5 for 5: The Avengers

12 May

*****SPOILERS AND SUCHLIKE, YOU GUYS******

Okay, so, five things I like and five things I was all like, “not so much,” on in The Avengers.

Liked:

1. Mark Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner/Hulk was truly fantabulous. It was funny because a couple of days before we went to see the movie, I was complaining to Ed about how many bites the Hulk has gotten at the cinematic apple (especially when so female superheros, even iconic ones like Wonder Woman can’t seem to make it out of development hell) but on our way home from the theater, I was all “I would TOTALLY watch a Mark Ruffalo Hulk movie! I would watch EIGHT OF THEM!” There’s just not time for exhaustive character study in The Avengers; there are simply too many characters. So Ruffalo’s ability to make a lot out of a little do the work of creating a more fully realized character than might exist in the script. I like his tenuous friendship with Tony Stark, his quasi-paternal relationship with Black Widow and this is all stuff that’s done with suggestion and inflection. Plus, he’s always just really appealing and relatable.

2. They did a good job of reigning in Tony/Downey Jr. I remember that that was the big worry everybody had when The Avengers appeared on the horizon: Tony Stark is such a big character and Downey Jr., as an actor, does tend to suck up the air in a room, so everyone was afraid it would wind up Iron Man & Friends: The Feature Film but the story does a good job of, for lack of a better word, side-lining him. Not that he feels undeserved or anything, but nor is he allowed to trample over the film as a whole.

3. Hawkeye! I like Jeremy Renner a lot. I like his unique, expressive face and I’ve always thought it was exceptionally good at playing a soldier; he feels real in that regard. But what I liked most about him in this was that they essentially gave him a particularly feminine plotline. For the first two thirds of the film, he is an imperiled love interest that serves primarily as motivation for a character that plays a more active role (in this case, Black Widow). And, the capper: he is given a rape-as-motivation storyline. Hawkeye is mentally violated, rather than physically, but that feeling of trespass creates his “tortured backstory” and serves as his motivation for the rest of the film. I have my own issues with rape as character, but I find it fascinating to see this applied to a male character and, whether or not I approve of the plot device, I have to recognize that it’s pretty radical to try this sort of thing.

4. The judicious use of Thor. Watching Cabin in the Woods and this more or less back to back with this has really given me an appreciation for Chris Hemsworth’s comedic chops. He has a really good sense of timing, you guys! It is possible that I didn’t watch Thor under the most favorable conditions (dubbed in French. With no subtitles. Except for French ones) but I was pretty consistently bored during Thor and I found virtually all the characters forgettable and bland. It’s possible that Hemsworth is not sufficiently compelling to carry a movie, but I don’t the character of Thor is exactly easy to make riveting. But The Avengers finds the perfect Thor dosage and really takes advantage of Hemsworth’s ability to be funny without a hint of irony (I found the scene where he attempts to leap the canyon in Cabin in the Woods was fucking hilarious, mainly because he was never, not even for a second, not playing it straight). Thor gets a lot of the best lines in this and he delivers them pretty much perfectly.

5. Robin Sparkles: Badass Military Lady Who Looks at Chris Evans’ Ass. She’s the best, right?

Not So Much:

1. Cabin in the Woods is now the second most meta Joss Whedon-penned movie out this spring! Okay, that’s not exactly true, CitW is super, super meta. But so is The Avengers and…it’s weird, you guys. As I watched the film, I could not help but feel like I was watching the work of someone who was frustrated and a little bored. The movie was all about necessity and there was never anything in there that was doing work, which isn’t a bad screenwriting tactic. The problem was, I was always really clear on exactly what work it was doing. The movie was really explicit about the storytelling moves it was making, to the point of the characters openly acknowledging it. As with Agent Coulson’s death, where he uses his dying breath to point out that he can now serve as the inciting incident that draws together the disparate team of strong personalities. It was like someone was just like “fuck it! We’ll just say what we’re doing all the time!” It comes off as more cynical than clever and, quite frankly, in this kind of escapism, I have no particular desire to watch the superhero sausage getting made.

2. The reluctance to make Black Widow appear legitimately vulnerable. I talked in the post below this about Black Widow as an effective spy and how that makes her a valuable part of the team. But, honestly, I don’t think they really write her or play her as primarily a spy. Basically, she’s really unconvincing as someone who is ever weakened or in danger. For someone who is supposed to trade on gender expectations to manipulate those around her, Black Widow is fucking terrible at that. She can’t even fake-cry properly for fuck’s sake! I felt like the screenwriters were so dead set on writing a tough, competent, snarky character that they really resisted having her ever appear to be afraid or in peril. But her job requires her to be really, really good at appearing to be in peril or afraid. Black Widow is written-and played as-a soldier. She always seems slightly uncomfortable pretending to be someone else, she half-asses the weepy woman stuff and instead offers lackadaisical sarcasm. She reminds me of that scene in Haywire where Gina Carano has to go undercover as a society lady at a cocktail party and she just leaking ill-at-ease from her pores. That’s an interesting character and one I like a lot. But I’m pretty sure it’s not how Black Widow is supposed to work. And, quite frankly, they don’t need another soldier. They need a spymaster who is so adept at wearing the faces of others that she can fool even a god.

Which brings me to…

3. Loki makes very little sense. His “plot” such as it is, is really unclear and…he doesn’t seem to actually do much to make it happen. Everything in his stated plan more or less comes to pass but pretty much without his intervention at all. The movie kind of pretends that Loki drove a wedge between the Avengers using his superior, godly powers of psychology. But, in reality, the Avengers do a pretty good job of driving a wedge between themselves all on their own. As far as I can tell, all Loki does is laugh that one time and get snowed by Black Widow. Even his “big plot,” getting Banner to Hulk out and destroy the ship seems to happen for no reason at all and certainly not because he lamely taunted Banner a couple of time (now, why the fuck Banner does Hulk out for no apparent reason despite, as we see later, being more or less able to control his freakouts, it a problem for another day. Or five.) At the end of the day, we’re told Loki does a lot but we never actually see him do much except be sort of pale and uncomfortable looking.

4. Honestly, the big, planet-ending threat is…pretty empty. Besides the whole Loki thing kind of falling flat, the giant alien flying spinal columns are just, like, whatever and all. And maybe this is partially because the Avengers themselves don’t seem to care enough. As I mentioned before, they hit Agent Coulson’s death as a galvanizing force for the crew pretty damn hard. But…the entire human race is going to be either enslaved or horribly murdered…shouldn’t they already be fairly galvanized? If the only things the major characters seem concerned about is avenging this one dude’s death, how are we supposed to feel a sense of looming threat? The enemy is ill-defined and the stakes are so cosmic that they fly well over the audience’s head.

5. There’s no time for a complete arc anywhere. There’s just too much happening in this movie. There are two many “big” characters and the movie makes a half-hearted attempt to give many of them a “traditional” hero arc. Captain America gets the “reluctant, alienated hero learns to be a leader of men,” Tony Stark has “dysfunctional, selfish loner learns to sacrifice his ego and his body for the good of the team,” Banner gets “damaged outcast learns that there is still a place for him.” These are all fine, but the problem is that none of these arcs are at all consistent. They kind of fade in and out as the script requires and, in the end, there’s no sense of triumph because none of the issues that these people have are actually surmounted. There’s no consistent forward momentum; they set up these problems and then, at the end, they’re all solved because, you know, it’s the end. That’s when problems get solved. It kind of goes back to that meta feel. The film is very jaded about many of its choices and, most damningly, it just demands we accept these kind of half-finished story threads because that’s how these movies go. It’s like its leaning so hard on the genre that it feels it doesn’t actually have to do the work and put the characters through their paces.

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Travel Scenes 2: Party People

8 May

It was a Thursday night.

 
I stood outside on Swansea, Wales’ Wind Street, a row of bars and Chinese take-aways where students of the local university congregated nightly. I was in a little cloud of partiers outside a vodka bar where one of my housemates was tending bar. I think the plan was to scam free drinks but either that wasn’t a good plan, or I wasn’t good at it. I was thirty pounds poorer and not even drunk, as 85 percent of my cocktail had been poured on my skirt by a uselessly apologetic young man. “I’d buy you another one. But I don’t have any money.”

 
I stood, wondering if I was too late to catch the last bus of the night and if my other housemates were really going to saddle me with a drunk Chinese exchange student to ferry home, when the true, abiding strangeness of the scene occurred to me.

 
Burly rugby players with Chester A. Arthur facial hair burst out of black-lit clubs dressed as cartoonish little girls in frilled pink shorts and pink babydoll dresses. A group of girls zigged and zagged across the street wearing brief suede dresses. Fringe made their hems and bustlines appear to shimmy of their own accord. They wore feathers in their hair and called themselves “Indian Princesses”; a move that briefly shocked my American sensibilities, though I’d had plenty of chances to witness the rather laidback European approach to things like Blackface in France and Belgium.

 
It was a Thursday night.

 
As far as I knew, there was no particular holiday being celebrated. It was weeks from the end of term. Rugby rush had been the week prior. It was a Thursday night, and people were dressed like vampires and chickens for no readily apparent reason.
Weirdly, it was heartening. I am of the opinion that the settling-in process in any new place is accomplished mainly through osmosis. One walks, one sits, and the geography, the culture of a place is absorbed upwards. I had learned the following about Swansea: it was a city of reasonably priced home furnishings, drape-y, frothy, lacey tunics, late-night curries and fancy dress shops. It was, in short, a college town. Much like the sort I had come from in Michigan and that realization was a little bit of a let-down.

 
In the end, the exchange student wandered away, dancing through the thumping interior of the club like Neo dodging bullets and I missed the last bus by about seven minutes. There was a blonde girl dressed like a halibut tangled in a goth fishing net at the bus stop with me. She made no move to read the bus schedule or to make alternate arrangements. Occasionally, she picked a flaccid, nearly translucent chip from a styrofoam container in her lap.

 
The universe maintains certain constants, I realized.

 
And you should always bring your walking shoes.

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Everyone Quit Complaining About Scarlett Johansson’s Catsuit

3 May

The Avengers, right?

Okay, so, you know that shot at the end of the trailer where they slow pan around the team in a circle and everyone “locks in” to their hero pose, holding their respective weapons? And then it gets around to Hawkeye and Black Widow and they have, like, a sad little bow and arrow and weensie gun? And it’s kind of hilariously incongruous and the whole audience is like, “why don’t you guys go home, okay? Or maybe pick up donuts for the post-battle meeting?”

That’s a funny moment and I’ve laughed at it. In general, I laugh when people point out the pretty wide-ranging levels of formidability going on in the Avengers’ line-up, but isn’t it funny how that sort of criticism gets leveled more often and more vehemently at Black Widow?

I’m thinking about shit like this.

I realize that, in the meta sense, Black Widow and other characters like her have and often still are tossed into a group’s make-up for T&A, but I think it’s pretty cheap and unthoughtful to simply dismiss the character outright; especially as it’s clear to me that she’s got a far better justification for her inclusion on the team than, say, Hawkeye (…seriously?)

Black Widow isn’t magical or altered by science. She doesn’t have “powers,” as such, nor is she enormous. She doesn’t even really have super tools or weapons. But she’s good at what she does: spyin’ and shit. And, most critically, she’s the only person on the team who does what she does. She can’t beat a giant robot into submission, but when you need to infiltrate something, who would you rather send? Perhaps that socially retarded Norse God? Or the time-traveling boy scout? Maybe that highly-recognizable global businessman? That’s without even suggesting that monstrous green rageaholic. And it’s not always robot-punching, you know. The Avengers needs to be more versatile than that, or they’d just have a team of 5 Hulks.

Black Widow does exactly what a team member should do: she fulfills a very critical need. She does it well and nobody does it better.

It chaps my ass, because no one is suggesting that Hawkeye was added to the script so we could look at Jeremy Renner’s ass because that would somehow be ridiculous. Even if you acknowledge that Hawkeye is also a less apparently useful addition to the team, there’s never that “oh, well, he’s just there for the sexin’” kneejerk reflex.

And I’m about fucking done with it. The idea that women can be dismissed as purely sexual (even if they first have to be constructed that way) is too pervasive in geek culture and it absolutely does trickled down from fictional cat-suited spies to real women attempting to be a part of geek culture and getting continually dismissed as ineffectual sex objects; only there because some man wants to fuck them. Or, conversely, too unappealing to fuck and thus unworthy of participating.

This kind of thing seems innocuous and you begin to wonder, even to yourself, if you’re not overreacting, if there aren’t other, more important things to combat. But, dammit, this is so fucking stupid. Black Widow has something to contribute to the Avengers team and I’ll wager her character has something to contribute to the film; women and girls have something to contribute to world of geekery and this antiquated, sexist-elitist bullshit is both intellectually lazy and cowardly. More voices, of dissent, of agreement, of alternate experience, can only enrich a subculture. Blindly battening the hatches just creates an stagnant, unpleasant echo chamber.

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Stop! Look What’s Goin’ Down!

2 May

Fine Clickables for You and Yours:

Shimmer Magazine has raised their rate of pay to three cents a word. Also, they send you personalized little notes with your contributor checks. So there’s really never any reason not to be submitting there.

Heather Albano’s braaaaaains-tastic Choice of: Zombie dropped (dead) last week and it’s great fun, especially if you’re an undead enthusiast like myself.

Fiction powerhouse Ken Schneyer’s grim tale, “Confinement” is in SQ Mag. Read it; do it for the children…

Two great tastes that taste great together: Awesome Tina Connolly and Totally Rad Liz Argall have together produced this fine audio version of Liz’s tale, Dear Ms. Moon

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A Really Critical Workplace Conversation

23 Apr

 

 

Flirting With It

10 Apr

I think some sort of obscure licensing agency requires all blogs to, at some point, run an entry about the crazy search terms that led people to your blog. I didn’t plan on doing one, but then I saw this and I really needed to share it with you all:

“2 japanese guys flirting with the idea of panda anal sex”

I love two things about this:

1. The word “flirting.” So, someone was like “I don’t actually want to watch a couple of dudes Eiffel Tower a panda, but I would like to see them consider it thoughtfully.”? What’s great about this is the little glimpse it offers into the lives of others.
2. That it reminded me of that Jim Gaffigan joke:”I actually only dated one Asian girl. But she was very Asian. She was a panda.”
And, now that I’ve typed the words “a couple of dudes Eiffel Tower a panda” not once but twice,  I can only assume this sort of blog post will become even more frequent.

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Are You Afraid of the Retrospective? Part Three

10 Apr

The Tale of the Frozen Ghost

Airdate: 08/14/1992
Storyteller: Kristen
YouTube

This is on my short list of episodes that I remember really well. Someone in the comments on the YouTube video noted that this episode had been heavily promoted before it aired. That seems likely, considering it starred Nickelodeon staple Melissa Joan Hart or, as she will be called here, Clarissa (Explains It All). I was a mild Clarissa fan in the 90s. It’s sort of startling now to see her in this, how young and how completely a child she is. I remember when she appeared so cool and funky and grown up.

But I digress.

Frozen Ghost is one of the less realistic AYAotD episodes (if such a spectrum can even be said to exist in this context). It stars a pampered rich boy named, not shitting you, Charles Pemberton Schilling III, who is scared of everything and dresses like the littlest Dr. Zhivago.

Seriously, is this a Downton Abbey crossover?

He’s sent off to stay with his two maiden aunts on their vast estate in what looks like Miss Havisham’s house. It’s pretty stock gothic, but I don’t recall that mattering much when I was a kid. I didn’t need to recognize the lives the characters led if I could recognize the story beats, and I knew from gothic ghost stories, even at that age.

The only real nod to any kind of reality (and the requisite social/emotional lesson to be learned) is Charles’ aversion to rough play, rule-breaking, getting dirty and improperly folded laundry and Clarissa’s (his long-suffering babysitter) ever-growing impatience with him.

Clarissa is another in a long line of needlessly aggressive assholes who harangue the main character for being weak or dopey or some combination thereof. Every interaction she has with Charles is accompanied by a sneer and an eyeroll and, despite the fact that Charles’ parents are presumably paying her handsomely, she seems to hate everything about her awesome job that allows her to go cool random manor houses all the time.

But Clarissa bucks the trend a little, as I don’t think we’re supposed to think that she’s an asshole, or that her reactions to Charles’ whinging are inappropriate. Outside of the way she treats Charles, Clarissa is a nice young woman, helpful and considerate of others, interested in the maiden aunts and generally polite, cheerful and hardworking. Charles needs a swift kick in the ass, the story suggests, and Clarissa is right to try to give it to him.

Whether or not Charles really needs all that bile is up for debate. He’s a whiner, totally, and more than a little persnickety, but he’s certainly not malicious, not even impolite, really. He’s a little freaked out by his aunts and their constant allusions to ghosts and murders, but he never expresses any of that in an unkind or bratty way. Mostly, Charles is just mousey. So mousey, in fact that, even though it may be good for him, you gotta cringe a little when Clarissa lays into him for not knowing how to chop wood (he is basically Little Lord Fauntleroy, lady, what are you expecting?)

Is this the face of a lumberjack, Clarissa?

But that’s all trimmings, here’s the meat: cheerfully croneish aunts Gretta and Maylene live and care for their father’s estate, though money’s so tight they’re burning candles and using the (broke) wood stove having past due’d the electric company. But that’s all the better to scare you with, my dear, because the aunts have a resident ghost that Gretta, by far the more ghoulish of the ladies, cannot fucking wait to talk about.

This is face she makes right before telling them about children freezing to death. Not exaggerating.

At first, Maylene stifles her, in the interest of protecting Charlie, but Charlie experiences more and more ghostly phenomenon in the house, including a dream about a portly lumberjack stealing his coat and, in culmination, an actual appearance by the ghost, standing outside looking wan and being bad at acting.

"Good job hitting your mark, Kyle!"

“I’m cold,” he announces, and you might as well get used to hearing that, because he’s going to say it approximately 900 more times in the next twenty minutes.

Clarissa makes this face when Charlie tells her what happened.

Behold! The face of pre-teen scorn!

But the aunts are resigned and, finally, Gretta gets to unfurl her grisly tale. Back in the day, when the aunts were children, there was a great falling out between the aunts’ father and his brother (who went on to found the family like that Charlie is the end result of) after the brother hired a n’er do well bank robber to work on the farm. The aunts’ father was suspicious of the man and, when the whole bank robber shit came out, never forgave his brother for being careless and not listening to him (I presume, no one ever really explains how this extreme but potentially understandable hiring error became a lifelong rift between brothers, but whatever.)

So the bank robber is packed off the jail, but the train derails on the way and everyone is killed. The bank robber does not really show up again, but this part of the story is useful for sowing red herrings in the first half.

Around this time, the little neighbor boy goes missing. According to the aunts, he used to regularly sneak into their house to look for cookies. And then…eat them. Just…fucking eating other people’s cookies. At random.

What a little asshole.

It is possible that I’m passionate when it comes to cookies and the rights conferred by cookie ownership, but that is fucked up! Where are these vaunted Depression-era morals and manners!?! You don’t just randomly steal a woman’s hard-baked cookies! How is that okay? I am experiencing Mad Men levels of disappointment with the past here.

Anyway, the obnoxious little filcher was eventually found, curled up behind a shed on the grounds, frozen to death and, ever since then, he’s been standing around outside, bitching about how cold he is. Presumably he felt he hadn’t sufficiently annoyed the family in life and had been step it up now that he was dead.

(Yeah, that’s what you get for stealing cookies! A blogger will make fun of your ghost!)

Charlie’s pretty freaked by all of this; Clarissa is skeptical. The aunts take care to reassure the both of them that the ghost never ventures into the house; they’re safe inside.

So, of course, they immediately go outside to chop some wood for the horrible smoldery stove. Clarissa and Charlie get into when Charlie balks at wood-chopping, on the grounds that it’s likely to muddy up his outfit. Clarissa smears him with mud and yells at him for being such a princess and shit’s about to go down when some insubstantial footprints appear in the omnipresent mud and even Clarissa can’t deny that there’s ghosting afoot.

Charlie reacts in a predictably reasonable and collected fashion.

It looks like he's yelling at the ghost, doesn't it? "STOP BEING DEAD, YOU ASSHOLE!"

There’s a great “Child Acting is Hilarious” sequence as Charlie runs all over the forest, trying to get away from his spectral buddy and keeps running up against him. I took the time to note how much it sucked for the kid that died immediately after what had to have been the worst haircut of his life.

It's like the kid equivalent of Marley's chains. How are those cookies tasting now, you little snot?

Eventually he leads them to a hollow log, the same one that Charlie dreamed about earlier. He points at it urgently, announcing once again how cold he is, until Charlie and Clarissa reach inside the log and pull out his moldery old jacket. He puts it on and that’s apparently all the kid wants because he goes on his merry ghost way, presumably to steal cookies from Zeus and the angels now. Clarissa and Charles have a totally unearned moment of understanding (they neither worked together nor put aside their differences and Charles sure as hell didn’t learn any lessons about not being such a dribbling wuss all the time). Nevertheless, this apparently solved all their interpersonal problems and I didn’t buy those in the first place, so whatevs.

Tying up everything with a little bow, Charles finds the a piece of the old stove that allows the aunts to open the flue and, presumably, no longer fill their house with deadly carbon monoxide through the entire winter (which, actually, as a hypothesis, explains a lot about the aunts.) And, lo and behold, when they finally open said flue, a big pile of giant gold pirate coins comes rushing out, solving the aunts’ money woes forever.

The aunts surmise that this is the bank robber’s secret treasure (this bank was located in 17th century Spain) and that the kid had walked in on him hiding it, incited the robbers wrath and getting shoved in a hollow log for his trouble. And then everyone’s all like, “whoa!” and then they live happily ever after, off of a dead child-killer’s stolen loot.

Stray observations:

-I like this one quite a bit. It’s absolutely classic from the moldering manor to the revelation of a secret treasure hidden in the family home. Despite the child-centered nature of the story, it never really makes any particular attempt to feel modern at all. Which makes me curious, actually, about why, as far as I know, there were never any period piece episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark?

-This is one of the weaker central conflicts in the series, though. Charles is just fine. He’s never going to be a messy, outdoorsy kid, but he’s hardly some rich snot who looks down on others. He just appreciates a well-folded pair of underpants. And I can’t buy that any teenage babysitter who has been around the block would consider that kind of kid a major trial worthy of constant teeth-gritting and eye-rolling.

-I tend not to enjoy Kristen’s stories quite so much, because they all revolve around the concept of love in the way that Gary’s all include some element of magic, but that often means that they’re really emotionally cheesy and don’t have the snap of some of the other stories, from kids more willing to indulge in cruelty. But I actually think this story was well-suited to Kristen and firmly within her wheelhouse without being yet another boring story about, like, a girl being sad about a locket or something.

Best YouTube Quote:

for the sartorially minded: “also: why is the ghost dressed like he belongs in a chinese opium den? LOL”

 

The Tale of the Hatching

Airdate: 09/25/1993
Storyteller: David
YouTube

I’m glad these two were stacked up against one another, because I feel like this presents a nice contrast with Frozen Ghost. It’s trying pretty hard to be “up to date” and transparently courts the awkward, surly pre-teen demographic with a story that relies heavily on the insidious nature of The Man and the fog of duplicity that rings everyone over 16.

The story opens with Auggie,  yet another geeky adolescent scientist wearing tan slacks. I feel that this demographic is, perhaps, disproportionately represented in AYAotD. As usual, he’s accompanied by his odd-couple other half, in this case it’s too-cool-for-monster-boarding-school Jasmine, his sister and mother-fuckin’ fashion plate.

Their parents, this time nondescript “business people” have to leave them for an extended period of time and thus enroll them in the aforementioned monster boarding school. Things are obviously fucked up. Instead of the traditional bell system, the school uses a series of buzzing “tones,” possibly because the principal flips his lid when Auggie’s watch alarm goes off (an incident that I’m sure will never be mentioned again), everyone eats a daily meal of some sort of diabolical bread pudding called “spung” and they go completely apeshit over it.

"OM NOM NOM! ENTIRE SPOON! IN MAH FACE!"

And, of course, all the children arise in the middle of the night and sleepwalk uncontrollably to the pool where they sprinkle quicklime on a bunch of creepy giant eggs. I suppose it’s no worse than the shit that went down in “Boy.”

"Just another SNICK in the waaaaaaallll..."

Things devolve pretty rapidly from there. Jasmine, like a normal fucking person, is weirded out by this and wants to find out just what the hell is going on. Auggie wants to go back to bed because he “doesn’t want to get into trouble.” Arguably, being mind-controlled egg-feeding drones for a bunch of shady school administrators could be defined as “trouble.” But, hey, I don’t even have a pair of tan slacks, what do I know?

Jasmine convinces him to investigate further, which turns out to be for the best, because the school administrators are actually reptoid aliens who share a giant martini full of Gak.

Mr. Rogers, what are you doing!?

(Also: why is everything so pudding-based with these aliens?) The eggs belong to their Queen and, when they hatch, the supple, spung-stuffed kids will provide their first meal. Man, Jasmine must be feeling, like, super-vindicated right now. Shenanigans ensue and, naturally, Auggie and Jasmine wind up trapped in the basement with a hungry Queen. Auggie uses his superior intellect to deduce that the aliens can’t stand certain frequencies of sound and, luckily, he has a fucking old-timey radio on him, in case he needs to catch an emergency episode of The Adventures of Little Orphan Annie.

The Queen doesn’t handle it well. She explodes. Is what I mean. Her head explodes. And she’s apparently full of that Gak that the administrators were shot-gunning earlier, which raises certain uncomfortable questions.

The lesson in this one is not unlike that of Frozen Ghost. In both, a kid is a little too straight-laced and needs to loosen up. Auggie not as persnickety as Charles, but he’s very submissive to authority and needs Jasmine’s help to determine what rules need to be broken. Jasmine, presumably, learns nothing, except that she was right and boarding schools and similar institutions are soul-sucking individuality quashers that will literally eat you alive. In a few years, she’ll discover clove cigarettes and Pinterist and it’ll all work out for her.

There’s a little more cohesion in The Hatching’s emotional arc, mainly because we’re clearly shown what’s “wrong” with Auggie and also because, while Jasmine is indeed sullen and sarcastic, she saves most of her ire for the the school and seems to actually have a fairly good relationship with her brother. There’s a nice scene where she expresses fear over living away from their parents for the first time and he reassures her. It’s a far more believable dichotomy than Jasmine just being inexplicably enraged by Auggie’s “keep your head down” approach to life.

Beyond that, there’s not much to this. There’s no build on the set-up, we know immediately that things are wrong there and it’s really an exercise in waiting for the other shoe to drop. Once it does, everything seems to happen really fast, like the episode itself just wants to get all this stuff out of the way. Plus, AYotD should maybe make a policy of staying away from plots that require elaborate monster constructions because their “all puppets, all the time” approach is not exactly killing it. Though, to be fair, they did a cool and gross job with the reveal of the administrator’s true nature:

That wart removal really escalated.

What I remembered about this episode was the scene where the sleep-walking children stagger zombie-like to the pool and sprinkle fish food on the eggs and, watching it again, that’s still probably the only eerie or creepy part.

Stray observations:

-where the fuck is this school? It’s in, like, this enormous stone manse, like they’re going to Hogwarts or something. When the the male administrator was showing the children around and said “You may think we’re old-fashioned…” I wrote in my notes YOU ARE IN A FUCKING CASTLE.

-okay, so if a, like, Victrola, playing at full blast causes the Queen to literally explode…how did these people survive long enough to set up a private school and collect all these children?

-really, spung?

-despite his tan slacks of authority, I have to doubt Auggie’s commitment to science and reason. Logic would suggest you maybe not touch a giant creepy hypno-egg floating in a pool of unidentified fluid?

Best Youtube Quote wears its sunglasses indoors:

“I guess you could say that
*puts on glasses*
that was a facemelting solo
YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA­AH”

 

 

 

 

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Reasons Why

9 Apr

Ten reasons I have not updated this blog in so long.

Or folded my laundry.

Or bothered to make a lunch that didn’t consist of popcorn and apples.

Or brushed my hair.

Anyway.

 

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

 

Annnnnnd 10.

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Are You Afraid of the Retrospective? Part Two

24 Feb

The train rolls ever onwards!

The Tale of the Captured Souls
Airdate: 09/26/1992
Storyteller: Kiki
YouTube

Honestly, watching this episode is one of those times when I really can’t understand how Wee Nicole became Current Nicole. I know that I saw this episode as a child, probably more than once, but I don’t recall being at all properly amazed by what I’m comfortable calling the strangest character in the AYAotD canon.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Captured Souls is the tale of Dani, a pubescent tomboy who experiences a supernatural brush with death during (once again) summer vacation. Seriously, this show was secretly sponsored by the Go to Summer School Council. Dani has been dragged by her well-meaning parents to a charming cottage apparently in the middle of nowhere, staffed exclusively by Peter, the suspendered, whispery, Sideshow-Bob looking teenage creeper.

"I'm not much of a...sportsman." That surprises me, Peter.

Seriously, this kid is amazing. I literally cannot imagine what direction he was given here. He sort of skulks everywhere and does this sing-songy whisper voice thing that is both hilarious and deeply upsetting. Everything he says is some sort of skeevy innuendo, beyond even what the actor probably realized or intended. In short, Peter is art and I love him. I want him to be in every episode, which is why I’ve liberally peppered screenshots of him throughout this post.

Anyway, the charming cottage is packed with mirrors that give you an electric shock if you touch them (totally not a red flag) and, as the days go on and Dani sulks, it seems that her parents are growing steadily more tired, grayer, weaker. Dani starts to worry that there’s some mad science afoot and she’s totally correct, since Peter spends all his free time curating his suspender collection AND locking himself in a steampunk tube of bendy light while laughing maniacally.

Also, he dries and presses his own tea.

Dani eventually figures out that the mirrors are actually hidden cameras/soul-sucking devices that are prematurely aging her parents and feeding that life energy directly to Peter, who presumably uses it to keep his hair sproingy. She discovers a secret graveyard ten feet away from the house (Poor Planning Peter) where Peter’s unfinished gravestone reveals him to be approximately ten million years old and also he apparently keeps a tally of the dozens of souls he’s sucked out over the years. Dani defeats him will an ill-conceived “Reverse Soul Sucking” switch. Peter, aged up to his proper chronology, is left alone with a room full of soul-stealing machinery. Which seems like, you know, risky, but he seems pretty bummed about the whole thing and promises to go die, so…that’s a win?

Peter aside, I actually like this episode quite a lot and I think it’s one of the more thoughtful episodes of AYAotD. Putting aside the silly things (Peter’s bedroom flips into a mad scientist’s lair in a rather Austin Powers-ian fashion), the story has a logical, concise theme and it goes after it in a subtle way. So subtle, I really didn’t pick up on it as a kid.

Dani is frustrated and restless, she’s anxious about zits and chafing against her parents. At one point, she opens up her shirt collar and checks out her burgeoning chest. And then she goes to a place where growing up is enforced. Where her parents are almost immediately taken out of the equation and she, the child, has to protect them instead of the other way around. Peter offers her a lifetime of youthful limbo, as he’s chosen, but Dani is brave enough to realize that everything comes in its own time and that she’s becoming a woman, a smart, brave, capable woman, and that that process is pretty darn cool, actually. These stories are always at their best with they find a seed of some real scariness. Growing up is profoundly scary.

Dealing with the fallibility of your parents and the fact that someday they are going to die is really, really scary. It’s not just that the mirrors make Dani’s parents old, it’s that they make them somehow ineffectual (or more so, considering the staggering displays of parental suckniess on display in this show). When Dani smashes a murdermirror and finds what is obviously a GIANT FUCKING CAMERA LENS behind it, her father dismisses it as old wiring and irritably goes to take a nap. They aren’t going to help her; they can’t.

But Nicole, you’re asking, where does Peter fit into all of this!?! Shush now, little blogizens, I’ve thought this through. You know what else is scary about adulthood? Being suddenly thrust into the world of sexuality. Dani’s a sporty gal, she’s not totally down with the changes that are going on in her body and she’s really not cool with the way Peter is constantly…um…well, I’m not sure how you’d call it. Peter’s a weird proposition because, somehow, between director, writer and actor, they’ve developed this tweenage character who nevertheless always presents as a dirty old man. In my notes, I wrote “Peter is molestory beyond his years.”

Just hanging out. Casually. Almost too casually. Like my Little House on the Prairie Quilt?

What he’s doing isn’t really flirting in the standard young adult way, it’s the kind of predatory, insistent focus on her and her physicality that young girls often start experiencing, often from men and older boys, once they hit puberty. Peter doesn’t respect her boundaries and intimidates her…because he’s an evil mad scientist, but also because the way he approaches her is confusing and upsetting in ways she probably can’t even articulate.

"I've always admired a woman with...great...physical...strength..." Actual line. Actual ellipses.

Like the dude in the pick-up truck who bellows “how much?” out the window at you, or the adult who tells you you’re pretty in way too much detail, these are interactions that make young girls ashamed and scared. The world is treating them like a woman in a very negative way and counting on the fact that they are too young to have the skills to deal with it. Joking aside, this is actually why I think Peter is kind of brilliant: because he is never young. He is old, old, old all the way through. He knows he’s making her uncomfortable, because he is an adult and she is a child. It’s very easy to forget his teenage face and realize the truth: this is a grown man behaving inappropriately with a little girl because he can, because there’s no one around to clearly see the warning signs that Dani can only faintly glimpse. And no one to protect her.

And so Dani protects herself. She steps up; she says “no,” loudly and firmly. She claims her own childhood and she stands unafraid of her journey into adulthood. She rescues her parents and herself. Dani rocks.

Stray Thoughts:

-Although Peter absorbs, conservatively, 30 to 40 years from Dani and her family, he consistently looks thirteen, no matter how often he bathes in his light tube.

-Dani’s mother because increasingly (and inexplicably) southern as she ages.

Best YouTube Comment:

Raising a good question: “Doesn’t it bother anyone else that this teenage innkeeper has a mass grave in his backyard filled with women and children???”

The Tale of the Super-Specs
Airdate: 09/19/1992
Storyteller: Gary
YouTube

By contrast, this one is not as well put-together, just at a storytelling level. For one thing, it contains a lot more inter-Mystery Society drama than I care for (my preference is for something a little closer to the “zero” percentage). It even opens far from the fire (a rarity) in Gary’s father’s magic shop where the blonde girl who tells a lot of stories about how people loved other people and stuff (as you might imagine, she is not my favorite) is telling him about how everyone is talking smack about him and his lame, non-scary stories. Which they’re totally right about it; Gary’s stories are consistently the most firmly fantastical and least horrifying. Gary engages furious reprisals.

I mean, he decides to tell a really terrifying story.

He sticks firmly in his wheelhouse, telling a tale of Weeds (really) and MB (apparently short for “Mary-Beth,” the way absolutely no one is commonly nicknamed), who discover yet another sinister magical object in the seemingly harmless kitsch shop owned and operated by the other major recurring character, Sardo, a perpetually sweaty failed magician who looks like the kind of guy who still has a MySpace page. In this case, it’s the titular “Super Specs,” which are actually not terribly super, until Weeds dumps some magic dust on them and recites a “perfect sight,” spell (fucking Weeds!). Suddenly, MB can see a bunch of lurking gimps in the previously empty magic shop.

"Enchanted ball gags are on the far wall, sir."

Removing the specs reveals a total absence of S&M enthusiasts in the area. Neither Weeds nor Sardo seem very interested in this, especially for two dudes allegedly all about the magic and shit, and the kids pay for their novelty items and leave.

After this, the narrative splits in two. Perpetual jokester and general pain in the ass Weeds goes about his merry way, liberally sprinkling the magic dust on all and sundry and reciting undoubtedly accurate spells from this helpful tome.

I'd be more confident in him if he had a printout of a Wikipedia article.

Because he’s clearly not big on the scientific method, he never sticks around long enough to see that his spells are actually working, doing everything from improving his basketball game to giving a girl a chipmunk voice. This is some seriously all-purpose dust that Sardo is dealing in here.

Meanwhile, MB has commandeered the specs after being consistently horrified by the the sinister shadows that appear every time she puts them on, including a sort of evil nun who keeps pointing at her like the aliens in They Live. Oh, shit, this is totally a version of They Live with special glasses, isn’t it? I literally just realized that.

Anyway, MB discovers that even small home appliances can’t be trusted, when she sees a spectral teakettle and a toasty fire in a fireplace (which she responds to with an inexplicable “awwww, MAN!” like the ghost fire is really disappointing or something?) The final straw is a group of bondage-clad basketball players on the court, like the world’s most fucked up mounting of The Outsiders.

"Stay black latex, Ponyboy. It's hella easy to clean."

The kids head over to Sardo’s where he explains that the accidental spell on the specs has opened up a window into a parallel universe. Rather direly, he points out that two universes cannot exist in the same place at the same time and, now that they’ve seen one another, the two will battle it out for supremacy. Everybody seems pretty chill with all of this, honestly, way more chill than I would be when confronted with the possible destruction of the entire fucking universe. But, whatever, MB seems mostly worried that they get everything squared away before her parents get home. MB is the best at priorities.

Sardo claims that they can close this inter-dimensional window with a little seance, which Weeds reluctantly joins them for, still not fully believing MB. He changes his tune, however, when the denizens of the other universe…um…notice them.

"Knock that shit off!"

Sardo valiantly waves him arms around to little effect. Then he hurls the kids on the mercy of the giant floating sky eyes and attempts a quick exit. I wrote in my notes here: “Never trust a pudgier Pauly Shore with a scarf on his head.”

"Bio-Dome was underrated, I've written a LiveJournal entry about it."

Sky Eyes makes some threatening rumbles while MB desperately tries to complete the spell Sardo abandoned and then there’s a moment of stillness, during which Weeds declares that MB has done it and saved them all.

But not so fast, kids! It turns out MB did nothing, which is actually kind of hilarious. It turns out that, if you get a rag-tag team together under the auspices of a washed-out pseudo wizard, they don’t pull through in the last minute to save the day. They fail, because the people in the other universe hired an actually competent person. The shadow universe asserts itself, Shadow Weeds and Shadow MB take their place and Regular Weeds and MB are trapped forever in a crystal ball, along with a screaming Sardo, which is going to make for a fun eternity.

And the whole Midnight Society is, like, extremely freaked out. Especially when Gary has them put on a bunch of Super Specs he stole from his dad’s magic shop (“well, it’s macaroni and cheese for the rest of the week, Gary, but I’m glad your friends enjoyed the free inventory!”) and Gary has one of the other Midkateers (the boring one I can never remember) pop out in a gimp suit of his own (wait-why does a teenager have one of those on hand?), causing everyone to flee into the forest. Gary is smug, pleased that now he won’t have to face one of the others in single combat for title of Alpha Midkateer and he, the kid in the gimp outfit and the blonde girl give one another the whitest three way fist grab ever.

"GOOOOOOOO CANADA!"

Stray Observations:

-this episode doesn’t really work, I think, because it divides itself into two viewpoints and Weeds’ is very repetitive. He just wanders around failing to notice stuff. The real story’s with MB, but we don’t get into her POV until halfway through the episode.

-Sardo is a recurring character even less frightening than Dr. Vink and it’s interesting to me that this is his first appearance in the show, implying that at some point he wiggled his way out of the crystal ball and left the kids to rot there. Which is, yeah, pretty much how he rolls.

-If this was executed a little more skillfully, this could have been really good episode. I like how indifferent the final calamity was. Weeds and MB were mildly careless and trusted an obvious con-man, that’s about the extent of their wrong-doing in this episode and, for that, their entire universe was subsumed and they were trapped in limbo for all eternity. It was just math: somebody had to win and the other universe kids had access to an actual professional. AYAotD Life Lessons: The universe is cold and indifferent to your struggles.

-this is the first of these that I don’t actually remember and, having seen it, I really can’t say if that’s because I never saw it as a kid or because it’s just….kind of forgettable.

Best YouTube Comment:

Don’t we all? “Mulletino the magician i remember him.”

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Scenes From Nicole M. Tayor and Edward Gauvin’s Great Westward Expansion

18 Feb

First, there was Michigan.

Wait-that’s not right.

Okay, first there was Brussels, but you knew about that.

And then there was Los Angeles, but only for a week. Just long enough for me to make Ed do geeky couple stuff that I always had a vague idea I should do. Once, in Sisteron, we went for a day hike and, just as we were climbing back up to the little mountain roads, the sky cracked and the the single most torrential rain storm I’ve ever been out in commenced. We ran up and down the shoulder of the road, looking in vain for cover and I saw an opportunity. I grabbed Ed and smashed my face against his.

“There!” I said, “Now I’ve kissed someone in the rain!”

“Ow,” Ed said.

What I mean by all of this is: these picture should be black and white.

Neeeeeeeeeeerds.

Okay, then it was Michigan, for serious. Ed took some grand pictures of my endlessly adorable wee cousins.

Lea reaches for the low-hanging fruit.

 

The best thing about a little sister is periodic frog instruction.

And then it was on the road again, first to Iowa, land of incredible windows and appropriately incredible early  sunlight. We also went to a Hi-Vee (which is, I guess, a thing in Iowa?) and met a very nice cashier who asked us where we were moving and marveled at the SoCal weather. A much more cheerful experience than the rueful Secretary of State clerk we encountered in Michigan who, upon hearing we were heading to LA said, “I wanted to go to LA when I was young. I was going to be a star.” She laughed. “But it turned out that I couldn’t act.” Now, she informed us, her daughter wanted to go to Hollywood and be a singer/actress/model. The American Dream is congenital, apparently.

The Morning Room is a room filled with morning.

We played elaborate German board games and talked about narrative hooks and I stole a store-dry-goods-in-mason-jars-idea. It ruled.

Edge of the evening.

We stopped at the Missouri river, where it halves the world.

The gentle herbivore in repose.

There was a dinosaur just chilling in a lonely field, but we couldn’t go climb on him no matter how badly I wanted to because of barbed wire and I am certainly not bitter at all, despite the fact that I’ll probably never get to climb on a green dinosaur in the American heartland ever again but IT’S COOL, DINOSAUR COCKBLOCKERS!

That makes it sounds like there’s some stegosaurus who’s always getting drunk and telling hot dudes you’re trying to score with about the time you peed into a travel coffee mug when the Burger King bathroom was closed for cleaning.

An un-earned feeling of triumph.

Ed claimed all of the west in the name of Joker Queen Elizabeth. Bonus: my finger!

Harness the power of the powdered sun!

For energy, we drank pure solar energy.

He's got the whole world in his feets.

Ed used the non-driving time to improve the dexterity of his feet. He can now manipulate a quarter with three out of five toes.

I believe the word is "burnished"

We drove through South Dakota, which contains a totally unreal level of natural beauty. And we stopped in Deadwood, because we’d been watching the show through the summer and it seemed like a good idea. But man, since Swearengen and the whores moved out, Deadwood is a real buzzkill. Their foremost attraction is the cemetery, if that conjures up a mental picture for you.

Also, there’s a totally inexplicable series of creepy faceless mannequins dressed like prostitutes and posed in all the windows along the fakey western main street. It was both bizarre and distasteful, as things often wind up when you spiritually situate your tourist trap halfway between chinzy family vacation fodder and Sturgis stopover.

We explored Devil’s Tower in Wyoming:

It's actually the ossified interior of a volcano! Er...Devil's Tower, not our relationship.

At one point, I died.

...I got better later.

Never one to let me go it alone, Ed died shortly later, in the surreal, spacey canyons of Utah.

...he also recovered.

In between, we stayed over with another kindly Ed friend and his awesome wife and equally awesome kid, who we subsequently discovered has his own robot-themed return address labels when he sent us a Christmas card.

Also, there were honey lavender pancakes.

At one point, during a stopover at a supermarket, we saw that someone had brought their goat to the supermarket, in the back of their pickup.

"Look, this is the only place that has that Açai-Gogi Berry Energy Pulp that I like."

One night, we snuck into Arches National Park after the six o’clock cut when they quit charging for entry. We raced the setting sun through the park and stopped to take some pictures of what I presume is the titular arch.

I have no idea who that tiny orange speck is.

Around this time, we remembered that we’d brought along the Dread Elder God Cthulhu and belatedly realized that he’d probably like to get out and stretch his tentacles once and a while.

The following are from his personal collection:

he could be very helpful, even doing light housework along the way.

"I care not for this merriment round-a-go. Fetch me another."

"I do not allow brambles in my tentacles to compromise my dignity."

It's everything he doesn't...um...float for.

He's feeding on Ed's life force...and that's just how Ed likes it!

he got really pissy if anyone woke him before 9:30.

You can't really tell, but that's additional "6" Ed's making with his hand. Not an OK sign. Nothing is okay when you ride with an Elder God.

Buffalo may bite, but can they incite brain melting madness? I didn't think so.

In the center console, dead Cthulhu waits for his turn to drive.

None will escape his wrath.

Virtually the only rain we encountered on the trip was in New Mexico, of all places. The same place where we saw this very emphatic store:

Right behind it: "GUNS AND ALSO JACK LINKS BEEF JERKY."

It was a long and delightful trip, occasionally arduous and often slightly smelly. I drove Route 66 for the first time in my life while Ed leaned out the window, snapping pictures of fading diner signs and old fashioned gas stations, leftovers from a vision of America in the future that never quite came to fruition. We stayed in cheap motels and on campgrounds. We saw the lights through the trees and the water through the stones. I drove all night across the desert, the clerk at the motel asked us if we were best friends. Looking at these pictures makes me want to go adventuring all over again.

Formatting them was a pain in the ass, which is why this took 7 goddamn months.

In the end, we were all pretty glad to get back to what would become our home.

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