Freelancin': The Death of the Star Wars Expanded Universe

I'm late again by a day.  I'm thinking I'll just have to make this Wednesday series in order to give myself more of a buffer.  Anyway, this is about Disney's announcement that the Star Wars Expanded Universe has been declared non-canon.  What have we lost?  Why was it necessary?  And really, should we mourn?

The Quiet Ones

I'm growing to hate my powers of observation.  I was looking forward to seeing "The Quiet Ones", the newest film from legendary British horror studio, Hammer Film Productions.  And I managed to stay positive about the movie for exactly thirty seconds until I spied with my little eye something distressing.  I saw that the screenwriter credit for Tom de Ville, said "Based on the Screenplay by".  Meaning the studio paid this man for his screenplay, and then ditched it somewhere during production.  This was followed by three more screenwriter credits for Craig Rosenberg, Oren Moverman, and John Pogue, who was also the director.  That means "The Quiet Ones" has gone through at least four revisions somewhere between its conception and release, which is always a bad sign.  Movies and screenwriters are like food and a chef.  It is great to eat a stew prepared by one chef, it is not so great to eat a stew prepared by four, each of whom are trying to complete their own artistic vision as to what the food is going to look like.  Just leave your check on the table and go eat at Burger King instead, you'll do your stomach a great service.

What we have here is yet another mediocre horror film.  It is not very good, and it is not very bad, but perhaps worst of all, it's not bad in any kind of interesting way.  You've seen "The Quiet Ones" before:  this story has been done and done better hundreds of times.  Though the concept might be unoriginal, there are a few scares to be found here and there.  However it is executed so sloppily.  This is the kind of movie that moves with terrible slowness because it seems to get impatient with itself.  As soon as it looks like "The Quiet Ones" is going to give us some stronger characterization or a firmer sense of mood, it ditches the structure-building for another predictable scare.  This isn't a movie that builds its terror continuously, it just throws out a regulation number of scary scenes, until it reaches a regulation running time, and then just ends lazily ends with a hilariously-bad ending.

More unfortunately, "The Quiet Ones" is completely unable to play to its own strengths.  For such a corny horror movie, it actually managed to amass a solid entirely-English cast with an effective visual style.  Last year's "The Conjuring" showed the world that the 1970s was the creepiest decade in history, making plaid clothing, wood paneling, and old rock music the perfect backdrop for a ghost story.  Unfortunately the plotline is a confused mess.  1970s scientists attempt to study a troubled young girl with psychic powers, apparently trying to conjure her poltergeist powers and - somehow - cure her mental illness.  Thus most of the film is sitting around a dusty old house while various kinds of quackery and bad science are performed, without much context as to how this is going to work, or what we're trying to achieve.  Worse, the characters themselves are underwritten and bland, so there is no real arc to be found.  There's no claustrophobia, no sense of an evolving story.  I don't know what was wrong with Tom de Ville's original draft, but was this final version really an improvement?

Fanwank Corner: The Marvel Universe's Embrace of Freedom

2008's "The Dark Knight" was one of the more interesting films in what I'd call "The Post-9/11 Era" of pop culture.   Batman, one of the better superheroes suited to a Post-9/11 story, battles a maniac out to shatter the safe dimensions of America's greatest city, Gotham (read: New York).  Modern Batman jumped right out of late 1990s cheese, threw away his Bat Credit Card, and got on the streets, fighting a gritty battle against terror, as symbolized by a re-imagined Joker.  This nightmare of a supervillain was the nihilism of terrorism given living form, a man without any plan at all but to destroy everything around him.  This Joker wasn't throwing out Laughing Gas and making puns, he was blowing up buildings, assassinating elected officials, basically bringing the War on Terror home to the United States.  All the fear and insecurities of the 9/11 attacks came together, making for an exciting action movie based upon our modern horrors.

That was DC's take on the War on Terror.  It was one of the most successful movies of all time, and widely considered the greatest superhero film ever made.  Meanwhile, other superheroes have simply avoided world politics*.   But what about Marvel?  Marvel's film universe began the same year as "The Dark Knight", with "Iron Man".  Since then the Marvel universe has had Viking Gods, invaders from outer space, a WWII story, and will soon include a talking raccoon to its ridiculous collection of heroes.  You would assume then, looking at this eclectic film universe that it has mostly ignored the War on Terror entirely to focus on fun entertainment with a smile.  But Marvel hasn't done that.  It has embraced the times it was born into and made them fundamental to its mythos.  It is impossible to imagine, for example, Tony Stark being given his inspiration for Iron Man in the middle of an Afghan Cave in any decade other than the 2000s... Naughts... whatever the Hell the name for the last decade is.

The Marvel movies do something very interesting with the War on Terror.  Rather than have its heroes fight on the front lines of the war, staring madness in the face, like Batman did, it has its heroes transcend the war.  The Marvel cinematic universe is one where the War on Terror is a place of exploitation and manipulation, a moral gray zone of corruption which is - more often than not - a sham for its heroes to overcome.  That's not to say the threat is not real or the villains there are no less villainous in the Middle East (if anything they're too evil for a superhero film to deal with) but rather the War on Terror offers temptations for the Marvel heroes.  It is tempting for them to look upon the fear of Islamic threats and simply surrender to easy answers, such as endless security, a loss of liberty, and militarization.  But the heroes say no every time, staying heroic in ways that shame our real world peacekeepers.

Transcendence

"Transcendence" is a catastrophically stupid movie.  Being a Hollywood production about cyberpunk, which combines two things producers know very little about:  science and computers, "Transcendence" was bound to be incredibly stupid.  Worse, this is a movie whose subject matter is the technological singularity, a cutting edge theory of social evolution that predicts the combination of the human brain and computers.  The natural reaction the screenwriters have to this concept is, "well this is new and revolutionary, and that's scary!!"  The assumption here is that transhumanism is inherently evil, computers are bad, technology is made of Satan, and this is a well-known universal truth, unknown only to those vile scientists deluding themselves about making the world a better place while really breaking the sacred laws of Yevon and summoning Sin to destroy another city in Spira.

What's amazing is that "Transcendence" somehow manages to become more stupid when it tries to be more open with trasnhumanism and less mindlessly Luddite.  Oh don't worry, the movie is still amazingly ignorant of computer technology, essentially treating science as magic that can do anything, but in its own pretentious way, it is trying to make a bigger statement about technology and God.  A statement which makes no sense within its own plot.  If "Transcendence" had embraced its own stupidity and just gone with a generic horror movie, albeit one with idiotic anti-science overtones, it would have been a perfectly serviceable silly movie.  Ultimately though it treats a character as a villain who is not really evil, treats clearly villainous characters as heroes, and tries to find an uplifting conclusion with the end of civilization.  This is a movie that pulled its head out of the sand and then shoved its head firmly up its ass.

The plot of "Transcendence" is a fairly generic SciFi concept of a Ghost in the Machine, only done in an amazingly clueless manner.  Johnny Depp plays Dr. Will Caster, a brilliant computer scientist who has created his own AI.  However, a group of terrorists who have no particular dogma other than a mindless fear of the singularity, target Caster and dozens of other computer labs around the country.  Caster is left slowly dying thanks to an extremely farfetched radiation-tipped bullet, and his loving wife, Evelyn (Rebecca Hall), decides to upload his brain to their supercomputer.  Unfortunately now they have meddled in God's domain, creating a monstrous Super Dr. Caster, who can command the universe from his computer body.  So now the terrorists apparently become the heroes, fighting to stop this supreme AI from... healing the sick and saving the environment(??).  "Transcendence" is a mess, frankly.  It tries to transcend the cliches of Hollywood cyberpunk while sticking firmly to the pre-established tropes, meaning nothing makes very much sense.  A very simple question such as:  "who was the good guy supposed to be?" is entirely impossible to answer.  Oops?

Freelancin': JRPGs I Could Never Finish - Radiant Historia, The World Ends With You, and Xenogears

Sorry this is a day late, the Internet died on me last night, meaning I couldn't get the images required to make the video.  (Not that its really necessary, but I like to at least try to justify uploading this on Youtube.)

These are three JRPGs I could never finish for whatever reason.  I'm sure you'll enjoy finally seeing me talk about TWEWY, but since I hated playing that game, you might not like what you find.

CORRECTION:  "White Knight Chronicles", "Dragon Quest IX", and "Ni No Kuni" were actually Level-5 games, not Atlus.   Sorry about that.