#and nitpicking every single tiny thing i do is driving me insane

[legionofpotatoes]

alright here’s ma thoughts on that flick I mentioned

we hatewatched a*my of the dead because we were CONVINCED “zombies in las vegas” would be an impossible concept to screw up, but in so assuming we obviously invoked a holy wager with the universe and got reminded, once again, that hoping for improvement from someone who’s dependably put out bad art is never a wise choice 😐

but we were honestly kinda roped in by the marketing??? and expected a goofy fast-paced flick with the odd traditional undead metaphor thrown in, framing some sort of relationship drama maybe or hell even nothing at all! we’d have taken pure indulgent storytelling, idk italian job with zombies in las vegas, I don’t know fucking anything but??? whatever this was???? spoilers below for it is time for One Of My Rants

I mean the main reason I really want to write all this and complain. this film here probably has the most unappealing cinematography I have ever experienced in my life and that is saying something. who the fuck signed off on that CONSTANT shallow-ass depth of field that imprisons your eyeline and turns every shot into bokeh paste???? and I mean every shot almost!!!! I promise if you think I am overreacting just throw a dart at the seek bar and watch twenty seconds from wherever it lands. it is horrifying to look at. at least it gave my girlfriend a good visual shorthand for what it’s like when I lose my glasses

why was sean spicer in this movie. did they pay him to be here. was sean spicer paid hollywood money for his scene in this film because fuck everyone who was involved in that decision

the legitimately baffling hints at the extraterrestrial origins of the infection that went absolutely nowhere and had no dramatic or plot-level bearing. we love to see the franchise sprouts fellas

yet another big budget waste of everything hiroyuki sanada has to offer. and bautista too I guess? I like him but man was this an odd career move

what was the crux of his conflict/resolution with his daughter btw. I understand it was rooted in miscommunication over their forms of grief irt mom but uhh… it was all rather clunky and didn’t land for me. I tried I really tried to buy in but something was wrong fundamentally with the groundwork there, it did not click and their catharsis felt unearned. I know there’s massive amounts of tragic baggage being projected there from the author so I’m not slapping any judgment down really;

but again it would be an easy thing to wave off if they just had a vibrant cast of lovable simpletons with good chemistry and the kinetic sense of plotting the trailers promised (and this premise never discounts good drama, either). but instead it was just two and a half (!) hours of meandering into situations the filmmaking instincts had no idea how to flow in and out of

to wit. I know talking about “bad pacing” is associated with armchair bullshit but consider the example of the scene were dieter does an out of nowhere little dance after childishly screaming but then still-killing a zombie, with the film framing this as a micro character triumph, and not a second later the bg soundtrack instantly fades into an orchestral score dramatizing a nearby mcguffin reveal, completely 180 degreeing the tone without a semblance of deft insert shot stitching or even I dont know a fucking jump cut maybe. now imagine this whiplash for 2.5 hrs uninterrupted

I will keep complaining about the length yeah because this was not a story requiring this much real estate to be told. Uhh in my humble and personal opinion, of course

[man sees zombie tiger] “this is crossing the line!” you can in fact write dialogue that is not utter nonsense that falls apart once you drill down its single fickle layer of referential meta winking. what line are you talking about. you have rules in this insane situation you’re in? total nitpick moment I know but it got burned in my brain for some reason. like a microcosm of the mismanaged dramatic instincts paired with weird writing that dots this movie. I am sure the director calls this either satire or genre deconstruction. I am SO sure

tumblr domino meme that goes from “dude getting sucked off while driving” to “entire las vegas literally nuked”

tig notaro is always great to see but once you know she’s been filmed as a separate greenscreen plate months after photography wrapped - cause she had to apparently replace some abusive asshole but that’s a whole other pig not worth fucking - it becomes impossible to unsee her odd detachment from everyone else in the movie lmao. it doesn’t really “ruin” anything on its lonesome but it is hard to unsee

why. was. sean. spicer. in. this. movie

a very simple key ingredient missing from fully turning lip service sympathy for main uruk hai dude into actual empathy that would generate meaningful conflict with hero family would be to spend a bit more time articulating what he internally wanted the most. because he was obviously trying to do something here with pointed agenda. a family, to have kids, build a caste system, save his wife’s head, return to his planet??? all of these could represent the bigger context in his psychology that spurred his vengeance but none of them are dramatically emphasized long enough for you to cheer him on. I’m not asking too much I promise. Articulating interiority of a mute character is pretty doable with deft cinema language, just gotta linger and hold a shot here and there for a few seconds, frame as his POV, donezo. I know this is also one of those like. “who cares” moments but the movie does, very evidently so, in making this guy an actual character. you can kinda piece it together and create a framework of sympathy for him, sure, but then again he ultimately becomes a foil to be killed and not defeated, so. Ehh whatever

quarantine zone stuff was not a wildly childish covid allegory quarantine zone stuff was not a wildly childish covid allegory quarantine zone stuff was n

the rooftop helicopter fakout at the end was such an ass-backwards, manufactured moment of what could be a simple setup/payoff it just pissed me off??? you gain nothing by giving sad dad five seconds of pointless crisis that flips right back to previous status quo ANYWAY, except for a weaksauce waste of runtime, which could be used instead to get inside notaro’s head and actually SHOW the remorse form as she took off, literally maybe even a frown playing on her face as she’s headed for safety right before we cut back to drax and the kid. just a simple-ass, minimal, momentary setup for what is the most basic filmmaking trick of creating macro catharsis moments. Just???? g o d if you can’t even land that shit why are you even doing any of this

that lil run final pam did was very very charming and super choreographed in a way that was the tiiiniest bit overdone

the whole intro with the simul-backstories and posing with family photos was just… oddly motivated. what was the goal? “here’s what we’re fighting for” vignettes? why? it’s not a functional setup in that vein. what was all that

also I am sorry if this is insensitive but the reasons most characters end up articulating to justify going back into the hell that destroyed their lives makes them sound seriously insane

I dont like complaining about CGI (honestly) but so much of it in modern movies can achieve higher fidelity if the animation is simply subdued. Do not overengineer and over-apply 2D cell methodologies and kinematics to each tiny twitch and movement in a hyper 3D model and I promise you. it will look a thousand times more natural. look at thanos in those last two movies. your rendering and detail are absolutely perfect with the tiger you just have to let stuff sit instead of constantly simulating swaying hair strands and firing off all facial muscles at once. great moment at one point where makeup zombie horse and CG zombie tiger are both in one shot together and just by unnecessary amounts of movement alone you can tell who doesn’t belong. again; detail, rendering, compositing, lighting, all picture-perfect; but y’all just gotta let the animation breathe sometimes, and chill it out

plot holes don’t really matter to me but it was kinda funny how lilly decided not to mention the enormous wrinkle in intel pertaining to an actual territorial tribe of intelligent zombies that require human offerings to let you pass, just so that reveal could play out in real time through the joyous punishment of the cartoonishly misogynistic dude

total chad move for mister uruk hai and final pam to rule from a rusted swimming pool complex

the ending with vanderohe oh my god. with the. cash stacks at the airport register. and specifically them working in his favor. that is literally something you do to get arrested under suspicion of theft. it was almost played for laughs and I respect that. coulda been goofier. make these movies goofy ya dorks

anyway, weird, weird movie. bad marketing. message unclear (something something sins of the father???), baffling editing instincts, literal worst-looking cinematography I ever laid eyes upon. Confidently dying on that last hill

[love-and-socialism]

There’s a new Iron Curtain falling. Here’s a tiny observation. America and Britain are on the verge of forming something very much like the old Soviet Union. A new bloc, a global axis, an entity that follows its own paradigm, trades among itself, treats its citizens like dirt, enriches its elites…and shuts out the rest of the world.

Let me explain, beginning with America.

What got America to this point? It wasn’t al-Qaeda or ISIS or the commies. As it turns out, the thing that wrecked America was good ole’ home grown capitalism. Now, I catch flak for saying that, Americans get instantly defensive, because capitalism is to them what socialism was to Soviets: neither really understand their ruling ideologies well, which is the point of an ideology, really.

So let’s quickly cover with what capitalism isn’t. Contrary to popular belief, capitalism isn’t your local drycleaner or bar or bartender or the guy that polishes shoes at the train station. It’s not really small or even medium-sized business at all. Those guys aren’t capitalists — they’re barely eking out a living, weary, humble, average. Capitalism is Goldman Sachs throwing bailout money at hedge funds to build bots to trade Facebook shares with by the nanosecond…so there’s every more profit. More, more, more. Is your local bartender obsessively, ritually, fetishistically, single-mindedly concerned with maximizing profit at the expense of the planet, democracy, and the future? Does he only care about increasing his quarterly earnings, to meet profit targets set by Wall Street analysts? Is his stock publicly traded? Does he have a fiduciary duty to those shareholders? I didn’t think so. He’s not a capitalist. The capitalists, my friends, are the robber barons of American collapse…the average person trying to start something new and cool and interesting, or just making a meagre living from their passion, isn’t a capitalist, a soulless impersonal profit-maximizing entity, and they never will be. Do you see the difference? Please tell me you do, because it drives me a little crazy that Americans don’t know what capitalism actually is.

(Now, this is more like the European definition of capitalism, it’s true. The American one is more like “corporatism.” Call it what you want — let’s not get hung up on semantics. I’ll stick to capitalism not “corporatism”, because Europe has corporations too, but they’re not as insane and abusive as American ones.)

Phew. OK, let’s get to work now. What collapsed American life? Capitalism did, obviously. It can’t have been anything else, because there isn’t anything else. There’s no public healthcare, retirement, childcare, etcetera. Not surprisingly, deficits of all these very things, which are the basics of life, caused life to crater. Meanwhile, capitalists, who by now had lobbied to privatize all these industries and many more began to charge Americans an arm and a leg (literally, maybe) for things that were…free…in every other rich country. Insulin, visits to the doctor, retirement, parental leave.

Fast forward to today. The average American is effectively the weird paradox of a poor person in a rich country. The majority of Americans can’t afford food, housing, healthcare, and bills — hence, they just go deeper and deeper into debt…debt which they never pay off, hence the majority of Americans literally die in debt, too. Yes, really. Think about that for a second. What happens to nations that plunge into fresh poverty — where the middle class implodes? Fascism does. Hence, American fascism ignited at precisely the moment when Americans plunged into poverty: not a coincidence — cause and effect. And what caused the weird situation of American poverty — a new kind of poverty, poor people in a rich country — was capitalism: it ate through everything Americans had, in its quest for eternally rising profits, which meant that they were left broke, perpetually on the edge, unable to afford the very things they were often involved in producing. Again — that’s capitalism: it doesn’t care about paying you decently, it just cares about maximizing its own profits, getting as rich as possible, everything else be damned. But the inevitable result was a fascist meltdown.

Now look across the pond. There’s Britain. It’s the world’s second most capitalist country. If you understand all the above about America, what might you expect to happen to Britain? More or less the same thing — only less so, no? And that’s what did. Did you know that the only two countries in the world with the combination of falling life expectancy, flat incomes, and spiking poverty are…America and Britain? Apart from maybe North Korea and the Congo…but those are places that never were democracies at all.

So here we have these two countries — the Romeo and Juliet of modern collapse. Europeans live pretty good lives. Sure, times are tough, they are everywhere. But only in America and Britain did times get so tough that the extremists literally rose to the heights of power and controlled the destiny of nations. Europe fought them off in its most recent election, in fact.

So the Romeo and Juliet of collapsing countries — what are they doing? Well, they’ve made their choice. Their choice is capitalism. They’ve both rejected social democracy. Britain’s rejected the “democracy” part — it doesn’t want to be part of the EU, and America’s rejected the “social” part — it’s still so backwards it thinks socialism is some kind of horrible curse, not how people get working healthcare and college and retirement in the rest of the world.

So Romeo and Juliet have made a kind of suicide pact. They’ve decided to go all in on capitalism.

And that brings us to now. Trumps’s in Britain, trumpeting (sorry) a “trade deal.” What does all that really mean? Well, it means the following. Britain is effectively a strategic beggar on the global stage now, and it has to take what it can get. What America will demand is that American capitalism has access to all Britain’s remaining public goods. Britain never built a full social democracy, but it got further than America did: it has public healthcare, education to a degree, retirement of a kind, housing, and so forth. All of those will be “opened up” to American companies, which is to say, they’ll be sold to them, privatized. That means American capitalism will now be running what’s left of Britain’s public goods.

Imagine the NHS for a second. Who “owns” it? Nobody and everybody does, in fact. Local towns and cities, if you want to nitpick. But really — everybody and nobody. Now consider the fact that when it’s privatized, there will be a dude — an American “hedge fund manager”, which means some clueless Ivy League nitwit — or two who literally “owns” the NHS. And the BBC. And the retirement system. And the education system. Are you getting my drift? How rich will that dude, the guy that “owns” the healthcare system of a country, be? Obscenely, I think is a fair term to use. It’s the kind of thing we once associated with failed states.

Now think of how perfect that is for American capitalism. Why? Because it’s sucked Americans dry, that’s why. They literally have nothing left to give. Less than nothing. The majority die in debt — that’s how poor Americans are now. They never break even their whole lives long. Capitalism can’t take more from them, because they don’t have it. Nor does America have any real publics goods to cannibalize. Ah, but Britain does. Britain’s expansive public goods — though they’ve been underfunded for decades — are just what American capitalism needs to prey on.

Why? Because the crux of American capitalism is ever increasing profits. It’s bled America dry in its quest for those. But that game is done now, as Americans have plunged into lives of dire and ruinous poverty. So where to look? Britain is the perfect target. If you can’t increase profits forever…you’re not going to stay a capitalist for very long.

Do you see how perfect this setup is? American capitalism needs fresh meat to tear apart and feast on. There’s Britain, who’s rejected European social democracy, and chosen…capitalism. It’s not just a marriage made in hell — it’s a suicide pact.

Here’s what will happen — what’s already happening, in fact. America’s declaring trade war after trade war — China, India, Europe. Britain is too — thats what Brexit is. But they’re seeking succor in each others’ arms. They are building a new entity, a new bloc, a new kind of Soviet Union in a sense. A part of the world where these two countries basically trade only with each other, do business with each other, care for each other. Where these two countries will have intertwined their fates, and linked hands in a shared destiny.

That much is already happening because it’s more or less inevitable. Americans can’t ever question capitalism — and Brits rejected social democracy. So where does that leave them, except together, in a new Soviet Union of capitalism, whose Iron Curtains are already falling, to shut their people off from the rest of the world, whether Europe, China, or Mexico? What else is Brexit? Trump’s wall? The coming trade deal between them?

Now, if you’re a Brit, that means that your life is going to get worse. A lot worse. Fast. You’re going to live like an American. You’re going to eat American food, watch American TV, and get American healthcare and retirement and childcare. Oh wait, there isn’t any decent version of most of those things. You see my point, then. British livings standards will plummet to American levels — which are the lowest in the rich world by a very, very long way.

If you’re American, on the other hand…this also means that life will get worse, too. That’s because instead of learning from the better parts of Britain — the NHS, the BBC, the Royal Societies, the education system, and so forth — America’s basically intending to take a wrecking ball to them. That means capitalists will go on getting rich — imagine how rich the dude that ends up “owning” the NHS is going to be — and Americans will go on getting poorer and poorer. But worse, because this new union, only really trading with itself, thinking about itself, listening to itself…it’ll just stay stuck in a loop of collapse.

I know. A lot of you will probably whine reading this article — “that sounds outlandish!” Does it? You’re missing the point, completely. Britain’s rejected the EU. America’s rejected the EU, China, and Mexico. Both have rejected everyone else, in a kind of mass delusion, a hysterical tantrum of macho man tears. Who do they have left? Birds of a feather flock together, my friends, when it comes to political economy. Europe is a union of social democracies. So what else can the last two capitalist countries do but flock together, too?

The last two capitalist countries on earth have no one to turn to but each other. Reinforcing that, of course, is a healthy dose of entitled white supremacy, to be sure. But it’s political economy that drives it. How can a capitalist country have a union with a social democracy? A socialist one with a capitalist one? They can’t — impossible. These political economies are too different — which is why, for example, America and Canada never really joined hands in any real way. Hence, Britain and America, in choosing capitalism, have also chosen each other.

So there they are, the last two capitalist countries on earth. I don’t mean: “the last two countries where any capitalism exists” — I mean: “the last two countries on earth where capitalism is the dominant, monopolistic organizing principle of all life, thought, action.” They’re star-crossed lovers, America and Britain, the Romeo and Juliet of capitalism.

Capitalism is what led them to collapse. Collapse is what made them to turn to each other. And turning to each other kept them firmly capitalist. Choosing to stay capitalist in each others’ arms took away the chance to join the more prosperous, modern, social democratic world around them — Canada, Europe. But capitalism was the very compound whose overdose poisoned their systems to begin with. How could anything but more ruin come from overdosing together, all over again?

And yet no one asked, no one saw, and no one cared very much. Their eyes were full of dollar signs, and their blood ran hot with the thrill of conquest.

Umair 

May 2019