themason

[themason]

Caught some buns feasting at the community garden on Sacramento.

[themason]

Ah, yes. Good ol' M. Fishman maintaining the majesty of Logan Square.

[themason]

Friend. Yes. Hello. It would mean a lot to me if you made it out to the Movie Club show at Bric-A-Brac Records tomorrow afternoon. It might even put a smile on my face 😁.

What is movie club? A comedy variety show. We do not show movies. We recreate em with stories and songs and all other manner of dumb shit. Tomorrow's theme is "My mom's favorite movie."

[themason]

Darkness on the edge of town.

[themason]

New lens! 22mm f/2.0. Getting used to it.

[themason]

Do YOU know what men are like??

[themason]

At the last Movie Club, we painted my face with condiments to "blend" with the background (a giant paper mache duck). It was supposed to mimic Peeta from the Hunger Games? I guess? It was awful! Mustard is awful! Every moment of this was torture!!

With that said, thank you to Laura Mitchell for bravely painting me. Photo credit: Claire Lipskey.

The next Movie Club is on June 23 at Bric-A-Brac Records. Come on by, it's fun. Event link here.

[themason]

Seems presumptuous for this sign to think I'd want to trespass on its shitty lot.

[themason]

The sky was killing it yesterday. Montrose Beach Bird Sanctuary. And also Bric a Brac Records in Avondale.

[themason]

Went outside. Touched grass.

[themason]

Just a cat dad despising everything about the 4th of July.

[themason]

Bizarrely mediocre and somehow made even more mediocre after I watched it and realized it was written and directed by the Haunting of Hill House guy—you'd hope he'd do better.

I knew, mind you, that this would be an unenthusiastic watch. But I'll subject myself to anything to stare at Ewan McGregor's face for two hours. And despite we get two sides of Ewan's face—haggard and bearded and fresh and clean—that doesn't quite make the journey worth it.

Some quick thoughts:

#1. Cut the first 40 minutes. We know what a cliché drunk running from his past/telepathic powers looks like, so just stick him in AA and assume the viewer can imagine the cliche on their own. #2. Make Abra definitively the main character. Splitting the movie between Danny, Rose the Fucking Hat, and Abra may have imparted more information upon the viewer, but it didn't help the momentum of the story one bit. #3. The white woman "Romany" aesthetic of Rose that Fucking Goddamn Hat is laughable at best and painful at worst. Rebecca Ferguson works her ass off to make it work, but no amount of effort could pull that magic trick off. #4. It's truly funny how anti-climatic the end is. #5. By the very, very end, the relationship between Abra and Uncle Dan started to work... but it was too late. Because it was the end of the movie. Adhering to Thought #2 above would have had this emotional impact much earlier in the film. #6. The only way I would trust a Director's Cut of Doctor Sleep is if the running time were shorter. There are precious few directors who understand the virtue of brevity, and I truly don't think *more* Doctor Sleep could create a more significant impact.

Final thoughts: Flannagan took this middle ground between giving the viewer no information about the mysticism in the flick and giving them all the information... Or so it felt to me. And I think this need to tell the whole story and, when possible, provide context for the crazy shit, ultimately created a limp narrative. It's easy to want to give the viewer more or to be pressured into feeding the viewer more by producers, but there's a reason the term "less is more" exists. The end result was a mildly confusing movie that lacked heart, and I'd have been much happier with an extremely confusing and nonsensical movie with a lot of heart. Doctor Sleep is competent, but not all that entertaining. Even if you enjoy staring at Ewan McGregor's face, this film isn't quite worth watching.

[themason]

I don't mean to ruin your day but I put Abba's Waterloo in slow motion on YouTube and this is what happened...

Another productive day working from home!

[themason]

The God of Lies, telling the truth…

[themason]

Quick and Dirty Jupiter’s Legacy Review: They Did Josh Duhamel’s Fake Beard Dirty

In a lot of ways, Jupiter’s Legacy delivers: it is mediocre superhero escapism that spits out just enough plot twists to interest viewers. But in the ways in which art reflects reality, it is DUMB AS FUCK.

An ensemble cast of superheroes—Josh Duhamel, the only actor I recognized, plays the Superman-esque Utopian—I  think I'd have been 10x more into this show if the fake beards and wigs were of a higher quality. And I mean that. I would 100% dig a gray-bearded, long-haired, farmer Josh Duhamel... If only his fake follicles weren't so distracting. Maybe my standards are too high, as the muttonchops in the British dramas and mysteries I watch are top fuckin' quality, but I must not digress...

Like much of the work by writers I followed in the early oughts, this Mark Millar adaptation follows the various stages of life. Millar and other writers of his generation (and gender) have spread their tendrils throughout media the last 20 years as they chronicle the stages of their lives through pop culture: the manchild years, early marriage years, what it's like to have young children, reckonings with their own aging parents, and finally, what it's like to be an overbearing father with teenagers that hate you.

Mark Millar must have had teens that hated him when he was writing this initially*—or was recalling the ways his overbearing dad raised him—because the show is mostly about the family dynamics of Duhamel's character's family, which includes his spunky and faithful wife (Grace), too-hard-on-himself son (Brandon), and rebellious celebre daughter (Chloe). All of them have superpowers, and it's Duhamel's 120-year-old ass attempting to guide them responsibly through those powers. Comically, though the quality of the tantrums of the kids are analogous to teens, they are actually in their early 20s in the show.

(*Admittedly, I haven’t read the 2013 comic series, and am not certain how closely the show follows it. So maybe the comic is more opaque in its intentions than the show 🤷‍♀‍.)

The thing most people will hate about Jupiter’s Legacy is that there are multiple timelines. More than you can keep track of. Parceling out story tidbits seemingly at random. I'm ambivalent about this, tbh. I don’t mind feeling lost in a plot, but I can see others having problems with the jerkiness these timeline cuts bring to the flow of episodes. Ultimately, the freedom to jump between 1929 (right before Duhamel and his super friends received their powers) and 2021 (and sometimes in between) ends up feeling like a crutch for the writers to lazily lean on. But, this is the quality I'd expect from Netflix, as they seem to prefer to waste money and not time. Were they less stingy with time, maybe the writers room could have had a few more months to work out tighter scripts with fewer flashbacks.

At the core of my problem with Jupiter’s Legacy, and the core of the plot of the show, is "the code"—a set of rules Jupiter's Legacy's senior superheroes created and follow. The code: supes do not govern, and they do not kill. The do not kill aspect don't sit right with me specifically. As times have gotten tougher in the show, the do not kill rule has gotten harder, and the younger, new generation of heroes is finding it more difficult to understand why it exists, let alone abide by it.

And, of course, an important character eventually does kill. And thus, this further complicates the world heroes and villains alike live in, and this is doubly true for Josh Duhamel's Utopian.

At one point in episode seven, while discussing the “no-kill” code with his sister, Utopian’s son Brandon says, "You have to make a choice, otherwise you're just standing by letting the world go." Which is ironic since this is a show that does not make a choice. What “choice” do I mean?

It’s difficult to watch a show about superheroes acting as world police without thinking about the real-world police. This is doubly true when one of the subjects is whether said superhero “world police” (as I’ve dubbed them) should be allowed to kill dangerous combatants. The problem isn’t that the show “takes a side” when it comes to real-world violence. The problem is that the show pretends the subject doesn’t exist. Violence at the hands of superheroes and the ensuing effects are just utterly outside of reality. Of course, this is escapism, right? But escapism or not, there are other ways the show attempts to parody the real world, from the strained experiences of an overbearing father and his kids to the portrayals of celebrity lifestyle through the Utopian’s super-daughter, Chloe. I think I case could be made that the “code” is actually a fight against an increasingly fascist world (both on the show and in reality), but the metaphors get so lost in translation and muddled by real-world-problems that they seem meaningless to me.

I’d love it if I could JUST view Jupiter’s Legacy as a clumsy metaphor for all of our daddy issues, but it lives in a world where police violence exists. And when it’s engaging not only with the concept of whether the powerful should kill but batshit ramifications of that violence, like the superhero trope of supervillain “escalation,” it becomes real hard to find the show compelling.

Ultimately, the overall story itself isn’t about whether superheroes should kill—which ends up being a pawn used by both sides for control and power…but that doesn’t stop that single component of the show from being a distraction. By the time the last episode ended, I found that the way that the overall material had been handled left the Machiavellian plot twists inert. Which is not to say I saw them coming or did not see them coming, but to say that I just really didn't care.

[themason]

Not sure what’s funnier, the thumbs up or the awkward response.

[themason]

Honestly? I’d despise anyone else who said this. Carolyn pulls it off tho.