x-men

May 26, 2016

White Screen

First – welcome Josh!

Second – I was recently a guest on the Oi! Spaceman team’s new(ish) Red Dwarf podcast ‘Searching for Fuchal’, chatting about the Series 1 episode ‘Balance of Power’, here.

It’s the 22nd of May 2016. Jack has no idea what’s in the charts.

Jack’s at the movies… because, for all the snark, Jack loves big SF movies, even when they’re also superhero movies starring good-but-ridiculously-overrated British actors who unfairly monopolise jobs in the industry. Jack has also always had a soft spot for the X-Men movies. For all their flaws, Jack likes the way they try to engage with material politics and history. They do so far more successfully than the Watchmen movie did, though Jack wouldn’t want to comment on the source material as he’s never read it. (Jack plans to. Jack read From Hell at Phil’s insistence, and loved it.)

Jack’s waiting for the movie to start. Jack is only mildly irritated by the routine discomfort of the seating, and the less-routine smell of someone’s dirty feet from somewhere else in the theatre. (Jack’s irritation at the latter will grow throughout the movie.) Jack is drinking water he brought from home, because Jack’s nearly 40 and – much to his own surprise – has reached the tragic stage of incipient fogeydom where he resents cinema tuck prices so much that he’ll bring his own packed lunch to the movies, secreted in his pockets. Really, the next stage for Jack is probably camping holidays, Old Spice, and argyle socks worn under sandals. Can’t be far off.

Jack’s watching trailers.

There’s a trailer for Independence Day: Resurgence. Jack is reasonably impressed by the film’s unusually accurate use of a relatively obscure word. ‘Resurgence’ does indeed mean ‘to continue after a break’, which is apt for this film. Normally, films will misuse words because they sound cool, or just make words up. Jack also rather likes the bit where the aliens smash London to pieces. Down comes that stupid ferris wheel! Yeah!

No appearance by the new Ghostbusters trailer. Jack, whose personality paradoxically combines reticence and shyness with a tendency to enjoy public fights over things about which is he passionately angry, was almost hoping for it to come on and be met by petulant outbursts of “they’ve raping my childhood!” so he could tell the outburster/s to either grow up or shut up, and to get some perspective, etc. Jack was thrown out of a cinema once (because he started a political argument) when he was a student and enjoyed the experience so much he subconsciously hopes to get an opportunity to make it happen again. (Jack, needless to say, should perhaps be careful of the glass walls of his own house when lecturing other people on maturity…) Jack is enjoying the spectacle of manchild crybaby diaper-fillers the world over having waaah-waaahing sessions over the new gynocentric Ghostbusters. But then Jack is a Cultural Marxist SJW, deeply involved in the global Cultural Marxist SJW cabal, and their White Genocide conspiracy to destroy heterosexuality, masculinity, and civilisation itself, and so is always pleased to see his victims wail in vain against their inevitable fate. …

June 19, 2012

When Titans Clash

Jack Graham alien, bio-mechanoids, CGI, h.r. giger, prometheus, reviews, ridley scott, whinge, x-men 1

Spoiler Warning

Prometheus tries to evoke the aesthetics of Alien in a way that is borderline obsessive. Even down to making sure there are cream-coloured leathery/cushiony pads on the spaceship corridor walls. Still greater attention is paid to replicating H.R. Giger’s design concepts for the derelict alien ship, cockpit and pilot from the original film. The really weird thing is that, even as Prometheus deliberately and slavishly tries to evoke and/or copy the aesthetics of Alien, it completely overlays them with an entirely different, clashing aesthetic sense.

Look, why is this image so powerful?

There are, I think, a number of reasons.

Most importantly, it’s because it is just explicable enough to make sense while also being inexplicable enough to unnerve. We are plainly looking at a navigator or pilot in a cockpit. We understand this. We are also looking at something inhuman and estranged, something that evades any attempt on our part to relate to it directly. The ‘Space Jockey’ (as it is sometimes called) is a pilot, evidently, but it is also a giant, a fossil, a mammoth, a skeleton, a statue, a cyborg, a petrified outgrowth of flesh embedded within a colossal machine. We cannot separate the entity from the artifact. The ribs of the creature flow outward into the cables of the chair. The trunk of the face flows down into the workings of the mechanism. We cannot disentangle organism from system, animal from engine. They are fundamentally akin, interchangeable, interpenetrating, symbiotic. This was always the intention: to suggest something that was inextricably both biological and technological. The cockpit and the pilot are not discrete things but are conjoined to the point of identity. They were one flesh, until the flesh peeled away. It’s entropic in both an organic and mechanical way simultaneously. It’s the ossified cadaver of a wrecked bio-machine.

It’s also beautiful, but not in a straightforward way. It’s not pretty. It’s hideously, ominously, unnaturally, grotesquely beautiful. It’s beautiful in the same way as a scorpion, or the bleached skull of an ox lying in a parched gulch, or a pile of rusted flywheels that was once a graceful machine. It has the troubling, terrible beauty of wreckage, of the predator, of the insectile, the dead, the decayed, the destroyed, the deadly.

And it’s fucking scary. It’s a great big skull-faced monster in a huge black room made out of what looks like loads of bones.

Now, look at this:

This is pretty. It’s the cockpit from Alien… decorated with shimmering CGI lights and swirls and spirals and graphics and glowing planets. It’s like someone stuck gold stars all over one of Goya’s ‘black paintings’ or inserted some watercolour daffodils into a Max Ernst canvas. Well, why am I dancing around this? It’s like putting pretty, computer-generated patterns all over a picture by H.R. Giger. The design and CGI rendering is perfectly nice in and of itself, but in this context it looks like a tawdry, clashing embellishment. It neutralises the uncanny effect of the setting.…

May 19, 2012

X Marks the Shit

Jack Graham movies, reviews, series 2, x-men 1

?”You need to see X-Men First Class Jack, you’ll love it, I promise!”

Nope. Sorry.

Fassbender spends the movie auditioning to take over from Daniel Craig. Kevin Bacon excepted, none of the others can act at all.

The Cuban Missile Crisis is fidgeted with to the point of incomprehensibility. The Russians send missiles to Cuba despite a full US Naval blockade… because one general has been threatened… and this makes the entire politburo accede to nuclear suicide? Well, I guess that’s why their culture produces mutants that look like Satan.

It’s the usual reactionary farrago of lies.

The standard crap about how homo sapiens wiped out the Neanderthals is repeated yet again. It’s an obsession of pseudo-thoughtful pop-culture and it’s a lie. Nobody knows how homo sapiens and Neanderthal man interacted. There is no data. That the null hypothesis of capitalist culture is that homo sapiens went on a genocidal killing rampage tells you more about capitalism than about homo sapiens.

And the Nazi war criminal goes to work for the Russians, which is another lie. The ex-Nazis all went to work for the West. West Germany was run by ex-Nazis, a couple of cosmetic dissidents aside.

And, once again, evolution is depicted as teleological and going in ‘stages’ and quantum jumps, which is barely-disguised social darwinism. What makes this all the more revolting is the moralising about Magneto’s supposed evil… for doing something so scandalous as to defend himself when attacked! Oh, what a twisted bastard!

And what exactly is Raven/Mystique’s problem? So, her default setting is blue and scaly… so what? I’d have that as a default setting if I could make myself look however I wanted the rest of the time!

AND this film, which takes a moment here and there to jab at 60s-style sexism, takes every opportunity to get the female cast semi-naked! Fucking hypocrites.

Oh yeah, AND the only black character dies half way through the film – what a fucking shock! That hardly ever happens in movies!…