#the google machine tells me it’s mostly an American thing so I’d genuinely never seen any news coverage about that

[ghosts-and-glory]

Pls don’t use triple parenthesis—> (((___)))

It’s an antisemitic dog whistle

Oh my god what, I had to stop and google that for a second cause I had no idea. I edited that post now so it’s only single parenthesis, my sincere apologies, thank you for letting me know.

[petetoms]

Every new year I think about how it might be nice to return to the salad days of blogging a little about things I’m watching or reading. Then I slip into the part of my seasonal depression where I’m rarely not lying on the floor until April and my thoughts of blogs turn to thoughts of our bad world, my lifetime of numerous regrets, how tired I am all the time, raccoon liberation, and my increasing understanding of the villainous characters from sci-fi literature who are trying to Freejack younger bods.

So while I doubt this will be an ongoing concern, here’s some bloggin:

CRAWL (2019)

Two things I would’ve put into this movie about two people hiding behind a sort of pipe fence from the alligators that are in their basement and want to bite them is a scene where they hear an unusual page turning sound and slowly realize that a gator is reading a how-to plumbing book and they have to escape before it gets to the chapter about removing pipes. And I would’ve had the gators, as a last resort, throw their gator eggs through the pipe fence, and as they break, baby gators would hatch and attack.

I was not exactly rooting for the alligators while watching this movie, I guess I just feel they could’ve tried harder.

THE PROFESSIONALS (1966)

This is kind of like SUICIDE SQUAD with aged western hunks. So like Burt Lancaster is Harley Quinn and uh, Jack Palance is the Joker* (I don’t really remember anything about the Suicide Squad movie at this point other than the couple that sat next to me when I saw it in the theater sang and danced to every song on the soundtrack and I now - perhaps totally unfairly- think of the two of them as the audience that all contemporary pop culture is geared towards).

There’s a lot of really good tough guy one liners in this movie. To the point where I imagined the anxiety I would feel if I was one of the professionals and had to talk knowing that all the other pros would have a cool comeback.

Me: Good night, Lee Marvin.

Lee Marvin: Nothing good about it.

Me to me: Damn he got me again.

*I realized after writing this that Palance is killed by the Joker in the Tim Burton Batman movie, so I apologize for making this joke.

DETECTIVE COMICS 339 (1965)

This comic has the same plot and many of the same layouts as one of Jiro Kuwata’s Batman stories and I’m assuming one is an adaptation of the other, though the laziest possible Google search doesn’t tell me which one came first.

A scientist feels bad that he grew up wimpy and boring so he builds a machine that gives him the traits of animals for a limited time so that he can become tough and interesting like your average animal. It’s all good when he gets like the flying powers of an eagle or the cool vibes of a snake, but when he gets the strength of an ape, the ape also gets the scientist’s intelligence and declares war on humanity. Kuwata’s story is longer and spends a lot of time on the ape’s motivations and ends with Robin being like “If I was an ape, I’d also want to get revenge on humanity.” So it’s much better, but this one ends with Batman saying that they’re going to send the ape to live in the jungle so he can hang out with other apes and the scientist is like “I wish I could get sent to a human jungle where other humans would be forced to hang out with me,” which is also a pretty good ending.

The most interesting thing about this is seeing how both artists interpreted the same material and it made me wish that every single Batman comic was just an adaption of this story.

THE PUNISHER LIBRARY

http://stanleylieber.com/2019/12/21/0/

IP MAN 4: THE FINALE (2019)

I went to go see the new Terrence Malick movie (I will possibly never get over the blurb on the Instagram ad I saw for it that said, “CINEMA AT IT’S MIGHTIEST AND HOLIEST. A MOVIE YOU ENTER LIKE A CATHEDRAL OF THE SENSES,” because it’s like something Dracula would say and you’d be like “Take it easy, Dracula. This is dramatic even for you”), but I was already feeling very sad and was nervous it would make me even sadder. So when I saw that Ip Man was playing, I decided to watch that instead. Then it opens with Ip Man being told he has terminal cancer.

Ip Man goes to San Francisco to try to register his jerk teen son for high school, but can’t without a recommendation letter from the Chinese Benevolent Association (which is made up of martial arts masters), so the main plot of the movie is him trying to get this recommendation letter. While, of course, dealing with racism against Chinese immigrants (it’s suggested in the film that the main cause of this prejudice is that Americans think Karate is better than Kung-Fu). The audience I saw it with (at like 5pm on a weekday in the mall) was kind of laughing at the entire movie and then when Donnie Yen beats up Scott Adkins (playing a racist American marine who’s a karate-expert and has a British accent) at the end, everyone started genuinely cheering.

I’m mostly curious if in trying to figure out what Ip Man was up to in his later life, the screenwriters heard he had a hard time getting his son a recommendation letter and were like “That’s it. That’s the film.”

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1996)

I can’t remember if I saw this when it first came out, but I liked it so much when I watched it last week that I keep saying, “Yo, you seen Portrait of a Lady yet,” to people as if I’ve been in a coma since the 1996 awards season.