Joker: When Cinematic Universe Becomes Branding

After an endless string of nauseating Marvel movies, culminating in the oh-so-dull Avengers: Endgame, the comic book cinematic universe market has presented an opening for DC to shine. Initially, the franchise stumbled around, unable to find its footing, before deciding to copy the risk-free action-comedy formula of the MCU. This climaxed with the gigantic crap-show that was Justice League. However, thanks to 2018’s Aquaman and now Joker, DC appears to have figured out their cinematic universe formula: making great, director-driven stories and disguising them with superhero/villain branding in order to lure mass audiences.

This is the revelation that struck me about halfway through Joker, a slow-paced movie permeated with so many bursts of shocking violence and psychological terror that I initially couldn’t understand why it was receiving so much interest from general moviegoers. Unlike just about every major DC/Marvel movie of the last decade, Joker features no action set pieces, no traditional conflict between protagonist and antagonist, no ensemble cast, and, rather ironically, very little in the way of humor. In other words, it has none of the qualities that have drawn hordes of audiences to fill the coffers of Marvel. Instead, what we get is something more akin to 2004’s The Machinist; a small-scale character study of a severely disturbed man as he struggles to find his place in the world.

You’ve probably heard people praise Joaquin Phoenix’s performance as Joker’s greatest asset, but what I think makes it stand out the most is that it goes where few movies dare to go, by challenging how far we’re willing to sympathize with the main character. Arthur Fleck isn’t so much an inherently evil person as he is a byproduct of a society that’s lost its moral compass. When all hell breaks loose in Gotham, there are no identifiable good guys or bad guys; just people whose unwillingness to understand each other has set them on a collision course. Whether it’s the elitist one-percenters, the Antifa-style rioters, the uncaring social workers, or the apathetic dead-eyed citizens of Gotham, no one is innocent in the world of Joker. Not even Thomas Wayne, Bruce Wayne’s often revered father, is given an entirely sympathetic portrayal. This is a movie that portrays not just the decay of a man, but that of an entire city.

As a result of this uncommon morality play, Joker has been stirring up controversy in the media, with morons on the interwebs criticizing its violence, its portrayal of a psychopath, or claiming it will inspire mass-killers. It’s a movie that, thanks to its superhero (or in this case, supervillain) branding, draws the attention of even the most casual moviegoers. Yet, once you remove that branding, Joker is precisely the kind of movie that would only attract psychological drama fans and make, at best, $20 million at the box office these days. Most people would have no interest whatsoever in watching a lurching two-hour psychopath character study; yet those very people now find themselves watching one, and in many cases it’s well beyond the mass-marketed entertainment they’re used to. One might even think that director Todd Phillips used the comic book branding to trick superhero audiences into watching something that’s actually good.

In an age when major film studios are becoming risk-adverse and the call of the lucrative Chinese market ensures that blockbusters are thematically castrated and dramatically inert, it’s interesting to see a director use the superhero brand as a delivery device for a story that he, not so much the studio, wants to tell. Hopefully DC will stick to this formula as they make further inroads into the superhero film genre; so far it’s the only one that’s working for them. Perhaps we could next see a detective-style Batman movie in which the caped crusader spends the entire time solving a crime without so much as throwing a punch. Who knows? Miracles can happen.

Black Powder\\Red Earth: Yemen – There’s No Call of Duty In This Modern Warfare

If you have even a passing interest in military stories, both fiction and non-fiction, you’ll know that the most crucial element that these stories live and die by is accuracy. Are the characters correctly demonstrating military protocol in their tactics, dialogue and use of equipment? Does the story reflect the chaos and moral grayness of warfare? Is violence depicted in all its unkind glory? It’s an incredibly hard thing to get right, given the near-infinite levels of complexity within the military world; a world with its own set of rules so foreign to civilian life that those who leave it often find themselves at a total loss as to what to do.

Black Powder//Red Earth: Yemen, a graphic novel by writer John Chang and artist Josh Taylor, is arguably the most realistic, well-researched and visceral works of modern military fiction that delves into the unexplored realm of private military contractors. They’re often depicted as cannon fodder or convenient villains in many other military works, but in BPRE we get to see an honest and realistic portrayal that is as refreshing as it is labyrinthine.

BPRE follows Cold Harbor, a PMC (Private Military Company) that, officially, has established operations in Yemen to train the local military (or “indig”, as they put it) and protect foreign aid workers. In reality, they are there to hunt ISIS. Without the diplomatic shackles and threat of repercussions that would normally keep a conventional military in check, Cold Harbor are free to negotiate under-the-table deals, trade prisoners like currency, work with both US allies and enemies, and backstab them when convenient. One of the most iconic moments happens early in the story: a squad of Cold Harbor operators, led by a man known as Crane, wipe out an Al Qaeda cell on behalf of the Yemeni military. Upon returning to base, they are greeted by an officer, who salutes Crane. Instead of returning the salute, Crane hands the man his business card.

The narrative style is minimalist. There is virtually no captioning, little exposition to set up each scene, and many of the action sequences have little to no dialogue. This is a wonderful example of “Show, don’t tell”, though given the complex nature of the story, I did find myself having to re-read several sections in order to better grasp what was going on. As someone who yearns for more accuracy and authenticity in military works, BPRE at times felt to me like a classic case of “be careful what you wish for”. This is an exhaustively researched story that does not hold your hand at all and requires at least a basic understanding of military lingo, the history of the War on Terror, and the geopolitical situation in the Arab peninsula. For example, one of the key plot elements involves Cold Harbor working with the Houthis to invade an ISIS-controlled town. If you don’t know what the relation between the Houthis, Quds Force and Saudis are, you will have no idea what the hell is going on in the negotiations that follow. That’s the beauty of BPRE, though. It’s a very sophisticated story written for adults, and it expects you, the reader, to be an adult and do your homework if you want to fully appreciate it.

The most striking aspect about BPRE is how brutally honest it is in its portrayal of modern warfare. This is neither a pro-war nor anti-war story; it’s a neutral-war story. There are no heroics, no big morality speeches, and no answering to a higher calling other than the call of profit. Yet, despite their decidedly greed-driven motives, Cold Harbor are shown to be a necessary evil in a country so deeply corrupt that it simply can’t deal with the ISIS threat with its own soldiers. Although BPRE has no shortage of battle sequences against terrorist insurgents, it takes a refreshing approach by devoting much of its time to the backroom deals and tactical planning that allow these battles to take place. We are shown Cold Harbor agents negotiating with a myriad of shadowy figures within the Saudi, Iranian and Yemeni governments; many of these characters would normally belong in the darker side of the morality scale, but even they see ISIS as an existential threat that must be wiped out at all costs. These backroom deals don’t involve suitcases full of money; instead, entire battles are waged by Cold Harbor just so they can capture a specific high-value target and trade him to an interested party for information on their primary ISIS target. The battles often entail collateral damage; scenes of hapless civilians blown apart by bombardment from both sides of the battle are common, and most disturbingly, there’s a sense of resignation in the way these civilians are portrayed. One panel shows a man, his arm sheared off at the elbow from an explosion, calmly walking his son out of the raging battlefield.

Aside from their technological and tactical sophistication, the one thing Cold Harbor has that none of the local forces have is best embodied in Crane: a man who has devoted his existence to waging war, not for family or country, but because he’s good at it and there just so happens to be an enemy no one on planet Earth likes. At one point, he waterboards a captured Al-Qaeda agent for information on ISIS, but unlike what you’ve seen in shows like 24 and Zero Dark Thirty, Crane literally drowns the man, has him brought back from the dead with CPR, drowns him again, revives him a second time, and THEN asks for information. It’s this scene that tells you everything you need to know about the plausible future of BPRE, and the kind of men and methods it takes to wage war on an enemy driven by religious fervor to the point of inhumanity. It reminds me of Colonel Kurtz’s iconic speech in Apocalypse Now: “You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgement.”

The world of BPRE is relentlessly dark, and Jon Chang and Josh Taylor conveys this by simply giving us an honest, no-bullshit look at the world of the modern mercenary. There’s no emotional hysterics, no dramatic character arcs, and no plot twists; there is only the cold, calculating game of chess played by private contractors, religious fundamentalists, rogue generals, and shadowy politicians in their respective quests for personal gain. Black Powder//Red Earth: Yemen is a story about war itself, the likes of which you will rarely, if ever, see in more recognizable works, and is a stunning and important achievement for crowdfunded projects.

If you want to purchase the graphic novel, go to the official website if you’re in the United States. Otherwise, use Amazon (Volumes 1, 2 and 3).

Chernobyl – The True Horror of Tyranny

The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, for the longest time, stood out to me for two reasons: It took place on the year I was born, and it gave inspiration to one of my favorite videogames, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl. To me, and presumably many others, the disaster was a relatively minor footnote in history and at best a point of curiosity for some late night Wikipedia reading. HBO’s miniseries Chernobyl was like a violent wake-up call, jolting me out of my ignorance with some of the most shocking depictions of bravery and environmental horror. However, its most notable accomplishment is how it masterfully exposes the Soviet Union to its own kind of radiation: Truth.

Chernobyl is a rare feat in which a show manages to stick to the facts of its real-life story as much as possible while maintaining an insane level of dramatic tension that few works, fiction and non-fiction, can conjure. This is even more remarkable when you consider the imperceptible nature of the show’s major antagonist: the radiation. Although basic storytelling conventions suggest that you should show and not tell, some of Chernobyl’s most unsettling moments are when its lead character, Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), is describing the incalculable dangers of the radiation billowing out of the Chernobyl power plant to various ignorant bureaucrats. Indeed, the show goes through great lengths to ensure you, the audience, have a rudimentary understanding of how nuclear power plants and radiation work. By the time soldiers clad in protective gear venture into the irradiated zone, their geiger counters crackling like white noise from a TV, it’s hard not to feel nervous for them, because by this point the show has made clear that anything, anything within the radiation zone can trigger a slow, agonizing death. It’s like a horror movie, except the danger isn’t some creature lurking around; it’s in the air, the ground, the walls, the ceiling, and before long, inside one’s skin and bloodstream. Worse still, many of the men don’t fully understand what this radiation will do to them once the mission is over; they cheer and hug when they succeed, not realizing their lifespans have just been slashed in half, at best. The show doesn’t shy away from the effects of exposure either, and it’s hard not to feel genuine anger at those responsible for the disaster once you see the suffering that inevitably dooms these young men.

There’s a scene in the 2004 Battlestar Galactica TV series, in which the Galactica discovers a civilian ship heading their way, but are unable to establish communications with it. An argument ensues among the crew: is the ship full of civilian refugees, and their communication systems are merely not working? Or is everyone on board dead and the Cylons have set the ship on a suicide course for the Galactica? Unable to take the risk and lacking any good options, the crew of the Galactica opts to fire on and destroy the ship. It’s this kind of grim reality that drives the dramatic tension in Chernobyl; when they realize the gravity of the situation, the Soviets have no fancy tools and no “a-ha!” moment. They field their best scientists, the full weight of their military resources, lunar rovers, and even beg the Germans for sophisticated robots, but instead of arriving at a brilliant plan, they come to the slow realization that the only solution they have is to basically send waves of men to their deaths and annihilate everything that has been touched by radiation. One of the show’s standout moments involves thousands of soldiers having to scoop enormous piles of radioactive graphite off the power plant’s roof with shovels in 90-second shifts (any longer would certainly kill them from excessive radiation). The comical simplicity of this solution, faced against such an enormous threat, makes this scene one of the most compelling in recent memory.

The battle to stem the flow of radiation and the sacrifice of so many firefighters, miners, soldiers and scientists already makes Chernobyl a superb drama, but what makes it exceptional is how it slowly unravels the true cause of the disaster: the Soviet Union’s futile quest to project an image of strength to the world. The show has no shortage of despicable bureaucrats who care more about the Soviet agenda than the lives of those beneath them, and the heroes struggling to salvage the situation often find their efforts needlessly sabotaged from behind because some KGB asshole deemed it more important that the Soviet Union not look vulnerable in front of its allies and enemies. The irony is that, in order to achieve this cause, the Soviets have built an institution that is so good at spying on people, withholding vital information, blackmail, coercion, and ruining the lives of those who step out of line, but is jaw-droppingly incompetent at protecting its own citizens when the time to shine comes. It’s a deeply corrupt empire built on lies in order to perpetuate more lies, all in an effort to pretend that it’s something it’s not, using people as commodities that can be thrown away at the slightest inconvenience, even if those people are the very ones who saved the country from radioactive destruction. Chernobyl presents such a savage and decisive takedown of this regime that it’s surprising it’s even allowed to be shown in Russia.

The big tragedy of Chernobyl is that it’s the decent, honest people who suffer the most. The Soviet Union was one of the worst blights on human history, but within this failed socialist state were millions of good people who, when called upon, willingly risked their lives for the simple reason that there was no one else who could. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the character arc of Boris Shcherbina (Stellan Skarsgard), a deputy chairman who, at first, is your typical government stooge, but is gradually humbled by the sacrifice of those beneath him and becomes disillusioned when his superiors’ executive meddling condemns so many of those people to a fate worse than death. Chernobyl is one of best dramas to come out of HBO, but it’s also a masterful lesson on the horrors a corrupt, selfish government can wreak on so many ordinary people, many of whom will never realize how avoidable it all could have been.

There Is Something Terribly Wrong With Game Journalism

Ever since I started reading gaming magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro in the 1990s, and then eventually moved onto online outlets like GameSpy and Gamespot, I’ve always enjoyed reading reviews, commentary and coverage from a variety of game media outlets. Much like the relatively young gaming medium, game journalism always stood out to me as more youthful, fun, and vibrant than the hoity-toitiness of more established mediums like film. Guys like Greg Kasavin, Jeff Gerstmann and Alex Navarro were some of my favorites, and it really felt like both gamers and game journalists were part of the same community, experiencing this fascinating and burgeoning world of videogaming together as it forged its own brave new world.

Unfortunately, somewhere around 2014, I began to notice a growing disconnect between today’s generation of game journalists and the gamers that formed the bulk of their readership. It seemed like many game journalists were coalescing into some kind of elite private club that was increasingly out of touch with the game community at large, sneering at them from up high while allowing their political biases to contaminate their game coverage.

The first time I noticed this was with the worst game I have ever played in my life, Gone Home. I had read many reviews from the likes of Kotaku and PC Gamer about how amazing this indie title was, and the Metacritic Critics’ Score was also exceptionally high. Gone Home was quite expensive for an indie game, but I mean hell, it was supposed to be amazing, so why not? As it turns out, not only did I beat the game in slightly over 90 minutes, but it was a ferociously boring experience with a weak story that may have been interesting in the 1960s, but definitely not in 2013. I felt like I had been lied to by everyone; this was, by every conceivable objective standard, nowhere close to a 9/10 or 10/10 game. The most likely explanation for the disproportionately high critic scores for this at-best-mediocre game was its LGBT-centric storyline.

Indeed, in the years since then, many of today’s professional game journalists have become more flagrant in allowing their political views to infect their game coverage and reviews. Here are some notable examples that I can recall simply off the top of my head:

Grand Theft Auto V was marked down by Gamespot reviewer Carolyn Petit because of its misogynistic characters, completely missing the point that the GTA series has always been a visceral satire of the worst elements of modern society.
A writer for Kotaku, Patricia Hernandez, described the indie game Papers Please, in which you play an immigration officer in Soviet Russia, as a white male power fantasy of deporting Mexicans.
The #gamergate controversy, in which the gaming media used incidents of sexist harassment and death threats towards game journos to paint the gaming community as a whole as being bigoted thugs.
Nathan Grayson of Rock Paper Shotgun and Kotaku criticized Kingdom Come: Deliverance, a historical RPG set in medieval Europe, for its uniformly white cast.
Far Cry 5 was also criticized by many in the gaming media, such as PC Gamer, for not using its rural America setting to make a political statement on their favorite topic of white supremacy in the age of Trump.
VentureBeat journalist Dean Takahashi, often regarded as a joke in the gaming community for his inability to get past the Cuphead tutorial, openly advocated for the censorship of the upcoming Call of Duty: Modern Warfare because he felt the game’s real-world violence had no place in a game.
CNet journalist Ian Sherr wrote a hit piece on several independent gaming YouTubers such as The Quartering and Upper Echelon Gamers that was designed to pull advertising revenue from those channels.
Rock Paper Shotgun and PC Gamer journalists Jay Castello and Andy Chalk openly criticized a statement from Ubisoft regarding their refusal to politicize their games, opining that such impartiality could lead to sympathy for slavery, Nazism and homophobia.

Note: The last three examples alone happened in the span of the past week.

One could argue that, as games become more sophisticated and touch on real-world topics, it behooves game journalists to offer more “mature” commentary in turn. The problem is that many of today’s so-called game “journalists” are losing sight of the difference between being a professional journalist and being a political activist. As shown in some of the above examples, you have cases in which journalists are openly advocating for certain political causes, most particularly LGBT and Net Neutrality, and even going after independent creators by targeting their sources of funding. The sneering, condescending attitude a number of these journos have towards gamers, many of whom are young men, does not make the case for continued patronage, either. When gamers complain that Battlefield V has included ahistorical female soldiers in frontline combat, it’s not a good look when gaming outlets dismiss these gamers, many of whom form their readership, as sexist bigots filled with toxic masculinity, rather than gamers who just can’t buy into the notion of black female Nazi soldiers.

It’s also worth pointing out the monolithic nature of these political views in the gaming media; they cut in one direction only, and I cannot recall having ever read an editorial from any of these outlets that argued from a more conservative or even centrist point of view. There is virtually nothing that distinguishes the political and social commentary of Kotaku, Polygon, PC Gamer, and virtually every other major game media outlet, which is kind of ironic considering that they all champion diversity in gaming.

This is all a far cry (no pun intended) from the days when gaming coverage and commentary were much more in-line with the expectations of the people who consumed such media. It’s not necessarily that the political viewpoints today’s gaming journos are expressing are right or wrong; it’s that they are so vastly removed from their target audience, and expose these journos as biased and unreliable at doing their one job: covering and reviewing games fairly.

This is not to say there is no room for political and/or LGBT commentary in gaming media; of course there is. That kind of commentary should be relegated to games that inherently want to deal with those topics (of which there are very few), and not more mass-marketed games like Far Cry 5, which use real-world topics to set the stage for story and gameplay, not to define them. Most game developers are not looking for this kind of trouble; they just want to create games that are fun and generate profit. It’s the responsibility of game media platforms to cover these games fairly and expose poor gameplay and narrative design as well as shady business practices in order to keep gamers informed and push the industry to higher standards. It is not the responsibility of these journalists to use games to promote their political activism, call for censorship, disparage their own readers, and threaten the livelihoods of independent competitors.

Of course, if these media platforms knew this, they wouldn’t be losing their audience to independent creators like Pewdiepie, Markiplier, The Quartering, and Upper Echelon Gamers. Some of them, like Markiplier, have a sense of youthful wonder and excitement that reminds me of the game journos from when I was growing up. Others, like Upper Echelon, have highly nuanced, relatively apolitical commentary on the industry that is in increasing short supply in mainstream outlets. Part of this, I think, is because these creators are a lot closer to their audience than, say, an editor at Polygon is, and are better able to get a feel for their audience through livechats and comments.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still great content from major media outlets such as Game Informer’s Replay series, which is an absolute hoot, and Giant Bomb, which has alumni from Gamespot’s best days. It’s just that after all that I have seen and read, I think more old-school gamers like myself need to stop sitting around, being spoonfed politically inept garbage from the likes of Ian Sherr. We have to be more proactive in seeking out indie creators who love games like we do, and show them our support both through continued viewership/readership and donations.

Upper Echelon Gamers

The Quartering

Downward Thrust

Hotel Mumbai is Not For Pussies

Directed by first-time Australian filmmaker Anthony Maras, Hotel Mumbai is a real-life story that is unique in its brutality and unflinching in its courage to depict the 2008 terrorist attack on the Taj Hotel in Mumbai without any sanitizing or political correctness. Though it can be an exhausting experience, it also contains some of the most uplifting portrayals of the heroism and sacrifices that rise out of ordinary people, and the impossible choices they have to make.

Hotel Mumbai is built upon exhaustive research by the filmmakers, who stayed at the real-life hotel the movie takes place in, interviewed numerous hotel staff and guests who were there and studied phone calls between the terrorists and their mastermind. It isn’t hard to see this reflected in the movie. It portrays, with great economy, a full spectrum of emotions and factors to the attacks from the hotel staff, guests, and even the terrorists. Fear, anger, love, bravery, smart decisions, stupid decisions, and even racism come into play as everyone tries to cope with the insane situation that has been thrust on them, and the relentlessness with which so many of these elements ebb and flow can be a lot for the average viewer to stomach.

The terrorists, surprisingly, are also given a fair shake. Though the movie doesn’t shy from their outright evil actions, it accurately depicts them as young, uneducated and gullible men who have been brainwashed into terrorism by a mysterious Pakistani known as The Bull. Through earpieces, The Bull walks them through the entire attack, instructing them on how to properly execute hostages, when to throw grenades, and so on. In the brief moments when they aren’t in contact with him, the terrorists are easily fascinated by the modern wonders within the hotel, such as flush toilets and pizza. Though some might find it improper to humanize such people, Hotel Mumbai is a film dedicated to telling you all sides of the story, whether you like it or not.

To that end, the most surprising aspect of this movie is its utter refusal to downplay the radical Islam angle of the terrorist attack. The terrorists and The Bull repeatedly invoke the God of Islam and rationalize their actions as being in the name of Islam. In the hands of any other filmmaker or studio, this aspect would have surely been sidestepped entirely in the name of political correctness, so it was quite surreal to witness such a depiction in 2019. Many parts of this movie, in fact, are exceptionally shocking and upsetting because of this dedication to realism. In one scene, a hotel receptionist is forced at gunpoint to call up guests and persuade them to open their hotel room doors for the police, only to be gunned down by terrorists waiting outside. In another scene, a character prays out loud to Allah in order to persuade a terrorist to spare his/her life. The numerous executions of hotel guests and staff alike are merciless; no one who dies in this movie dies gracefully. I’ve seen a lot of violent movies to the point of being desensitized, but Hotel Mumbai’s combination of visceral sound design, unobtrusive camera work (Note: any scene taking place in the hotel’s main lobby) and incredible performances messed with the part of my brain that differentiates fantasy violence from real-life violence.

With that said, what holds Hotel Mumbai back from becoming a pure exercise in suffering like The Passion of the Christ and Silence are the acts of bravery from the hotel staff and police. At the beginning of the movie, head chef Hemant Oberoi (Anupam Kher) reminds his staff that “the guest is God”, and even in the chaos of the attacks, the staff continue operating by this mantra by using their knowledge of the hotel layout to hide surviving guests. The police, meanwhile, are shown to be comically under-equipped and untrained to battle terrorists wielding fully-automatic rifles, but a small cadre of them decide to venture into the hotel anyway. Though they bumble their way through much of their efforts, the humanity that underlines their characters is so well thought out that you can’t help but root for them in the few little victories they manage to achieve.

Hotel Mumbai is not for pussies. You might be upset by its relentless ultra-realistic violence. You might be offended by its unflinching portrayal of radical Islamic terrorism. You might be offended by its attempts to humanize the terrorists. Yet, once you become invested in its characters, the movie is impossible to look away from. It’s both a dedication to the harsh reality of the attack, and a celebration of those who risked or gave up their lives in service to others; equal parts violence and humanity. When the climactic finale rolls in, it’s hard to resist the urge to cheer. Ditch the superheroes and pokémons and watch Hotel Mumbai, a testament to real heroes and incredible drama.

Avengers: Endgame Is Simply Not Great

Note: This critique contains spoilers for Avengers: Endgame.

By now you’ve likely watched Avengers: Endgame, a movie that apparently every man, woman and child on planet Earth is legally required to watch. In all likeliness, you probably think it’s a very good movie. Admittedly, it does provide a worthy sendoff for many of the characters we have followed over the course of a decade, especially Tony Stark. Unfortunately, by every objective measure, Endgame simply isn’t a good movie as a whole and squanders much of its gargantuan three-hour runtime just so it can hurry up to the last 30 minutes.

The main problem revolves entirely around the hackneyed time travel story. Time travel is a very risky plot device to use because you open yourself up to an endless array of plot holes (and indeed this film does have a few, particularly one involving Captain America) and have to spend valuable minutes covering all your bases with long explanations on how your movie’s brand of time travel works. Endgame tries to brush past these intricacies by namedropping famous time travel movies like Back to the Future, with the Hulk explaining that the time travel they are using to undo Thanos’s actions doesn’t involve the “butterfly effect”, in which rearranging events in the past affects the future; it just spawns an alternate timeline that continues on its merry way while yours remains untouched. This, I thought, was such a lazy cop-out and a convenient way for the writers to get out of the corner they had written themselves into.

With half the world population dissolved by Thanos, the Avengers go find him in hopes of recovering the time stones and undoing the damage. It turns out that Thanos has already destroyed the stones, and Thor decapitates him on the spot before they have a chance to properly interrogate him. I get that this was a sort of Rian Johnson-esque attempt to subvert expectations, but to follow that up with a cliched, weak-ass time travel plot is just lazy storytelling and condemns the rest of the movie into mediocrity.

The next two hours of the movie are some of the most tedious and meh-inducing I’ve ever seen in a blockbuster of this magnitude. By the time the Avengers recover the second stone, I realized that this movie was basically now a TV show. It had no cinematic scope or sense of wonder or discovery; you’re just experiencing remixed scenes from previous MCU movies as the plot twists itself into a pretzel in order to resolve a seemingly unsolvable conundrum. In this middle act, Endgame is essentially a very long exercise in fan service and retreading its own lore. This might be fine as a Netflix series, but it does not deserve to go on the big screen.

The other major factor that exacerbates Endgame’s meh-ness is that, having killed off Thanos early on for the sake of shock value, it has no compelling antagonist for the Avengers to go up against. The movie becomes a long time-travel story with no real threat or stakes involved; the Avengers are merely trying to undo something they’ve already come to live with for five years, while at the same time seeing things in the past that make them reflect on themselves. Once you realize that it is basically a very, very long wave goodbye, Endgame feels less like an endgame and more like an epilogue.

Nearly halfway into the story, with the Avengers breezing through their time travel heist unchallenged, I was genuinely curious as to what sort of threat Endgame would conjure in the absence of Thanos. It turns out the answer was…more Thanos. And it’s not even the same Thanos responsible for the snap; oh no, this is a pre-snap Thanos from the past who hasn’t even gotten around to setting his Infinity War scheme into motion. Compared to his older self, pre-snap Thanos is a buffoonish caricature. Instead of wanting to save the world from itself by alleviating overpopulation, he’s now a cartoon villain who wants to destroy ALLLL life as we know it, and as if that wasn’t cliched enough, he adds that he will enjoy doing so. How do you go from the Infinity War Thanos, a surprisingly complex villain with complex motivations and ambiguous morality, to this? When the climactic final battle rolls in, it feels like a cheap, obligatory, tacked-on excuse to have the entire MCU cast do battle against a generic bad guy, with none of the weightiness of post-snap Thanos. There’s even an eyeroll-inducing feminist empowerment moment in which all the female superheroes conveniently converge on one spot of the gigantic battlefield to do this tag-team girl power ass-kicking. If that doesn’t tell you this final battle is little more than fan service than a meaningful part of the story, I don’t know what will.

Endgame could have been a lot better if they did away with the idiotic time travel story and instead went for a more conventional but effective route, with the Avengers hunting down post-snap Thanos throughout the movie. He is far and away the most well-written and formidable villain in the MCU, and it’s such a waste the writers elected to kill him off like he was nothing. The Last Jedi did a terrible job at this; what made the Endgame writers think it would work for them?

The best thing I can say about Endgame is that, once again, Robert Downey Jr. outshines everyone as Tony Stark; by far the most entrancing, witty and charismatic superhero of all time. Because he’s so relentlessly funny, the moments when Stark actually gets serious, especially when it concerns his family, are some of the finest moments in Endgame. The bit where he hugs his dad, I will admit, stirred something in me. The fact that Stark sacrifices his life at the end to save his friends is irrefutable proof that The Avengers series is and always has been about Iron Man; an arrogant millionaire playboy who gradually comes to learn the meaning of family and friendship, and offers up his own life to save them. It’s an incredible character arc on a scale never seen before, spanning eight movies, and I give RDJr major credit for that; I just wish I could say similar things about the rest of the movie. Endgame isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, but once you get past the hype and fan enthusiasm, it isn’t hard to see that it simply isn’t the world-shaking cinematic monument that everyone’s making it out to be.

The 21 Greatest Movies of All Time…In My Opinion (#1)

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At last, we have arrived at the #1 greatest movie of all time (in my opinion). Before we go on, I should explain something. Alien is my favorite movie of all time, but when it comes down to the literally greatest movie of all time, every single aspect of it, be it narrative, cinematography, set design, sound design, or soundtrack, must have a degree of grandiosity and scale that befits such an accolade. It can’t just be a claustrophobic story of an alien slaughtering a small group of people on a ship; there needs to be a degree of epic-ness to the movie in question for it to be called the greatest of all time. Every facet of its design can’t just be well executed; they must also explore the capabilities of the film medium to their maximum potential. So with that in mind, here is, at last, what I consider to be The Greatest Movie of All Time:

1 – 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Literally half a century after it was made, not one of the tens of thousands of movies put out since 1968 has come close to matching the transcendental storytelling of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is a spectacular work of art unlike anything, be it a book, movie, painting, or song, that has ever been crafted by human hands, with a story as expansive and grand as one’s imagination can muster.

I first watched 2001 with my high school friends, one of whom had the DVD. Initially, I was confounded by it and couldn’t make it through the 142-minute runtime without catching some serious Zs. The agonizingly slow pace, the near-absence of dialogue, and the minimalist storytelling style were such a shock to my system that I think my mind’s instinct was to outright reject the movie. Despite that, a small part of me felt that, in spite of my confusion, I was watching something profound and unlike anything ever put to film. A year or so later, I had my own copy of the DVD and after two or three attempts, managed to watch 2001 in its entirety in one sitting for the first time. They say that humans can only use 10% of their brains’ capabilities. After watching 2001, I felt as if my brain unlocked an extra 20%.

From a technical perspective, 2001 was incredibly well researched and prophesied a number of technologies that today are synonymous with human development. Keeping in mind that this movie was made before the 1969 Moon Landings, 2001 accurately depicted the surface of the moon and the physics of space travel. It also predicted the advent of video calling, electronic tablets, in-flight entertainment, suspended animation, and space robotics.

One of the most memorable aspects of 2001 is its soundtrack, which uses classical pieces like The Beautiful Blue Danube and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. You’d think that these pieces were composed specifically for the movie, because they sync up with the majestic space sequences in ways that defy description. Another exceptional piece of music is the monolith song, aka György Ligeti’s Requiem, which plays whenever the characters encounter the mysterious alien monoliths. The song literally consists of a female and male choir singing a rising crescendo that can be described as terrified shrieking and humming. It’s one of the scariest things I’ve ever heard and does wonders to convey the vast, unknowable nature of the alien beings behind the monoliths.

2001‘s slow and minimalist style can be an acquired taste for most. Long, uninterrupted takes of spacecraft docking and astronauts floating through space dominate the movie, and there are virtually no dramatic outbursts from any of its actors (unless you count the apes from the opening chapter). It can seem off-putting until you realize that 2001’s visual style centers around the concept of beauty; of marveling at something so magnificent to the eyes that you savor every second it is on-screen. This is a movie with a richly detailed plot beneath its surface, but it would rather you take it in as a sensory experience as much as a mental one.

Then we have the special effects, which are jaw-dropping, especially when you realize this was 1968. Everything, everything was accomplished through practical means. The spellbinding sequences of astronauts David Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) defying gravity as they move about the Discovery were accomplished by strategically rotating the set around the actors while they simply walked on the spot. The cameras filmed from a fixed position, giving audiences the illusion that the actors were walking up the walls and on the ceiling. Another example: The sequence in which Bowman flies through an airlock in zero-gravity was accomplished by suspending the actor by wire and having a stagehand jump off a platform with the wire in hand, causing the actor to “fly” through the airlock. One more example: the famous hyperspace sequence was, hard to believe, not done with any computers. It instead utilized slit-scan photography of high-contrast images, and filming various swirling chemicals in slow motion.

The special effects people of 2001 were not CGI artists working entirely behind computers; they were more akin to magicians, using clever trickery and deceptively simple solutions that had more to do with engineering and physics than computers. Because of this, 2001 can never, ever be beaten by any CGI-driven film, not even Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, because everything in it is REAL.

The story of 2001 is about as grand as can be, and surprisingly optimistic. Rather than focus on deep characterization or intense dialogue, the story zooms out to tell a tale of human evolution and the technologies man must struggle with to get to the next stage. Nowhere is this more apparent than the transition between the opening Dawn of Man chapter and the Clavius chapter. In a single jump cut, the film transports us millions of years forward to show how humans evolved from smashing skulls with animal femurs to threatening each other with orbital nuclear weapons platforms. It turns out that man’s evolution is triggered by the presence of alien monoliths, left by a sentient race so advanced that it transcends 3D space in a manner beyond human understanding. For such a story to exist in 1968 is mind blowing, and it still is a far more original concept today than the vast majority of science fiction movies.

2001: A Space Odyssey is by far the most epic of film narratives. It features an AI gone wrong, hyperspace travel, great mysteries of benevolent aliens in 4D space, and the creation of amazing technologies. Above all, it is a movie that tells a story that seems impossible to tell: the journey of all humanity from the deserts of prehistory to an existence beyond space and time. It is also a technical masterclass on special effects, sound design, and cinematography. To this day, no other filmmaker or film studio has had the creativity or the balls to craft something so ambitious, so highly original and so disruptive to the most inherent concepts of film, storytelling and art in general. That so many people today have neither the patience or ability to comprehend this movie is a sad testament to how major film studios have eroded away general audiences’ creative tastes with an avalanche of shitty superhero movies, reboots, remakes, sequels, and, perhaps worst of all, soft reboots. If you haven’t seen 2001 before, I challenge you to seek it out however way you can, sit your ass down for a good 142 minutes, and watch it with a very open mind. I promise you won’t regret it.

That just about rounds out my 21 favorite movies of all time; hopefully now you have a few movies to add to your “To Watch” list. Next up, the 5 Shittiest Movies I’ve Ever Seen!

The 21 Greatest Movies of All Time…In My Opinion (6-2)

We’re now at the final stretch of the 21 Greatest Movies of All Time (in my opinion). These next few films are especially near and dear to my heart and have been hugely influential in helping me realize what kind of art I gravitate towards. They are virtually flawless and embody all the reasons I go to the movies. So here we go now…

6 – Heat (1995)

Street Shootout Heat - YouTube

Michael Mann’s Magnum Opus is without any doubt the greatest crime story ever told. It stars both Robert De Niro and Al Pacino. It has the most realistic, well choreographed shootout in film history. Its epic three-hour runtime includes big heists, police surveillance, corporate betrayal, familial trauma, and massive gunfights.

Unlike other crime epics like The Godfather, Heat is still very much a sleek, modern movie that feels like it could still take place today. The film has a steely-bluish tint throughout. Electric guitars and synthesizers permeate the score. Characters on both sides of the law speak quickly and professionally, with distinct personalities that suggest enormous depth, even if the movie doesn’t have time to focus extensively on them; they just exude coolness with every movement and every word. This is what is at the heart of Heat: The immense professionalism of both cops and robbers in the modern urban battlefield, whose zealous dedication to the job wreaks havoc on themselves and their loved ones.

The centerpiece of Heat is its jaw-dropping climactic shootout in the streets of downtown Los Angeles. It was filmed with an eye towards accurate tactics, with the bank robbers using suppressing fire to cover each others’ movements while the police attempt to flank them. The sound of the gunfire was also recorded “as-is” with no effects foleyed in, and the cacophony bouncing off the surrounding buildings makes Heat‘s shootout sound terrifyingly loud. Technical perfection aside, the shootout is as great as it is because by the time it happens, we are completely invested in just about every character who is involved. Whether it is McCauley, Hannah, Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), or Cherrito (Tom Sizemore), every death and injury hits hard because we have come to fully understand these characters inside and out. It isn’t just an obligatory gunfight between cops and robbers; its the confrontation between two unstoppable forces that we have all been waiting for.

The mark of a truly astounding movie is that it’s so detailed and nuanced that you notice new things every time you watch it. Heat may be almost three hours long, but every second of it is peppered with bits of dialogue, small gestures and shifts in posture that you might not notice at first, but reveal so much about its characters and storyline. I’ve seen Heat a number of times, and every single time I watch it again it feels fresh because of that. I couldn’t ask for much more out of a movie.

5 – Black Hawk Down (2001)

Black Hawk Down Wallpapers

I was too young to watch Black Hawk Down in theaters when it came out, which is why my friends and I hatched a plan involving fake IDs to get into the theater. It worked, and I don’t for one moment regret the decision. This is my favorite war movie of all time and one of maybe three movies that have nearly moved me to tears.

What Black Hawk Down does incredibly well is to accurately portray the Battle of Mogadishu from two distinct perspectives: The violent mayhem experienced by the Army Rangers and Delta Force operators on the ground, and the strategic and bureaucratic clusterfuck paralyzing the military commanders up high. This is a masterfully paced and edited depiction of real-life chaos, and repeat viewings reveal subtle hints that the operation was doomed to fail from the very beginning.

From a sensory perspective, Black Hawk Down’s visual and sound design are unmatched by any war movie, aside from maybe Saving Private Ryan. Of particular note is the approach sequence in which the American forces fly into Mogadishu in their Blackhawks and Little Birds. It’s a sequence so astonishing that you can’t even blink. As the choppers approach the mission area, the sounds of the world fade away as Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack flows in, electronic percussion imitating the sounds of the helicopters’ rotor blades and a sense of dread marches in to the sound of thunderous toms. The camera switches focal lengths and uses contrasts of color to great effect; one moment, the choppers look like shadow dancers in perfect unison with one another, and in the next shot, they resemble an enormous flock of birds spread out across the skies.

The all-star cast includes Josh Hartnett, Tom Sizemore, Orlando Bloom, Tom Hardy, Ewan McGregor, Jeremy Piven, Eric Bana, Jason Isaacs and William Fichtner. Yet, you don’t even realize half of them are in the movie because they look indistinguishable with their combat gear on. More so than any other war movie, Black Hawk Down has no real main characters and instead portrays collective heroism from the men on the ground, all of whom were willing to die for one another. Case in point: the scene with Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart defending a downed Blackhawk against waves of Somali gunmen. It’s extremely difficult to watch, but it’s an extraordinary portrayal of two men who willingly went to their deaths in order to give their brother a small chance at survival.

Someone once said women cry to Titanic, and men cry to Black Hawk Down. How true.

4 – Zodiac (2007)

"Zodiac" (2007). David Fincher

During my college years, my friends and I walked into a screening of Zodiac fully expecting it to be a slasher movie. What we got instead was a 2-and-a-half hour detective story that is extremely light on the slashing. My friends walked out of the theater, thoroughly bored. I stayed, and Zodiac became one of my favorite movies of all time.

Zodiac isn’t so much about the real-life killer who terrorized North California as it is about the decades-long investigation to find him. What exemplifies this movie is that it successfully tells the true story of the Zodiac manhunt without much sacrificing of accuracy, while at the same time maintaining a compelling narrative. A lot of this has to do with the performances of Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo, as well as David Fincher’s flawless direction.

Initially, the film portrays the Zodiac’s killing spree and the turning of gears that gave life to the investigation. Once it gets into the swing of things, Zodiac takes on a hypnotic quality, slowly but surely drawing you into the investigation along with its characters. You find yourself trying to work out the identity of the killer, and when a supposed slam-dunk in the case turns out to be a dud, it’s impossible not to feel the same frustration as the detectives.

Casual moviegoers will be exhausted by Zodiac while cinephiles will be entranced by it; something that, in a metaphysical way, imitates the point of the movie. The real-life Zodiac investigation was a frustrating bottomless rabbit hole of potential suspects, loose threads, and deflated expectations. Those who were peripherally interested in the case gradually lost interest, while those who most actively investigated it only became more obsessed. The Zodiac killer wasn’t memorable just because he killed some people and got away with it; it’s because he stirred up the imaginations of investigators, journalists, armchair detectives and scholars, and profoundly affected their lives without him having to so much as lift a finger.

Zodiac is 1000% a detective story in the purest sense, and doesn’t require shootouts, chases or gratuitous violence to stay interesting. It’s a story about the thrill of the investigation, the addictive sensation one gets when one puts the pieces together, and, unfortunately, the disappointment that slams into one’s face when real-life doesn’t fit the narrative. It is by far the most unflinchingly realistic story of its kind, and for that it fully deserves its #4 spot on my list.

3 – The Insider (1999)

The Insider (Blu-ray) : DVD Talk Review of the Blu-ray

At the #3 spot is a movie that, unlike pretty much every other movie on this list, has no violence, no deaths and no injuries; not even so much as a shoving match to drive up the action. Michael Mann’s The Insider is a ferociously compelling drama based on the true story of the Brown and Williamson/CBS scandal with some of the most incisive dialogue and arresting performances put to film.

The Insider, at its heart, is a classic David versus Goliath story, with Russell Crowe playing Jeffrey Wigand, ex-Vice President of the Brown and Williamson tobacco company, who goes up against his former employer to expose a public health hazard to CBS News. Instead of swords and slings, the battle is fought with lawsuits, court depositions, non-disclosure agreements, and something called tortious interference. Like many of my other favorite films, The Insider sits upon a bedrock of exhaustive research on the part of the filmmakers to ensure their story and dialogue are accurate and authentic.

In keeping with Mann’s flair for accuracy, The Insider does not do a whole lot to artificially heighten its drama. There’s no scene of Wigand punching out a B&W executive or someone throwing a brick through his living room window. At its most action-packed, Wigand uses a golf club to mildly threaten a man he thinks is trying to intimidate him. I mean shit, the movie even states outright in its end credits that one of its scenes (in which Wigand finds a bullet in his mailbox) was added for dramatic effect. Instead, what we get is the real-life drama of a man under 360-degree assault from some of the very people he’s trying to help by exposing B&W’s dangerous practices. Even worse, the movie shows how CBS News, who are supposedly in the business of informing the public, intentionally sabotage their own 60 Minutes program when they realize publishing Wigand’s information could potentially open them up to a legal disaster.

The performances are some of the best I’ve ever seen. There are way too many excellent scenes to list here, but the most memorable one by far is of attorney Ron Motley (Bruce McGill) tearing a B&W executive a new asshole, screaming “WIPE THAT SMIRK OFF YOUR FACE!” in such a terrifying manner that you will surely be silenced by it alongside the poor bastard getting yelled at. Christopher Plummer also brings enormous gravitas to the movie with his portrayal of Mike Wallace, a veteran journalist whose idealized vision of CBS is brought crashing down when he sees the insane degrees to which they try to cover up the truth.

The Insider is an extremely rare and well-told story of corporate and media malpractice, the kind of which still happens today, that we should all be aware of. It isn’t about a war in a distant country or space aliens or serial killers in a small town. This is happening in the society we live in and affects our lives quite directly. It isn’t just a film; it’s a warning.

2 – Alien (1979)

Alien (1979) - Cinespia | Hollywood Forever Cemetery ...

1979 is the year science fiction and horror were changed forever by a single movie. Alien isn’t just a profound landmark film with a great story and great actors; it’s the first monster movie that reaches into our subconsciousness and defiles the very thing that defines all life.

One of the great things Alien does is bring a working-class vibe to science fiction. There are no sleek space ships or fancy space suits; the Nostromo and its crew are basically a giant space 18-wheeler being driven by grizzled blue-collar joes who like to fuss over bonuses, read dirty magazines, and get into arguments a lot. It does wonders to make the characters likable, and just like The Thing, it isn’t hard at all as a viewer to experience the roller coaster of wonder and horror alongside them.

The xenomorph that hunts and kills the crew will forever be the greatest monster movie ever created and it isn’t because it bleeds acid, or that its the perfect organism. It’s because every facet of its design is designed to disturb us subconsciously. Think about it. Its life cycle begins when a facehugger is birthed by a vagina-looking egg. The facehugger thrusts an appendage down one’s throat. After its violent chest-bursting birth, it’s head resembles a penis and it kills by thrusting another appendage from within its mouth into one’s skull. The xenomorph is a horrifying perversion of the very things that gave us life, and it exists solely to give us the worst of deaths. It’s hard to think that there could be a creature more terrifying than that.

I’ve seen Alien a number of times since I was young, of course, and as an adult, one of the things I picked up on is the complexity of its secondary villain, Ash the android. After being exposed by Ripley as working against the crew to protect the xenomorph, Ash tries to murder her by, of all things, rolling up a magazine and ramming it down her throat. At first, I and I assume many others thought this was strangely comical but figured it was because Ash was in the process of a major malfunction. The more likely explanation is that Ash, an android, is trying to both act out a deep-seated rape impulse on Ripley, and imitate the creature he so desperately admires by doing to her what it did to Kane. There is such a shocking level of depth to this movie that even the secondary antagonist is miles beyond most other movies’ main antagonists.

Alien also features some of the most distinctive set design ever. The clear highlight is the 70’s style, boxy clunky-junky design of the Nostromo. The ship has two distinct looks: the pristine white and plastic-y living and medical quarters, and the gray, metallic and angular look of the bridge and engineering deck. Even the sounds of the ship are ear-catching, whether it’s keyboards click-clacking, doors hissing open and shut, or even just the air venting. The scene where Ripley activates the Nostromo’s self-destruct sequence, for example, is just pure ASMR.

For a film of such tightly constrained scope, Alien broke so much ground not just by revolutionizing genres, but filmmaking and storytelling concepts as well. It introduced the greatest female protagonist of all time, Ellen Ripley. It brought a relatable cast of characters to the table. It created a movie monster that set the standard for all other movie monsters. It fused science fiction and horror together for the first time. The list goes on and on, but for me, Alien is the starting point of my obsession with its amazing universe that drove my imagination throughout much of my youth.