Minus

There are some things I will recommend to everyone.

Minus is a painted comic, short and simple and beautiful. It's the story of a girl with a lot of imagination who is magic and can do absolutely anything she puts her mind to.

This one is my favorite. With or without context.

The Enemy Within (the fursuit)

Notes from episode 5, "The Enemy Within":

• This episode is an MST3K masterpiece.  There is nothing about it that isn't amazing.  
• Dog in a fursuit.  With a unicorn horn.  And antennae.

• The third actual alien creature ever on Star Trek.
• This alone kept me in tears through the entire episode.
• William Shatner acts out his good and evil side.  William Shatner forgets anything he may ever have learned about acting.

• By sheer brilliant misfortune, just when you're tired of the dog, the strangest looking man ever to exist is the ships navigator this episode.
• Moralizing made somewhat worse by Shatners good and evil halves being less good and evil and more "torpid" and "fucking batshit".
• Super efficient whiskey bottles.

• Incredibly bizarre rape sequence.
• Spock theorizes that Kirks inner rapist is what makes him an incredible leader.
• Spock berates Kirks non-rapist half and reminds him that if he seems insensitive in doing so, "it's just the way I am".
• Spock tells rape victim that she must have been glad to see all of Kirks "special characteristics".
• Spock is the worst person.
• EVIL dog in a fursuit.
• Evil self groping.
• EVERYTHING ELSE.
  
  I can't hate this show.  When it's good, it's good.  When it's bad, it's horrific.  Sometimes it is both in the same breath.

Gods and Monsters

Caught up to the Walking Dead's seventh episode this season.  The characters improved quite a lot, Rick lost his hat, story coverage was again given to the interesting people, and the less interesting people broke down in fairly charming ways.  Rick and his deputy both have obtuse moral compasses that point only in the direction of one plot rail or another, but the show has dramatically improved, and it was already pretty great.

But when you have no money in Portland, you get to watch a lot of things.  And it just so happens I'm also wending my way through the first episodes of the original Star Trek.

This was an odd choice for me.  It's been somewhat impossible to deny that Star Trek is, at least in many different parts, good.  Its overarching message, which can pretty much be equated to the beauty and triumph of exploring and confronting the unknown, is as powerful today as it was 40 years ago.   Still, it has that nagging little problem of 40 years of continuity that always serves as a rather ominous barrier to entry. And there's a pretty wide variety of other Star Treks to choose from, all of which seem to maintain an at least tenuous grasp on quality.

There's a mood you have to be in to even think of starting from the beginning - which I'm in. But under no circumstances can I make getting to the end even a remote priority. That way lies madness, madness and despair.  Nonetheless, I decided I couldn't go without seeing the pilot and... well, I enjoyed it.  And then I enjoyed the next couple of episodes too.  So I think I'll ride a while with Kirk and his crew, and see how long it takes me to move on.

Notes from episodes 1-4:

• The pilot with Captain Christopher Pike has the most ridiculous aliens ever.

Sup.

• These aliens spend the entire episode trying futilely to convince Pike to have sex with women.

• The new movie did a pretty good job of capturing a lot of the charming little elements from the first show, the ones that slowly introduce the characters:  Uhura openly flirting with Spock; Sulu and his swordsmanship and musketeering, Mccoy and Kirk's friendship, Spock openly crying over his human mother.  The plot writers clearly just scribbled down every endearing moment of character development they could find in the first season and threw them into a cohesive narrative, for which they actually deserve some mad props.  

• These are elements that the shows writers clearly hadn't really discovered just yet - Spock mentions his mother incorrectly as "a human ancestor" in the episode before he has a mental breakdown, a friend of 15 years carves a gravestone for Kirk but screws up his middle initial, and several characters don't really have any distinguishing personality traits until a few episodes in when they develop them so they can have personality problems.  The show in its infancy is just about Kirk, but it expands very quickly and within just a few episodes.

• Funnily enough, one of the only other character who gets an actually charming moment in the pilot is Uhura, who is SUCH A BADASS.  At this point in the shows life span, Star Trek deserves a pretty thorough gender critique but Uhura makes up pretty much all of the exceptions to their generally shitty portrayal of women.  See also.  She's my favorite character in the show right now, and feels more adventurous and clever than Kirk, who might as well have adventurous and clever in his job description.  

• There's some element to Star Trek at this point that involves ship captains getting into fist fights and tearing their suits off with stunning regularity.

• Alien life is for pansies.  The challenges the Enterprise faces in the early days almost entirely consist of fighting omnipotent beings and acts of god.  Two episodes in a row, a human being develops psychic powers capable of tearing starships apart.  The things that Kirk faces are things he has no hope of defeating without reasoning with them, and he has to do that without sacrificing his own ideals, which are pretty straight-laced. Sometimes they're out to replace humanity entirely, and not entirely for the wrong reasons. It's an interesting dynamic, really, one that they clearly run with as Q becomes a part of TNG later on, and it forces some hard questions with skewed, but interesting answers.  

• In the fourth episode, Mr. Scott firmly insists that he cannot break the laws of physics, and then reverses time by three days so that the ships engine will boot up faster.

Even in its early, early days, Star Trek is surprisingly smart.  It doesn't have a budget, so it has to get by on the quality of ideas and discussion it generates, and I'd say it succeeds pretty well at it. Whether it passes or fails with me depends on to what level the show repeats itself, espousing the same ideals over and over again, or constantly asks new questions and (preferably) leaves them unanswered.  It's that part of the show, that venue for discussion and new avenues of thought, that really appeals to me.

Because.  You know.  Neeeeeeeerd.

Wear Many Hats.

Better blog title to come.  Or not.  Let me just start by saying I am so going to regret "righteousbrose.blogspot.com", and I will never change it, ever.

I'm watching the Walking Dead into its second season, and I'm astonished by how much worse it seems.  The first season laid out a pretty grand promise of potential, using the exceptional amount of scope provided by six hours of drama to tell a wide arc of stories in a singular apocalyptic setting.

There's a lot of appeal to that universe, as the current zombie craze helps demonstrate.  It's not hard to guess why: a sparse, desolate setting that makes great cinema, the gore and gloop of the rotting fleshoids, an appealing fantasy of "the last man on earth" or "a ragtag group of survivors" matched by constant conflict and a struggle for survival.  And there's room for some really deep stuff too, the dark mirrors created by these walking shades mimicking their former lives, the behavior of humans when human society breaks down, and the study of meaning in a world where any belief in the greater purpose of humanity or god is broken beyond repair.




So this is great story territory, and it's incredibly well suited to a serial drama. The reason for this is that this genre allows moments of inspired observation and cinema that you cannot make otherwise, and each of these moments has to be created by a separate chain of events.  A lot of good zombie movies follow this line of thought already.  Rather than a connected plot of one greater meaning, there's an intro to the apocalypse which is typically stunning, a travelogue of random happenstances where shit alternately happens and doesn't happen, and a big final conflict leading to what can be a happy ending but is usually a giant fuck you, because the ending doesn't really matter.

What matters are those moments along the way - the point in 28 Days where the protagonist lets out his animal and the zombies cease to recognize him.  The bit in Dawn of the Dead where, having achieved total safety, the survivors become a miserable hollow shell of a family unit.  Francine whispering "what have we done to ourselves?".  Will Smith in I Am Legend going crazy in solitude and triggering one of his own traps - either set by a zombie, or by himself.  Britain, empty.  New York, empty.  Silence, terrible silence.

The zombie genre is, as Hideo Kojima might describe it, a vehicle for great art, though not always an art in itself.  It's a setting with a lot of great things that people can relate to, an easy place to explore with a pen and paper and video camera and copious amount of fake blood.  It's an opportunity to tell great stories, and a call to arms.

From the opening credits you can tell that The Walking Dead answered this call.  Sometimes it's just the simple pieces of beautiful concept art, like, say, the moment where our lead character Rick gets caught on top of a tank, or that great shot of the freeway with all of the broken-down cars leading in one direction.  Other times they're arcs - the journey to the city, Merle Dixon and the handcuffs, the corny CDC plot which was, at least, unique ground to cover.  But yeah.  It's there, whatever "it" is.

And Season Two has it too.  This episode a bunch of zombies went to a church and sat down quietly in the pews, just as they had in their former lives, and stayed there until a batch of survivors beat them to death with hatchets in front of a Catholic crucifix. A better one: a group of survivors stumbled upon a suicide victim with a pin on his shirt emblazoned NO EXCUSE FOR DOMESTIC VIOLENCE.

So I am pleased to report that the Walking Dead is still trying to say something, albeit that it is right now trying to say something about religion, very clumsily.  And while the popular cry seems to be MOAR ZOMBIES, that's not the problem I'm having right now.

It's the characters.

Look - all of the things I mentioned above are pretty damn important, and really the reason to watch the show.  But you can't have a story without interesting, relatable, unique and dynamic characters, especially if it is a serial drama.  And when the Walking Dead opens its second season on a haphazard narrative in a hatefully bad accent by a man who is talking like he swallowed a speechwriting book and choked on it, a man who for no goddamn reason is still wearing that ridiculous Sheriff's hat...

The main character of The Walking Dead is Rick. As you can see from his outfit, he's a caricature, a righteous southern sheriff who only tries to do what is right.  He never deviates from this path.  And because of this, he's eminently forgettable.  I remember his name only because it sounds funny if you say it in a terrible southern accent.

In fact, I couldn't actually name a single other person on the cast.  I could tell you the guy in the Hawaiian floral shirt is probably the most interesting, right alongside the second Dixon brother, and that this character or that is "the mother" or "the sister" or "the rapey deputy".  There are at least two party members who have no skills or talents and who have received no major dialogue or plot arcs since their introduction. They're also the racial minorities in the survivors party.

Not one of these people has either the presence of mind or the strength of character to really surpass the sequences of events that dictate their lives.  They're slow and aimless and unlikeable.  And now that the honeymoon phase is over and the initial burst of gravitas the show rode in on is done, we're spending all of our time getting to know them, just like we should.

And it's terrible.

If the Walking Dead is going to continue in this vein, the ability of any sane human being to care for these people is going to evaporate.  They're currently struggling for the right to exist, but their existence is by and large meaningless if none of them have motivations or desires beyond survival.  If the show wants to reach its potential and show that it can really be good, it needs new cast members, or some serious work on the old ones.

At the start of the second episode, Rick is suddenly forced to run several miles carrying a heavy load in a fit of absolute, complete, utter desperation.  He is still wearing his giant, oversized, gaudy hat.  It looks ridiculous.  It creates tremendous wind resistance and heats up his head.  He should knock it off and leave it in the field - but then it would be gone, and you'd never see it again.  And despite the immense, terrible gravity of the situation, I can't help shake the ridiculous feeling that if a passing gust were to snag the thing off his head, he'd drop what he was carrying, turn around and come back for it.  Because, really: there isn't much of a person beneath that hat.