Schlock Mercenary

Howard here… I couldn’t bring myself to see Hardcore Henry. I was too busy, and too stressed out, and this did not look like something that would make me in the least bit less anxious. Fortunately for all of you, my friend Bob saw it. He started to tell me about it, and I said “stop! Write this down and let me steal it.” That’s probably not how he’ll tell that story… My good friend Howard Tayler asked me to review Hardcore Henry for him, so this will be a crosspost between robertjdefendi.com, schlockmercenary.com, and curiosityquills.com. I’ll break it into two sections, the review and an analysis from a more writerly standpoint. The analysis will likely have more spoilers but just a few. Read the sections that are right for you. The Review Hardcore Henry is, without out doubt, the most terrible movie I’ve ever loved without reservation. It’s fast-paced. It’s a riot. It is a popcorn movie in it’s purest sense. Unless you see it in D-Box like I did, and then the seats will fling your popcorn onto the row in front of you. So be warned. Hardcore Henry is, in essence, the twitch.tv stream of the virtual reality first person shooter that’s coming out in ten years or so. Told from the point of view of Henry, a mute protagonist who is brutally murdered during the opening credits (and I mean brutally), the movie begins with the cybernetic rebuilding of his body, the introduction of his wife, the attack of the antagonist, and a blast into the non-stop action of the film. This is a movie where every punch is a literal blow to the camera and every stunt is entirely from the point of view of the stuntman. It takes the criticisms of “shaky cam” movies (which I generally hate), embraces them and takes them out to dinner and dancing. It owns every glorious flaw. And there are flaws. My my God, are their flaws. From interviews I’ve heard with Sharlto Copley (Powers, District 9), they embraced these flaws. If these interviews are correct, Copley saved this movie, because the filmmakers wanted to make a serious film, and Copley seemed to understand that if they tried to make a serious film, what they got would be terrible, but if terrible was their goal, then what they got might just be genius. So this movie embraces its warts. The villain is hackneyed and terrible and has inexplicable powers (because technology!). The conceit that explains Copley’s character is more the pretense of an explanation than an explanation itself, and the climax involves a solution that seems to be making fun of action movies, video games, and Legolas all at the same time. And here we come to the caveat of the film. This was, for me, the second funniest movie of the year. I rarely laugh out loud at a film and I burst out laughing at least four or five times during Henry. However about half the jokes are totally straight plays of action tropes. The other half are video game tropes. If you don’t get into either of these, you will lose at least half the humor. If it’s video games you aren’t into, it’s probably more than half (the movie literally has a silent protagonist and at one points goes into full tooltip-style quest tutorial). If these facts sound appealing to you, you will likely love this movie. If you didn’t understand half of that last paragraph, you might want to skip it. It aims at a certain few groups of viewers with a laser focus. It ignores the rest, and that’s okay. It’s pretty clear from the trailer that this movie knows what it is and makes no qualms about it. But if you get motion sick, maybe watch it from the back half of the theater. Or take motion sickness pills before you go. The Analysis The genius of this film is its paradoxical two-fold stance. Most movies that approach this level of absurdity feel like they need to wink at the audience and prove that we are all in on the joke. Hardcore Henry embraces this absurdity, but it never wavers in its viewpoint. It never blinks. It play its tropes with a perfect poke face, and if I can mix metaphors, doubles down. Its rare you see a film display this amount of courage. It knows what it is, and it plays the entire thing entirely straight. The first time I laughed out loud, Henry was trying to escape in underground tunnels, a subway I believe. He darts down a side tunnel only to see it filled with cops, looking for him. He turns and runs down another tunnel, and for the briefest moment you see not one, but two…two…women pushing baby carriages, blocking the way. Two. I burst out laughing at the movie’s own self aware ridiculous moment, but what won me in the scene is that the camera barely registers the two mothers. Henry takes them in and immediately Jackie Chan’s his way up the wall. I’m not sure if I was the only person laughing because I was the only person who got the joke, or if I was the only person who saw the joke. I really wonder how much I missed. That other viewers got. Technically, this movie is very challenging. It is not natural for a stunt man to do the things he has to do in this movie as Henry. A stuntman enters a zen state to do his work. In one scene, a scene pointed out by Copley in interviews, the stuntman playing Henry doesn’t just get set on fire and have to hit his mark. He has to be set on fire. Then jump through a window. Then hit his mark. Then catch the appropriate images on camera on the other side. Then perfectly time turning back to catch the other two stuntmen also on fire. The stuntman part is probably old hat. The cameraman stuff is probably pretty old hat too. But doing them both at the same time? It’s like trying to chew and cry on camera, two mechanically exclusive actions that can happen naturally but are very difficult to manufacture at the same time. And as for the special effects, I’m sure there’s some CGI cable replacement and non-stunt CGI, but the stunts themselves are spot on and live, and there’s a visceral power to knowing that you’re seeing what the man himself sees. The moment in the trailer where he drops a grenade in a van, speeding down the road, and the van explodes, hurling him into the air, and he lands perfectly on the back of a motorcycle? There’s no CGI in that. No cuts. That scene was filmed live and presented as is. They used a crane, sure, but how hard is that shot even with a crane? I can’t imagine getting it in just a few takes, and this movie was too low budget to afford a lot of tries. And that is mentioning all the stuff that’s just improved. “Hey, you think we can shoot a running chase scene right up the girders of that bridge?” Usually I analyze plot and character. This movie has no plot and character. The plot and character are so bad that this almost has to be intentional. The villain’s final monologue is only one step above, “Evil plan, evil plan, this is my evil plan, mwah ha ha ha ha ha!” And it’s only that so they could play it straight. The movie hits a bare minimum of plot points and twists and then it moves on. It doesn’t pretend you’re there for anything else. Hardcore Henry is a prime example of knowing your goals, making your promises, and then fulfilling them with the deftest hand you can manage. And I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it succeeds.

Sandra and I have been grinding hard for the last week in order to get Force Multiplication out the door to the printer. Saturday we¹ arrived at a final cover. Monday we got test prints, in color, for the whole book. Today? Well, today is spent fixing things². Our goal is to send this to the printer on Friday. Pre-orders won’t open for at least 45 days, though. Be patient! ¹Me, Sandra, and K.B. Spangler, who drew some amazing circuitry for the cover texture.

When I worked in the software industry a decade ago there was this lovely term we used when a particular product or code-base was being terminated. We called it “sunset,” and that lovely, red-orange noun with its purple shading would get verbed, and we’d say we were “sunsetting” something, because that’s so much nicer than “terminating.” On to the point, then. The Schlock App for iOS and Android is being sunsetted, put out to pasture, end-of-lifed—pick your favorite word, there’s no truly nice way to describe this. Let’s talk about what it means, and why it’s happening. The TL;DR Here’s the short version of the rest of this post: we can’t afford to continue supporting the app. If you’re using the app, we recommend that you switch to an RSS app, and use that to consume the Schlock Mercenary RSS feed. Why Sunset? Ultimately it comes down to time and money. In the early days the Schlock App was a labor of love, and Gary Henson’s passion for a clean interface gave thousands of Schlock fans an unparalleled reading experience. We were never able to successfully port that experience to Android, and as mobile devices matured, we became increasingly unable to comprehensively test the app on the wide range of devices where it might be run. Bugs proliferated. And then, two weeks ago, I crashed the app by putting a frame in a blog post. Gary discovered that in order to identify the problem he would first need to update the entire app for iOS 9, which is only a very small step away from rewriting it, since it was originally coded for iOS 3. As last straws go, this was a hay bale, or perhaps a cord of firewood. Gross revenue from the Schlock App has been about $2,000 per year, which is less than 10% of the total ad revenue generated by the comic. The time spent managing the Schlock App is twice, or three times the amount of time spent managing ads on the main site. By that math alone, the Schlock App is a time sink that does not pay for itself. Consider, however, that the gross revenue is split between us and Gary. $1,000 per year comes out to far less than minimum wage for Gary. I asked Gary what it would cost to re-code the app, assuming a fair hourly rate for his engineering services. Without divulging his rate, let’s just say that the app is nowhere near justifying that level of investment, and that’s not even taking into account the drudgery involved in rewriting 5-year-old code. I can divulge that after shopping around other app studios we learned that an app coded natively for iOS and Android, portable across and tested against the most recent 3 years of devices and OS releases, and designed to read via a hybrid onboard/online cache of comics would cost between $80,000 and $250,000. But, The App Is AMAZING! It sure is. Unfortunately we could not get people to support “amazing.” Less than 1% of Schlock Mercenary readers use the app, and less than half of the app users bought subscriptions. Ultimately we have to come to grips with the fact that in demographic terms, the app isn’t actually something the fanbase wants. That’s kind of harsh, I know, and it will sound the harshest to that tiny¹ group of devotees who appreciate the Schlock app for what it is: the best way to consume a comic strip on your phone. No other app comes close. Beyond the Schlock App If you’ve been using the app, you may have noticed that we’ve turned off the subscriptions. We obviously won’t be taking money for something we’re not going to continue supporting. We haven’t decided when we’ll be turning the Schlock App server off, but we’re 100% confident that the app server will not be running in 2017. It’s likely we’ll pull the plug this summer. Once the server is off, the app will no longer be able to pull down new comics, and it will instantly go from “unsupported” to “unusable. There is a Schlock Mercenary RSS feed that you can consume on your mobile, and both iOS and Android users have a wide range of RSS reader apps available to them. Here’s a short list²: iOS

This review can be summed up by giving it a different title. Batman vs Superman: It’s Not as Bad as All That, But Please Can We Have Some Color? Original movie poster on the left, saturation-adjusted poster on the rightHere are some selling points, although based on the film’s domestic gross, Time/Warner/DC does not need my help selling the movie to an English-speaking audience:

Javelin Rain is the sequel to Myke Cole’s Gemini Cell, and if you thought the first book was riveting, you’ll likely find Javelin Rain to have even more rivets, and maybe some arc welding. “Gripping” is a word that gets used a lot. Javelin Rain was definitely that. Myke’s Shadow Ops series is shelved as Urban Fantasy, which is the bookshelf genre that bookstores use to tell people that the book features our world, except with magic in it. Bookshelf genres only really tell you what group of readers the booksellers are trying to aim the book at, and Javelin Rain could be very accurately aimed at fans of thrillers, horror stories, and science fiction—not to mention aficionados of military fiction, and anybody who likes to see a moral quandary laid bare on the page. If you like any two of those things, you’ll enjoy Javelin Rain. If you like some of those things, and hate some of the others, Javelin Rain may force you into that uncomfortable place where you have to reconsider your tastes before growing a bit as a reader. Myke’s debut novel, Control Point was described by Peter Brett as “Blackhawk Down meets The X-Men.” The best mash-up logic I can come up with for Javelin Rain is “Steven King and Brandon Sanderson perform necromancy on Tom Clancy.”

Renee Collins, one of the author guests at FanX, walked into the green room shaking her head in mild disbelief at an encounter she’d had in the hallway. Someone had pitched his writing tutorials to her, and when she said “no thank you” he said “if you’re a writer, then you obviously know the twelve archetypes, right?” Our table’s response was a mixture of wide-eyed surprise, and eye-rolling at the bad behavior. And maybe just a little embarrassment. For myself, I know of the archetypes, but I don’t have them memorized, and I certainly don’t work from that list while creating a story. So I put myself in Renee’s shoes and role-played my answer: “Of course!” I began ticking things off on my fingers “Joan of Arc, Arc de Triomph, Noah’s Ark, Arc Reactor, The Ark of the Covenant…” We burst into laughter, and everyone at the table began shouting suggestions. We swiftly added Archimedes, Archaeology, Arc Welder, and Archipelago, and then lost some steam. “Come on, folks! That’s nine!” I said, feigning panic while waving nine fingers. “We just need three more!” I think Monarch, Archaeopteryx, and Arkham Asylum finished the list off. This morning I got to wondering if words, terms, and names with the “ark” sound in them could be usefully mapped onto the actual Twelve Archetypes. And by “usefully” I mean “as a mnemonic.” For instance, “Monarch” maps pretty directly onto “The Ruler,” and if you’re thinking about the end of the 1st Indiana Jones film, “The Ark of the Covenant” can correspond nicely to “The Destroyer.” Unfortunately, some of my favorites, like Archaeopteryx and Arc Reactor, are harder to plug in. Or at least, I had to stretch them so far that it was easier to go looking for other words. Here’s what I came up with:

FanX, the spring installment of Salt Lake Comic Con¹, is this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I’ll be in Artist’s Alley with my friend Jim Zub at tables Berry 5 and Berry 6. Jim and I also have three panels together! My schedule is posted here on the official FanX site, and I’ll break it out for you below. If there’s Schlock Mercenary merchandise you’d like to acquire at the show, email schlockmercenary@gmail.com and Sandra will make sure we’ve got it on hand. we’re packing a little light this year, because there’s just not much room at these tables, but that doesn’t mean we can’t bring the stuff you want². My FanX Schedule Thursday

You may already know that I tweet. I’m trying out Storify to collect groups of tweets. This is from last night… Note: The original Storify iFrame was breaking the Schlock Mercenary mobile app, so I turned it into an image. You can get to the Storify page by clicking on the image. Or on this.

I have loved XCOM 2, but not unconditionally. There are some things you should know when you consider my review:

Clearly, Americans have gotten tired of seeing American landmarks blowing up in movies, because this film, the sequel to Olympus Has Fallen, featured London’s landmarks getting blown up in the sort of loving detail that has been standard popcorn-fare for recognizable American architectural stuff since Independence Day (the movie, not the holiday, although there are plenty of explosions then, too.) It’s been a long time since I was in London. I confess, I didn’t know which buildings I was supposed to be rooting for. There was a bridge that I think may have been important, too, but I didn’t recognize it. I did notice that The Gherkin survived unscathed. London Has Fallen spent a lot of time creating suspense for the things that we saw happening in the trailer. The build-up was pretty effective, except for the bit where they also tried to get me to care about too many of the characters. Oh, and except for the part where I knew what was coming. From the one trailer I’d seen, I knew that if the person on camera was a) a major world leader, and b) not the U.S. President or Gerard Butler, that person was going to die. Sadly, the film flinched away from what could have been a really powerful bit of storytelling. There’s this moment where the U.S. President is uncomfortable with a particularly vicious bit of knife-work on the part of his one surviving bodyguard. And to be honest, that bit stepped across a couple of lines. It was brutal, and satisfying, and very wrong. But we never came back to that moment. The President and his bodyguard never had a discussion about becoming what we behold, or keeping to principles even when it’s inconvenient. This was truly disappointing. I never feared for either character’s life, but the film could have made me seriously worry for their friendship, their sanity, and even their souls. But no. The film flinched. Sure, I got all the asplodey eye candy I expected, and some genuine suspense regarding secondary, non-world-leader characters, but about an hour in, the movie promised me some soul-searching, which it utterly failed to deliver. Pro-tip: Don’t wreck an okay movie by promising an awesome moment you can’t, or won’t, deliver. Olympus London Has Fallen enters my list at the bottom, and is this year’s first entry below the Threshold of Disappointment.

Work on the new schlockmercenary.com site continues. Some things that vanished have returned now that Gary has figured out to make them work. Other things are still being worked on. A few things are gone forever...