of Thrones gets nominated for Emmys, and there is a TV show about Green Arrow of all people that isn’t just “kind of watchable” like Smallville at its peak but legitimately good with flashes of greatness.

And then there’s videogames.

I’m not going to get into a thing over which side is winning, games that push the medium to grow and expand and find new ways to tell stories, or Battlefield of Duty knockoffs so generic you can’t tell one brown and gunmetal grey cover-based first person shooter from another. I’m instead going to talk about how Hollywood continues to make movies based on videogames, but also insists on not trying very hard.

It’s been over twenty years since the first major Hollywood movie based on a videogame, 1993’s Super Mario Bros., and despite that, to put it mildly, shaky start to genre, there’ve been 27 more released theatrically since then. But they haven’t gotten much better. In fact, thanks to some loopholes in German tax law, Uwe Boll was able to make several far, far worse.

We could argue back and forth for hours about why, exactly, video game movies seem unable to compete with their comic book brethren. Maybe it’s like horror movies, where the rate of return is narrow yet good enough that they don’t need to make it a great movie, just a profitable one. Maybe video games, unlike comic books, just don’t have the Joss Whedons and Christopher Nolans of the world champing at the bit to tell a story of quality in that universe. Or maybe there is just an intrinsic problem in taking an inherently interactive medium and attempting to adapt it to a medium far more passive. By way of a for instance, when I play Mass Effect, I am Commander Shepard. I decide who Commander Shepard is, what he or she does, how he or she feels, who he or she loves. Why would I want to exchange that for watching Chris Pine play a Commander Shepard I didn’t help shape making decisions I didn’t choose? Even for something as linear as Legend of Zelda, you lose something in the transition from interactive to passive.

But whatever the reason, videogame movies seem to go out of their way to make some of the stupidest choices available. Even the ones that avoid the obvious stuff, like “hiring Uwe Boll,” or “Being as terrible and as Super Mario Bros.” make stupid little choices that ensure video game movies stay stupid. Here’s some examples.

Resident Evil: just how many zombies are in that crate?

It has to be said: the Resident Evil series are the most successful videogame movies out there. We know this because they’ve managed five sequels, one of which is expected this year, none of which have gone directly to video. And they’ve managed this despite completely throwing out the basic plots of any of the games. Sure, every now and then Jill Valentine or Claire Redfield will turn up so fans of the games can say “Hey I know that person, awesome,” but in general the blend of lateral thinking and extreme violence that defined the game series has been replaced with the ongoing adventures of Milla Jovovich’s Alice, the genetically engineered superwoman out to defeat her former masters, the Umbrella Corporation.

And why not? Frankly the only surprise is that they haven’t made a game based around Alice yet. Maybe her style of combat is just too divorced from the engine they typically used to make the games. So that’s not the sin I’m here to complain about. I’m complaining about how one action beat led me to identify an annoying trope.

The third film, Resident Evil: Extinction, is set after the zombie plague has ended society. Umbrella is experimenting with a method of domesticating the zombies. However, while they do regain a modicum of intelligence, they also become hyper aggressive. So an Umbrella executive decides to bundle a group of these super zombies into a shipping crate and use them to ambush Alice and company. A standard sized shipping crate. Regular readers will be familiar with my usual complaints against what I call “infinite respawn,” in which the heroes are gradually overwhelmed buy an unending wave of generic bad guys. This can work if you have, say, a portal leading to sufficient numbers Chitauri to invade and occupy the entire planet, but not if you only have one shipping crate.

Sure enough, dozens upon dozens of zombies pour out of that crate. No matter how many team Alice kills, there are enough left over to wipe out half the main characters.  Just how many super zombies did they actually have? And how exactly did they stuff dozens of hyper aggressive extra strong living dead soldiers into one crate? One crate that, to hold all of them, must have been packed tighter than a Tokyo train at rush hour? Did they put the crate on its end and drop the zombies in through a trap door? Was there a bulldozer? How many staff died getting this crate filled?

You want a huge obstacle for the protagonist? Fine. You want the high body count that comes with horror films? Sure. Do that. But when I was watching this scene, I did not feel horror or even anxiety. I felt annoyed that they were still this many zombies no matter how many they picked off. That sort of physics bending just drags you out of the moment. Stop doing it.

Tomb Raider: worst artifact ever

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider wasn’t particularly well reviewed, and isn’t exactly the crown jewel of anyone’s DVD collection, but it remains one of the few actual success stories in videogame movies. And by “success stories” I mean it made a lot money. It was the highest grossing videogame movie until Prince of Persia, and it’s still the highest grossing if you adjust for inflation.

And at its center is the stupidest artifact you could ask for.

Lara wakes up one night as she’s heard a clock start ticking somewhere in her vast, vast mansion. She tracks it to a secret room under a staircase (must be a hell of a tick for her to have heard it while asleep on a different floor), and breaks it open to reveal an artifact. Which is a little stupid, but there’s more. She senses that it’s supposed to fit into something (like maybe a clock?), and learns that it’s the key to finding the fabled Triangle of Time, which was split into two pieces after it destroyed the city it was last used in. But it can be reunited during the planetary convergence that happens once every five thousand years or so. Which is different than all those other times the planets line up. Yes this is exactly what I was making fun of in course of true love in person the Jade Monkey. No I’m not sorry.

So Lara races against and sometimes works alongside the fabled Illuminati, and her friend/rival Alex West (tomb raider for the ladies) to find both pieces of the triangle. Why is the triangle split into two pieces and not three? Don’t worry; there’s an explanation and it’s stupid.

When both pieces are found and the Illuminati inevitably turns on Lara and Alex, the Illuminati leader attempts to reunite the two pieces which, it should be pointed out, have the jagged edge indicative of being smashed over a rock, not split into two modular pieces meant to be reunited. It does not work. Because it wouldn’t. It’s broken, you’re not getting it back together without super glue.

He turns to Lara, asking why they won’t reunite, and she throws a piece of the puzzle through a little space-time portal (I do not have space to explain why that’s a thing that happens), and as the pieces tumble out in slow motion, she grabs a single grain of sand, which is the missing piece of the triangle.

ARE YOU SHITTING ME.

First of all, who told her that was the key? I don’t recall any mention of two pieces and a grain of freaking sand that need to be reunited! And how did it not get lost? How did anyone come up with the plan “We’ll let them reunite the Triangle once every 5,000 years, but only if they figure out that they need to throw the compass through a magical time/space hole that splits it into its component parts and then grab a fucking grain of sand out of the air, which is the third piece?”

Nothing about this tomb raiding plot isn’t stupid. If you’re going to make it that weirdly hard to rejoin the Triangle, just leave it god damn broken.

Street Fighter: That UN asshole

There was so, so much wrong with this movie. While they fit in nearly everyone from the first three Street Fighter 2 games (there were a great many Street Fighter 2s before they gave in and made Street Fighter 3), only a handful of them actually resembled their counterparts from the game. Instead of focusing on Ryu, the most popular player character (from what I could tell) and the central character of any Japanese adaptation of the game (such as the far superior anime that hit video around the same time), they instead made Guile the main character. Presumably this was to give the plot, which centered around UN forces attempting to oppose General Bison and his terrorist army in the rogue nation of Shadaloo, a noble American protagonist. Which was not aided by casting a Belgian with the thickest accent possible.

But that’s not what I’m here to bitch about. You know what? Make Guile the lead. Guile from the games was actually out to stop end-boss M.Bison, while Ryu from the games just roams the globe looking for fights. Ryu from the game is an asshole and the people who played him at arcades I visited game zero shits about plot anyway. What I’m complaining about is the set-up to the most mocked and/or ironically beloved moment in the whole awful movie. Specifically, this speech.

Jump to the thirty second mark if you want to skip to my point. Jump to the 30 second mark and look at that asshole. “The security council has just voted. They’ve decided to negotiate.” Right. Okay. “What an asshole” speed round, go.

1. Of course the jerk who’s been riding Guile this whole movie picks the douchiest way he can think of to pronounce the word negotiate. “They’ve decided to nego-see-ate.” Dick.
2. Look how fucking smug he is about this. “Sure, he’s a terrorist who has killed thousands, including several of our own troops, but we’re knuckling under! Aren’t I the goddamn best, you Belgian gun-nut.” I guess “We do not negotiate with terrorists” hadn’t come into vogue yet.
3. Of course he’s British. Why wouldn’t the stick-in-the-mud trying to prevent good ol’ American gun-style justice be British. Unless you read a history book.
4.  Guile’s troops were literally minutes away from deploying, which should mean the council had already voted and the result was “Okay, go get him.” Armies don’t mobilize without a go-order, and when they get one, there’s typically little wait time and an understanding of “No take-backs.”
5. We’re over an hour into this movie and the action beats have been few and far between. There was no circumstance in which this preening frumunda stain strolling casually up to announce his intention to nego-see-ate with the ruthless terrorist was actually going to prevent the Guile/Bison showdown, or even delay it.
6. And how was that even necessary to motivate a rousing speech to the troops? President Whitmore managed to give a speech to the troops in Independence Day without needing anyone to saunter up and say “forget this desperate counter-attack against the genocidal aliens, we think we can talk this out after all.”
7. Was it impossible for action heroes in the 80s and 90s to head off to the climax without some blustering authority figure showing up to demand their badge and gun and say they’re off the case? Because that is all this moment accomplishes. We’re supposed to believe that Guile’s charge is made more badass because some dickless bureaucrat told him not to do it.

In summary, this useless blob of taint-flesh made man was the worst, most ham-handed “But you guys, fighting is bad” strawman this side of the celebrity caricatures in Team America. All the honest-to-god hard-working diplomats in the world should have filed a class action suit for defamation of character the second this ponce opened his mouth.

Prince of Persia: now 100% Persian-free

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time managed the twin tricks of being the highest-grossing videogame movie (domestically and without inflation) and being sort of okay, which is sadly high praise for the genre. It wasn’t a thoroughly faithful adaptation of the game, as it barely used the time-reversing dagger that’s the game’s primary hook, and had no sand-infected zombies for the heroes to battle, but we can let that slide. There’s still a roguish Persian prince, a princess charged with protecting the Sands of Time, and a scheming Vizier out to control them.

Except I remember them being a lot less white in the game.

Prince of Persia is set in what we now consider the Middle East, and was one of the few North American videogames to have an entirely POC cast. Look. I don’t want to have to explain why taking some of the few roles available to non-white actors and casting white folk in them is stupid and regressive, so I’ll not. Instead, here’s a list of actors who could have played Prince Dastan and Princess Tamina other than the very white Jake Gyllenhaal and the uber-British Gemma Arterton.

Oded Fehr (The Mummy, Resident Evil: Apocalypse and Extinction), Freida Pinto (Slumdog Millionaire, Immortals), Naveen Andrews (Lost), Aishwarya Rai (The Last Legion, Bride and Prejudice), Kal Penn (Harold and Kumar, House), Preity Zinta (just Bollywood movies but she’s awesome), Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire, The Newsroom), Parminder Nagra (Bend it Like Beckham, ER, The Blacklist), Sendhil Ramamurthy (Heroes), Gal Gadot (The Fasts and the Furiosos, soon to be Wonder Woman).

There. And that’s just people from things I’ve watched (and Wonder Woman). And all but one of them are known to North American audiences. Would’ve been just that easy. If only major studios weren’t so convinced that white people are afraid of movies that don’t star white people.

Which I suppose would be easier if less white people were afraid of movies that don’t star white people.

Wing Commander: forgetting what kind of game they were adapting

The thing I remember most about the Wing Commander movie, other than being less interesting to watch than the Wing Commander full-video cut scenes, is that word had gotten out that it had the first trailer for Star Wars: Episode One, and when that wasn’t true, theaters actually had to put up disclaimers warning people. I guess people were demanding refunds, because without a Star Wars trailer there wasn’t anything worth the $10 ticket. Or whatever movies cost in 1998.

So, back then, I was powerfully fond of the Wing Commander games, even if my computer couldn’t reliably run the videos. Three and Four starred Mark Hamill and Malcolm McDowell, how can you go wrong with that? Well, some reviewers say “easily, as it turned out,” claiming the CGI in the cut scenes doesn’t hold up and that Hamill, McDowell, and Biff from Back to the Future aren’t exactly doing their best work, but all I know is that 15 years later I still recognize people as being from Wing Commander 4 when I see them in other, probably better paying projects.

But at the heart, this was a series based around outer space dogfights. Wing Commander the movie should have been Top Gun in space with cat aliens, but somehow they forgot about that, and instead made a submarine movie. They even had a scene where everyone on the cruiser had to stay quiet to avoid detection by the Kilrathi. Because, you know, sonar works exactly the same in the silent void of space as it does under water.

I do not remember a single decent dogfight in a movie that should have been 70% awesome space dogfights, but I remember that nonsense.

Hollywood is still determined to take some of that sweet, sweet gaming money and turn it into movie money. People are working on a new Tomb Raider (hopefully based on the new, more human Lara Croft), a new Mortal Kombat, an Assassin’s Creed movie set for next year, and possibly even a movie based on my beloved Mass Effect. I just hope even one of those screenwriters decides to put a little effort into the story. Because it would be a nice change of pace.

Danny G Writes Plays: Salvage

And we’re back. My general inability to make use of my afternoons during the run of a play, coupled with some decent freelance writing work, has once again impacted my blogging schedule. Sorry about that.

So, right, Danny writes plays. Where’d I leave off? Ah yes. 2003. In 2002, my wife and I split up. In 2003, I found out that if it had, at any point, been a trial separation like I thought it was, it wasn’t anymore. I had some worries that, as a writer who specialized in comedies and love stories, the impending divorce would kill my ability to write. Instead, I hammered out two and a half scripts that year with ideas for two more I’d write in 2004.

Hooray! I thought. The divorce isn’t impacting my writing at all!

Ha. Ha. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA–

Anyway, here’s Salvage.

What’s it about?

Years ago, the Sterling Salvage company, run by best friends Amy Thatcher, Caleb Walsh, and Jasmine Bishop (plus assists from their accountant Marcus), roamed the world having adventures and finding lost things. But when Amy died, everything fell apart. Caleb and Jasmine stopped talking and started finding ways to self-destruct. Amy witnesses all of this from the afterlife, specifically a limbo-like portion of the afterlife called the Departure Lounge, and concern for her friends is keeping her from moving on to Heaven. Saint Matthew, who runs the Departure Lounge, tries to encourage her to let go, but accidentally encourages her to go back to Earth and try to fix her friends instead.

A task that’s made more difficult by the fact that in life, Amy had been sleeping with both Caleb and Jasmine, and mistakenly believed neither one knew about the other.

Anyhoo, after making a deal with Saint Peter, Amy visits Caleb and Jasmine, which only makes things worse, then teams up with the more stable Marcus to try and turn her friends’ lives around before Caleb drinks himself to death or Jasmine gets herself killed recovering stolen goods for the Mafia.

PREMISE!
There it is!

Yes, fine. Ghosts and mafiosi. Anyway, Ghost Amy and the long-suffering Marcus launch a scheme to reconcile Caleb and Jasmine while keeping them both alive, because if Amy doesn’t succeed in her quest, there’s no going back to Heaven. Key words are “ghostly,” “torment,” and “eternity.”

So why’d that happen?

I had a dream (yep, that line again already). The main plotline was basically there. Caleb (or who I would come to call Caleb, nobody in the dream had names… but he was played by Leonardo diCaprio) is visited by the ghost of Amy (Jewel Staite), who implores him to seek out and assist their former partner (Reese Witherspoon), who’s taking shifty jobs from a shady former acquaintance of theirs (Fred Ward from Tremors). Which is the basic premise of the play. With other plays based on dreams, it’s more about capturing the essence of the dream, the thing that created a strong enough emotional reaction that I remember it long enough to write an outline. In this case, all I really did was split the villain of the piece into two characters: Marcus, the former acquaintance, and Lilith deSalvo, Jasmine’s sinister boss. Well, I also had to come up with a way to wrap it up, gave Amy more stage time, and added in Saints Peter and Matthew.

See, a couple of years earlier, I’d written a short play about an athiest finding himself at the gates of Heaven and having to deal with surly clerk Saint Peter, with a cameo by party-Saint Matthew. It turned out incredibly well, was super fun to write, and so I decided to bring the saints back for another go-round.

How’d it turn out?

Let me tell you, 2003 was the year I learned to love the editing process. That was the year I started workshopping my scripts with a select group of friends, friends I could count on to tell me what needed work. So by the time it hit the stage for the first time in spring of 2004, I’d managed the following:

1) Amy was now afraid of being alone, so afraid she couldn’t go to Heaven by herself. This improved her previous motivation of just being too darned nice a person to move on while her friends suffered. Seriously, she was more saintly than the saints in the first draft. That girl needed some flaws.
2) Amy no longer appeared to give her friends a final farewell. Because three weeks before opening night, someone finally pointed out that it undermined literally everyone’s character arcs.

We remounted this one a couple of years back, but eight years had taught me a great deal about writing, and the version we’d staged earlier needed some further changes. Some scenes just needed a light edit, some a complete overhaul, and some had to be written from scratch because 2003 me didn’t know they were necessary. To wit:

1) I realized just how underwritten Jasmine had been. In the new version, she gets just as much stage time and development as Caleb, including her own ghost visit from Amy.
2) While still giving Matthew more ghost powers than Amy, when he gets dragged to Earth to help with the plan, he’s still a ghost and not an undead thing like Rufus in Dogma.
3) The wacky scheme to escape Lilith was rewritten from the ground up. The first one was just ridiculous.
4) As part of that, Lilith and her henchman Big Jim were made less comically inept. Lilith became more dangerous, more willing to kill inconveniences at a moment’s notice, and Big Jim, now just Jim, stopped being quite so mind-bogglingly stupid.
5) In the first version, Caleb believed in his ghostly visit from Amy. Now, he (and Jasmine) assumes it was a dream, but is still motivated to reconnect with Jasmine.
6) Matthew’s motivation to help Amy on Earth is refined: instead of just being worried about getting in trouble, now neither one of them can enter Heaven unless Amy succeeds.
7) All scenes with the saints were made 80% less lame.

And the 2012 version, while maybe not my best work ever, was still pretty damned watchable.

Would you stage it again?

I don’t know, probably. It’s improved every time I’ve taken another crack at it. It might still have further to go, but that’s okay, I doubt I’d have to burn it down and start over like some of the others I’ve mentioned.

Maybe the characters could be deeper. Maybe the mob plot is still a little cartoonish, despite my best efforts to scrape the wacky off of it. Maybe the flashbacks are still a little shoehorned in. And if any of those things are true, then a ground-up re-examination of the plot would be necessary, but I think the characters still work. Especially once I stopped under-writing Jasmine.

Plus playing Matthew or Marcus might be fun and I haven’t gotten to do that yet.

Recurring Theme Alert

  • And now for a new recurring theme, So how was this one about your divorce? This play is very much about loss, about the empty pit that comes with losing someone important to you, and the damage it can do. I don’t know that Caleb and Jasmine’s struggles to forgive Amy for all of the secrets she kept had to do with my issues regarding my ex-wife, but it would make a great deal of sense.
  • Funny-yet-menacing-villains, take two: Lilith was always more competent and legitimately threatening than Helena Von Drax, my previous effort, but Jim was even more cartoonish to balance it. Well, until the 2012 version.
  • Man and woman cannot be friends: apparently woman and woman can’t be friends either if they’re at sea too long. Marcus was the only one on that boat not getting any…
  • Mild amounts of pop culture. Batman references. That’s not so bad, right?

Next time: the other 2003 script gets extra workshop time, and man was that necessary.

Are you even trying? Oscar edition

I love the Oscars. They’re my Superbowl, or Stanley Cup, or whatever big exciting sports event you prefer, and I’ve only missed them once in the last 27 years. I’ve been throwing Oscar parties for 14 years, with an annual betting pool I almost never win. And, on top of all that, I do my best to see all the best picture nominees before the ceremony. Since teaming with an even-more devoted friend, I haven’t missed a best picture nominee since 2008, when no power in the ‘verse could make me care enough to watch Atonement.

But they do not make it easy.

Every year the accusations of the Academy being out of touch with contemporary tastes fly, and every year the Academy does everything in its power to earn those complaints. Sure, now and then they’ll make a token attempt to seem “hip” or “with it,” like having Cirque du Soleil do a tribute to action sequences, or hiring someone with youth appeal to host and then immediately regretting it, but they’re still going to fill the nominee list with obscure art house movies that nobody saw.

Even after they hit a breaking point, and changed the best picture rules. They went from five nominees to up to ten, supposedly so they’d be able to sneak in some more popular films, but instead just nominate even more obscure movies nobody cares about.

Okay, fine, sometimes James Cameron slips a hit in.

And frankly, sometimes a movie makes the cut that just really shouldn’t have. A movie that makes one have to ask… Academy, are you even trying?

Examples, you ask? But of course.

2008: The Reader

2009 (the year they handed out trophies for 2008, in case you think I mistyped) was the breaking point. 2009 was the year the Academy had to stop and take stock. 2009 was the year that the North American (and, I assume, international) viewing public was pushed as far as they could by the obscurity of the nominees. And as such, 2009 was the year that the traditional “Oscar bump,” a surge in ticket sales that followed receiving a nomination, failed to materialize, at least not to the extent it typically had.

And the poster child for this? Not the bland, weirdly unambitious Curious Case of Benjamin Button (in which Brad Pitt ages backwards but nobody seems to care), but The Reader. Specifically, why nominate The Reader and not, say, The Dark Knight? One of the most highly reviewed movies of the year and a massive, massive hit. You’d think, said the populace, that a film that proved itself to be a favourite of critics and audiences alike on that scale would at least warrant a nomination. And some replied “Just because it made literally a billion dollars at the box office doesn’t mean it’s a best picture contender.”

APPARENTLY IT DOES.

But the real question, beyond “Why not the Dark Knight,” is “Why the fucking Reader?”

Why it didn’t deserve the nod: The Reader barely even knew what it was about. Was it about the Holocaust? Illiteracy? Injustice? Who knows. It’s all over the place.

Teenager Michael Berg has an affair with Hanna, an older woman (Kate Winslet), that supposedly affects every relationship he has for the rest of his life. Like, right away. He’s unable to connect with or commit to other women because of this three-month affair, due to… I don’t know. It’s not clear. Her only winning attribute seemed to be “Willing to have sex with him,” and while she may have been the first woman with that particular willingness she was not, by any stretch, unique.

But fine, she was his first great love and her disappearing at the end of the summer hurt him in a way that younger, blonder co-eds couldn’t cure. I’ll cede that for now. Ten years later, he sees her again… on trial for war crimes. She was part of a group of SS women that locked a bunch of Jewish prisoners in a burning church, and the other defendants are claiming she wrote out the orders and is therefore more responsible than they are. A claim which Michael knows to be untrue, because he knows her secret: she’s illiterate. She couldn’t possibly have written out the orders. She won’t admit it, because she’s been hiding her illiteracy her whole life (it’s the only reason she was even in the SS), and takes the fall. Michael, in shock over his love being a Nazi war criminal, remains silent and lets her go away.

And lets a group of other war criminals lie their way into reduced sentences. Let’s not forget that. In not defending Hanna he lets all the other defendants walk away. And that’s where I call bullshit. Either Hanna’s his one great love (again–they were together for three months when he was 17) that haunts him for the rest of his days, or she’s someone he cares so little for that he’ll let a gang of war criminals frame her and send her to prison for decades. Pick a side.

The plot makes no real sense. The characters’ motivations are fuzzy at best. On Rotten Tomatoes, it scored an anemic 61%, barely ahead of My Bloody Valentine 3D. But because it’s sort of about the Holocaust, sure, let’s make it a best picture nominee.

What should have replaced it: Even putting aside the Dark Knight, in 2008 we had the Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky’s heartbreaking story of a washed up pro-wrestler trying to find a purpose in life without the adoration of the crowds.

Not your thing? How about RocknRolla, Guy Ritchie’s urban crime masterpiece? After years of playing in the genre with Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, he was firing on all cylinders when he wrote and directed this complex story of criminals and would-be power-players all united by a purloined lucky painting.

No? How about Valkyrie, the true story of the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler? There’s an all star cast of British actors (and, yes, Tom Cruise, I know that’s a dealbreaker for some of you) playing the good Nazis. But no. Let’s nominate the movie about the guy who’s so conflicted about his country’s past he’s stuck in boring, pointless inaction rather than the movie about people who tried to do something.

2009: The Blind Side

A few big hits snuck into the nominees the year after Dark Knight was excluded. There’s Up, from Pixar… there’s Avatar, proving that the Oscars are a billion-dollar whore when it’s James Cameron making it rain… and there’s The Blind Side, in which Sandra Bullock plays a rich woman who takes in a homeless black youth in order to save him from gang life and insert him onto her alma mater’s football team. But mostly the first thing.

Why it didn’t deserve the nod: Maybe one day Hollywood will make an inspirational, Oscar nominated movie about a black person who accomplished something without the aid of a magical white person. It’s not The Help, and it’s not even 12 Years a Slave, but it’s most definitely not The Blind Side.

But I’m singling it out because it’s so aggressively empty. The movie does everything it can for the bulk of the running time to squash any conflict in the story. Michael is immediately accepted into his new home, there’s never a second thought, any resistance to him playing football for the college is quashed by Sandra Bullock’s southern sassiness, even the gang he used to run with is no match for her Kentucky-fried stubbornness… and then at the very end, it generates the most forced, unbelievable conflict it can to finally inject a little drama into the story. Too little, too late to save this tale of how rich white people can fix everything if they can be bothered to try.

What should have replaced it: I want to say Black Dynamite, the note-perfect parody of 70s blacksploitation films. I also want to say (500) Days of Summer, the amazing deconstruction of “manic pixie dream girl” love stories. But let’s talk A Single Man.

A Single Man is the story of a gay professor in the early 1960s, a time when it was even more difficult to live openly. His partner died in a car crash eight months earlier, and due to the times and his position, he can’t even grieve publicly. He can’t find solace in his best friend, for not even she believes that his one great love was a “real” relationship, and that he just hasn’t tried hard enough to like women (specifically, her). And so he set out to enjoy what he intends to be his last night on Earth.

It might not be as flashy as Milk, but it was an excellent examination of the subtler tragedies of being gay in a less tolerant time. Not that we’ve nailed tolerance today. Which if anything makes it even more worthwhile.

2010: …

Well I’m not a big fan of 127 Hours and had forgotten entirely about The Kids Are Alright, but I’ll give this year a pass. Nothing that was nominated really offended me. Not like the year after.

2011: The Tree of Life

Fuck this movie. Fuck this movie so hard.

Why it didn’t deserve the nod: Because it’s a two hour screensaver, that’s why! The story, if there even is a story, is incomprehensible. The characters have no depth because it’s impossible to learn anything about them when they’re just wandering around a series of images whose meaning is cloaked in bizarre and off-putting lurching camera work.

After opening with aged-up Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain receiving news that their son (I think?) is dead, and Sean Penn receiving the same news, we cut back to the origin of the universe. Followed by the time of the dinosaurs. Why? I still don’t know. How can this have added to the story when there basically isn’t any story to add to?

I don’t know what the point of this movie was. I hated all of it, every minute, every artistic choice. Nominating Tree of Life for best picture is like nominating the crazy guy screaming at traffic for a Tony.

I mean that was the weakest year for best picture nominees this century, but Jesus fuck.

What should have replaced it: The Muppets. Sure, it had no chance of being nominated for anything but best song (damn right it won that), but I’m saying the Muppets anyway. First of all, because the best picture nominees were a sorry lot that year. Midnight in Paris and The Descendants were good, and The Artist… sure had a neat gimmick, but after that there’s a big drop-off in quality. And second, because no movie in 2011 brought as much sheer, unadulterated joy as the magnificent return of Kermit and crew, and being a movie that fully and magnificently fun to watch has to be better than some piece of garbage that the Academy assumed was good because they didn’t understand it.

And it has Amy Adams. Awards folk love Amy Adams. Because Amy Adams is inherently lovable and nobody can be that out of touch.

2011 Bonus Round: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

2010 got let off the hook, so I have room to mention the second worst nominee from 2011, in which a young boy’s autism cures 9/11.

No, really. He wanders around New York being autistic and people magically get over 9/11, that is what happens. Oskar Schell’s father used to delight him with puzzles and mysteries, but when he’s killed on 9/11 Oskar decides there must be one great mystery left, and in seeking it out, he accidentally helps some other people with their problems. Not that he really cares about that. Or his mother, who is alive, also grieving, and trying to reach out to a son who couldn’t give a fuck about her from what I could tell. Instead, he works with the man who rents a room from his grandmother, who turns out to have (probably) been his grandfather.

It’s a load of wank that builds into basically nothing. Its attempts at emotional manipulation are so obvious they don’t even work. The only reason I can see for it being nominated at all is the 9/11 connection. And maybe the presence of Tom Hanks.

What should have replaced it: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a tense spy drama in which Gary Oldman (doing some of his best work, which is saying something) must figure out which of four British operatives is working for the Soviets. Or My Week With Marilyn, a truly charming movie about a PA who is assigned to keep an eye on Marilyn Monroe while she’s filming The Prince and the Showgirl with Laurence Olivier, a famously doomed pairing. Or anything that doesn’t ask me to root for a kid who’s being unreasonable and unlikable because his father died a year earlier.

2012: Zero Dark Thirty

The nominees the following year weren’t nearly as bleak as the 2011 crowd. But the low point is probably the story of the ten-year search for Osama bin Laden, which makes you feel every minute of those ten years.

Why it didn’t deserve the nod: How do you make the search for the world’s most wanted terrorist so damned boring? Debate whether the film endorsed torture or revealed it didn’t provide good intel all you want, but once the torture sequence is done, we’re stuck with years upon years of nothing happening. Followed by a sequence in which bin Laden’s location is found… followed by about 15-20 minutes of the lead character (who, by the way, is a complete cipher, devoid of anything we as an audience can relate or connect to) being frustrated that months go by without action on her intel.

Months of the government doing nothing. Makes all the walking in the Lord of the Rings movies look like the battle of New York from The Avengers.

And when they finally do raid the house and kill bin Laden, it’s still boring. There’s no tension, no sense of danger. Say it’s because we know how the story ends if you like, but a quick trip to Wikipedia tells you how fellow nominee Argo ends and that one still had me on the edge of my seat.

What should have replaced it: Skyfall. Yeah, you heard me, Skyfall. An absolute triumph of a Bond movie, again beloved by critics and audiences, and the exact sort of thing they claimed they expanded the best picture category to include. Masterfully directed, tense and exciting in every way Zero Dark Thirty wasn’t, the pinnacle of its craft, with one of the best villain performances out there. The Oscars “honoured” the 50th Anniversary of James Bond with a montage and a performance of Goldfinger, but they should’ve given Skyfall a nomination.

And now we’re weeks away from the announcement of the best picture of 2013. The nominees aren’t quite as pathetic as 2011, with nothing as bad or undeserving as Tree of Life or Extremely Loud (they’d be hard pressed to screw up that hard again so soon), but there’s still a couple in there they could’ve skipped. But I’ll talk about that more soon, when I rank the nominees.

Wait… I’m supposed to LIKE this character?

So a recurring issue for writers everywhere is making sure that your audience actually likes the characters they’re supposed to like. I know that’s something I struggle with. Try to make your protagonist too awesome, and your audience may turn against them on general principle. By way of a for instance, a friend once wrote a doomed love story between a party-loving bachelor and a married woman, which resulted in me saying “He’s brilliant at everything he does, speaks four languages, everyone clearly loves him… and it’s not enough? I’m supposed to root for him to steal someone’s wife? If this were an 80s movie I’d be rooting for Matthew Broderick to steal his girlfriend and for him to get busted for insider trading!”

On the other hand, swing too far in the other direction and you create such a pathetic sad sack that the audience will have to wonder why, exactly, they should care about what happens to them. You want them to root for the underdog, but they’re just hoping someone will put this poor sap out of his misery. Looking at you, Jordan Bleachley of Jade Monkey. I’m not saying it’s impossible to root for a sad sack (Hamlet, anyone?) or a Nietzchean superman (Batman, anyone?*), but it’s tricky.

Protagonists aside, these days I often find something I’m watching, reading, or what have you grating on me slightly because there’s this one character that the creators and, at times, the other fans, are convinced I should love but I just don’t see it. The flaws everyone else seems willing to overlook irritate me, or their supposed appeal is a mystery.

Now, maybe it’s just me. Any or all of these cases could just be me. But just the same, here’s some characters that irritate me anywhere from a little to a lot, partially because their writers think I ought to love them, and some examples of how to do it better.

*There may be those who wonder why I chose Batman for my Nietzchean superman and not, say, Superman. Let’s just say not everyone I know is as on-board with Superman as I am and this isn’t the time for that argument.

Diane Chambers, Cheers

Who’s this? 

Anyone not know Sam and Diane from Cheers? Surely not. But just in case… Cheers was a long-running sitcom set in a Boston bar owned by ex-baseball player Sam Malone. In its early seasons the show focused on the opposites-attract chemistry of blue-collar, street-smart ladies’ man Sam and eternal academic, high-brow Diane Chambers, who takes a job as a waitress in the bar. They get together, break up, love each other, hate each other, and after rewatching a season and a half it is already getting old. Diane comes out ahead in most of their confrontations, because the writers clearly thought hers was the sharper wit.

What’s wrong with her?

Good lord she is insufferable. Perhaps this is just how Reagan’s America chose to view academics, as long-winded stuffed shirts, but Diane’s condescension, insistence on showing off by using ten-dollar words whenever possible, and massive superiority complex can really wear a brother down after a while. No wonder so many people somehow think being smart is something to be ashamed of, if this is how TV made it look.

She appoints herself bar caricaturist, despite not being able to draw. She thinks her blue-collar customers can come to love mime over their usual diversions. She’s constantly mocking Sam’s intelligence, even when they’re a couple. She expects Sam to “evolve” and grow into her passions, but demonstrates no interest in learning about his. She was incapable of picking a major in school and seems woefully unable to survive outside of academia, yet somehow manages to come out on top more often than not.

Take the episode I just watched. Coach, the elderly, absent-minded second bartender, is supposed to give a eulogy for his old friend and teammate, only to learn moments before that his old friend tried to sleep with his wife back when. He puts his rage aside and delivers a warm, heartfelt speech just the same, but it comes out that his wasn’t the only wife that got hit on, in fact his old teammate had managed to wrong everyone at the service. The crowd turns against the deceased and rushes out to burn a cardboard cutout of him in effigy… but as they do, Diane begins singing Amazing Grace, causing them all to calm down, turn back, and join her in song. Cut to credits. No, seriously, that is the last shot.

Are you fucking with me, Cheers? That is the worst sitcom ending I have ever seen, and I’ve seen over 30 episodes of Two and a Half Men. Why would Diane singing make them give up their anger en masse? There is no reason. None at all. But it works. It works instantly. It makes the titular pirates of Pirates of Penzance giving up because someone shouted “Surrender in the name of Queen Victoria!” at them seem downright logical. But because Diane did it, it works. Sorry, Cheers writers, I ain’t buying it.

Who does it better?

Britta Perry of Community. But not because she makes academia look good, although on behalf of smart people that would be nice. Britta works where Diane doesn’t because a few episodes into their first season, the writers of Community realized that Britta was kind of insufferable, and instead of trying to soften her they embraced it. They took her need to chastise and rebel and cranked it from “kind of annoying” to “so crazy she becomes adorable.” She’s a buzzkill, is constantly seeking out new things to rage against, she tries to do the right thing in the wrong way, and will typically fail miserably for the first two thirds of the episode before self-correcting, but there’s never any doubt her heart’s in the right place. I wouldn’t want to imagine Community without Britta (not that I wanted to imagine it without Troy, either, but he we are), whereas Cheers thrived without Diane.

Schmidt, The New Girl

Who’s this?

The New Girl is about Jess (Zooey Deschanel), who after a bad breakup moves into an apartment with three male roommates. One of those roommates is Schmidt, the image-obsessed alpha-male-wannabe whose behaviour necessitates a “Douche Jar” he needs to throw money in when… well, you get it. He’s image-obsessed, self-centered, insensitive, and a little controlling at times. But he’s apparently lovable enough to be the breakout character. Moreso than Jess, who the series is based around. It’s just… well…

What’s wrong with him?

The Douche Jar isn’t there for no reason. Where Britta Perry goes about the right thing the wrong way, Schmidt locks on to what he wants, which is often something he shouldn’t want or doesn’t deserve, and pursues it in the worst manner possible. He spends twenty minutes of the episode absolutely not deserving anything nice to happen to him, makes one token gesture of decency, then nine times out of ten he gets the girl or the promotion or whatever. And, since this is a sitcom, he goes back to being awful the next week,

People seem to love him, probably because the guy playing him is unquestionably funny, but I spend at least half of most episodes wishing something would happen to pierce his shell and force him to realize that he’s the worst. Or get hit by a truck. The bubble finally popped in the third season, though, as his attempt to date two women at once while claiming to both that he’d broken up with the other, and his decision to lash out at Jess and his best friend Nick for revealing his deception, finally broke the spell he had over viewers. Schmidt went too far, and they were forced to dial back his douchey habits. To which I can only say “How did you not see this coming.”

Who does it better?

Tom Haverford of Parks and Recreation. Tom is even more selfish, image-obsessed, and materialistic, but unlike Schmidt, he fails as often as he succeeds. He often doesn’t get the girl. When he founded a business with his even more ridiculous best friend Jean-Ralphio, they blow all of their money on insane opulence, and as a result the business folds within months. He, too, has his flashes of decency, but they’re not used to excuse his bad behaviour. They’re used to make the few times he does succeed feel earned. Tom’s easier to love because when he does act the fool, you know he’s going to get a smack for it.

Dwight and Angela, The Office

Who’s this?

Some spoilers for anyone who hasn’t seen all of the Office but intends to. A mockumentary of life in a Pennsylvania paper company, the Office grew from centering on four leads (writer/producer BJ Novak may have been in the opening credits, but not even he considered his character a “lead”) to a large and well-developed ensemble. Among the ensemble were Dwight, the tyrannical but clueless assistant manager, and Angela, the stern head accountant. Dwight was always trying to seize more power and take over the branch, while Angela was swift to disapprove of anything and everything that didn’t match her hyper-Christian, hyper-conservative values. The two had an on-again, off-again affair that covered the show’s entire nine-year run, and in its own broken, dysfunctional way rivalled the supposedly central relationship of slacker salesman Jim and receptionist Pam, least awful characters, and thus theoretically the emotional core. Didn’t always work out like that, though.

Why don’t they work?

They do, most of the time, because so much of the humour of the show comes from laughing at how terrible and awkward everyone is. Dwight is always unnecessarily hostile, controlling, and power-hungry. Angela is always judgmental, especially of Pam. But eventually, they grow from characters you love to hate to characters you just kind of like. But there’s some problems.

In the first seasons, Dwight was always getting pranked by Jim. Dwight was crazy and borderline abusive to the rest of the staff, so Jim would pull a prank to knock him down a peg. An entertaining running gag. But as Dwight grew in popularity, they stopped playing him as a victim. In later seasons, Dwight even pulled his own schemes against Jim, but where Jim’s pranks were meant to annoy but generally harmless, Dwight’s schemes were actively cruel, including trying to get Jim fired or repeatedly ambushing him with snowballs, pelting him until he drew blood. It got uncomfortable to watch, and not the funny uncomfortable that was the show’s stock in trade.

Angela, meanwhile, continually judged her female coworkers, labelling any deviation from Victorian morals or dress code whorish. She was especially hard on Pam, for the crime of having been engaged to one co-worker (Roy from the warehouse), then dating another a year after she and Roy broke up. Angela, meanwhile, had an affair with Dwight while engaged to someone else, and eventually everyone knew about it. Yet she continued to play judge and jury on everyone’s morality. No, Angela, no. You do not get to cheat on your fiance with one of his co-workers and then still be the self-appointed moral center of the office. But nobody on the show ever throws that in her face, because that might mean somebody grows out of their assigned persona.

And then comes the series finale, when it gets a bit awkward. See, they needed a big happy ending to wrap things up with. But of the original primary characters, original lead Michael Scott had found his blue heaven and left the show in season seven, and Jim and Pam had gotten married in season six, and now had two children. Well, there was a year-long plot about Jim founding a sports-rep company to pursue his dream job, and the stress that put on his and Pam’s marriage, but “They’re still married” isn’t a big enough thing to wrap the show with. That left Dwight. So in the final hour, Dwight is finally made manager of the branch, and he and Angela get married. This despite the fact that every time Dwight was put in charge earlier in the run, it was an unmitigated disaster.

In short, Dwight went from believing he was a Machiavellian genius but really being hopeless at anything but sales (delusions of who you are vs. the unpleasant reality being a key motif of the show) to actually being a Machiavellian genius because Dwight got popular, and Angela’s hyper-Christian judgment act became the peak of hypocrisy but nobody seemed to notice, and they both got a happy ending they didn’t really deserve because that’s what the final episode needed and someone told the writers it was okay now. It’s not terrible, but there is a sour note about the whole thing.

Who did it better?

Frank Burns and Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan on MASH. In the beginning, they fit the same mold as Dwight and Angela, the uptight rivals of our fun-loving protagonists (well, Jim Halpert was never the central character of the Office the way Hawkeye was on MASH, but you follow me). Margaret got humanized far more than Frank, to the point where they stopped calling her “Hot Lips” pretty fast, but no matter how much they softened the edges of Frank Burns two things never changed: he was never a better surgeon than Hawkeye, and he was never going to be put in charge of the camp. Not for long. He did get a happy ending when he left after season five, but it wasn’t as unearned. In a show meant to satirize the foolishness of the military, of course Frank’s mental breakdown would result in him getting not only transferred back to the States, but promoted. And Margaret, post-Frank, grew as a character in a way Angela just never did.

Jamie McJack, Girls With Slingshots

Who’s this?

First, let me say that Girls With Slingshots is, overall, an excellent comic. Creator Danielle Corsetto is a great writer and artist and, from my limited encounters, a genuinely wonderful human being. Girls With Slingshots is about a group of friends in a small town, primarily gloomy, somewhat emotionally-stunted writer Hazel and bubbly, happy-go-lucky photographer Jamie. The strip follows their lives, loves, passions, friends, and attempts to avoid bankruptcy.

What’s wrong with her?

<Awkward yet deep inhalation> I’m not… I’m not sure. I think my issues come from the fact that Corsetto has decided that Jamie is the heart and soul of the cast. Which is fair, really. Hazel’s the dark cloud and Jamie’s the silver lining, why wouldn’t you make her the heart of the strip? But this has led to a conviction that Jamie is so wonderful, everything she does must be okay. And I’m just not sure that’s strictly true, but it’s not always easy to put my finger on why I think that.

My issue is that Jamie is portrayed as always right, yet when trying to help her best friend Hazel, she’s wrong so very often. Knowing Hazel is hung up on her decade-long crush Reese, Jamie still doesn’t bother to tell her Reese is in a relationship. When she and Hazel are supposed to go to Miami, Jamie bails and instead tries to fix Hazel up with a guy she has no interest in. She tries to make Hazel more confident, able to ask out a handsome cabbie, but her attempts only make Hazel uncomfortable and resentful. And perhaps this is where Jamie loses me. I, too, know the pain of friends who want to help but go about it so, so badly. But all these failures to help Hazel don’t put a dent in her portrayal as endlessly wise and lovable, and it irks me when she doesn’t get called on her shit.

Who does it better?

Lorelei Gilmore, the Gilmore Girls. Like Jamie, Lorelei doesn’t see getting older as an excuse for being boring. Like Jamie, she’s almost super-humanly bubbly. Like Jamie, Lorelei is powerfully devoted to the people close to her, even though her attempts to help her daughter Rory sometimes miss the mark. But unlike Jamie, when she screws up, they admit it.

That was a tricky one, since Jamie is such a singular character and there’s not really that much wrong with her. But at least when I’m mad at Lorelei, the show doesn’t act like she’s owed a high-five and a trophy.

Wolverine, basically Marvel’s entire product line

Who is he?

You must know this one. Mutant? Skeleton laced with unbreakable metal? Claws and a healing factor? Says “bub” a lot? He’s the most over-exposed character in comic history, yes including Batman. Although that one’s close. In addition to appearing in somewhere near a dozen books a week, a surprising number of big event books revolve around him.

What’s wrong with him?

Okay, this one seems to just be me, so I’ll make it quick. Maybe it’s because I didn’t get into X-Men comics until the 90s, when the vast majority of mainstream comics weren’t doing anything to be proud of, and Wolverine’s appeal was thought to be self-evident, but I just don’t get it. He has claws and acts all brooding and badass. How does that not get old? Or failing that, how does it make him interesting enough to be front and center of Marvel’s entire product line? The best super heroes are inspirational. Superman is an icon of hope, a being who devotes his gifts to helping the helpless. Wonder Woman teaches women that they, too are powerful, and don’t need men to validate their power. Green Lantern is based around a simple yet beautiful idea: if you have the will to overcome great fear, you can do anything. Wolverine is based around the notion that retractable metal claws and not caring about rules are awesomesauce.

And his starring role in two of the last three major Marvel event books has entailed trying to solve the big problem with murder, whether it was killing an innocent teenage girl in Avengers Vs. X-men or a founding Avenger in Age of Ultron. By the way, in AvX, Cyclops wanted that teenage girl to get the Phoenix force and reignite mutant kind, which is exactly what ultimately happened, but because he went a little nuts on Phoenix force himself he’s been branded a villain. In Age of Ultron, Wolverine personally broke literally all of reality travelling in time to murder Ant-man then undo said murder because it didn’t fix anything, but nobody seems to mind. What the hell.

Still just me? Fine, whatever.

Who does it better?

John Constantine. He doesn’t care about rules, he also acts badass to cover a tormented soul, but at least he has the decency to acknowledge he’s a bastard. And when he does end up in charge of a team (he currently leads the Justice League Dark, while Wolverine is currently head X-man, because why wouldn’t a chain-smoking serial killer who broke time be a great role model for mutant children), the rest of the team follows him begrudgingly at best.

Although they could both use a better movie.

Disagree with any of these? Think I missed someone? Hit me up in the comments.

Corn Monkeys in the Mist: Year One

I started training to be a projectionist in the year 2000. Unofficially, though. I hadn’t applied to the union or anything. That would come later. I just happened to know one of the projectionists at Westhills cinema, conveniently one of my favourite theatres, and he said we were free to come visit him in the booth any time he was working. He’d even get us free movies and drinks when we did.

The first time I entered a booth it was like stepping into Narnia. The projectors hummed all around me, the lamps flickered in the dim light of the booth, vintage movie posters hung everywhere, and for someone who loves movies like I do it was a magical place.

These were the glory days. Free movies, chilling in the booth, or just going from projector to projector and watching trailers through the window. “Trailer hopping,” I called it. I felt I could hang out there forever.

So when my friend offered to train me, I jumped at the chance. Also I hadn’t had a job in like two years, since quitting the Winter Club (hates it, hates it forever) with a vow to never work banquet service again. Seriously, banquet service is awful and I hate it. Just so we’re clear.

Anyhoo.

After a few months working with him, I applied for a job with the union. Took a little while to get it, but once the person they hired instead of me washed out (I’ve gotten my share of jobs because their first choice was terrible but then I turned out to be awesome… ladies) I started training officially, now with Doug, the union’s business agent. I practiced running the booth at Canyon Meadows, a discount theatre that was once the flagship theatre for Cineplex Odeon in Calgary (how times do change) while learning theory with Doug. And some days I’d still go and do some time at Westhills, learning all I could so that I could start actually getting paid faster.

The Vagabond Permittee

In the spring of 2001, I finally knew enough that Doug was comfortable scheduling me for work. Solo. And hours weren’t hard to come by. As soon as I was an official permittee, that is, not a member of the union but someone the union allows to work, I worked 11 days straight, again bouncing between Canyon Meadows and Westhills. It was during my Canyon Meadows shifts that I learned I truly never get tired of Ocean’s 11: for three days straight I ended my afternoon shift by rewatching it through the window, and cleaning projectors when Julia Roberts showed up.

I do not like Julia Roberts. Not positive why.

Over the months that followed, I’d work nearly everywhere. I spent a month working at what was once called the Colosseum, a theatre so far south I had an anxiety attack the first time I drove there (“There’s still city down here? Who lives this far south? How? And WHY?”), where I learned that customer complaints are not always right.

“AI is out of focus,” the staff would tell me. I’d reply that it was a soft focus scene, and their issue was with Steven Spielberg, not me. “Jurassic Park 3 is dark,” they’d say. I’d reply that it was a night scene. This was great practice for the Moviedome, where I’d learn that 95% of the time, if a customer was complaining that their movie hadn’t started yet, they were in the wrong theatre.

I had the best time of my career working at Westhills that September. In the off season, they didn’t even run movies on Monday, Wednesday, or Thursday afternoons, so working Monday and Wednesday was a pretty easy gig. I’d show up at noon, clean a little, do trailer work if necessary, go to Chapters and read Star Trek novels for two hours, come back and thread all the projectors for the evening, get dinner, and be back in time for everything to start running. The best of times for me, if somewhat proving the corporation’s point about not wanting to pay us for 80 hours a week anymore.

Not every job went so well. One night at Canyon Meadows, I decided to leave before everything was done (having been told that was an option), only to have Count of Monte Cristo grind to a halt due to problems with the platter motors.

The movie goes from the top platter, through the projector, and then winds back up on the second platter. Unless one of them stops turning, in which case all is ashes and ruin.

The manager had to hand out a lot of refunds. I didn’t work a lot of shifts there after that. On the other hand, the regular guys got more paid hours as a result, so…

Anyway. That year I lived as a vagabond, going from theatre to theatre, wherever someone needed hours covered. I never bothered to get to know the staff anywhere, in case I was whisked away somewhere else. Also because spending the whole shift alone in my booth was A) second nature, being a bit of a shut-in at the best of times, and B) encouraged by management. If something went wrong with a projector, they preferred I be right nearby.

Point is, at the big theatres I never really got to know the various staff. Not even at the Sunridge Spectrum, which in the fall of 2001 became my home for twenty hours a week. A few supervisors, sure, but not the ushers or concession staff. Not the girl with the multi-coloured hair who smiled at me whenever we passed and called me “Vagabond” in a flirtatious tone. And she’d have been my exact jam if I’d been single, younger, and possessed of even the base elements of self-confidence regarding talking to pretty girls. (erm… ladies…)

I was alienated enough from the staff that it was only years later that Ian, of Dan and Ian Wander Europe, realized we’d worked at that theatre at the same time for months, and never crossed paths.

Finding a home

As months passed, I began to settle down. My friend at Westhills eventually left the theatre, and shortly thereafter the union, and the glory days of being able to hang out in the Westhills booth came to an end. I started splitting my time between the Spectrum and the Silver City, one of the city’s two largest theatres. And then my 20-hour per week shift at the Spectrum got jacked by someone with more seniority, and I ended up working full time at the Silver City.

And then the Spiderman incident happened. And it was time to go. And that’s how I ended up in Calgary’s other discount movie theatre, the Moviedome.

But we’ll save that for a future installment.

Danny G Writes Plays: The Course of True Love and the Curse of the Jade Monkey

Been a couple of months since I last did one of these. I could say that I was enjoying the spike in comments following my post office blogs, and tried to shift to topics of more general interest. Might even be true. But there’s another reason. Deep down, I was avoiding returning to this topic because I knew that it would mean talking about how a script managed to go from “this is the best thing I’ve done” to “this is too embarrassing to show people.”

So buckle up for the rise and fall of the Jade Monkey.

What’s it about?

Jordan Bleachley, a shy, awkward graphic designer for a local newspaper, is living a quiet life, typically alone in his office, until the night Maya Tarlington crashes into him. Maya’s a globe-trotting woman of mystery, roaming the world having adventures, and decides that as long as she’s here, she may as well insert herself into Jordan’s life. Soon he and his two closest friends, investigative reporter Travis Thompson and travel columnist Saisha Porter (also Jordan’s ex), are pulled into Maya’s latest adventure: finding both halves of the legendary Jade Monkey, said to make whoever wields it unstoppable, before would-be supervillain Helena von Drax beats them to it.

PREMISE!
Oh god damn it.

Yup. Soon the whole gang is tracking the second half of the monkey to Indonesia while Jordan and Maya try to figure out if a timid shut-in and a globe-trotting madwoman can make it work.

So why’d that happen?

I had a dream. A dream involving a… mildly sexual encounter with an exotic woman of mystery who my dream-friends immediately distrusted. Despite their misgivings, I decided to help her on her quest, attempting to find a better reason for this choice than “I saw her breasts the night we met and if I help her I might get to see them again or maybe even touch them.”

Now, I’d recently joined a writers’ circle led by the playwright-in-residence of one of the big professional theatre companies in town, and in this group I confirmed something I’d been afraid of: as of Knoll, I’d grown stagnant, leaning on dialogue riffs and wacky premises instead of properly developed characters and emotion. I decided that this dream, whose details stuck with me throughout my shift at whatever movie theatre I was working at that week (odds favour Westhills), would be the script where I started to push myself to inject some real passion into the love story.

The love story that still involved a wacky premise. And a meet-cute. And an intrepid reporter. And like four comic-relief characters written to be played by one actor.

I’d have probably been shocked, maybe a touch offended, if someone back then had implied that Jordan was based on me and Maya was the personification of my secret desire to be a) swept away and b) found interesting by an international woman of mystery. I know this because people implied characters were based on me all the time and I at least acted shocked and offended each instance, even when it was blatantly true. And in this case, I didn’t think Jordan was secretly me at all.

And yet it is demonstrably the case. Right as my marriage was beginning to crumble I suddenly write a script in which the lead character is a quiet, shy, shut-in who runs across a bold, inhumanly friendly woman of adventure, who sees how deep and creative he is behind his awkward exterior and decides that not only is he worth knowing but she’s also going to bang him? Merciful Zeus, the wish fulfillment is just dripping off this thing.

But maybe I missed it because I was so enamoured with Travis Thompson, a character I’d experimented with in writing classes because Trasmetropolitan’s Spider Jerusalem made Gonzo journalists on a crusade for the Truth look so damned cool, and I wanted to write one. And including Saisha gave Travis a romance plot of his own, because why wouldn’t the crusading journalist be just as useless as me at telling girls he likes them?

I included a role I called the Titanically Talented Bit-Player, who would play Helena’s faithful Manservant, Jordan’s editor, an informant named Jerry the Snitch, and Jacques the pilot, who flies the gang to Indonesia at the top of act two. This was inspired by the extras from Supervillain. I decided this play needed some minor, often single scene characters, so why not have them all played by one person, and why not make all of them just as entertaining as Supervillain’s delightfully bitter cocktail waiter?

As for Helena, and her trusty Manservant, this was my first attempt to write villains who were both funny and menacing. Because any villain out to reunite the halves of the Jade Monkey has to be a little silly, right?

Right?

How’d it turn out?

Oh man. Where to start.

In 2002, when it was first staged, I thought it was great. I’d pushed myself to add more depth and passion to the love story than I ever had before (not hard, I think my only successful romantic pairing by that point was Illuminati, and we all know what I think of that one), and I was proud of that. Thus, I thought it was good enough to take to the 2003 Edmonton Fringe Festival, despite the fact that most Fringe shows are 60-75 minutes and this one came in at two hours including intermission. But during the not very successful Fringe run, one of the cast put the idea of filming it as a movie in my head, and I started thinking of what I’d change to adapt it for film. And I began to see problems. So many problems. Because I had pushed myself into new territory… and the first time we try something, there are usually some kinks to be worked out. On that note.

The meet-cute is terrible, even for a meet-cute, and what’s worse it’s excruciatingly unmotivated. Second worst I’ve ever done, possibly, after Illuminati in Love. At the time of writing, I suspect I’d been influenced by a Kevin Smith blog from a series about the casting process on Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. In said entry, Kevin Smith talked about how the studio had put pressure on him to cast Heather Graham in the female lead, but she’d balked at the role because she didn’t understand why the character falls in love with Jay. Smith had trouble answering, because, as he put it, who knows why anyone falls in love with anyone? The only answer he could think of was “Why does her character fall in love with Austin fucking Powers?”

And thus did I decide I could use the same logic to skate by the question of why, exactly, a world-travelling treasure hunter could possibly decide to hook up with a graphic designer who barely leaves the office. But I couldn’t. Because, 11 years later, it stinks of the aforementioned wish fulfillment and I want to punch their flirty scenes in the face.

Flirty scenes which, by the way, are nowhere near as engaging as they needed to be. It takes this thing until the end of act one to get out of first gear. Right before the act break, everyone escapes a trap laid by Helena and leaps onto a plane to chase down the remaining half on the Jade Monkey. Right after the act break, Jordan and Maya sit on the the plane and exchange backstories for at least ten minutes. Once we had to cut the intermission for time at the Fringe, it became all too clear that this little narrative choice killed the show’s pace like an overly wordy pause button. Any momentum we’d gained was brutally murdered by exposition and monologues.

Wow. Four paragraphs and I’ve barely scratched the surface here… time for an “everything wrong with this script” speed round.
1) Nearly every scene that the villains appear in features Travis complaining about how stupid the plot is. Admitting the plot is lame doesn’t make it not that.
2) Speaking of Travis, I thought his angry-ranting-but-he-really-cares shtick was pretty good… until I saw Dr. Cox from Scrubs do it about 50 times better. I thought “Oh, that’s what I was going for,” and was sad.
3) Half of the Titanically Talented Bit Player characters serve no real purpose. Mitchell the editor provides details that get repeated, and Jacques is only necessary for the plane scene, which the play would be better off without.
4) The Titanically Talented Bit Player also breaks the fourth wall at least once, which is not something the rest of the play does, so it kind of sticks out.
5) “Travis most of the time” and “Travis crushing on Saisha” are like two different people. A switch flicks and he goes from bargain-basement Spider Jerusalem to stammering mess on a freaking dime.
6) I’ve written my share of quiet saps who end up in shenanigans, but Jordan has to be worst of them. And by worst, I mean least interesting to watch.
7) But at least I made sure to have a conversation between Saisha and Maya establish that Jordan’s great at sex. Because that was necessary, apparently.
8) “Tarlington” would be my least favourite last name I came up with for a character if I hadn’t also come up with “Bleachley.”
9) I wrote this thing and I have a hard time getting invested in anything that happens. What chance does anyone else have?

I will say this. I do kind of like the resolution of the jade monkey nonsense. In front of everybody, Helena reunites both halves of the monkey… and nothing happens. Because, as Jordan puts it, “It’s not modular. It’s broken.”

Because fuck every movie in which some ancient artifact was broken into pieces but can be magically reunited every five thousand years or when the planets align or whatever. Because really, honestly, who thinks like that. If you’re going to break something because it’s too dangerous, YOU LEAVE IT BROKEN.

Anyway.

Would you stage it again?

We staged this one twice. We went through no less than five Mayas over the two productions. The two people who directed it left theatre entirely afterwards. I used to think it was because the show was cursed. Now it’s because I think the script is shit.

Trying to think of how to rewrite the script into “Jade Monkey: the Movie,” I came up with so many flaws (as you’ve seen) that I decided there was only one solution: burn it to the ground and start over on a white piece of paper. Because I still liked the concept, just not the execution. Watch the skies… we’ll get to how that turned out.

But as for re-staging Jade Monkey, in short, no. No a thousand times over.

Repeated theme alert

  • This was my first attempt at funny-yet-menacing villains. But not the last.
  • “Man and woman cannot be friends.” Travis and Saisha spend the whole show crushing on each other, and Manservant’s got it bad for Helena. Which makes even less sense than Maya liking Jordan.
  • Pop culture references: Why a Jade Monkey? Homer the Astronaut. The whole B-plot is born of a Simpsons reference, and its resolution is a near-verbatim recreation of my reaction to the climax of the first Tomb Raider movie.
  • “Let’s swap backstories for fifteen minutes like that’s not pacing Kryptonite!” I was still doing that last year.
  • The Quiet, Shy Protagonist The Ladies Still Unaccountably Love. Somebody shoot me.

Five comic-related TV series that would be better than Gotham

Is it apparent yet that I take a particular interest in comic-related properties? Especially the ones from DC? Well, we’re back on that topic for the nonce. What’s key this week is that we had another announcement from Fox regarding its upcoming series Gotham. Apparently it’s young Bruce Wayne, not Captain Jim Gordon, who will be the main character of this show about Gotham before Batman. 

I keep waiting for some piece of news about this series to make me in any way excited to see it. No, that’s not true… I keep waiting for someone involved in this series to say “Just kidding, we’re not making this show at all. Can you imagine? Wow. That would be awful.” Because everything they’ve announced has sounded terrible so far.

“It’s about James Gordon before Batman, featuring Bat-villains before they were the Bat-villains!” No.

“Twelve year-old Bruce Wayne will also appear on the series!” NO.

“Actually he’ll be the main character! The series will follow him from childhood in the first episode to finally putting on the cape in the last episode!” NO. “We’ll have early versions of the villains too! It’ll be just like Smallvi–”

AM I STUTTERING, FOX?

I watched Smallville. I watched Smallville for an entire damned decade. I have, in weaker moments, considered picking up the complete series box set on DVD. But I don’t want to do it again. One of the things I love about Arrow, one of the things that’s made it easier to convince others to watch it? It’s not Smallville. It’s an improvement on Smallville in nearly every way, most notably in that Oliver might not be calling himself Green Arrow yet, but in the very first episode he was still fighting crime with a god damned bow and arrow.

In short, of all the projects circulating based on comic properties, this one is the absolute least appealing, and yet it’s the one that’s basically guaranteed to be on TV screens by year’s end. They’ve been greenlit without even shooting a pilot. The Flash series doesn’t have that kind of guarantee. Millions of dollars will be thrown at a series that has the most “This is a bad idea” red flags coating it since they made a TV show about cavemen from an insurance commercial.

So, here’s five TV series based on comics they could make instead that would be nigh-infinitely better than ten years of Bruce Wayne, Selina Kyle and Edward Nygma dealing with high school and peer pressure.

1. Gotham Central

This is the one that occurs to literally any DC comic fan a few seconds after they hear about Gotham. So let’s start here. It’s about the Major Crimes Unit of the Gotham City Police Department, attempting to solve crimes without leaning on the Bat-signal. This almost was a TV series back in 2003, but after Birds of Prey crashed and burned Warner Brothers put a halt on all Batman-related TV (well, live action, anyway). So here’s how they could make this a great series.

Premise: Commissioner James Gordon (who wasn’t in the comic but we’ll put him in the show as a recurring character) struggles to root out the corruption that infested the GCPD prior to his appointment, in a cautious alliance with the Batman. His greatest accomplishment in the public eye, the Major Crimes Unit, is also the biggest source of tension in the department itself, as key positions were given not to GCPD veterans, but to transfers from Metropolis, such as openly gay Captain Maggie Sawyer. After one of their own is killed in a drug bust that brought them face to face with Mr. Freeze, MCU detectives Marcus Driver and Rene Montoya make an appeal to Sawyer and Gordon: no Bat-signal. They’re going to catch Freeze themselves, to prove that Gotham cops can solve Gotham crimes… even if some of them, like Montoya’s new partner, are more used to the squeaky clean streets of Metropolis.

Now, you couldn’t have Bat villains every week, and sometimes they wouldn’t be able to get the win without Bat-assistance, so this could descend into a bland “procedural with sci-fi elements,” like Agents of SHIELD in the first half of its debut season. So to avoid this, let’s have some long plots. Specifically, something you often see in better Batman stories: the growing tensions between established organized crime families like the Falcones and the newly emerging “freak mafias” under figures like Oswald “Penguin” Cobblepot, Roman “Black Mask” Sionis, and the real crazies like Joker, Scarecrow, and Two-Face. Make Penguin, Black Mask, and Carmine Falcone regular players to give the MCU some big bads to contend with as they struggle to shut down the gang violence.

Cast:
–Jason O’Mara (Life on Mars, Terra Nova, Vegas) as Detective Marcus Driver, GCPD veteran out to redeem the department by proving real cops don’t need the Batman to solve crimes for them.
–Paula Patton (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol) as Renee Montoya, personal protegee of Jim Gordon who as a uniformed officer dealt with the worst Gotham’s streets and precincts had to offer.
-as long as I’m dreaming, Idris Elba (The Wire, Thor) as Montya’s new partner, Crispus Allen, a Metropolis transfer disgusted by the corruption that still infests the GCPD.
–Sarah Jones (Alcratraz, Vegas) as Maggie Sawyer, head of the MCU, who transferred from dealing with crimes involving aliens, monsters, and Superman in Metropolis to worrying that every unsolved homicide might be the Joker in Gotham.
–Victor Garber (Alias, Eli Stone) as Carmine Falcone, fighting a two front war against Gordon’s attempts to root out his crooked cops and the Penguin’s attempts to rule Gotham’s underworld, all while trying to keep his son Alberto’s growing psychosis hidden.
–Mark A. Sheppard (Firefly) as the Penguin, Gotham’s second biggest (and rising) mob boss, whose vicious and unforgiving nature makes him a terror despite being short and seemingly harmless.
–Peter Krause (Six Feet Under, Sports Night) as Jim Gordon, Gotham’s top cop on a mission to redeem his department and his city.
–David Marciano (Due South, the Shield) as Jim Corrigan, the corrupt head of CSI, whose side business of selling key bits of evidence is endangered by Gordon’s crusade. He’ll be driven to greater and greater lengths to keep his activities hidden.

Other stories: With the Falcones in the cast, make season two a loose adaptation of The Long Halloween; no adaptation of Gotham Central would be complete without including Half a Life, in which Montoya is outed as a lesbian and kidnapped by an amorous Two-Face, and Soft Targets, in which Joker starts picking off cops and civilians with a sniper rifle; the Black Mask launches a savage and destructive bid to make himself the king of Gotham’s underworld, which forces an uneasy alliance between Falcone and Cobblepot, but will the MCU play ball with the devils they know to stop something worse?

God this series could be so good I just depressed myself.

2. Starman

One of the best superhero comics of the 90s, featuring reluctant legacy hero Jack Knight.

Premise: Decades ago, scientist Ted Knight created the cosmic rod: a weapon powered by cosmic radiation Knight was able to harness. For a brief time, he used the rod to fight crime as Starman, defender of Opal City, until his mental breakdown. Now he’s passed the rod to his son David… but when David is shot dead by the son of Starman’s oldest enemy, the Mist, it falls to Ted’s younger son Jack to take up the mantle and save the city from the Mist’s comeback crime wave… with the unexpected aid of immortal supervillain the Shade.

Cast:
Arthur Darvill (Doctor Who, Broadchurch) as Jack Knight. He’d rather just buy and sell antiques and collectibles, but after his brother’s death he makes a promise to his father to carry on the mantle of Starman part time, growing from reluctant protector to true hero.
Alan Alda (MASH) as Ted Knight, genius inventor, who struggles with depression and guilt over misuse of his earlier inventions. Jack’s promise came with a catch: Jack will be Starman if Ted tries to turn the energy he uses for the rod into a new, global energy source.
Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock) as the Shade, an apparently immortal villain with deadly shadow-based powers. When Ted Knight was Starman, the Shade was robbing banks for fun, but comes out of retirement when the Mist’s crime wave threatens his preferred home, Opal City. He becomes an ally to Jack.
Rooney Mara (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) as Nash, aka the new Mist. The Mist’s son Kyle is his heir apparent, and his daughter Nash a shy, stuttering disappointment. But when Jack kills Kyle to avenge his brother, Nash sets out to make herself a true villain, becoming a more deadly Mist than he brother ever was.
Mark A. Sheppard (Supernatural) as Jake “Bobo” Benetti, a former small-time supervillain who, after a few bank robberies, decided being super-strong and tough didn’t mean evil was the life for him. Becomes a reluctant hero in his own right.

Other stories: A series obsessed with the past and future, you’d have flashbacks to Ted’s Starman days and, why not, a season set in space as they adapt the classic arc Stars My Destination. Also of note is the O’Dares, for whom being Opal City cops is the family business. Black sheep Matt is corrupt at first, but his past life as legendary Opal city lawman Brian Savage calls out to him, and with the Shade’s help he works to undo the damage he’s done to his city and family name.

3. The Boys

Based on the graphic novel series by Garth Ennis, in which… oh, who am I kidding. This is a series about super heroes that makes Game of Thrones look like the Gilmore Girls, no network would touch this thing.

3. Top Ten

Another cop series, this one set in a world where literally everyone has powers. Not just powers, but costumes and code names to match. In this world, Top Ten are the cops.

Premise: Like I said, everyone in the world has some sort of power, so the local precinct of Top Ten must deal with crimes involving aliens, robots, gods, and super-powered serial killers. All part of a day’s work.

Cast:
The book has a huge cast. I’ll stick to the highlights.
–Amber Tamblyn (House, the Unusuals) as Robyn “Toybox” Slinger, the new girl on the force with a small arsenal of toy-sized robots suited for light combat, forensics, and other tasks.
–Adam Baldwin (Firefly) as Jeff Smax, Robyn’s partner, a grizzled veteran officer who happens to be a massive, blue, super-strong, nigh-invulnerable half-ogre from a fantasy realm who joined Top Ten after a failed career as a dragon slayer. Oh yes, he also has an intimate relationship with his twin sister, because in his home dimension that’s apparently okay.
–H. Jon Benjamin as the voice of Kemlo “Hyperdog” Caeser, the talking dog in a human-shaped exoskeleton that’s the sergeant in charge of the division.
-Mark A. Sheppard (Battlestar Galactica) as Duane “Dust Devil” Bodine, a cowboy-themed veteran trying to break in his rookie partner.

Other stories: Avoid the trap of being just a procedural with powers through the original book’s long arcs. A murder in the robot ghetto that leads to a drug lab and a conspiracy that goes all the way to Top Ten’s bosses in Grand Central, an alternate reality where Rome never fell (although the locals claim everyone else is from “an alternate reality where it did”), and the serial killer known as the Libra Killer, which connects to legendary “science heroes” the Seven Sentinels. Beyond that? Keep the tongue in cheek homages to classic comic characters and stories flowing. Make sure to include the story where Balder, brother of Thor, is killed by Loki in the God Bar, causing Smax to deliver the classic line “Nobody move in a mysterious way.”

Also the one officer who delivers the “official warning” before raiding a drug lab: “Ahem. Hey you in there, you’re dead.”

4. Frontline

Front_Line

Spinning out from the woefully short-lived series The Pulse, reporters Ben Urich and Sally Floyd start the news site frontlines.com to report on what’s really happening in the super powered world.

Premise: Ben Urich becomes a leading force on reporting on the new, stranger world that has arisen in the wake of the Battle of New York (which we know as the climax of the Avengers), but is let go when his paper downsizes its reporting staff in favour of pulling stories off the wire. Sally Floyd convinces him to become a more responsible Rising Tide, investigating the hidden stories behind SHIELD, AIM, the Dark Elf incident in Greenwich, and everything else happening in the Marvel cinematic universe, only through journalism instead of cyber-anarchism. So basically, all that stuff we thought Agents of SHIELD was going to do.

Cast:
–John Schneider (Smallville, Dukes of Hazzard) as Ben Urich, veteran journalist out to expose the truth behind this new wave of heroes, gods, and monsters.
–Eliza Coupe (Happy Endings, Scrubs) as Sally Floyd, who pulls Ben into the world of cyber-journalism.
-Mark A. Sheppard (Leverage) as their contact at SHIELD, who sometimes gives them legit scoops and sometimes feeds them disinformation for his own ends, and it’s hard to be sure which he’s doing at any given time.

Other stories: We all thought Agents of SHIELD was going to be the glue holding the Marvel cinematic universe together. Well, it isn’t. But the fact that we’re this disappointed that it isn’t shows there’s a market for that. And with four new street-level series hitting Netflix soon? There’ll be even more to glue together. Frontline would do what the various Frontline miniseries always did: show us what’s happening off camera during the big events.

5. Transmetropolitan

Warren Ellis’ classic cyberpunk graphic novel set in a chaotic dystopia that’s uncomfortably similar to the modern day, starring rage-filled journalist Spider Jerusalem.

Premise: Renegade gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem is living a quiet life hidden in the wilderness, having become disgusted with society in the aftermath of the previous presidential election. Sadly for him, he still owes his publisher two more books, and when they track him down to his mountain hideaway to remind him of his debt, Spider returns to The City, a sprawling metropolis where consumerism, sex, and drug culture have run amok. With the aid of his “filthy assistants,” as he calls them, Spider attacks the establishment through his articles, eventually being drawn back into the political arena as his old nemesis, “the Beast,” seeks re-election against a charming challenger, Gary “the Smiler” Callahan (largely believed to be a satire of British PM Tony Blair).

Cast:
–John C. McGinley (Scrubs) as Spider Jerusalem, the crazed journalist out to save or destroy society by shoving its face in The Truth.
–Yvonne Strahovski (Chuck) as Channon Yarrow, the original “filthy assistant” who also served as Spider’s bodyguard.
–Mila Kunis (Black Swan, That 70s Show) as Yelena Rossini, his second “filthy assistant” who gradually grows into his apprentice.
–Louis CK as Mitchell Royce, Spider’s long-suffering editor and the one person who might qualify as his friend.
-Mark A. Shepard (Doctor Who) as “The Beast,” incumbent president.
–Michael Sheen (Masters of Sex, Frost/Nixon) as The Smiler, the opposing candidate who seems like the lesser of two evils… at first.

Other stories: In addition to Ellis’ long-plot of Spider and the Smiler, do what sci-fi does best, man. Hold a mirror up to society and show us what we’re doing wrong. Wield The Truth as forcefully as Spider Jerusalem does. Take particular aim at cable news, as broken and dysfunctional an industry as you could name. And make Yelena’s transformation from “rich guy’s daughter with an internship” to “woman who could destabilize a government with an op-ed” one for the ages.

So, there you go. Five TV shows that in a just world would each be ten times more critically acclaimed and as much as twice as popular as “Smallville with Batman.” Six seasons and a movie for each one or we don’t deserve nice things.

And yes, Mark Sheppard has to be in each one. Because that’s how it works. You make a show with geek appeal, and then you put Mark Sheppard in it.

And the best part, Warner Brothers and Marvel Studios? One or the other of you already owns every single character, title, and major plot I’ve mentioned. You can take any of these ideas and run with them, and not owe me a damned thing, and I’ll just be happy the project is happening.

Although, that said… if you need a cheap showrunner, I’m available.