#these guys are frankly bombastic enough that's how it's done

[amateurmonastic]

The text of this anthem is in the Daily Office today as the Old Testament reading. I remembered this anthem and had to find a good performance to share. There's a moment when, if you've registered your pedal division properly, the building will actually shake, as the text describes.

[disastersandretreats]

regrettably that was a pretty disappointing season of sas rogue heroes. first reactions (incl some spoilers)...

pros:

tonkin always seemed like far too fantastic a character to waste, and to their credit they didn't. his adventures in italy were a little meandering, but he came across terrifically - great verve and that characteristic sense of humour.

reg's arc added a much-needed dose of solemnity to a season that otherwise felt more boys' own even than the first. his awful extended breakdown culminating at the burial scene was genuinely discomforting to watch.

the action was fantastic. you can tell they had a much bigger budget this time around, and they had fun with it. the set pieces were fast and fun and many were surprisingly tense.

i appreciate what they were going for with bill stirling, and i think they mostly stuck the landing. it's not a show that has a lot of natural interest in guys that are more careful, closer to command, and less bombastic so i appreciated that it built bill to be fairly sympathetic and three dimensional.

late season paddy when they finally let him settle into leadership a bit more. seeing how he handled difficult situations (see: reg's breakdown, conflicts with command) in his unconventional style in a way that actually worked and showed his development was gratifying.

great engagement with the comparative complexities of fighting in italy. i would have loved to see more of the civilians and even more from the politics of fighting alongside the mafia and partisans, but they did a very solid job of building out the field of war.

cons:

early season paddy. good grief did they flog the "wild uncontrollable drunkard" bit into the ground. starting with him in prison again was imo frustrating; we've been here, done this, and seen him develop. frankly after a while and enough monologues, it's just one-note and uninteresting to watch. let your characters grow!

my understanding is that they only included david stirling's arc because he was such a fan favourite. don't get me wrong, it wasn't all bad, but ultimately i think the show would have been better spending that time elsewhere (specifically with the men of the sas!!). it didn't move the plot on, it didn't develop stirling in any way. it all felt a bit pointless.

eve's arc was similarly pointless. such a waste. they clearly felt they couldn't drop their only significant female character so they forced her into an uninspired, insipid and largely ineffectual arc - some unconvincing will they / won't they with bill, a weirdly out of place girls can use guns moment, and being a bit of a chew toy in the sas' internal politics.

speaking of eve, mr knight needs to explain to me why she was the choice to play therapist to reg without using the word "woman". massive missed opportunity not using johnny there when they clearly had this very genuine, touching and unlikely friendship of which we've seen next to nothing.

generally a bit disappointing how much they softened the series. i get the impression it's been a casualty of its own success in that respect. significantly fewer deaths of characters with significant screen time. the main guys were practically invincible. filing off some of the source material's more unpleasant edges (the homophobia, the racism we saw in the first series, the sectarianism). ymmv ofc but i got the sense that this was a series made to be more palatable. fine but it feels less real; we all knew our heroes were going to be fine and heroic at the end.

in all: not a bad show but could have been massively improved by cutting the david and eve storylines and spending less time re-playing paddy's s1 arc to focus more on building up the secondary and newer sas guys.

[can0n-fodder]

SVU kind of botched Carisi’s introduction, if you think about it.

Okay, listen, we know Carisi’s debut at season 16 is hilarious and has given us soooo much fic fodder with the infamous mustache, but  let’s talk about the painfully forced and artificial way in which he was received by the rest of the squadron.  When Benson meets Carisi for the first time, the exchange goes like this: CARISI: Hi! Dominick Carisi, Jr. Call me Sonny. I brought zeppoli. BENSON: *sarcastically* I asked for an experienced, empathic detective - and they sent you? At that moment, Carisi has not done or said ANYTHING to indicate he’s a bad detective or doesn’t belong there. Benson has interacted with him for a grand total of 3 seconds and she is already dismissing him and acting like his presence is a burden. Since Benson’s character is not supposed to be a judgmental snarky asshole, this makes no sense and is totally out of her character. A sensible viewer is left to assume that his clothes and accent are the only thing Benson is working off of, which would make her shallow and prejudiced as well (another thing we know she IS NOT). Later on, in that same episode, after they have dismissed Carisi multiple times and not allowed him to do anything but make phone calls, this happens: CARISI: Want me to take a run at [the witness], sergeant? BENSON:  I can certainly see why you're so popular. Rollins, how about you talk to the John. And, Carisi, come with me. I need you to follow my lead or you'll be oh for four, and then your all-borough tour of SVU will continue in the Bronx. Like, holy shit, what? This dude is eager to be involved, he brought you assholes pastries, and after he finally works up the nerve to directly ask to do something with the case, Benson basically goes full Mean Girl and tells him nobody likes him and threatens to transfer him to another borough.  TV shows get away with garbage characterizations that would never fly in literature. The way your characters react to another character has to make sense. If your characters are going to treat another like he’s an bombastic annoyance, then you have to actually make sure the other character IS a bombastic annoyance. Carisi was never that. The writers never made Carisi annoying enough to justify the irritated reactions of all the other players.  It’s like they got handed the scripts with a post-it note attached that said “Carisi is annoying and everyone hates him”. It’s the cinematic equivalent of telling rather than showing. This cynical irritation they show to Carisi because he’s eager just smacks of that gross Curb Your Enthusiasm type humor. And they’re still doing it, even now, with season 19 wrapping up. The squad still acts as if Carisi is pulling out their finger nails whenever he mentions anything having to do with the details of the law, as if the law is so separate and uninteresting to a BUNCH OF COPS. Rollins, especially, seems to be have been given the character role of “kick Carisi’s puppy whenever possible”  The only saving grace we have is that Carisi’s continued good nature and stable personality in the face of his, quite frankly, toxic fucking work environment has allowed him to take the title of most likable character. Do you hear that, writers!? The guy you try to present as annoying and insufferable is the fucking fan favorite good guy. You failed. 

[downinfront]

“Godzilla: King of the Monsters”: Just go with it, people

The new Godzilla should come with a disclaimer at the beginning asking you to turn off your brain along with your cell phone, and I mean that as a compliment. But also kind of as an insult. But mainly a compliment. Unless it's an insult. Which makes me think that it's more of a compliment.

Look, point is, when the big guy himself is onscreen, brawling against or alongside the scores of hairy, scaly, winged creatures that have risen to ravage our worthless asses, Godzilla: King of the Monsters is frankly spectacular summer entertainment on par with anything the final battle of Avengers: Endgame cooks up. But when the film turns its gaze towards the hapless humans scurrying around in the lizard king's wake, it turns into a different kind of stupid, where paper-thin characters shift motivations seemingly at random, profanely talented actors stare ponderously into the middle distance (better to do the math on the zeroes in the paychecks) and a crew of military jocks/science dorks sprout impenetrable jargon that serves as exposition. Ultimately, whether this movie is worth your while will depend on where you land with respect to that dichotomy: Is numbingly silly human drama worth sitting through to get to the endorphin high of a monster rumble?

In fairness, this movie has not been remotely shy about what it's selling us. Gareth Edwards' 2014 Godzilla, which this movie serves as a sequel to, teased the monster as a malevolent natural force and pump-faked him into a surly protector of humanity, albeit one with a conspicuous disregard for collateral damage. This one, from jump, has been marketed as a four-way showdown featuring Godzilla and three of his most notorious frenemies: The glowing insect Mothra, fiery pteranodon Rodan, and three-headed dragon, King Ghidorah. It shares a central thesis with its predecessor — long story short, humans are wasteful, horrible creatures who've ruined the planet, and we deserve what's coming to us — but to its credit, has no patience for the ponderousness with which Edwards approached the subject. Instead, it settles for a blunt-force, here's-what-I'm-doing-and-why speech by a scientist (Vera Farmiga) who seeks to use the monsters to restart the earth alongside someone the script has seen fit to designate as an "eco-terrorist" (a harrumphing, underused Charles Dance). What earned him that reputation is left mostly to the imagination; he is quiet, British, speaks in monosyllables and shoots a lot of extras, ergo, he is bad.

Along for the ride is Farmiga's daughter, Eleven — err, Madison (Millie Bobbie Brown from Stranger Things), who has been drawn into her mother's plan as ... a co-conspirator, I think? She seems oddly willing to go along with the extinction of humanity in principle, though her mom's execution of the plan leaves a lot to be desired. On the other end of the spectrum is her father (Kyle Chandler), another scientist of sorts who is trying to repair his own relationship with Madison -- her brother was lost in the events of the previous film, as established in a prologue that recalls Batman v Superman, of all things -- while also reconciling his own feelings about ... Godzilla? I think?

Yes, it's all very silly. And the director, Michael Dougherty, is visibly lacking the personal touches he brought to his last feature, the nasty, nihilistic horror-comedy Krampus from 2015. (Worth a watch, by the way.) But to his credit, he also seems to realize that this is not the reason for whence you have come. And when it comes time to get to the smashy-smashy stuff, he excels. His King of the Monsters may have ditched Edwards' sense of seriousness, but it wisely retains that filmmaker's eye for sheer, awe-inspiring scale. He knows how to use it a little better, I think, lingering less on the shots emphasizing the monsters' enormity and using them more as beats in the kind of viciously streamlined action sequences Edwards never felt the need to attempt. (The scene where the military tries to bait Rodan away from the Mexican village he's nesting above is so thrilling it took me out of the movie for a bit.)

It's to Dougherty's credit the effect isn't diluted despite the movie's dumbing down: Even if some of the best shots have been spoiled in the trailers, there's still something primally majestic about the sight of these monsters among us and the merciless destruction they wreak in a battle that is revealed to be, quite literally, older than time and beyond the scope of our world. It makes you wish both movies had done away with the speechifying entirely; the imagery in them is, frankly, enough to speak for themselves, and the people speaking are blindingly puny in comparison anyway. (That's is no reflection on the actors, a talented bunch that brings back Ken Watanabe, Sally Hawkins and David Strathairn from the first movie and expands to include Ziyi Zhang, O'Shea Jackson, Jr., Bradley Whitford, Aisha Hinds and Thomas Middleditch. They all seem pretty happy to be in a Godzilla movie. Good for them.)

Like all good bad movies, King of the Monsters does contain one single germ of a good idea: That all these other monsters are the only thing stopping Godzilla from turning his attention to us, the reason he has to come back in the first place. Edwards reimagined Godzilla as a burly, glowering sort, but his movie didn't go far enough to establish any kind of relationship with the humans at his feet. Dougherty, again to his credit, at least tries to create a dynamic: This beefy, lumbering Godzilla has the air of a blue-collar dad who comes home to find his spoiled kids have trashed the joint and wearily resigns himself to setting things right. He lumbers from mess to mess, spewing fire and moving on to the next one before things get really out of hand. (As if to drive the point home, at one point in King of the Monsters, he actually takes a nap.) Unspoken in all of this is whether we as a species are worth this aggravation, save for a throwaway line at the end, and you wish the script, by Dougherty, Zach Shields and Max Borenstien, had made a little more room for the kind of existential query that would give this movie some urgency, especially in an age where climate change has become an existential question.

Alas, no time for that. There's cities to smash, some queasily so (Boston is completely disintegrated in a nuclear holocaust — go Yankees?), people to eat, overqualified actors to kill off and a hairy fellow glimpsed only in shadow on the periphery, patiently awaiting his own throwdown next year. (Stay through the very entertaining, creative credit sequence for some setup on that front.) Again, this isn't necessarily an insult. Godzilla may have begun as a metaphor for Hiroshima, but it's worth noting that his legacy is probably more in line with the cheesy, B-movie, man-in-suit movies that followed suit, so the movie isn't quite as out of line as you might think by choosing destruction over allegory. Nonetheless, even the most forgiving of viewers might be tested with its final sequence, a bombastic, ridiculous scene that is probably the dumbest thing ever put to film — unless it's your thing, in which case it's the coolest thing you've ever seen. (Full disclosure: It’s totally my thing.) It's to King of the Monsters' credit that it plants its flag, then and there, as to what kind of movie it's trying to be, and if I do say so myself, it's to your credit if you go along with it: You're allowed to like a dumb movie. But there's nothing wrong with quietly wishing that it was a little smarter, too.