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Saw Dark Knight Rises. Really quite hateful. Twenty (largely abusive) observations below.

1. This is a story about a rebellion of slaves against their masters in which we’re supposed to side with the masters. No.

2. Plot wise, it’s essentially the story of the Paris Commune as re-written by Thomas Hobbes. Disenfranchised people take over Gotham, the police are powerless, everyone’s sharing the resources and the citizens form their own government. Great, when do we sta— oh, wait, people are just vicious animals and the whole thing descends into a Lord of the Flies-esque nightmare within days. Nolan is clearly of the Joker’s party.

3. Said disenfranchised aren’t depicted as having legitimate grievances, but being a frenzied mob stirred up by an outside agitator with his own irrational, self-serving agenda. Kill him and they all go back to normal (ie. docile and unquestioning of power), because they were just under mind control.

4. There’s seriously a scene where we’re supposed to cheer for Batman because he’s backing up this huge mass of police officers who are marching on a public building full of poor people wearing rags and carrying improvised weapons. In ANY other movie, even the most reactionary Hollywood crap, this would be depicted as the heroic last stand of the resistance against the state’s army of identical uniformed thugs. It is, and I’m just being honest here, like watching fascist propaganda.

5. Oh, the terrorists are just a mix of people who look generically “foreign”. Lots of shots of swarthy men holding white suburbanites at gunpoint. You keep expecting Chuck Norris to show up. Ah, but the real villain is Tom Hardy, who’s quite unavoidably white… except that he adopts a (ridiculous) fake foreign accent and comes from a nonspecific desert where we keep seeing people wearing rags on their heads. It’s ostensibly because there’s a plague there and they need to keep their faces covered. Yeah, that’s exactly why.

6. Wayne Enterprises goes belly up because of a risky financial gamble. Now that LITERALLY EVERYONE UP TO AND INCLUDING DAVID LETTERMAN knows that big business gets a government safety net for shit like this and CEO’s keep their jobs while everyone else (ie. the frenzied mob) is told to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, it’ll be REALLY interesting to see how the “poor Bruce” section plays to audiences. And, in the same way that the League of Shadows were responsible for the recession in Batman Begins, rather than, you know, the people who cause them in real life, here the market crashes because Bane has a magic iPad. I’m lost for words (I’m not).

7. There’s one line that attacks the USA’s use of mercenaries in securing oil reserves. Guess what? It’s one line, in a script where the denouement hinges on people not knowing how to create viable alternative energy sources, rather than it not being profitable to those who control oil reserves.

8. For all the industrial-scale special effects and overwrought melodrama, the most affecting thing in the film is Gary Oldman. Guess who also isn’t in it very much?

9. Bruce gets furious at Alfred for hiding Rachel’s letter where she confessed her love for Harvey. That this is exactly what Bruce and Gordon did on a massive scale at the end of The Dark Knight isn’t commented on.

10. Oh, on the subject of That Ending I Kept Complaining About, and all the people who assured me it was meant to be morally ambiguous? It’s shown to have worked. So it wasn’t.

11. You know that bit in the Adam West movie where Batman’s carrying a bomb around and can’t find anywhere to put it…? I dare you not to think of it during the climax.

12. Or hum the Rocky theme during the training montage.

13. The trailer for Skyfall looked quite good.

14. On less political matters… it has quite possibly the most incompetent first act I’ve seen in ages. A series of sub plots - honestly, it’s anywhere between three and five - are introduced in rapid succession and then cut between seemingly at random before we know enough for them to be properly involving. Then the things that would’ve made them involving - like Selena’s motives, or Bane’s backstory, or precisely why Pavol is important - haphazardly arrive after an hour of narrative constipation.

15. Owen from Torchwood’s in it. It took me a while to figure out who he was, so I thought it was worth mentioning in case you start suffering flashbacks to “Exit Wounds” and aren’t sure why.

16. In order to distance itself from the ridiculous and embarrassing Batman & Robin, the villains are a musclebound psycho with a ridiculous Germanic accent and a femme fatale in tight clothing who flirts during life or death situations.

17. Hathaway’s Catwoman is actually a perfectly serviceable Sassy Action Girl, certainly better than ScarJo, it’s just that she’s in a movie that takes itself gut-achingly seriously and as a result clashes horribly with the self-conscious grimness. And no, the fact they’ve got knives on them isn’t a good enough reason to wear high heels to combat zone. At least put them in the toes, like Rosa Klebb.

18. Wayne says that the idea of Batman is that “anyone can be him”. Except “anyone” doesn’t have a fucking military-grade APC / rocket-powered motorcycle / bullet-proof body suit / personal weapons designer. So it doesn’t really work, does it? Hell, they actually tried that in The Dark Knight, and it went horribly wrong. This Batman, regardless of what Bruce Wayne says he is, isn’t a figure who inspires people to take their city back, he’s a saviour that you sit around passively and pray for. It’s like V for Vendetta in reverse.

19. It has the three worst endings you could possibly imagine, all at the same time.

20. This is a film in which the military describe Gotham as “under occupation” because it’s been taken over by the people who live and work there.

After posting and then deleting three captions for this, I’ve decided this speaks for both itself and whoever decided to make it.

Soups that sound like Star Wars characters:

Asam Pedas
Coto Makassar
Dropka Katsa
Fabada Asturiana
Ghormesh Sabzi
Koottu
Miyeok Guk
Olla Podrida
Sayur Lodeh
Tatws Pum Munud

The Weird in Doctor Who

If the greatest flaw of “Rose” was that it tried slightly too hard to disassociate itself from the old series, then its greatest strength was that it disassociated itself from modern SF television as well. The McGann TV Movie is quite blatantly an attempt to “update” Doctor Who for the mid 90’s, so it’s as much like a car-crash hybrid of Star Trek and The X-Files as was legally possible with superficial elements of the original series haphazardly splattered on the screen in an attempt to establish some kind of brand identity, but “Rose” is… Well, it’s “Rose”. For all its faults there isn’t really anything else like it, and despite the frequent comparisons to Buffy, the pair don’t really share much in common beyond having a blonde teenage girl as the central protagonist.

What’s particularly striking about “Rose” is that the way that it often looks as if it’s going to head down the road of predictable SF banality, but doesn’t just avoid the predictable trope, it outright inverts it, yet doesn’t do so in a knowing or detached way. When Mickey is captured and duplicated by the Nestene, it doesn’t lead to a tedious “Which is the real Mickey?” sub-plot, it leads to a comedy sequence where we laugh at Rose for not picking up on the fact that Mickey no longer looks, acts or talks like he used to… and yet this all makes perfect sense, because the Nestene don’t know anything about human beings and therefore Auton-Mickey is exactly the kind of disaster they would come up with. Aliens invade a department store rather than a secret military base, but we follow the effect it has on someone who used to work there rather than treating it as a punch-line. We get a “Time Lord” with a Salford accent who acts like an urban guerrilla, but this is totally in keeping with his personal history, not a piece of moralising about why we shouldn’t judge by appearances. Even Clive, the conspiracy theorist with a basement full of newspaper cuttings and old photographs, is a likeable family man with a weird hobby rather than a one-note joke about saddos whose only friends are on the internet. That would be lazy, glib characterisation and no highly-regarded SF screenwriter would ever think of doing such a thing.

Rose herself has no super-powers, destiny or anything out of the ordinary besides a bronze medal in gymnastics. She’s not “strong” or (God forbid) “sassy”, she’s bored and self-absorbed and fed up. The use of the Autons as the story’s monsters isn’t an attempt to recreate the Pertwee years, it’s there to show us Rose’s whole world - her job, the commercial high streets where she spends her leisure time, and her culture’s own plastic superficiality (cf. her comment about breast implants coming to life… or the next story for Lady Cassandra) - turning on her. Unlike the Pertwee Auton stories, these dummies (yeah, alright, and wheelie bins) aren’t alien weapons in disguise as ordinary objects, they are ordinary objects, the exact same ones she hangs around every single day, now revealed as something hostile and alien. How long have the Nestene been in London? How long were the dummies in the windows really watching her? Considering that the clothes she’s selling were more than likely a product of sweat shop labour, do the dummies even need to be alive to haunt us?

She might be a wonderful person fundamentally, but she’s also part of a superficial, consumption-driven society that goes out of its way to stunt her thoughts and feelings; it’s not hard to trace a direct lineage from consumptive, complacent London 2005 to the stagnant, insular, vicious, self-interested empire we’re shown in “The Long Game” and “Bad Wolf”. Nothing she does throughout the first season is beyond what an everyday person can do; she just asks questions, listens to people, reaches out to help, learns from her mistakes and (eventually) makes a stand when nobody else will. Anybody can do that, and that’s why she’s strong. She doesn’t need a time rift in her bedroom, or alien DNA, or any other kind of spurious superpower to make a difference.

Even the killer wheelie bin sort of works, although it tips things a bit too far into Dangermouse territory. Honestly, though, I’d rather watch Dangermouse than Babylon 5.

“So I get irritated when people say on Twitter: ‘It’s too complicated. I’m not following it.’ Well, you could try putting your phone down and watching it.”

Well, he’s right. It’s not too complicated, it’s just intentionally fragmented and confusing so that he can pretend it is.

Oh hey, that was fast.

Having your life depend on an internet comic book review show is deeply, deeply disturbing and should be treated as such. It is not life-affirming or heartwarming or a testament to the wonders of fandom, it’s something that you should seek professional help over.

So is forming an intense emotional attachment to complete strangers and/or fictional characters played by said strangers.

If tgwtgsecrets found these things even a fraction as disturbing as I do then they wouldn’t be posted, because doing so normalises and affirms it. This person was actually going to kill themselves. I’m not fucking around here, it scares me that this is happening and it needs to be said in no uncertain terms.

Believing angry, negative reviews of movies are above criticism because of the “effort” involved while completely neglecting to take into account that those same movies being torn to shreds for your amusement represent a vastly greater effort on the behalf of hundreds of people over a period of years demonstrates a horrifying level of insular, elitist double-standards.

Even if I liked TGWTG, the levels of fanatical obsession and detachment from reality I’ve seen would still genuinely disturb me. I do not give a shit that people like something that isn’t funny (cf. my dig at Yahtzee being all of a sentence fragment). I give a shit that people sound like they’re in the Branch Davidians. It’s hard not to implicate the site itself in how its fans behave, since it’s set up so that everyone inside TGWTG is special and human and has real feelings and should be coddled and respected, whereas everyone outside TGWTG is there to be made fun of for the insiders’ amusement. Look at Doug repeatedly and personally tear down Tommy Wiseau, a guy who spent five years - that’s longer than Doug’s whole “career” - scraping the money together to make The Room, then watch hysterical fans rally to Doug’s defense on the grounds that Doug puts a lot of effort into screaming at a camera every week and thus warrants our respect and admiration. I use the word “cult” because there is no other word.

Tangentially, people with years of practical video production experience don’t appreciate being lectured on how they will never understand the difficulties faced by internet video reviewers.

There. Done. Unlike Doug, I have no interest in milking things past their natural lifespan. tgwtgsecrets is a horrifically disturbing monument to things that are legitimately crazy. It’s the kind of stuff people accused D&D players of doing in the 80’s, only in this case it’s actually real and the evidence is sitting up there in public. Fandom should not be a competition to see who can detach themselves the furthest from reality.

(repurposed from an old facebook update just after the trailer leaked)

The big problem with doing a “realistic” Batman, apart from the fact his costume has little ears, is that it requires “realistic” villains with “realistic” motivations, rather than cartoonish supervillains who want to freeze the planet with a diamond-powered laser. Because Batman is very specifically an urban character, Nolan has so far given us two contemporary urban bogeymen in the form of a super-duper drug dealer and a super-duper arsonist / bomber.

What makes me uncomfortable is that both these things - drug addiction and directionless urban violence - are both fuelled by social alienation, poverty and extreme class inequality. Striding into the fray to protect “us” is… a multi-billionaire corporate CEO who’s in cahoots with the police while simultaneously flouting the law when it suits his purpose. His goal is to maintain the status quo from which he directly benefits, yet there’s no acknowledgement that status quo itself is actually at the root of the problems which are being manifested. The threats have all come from *below*; we haven’t seen him take on anyone who’s rich or powerful. Not that I literally want Mr. Freeze back (he blatantly doesn’t fit in the Nolan-version), but someone along the lines of a millionaire Bond villain, an Auric Goldfinger or a Max Zorin, might make it easier to cheer for the guy.

This becomes highly problematic when we have Alfred - the locus of good and voice of reason - discuss how “some people just want to watch the world burn”. He’s talking about the Joker, yes, but this is the same rhetoric used by establishment figures when they want to blame the oppressed for being pissed off about being oppressed. “Black culture is the problem”, “They hate our freedoms”, “Genes for crime” etc.

Things then tip over into outright totalitarian in the final scenes, when Batman and Gordon - the wealthiest man in the city and the guy in charge of the police - decide to conceal the truth about Harvey Dent for the good of society, because, apparently, the people of Gotham cannot be allowed to know what really happened or they’ll tear each other apart. The fact Batman himself takes the blame doesn’t change the fact that he’s the one who made the decision for us because we can’t be trusted. The representatives of wealth and power must shoulder the burden of saving the masses from their own innate savagery. I’m not reading too much into this; that’s the actual plot.

So, when we see the leaked trailer and Selena Kyle is telling Bruce Wayne that, in so many words, he’s basically a parasite (and he uncontroversially is, by the way - he inherited Wayne Enterprises from his parents and leaves other people to run it while he goes yachting and collects the profits; you don’t need to be Marx to find this a fundamentally fucked up arrangement) it looks like we’re heading in the direction of some kind of critique, possibly. But then I see Bane, the villain, leading an army of escaped prisoners, and his goal - as stated - is to reduce Gotham to “ashes”. Then he blows up an NFL game while an adorable kid sings “The Star Spangled Banner”, just to drive home what a threat to the American way he is.

This is a roundabout way of saying I don’t think I’m going to like it very much.

Psychologists should really study the tgwtgsecrets tumblr; it’s a horrifying descent into cult-like fanaticism.

The site does not produce “reviews”, oh no it does not. It produces self-indulgent snarkfests which are designed - like all snarkfests - to demonstrate that the snarker is cooler, smarter and funnier than their target, and to bring the audience along for the ride via smugness osmosis. It’s the mentality of a mob who find solidarity and self-worth through ganging up on an obvious scapegoat, with the key difference being that TGWTG’s targets are mildly unsatisfying Hollywood movies made by people too powerful for Doug’s “reviews” to affect them, rather than Huguenots. None of their targets are going to suffer any real consequences, but that doesn’t stop the feelings behind it being ugly and depressing.

I’m not against tearing into shit for being shit, oh no, but there’s a difference between “I find this amusing in its ineptitude” or “Folks, this is awful” and “My primary source of income is proving how much cleverer I am than the people who worked on this” (not just a TGWTG issue; naming no names but he rhymes with “Yahtzee”). This is particularly grating when fanscum feel the need to leap to the defense of their favourite reviewers if they ever get criticised, because they have feelings and put so much effort into their work. Yeah, well, so does Joel Schumacher. Live by the snark, die by the snark.

A review analyses elements of the work being criticised and uses them to support a case. Half an hour (!) of someone recapping every plot beat of a story and following it up with a forced sarcastic remark and/or hyperbolic screaming fit does not qualify. It’s like listening to a bad high school book report. “This happens, then this happens, then this happens, it was so stupid and I can’t believe you made us read it” wouldn’t be acceptable from a 14 year old, but from someone over twice that age it’s apparently amazing enough to be your reason for living. Conclusion: TGWTG is aimed at people who found high school book reports too taxing.

Anyone who thinks I’m taking this too seriously: look at the above image and remember there’s more where that came from.