A couple years ago, when Marvel was releasing their miniseries/event Siege, my excitement was off the charts. Ever since Avengers Disassembled, Secret War and the Sentry, Marvel – with Brian Michael Bendis at the helm – had been putting together one big arc of events tagged together. Siege was going to be the big finale to it all and it was doing a great job. Not only were they coming off an entertaining status quo with the whole Dark Reign thing, but the miniseries was hitting all the right notes. It was four issues, had less tie-ins than normal and set up a great big bad in the Void. After the third issue, I couldn’t wait for the conclusion.

Then Siege #4 was a huge wet fart of a comic that took away my enthusiasm like nobody’s business. My excitement for this years-long epic went up in smoke and I’ve lost any interest in Marvel’s event stories.

Last night, I went to the midnight showing of Avengers. I thought it was absolutely wonderful. I had a complete blast and while there are some definite flaws (why did the bad guys die all at once, exactly?), I’m more than ready to see it again. More than anything else, there reached a point where I had to step back from everything and realize that it was more than just a fun movie. I had to step back and remark, “I can’t believe they actually pulled it off.”

Seriously. Can we take a second to look at how absolutely miraculous it is that things turned out as they did?

The Avengers always had this weird spot in Marvel lore in that they were considered a major deal, but lacked the mainstream star power. Of the main three Marvel superhero teams, they were the least memorable to the average man on the street. There’s a reason why Spider-Man and Wolverine were inserted into the lineup. If anything, that made them perfect fodder for Marvel Studios. They had fanboy recognition and lots of history to mine, showing that there were existing stories that proved that they are viable characters. Yet at the same time, there would be a public unaware of who these guys were and they’d get drawn in by the hype, seeing the non-Hulk guys as something fresh and new.

I recall how cautiously optimistic I was about Iron Man ever since seeing the very first picture of the armor as designed by Adi Granov, the man known for illustrating the hell out of Iron Man’s armor in Iron Man: Extremis. The early photo of Robert Downey Jr. with the glowing chest looked perfect and from all accounts, he was genuinely excited to be playing the role. I even recall an interview where director Jon Favreau claimed that he had read every single issue of Iron Man to get his head in the game.

With the then-upcoming Incredible Hulk coming out, there was a rumor on the internet that both movies would share the same scene. Like some event would occur and we’d see the incident from Tony Stark and Bruce Banner’s point of view, respectively. I even made a joke about this in the first page of Ultimate Edit way back when. There were definite rumblings that they were building towards something big. It didn’t happen, but it wasn’t too far off.

Part of me was afraid. Comic movies are incredibly easy to screw up. I’ve seen Dr. Doom look tame. I’ve seen Galactus as a cloud. I’ve seen a movie studio that refused Sentinels in an X-Men movie. I’ve seen Juggernaut with cheesy rubber abs. I’ve seen Daredevil and Superman Returns and Spider-Man 3. I wanted so much for Iron Man to be what it should be.

Other than removing a subplot because of the US Air Force throwing a hissy fit, that’s what we got. Iron Man was the movie comic fans have been wanting to see. Thing is, it wasn’t JUST a good movie. After the credits, Nick Fury appeared and told Stark that he wasn’t alone in the superhero game (though as far as SHIELD knows, he is, which is weird in retrospect) and introduces the Avengers Initiative. And some people go, “HOLY SHIT.”

It continues weeks later when Incredible Hulk comes out and we have a scene at the very end where Tony Stark tells Thunderbolt Ross that they’re putting a team together. Not to mention that there are definite callbacks to Captain America existing in that movie’s continuity. Marvel Studios was planning on not only doing a bunch of movies in a shared universe, but funneling it into a gigantic team-up.

Each movie featured more and more references to other movies. Iron Man 2 showed a half-finished version of Captain America’s shield, introduced Black Widow and ended with a shot of Agent Coulson finding Thor’s hammer in the middle of a desert. Though if anything, Iron Man 2 gave me pause. Not just because it was the weakest of the Avenger movies, but also because they went out of their way to point out that Stark was only going to be an Avenger in a minor capacity. Like they were sitting us down to explain that Robert Downey Jr. was going to only get a couple scenes in Avengers because he’s a busy dude, so don’t get your hopes up.

Thor and Captain America were both extremely solid in my opinion and brought everything to a head. The end of Cap’s movie showed a teaser trailer for Avengers and the hype continued.

The trailers honestly didn’t do much for me. Plus I still felt a little apprehensive. A movie with so many characters? I don’t want another Spider-Man 3. Plus the Avengers haven’t been known to be used especially well in other medias. Back in the 90’s, they gave us that bewildering Avengers cartoon that decided that Captain America, Thor and Iron Man weren’t worth talking about, so they went with Tigra, Wonder Man and the like instead. Then a few years ago, Marvel started releasing animated movies such as Invincible Iron Man and Ultimate Avengers and those sucked on ice. ESPECIALLY Invincible Iron Man. Try that animated turd and be amazed by how unwatchable it is.

And so I saw Avengers. And it ruled. My fears — including the idea of Tony Stark being a glorified cameo — were unfounded. It gave me the opposite reaction of Siege #4. I want to see it again after watching all the others over again on DVD. I want to read about the next installments of Iron Man, Captain America and Thor’s movies and where they lead to next. I want to hear about new characters being brought out of the ether. I want more.

I can’t believe they pulled it off. DC Comics and Warner Brothers briefly tried and immediately tripped over their own feet before they could make a single step. Marvel simply got their shit together and while there were so many reasons for things to fall apart, they pulled off one hell of an impressive project.

It’s movie history is what it is. Bravo.

Also, whoever came up with the idea of the final post-credits scene deserves a statue in his or her honor.

The Viral Factor (directed/screenplay/story by Dante Lam, story by Candy Leung, story by Wai Lun Ng): I caught Dante Lam’s Viral Factor back in January. I liked it a whole lot. It features Andy On from Mad Detective, the guy who played Detective Ho. Viral Factor is one of those movies that manages to hit every cliche in the book for its genre (~dreams as metaphors~, convenient callbacks, drowning, and there’s probably a scene where two dudes point empty guns at each other but I don’t remember), but everything is so well executed that it doesn’t even matter. It’s like watching someone play a video game that you know very well, but the player is so skillful that you can’t look away. The cast is pretty strong, too. Jay Chou is probably best known for being the biggest of the three or four good things about Green Hornet, and Nicholas Tse is an HK vet. I remember seeing and enjoying Time & Tide in high school, and I’m looking forward to watching that one again. (edit: I wrote this review like two months ago. I’ve since gone back and watched Time And Tide, and it is this weird, unfocused, awkward, entertaining little action movie. It’s also very post-Matrix, so the bullet time looks awful, but the chase/shootout in the apartment building rules.)

The most surprising thing about Viral Factor is how videogame-inflected it was. There were several action scenes that weren’t direct rips, but at least felt inspired by games. The opening is straight out of Call of Duty, there’s an Uncharted-style climbing sequence that comes complete with air conditioners in the way (which I thought was introduced in Uncharted 3 back in November, so it’s probably coincidence), several different platforming sequences, and finally, a platforming/fighting sequence in a transport ship. Obviously all of this stuff has been in movies before, but something about the way this one was shot and staged thrust the idea of a video game inspiration into my head, and I still can’t let go of it. I wish I had more concrete examples to give. I need to see this again so I can maybe take some notes. But the video game idea kicked around and actually made me like the movie a bit more, as they chopped up and remixed classic video game tropes into new or perfected forms.

Heightening the video game feel was the sequence when Man Yeung, played by Nicholas Tse, escapes from police custody. It put me in mind of that sequence late in Metal Gear Solid 2 where Raiden is running around nude, but filtered through Heath Ledger’s approach to the Joker in The Dark Knight. Tse has a reckless disregard for his own life, but he basically stumbles and fights his way through a bunch of guards (and pepper spray!) before making his way almost to safety… at which point he leaps off a walkway, falls a couple stories before crashing into a parking lot, steals a car, and escapes. It’s almost comical, but it’s basically exactly how the regenerative health in modern games would look in real life. An idiot, rushing headlong into death, but somehow surviving for no good reason.

I really liked how relentless this movie was. It opens with a stylish bang, spends maybe 15 or 20 minutes setting up the rest of the plot, and then it’s on. There’s a pretty crazy shotgun bit (you can see it in the trailer), wild car wrecks, well-done slow motion shots, guys swinging over gaps firing guns… I can’t even remember what else. It’s an action movie that goes all the way in. I cackled at this movie like the wicked witch of the west, and the people I saw it with did, too. It’s real nice to see all these tropes and gimmicks I’ve grown up totally in love with, down to the dynamic duo of good and evil teaming up to fight eviler, refined and perfected.

What’s cool is that the characters sort of fit that mold, too. Chou plays a doomed cop, Tse a villain who Isn’t That Bad, Really, and Andy On plays a dirty cop who’s out for himself. I’m not sure who plays her, but the little girl who plays Champ, Tse’s daughter and Chou’s niece, is great. She’s spunky and direct and yes, she gets kidnapped. (And tossed into the ocean!) She is also exactly like basically every single girl who shows up in these movies. A little sad, a super-snarky dick, and adorable. Their father is a broken, but dedicated, old man who regrets his sins. Chou’s mother is kind, but kept a horrible secret for years. There’s a dream that echoes throughout the movie with special meaning.

Viral Factor basically doubles down on every cliche in the action movie book and makes it out unscathed. It’s a tense and fun example of an HK action flick, without being overbearing about its central gimmick or wasting a bunch of time trying to make the movie seem like it has something important to say about morality or whatever. Viral Factor: it’s a movie where people get shot and die in interesting and exciting ways.

-I’m slowly getting into Michael DeForge’s work. It’s weird and a little out of my wheelhouse of cusswords and violence comix, but I like how creepy and weird and John K his style gets sometimes. He’s put Kid Mafia #1 online for free, asking only that if you read and enjoy it, you kick him fifty cents via Paypal. I read it, I liked it, and I paypaled him fifty cents in Canadian dollars. If you like it, you should do the same.

I like this idea, and I hope more cats who produce minicomics start doing this. I’m not much for paper books and totally fine with making it rain via Paypal. Hopefully you are, too!

–I did a podcast with Chris Eckert from Funnybook Babylon about our comic book origins. I really like this photoset he made for the chat, which really says it all:

Is it any wonder my taste in comics turned out like it did? That Batman cover is crazy, though. I also spill the beans on the time I had a nightmare about Terry Kavanaugh, which is one of the stupidest things that has ever happened to me. We talk a lot about Image comics, too. I guess I hadn’t realized how fundamental their stuff was for/to me until this chat, so it was nice to look back and sort of reconcile what I like now with what I liked then.

-Michael Peterson and Kevin Czapiewski have launched Project Ballad, a webcomic about a girl named Kendra Price, RPGs, and maybe… video games?? Start reading it here. It’ll update Monday-Wednesday-Friday from here on out. You should read it. I am.

-I watched Lena Dunham’s Girls, but I don’t really have a thinkpiece in me like the rest of the internet. I hated it, basically, because the experiences and people I watched on TV were so completely and utterly alien to my experiences. Like, magic, kung fu? I can buy that. Asking my mother for eleven hundred bucks a month to pay my rent while I douchebag around town? My mom would die laughing and then haunt me for the rest of my life, telling me to get a job in between ghostly guffaws. So yeah: not for me.

-I watched Frederic Jardin’s Sleepless Night the other night. I liked it a lot. It’s this tight little crime thriller about a cop who robs the wrong guy and gets his son kidnapped. Most of it takes place in one building, there are several factions, and I love love loved that the violence was so awkward and off-putting. Tomer Sisley as Vincent is not playing Jason Statham as Jason Statham, as the fight scene in the kitchen proves. He’s just a cop, rather than a supercop. Also there are father/son issues, and I’m a sucker for those, not to mention gunfights and action.

A lot of Sleepless Night takes place in a nightclub, but it never dragged the movie down like every other nightclub scene does for me.

Sleepless Night reminded me about Fred Cavayé’s Point Blank because… well, they’re both in the same genre, French, and pretty good. Point Blank shakes out a little differently. Samuel is a regular dude, a nurse, put into a tough situation. He sucks a a lot of things, but the movie livens things up by teaming him up with a hardened criminal. That doesn’t mean that you won’t see cross on double cross on triple cross over the course of the movie, though. Gilles Lellouche is perfect as the desperate regular dude, and Roschdy Zem gets a good turn as a gangster. There’s a scene in an apartment that was tremendous, really great writing, action, and film-making.

-My man Sean Witzke put me onto Yamantaka // Sonic Titan, which is a… some type of band. Rock? Noise? Whatever. I really like “Hoshi Neko,” but the entire album is pretty good.

I don’t really have the frame of reference to describe it in proper terms, I guess, so I’m going to copy & paste from their blog:

YT//ST was founded in late 2007 by performance artists alaska B and Ruby Kato Attwood, born from the ashes of the late Lesbian Fight Club. Armed with mixed-race identities, mad illustration skills and a whole pile of home-brew junk electronics, alaska and Ruby wrote and performed the first mini ‘Noh-Wave’ Opera, ‘YAMANTAKA // SONIC TITAN I’ in April 2008. YT//ST continued to perform short homebrewed operas, eventually forming a network of Asian and Indigenous artists through collaboration and formed the current YT//ST collective.

They have this weird multi-disciplinary sound, sort of dissonant but appealing at the same time. The vocals sound like they’re coming in from a distance, or through a filter, and instruments sound like they fade in and out of the mix as needed. I dunno, I could keep putting words that don’t quite fit on it or you can listen to “Hoshi Neko” and “Reverse Crystal//Murder of a Spider” and hear exactly what I mean. I bought the album and it was more than worth my time.

–This guy Boulet is so good. I love this strip about childhood dreams, too.

-Philip Bond is still drawing spacegirls.

-Faith Erin Hicks is great. I think she’s super interesting as a person, going by her essays on making a living in comics & animation and whatnot, and of course she’s scary talented. She’s got a Tumblr now, which includes this great picture of Liz Sherman from BPRD:

I really really like this. Liz’s bored expression, which extends to the lazily arcing cigarette smoke, is pitch-perfect. Even the lazy posture, starting from her bent left leg on up. But, and maybe this is weird, my favorite part is Hicks’s signature. “feh.” is the best signature since Walt Simonson’s dinosaur. Someone should do one of those knock-down, drag-out, ultra-long, “here are all of my opinions on every subject ever” interviews with Hicks. I bet it’d be a great read.

–Powerhouse blogger Kate Dacey is curating a Manga Movable Feast on Viz Signature, which may well be the best comics imprint since the glory days of Wildstorm. The MMF is a collection of reviews, criticism, and just content in general, all on the subject of Viz Sig’s fantastic catalog. I’m not sure if I’ll have time to contribute this time (my motivation for everything these days is on approximately a negative thousand million, but it’ll pass. I’ve been working on this simple post since Wednesday, ha ha), but I did pick Takehiko Inoue’s Vagabond Vizbig 9 and Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka as part of my best of 2010, and I still like this look at Inoue’s writing. I’m down for another Vagabond reread, actually. Maybe that’ll be this summer’s big series of posts? Inouefest, 2012. In-No-Way-Fest 2012. Anyway! Go, read! Kate’s list of 7 essential books is pretty good.

-I’m probably going to pre-order the super deluxe funcrusher plus monster package of El-P’s Cancer 4 Cure (that title!!!!!) and Killer Mike’s RAP Music. I love those guys, and dropping 85 bones on their work doesn’t seem like a huge extravagance. I’ll have to wait to see how next payday shakes out, though. I definitely want the vinyl of both. I just have to make sure the math makes sense. It may be smarter to just order Cancer 4 Cure and R.A.P. Music on vinyl separately, though. I don’t necessarily need the instrumentals or poster.

-Paul Jenkins and Humberto Ramos have a kickstarter going for their book Fairy Quest. Here’s a video:

And a widget:

I like these guys, especially when they work together. I’m going to kick some cash their way come payday, too.

-Here’s a couple STS videos I liked. I like how regular the video for “Good Intentions” is. It’s just a bunch of guys hanging out and doing things. It fits the theme of STS’s Goldrush, too, which is laid back flips of established songs. And STS is a spitter, too. Always a treat to hear a new verse.

-Tucker’s Comics of the Weak is still the best post every week. He’s got Jog and Abhay backing him up this week, plus Nate Bulmer, so maybe you should get down or lay down. Also, I vote you don’t get to make the Holocaust into a pithy comeback in your stupid fight comics. Been there, done that.

-Next week: I’ve got my uzi back, you dudes is wack, face it, the Wu is back (hopefully, but if the Celtics beat the Hawks on Sunday, I may spiral back into the Pit of Depression)

If Morrison’s personal history includes magic, wild experiments with consciousness-tweaking substances and reported alien visitations, why does he keep writing about square-jawed guys with capes? “We’re running out of visions of the future except dystopias,” Morrison says. “The superhero is Western culture’s last-gasp attempt to say there’s a future for us.” Sitting in his drafty house overlooking Loch Long, an hour outside his hometown of Glasgow, the 52-year-old writer smiles. “The creators of superheroes were all freaks,” he says. “People forget that—they were all outcasts, on the margins of society.” And then, inevitably, he shifts from the third person to the first. “We’re people who don’t fit into normal society.”

–Grant Morrison, Playboy, 2012

One minor point: it’s sort of weird to say that the creators of superheroes were freaks when that is pretty much factually not true. It’s the same line of thinking that suggests that “sex-starved geeks,” so described by IGN, created all the sexy ladies in comics. I’m not sure what your measure for freaks is, but I’d guess that Morrison’s is so low as to be meaningless. Here’s a quick sample that I used to debunk IGN:

Sue Storm: created by Stan Lee (married since 1947) and Jack Kirby (married since 1942)
Mystique: created by Dave Cockrum (married)
Jean Grey: created by Stan Lee (married since 1947) and Jack Kirby (married since 1942)
Mary Jane: created by Stan Lee (married since 1947) and John Romita Sr (his son JRjr was born 08/1956)
Elektra: created by Frank Miller (married to Lynn Varley in the ’80s, divorced now)
Rogue: created by Chris Claremont (has a wife and kids) and Michael Golden (can’t find any info on him)
Storm: created by Len Wein (married twice) and Dave Cockrum (married)

Siegel was married, and I can’t find anything on Shuster. Bob Kane was married. Jack Kirby was married, had kids, and served in the military.

And I mean, a lot of these guys were Jewish, and a handful of them probably drew porn comics at some point, but I think freaks is a bit much. Anti-semitic prejudice definitely factored into their lives, but a lot of people deal with prejudice without being turned into freaks. These were regular dudes who had lives and families, not freaks. Freaks makes for a good narrative (Superheroes as outsider comics! The freaks will lead the way!) but all of these dudes fit into normal society in just about every way, other than the (at the time) less-than-distinguished job of drawing funnybooks. I mean, if you called Robert Crumb a freak, sure, okay. But like… Jerry Siegel? Jack Kirby? Freaks? Ehhh.

Anyway, my bigger point (which is rougher than I’d like) regards my thoughts on this:

“The superhero is Western culture’s last-gasp attempt to say there’s a future for us.”

Me and Morrison differ pretty drastically on the subject of the superhero. From my perspective as a dude who grew up on capes under the shadow of Reagan and later Bush, I don’t see much difference between, say, westerns, cape comics, crime movies, and those dystopias that Morrison thinks are a cynical depiction of the future.

There are a few things that I feel like are an integral part of American (pop?) culture. We prize the individual who chooses to go his own way, at least up to a point or within certain accepted standards. America is built on a mistrust of authority, whether we’re talking about the Revolutionary War or the pervasive paranoia that infested films noir. We prize violent solutions not because we are bloodthirsty, but because they are permanent, and there is safety in permanence. There’s a certain beauty and honor in being an outlaw, and while we dislike when outlaws enter our life, there’s a vicarious thrill in watching them work.

I once tried to describe film noir to a lady I know as “the most American of genres” for a lot of these reasons. She thought I was being jingoistic, but I mean it in as genuine a way as it gets. That distrust of authority, wresting control of your life from those who control it, and having a driving need to uncover the truth even if it destroys you… There’s sort of a siege mentality there, like you have to protect yourself and repel the invaders at all costs, because you’re the last righteous/honest man, no matter your sordid past. Redemption and destruction, over and over again, shifting shape a little each time.

This is a story that has repeated itself throughout American culture, whether it’s Malcolm X transforming himself from a street hustler into a truth speaker or corporate whistleblowers or film noir or westerns or crime flicks. It’s all about being your own man and making your own way.

Dystopias are just another way for us to exercise our will. The dystopias are usually not the fault of the main character, but that main character is often the last of the righteous, or at least one of the last willing to stand up and fight back against the darkness. I really liked The Book of Eli, with Denzel Washington, for those reasons. In the world of the lawless, one last man holds tight to the law and lives his life accordingly. Or the Punisher — in the ’80s, he was explicitly a ripped from the headlines revenge fantasy. He went after fake versions of Norieaga, the dude who was poisoning medicine, gangsters… he fought against our fears on his own, because no one was strong enough to shoulder that burden but him. We excuse Rambo’s violence because he’s getting things done. We celebrate Ripley because she’s a problem solver, and John McClane because he knows how to not just get things done, but be charming and relatable while he does it. I mean, “Do you really think you have a chance against us, Mr. Cowboy?” and “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker” isn’t just a cool one-liner.

(I think it was Dennis Culver who pointed out that Hans is a form of John, which shifted that movie a little bit for me, thematically. I haven’t quite quantified how, yet, but it’s something that’s going to run through my mind next time I watch Die Hard.)

So I think Morrison is wrong when he says that capes are the last-gasp at a future. I think that’s extremely myopic. We have a future. That future is that there will always be some rugged individualist willing to stand up and say, “No” or “Not in my name” before blowing the head off whatever scientist or priest or politician or cop put us in such a terrible condition. It doesn’t matter whether that future is dusty and barren or colorful and filled with costumes. It’s rap music and Scarface and rock music and The Godfather and Blade Runner and all the rest.

I moved to Madrid, Spain in the middle of spring in 2000. I was sixteen, I’d recently broken my thumb (playing video games, of all things), and I was suddenly transported from Georgia, where I’d lived off and on forever, to another continent where I didn’t speak the language and knew no one.

It was strange. I made friends, thanks to meeting people in the embassy. I went to a school with Americans and Spaniards, too, so adjusting was a daily process. I ended up picking up conversational Spanish pretty quickly — I found Frank Miller’s 300, of all things, in a grocery store and learned Spanish alongside it — so my social life wasn’t too bad. One thing that brought my group of friends together, and kept us together, was music.

We all had slightly different tastes in music. I was hard on my backpacker tip at the time, while secretly making way for music from Georgia. We all liked rap, though, from OutKast to the Kottonmouth Kings. We learned to breakdance together, some of us having better luck than others (read: not me) and went out to rap clubs on weekends. The jam was Kingston, because they played mostly rap and R&B stuff. It wasn’t upscale enough for the girls, I guess, so we’d also go to Capital (Capi), which played different music depending on what floor you were on. (There was another club we’d go to regularly, but I don’t remember the name of it. It played techno, though, and one night I fell asleep on a couch there.)

I met one of my best friends from high school, James, because he wanted to borrow my Jurassic 5 CD and wouldn’t give up when I put him off. Later, when the homey Nick was being honored for something (I forget what–I think we were all acting in a play?) we pulled our shirts off, twisted ’em round our hands, spun them like helicopters, and yelled “Raise up!” Why? ’cause he was from North Carolina. And we all loved this:

It was like that, man. Music was something we listened to, absorbed, and expressed ourselves through, whether via awkward, halting freestyles or turning songs into personal anthems. It felt good. It felt right.

There’s something amazing about music. I went to Spain and one of the first things I heard on the radio was an uncensored Tupac song. I think it was “Letter to the President,” but I’m not 100%. I heard a bunch of Spanish rap. Friends put me onto cats like Frank T and 7 Notas, 7 Colores. I branched out into French and German rap like DJ Tomekk (that one via his GZA collab, “Ich Lebe Fur Hip-Hop”). Today, in 2012, I’ve own a few hundred songs and maybe a dozen albums in languages I don’t speak. Graeme McMillan put me onto Camille, a french singer, and I think Sean Witzke was the guy who showed me Charlotte Gainsbourg first, who sometimes sings in French. But past that, I’ve got Yoko Kanno, Yuji Ohno, The +2s, that one Miho Hatori album she did with a Brazilian guy, a different Miho Hatori album… I’ve got a lot.

I don’t understand a lot of it. But that doesn’t matter. The music just turns me on. It doesn’t matter where it came from or who did it. The only thing that matters is if it knocks. If it’s hot, it’s hot. And if it’s hot — and this is the important bit so pay attention — there’s somebody else out there who likes it, and you can talk to them.

That’s the part that kills me every time. When you meet somebody who is into what you’re into, or knows what you’re into, and you just chop it up for a while. They reveal crazy connections between songs, like how I’m pretty sure that there’s a way you can crossfade from David Bowie’s “Rock’n’Roll Suicide” directly into Saul Williams’s “Black History Month” and have a transcendental moment as you bridge Ziggy Stardust to Niggy Tardust. You trade trivia and lists and you bond. You talk about how the piano (pianoing? piano playing? piano riff?) that opens Kanye West’s “Runaway” is the loneliest thing ever. You can bond over a lot of things, but music seems to be that one thing that works better than anything else. And it’s amazing.

Crunchyroll is streaming Kids on the Slope. Here’s a trailer. Don’t worry about the Japanese text. Just let the visuals and sound wash over you.

I didn’t know a lot about Kids on the Slope before I watched the first episode. I did know that it is based on a josei manga I’ve never read by Yuki Kodama. I knew that Shinichiro Watanabe directed it, and that the show features music production by Yoko Kanno. I know that it takes place in the ’60s in Japan, and features jazz as a major aspect of the setting. I like the director and music producer a lot, mainly due to Cowboy Bebop, so I was already on the hook.

It turns out this show is really good, and uses music in a really familiar and comforting way. Kaoru Nishimi arrives in small town Japan friendless, nervous and depressed. Sentaro Kawabuchi is feared by the other students because he’s a big brawling jerk. Ritsuko Mukae is Sentaro’s childhood friend, and is really the only one who likes him. Kaoru plays classical piano. Sentaro plays jazz and is a killer drummer.

There’s a scene in the first episode where Kaoru watches Sentaro play drums. He covers one ear at first, trying to shut out the noise. Then he pulls his hand down. Then he loosens up. And then he listens. It’s this hugely powerful moment, and you watch this epiphany we’ve all had happen behind his eyes. He tries to play some jazz on piano, almost immediately, and Sentaro is like “Nah son. That’s not jazz. That’s got no swing.” The two characters are set at odds immediately. Kaoru plays classical music and is pretty strait-laced. Sentaro is a big bruiser and plays jazz, so he understands the importance of improvisation. You have to feel the music, rather than replicating it.

Kaoru has to descend into darkness in order to hear the jazz. There’s this tiny room below Ritsuko’s record shop. I like this, because it presents jazz, and the relationships that will undoubtedly follow, as something special. It’s top shelf, rather than just being a regular old thing you trip over.

I think that’s how we all feel about our favorite type of music. Our favorite music is revelatory, whether about the world or ourselves, in addition to being something that you can bounce to. In the case of Kids on the Slope, jazz represents freedom. Freedom from constraints, from conformity, from depression, from anxiety. Freedom to enjoy life. There’s something raw in jazz that Kaoru doesn’t get out of classical music.

I liked this cartoon a lot. The animation has this strange 3D quality to it that makes regular people look a little more exciting than they normally would in such a simple coming of age story. It’s very pretty, but in a very natural way. There’s no glamour in the characters, but the music scenes have this swing to them that I find really attractive. Sentaro is introduced not by face or cool pose, but by how he drums with two sticks on his way to school. His drumming is great, and there’s a palpable difference between his piano playing, which came across as earnest but inexpert, and Kaoru’s, which is talented, but stiff.

I also love the added texture that jazz brings to the series. Jazz is a black art form, or at least it started that way. But Japan is several thousand miles away from the birthplace of jazz. Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue gets a visual shout-out in one scene, lurking behind Kaoru’s head like the most obvious and menacing foreshadowing ever. That’s 1959. Kids on the Slope takes place in summer, 1966. In the US, 1966 was President Johnson sending more American boys off to die for no good reason, The Beatles playing their last live performance, and the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense by Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale.

I don’t expect Kids on the Slope to reflect any of that, but there’s such a cross-cultural thing going on (black and American to Japan and Japanese) that it makes considering the context really interesting. I keep a set of black anti-war songs on my iPod, I think the bulk of which were recorded between ’66 and ’72, so that period is one that I’m extremely curious about. I’ve never seen it from this point of view before, and that has an attraction in and of itself.

I don’t know jazz like I know other types of music, and this is going to be an education for me, too. I know the greats or whatever, I guess, but that’s not knowing jazz. That’s just knowing somebody else’s top ten list. The centerpiece for the first episode is Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers’ “Moanin’.” I wasn’t familiar with it before I watched the show, and they don’t really play the entire thing, but I like it a lot.

I really like the idea of watching Kaoru open up as he dives into jazz. It’s clearly not going to be finished by episode two, and I think the ongoing transformation is going to be fascinating. I’m hooked, basically. It’s intensely relatable, well-written, and the music stuff is, as expected, fantastic. There’s something so nice about discovering something new and finding that it’s not only extremely emotionally resonant, but well done and educational, too. And yeah, it worked: I’m going to start listening to a lot more jazz.

You can see the official site here, or stream it on Crunchyroll.

Let “Moanin'” play while you go about your biz online. It’s nine minutes long, but so good. It sounds like sunshine feels. You can’t help but bop to it.

“You know who goes to jail? Nigger stick-up men, that’s who. You know why they get caught? Because they fall asleep in the getaway car, Karen.”
–Goodfellas, 1990

“That’s what the niggers don’t realize. If I got one thing against the black chappies, it’s this. No one gives it to you. You have to take it.”
–The Departed, 2006

“Sonny: Niggers havin’ a real good time up in Harlem…
Carlo Rizzi: I knew that was going to happen as soon as they tasted the big money.”
–The Godfather, 1972

I love crime movies, man. I’m sure that’s obvious if you’ve ever read this site before, but it bears restating: I luv them. Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy was always around the house when I was growing up. For some reason, my grandparents weren’t down with Scarface, but they could watch The Godfather all day. (My grandfather had a tape of New Jack City, though.) When the DVD boxed set came out a few years back, the first thing I did was order it so that they could replace those awful double-VHS sets. I’d end up looking at about a foot of The Godfather every time I went to find a movie to watch.

Now, the thing about crime movies that I hate the most is the nigger speech. It’s not in every crime flick, but it’s in enough of them (and most of the major ones) that it’s something I took notice of and started rolling my eyes over. The gist, if you somehow aren’t familiar with the nigger speech, is that a bunch of guys will sit around a table, maybe at a meeting or maybe at dinner, and talk about how they don’t do _____ like the niggers do. Usually it’s dealing heroin, but sometimes it’s petty crime or sticking people up on the street. It pitches the guys giving the speech as classy criminals, as opposed to the inelegant savagery of the negro peoples when it comes to crime.

It’s a cheap, lazy shorthand version of characterization. I get the reasoning behind it. It actually makes a lot of sense. You want to set your criminals apart from other criminals, and honestly, stick-ups and dealing drugs is probably the primary narrative in the media when it comes to black crime. The dominant image for black crime is basically street gangs and crackheads, right?

But man… black people have had some amazing criminal enterprises. The Black Mafia ran wild over Philadelphia, the Black Mafia Family as a concept is begging for a fictionalized movie (You know that bit from Prince Paul’s A Prince Among Thieves where Chubb Rock is like “I do prostitution, drugs, guns, and rap management?” I feel like that’s the secret origin of BMF), and there’s also The Council (recently immortalized in American Gangster), Nicky Barnes, Freeway Ricky Ross, Bumpy Johnson, and plenty more. If you’re looking for amoral predators willing to do anything to make a buck, there’s plenty you can pull from.

I get the nigger speech, but I don’t like it much. I’ve seen it too often, and I feel like it’s at the point where it’s only in these movies because it was in the other movies, and now the nigger speech is an accepted part of crime movie culture (for lack of a better phrase). The nigger speech puts forth a fake idea, and I don’t know that any movie has actually factored that into the speech as some type of dramatic irony. It’s never a rebuke. It’s just a statement: Italians (or whoever) do crime like this, black people do crime like this. It’s an argument of sophistication vs unsophistication, or honor among thieves vs dishonorable actions, more than anything else. It’s character- and world-building stuff, and it actually works pretty well, assuming the writing’s above a certain quality.

But I still don’t like the nigger speech. It’s not even the racism that bothers me. It’s not the historical inaccuracy, either. Neither of those is really what gets under my skin. (Well, maybe the racism, but c’mon. I live in America. I know how to roll with the punches/racism.) It’s really about the lack of originality for me. It’s like how every movie has to have a scene where the good guy and bad guy points their guns at one another and WHOOPS the guns are empty. We’ve seen that scene. We know how it ends. We’ve heard the nigger speech, and we don’t care. At this point, throwing the nigger speech into your movie just makes you a biter at best.

I missed out on Abel Ferrara and Nicholas St. John’s King of New York (released in 1990) the first time around. I’m not sure how or why. I certainly knew of it — I’m a big fan of the black Frank White and the movie was sampled in Tupac’s “Death Around the Corner”, which was my favorite Tupac song for years, so some things you absorb without even realizing — but I hadn’t watched it until last year, when either Sean Witzke or Tucker Stone urged me to do so.

I loved it. Christopher Walken was great. Laurence Fishburne was great. Giancarlo Esposito, Wesley Snipes, David Caruso, Steve Buscemi, everybody was good. Toward the end, there’s a bit where a guy goes “Hey. You.” and what follows is one of the coldest killings ever put to film.

But partway through the movie, there’s this exchange:

“Joey Dalesio: I’ve got a message from Frank White. He wants to sit down, he wants to talk.
Arty Clay: You tell him I don’t talk to nigger lovers.
Joey Dalesio: Well, he says he’s got things on his mind that he wants to discuss with you, and he wants to know where and he wants to know when.
Arty Clay: You tell him in fucking Hell, that’s where. He’s gonna wish his lawyer left him fucking those Sambos in the joint when I get through with him.”

I started to roll my eyes, because man, this is biz as usual, no matter how good the movie is. But, Frank runs with black dudes. He’s their brother. So, a little later, he goes to visit Arty. I can’t embed the youtube, but there’s an official excerpt here. And I loved this scene. I can’t even tell you. It instantly made up for the nigger speech in this flick and dozens of others. It’s this super hardbody statement of intent for Frank White and one of the coolest scenes out. It’s Batman delivering his ultimatum to the crooks in Miller and Mazzucchelli’s Batman: Year One times a billion. “You guys got fat while everybody starved on the street. Now it’s my turn.”

King of New York upset a lot of my expectations on top of just being a dope movie. The violence, the plot, the dialogue, the acting, all of it was top notch. Getting a bit of blatant revenge on the nigger speech was just icing on the cake. When you add in “Hey. You.” from the end, you’ve got one of my favorite crime flicks.

(You know what sucks? I can’t embed a trailer of this movie from youtube being LionsGate doesn’t understand how the internet works. Check the trailer here, though.)

Fantasia, directed by a lot of dudes, written by a lot of other dudes, 1940 (Amazon VOD): This was playing at the Castro Theatre (which turns 90 this year!). I haven’t seen Fantasia in years. Probably 15 years? Definitely not since Y2K. As a result, this was almost entirely new and a real deal delight. In my head, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” was much, much longer. I’d somehow forgotten about “Night on Bald Mountain” and its blend of the profane and sacred, and the totally insane “Dance of the Hours” with the dancing gators and hippos, too.

I watched this on an old 35mm print, I think, so it was pretty scratchy, but still beautiful. The theater was full of old people and children, which was nice. The kids a few rows behind me kept gasping and talking about the action on the screen. They sounded impressed. I was, too. I think my favorite sequence was “Nutcracker Suite.” I like the song, but the animation was nuts, the ice and water effects especially. Watching the fairies dancing around and the colors slowly fading through the seasons was amazing.

My absolute favorite part of that sequence was the very beginning, as the fairies bring color and life to the land. Everything about it, from the palettes to the detailed animation and the sweeps of color that serve as pollen or contrails or whatever, rocked my world. The bit with the spiderwebs especially, where the fairies are dropping dew on the web? Yeah, that. Dang. All of Fantasia is good, but this was the bit where it looked like someone was trying to show off. “Look what I can do.”

Second favorite is “Night on Bald Mountain.” I’ve been really into looking at… I don’t know the term, occult iconography? Hellboy stuff, basically–Ars Goetia, cultural monsters and demons, what evil looks like to different people. That sort of thing is really interesting right now, and “Night on Bald Mountain” is an incredible example. I remember being surprised that “Rite of Spring” was basically “Evolution: The Movie.” I mean, 1940–was that sort of thing cool back then? But then “Night on Bald Mountain” brings it back around to religion.

I love the monsters in this one. The creepy limp demons and lizards, the paper-thin ghosts, and then that bit where the demons and skeletons are dancing in front of the fire pit as their brethren are destroyed. The demons feel like they’re part worm. They look like regular monsters, but the way they move is disgusting. They’re the embodiment of the other. I love the bat-faced monster, too. He’s such a great idea, and so well-conceived. He’s an overpowering, burdensome presence while he’s in action, and then when he disappears, it’s obvious that he’s just around the corner, laying in wait. He looks and feels like a predator. The part when the bells begin chiming and light strikes him is a very arresting visual, too.

“Night on Bald Mountain” is basically 1 Peter 5:8 in animated form. “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour.” He’s always there, lurking in the shadows, and everyone is a target, no matter how sleepy your town might be.

I liked all of Fantasia, really. I was surprised at how much nudity there was (the harpies have nipples!), but it was a really good ride. I was actually thinking about Kubrick’s 2001 while I watched it. The wordless visual cacophony late in that movie bugged and bored me, but I had no trouble with the first part of Fantasia. They’ve got two entirely different goals, I think, but I couldn’t help but compare them.

It’s kind of surprising to me that something from 1940 can look so good. Some parts have aged better than others, yeah, but by and large, this looks really good. Everything has a ton of personality, and the little useless things that add verisimilitude (bubbles popping, excess splashing, you know what I mean) abound. It’s sort of like Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira in that way. So much care was put into giving the movie not just a style, but a high level of quality, that it ends up looking really good. I want the Blu-ray, but this is definitely a movie that was worth seeing in a theater.

But yo, seriously, the dancing mushrooms–they were supposed to be Chinese stereotypes, right? That made me a little uncomfortable.

I had a joke I wanted to make about Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia being a re-imagining of “Rite of Spring,” but I can’t quite bridge the gap and make it work. But yeah–I definitely spent some time during that sequence like “Oh man, Melancholia was a huge downer, but really pretty.”

Annie Hall, written and directed by Woody Allen, 1977 (script, Amazon VOD): I watched this for the first time after talking to Sean Witzke about it. I liked and disliked it at the same time. I thought it was pretty well written and the direction was great, but I never really got into any of the cast. Woody Allen as Alvy Singer was basically my exact mental image of Woody Allen, which was funny to see. I guess I’ve absorbed some of this movie over the years. But every character wasn’t repellent so much as… just kind of there. I never found myself caring what they did, though I did have a strange sense of dread every time Alvy met a new woman. It’s well-acted, but like… there’s something I didn’t get here.

The direction, though, rules. It only took a handful of scene changes for me to pick up on what Allen was doing with the transitions between scenes. I didn’t even have the words to describe how I felt about the transitions before I reread the first issue of Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen and everything clicked. I don’t know that it works for every transition, but I got the feeling that each scene built on the previous one or was directly connected to it, either by way of a scrap of dialogue, a phrase, or some theme that was being explored.

Sometimes it was overt, as in when Alvy’s mother is talking about how he distrusted the world and they cut to Alvy ranting about hearing someone muttering “jew” under his breath. Other times, it was more subtle, like when Alvy says he needs a cold shower and then we cut to Rob telling him that he’s gonna send him to the showers. There were a few of those bits, and I really enjoyed them.

The cuts also made the movie more interesting to me in a structural way. It feels like a cut-up movie, like if a movie had been made and then diced into pieces and… not rearranged, since it’s mostly in chronological order, but had all the fat cut out, I guess. Annie Hall feels lean, and I couldn’t find any wasted space. I didn’t really care what happened to the characters, but I did like seeing what happened… which I guess is a kind of caring. (Now I’m wondering why my reaction is “I like this but I don’t like it.”) But the scenes are short and snappy, the dialogue pops, and I don’t think I was ever bored. It’s easy to see why so many people love this movie.

It’s such a funny movie, too, and I loved how weird the cast was. Christopher Walken as a creepy brother, Jeff Goldblum as a party member with one line, and Shelley Duvall was the reporter, right? Alvy’s asides to the camera were all pretty good, and I loved the subtitles when he and Annie were freaking out about each other. I think my favorite part was the cocaine scene.

There’s this one bit in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou, one of my favorite movies, when Ferdinand looks at the camera and says “All she thinks about is fun.” Marianne notices, and says “Who are you talking to?” “The audience,” Ferdinand replies. I love that bit, that conscious recognition that you’re watching a movie, and a lot of Annie Hall gave me that same feeling. The asides, the pace, the editing… it’s a movie that couldn’t be a play or a book or a song or anything but exactly what it is. Pierrot Le Fou lingers and lavishes attention on its subjects, while Annie Hall hits you with rapid-fire anecdotes. There’s a charm and a conscious acknowledgement that it’s a movie, a filmed record of someone’s life. I thought that was a very cool touch, and it deepened my appreciation of the movie. “I’m a movie,” both films say. “Watch me.”

I said, “I liked and disliked it at the same time.” Now that I’ve actually written this out, I’m gonna go with just, “I liked it on several different levels.” I don’t know why I’m so hesitant to admit that.

The Raid (written and directed by Gareth Evans, fight choreo by Yayan Ruhian & Iko Uwais, 2012): You can tell whether or not you’ll like The Raid by looking at the full cast and crew on iMDB. See all those dudes with numbers by their name? Five members of the Machete Gang, eighteen Special Force dudes, 21 guards for the drug lab, and all the rest? Basically all of those dudes are gonna get destroyed, on-camera, in excruciating detail. You can see it in the trailer. Heads slammed into walls repeatedly. A handful of people get the punch-punch-stab-stab-stab-flip-slam-stab again treatment. Another goodun is the slam to close range gunshot. Or yo, every time the blades came out. You’re going to this movie to see a bunch of dudes get wrecked, and it more than delivers.

This is another movie that felt like a video game to me. The structure is very much like Final Fight or Double Dragon. You meet the guy with the wife and unborn kid in the beginning while he shows off his skills. There’s a briefing that lays out exactly how the movie is going to go. There are hordes of faceless goons, most of which are beaten down in huge group fight scenes. There are guys with specialties. There are actual factual midbosses. (They all use the same weapon, too, and are treated like horror movie monsters in a few great scenes.) There’s an end boss. The sets are pretty samey, and everything is fragile. One guy breaks a window at point blank range by rolling into it with maybe a foot’s worth of movement beforehand. It’s all very basic.

But The Raid: Redemption‘s not here to wow you with stunning set design. This is a murder movie, and one of the best examples of the type I’ve seen in ages. It’s a movie that benefits from being seen with a bunch of people, too. At my showing, the audience was mostly quiet for the first fifteen or twenty minutes. But as the tension ramped up and the action got more and more extreme, you could hear the audience getting into it. Sometimes it was a joke, like a hissed “Awkward” during an elevator scene. Sometimes it was a gasp of surprise. More often, though, it was a pleasurable exclamation. “Oh MAN!” “Aaaaaaaayo!”

I know a lot of people hate loud audiences, but this totally enhanced the movie. The Raid gives you a lot of spins on things you’ve seen before, but always manages to go one step past where you think it’ll end. It’s going to shock and make you want to cringe and look away. THat other people around you are reacting similarly is a boon. It’s a bonding, or maybe just communal, experience when someone loudly curses after a characters gets his brains blown out at close range.

I liked all of this one, basically. It did exactly what the trailer promised it would. We saw twenty cops fight their way into an apartment complex and then through a video game-style army of thugs. We saw people get stabbed up. We saw people get shot. We saw a few pretty great hand-to-hand fights. The main character, played by Iko Uwais, is just baby-faced enough that we believe he’s an earnest, classical hero, but not so baby-faced that we aren’t completely under his control when he sets about demolishing a hallway full of dudes armed with knives.

I want to talk more about the action scenes, but it’s tough. I don’t want to ruin any of the specific surprises that make the scenes so much fun to watch, and also, I saw this movie on Sunday and some of those specifics are fading. But the gore effects are horror movie quality, the fight choreography is consistently interesting, even if probably a dozen guys get thrown up against a wall during a fight. There’s a frantic and manic pace to the fight scenes that perfectly gets across the tension the characters are experiencing and makes it a very painful movie to watch at times. But at the same time, it gets away with being a little clever, too. There’s a gimmick with a machete and blood that worked really well for me, and there’s another bit where someone goes out of a window that I thought was monstrously effective and exciting.

The Raid: Redemption actually reminds me a lot of Crank 2. It’s nowhere near as profane as that flick, but both share a certain level of relentless action. The pauses for breath in The Raid are more like brief gasps of air. “Okay, my knees aren’t wobbling and I’m only seeing double. I’m ready for round two.” Crank 2 benefitted from me watching it with my friends, too. You have to be able to react, whether that’s flinching (you will) or gasping (you will) or laughing. Do you ever get that? Where something surprising and awful happens and you bark laugh in the throes of horrible tension? You’ll do that a lot. The Raid: Redemption is positively gleeful in its action, and that makes it an incredibly fun movie to watch. I’m waffling on whether or not I’ll see it again in theaters, but it’s a day one blu-ray purchase for sure.

Coriolanus (directed by Ralph Fiennes, script by John Logan based on a story by William Shakespeare, 2011): I think I came into this one with the wrong expectations. I’ve never read the play, and the trailer made it seem much more exciting than it actually is. Gerard Butler, Ralph Fiennes, a blood feud that leads to a man being outcast, more than a little homoeroticism… Fiennes gave this interview, I forget where, and he explained that the rivalry between the two plays out like a love story. The trailer makes it sound like a good time at the movies. Instead, we get all of that, but with added interminable monologues, slipshod analogues between Rome and Now, and nothing ever resolving satisfactorily.

There are bits I liked, of course. I thought the modernized Rome was a really cool setting, and Fiennes’s son was very interesting. This was my first real exposure to Jessica Chastain (she has a really familiar face), and she was pretty okay. Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Cox were great, though, definitely the highlights of the film.

But past that? Past the actors I liked, I had a hard time staying awake for this one at 1315 on a Saturday. The accents weren’t a big deal, but the monologues were a well-delivered huge bore. It needed more of the midnight parties involving head shaving and barbershop chairs or ugly fistfights in dusty, blasted apartment buildings and less of people walking around a room, looking everyone in that room in the eye, and talking about their motivations.

The people I saw it with loved it, though. Maybe the trailer just tricked me.

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I Saw The Devil, directed by Jee-woon Kim, written by Hoon-jung Park, 2010 (Netflix): I watch a lot of these revenge movies. I had this one in my queue for months, though, before a pal talked me into watching it. Two weeks later, I finally watched it, and it was pretty okay. It stars this dude Byung-hun Lee, who I liked a whole lot in GI Joe and The Good, the Bad, the Weird. This one was pretty okay, but frustrating at the same time.

I Saw The Devil is a revenge movie with a point, which tends to be exponentially less successful than revenge movies that don’t have one. Luckily, though, the point is “Don’t go too far with your passion or everything will fall apart,” or something like that, so you get a lot of exploitative violence to go along with the cheap, unearned, and unlikely ending. In fact, while the ending is imploding in slow motion, you’re treated to shots of a new height for revenge in these revenge pictures.

But from back to front, this is a movie about a secret agent (of some sort, you only ever see him do one secret agent-y thing, other than all the revenging) hunting down the dude that killed his lady. There’s no subtlety here, near as I can tell. Lee tracks Choi Min-sik, breaks his bones, cuts his tendons, and generally goes in as far as torturing a man goes. The guy runs, then figures out who Lee is, and then goes on a rampage. Lee’s boss wants his badge and gun. Blah blah blah.

Director Jee-woon Kim takes an uncomfortable, rather than gleeful, approach to the violence. Ears get cut off, there’s gallons of blood and guts, someone’s Achilles tendon gets cut at one point… it’s cringeworthy violence, rather than “Oh MAN!” violence. But at the same time, it gets that cringe not through some type of moral point of view or anything like that. The camera leers over the stabbings and crackings. You see skin break and hear bone’s crunch. The direction is pretty effective, actually, and I’d like to see more from this guy, maybe in other genres.

The ending doesn’t work for me because so much of the movie is concerned with slow pans over trauma. The movie says one thing (“Mmm, here’s a little shocking violence!”) and the ending says another (“Mm, violence… bad idea, bros.”) and doesn’t do a good enough job to bridge the gap between the two. There’s a leap that never gets made between the spectacle and the moral. It’s aight watching, but nothing exceptional. The style of violence sets it apart from a lot of other movies in this genre, but the script isn’t good enough to keep it from feeling bland in the end.