#52 -- Digital Narratives For Humans

"In this case, organizing our media and newness has become a meta-game -- syncing playlists, charging devices, organizing and filtering newsfeeds. It's not part of what we would consider 'entertainment' or 'media,' but you cannot argue that it's a part of it. . . Our brains are playing extra games to compress all of this data."

Imagine a hay wagon on a dirt road alongside some train tracks. Now imagine a Japanese bullet-train speeds by.

They were right next to each other for half a moment. Not anymore though. The hay wagon's driver caught a glimpse of somebody on the train but he doesn't think much about it, he can barely tell them apart by now, all these trains come by here all the time, another is already cresting the horizon, in fact. Maybe the next one will be different, or important -- maybe he'll even be able notice. Nevertheless, these passing trains are sleek and beautiful and they at least break up the monotony of rolling down this dirt road.

Why can't we process every event that speeds by? Are they too fast or are we too slow? What story are we afraid of missing? How do we keep a narrative moving at the speed of human cognition?

Compensating to a storytelling format, bending its restrictions and disadvantages until they become net-positives, is an admirable ability, one that we don't give enough credit. It's a complex mixture compounded from understanding an audience, tempering their expectations, maintaining interest inside the narrative -- and outside the narrative if it's TV show on the air week by week in a universe where Internet message boards and Twitter exist -- all while remaining consistent and insistent that the story is worth it. There are plots in serialized TV shows that don't have a planned ending.

Stephen King would applaud that because he's a writer that enjoys scaring himself by what comes out of his own brain as he writes, be it robotic wolves dressed like Doctor Doom or a shapeshifter that can change between looking like a clown and a gargantuan sewer-scurrying spider. He was (is) a writer in it for the self-discovery. Imagine his surprise when he was putting the finishing touches on Wolves of the Calla and realized it was the weirdest version of the Seven Samurai story since A Bug's Life.

Christopher Nolan would not applaud that because he likes stories that are wound like Swiss watches, containing reflective, driving purpose in beginning, middle and end. If you asked him what his favorite book is, he would probably say that mankind has not yet written it yet. If you asked him again, he'd throw out the title From Russia With Love, and tell you to get the fuck out of his face in the most reserved, British way imaginable.

With free time, imagination, and maturation, it took us years to comprehend the layered meanings in an expansive chapter book, so many characters that we can't see visually, but feel vividly speeding and strutting around inside our heads, and now that the speed of personal imagination has become outdated, where the hell are we supposed to find correct pacing in our modern, digital, faster-than-brains society? How can we keep these things from just speeding by? How do we keep ourselves from missing it?

There are news stories that are better-paced serials than than a lot of TV shows, and they're easier and cheaper to produce, sickeningly. A person needs to understand how an audience takes in what's being put to paper or to stage or to screen or to controller because no story exists in a vacuum because they are written by people with lives and perspectives, and tastes in music, and bus routes home from work that repeatedly break down. We suppose this means that we subscribe to a modernist deconstruction theory on deriving meaning in stories. This means the playwright and the news-station producer have not only plans for the product being plonked up there for the masses to observe, but they also have their own personal motivations worming their way into the story, sometimes involuntarily, sometimes violently. Then again, one of them is meant to be entertaining, the other isn't. Not all written, dramatic stories actually mean anything and then that means the storyteller is either being pompous, or is in denial, or is being spiteful of their medium and ought to tread carefully in that post-modern swamp or they'll soon realize they've gotten their heads little too far up their collective ass.

We are striding right past a notable fulcrum, ironically or not, and we can now absorb media content faster than we care to acknowledge. We have smartphones and iPads and 4G LTE and DirecTV and NetFlix Instant. It's division. Finding focus is becoming less voluntary when shiny objects and limitless content are involved.

Not saying that NetFlix Instant isn't a gold-dipped God-gift, but when we're this spoiled for choice, where should we start?

We find it harder than ever to give time and to acknowledge that it can become an overwhelming sensation. We often don't have time to acknowledge it -- there's something new to do. There's something new to see or to hear or to contemplate, except if you move to Vermont and drive a snowplow for a living. These things might not be better, it might not even be good, but it is new. New makes money. New sustains art. New is regenerative, it's new skin and fresh coffee, and it needs to happen. New keeps us from dying a little bit every day.

The Speed of New has accelerated past the point where humans can safely comprehend it all. We cannot even spot all the new bits in the New as it blurs past us. New outruns Purpose. Anybody that's read a cyberpunk novel will tell you that if there is no memory of something, then it has lost meaning, and it has lost purpose. Information and media delivery has continued to speed up beyond -- we aren't biologically wired to move this quickly. It'll be hard to craft human memories from the hours and days that are filled with so much information fed into us at inhuman speed.

So is any of it worth it then? It must be. If we remember it, it is. Perhaps, amidst the overflow, if something can cling, then it must be powerful.

Again, it's the matter of choice and focus. Drawing human attention has become such a measured and calculated chemical exercise that we have become so familiar with that we've become less aware of its presence and more aware of its absence, like an amicable addiction. Fast has accelerated past Need. There's so much New that we need to find ways to cram it all in. This has created a meta-game. A meta-game is when formerly-rote organization within an activity becomes a chess-match in and unto itself. Calling time-outs and icing a kicker in a football game is a meta-game, for example -- it isn't technically part of the football "game," but it's another peripheral operation that's relevant while being seemingly-unrelated. In this case, organizing our media and newness has become a meta-game -- syncing playlists, charging devices, organizing and filtering newsfeeds. It's not part of what we would consider "entertainment" or "media," but you cannot argue that it's a part of it.

Our brains are playing extra games to compress all of this data. Who is the winner here?

In short, we suppose that our media intake is inconsistently-paced. We could miss the memory and we could lose the powerful. It's becoming dangerous and it's becoming scary the further you step away, realizing this thing is an impressionist work of art coming into disturbing focus.

Now is a time where the truth is more more omnipresent and untrustworthy than ever. A story moves faster than we can even process when it hits the Web and before it can become idolized myth, before it can become more than a shapeless mass, before it can become powerful, it becomes punctured and punctuated -- deflated and finite. A 24-hour news cycle is more curse than blessing, a network that shows only news is a business model that has overextended its grasp, violating moral truths in favor of erecting a sustainable financial construct. The private newsfeeds, let's take Reddit as an example, is even faster. A hulking biomass that eats human-interest pieces and shits nihilism, it is the vocal minority swaying in a liquid inertia. As entertainment, it's the Marxist dream realized, and it beautiful. Unbound by a desire and a necessity to make money, Reddit moves too quickly for its own good, letting a myth live for a week or so before being declared "Old."

Old < New, for obvious reasons. Old is done and gone. How forward thinking. Time is relative and websites like Reddit move out of sync with the human day-night-cycle. Reddit is the seed of a good thing and a scary thing. It's simultaneously juvenile and well-minded, like a young adventurer looking for trouble in all the wrong places. It's fascinated with New -- they even have guys to promote New content -- but how can we correctly learn from the past when New is the most important thing? How can we harness that ambition to serve humanity, an entity that moves so much slower than Newness?

Imagine cultural watershed moments like 9/11 in a 24-hour news cycle era. There's no argument that 9/11 invented the 24-hour news cycle, CNN was just a bunch of basic cable nerds with a solution in search of a problem before the attacks. Imagine the terabytes of high-definition cameraphone footage that would've hit -- its weight would have cracked YouTube in half.

Imagine a culture-altering person like Rosa Parks in a 24-hour news cycle era. How quickly would her actions' validity been questioned? How many hours before she was booked on talk shows, how many hours before the psychiatrist on retainer debunked her as a fraud, how many hours before her living face, flattened up on half a billion newsfeeds, became an icon associated with lazy whiners? Or even worse, there would be a few hundred cases just like Rosa Parks, and the Birmingham Bus Line would release a blanket statement about how they're addressing the issue. Or not.

It's unlikely that networks, be it Fox News or MSNBC, spin every single one of these things on purpose. A lot of it is a mixture of habit, Stockholm Syndrome, self-obsession, and hedgehoging -- curl into a ball, project your spines outward, and don't even let anybody close.

There are a great deal of people that command attention, and right fully so -- and then there are noisemakers that make a racket in the interim. They are equivalent to pouty, spherical children that if they didn't have their lunch made exactly as they specified, they'd have violent, verbal diarrhea, shouting at anybody with the politeness to not tell them to shut their shaking cruller-holes. These are people that are dissolving their right to speak -- their personae are soluble.

These are digital narratives for analog humans. A digital narrative has no speed limit. Analog humans will always be analog. If we cease to be analog, then we are no longer human.

Recommended related reading:

[10 Ways The NFL Laughs In Your Face (But The Football Is Still Great)] by Ghost Little

[The 2011 Halloween Survival Guide] by Doberman

[The Top 10 Best And Worst Characters On TV In 2011] by Alex Crumb

[FULL REVIEW ARCHIVE]

-- Alex Crumb

on Twitter | @GhostLittle_WTF

#51 -- Mary Todd Lincoln And Her Horse, Caligula //Vs.// The MOON-SCORPIONS!!

" 'I'm not positive there's sense in this plan,

So file this under "because I can." ' "

Atop a thought whose view was far and lunar,

Mary wandered, aimed by madness retold,

There was a horse that should have come sooner,

To spring her from a cell of rock and cold,

Caligula was not a steed for sane,

Men fled when he arrived in rage that day,

His teeth like hell, jagged; dreadful, his mane,

Ragged, dank hooves wet red from trampled prey,

O thing of naught and worlds forgot,

The eight by nine Mary did pace with hope,

But her mem'ry is ink faded from rot,  

And this figment equine a'called "elope,"

Her mind recalled a poison sting within,

Scorpions 'o the moon had made her sin.

The problem with prisons built on the moon,

Whose cages contain the sharpest of loons,

There's no goddamn air,

It's really not fair

To trap Mary with the dish and the spoon.

The horse of metal just kicked in the door,

An easy jail-break, security's poor.

Mary grabbed her sword,

So done being bored,

A blade thirsty for moon-scorpions gore.

Crazy never breathes

Neither do robot horses

Go! Caligula!

Once escaped the walls so jagged,

Neath the space and stars of Eden,

Time's a highway for Caligula,

Trampled minutes repeat again,

"Such is madness," thought she again,

"Within, alone, shall I remain."

"Shut the hole that shelters cowards!"

The horse demands, silent no more

"Brave robots have no feelings,

So robotic you must become, j'ador."

To slay moon arachnids was the chore,

Perhaps her sanity would be restored?

A cave underground

Only a hope for hope's sake

This scheme had to work

There was fire down inside the dank old hole,

That licked and flickered out of control,

"I'll kill me these bugs,

Their corpses: my drugs."

And to self-medication Mary stroll'd.

"I'm not positive there's sense in this plan,

So file this under 'because I can.' "

She produced her blade,

And lit it aflame,

And descended to where madness began.

We should not forget Mary was braver,

Flying in the face of sense and purpose,

That would have given cause to men saner,

She struck moon-scorpions right where they dozed.

The battle that day was harsh and bloody,

Red heads rolled about the fiery floor,

Cut and stomped, Mary's hours were muddy,

Caligula carried the task he'd swore.

Bugs crawled and swords sang, and the day was won,

Or so the stories would make you believe.

In her bed, Mary woke, the dream was done,

Rain outside clicked and stung, no good reprieve.

Caligula gone, the moon was blackened,

The lady tucked down to sleep neglected.

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#42 -- The 7 Great Movies That Will Make A College Student Both Wise And Emo

BY THE WAY: An updated version of this article, and all of our other reviews, can be found on our new official site: http://www.ghostlittle.com/ No ads, no Google bullshit, just content. [The 7 Great Movies That Will Make A College Student Both Wise And Emo]

"An inexperienced film-junkie still in his larval form though might call it the best mobster movie since Goodfellas and he'd be unanimously fucking wrong."

The trouble with good movies is that people often try too hard to like them. Hungry people try too hard to like them. Students are particularly hungry for identity and for understanding and there's a lot to like in movies they've been told are great and there's no reason not to like them. Like scarves and black coffee, great movies pick up fair-weather fans, and more relevantly, gloom-weather fans. They can be powerful. These movies can cause pretty heavy impact, unloading weighty messages that free minds can't help but cull for meaning. It can be too much though. In the vernacular, they can fuck with young heads.

For these reasons, and more to be detailed later, we give you the 7 great movies that will make a college student both wise and emo, in no particular order:

1) Do not watch Dead Poets Society. You will never have Robin Williams as a teacher. In fact, it's more likely that you'll go through school silently, miserable to the last hair fiber, misunderstood because you couldn't even define yourself if you tried, defiant, maybe, but incapable of identity or credibility. The lesson in this movie is: "Don't be a pussy, go for it." That's a terrible lesson to teach to budding teenager at prep-school. "Subvert the system" is a better credo at that age. Nobody but Robin Williams would condone acting like a brash individual at that age and that's because Robin Williams is an honored, Zelda-playing, highly-profane and highly-successful, Julliard-trained actor. If you're out of college, and trust us on this, it isn't too late to go all Dead Poets and become a carpe diem'ing basket case. In fact, the timing is perfect! Most people are so grounded in a shitty work-routine by adulthood that a genuine, bright-eyed, poetry-quoting, art-loving individual is welcomed with open arms. If you tried to emulate the Dead Poets attitude in college, you'd be held in contempt by your peers as a grinning, overachieving wannabe and you'd be a social outcast to the lexically-flaccid, just like the kids in the movie.

INSTEAD, watch: Stand By Me! Metering out a pitch-perfect nostalgia dosage. It's a movie about the scariest adventure you never had as a kid with the best friends you ever had or never realized you had until way later. It's got tons of cool swearing and a child threatens Kiefer Sutherland with a revolver. It's such a better movie than Super 8.

2) As awesome as it is, Fight Club does more ill than good. It's an ironically glitzy ad for anarchy and nihilism. It's all good until you realize it's all about how you'll eventually go crazy in adulthood and the only answer is to stop caring and have sex with Helen Bonham-Carter and, let's face it, then nobody wins. We love this movie to death and most people will be able to watch it and say: "Yeah, that movie was sick. On with life!" There's a certain crowd though that will start dressing like Tyler Durden though and start wearing cheap sunglasses indoors and act aloof in their American literature classes and chew lots of sunflower seeds all the fucking time. In the 1990's, Everybody wanted to dress like Kurt Cobain, who dressed like a slob and didn't care -- his fans cared. They cared so much that they wanted to be indifferent just like him. Fight Club is the greatest pitch for hitting rock-bottom during a midlife (quarter-life?) crisis, the moment when you stop caring, utterly powerless against our own self-pity. Don't be like Ed Norton. Ed Norton is a pussy.

INSTEAD, watch: Wanted! James McAvoy begins this movie as a pussy. At the end, he shoots Morgan Freeman in the head from a mile and a half away as revenge for betraying and lying to him. That's badass. He becomes badass because he realizes he's a pussy capable of more. Be like James McAvoy. But don't shoot Morgan Freeman. Ever.

3) Requiem For A Dream will make you want to drink yourself to death. It's got, you know, that one song, more than double the editing cuts of a normal movie, and, like, fifty gallons of heroin. The movie is so elegant in the beginning, approaching the band of drug users like your ever-compelling junkie cousin at the beginning of Thanksgiving dinner and he's got great stories about accidentally selling his pool table to an undercover cop on Valentine's Day. That's funny. For a while, that's damn-funny. Then he starts saying that he needs to eat his own skin right around when the mashed potatoes are being served. The only way out for you is to rip the pouring spout off of that bottle of Cuervo and black out Requiem For A Dream's very existence from your memory. Killing 10,000 braincells to forget, genocide, is a justifiable reaction to seeing Aronofsky's hate-crime on happiness. At least The Fountain had a heartbreaking love story.

INSTEAD, watch: Equilibrium! If you haven't seen it, take a DVD (not a Blu-Ray) of John Woo's The Killer, have sex with it, swallow some Xanax, and then read Brave New World. Yeah. It's kinda like that. And it's that good. Christian Bale stops taking his meds in the future and starts doing bullet-karate on people. Near the end, he cuts a guy's face off of his skull with a katana in one stroke. All because he stops taking drugs!

4) Stop quoting The Boondock Saints. Goddamn, what a great movie. It's so dang delightfully misguided in its grandiose delivery (and something that its sequel pokes fun at (one of the only things its sequel does that's worth mentioning)). The movie opens with a preacher describing the Kitty Genovese story, then delivers some kind of mashup of Watchmen and V For Vendetta by way of South Boston. Well done, Troy Duffy, you read yourself some Alan Moore. As utterly entertaining as The Boondock Saints is, its final question distills into a fairly binary decision about vigilantism, yes/no? Do you have faith in the system? Can normal people justifiably be touched by inspiration and go on a bad-guy killing spree? If they can speak Latin and dual-wield pistols, fuckin' a-right they can! It's a superhero movie. An inexperienced film-junkie still in his larval form though might call it the best mobster movie since Goodfellas and he'd be unanimously fucking wrong.

INSTEAD, watch: Punisher Warzone! Now, Punisher Warzone and The Boondock Saints are awesome for similar reasons but the difference is that Punisher offers no pretensions about what it is. If Boondock was the gritty retelling of the original Punisher story, justification for vigilantism intact, then Punisher Warzone is The Boondock Saints: The Videogame: The Movie. The Punisher alone kills fifty dudes in the movie, one of whom dies because he is punched in the face so hard, it becomes concave. Justified!

5) Where to start with Garden State? This is a Zach Braff power-fantasy. And now you suddenly remember what stomach acid tastes like. What, you think if you run off to the movie industry, you'll come back to town, truly indifferent to your own success because of over-medication, and Natalie Portman will be all quirky-pants hot for you? That would be neat. Again, we can identify with this movie on most levels, it's just going to depress the hell out of anybody aged 16-22. It's about somebody else willing you out of a pretty deep depression and finding you're stronger than you probably ever gave yourself credit for. But to experience that sensation, child, you need to be utterly depressed first. Emerging from a dark phase in your life is great to look back on but you shouldn't kill yourself first to rise higher. That's what Vegeta does, man. Don't be Vegeta. Don't be Zach Braff either. He's a punk in real life. If you never act like him in the first place, you won't have to be a depressed wallpaper-sheet of a human being.

INSTEAD, watch Rango! These two movies are entirely unrelated. But seriously, have you seen Rango? It's the Pirates of the Caribbean CG-animal cowboys sequel that we deserved but never got. There's a part where anthropomorphic moles ride bats and play Ride of the Valkyries on a banjo, washboard, and jug!

6) Why do so many girls own a copy of American Beauty on DVD? First, there's Kevin Spacey going through a midlife crisis. Then there's the kid with the video camera trying to understand beauty in trash. Wait. Okay, stick with us on this. Beauty. . . beauty, beauty. . . American beauty?! American beauty is destructive and American beauty is hard to capture and American beauty is ugly and American beauty is often secretive and forbidden and it is misunderstood and until you walk that road, that miserable road, you will never have come close enough to American beauty to understand it. And. . . that's the name of the movie! The entire movie as an Americana art project vomitorium. Notice we used the term "art project," built with great purpose around the notion that it will be a many-sided sniderohedron that some folks just won't be able to comprehend, and they'll throw awards at it, just 'cuz.

INSTEAD, watch: The Incredibles! Best Pixar movie? Tied with Wall-E and Up. It approaches the superhero mythos and midlife crises with more elegance than the Watchmen movie while aping the Fantastic Four's powers and family dynamic. It's a love-letter to Americana, rather than a eulogy.

7) And finally, whatever you do, don't watch Donnie Darko. Ever.

INSTEAD, watch: Inception! Dream thieves, spiral-gravity, snowmobile chases, questionable realities, espionage, heavy weapons, heavier themes -- a heist movie, in reverse, about the very concept of drawing an audience into a movie, and letting them decide if the world is real or not.

We realize we might have been generous with the "great movies" label, particularly in Donnie Darko's case. 

Recommended related reading: 

[The 10 Types Of Bombast In Storytelling] by Ghost Little and Doberman

[Behold, The 7-Step Plan Of Vengeance®] by Ghost Little

-- Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#31 -- The Beach Is Weird

"A pristine trip to the beach forms no good memory. A weird trip to the beach forms a fantastic memory." 

What's weird about the beach is that people make every effort to exude a confident aura while they're there and yet simultaneously pretend that they aren't in the most filthy and public place imaginable. We aren't talking just about the looking-good -- there's more bad than good. It's more the "get out of my way, I'm having fun!" attitude.

"This here's my patch of dirt and seafoam, don't you even look at me (or please, please, please do)!" People pack their families and friends into salt-frosted vehicles, throw on highly-specific, and sometimes unbecoming, clothing, lie down in the heat beside water that most will be indifferent to, pretend that they're not hot, and get sand in their cellphones. We suppose it roots back to our theorem on why Winter Is Better Than Summer, and the recurring fact that people love being good at doing jack shit. Americans like to think they're good at this, but they need to understand that the position of "Most Chilled-Out Motherfucker On The Planet" was claimed all the way back in 1901, and we don't think Australia is going to give up her title any time soon. Nevertheless, people love working hard at lounging skills. They love tolerating the haters, blowing off responsibility, giving scheduling the middle finger, and turning up back in reality later on, sunburned and smelling like kelp, stating: "Went to the beach, bitches."

The beach is weird. Everybody wants to go. Not everybody feels good about going. You're either there to enjoy yourself in the half-nudity that you've been crunching together for the last month, or to hate on fatsos that are probably getting laid more frequently than you are. As a plus, you know that there are people inside right now (right-right now!) that are hating that you aren't yourself indoors. Haha! Fools! All your sunshine are belong to us!

Know what the beach is? It's your admission that: "You know what? I surrender. I will default to my inner tantrum-response and go limp, indifferent to the world. Just you try to drag me, mom. I'll read something I know is shitty. I will hold my beach neighbors in contempt for either being fatter or skinnier than I am. I will laugh at the people that I know are not brave enough to throw up their own hands and shout: 'Fuck it! Willful stupidity is where I belong. To the salty shores!' I'll hate myself, feeling niggling grains of guilt stuck under my toenails. I'll complain about the heat in the traffic. I'll complain about the heat on the sand. I'll miss my air conditioner. I'll worry about getting sand in my iPhone. I'll hate that I can't surf, or even boogie board, for that matter. I surrender to this dream I borrowed."

We've never had a moment where we've felt we've earned the right to collapse for a while. Happiness doesn't come from waving guilt away, putting something off. That's why the beach is weird. You have to either earn it or you have to deny responsibility for a while, potentially lying to yourself. There's always something better that could be done with this time, isn't there? There is no "enough for now, let's go to the beach." A pristine trip to the beach forms no good memory. A weird trip to the beach forms a fantastic memory.

People love the beach. That's weird. Almost all people love the beach, and yet they complain when everybody in Japan and America drops $10 to see Transformers 3 on a Wednesday evening (Pro-tip, don't pay $10 to see Transformers 3. Wait for NetFlix and skip the first hour (* 1/2 out of 4).). The beach is the Michael Bay Of Fun. It's loud, long, smelly, stupid, and hateful. And that bothers the large majority of people. 

The beach is "Fun," set to "Default." It's 5 out of 10. Sometimes though, you just kinda need 5 out of 10.

We went to the beach last Saturday and had a pretty good time. There was a lot of falling off of surfboards. There was a lot of bickering with locals about towel location. There was a lot of bro-heckling. Beer led to dark & stormy(s), led to grilled meat, led to meat jokes, led to the sun going down on a good day. Weird how that works. Stupidity is best when enjoyed with friends. Stupidity is best when it's shouted, when it's given a passing glance, and ignored for a little while. Fun can be weird, like the beach. We don't like to shout: "Fun is being had!"

Just please don't tell anybody that we are all shouting that on the inside when things get weird at the beach.

-- Ghost Little (has already had the worst day of his life)

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#21 -- The 10 Vital Reasons Why Winter Is Better Than Summer

THE UPDATED VERSION OF THIS POST IS AVAILABLE AT THE NEW DOMAIN: HTTP://WWW.GHOSTLITTLE.COM OR DIRECTLY VIA THIS LINK.

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"Fancy yourself a hard drinker? Go do a few Jell-O shots made with grain alcohol at altitude in Colorado -- it's like a Freaky Friday moment where you've suddenly swapped alcohol tolerances with an 80 lbs. girl, and somewhere else, a young woman has suddenly found a knack for cosplaying as Marion Ravenwood."

There comes a time every year where a man's just got to face facts, open up the windows, buy a paperback that's more than 1000 pages, and start paying extra for iced coffee. Winter is over. We mourn his passing, because winter is the best season of all. Winter is the season of slankets, sleds, and slightly-mad snowday schemes.

It's a simple fact that people love summer. It's warm, the days are long, there's an abundance of sauce-ready foods best eaten outdoors, like corn, and hot dogs, and corn dogs, and. . . less phallic things, probably. Like. . . fruit. Sure, we like fruit. Let's say fruit.

Goddamn. 

Anyway, it's the season of baseball and long, lazy weekends. And it's pretty good, we guess, if you're into that kind of thing.

Winter is better. Suck on these reasons why:

1. Skiing beats the beach for vacations. Sorry, but that's just a medical reality. On a beach, you can do is two things: jack and shit. And read -- three things. So-called beach-books are usually only-slightly better than your own average nap-dream, so you aren't getting much out of your Grisham backlog. "But you can drink on a beach!" you might say. Fuck you and the logic you rode in on! Have you ever been to a quiet drinking town with a skiing problem? It's the best, quickest, cheapest drunk you’ll ever stumble into. Fancy yourself a hard drinker? Go do a few Jell-O shots made with grain alcohol at altitude in Colorado -- it's like a Freaky Friday moment where you've suddenly swapped alcohol tolerances with an 80 lbs. girl, and somewhere else, a young woman has suddenly found a knack for cosplaying as Marion Ravenwood. Also, where there are ski vacations, there are hot tubs. For the uninitiated, hot tubs are these devices that were ostensibly invented to act as pan-dimensional inebriation machines, designed to put a proverbial revolver to your liver, coyly playing Russian Roulette with your consciousness, perception of time, and genital well-being. Hot tubs are wombs of drunkenness, you'll love them and fear them like you love and fear your own mother. They're okay in warm climates, but we all know they're better in the coldness, so start treating beach season like the poor man's destination vacation that it is.
2. There are no outdoor chores in the winter. There is no yard work, no watering plants, no weeding, no vanity-tasks. There is only shoveling, a task, a chore, the only chore that literally enables you to complete your day. Sure, shoveling sucks, but you do it for a reason, not because you like to pretend you have a green thumb in the spring. You physically cannot have fun until you shovel -- it's logic with no plot-holes.
3. The days are shorter in the winter. Now, this is a good thing, and we'll explain why. In most times of the year, you, and everybody else, will be up with the sun, heading off to wherever it is you might be going (Crate&Barrel? Your in-law's house? We don't know, wherever.). Anybody can get up with the sun. Anybody can watch the afternoon fade into dusk as evening sets in. But most people aren't built for this. Have you ever tried to cram everything you want to do into a summer day? You can rarely do it. The days just don't fucking end, and you run yourself ragged. And everybody else is trying to do this, trying to cram it all in. Everybody. . . and their kids. Gotta get to the beach, gotta get to the mall, gotta get to the grocery, gotta get to the ballpark, gotta get to the other end of this highway. And these people get overworked, and tired, and pissy, and frustrated that they aren't having as much fun in these short summer months as they should! GRAHH FFFUUUUUUUUUU RAGE-FIT!! Why is this? Why do we demand the more of these summer days than we ourselves can handle? Or, because the days are so long, you exhaust all of your options after a month -- you've done everything. That's why your parents sent you to that shitty camp where you would've been molested if you'd been prettier, but that doesn't erase your memory of what happened to your friend in the tall grass. In the winter though, you have your sunshine, you appreciate it when it's around, you soak it up, and it's gone before you can over-extend yourself or get bored or violated. See, there's so much lying around in the summer because the days either seem endless and boring, or we get frustrated that we can't fill every hour with tangible "fun," bringing us flawlessly to point 4. . .
4. Summer is a contest. Expanding on the "fun you should be having" mantra from the point above, summer is really a very subtle contest between you and everybody else. People have more lax responsibilities, so socially, it becomes a series of backhanded, passive-aggressive, hyper-compressed, battle of shit-eating grins. It's why people shriek stupidly whenever they're on a speedboat: it's them saying "I'll stoop to the level of a vapid teenage girl on prom night if it means I can convince you I'm loving life right now, filling each moment with euphoria that you can't come close to imagining!” If you aren't having fun in the sun, get out of the way because you're a butt-fucking waste of space. "Look, dude, Brah. Do you realize how much time I've spent in the sun? Look at my skin! My skin's the color of that spray that people spray on their skin when it gets too white in the winter! My tan is a national treasure! But I hate these icky tan-lines, ick, fuck, gross. Real dudes that know how to party are tan, and dudes that party are. . . uh, like, for real.(?) Have you had the experiences I've filled my summer days with? No? Then you should kill yourself. My devotion to my fun is unbridled, like giant African pelican, mouth brimming with ideas and with fish, standing astride a wild prancing water-buffalo! Bask in it. Envy it. If you don't, you're wasting the warm weather that others would be happy to have, man. Take some time off and emulate my lifestyle, I encourage you, dude. There are starving people in the world that will never have weather like this." This is so fucking backwards. Narcissistic assholes with no responsibility lie around in the sun and drool when they sleep on pool chairs (and eat broiled bear cub legs, we're told). Jesus, people love being "good" at summer the same way they love being psychotic fans of sports, or wine, or seafood, or The Fray. If so, you're. . . a. . . fanboy! You're a zealot and a sheep! Grey's Anatomy is, and always was, weak storytelling. Sack the fuck up! In the wintertime, you venture outdoors and you rip fun from the bony claws of the hibernating junkie that is WYNTARR: Barbarian of the Boxcars. Summer is your lame friend that won't drive his car because he has a good parking spot, winter is a crabby kung-fu master that will teach you to be strong by beating you with a length of pipe. Fun in the winter in the snow leaves you soggy, exhausted, and rewarded. And tan, if you have the balls to show some skin in the cold. Vaffanculo, you over-gelled he-cunt, you can get tan in the winter, and while you're stuck inside like quadriplegic asthmatic, we're getting tan in January.
5. Coming in from the cold. Coming in from the heat is a shitty feeling. It's a wave of cool at first, especially in warm climates where you really do need it. Then it flash-freezes your sweat to your skin like you've been in the ocean, and you smell like scallops, except you haven't been in the water, you've actually just been loafing around town like there's a problem with the Earth's gravity. Fuck, Texas would suck without air conditioning -- good food though. Now compare what we were talking about two sentences ago to the feeling of coming in from the cold. Spies come in from the cold, and James Bond is bad-fucking-ass spy who knows how to ski. When you come inside after a day out in winter's gnarled cryo-clutch, be it a weekend out or a weekday commute, you shake off the cold and it shoots life back into your body. Happiness and feeling return to your fingertips, you get some color in your cheeks, and you are excited to be home and inside. Drink something warm and you crack a more real smile that you just get other times of the year. Then get shitfaced and go back into the cold with even less clothing.
6. Drink hot chocolate. It is delicious. It makes you feel like a kid. You also drink coffee and get jacked up on caffeine. With everybody walking around with something warm in their cup and color in their faces, they're more social. Geared up in winter-fashion, the first thing you'll see is somebody's smirking, jazzed-up, trenta-powered face. Now think, what do you see when it's summer in that identical situation? You see everything but the face. Toenails, skin, hair, boobs, sunglasses, fuck-me-seashell-necklaces you bought for 40 cents in Barbados, useless tattoos, all of it. . . okay, not much thought went into that feature as a negative. It is not one. It is not a negative. Umm, so, well, but you can barely think straight in the summer because you're trying to think of what you should or shouldn't say based on the judgment your brain is already processing with all that pent-up contempt you have for people more tan than you (goddamn, our people were Nordic). It's the exact opposite in the summer, a true fact for both sexes. You will have infinitely better conversations with people in the winter over coffee than in the summer over iced coffee. Also, fuck iced coffee! It's almost entirely ice and it somehow costs you more! The inventor of price-gauging for less product should be kicked in the head by a horse, or, by the very inventor of ice itself, so that'd be Jesus, we guess. Jesus, we prithee, take the form of a faun and kick the inventor of iced coffee in the head. We don't know who it was, but we're certain you do, 'cuz you're Jesus.
7. Anybody that uses an umbrella to block snowfall is a mental defect. "Walking through snow that might land on us? Silly mortal, mayhap if we were serfs in Dark Ages England and wished deeply to contract swine flu! Nay, snowflakes will strike us. We are immaculate creatures from Planet Suede, and snow will not sully mine coif." Bull. . . fucking. . . shit! People are at the mercy of technology (AC) in the summer, something we, as humans, control. In the winter, people are at the mercy of nature. Nature hates you, she's been trying to kill off humanity for, like, decades. Battling winter, and winning, is badass. It's like nutting the cosmos with a steel-toed boot and then banging his hot wife and daughter while he's in the hospital waiting for the skin graft on his testicles to take hold. Umbrellas make people look like ponces and villains (exceptions: sword-umbrellas; magic-wand umbrellas). Nevertheless, being smattered with snowflakes makes a woman look fucking hot. You do the math. No umbrellas!
8. The thermo-inversion paradigm shift. Unseasonably warm days in the winter are better than unseasonably cold days in the summer. This isn't speculative, like listing things that you think might be weird in zero-gravity (kids, make you own list of things that would be weird in zero-gravity! then write them in the comments section!). No, when warm weather graces you with her presence on a winter day, it's your best beach day ever! The sensation of sledding in a t-shirt on a hot winter day is a Hindi cover-album of AC/DC's Back in Black -- boiling hot, familiarly cheerful, and laughably sing-songy in it's "fuck-yeah!" nostalgia. Now, compare those warm winter days to cold summer days. So, look, we aren't going to come up with a set-up, punchline, or witty simile to explain why cold summer days blow. We'll just say this: nobody walks home from breaking up with a girl on a warm winter day, he does it on a miserably cold summer day, without fail.
9. Winter has friction. Whereas summer is a half-in-the-bag deadbeat dad, groping through a cooler of swampy water for a lukewarm beer at 1:08pm, dismissing his sixteen year-old daughter, warning her to just "don't fuck up my four-wheeler, I ain't gonna pick ya up if the fuckin' sheriff's department calls sayin' it's been flipped into the creek by your dipshit friends," winter is a hard worker. Winter owns a lumber mill and encourages creative stupidity. It resists your attempts to find fun. Winter challenges you; it encourages you not to simply slip slide through the slip-and-slide at Jeff's house. No, winter builds highly-engineered snowmobile jumps. There's a quiet desperation to make the most of your day in summer and it's always left unfulfilled because there's no weight, no stick, no friction to what you do. "Yeah, knock yourself out." Winter forces you to be prepared, wear the right gear, bring the appropriate supplies (something hot and alcoholic), and to heed the warning that you could get stuck somewhere out there in the elements if it really starts puking (colloquialism, v. puking: a heavy, sudden snowfall). Summer is a slapfight on a sandbar, winter is Jeet Kune Do on a rope-bridge behind Mola Ram's house.
10. You're glad to see winter go when it's over. Seriously, fuck winter. It goes on and on, makes you question your sanity, and makes everybody stir-crazy. You will do anything to get to a warmer climate during the winter months, pushing friends out the door, shouting "save yourself, I'll hold them back," taking a full blast from January's icy dick of hate. There are a whole lot of stressful, travel-heavy holidays during winter that are compounded by continual darkness, familial responsibilities, and a deep drive to just crawl inside a whiskey bottle and be drunk for the entire season. Thank the Hypnotoad when it's over! We certainly are excited to see it go. People start flashing some skin, the movies are far more visually-arresting, roof-decks come into play for your weekend plans (roof decks are the greatest, they're. . . they're just great (seriously, we did keg-stands on the edge of a roof deck on Halloween 2008 (and we're still talking about it for heaven's sake!))), and you get to argue over what will be the new hot jam for the entire summer on infinite repeat. You can leave your house at 9am and not return until 2am, if at all. We just want winter gone when it's over.

Makes sense that we're glad to see winter go. It usually overstays its welcome. We're sort of done here, but this ending is a little flat, so. . .

. . .closing question: 

Q: What would be the worst shaved mammal to fight to the death?

A: Dunno about you, but we'd probably pick a tiger. Just a big old, near-death Indian tiger with a fresh Brazilian wax. We wouldn't want to fight one of those. Horrifying.

-- Ghost Little

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#18 -- The Airport Is Your God Now

"The airport is a really slow time machine that forces you to pass through an alternate Mirror, Mirror version of Nazi-occupied Britain before letting you reach your destination."

Flaming fucking hellshit in a deflating life-raft, I hate the airport. Every moment is an internal dialog. It's all questions. It's all criticisms, complaints, seething judgments, and escapist fantasy. How can this be so slow? How can this person be on their phone while disassembling their bag for security? Why is a soda cheaper than a water? Why does this guy smell like fruit that my girlfriend's cat puked up onto the radiator? Where the fuck is my plane? Why are all the people working at the airport so apathetic? Always? Why hasn't the air-travel "'business" imploded into itself with all these inefficiencies and infinite requests to tolerate their dickish practices? Seriously, 9/11 was almost 10 years ago, that's not an excuse. Get your shit back together. It's getting worse, they're just finding ways to gouge and tithe us until holograms put them out of business.

I'm not going to rail this wrecked locomotive down your throat. Everybody can recite awful travel stories or 5-hour delays in Newark where you realized just how durable the baby changing tables are thanks to an experimental move devised by a Rutgers waterpolo girl. Bruised tail-bone stories are commonplace. No, in short, your rage against the airport can be summed up quite plainly: The airport is your church now. 

It's where you go to have all control over your modern fate surgically removed.

It's abundantly obvious. You hate going to the airport. You have to go around the holidays because of your familial obligations. You don't really understand the things being shouted at you but you loaf your way through it because it's tradition, and you have to, and don't want to be hassled. You go through the ingrained motions whenever you can, which is when you get a reprieve from the internal fury backlog that I've mentioned above. But it goes beyond that. There's. . . the fear. You can't be a dick at the airport, just like you can't be a dick at church. And not 2011 church, I mean old-school pre-Martin Luther church. I mean Spanish Inquisition upside-down flesh-flaying shit. I mean excommunication, can't fight The Man, airport jail for saying "Paul Greengrass," God is always watching fear. It's one of the only places that white Americans are still afraid of other white Americans. They know they have to watch what they say or they might have their windpipe collapsed as a result of an air marshal's knee hose-kinking their trachea. 

The airport is a really slow time machine that forces you to pass through an alternate Mirror, Mirror-dimension version of Nazi-occupied Britain before letting you reach your destination. Papers, lads. Keep calm and carry on, for Queen and Country.

Watch for un-manned pieces of baggage! Also, watch for heathens, please! Constant vigilance -- of yourself and of that guy with that red hat! Verily, that guy. . . I do not trust. Ladies and gentlemen, sit and wait, you will be delivered to your desired destination, thank you. We cannot explain directly why things are the way they are, why you must suffer, the Lord speaks in riddles so that our souls might grow to accept waiting in the goddamn JFK E-terminal. The music is unusual, and you only hear it at church, played on a type of piano that you only hear in this place. You kind of hum along as you sit there, waiting for whatever, sort of recognizing it for a few bars, but you don't know why. The people around you have camped out in their pews, drawing their families close, their kids already wearing unfitting clothes that now are way too small since last year, so they continually fidget in their flip flops and hand-me-down parkas with colors from the incorrect decade. At the airport, like at church, you stare at people. I imagine going to Puritan church was like going to the mall back in the day, where you would walk in and try to figure who's daughter had been knocked up by an Indian brave or a Catholic, which I assume was like their version of a black guy. Except instead of judging silently, they'd throw big stones at her and then crush her to death under bigger stones like in The Crucible.

(A quick side note -- frequent fliers are the real Catholics of the airport. They're in, they're out, they mumble with begrudging respect in Latin and in acronyms (SFO, LAX, JFK, BUR), pop a Xanax at the exec-communion bar, then coast straight through the remaining hours, ready to do it again next week when they have to go out to Round Rock to meet with the guys at Dell. You WASPs wish you were that accustomed to the noxious mixture of obliged, guilt-soaked indifference.)

There's a ton of people-watching at airports. You keep to yourself, but you're very self-aware at church, so your mind is always going, assuring yourself that it's almost over, or that at least you look better than that guy with the $400 stroller who probably couldn't find a bathroom at his parents' house without his iPhone. Fuck the iPhone. It's a slap in the face to anybody that got made fun of for using a Game Boy on the school bus growing up. You just know that lady teased her younger brother for getting really good at Tetris back in 1989. Did you three-star every level in Angry Birds yet? Oh, on both iPhone and iPad, you say? Swallow a knife! 

People grip their smartphones like holy relics at the airport -- their only conduit to what they call reality, but what a Man of the Cloth would call "hedonistic pleasures of the butt." Which is why the airport bans these kinds of electronic devices on planes themselves. You're in God's house now, motherfucker -- your St. Francis of Assisi Skull is not allowed! If the airport is the church, the plane itself is your motherfucking confessional booth. You're stripped of everything, laid bare, and asked to be alone with your thoughts, and maybe your dad's old copy of The Winter of Our Discontent (for some reason?) that he bought in 1962 when he got delayed at Idlewild on his way to DC. The airport has the power to do that, take all that you have, and you can't fight it or you'll be labeled a heretic and put on the no-fly list or something. Who really knows? You don't. You don't want to know what happens to people that Skype'd during a flight from Boston-Logan to Detroit-Ft. Wayne. I'll tell you what happens to them. They end up in Detroit, a.k.a. The Capitol Wastes from Fallout 3. Except instead of roving gangs of Super Mutants, it's just the Detroit Tigers back from Kansas City for a home game.

The boredom at airports is crippling and baffling. You have entire weekends at home where people ask you, "so you seriously did nothing all weekend?" And you answer, "yeah," quite honestly. You loafed around from 9:32am, read part of The New York Times online, but mostly just stared at mail you didn't want to open because it's either junk or bills you already paid on their website. Then you watched SportsCenter, decided not to weed the back patio, and played Nintendo Wii until 4:30pm when the Jets' game came on. How is sitting for 20 minutes at an airport actually not 20 minutes, but instead 2 metric-fucktons of murderous dead space that has descended upon your soul like a inter-dimensional bogart with extra crustacean claws wriggling from its maw, swallowing all light, all hope, and all time? How, I ask? Because you aren't alone with your boredom in church/airport. You're at a party with no ride home. You're suffering together, and somehow, unlike normally, when co-misery makes everything better -- which is why you never crash a wake without a wingman -- you have to sit, and wait, until you finally get too awkward, and at last acknowledge the dude staring at you with such unabashed indifference. His eyes speak to you and they say, "hey, man, this sucks, doesn't it? But hey, what're you gonna do? We're in God's house."

Do we live in a society where idleness is synonymous with failure? If you aren't miserable, you're doing it wrong. If you're doing it right, you're actually forgetting something really important you'd better check every inbox, mailbox, bill-pay, account, and fact-sheet to make sure you haven't forgotten NAOW! I feel that constantly. I think it's been ingrained into me since before I could walk. At the airport, we're given time. But we are stripped of the means to be productive. What a paradox.

At the airport, there's no room for punk-rock. No room for irony. No room for humor. No room for the sly. No room for will, or even for humanity. We all serve the desire to get the flying fuck out of these skin-wrinkling circumstances and on to somewhere that isn't church. Anybody that thinks outside of the Order of Airport Logic is possessed by the devil, an interloper that fights the tenuous system that has promised to bind us together.

-- Doberman (. . .has had enough of this)
on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF

#16 -- "Sucker Punch" Reviewed | * *

"It's like Michael Moore's version of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. That movie would blow, and so does this."

The titular sucker punch refers to the fact that you, moviegoer, are what powers shallow, exploitative, CGI-soaked power-fantasies that dominate modern Hollywood. And that's why this movie is hard to enjoy, even when its German/orc/robot bodycount is in the hundreds. 

A girl's mom dies, she is taken to an insane asylum named after the lead singer of The Eurthymics so that her wicked Stepdad can have her declared insane, lobotomized, and then collect her inheritance. The asylum is a grimy toilet filled with sad girls and corrupt orderlies that consider themselves kings. They keep saying when the girls are lobotomized, they see paradise. Twenty minutes into the movie, the girl called Babydoll is lobotomized for seemingly no reason by Don Draper. 

What follows is a lengthy flashback told through a weird framing narrative. Without warning, the events of the previous 5 days before the lobotomy are related, but now, Babydoll is introduced as a "new girl," not at an insane asylum, but at a brothel, of all things. So what's going on? It's a badly-handled shift. Look, the workers at the asylum -- ostensibly the "real" world -- are re-drawn as 60's swingers and scummy club-goers. The girls working the brothel are mesmerizing dancers, we're told, and the dances they perform represent who they truly are when given the chance to create art. They lose themselves when dancing, falling into their roles as entertainers, all for the enjoyment of the club's audience. 

When Babydoll dances, she assures herself -- as all diluted entertainers throughout history have -- that this, distracting the trollish, all-male audience, is power, and she is then sent to a world where, at least in her mind, she's a hero. She fights samurai in an absurd costume, using katana and pistol like it's time to Devil May Cry, and it's so over-the-top that you, the actual movie-goer, should make the realization: 

This is satire. 

A poorly executed satire, sure, but it's satire nonetheless. Between the art direction, which eerily echoes Unreal Tournament III, and the "How The Fuck?!" action, particularly during the robots-on-a-train sequence, we give it 2 stars. We can't in good faith recommend it though. To anybody. It's basically all for naught. Let's drill down just a little bit further into the satire, because it's the only thing saving the story. It sure as shit isn't the characters, but a story can be carried a decent distance on the bent ankles of "concept" and "industry commentary." Yes, it's a metaphor for the stupidity of Hollywood, but so were Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back and Three Amigos! and those movies wasn't self-important and were very funny. 

This movie isn't good, but it isn't good for the reasons you'd initially think. Breaking this busted, poorly-acted metaphor down:

• Girl in insane asylum. The innocent goes to Hollywood, realizes it's an icky, insane, corrupt place that lobotomizes people if they cause trouble or stop being profitable.
• The subconscious brothel fantasy. What the higher-ups in Hollywood try to glam up to keep the audiences coming back and "the talent" dreaming their dreams and dancing their dances. There's a jarring sequence when the worm-man villain says he won't kill the girls just yet because they're going to make him so much 'effing money. But at this point, are we still talking about actresses or a certain writer/director/producer auteur, hmmm?
• The steampunk power-fantasy sequences. The movies "the talent" are told they are making, when in reality, they are actually making smut for the leering masses back in the brothel. Can the girls use this power to get what they want? Maybe. Is it empowering? Well, it's a mocking empowerment. Was it actually empowering to see Angelia Jolie punch dudes in Salt? No. And this is the same.

So it's no coincidence that the battles are bloodless, without consequence, and highly-stylized (/wink). It's no coincidence that these girls jump from battle to battle like highly-disposable working actors over the course of the movie. One day they're shooting an empty-suited, steampunk, (deliberately) historically-inaccurate World War I set-piece, the next, they're slaying inhuman orcs and murdering CGI dragons. Setting dragon-slaying to a cover of an Iggy Pop song is so blatant that it has to be mocking Kill Bill or any movie that thinks using obscure music for action sequences is hip. Then, it's worth repeating, comes the above-mentioned robots-on-a-train. And seriously, this scene is the "entering the Copacabana" of tracking-shot action sequences. We dare any living director from Michael Bay to Timur Bekmambetov to shoot a more jaw-dropping piece of ass-kickery. This movie treats action sequences like musicals treat elaborate dance-numbers. We just drop into them like pocket-dimension murder-soliloquies. They're the only moments when the movie speaks to the audience and goddamn they're good. Snappy, crunchy, hyper-accelerated and beautifully choreographed, like good bullet-riddled dance hip-hoperas should be. Give that one girl, Sweet Pea, her own movie, because she rocks the hoodie, assault rifle, and zweihander like it's her IRS-documented occupation.

She is self-employed and will have many itemized business expenses.

This film movie is a commentary on how we've allowed talented artists to become corrupted by the movie-making machine. Problem is, it has to become a monster to kill a monster. It's not a fun topic to tackle with a straight face. Somehow, Sucker Punch is a fairly humorless dry-heave, when we want physical comedy to be funny, but it's just gross to watch our friend wretch over a shit-stained toilet. For example, movies like Hot Fuzz manage to be comedic homages to the stupidity of Bad Boys II while sufficiently matching the action one-to-one. But this -- this isn't a celebration of thrilling cinema -- it's a dirge. We want to talk about Sucker Punch, the steaming-hot afterbirth of the 2000's.

We also want to talk about movies being compared to video games as a negative. Did you notice we compared it to a video game earlier? We did. But we didn't mention that we mentioned it (until now). Go back up and try to find the reference, it's in passing, but kinda funny, now that we think about it. 

Go do it, scroll back up. We'll wait. Do it. Did you find it? Good. 

Now, want to know why movies like Sucker Punch borrow concept and style from modern video games? Because modern Hollywood movies are artistic graveyards and aren't worth borrowing from. That's why this very film is throwing itself on its sword in defiant mockery. Today, imagination lives in interactive media, so to say it looks like a video game is a compliment. How is it that Quentin Tarantino borrows from shitty 70's exploitation grindhouse B-movies and he's called an visionary auteur? We're assuming nobody lives and dies by the artistic integrity of I'm Gonna Git You, Suckah! So how is the rambling, patchwork plot of Inglourious Basterds (sic (the rod up that man's ass has a rod up its ass)) worth any praise? His characters are matchsticks. His plots are vignettes. He knows nothing about story structure. Nothing he shoots could be called "beautiful."

Except the car chase scene in Death Proof. That's beautiful. 

And yet, Tarantino's best moments are when he steals, so we take that back about Death Proof. He steals the spiky dialogue from snarky French films by way of blaxploitation. He steals the Yakuza gangster attitude from Japanese anime. Want to know a secret? Video games stole from Japanese anime. American movies stole from video games. Anime stole from American movies. Oh, shit! Inspirational ouroboros! See, the thing is, these Tarantino eccentricities aren't part of conscious American culture -- we give it some grace. Sucker Punch's school-girl, robot enslicing, Call of Duty fetishism is very much a part of conscious American culture. It gets no grace. It gets no grace because it's Apple Jacks, and kids love that not everybody understand why they like it, in spite of it not tasting like apples, man.

But Sucker Punch. Oh, Sucker Punch. You are, at first glance, everything that parents hate in their children. Sucker Punch is basically a problem child -- it's other peoples' kids. Parents love making snap judgments about other peoples' kids. Maybe the movie critics of Sucker Punch are meant to represent the parents that actually allow and enable these movies to succeed, or something? We're just stunned that nobody has made this comparison of the film-making industrial-complex -- it took us a while to see Inception as a metaphor for constructing a movie and planting a story inside an audience, and not many critics made that link right away. These people should go back to, uh, like, creative critique, college, for the film-watcher? Put it on a dog. 

We've said before that Avatar is passable because of its audacious bird-flipping to accusations of being generic (it's a monomyth, assholes, just like Dances With Wolves, just like Star Wars, and just like The Bible). Avatar also lifts from 90's video games of all things. Those floating mountains are straight out of Chrono Trigger, which probably lifted them from a 70's prog-rock album cover by Roger Dean. You might call Sucker Punch a kid's wet dream. You'd be right. It's also a film exec's worst nightmare coke-fueled rampage ever. A bad movie about how they allow bad movies to be made, hurting talented people to make half a metric fuck-ton of money? With elaborate -- and unsurprisingly removed from this cut of the movie -- dance sequences? With too much CGI and no discernible script? Man, the dialogue in this bad. It's video game bad. But the action is video game good, which is better than movie great action. Eh, we'll call it a wash. 

Sucker Punch didn't need to exist. The only justification for its existence is so we could all have the black mirror held up to us and have it scream, "You're an enabler! Look what the machine does to cinema, to art, to critique, to talent!" It's like Michael Moore's version of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. That movie would blow, and so does this. It's like staring into a backed-up toilet and the only way for you to come to grips with a clog this bad is for somebody to smash the porcelain. And what a goddamn mess it makes. For all it does "right," it still doesn't "win." A casualty of war, this thing is exactly $7 worth of terrible. Here's hoping we've gotten all of this self-loathing out of our systems.

* *

(out of 4)

-- Ghost Little and Doberman

on Twitter  |  @GhostLittle_WTF