What We Do In the Shadows

Have you ever wanted to see what a vampire liar would look like? No? Why not? To Twilight-y? Visions of True Blood past season 2? Have you ever wanted to see what a vampire liar would look like when a manager's job at Panera Bread was the best job you could get?


What We Do In the Shadows takes perhaps the most over-done genre of the last 15 years and gives it a brand-new twist. Being a vampire when vampires are hip and cool. Imagine a den of vampires bewildered by the society in which they live.  

Now imagine the entire thing as a reality show. It has cutaways, one-on-one interviews, and so much wonderful confusion.

Guillermo, the familiar 


 is the reluctant guide in modern society. This is the show's most genius device. He is their guide through 2019.

The show is returning for the second season in 2020.

Watch a movie premise age badly!

Greta is Baaaaaad

Greta sounds great. Greta should be great. Old lady seduces younger woman into a friendship. The young girl bis looking for a replacement Mom because her Mom died. A suspense thriller that's well-acted starring Cloë-Grace Moretz and Isabelle Huppert.

It should be good. I keep telling myself. I shout encouragement to myself as I schlog through it. I must persevere. My readers depend on me to make funny comparisons between this movie and Game of Thrones!

Ok. You can do this.

Let’s see, old lady played by Isabelle Huppert. Ok, yeah, she’s good in the role. So there’s lots we can do with that. Cersei Lanister. Olenna Tyrell. That’s a way better comparison. Olenna killed Joffery after all.

Ok, strap in Charlie. Focus.

“Slow burn” is just another way of saying boring.

Um…

Okayyy….

Why is this movie so bad? It’s well-acted. It’s beautiful to look at. It’s just sooo stupid. It’s not even badly written.

I’ve seen it before!

A thousand times. Thirty years ago it would have been a classic. Forty years ago it would have won an Oscar. Fifty years ago it would have been one of the best movies ever made. Today, it’s a dull remake of a movie you’ve seen thousands of times.

Game of Thrones or Dan Carlin: Better History?

How do I like my history? Dan Carlin has me asking that question over and over. He's a podcaster who is educating the world about history. He often takes very deep dives into important events. And even though it's an audio-only medium, it's often engrossing.



Game of Thrones didn't happen, but it can still be very illuminating.



The Battle of the Bastards feels like an authentic representation of what a high middle age society and politics, here, here, and this.

Game of Thrones shows better than conventional historians tell.

Here, we see precisely how Dark Age rulers could instantly destroy an old family, thereby changing the politics of a realm well into the modern age. This is a literal time saver!

But, there are drawbacks. 


Dragons, after all, aren't real. And they are major players in the series. As is magic. 

But it's still a fantastic way to examine the Dark Age mentality. 

Shazam! is the Singularity

Shazam! Is a funny story about about a superhero which was at one time owned by Marvel. 

A foster kid fights evil as a grown man. It feels like an uncanny copy, because it is.

It feels like what would happen if Saturday Night Live did a superhero movie. It's a superhero film that understands it's for kids. And when the kids are doing the talking, the show shines. When the adults get involved, it feels like a very clunky Law & Order episode. Like the adults know that there is something wrong with a thirty-something man who acts like a middle-schooler paling around with a boy, they just can't put their finger on what it is.

2019's Shazam! feels like pop culture folding in on itself. It shamelessly borrows from Harry Potter. 

Hollywood, don't borrow from yourself. Copy from the War of the Roses!

Us has an incredible twist. 

A normal American family kills other normal Americans. Not with guns, but with sheers.



Sheers, and terror. 



The scariest thing is when we find out that they aren't really anything other than people. People who have been driven to do terrible things.



However, Game of Thrones takes the cake when it comes to playing the long game with a twist. The whole series was an enormous setup! And we fell for it!

Terror is (almost) Watching The Wall

Two episodes in, and I have to say that The Terror is great at showing stir-crazy. It's a hard thing to get right. The Terror is about three British ships going into the Arctic for some strange reason.

It tells the story of Victorian England's understanding of the unknown to a great effect. It assumes that the audience understands that they are watching a horror movie. It plays up mundane acts into horrifying events. It makes great work of the "slow burn" trope.

Nothing shocks anymore. So, what do they show? Nothing.

At least the dragons are seen.

Shae and Tyrion and Sunset BLVD

Hollywood loves love triangles. Sunset BLVD was one of the best. A young writer, (William Holden), gets into a financial scrape which will likely end with him banished to Dayton, OH. Dayton, OH wasn't a bad place in 1950. But Sunset BLVD wouldn't have an engine for the finely tuned plot without the drama of the explanation of the film's famous and bizarre opening.

Right away there's all manner of questions which draw you in. It's horror film told from the perspective of a never-was screenwriter as dead man recounts how he got that way. Only the scary demon isn't a ghost or a devil. It isn't even Gloria Swanson, who plays the past-her-prime-but-doesn't know-it star who he is taking advantage of.



It's his greed. Greed that killed him. Greed is frightening. Especially when it blinds people to reality.




Shae was blinded by her greed. In a much longer time-frame we see her work her wiles on Tyrion. She has him convinced that even though she is a prostitute, it is he that she truly loves.

 

Her long-con of The Little Lord was much more shocking in it's payoff and his killing spree was much more shocking. Game of Thrones proves that Hollywood has gotten better at storytelling.

The Vanishing (Watchers on The Wall)

2019 sees THE VANISHING, which seems to be a very popular movie title. The title has me like:



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"Am I going to see a ghost movie?!

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"I Don't want to see a ghost movie!"

THE VANISHING proves that people are far scarier than ghosts. All a ghost is going to do is haunt you. People, on the other hand, will bash you over the head with a rock for some gold.

And we get to see four people of different ages duke it out for someone else's ill-gotten gold.



The twist, errr if you can call it that, greatly depends on you remembering Gerard Butler from his 300 days. Once again, Game of Thrones wins at the twist!

Lucy? Don't you mean the Matrix?

Lucy is the Matrix if the Matrix were about drugs instead of computers. She doesn't have to deal with malware and viruses. Instead Lucy, played by Scarlet Johansen, has to deal with the Taiwanese Mafia. 

The Taiwanese Mafia has to deal with her. They are just stand-ins. Cut-outs about as fleshed out as the natives in a John Wayne Western. I want to know why they chose the life of crime? After all, humans have more agency than malware. Malware is just rouge binary code. Drugs are just chemicals. Humans are much deeper than that. Humans have career goals, humans write goal-oriented mission statements optimized for Power Point! 

Battle of the Blondes

HALT AND CATCH FIRE 

isn't just an old method of avoiding the rise of SkyNet by getting a computer to self-destruct. It's a show about a revolution in a box. It's a show with a silver-haired vixen who is breaking norms.

Before drinking cardiac arresting levels of Red Bull so you could regulate on some chumps during a Call of Duty marathon which has your 

SIGNIFICANT OTHER QUESTIONING HER JUDGEMENT

Before you could by seven pounds of chocolate flavored peanut butter in your boxers without being arrested

A team of intrepid computer geeks had to err...flawlessly copy IBM's code for the ROM BIOS?

And...an executive at AMC said yes? To this? 

Um...ok?

Do you appreciate a good computer building montage? Well then, this is your jam!

The opening of Game of Thrones had higher stakes!

Terrible news: Turn: Washington's Spies is better (in one narrow aspect)

I've been in a crisis for a month. The unquestioned supremacy of my favorite show has come into question. Not least, by me. Game of Thrones is supposed to be better. It's supposed to be perpetually amazing. It's supposed to be a boost to my self-image as a human!

How dare a basic cable show be better than Game of Thrones at something! Anything!

Turn: Washington's Spies is great at showing spies and spying! I am trying to find a way Game of Thrones is better! I have an audience to please! It's even better than The Americans! Nothing! It's a tight show! There's no hole to poke.

I mean, it has no dragons, but I'm not missing them. It has basic cable sex and basic cable nudity, but the story is so good,  I don't care. I'm so distraught, I can't even bring myself to review it. My entire paradigm of Game of Thrones fandom has been shaken!

Ok, let me try.

Turn: Washington's Spies is about a real spy in Washington's army. You should see it. How the spying works is really great.



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Captain America Winter Soldier Kung Fu Fight Club v The Battle of the Bastards

Very BAD KUNG FU MOVIE 

The Battle of the Bastards.

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Game of Thrones is better. 

The (Re-) Avengers!

The Avengers (2012) follows the well-worn trope of a prison transport movie where the transport gone horribly, awfully wrong. Hollywood has a proud tradition of Prison-Transport-Movies-Gone-Horribly-Wrong genre. This time with superheroes! 

There's a civil war between a Viking God from another dimension and a government agency which sub contracts out its work to people in tights.

They use a scientific staff with anger problems aboard a ship in close quarters as if to say nothing could possibly go wrong. 

But you know it will. You wouldn't pay money to see it if the situation was going to be alright, right? In the Prison-Transport-Goes-Horribly-Wrong genre, we pay to see failure, not success. Why would we want to see success?

Of course there has to be a battle in New York City which puts Ghostbusters to shame. And the battle has to take a long time.

I mean with Game of Thrones it's all in a nice neat package. And the prison transport is easily dispensed with.

Game of Thrones, that is so much better.

The Big (not so) Short

The Big Short is about the housing crisis that hit America in 2008. People are somewhat divided on it, between horrible, awesome, and sort of a hybrid between horrible and awesome mixed together to form a uniquely mutant creature.

They have to get celebrities to explain everything because it's so complicated that they really can't do it in the plot. I feel like I'm in school looking at PowerPoints, and overhead projectors. The celebrities are a who's who, though. They keep it coasting until the big payoff.

And then it gets really meta. There's this great big pull back where we really see the damage. We see that paradigms have shifted. Now, collapse is in our vocabulary in a major way! And, as an added bonus, we see the personal growth!

Except, why did we see the growth in 2 hours? Why couldn't we just have seen the growth in a shot?

I'm a busy man. I have stuff to do. I want to see growth in short little snippets! Then I want my Google alerts to talk endlessly about the growth of these fictional characters over and over again! I'm so busy that I need to be reassured that the show I'm watching is amazing!

I leave you with the first time Jaime Lannister saw the dragons as an example of how masterful Game of Thrones is at growth.

Star Trek Discovery: Pilot: The Vulcan Hello

You know what we can't do, Klingons. We as a country can't get our arms around Klingons. Every major iteration of Star trek has a completely different take on what a Klingon looks like. 

Also why is Star trek an action franchise now? Who signed off on that?

Also, and this really annoys me: Why in the name of all that's holy does every single spaceship bridge on every single show have to look like something out of the Apple genius store now? 

We get it Apples are amazing, it's a quick way to show everybody that you're wealthier than other people, we get it. I'm so impressed. 

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But exactly why does every single spaceship have to look like an Apple store. How much is Tim Cook paying y'all to do that?

But let me get back to the Klingons. What is going on with the Klingons? Come on, we know from every other Sci-Fi show on every other planet that the dominant intelligent species all look alike. This is Syfy 101. Not with the Klingons. No, they look like all kinds of different people. Maybe they're like some multicultural warrior race on some far-off planet?

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You know what? I'm sure that there's going to be an explanation. And I'm sure the internet is forever, so I know I'm going to write this out and some Trekkie is going to come back and defend some of the most valuable intellectual property in the history of anything like its real. And really I relish all this.

I want to like Star Trek Discovery. But it feels like a masterclass called “How to Butcher a Franchise.” It actually feels like CBS is daring us to like this. They put it on a network that's only available on the computer and you have to pay you like 6 bucks a month to watch that and probably nothing else. It's like they're really just screwing with you.

I mean at least HBO is charging a lot of money for their service so you can watch Game of Thrones. I mean Game of Thrones is like a commitment. Plus, like you're educating yourself on the high middle ages. You just have to subtract out the dragons and the magic. I don’t know about you, but I feel like I'm being educated whenever I watch Game of Thrones. Whenever I watch Star trek I feel like I'm watching a commercial for what they thought the future was like in the 60s.

#CoffeeCupGate

The Best Product Placement Ever!

Ode to a product placement. How thou shall get people talking about my television show! With one Starbucks cup thou hast United a divided media landscape! Many pretenders have come but you reign supreme oh Starbucks cup! Vibrating phones on five continents as countless and innumerable media outlets pontificate on thine importance. Other events click merrily along! Yet obviously thou art of supreme importance above all Else.

Oh Starbucks cup! Thou were obviously the most important thing that happened outside of Westeros. Thou hath raised awareness of a little show. And for that we fans are eternally grateful for the greatest product placement ever!

A Contrast of Great Teeth

Bohemian Rhapsody is an engrossing portrait of the accomplishments of one man’s teeth. It might be the most famous story of a generation. I ask you, did the teeth belong to Freddie Mercury, or does Freddie Mercury belong to the teeth. 

The band Queen was obviously greater than the sum of its parts. But as Bohemian Rhapsody constantly tells us, Freddie Mercury's teeth were the greatest part of all. These triumphs of odontology paved the way for 4 people to be enshrined in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as well as some pretty cool looking parties. I mean think about it. If he didn't have those choppers he'd probably still be throwing bags at Heathrow airport.

But as great as his teeth were, they were no match for dragon teeth. As great as his voice was, it was not fire. Yes he could get throngs of people to sing a love song to his wife, but he could not make them cower in fear with fiery breath. If you want to see teeth put to good use as with so many other things you have to watch Game of Thrones.

Interview with a (Whiny) Vampire

Interview with a Vampire is essentially a revenge movie. A very dramatic revenge movie with pre-weird Tom Cruise and pre Superstar Brad Pitt in two very important roles. The buzz from this movie is so hot that it reverberates to this day.

For all that buzz there sure is a lot of whining in the movie. So much whining. Brad Pitt's character just cannot handle the fact that he's a life challenged individual. Of course it doesn’t help that pre crazy Tom Cruise plays a crazy Moody person, who's not a person, but a dead thing. The two of them embark on this I hate you no I hate you worse relationship that goes on for quite a while. How long we don't know because after all time is a social construction the vampires don't have to deal with. Brad Pitt talks about this as he whines about being dead to Christian Slater. Christian Slater has gone to find Brad Pitt for reasons we're not clear on because he wants the interview.

Okay right away, I have a question. Actually many questions. But first let's just deal with why in the world is Christian Slater not running from Brad Pitt? Why in the world does Christian Slater believe that Brad Pitt is a vampire? I was alive in the 90s. I don't remember vampires being around. Why does Christian Slater simply believe that Brad Pitt is a vampire? This drives me crazy. It's the biggest pothole I've ever seen! And another thing, Brad Pitt has had over 200 years to deal with the fact that he's not going to die. God, how about some personal growth! I mean the whole time you're supposed to think Brad Pitt is the hero. But no I'm telling you, Tom Cruise is the hero he suffers over and over again as Brad Pitt whines again and again about how he's not dead yet. I mean if I got to look like Brad Pitt circa 1994 for the rest of time, I think I'd be grateful! The savings on medical bills alone would be astronomical!

Rachel McAdams is in a funk.

She's in yet another movie where the man she loves goes off into another dimension. Except this time we get to see the dimensional shifting! That's a terrific improvement over The Time Traveler's Wife. The whole time I'm watching I'm thinking "I wish I could see the dimensional shifting that Rachel McAdams’s man goes through!" Well now I do in Marvel Studio's Dr $trange.

I guess BBC doesn't pay Benedict Cumberbatch enough to play Sherlock Holmes, so he has to run out and do comic book movies. I hope we don't see in The Benedict Cumberbatch $tory which is going to come out in about the year 2050 that Dr. $trange caused horrible heartache and some sort of drug dependency problem.

Hmmmm...Although it totally sounds like an awesome movie! I'm going to call it: The Benedict Cumberbatch $tory is already the early Oscar favorite of the year 2050! I can't wait I'm going to start eating kale now just so I'll be alive to see it!

Seriously why did marvel studios have to give us another Matrix?

Rainy in Glenageary

Rainy in Glenageary directed by Graham Jones feels as though it is an impressionist painting of a crime story rather than a straight ahead true crime documentary. 

It’s a classy way to do true crime. It constantly forces you to ask why do you want to see the gore in the true crime genre? Why do you need the lurid details?  

This crime most likely took place inside of a close circle of young people. Young people we never see, except as a painting. The film tells the story of the unsolved murder of teenager Raonaid Murray in 1999 in Ireland. It feels more honest in this day and age of true crime podcasting precisely because it doesn’t really come out and explicitly offer a theory of the crime.

However the fact that it doesn’t feel sensational does detract. Jones has made a choice to not make the crime more lurid than it already was. Because Jones decided to treat both Raonaid and her circle of friends as the children they were in 1999, there is something missing. But, I keep asking, why did I want it? Murder shouldn't be a past-time, and Jones's effort makes that point over and over.

Ghostbusters

Ghostbusters (1984) was a classic tale of mid-career professional academics who came to a crossroads of sorts in their careers. They had run afoul of that most sacred cow in academia. A sacred cow that was so inviolable that to even question it was to be branded as a heretic and forever cast out of the warm confines of the ivory tower.

What did our intrepid heroes Dr. Peter Venkman, EgonSpangler, Ray Stanz do that so rankled the academic community of Columbia University? They dared expose to the world that ghosts were a very real phenomenon and impossible to ignore.

They set up shop in a derelict fire house and acquired an ancient ambulance to scoot about the City Too Busy To Sleep. But Egon slowly catches wind of a serious spectral problem.

Their problems with the powers that be only amplified as the spectral war ramped up. Civil servants steeped in the cesspool of the early 1980s concrete jungle that was New York City simply did not have time to deal with this supposed spectral war.  

Classic though it may be, director Ivan Reitman made the odd choice to turn a light comedy. A war with ghosts is not a comedy. Existence itself is no laughing matter.

"We are going to WAR!"

"How cute!"

Billions < Game of Thrones

The Time Traveler’s wife follows Rachel McAdams’ Clare through several different phases of her life. And what a perfect life it is. 

She’s married to her longtime sweetheart Henry. They live in a palatial house. Complete with a detached garage where she can do her art. She muddles through her relationship with this relationship as best she can.     

Henry is a time traveler. A fact that way too many people seem far too willing to accept. But I’m just going to leave that alone. (No. No, I’m not. World-building, learn what it is.) Ok, moving right along…

Um, I’m just going to come out and say it. Clare has issues! Think about it! She’s in love with the same man since she was 6! Lordy! She’s even confused! The younger Henry leaves, the older Henry comes back. Is she more in love with old Henry or young Henry?!

I think I got abandonment issues watching that! Why does she put up with potentially being left forever?! Know what? We’ll never know. The movie just glosses right over these issues. Nope, major character depth. Not. Plummed. At. All.

The whole entire time, I kept thinking about Cersei. She’s got issues!     

A Dark Tale about OCD (and Murder)

Hollywood loves to make movies about obsession so much they made a movie about the Zodiac killings that happened in California about obsession, and not really about murder.

Don’t get me wrong. They have murder, but what they really have is obsession. Robert Greysmith was a young(ish) reporter sitting in the boardroom of the San Francisco Chronicle when a letter containing a fragment of a bloody shirt falls out of an envelope.

This event touches off an obsession that ends up unfurling over decades, as well as a somewhat incidental series of murder investigations. But we came to watch the train wreck looming as both Robert Downey, Jr.’s and Jake Gyllenhaal’s characters crash and burn their lives.

It’s always a treat to watch Robert Downey, Jr. play himself. Hollywood loves to let us do that, and we should be grateful. Americans love to ogle self-destructive behavior. 

Why not pay to watch a movie that’s the better part of three hours to do it?      

Who is Titus Welliver, and what does he do?

Why are Americans obsessed with cop shows? Why must we cover every possible nook and cranny of our particular criminal justice problems?

Hollywood is so desperate for warm bodies that they got Titus Welliver(!?) (WHO?) to play Harry Bosch in Bosch. Available on Amazon. They set the show in LA. I guess so they could show the grit and the glamour.

America’s fetish with cop shows is an outgrowth of the fetish for workplace drama. It feels like a very paint-by-numbers as cop shows go. Harry Bosch plays a work-obsessed homicide cop who lives in a very nice home because he sold a story to Hollywood.

The show has an over-arching case which it finally arrives at, nearly halfway through the pilot.

Bosch seems as though it’s dialoging with Law & Order. Why?! Why can’t it talk with The Wire instead? It certainly has enough of the actors to do that!

Disgruntled civil servants is so overplayed as a TV trope that it seeped its way onto the internet like toxic slime. 

Can’t we use Dawn to clean this up?

Can we get some celebrities to sing and dance to raise awareness and money to pay for the government to airlift other tropes to Hollywood?

What are Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears doing? They’re not too busy, right?  

Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams: Episode 1 "Real Life"

Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams is a series of one-off worlds. Amazon's pilot episode called Real Life centers around 2 different somewhat perfect lives. One is that of a billionaire played by Terrance Howard, the other is a supercop played by Anna Paquin. Both are using virtual reality to escape into the other's world. Neither the main characters nor the audience can tell which is real. You won't find out until the very end, and then, it feels hollow somehow. 

The episode spent far to much time world building and nowhere close to enough time building the characters for me to care about the twist which was that both protagonists went crazy.

I won't even tell you how much better Game of Thrones is. What I will say is that Hollywood needs to step up their game. This thing was flogged everywhere. I thought it was going to be worth watching at least. God, I was wrong. 

I'm not linking to this. Save yourself.   

Dragon Review Revisits The Sopranos pt 1.: Mr. Ruggerio's Neighborhood

The Sopranos debuted this week twenty years ago. 

I thought I would take some time and examine what made it the prestige drama of the late 1990s and early 2000s. It was certainly not the first look into the mob, however it ended up being the most in-depth due to the show’s longevity. Law-enforcement is a heavy theme throughout the run of the show as we watch the dance between Tony Soprano’s New Jersey organized crime family and the FBI.

“Mr. Rugerio’s Neighborhood” was the first episode of season 3.

 We see lunch.

Overworked civil servants sitting in cars.  

Failed attempts at wiretapping.

More failed attempts at wiretapping than The Wire!

 The Wire!

A show about Wiretapping!

I don’t wanna see your Doritos. 

People don’t pay for HBO to watch people eat in a conference room!

Arrg! Look at Game of Thrones!

Why can’t The Sopranos be this good?!

Lord Varys barely mentions his spy network, the little birds! And then when we see that they are little children, such power! Such impact!

Don’t forget to follow #dragonreview on Twitter.

Nothing is as good as Game of Thrones.