#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.

[fraudulence-paradox]

5/25/16

        I had a dream about her last night. One I’ve had before actually. For some reason I’m in K----y’s house and her mom tells me she’ll be right out. Her voice is normal, but somehow I can tell something is wrong. I’m just never sure what. The backdrop is all wrong too. I know I’m in her house, but something is wrong. The whole scene makes me uneasy. It may be the impossible geometry of how we’re standing on muddy dirt, even though I’m sure this is her living room, it may be how K----y always just appears, like the birthing of an orc, out of the shadows, likely from the mud, but this is where the dream always goes awry. I remember a text I received from her a few years back (in real life) where she told me that she’d gained some weight and didn’t want me to see her (I don’t really believe this—and even if it were true, I don’t think it would matter to me—but it stuck in my head somehow), but lo and behold, here she is in the dream. I think this is my subconscious’s way of making it okay that I’ll likely never see her again, because when I do in my dream she’s always hideous. In the particular dream I had last night, she is tall, and pear shaped. Shirtless, for some reason, but where there were well-proportioned breasts, there are scars, and clumps of cellulose. Her entire torso looks like a chewed up pile of pale gum. There are scars covering her. Stretch marks, and what appears to be evidence of a mastectomy. This monstrosity, perched on top of two proportionate, yet asymmetrical legs, which appear to be made of only cottage cheese, and opaque flesh-toned trash bags, as if someone filled two empty bread containers with different amounts of milk, and let them sit in the sun for days, until they finally became rancid enough to solidify and support the weight of the monstrous torso. Yet on top of this mess is her face, normal; untouched.

           At this point in the dream I still want what I presumably came to her house for. I want to have sex with her. With it. It disturbs me, but I wouldn’t say I have no idea why my brain makes this. I think it has something to do with our incredibly bizarre, wonderful, and first relationship.

           K----y was my first real girlfriend, after the whole Kr---- fiasco, it was nice to find a girl who wasn’t as manipulative, and seemed to really care about me. I was her first boyfriend too, which meant neither of us knew what to expect. K----y was my first everything. First kiss, first fuck, first hand holding. Our first kiss was in a movie theater, where we went to see The Lorax, our first date. I was 15, she was 14, so neither of us could drive. I remember her father picking us up, D--- I think his name was. He was a really cool guy. I don’t know if the stories he would tell while we were driving were true, or meant to impress or intimidate me. But they worked. Quite honestly, I would be absolutely fine with becoming like him. He seems to have done everything in the world. He has a job doing something secret for the government, I’m not sure what. His cover is that he’s a psychologist for the military, but I think it has something to to with government torture techniques. K----y told me once that for a year, while he was stationed in “Florida”, he kept telling her and her family about these cool lizards he kept seeing. K----y later learned that these lizards were only native to [redacted]. He was likely speaking in some sort of code to let his wife know where he was without officially breaking his clearance. K----y also told me once, that she had a distinct memory of being at the natural history museum with him around 2008, looking at dinosaur bones, when he received a call. It’s nature was regarding [redacted] being declassified, and how he and a lot of others may be in the public eye for something in them. I’m not sure if the papers were ever made public, but I put the pieces together.

           D---- R-- played piano, but only knew how to improvise, played Anne Frank’s father in his high school show, and told me that’s when he learned how to cry on command. He took K----y and me to the spy museum a few times, and told us how to best memorize your lore. He inexplicably knew Morse-code and several other ciphers by heart, and there was a lot about his life even K----y wasn’t allowed to know about. When he was young, he was heavily involved in a “ministry” that required him to cross the Mexican-American boarder several times a month to do god knows what just south of California. He also told me once that he was one of very few people in the world who knew the exact whereabouts of [redacted]. He was a sketchy dude, but in all the right ways. Basically, he’s what I hope to use my CYSE degree to become.

           But he picked us up that day, and drove us to the theater. It was my first time ever talking to him, so he didn’t try to impress me too hard. I guess he used his psych skills to deduce that the first time meeting your girlfriend’s father is intimidating enough without bragging about how dangerous and well connected you are. We got to the theater, and K----y and I took our seats. I have no memory of the movie whatsoever. Likely because I was so concerned with how sweaty my hand was, and how it was locked in hers, so I couldn’t wipe it off. Coincidentally, this was the same movie theater that several months in the future, K----y would give me two blow jobs in during a showing of Frankenweenie, but that day, I was worried about holding her hand. When the credits rolled, I knew it was time. I asked her if I could kiss her, because chicks dig consent, and she said yes. Then, we didn't kiss. We both looked at each other awkwardly, waiting for the other one to make their move, and neither of us did. We were 5 rows ahead of where future K----y would have my penis in her mouth, and we were worried about kissing before the lights turned on. K----y said, “what do we do?”, so I hit her with the suavest line I could come up with. “Well, let’s make like Nike, and.. just do it” and we kissed.

           The second our lips touched, I got a feeling a lot like how people describe meth. A huge dopamine rush that even now I look back on with envy. If kissing is a drug, it has the fastest tolerance of any of them. I’ve never felt such a rush in my entire life as I did the day I quoted a shoe company at my ex, and pushed my mouth onto her. This was really the beginning of a long string of lust filled relationships, where I chased the dragon that was that dopamine rush. I used to think about that kiss just to pass time. When I used to mow lawns with J---, sometimes in the gasoline scented afternoons I would forget about how big a hill was because I was so caught up in replaying that memory. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a physically intimate experience with anyone in the world that was quite like that moment. But I came close, and that was when I took her virginity.

           This was really the beginning of the end of our relationship, but I didn’t know that yet. From the first time she gave me a blowjob, or I fingered her we lost focus in any romance, and just chased sexual pleasure, but it what we had seemed fixable. But as soon as we started having sex, that was all we did. Really it was my fault. I kind of fucked up everything in that relationship, and I often wonder what things would be like if we never broke up, if we met at a time when I wasn’t so focused on fucking.

(Note from the future)

I don’t think I have that many regrets in my life, but if I have any, one of them is breaking up with her. It’s been almost 7 years and I still think about her at least a few times a month. Currently I’m even in a really good relationship with someone else, but I always wonder, “what if?”. I mean, there must be a reason things didn’t work out. And as the dream sequence from this entry, and future entries that will be posted will undoubtably note, the K----y I remember isn’t the one that exists any more. In my mind, she’s still the same person she was when we were dating… 7 years ago. But I know that isn’t her now. I’m not the same person I used to be, why should she be?

It’s more of a bizarre, chase for something that doesn’t exist anymore. When we first dated, we were both weird outcasts. Her, a quiet girl, sitting by pure chance, at my table in 9th grade history. Me, a weird, bombastic, eccentric nerdy guy. These days, I know almost nothing about her. I know she at one point worked at a grocery store near where I live, and I sometimes go there with the creepy, stalker, self-loathing hope that I’ll get a glance at her, but I’m not sure she even lives here anymore. The last thing I heard from her was that she was with someone she really loved; the way she talked about him made it seem like they would be married. Frankly, I hope that’s what happened. It’s what she deserves. But some horrible, degenerate part of my mind wishes that one day, I would wake up, back in 11th grade, and everything would go back to how it was. I was happy then. I was dating a girl whom no other has ever compared to, I had several close friends. I was depressed as all hell, sure, but at least then I was doing interesting things. I was in a few bands, I was at the absolute peak of my “making interesting art” phase, I even made short films all the time, and had aspirations about becoming a professional film maker. I was happy and naïve.

These days, I’m on what I consider the path to maximal happiness. I’m a Ph.D. student at a just okay university for my field, I just submitted a paper, and feel like I’m learning things at a depth I didn’t even know was possible, but something is missing. What K----y represents to me now isn’t what she is, it’s what I used to have. K----y isn’t just a girl I used to date. She isn’t a person whom I used to love, and a person whom I gave a piece of myself that I can never have back. She’s a symbol. And I know that’s completely unfair if she ever actually read this—no one wants to be someone else’s metaphor. I’d be fucking pissed if I was (well, I don’t know, maybe I’d be a little flattered that I lived in someone’s head rent-free, as they say). To me she’s a symbol of that happy, carefree time that was late high school. I was old enough to drive, but young enough not to have any real responsibilities. Maybe part of growing up is just accepting that your happiness peaked at a certain point, and there’s nothing you can do about that.

All of this is to say, it’s easier for me to personify the whole “spent youth” thing in someone I used to date—used to love—then it is to just accept it as it is. Many of the things I associate with her, I wasn’t even dating her for.  But loving her was just the most emotionally significant thing that occurred for me in high school, so it’s just what happened. I really do hope she’s happy.

When we broke up, I sent her a lengthy text message on my old keyboard-having phone. I wish I still had it, because I think it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever communicated to another human being (wow, pretentious much, [fraudulence-paradox]?). But the gist of it is something like:

 The whole universe started with the big bang

And there’s this theory that it will all end with a big crunch.

Time will reverse, and everything will go backward and everything you and I have ever done will repeat in reverse.

But then, it will get to the beginning, and the universe will start again.

So at some point, you and I will be back together, back in those first days when everything was beautiful

And even though everything happens again, and we just have to relive everything

I don’t think I would change a single thing

[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.