Schlock Mercenary

I'm afraid I don't have anything nice to say.

I was at Gen Con Indy last weekend, so I didn't make it to Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation until the Tuesday after it opened. I really liked it. The action was taken to super-spy levels of unbelievable from the opening scene, and the intrigue and heist elements were both spot on and satisfying. Which is to say that the movie is full of all the ridiculous things you expect from the Mission: Impossible franchise, including punchy uses of the theme in all the right places. Joe Kraemer's soundtrack is lots of fun, and will make good music for me to write and draw to. I was pleased to find that the trailers did not spoil the film's key scenes—a kindness on the part of the marketing department, I suppose, though it's possible that they had explicit instructions from filmmakers who wanted to preserve some of the intrigue. Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation clears my Threshold of Awesome and enters my 2015 list at #10.

I'm exhibiting at GenCon Indy with Jim Zub and Tracy Hickman this week. You can find us at booth 1935.

The Happy Madison/Columbia Pictures big-budget, big-screen remake of the brilliant short film "Pixels," by Patrick Jean, could never be as brilliant or cool as the short was. I wanted to see it anyway, and I went in knowing that I was in for 110 minutes of Adam Sandler's "loser makes good" schtick. My low expectations helped! Also useful: my sons, both avid gamers, were really enthusiastic about seeing the movie, and they weren't at all jaded about the performers (in part because I'm a good parent, so they don't have a dozen hours of Adam Sandler dumped into long-term memory.) But most surprisingly of all, the film delivered fun video game references without showering us in raunchy Sandlerisms. His character was genuinely likable, and the comedy actually worked. The movie lays down its ground rules early in Act One: this is a universe in which a goofball played by Kevin James can become president, and will invite his underachieving, TV-installer childhood friend over to the White House regularly enough that security recognizes him. A proper action movie would spend the first two acts building up to that possibility. Pixels tells us to accept it early on, so that our Suspenders of Disbelief won't be strained later in the film. Which, to continue the metaphor, probably means that the first act steals our pants, ensuring that there's no work for the suspenders to do at all. It's a good thing, too. If you spend any amount of time asking questions that begin with "wait, wouldn't they just..." you will almost certainly lose whatever opportunity you may have had to enjoy the film. It's a precarious position for a film to take, I know. But there it is. I get upset when people tell me "just turn your brain off." That's a pointless thing to say after the movie is over, and if that disclaimer is actually required before the movie starts, something has gone wrong. Pixels invites you to shut down some of the logic circuits during Act I, which is how movies that need you to turn your brain off should be handling it: up front. Don't get me wrong, here. I'm not defending Pixels as great art (Patrick Jean's "Pixels" yes, Happy Madison's Pixels no.) It could have been a much better movie had different decisions been made early on, but once your green light is locked into a feature-length story of video game attackers pixelating targets on Earth, numerous "great art" paths are closed to you, and you do the best you can. Even so, Pixels could have done better. The movie's energy bled away pretty quickly when we didn't have pixelated action on screen, which suggests a pacing problem, which in turn suggests okay I have no idea what that actually suggests since I write stories but I do not make movies. All I know is that some of the parts just didn't work for me. Everything else is Armchair Eberting. Pixels enters my 2015 "fun" rankings at #14. It missed the Threshold of Awesome by a wide margin, but it did not disappoint. And my sons loved it. (Note: Patrick Jean, who created the original short, was given credit among the writing team for the big-budget Pixels. This makes me happy.) (cross-posted from howardtayler.com)

This is a comic book movie in some of my favorite ways. It's full of references to Marvel canon that you don't have to catch, it strikes the right "reluctant hero" notes for me, and it's funny. The sequence of posters starting here on IMDB works really well for me. It does not clear the high bar set by The Avengers, however. Also, it invokes comic-book physics, but fails to invoke them consistently. The rules change in ways that seem like they should be pretty important, and which are blindingly obvious, but the inconsistency is NOT a story point, so paying attention is just distracting. Here's the problem in a nutshell: We are told, and even shown, that shrunken Ant-Man can hit like a hundred-and-fifty pound ball-bearing. In ant-mode he dents cars and cracks tile. Perfect! He didn't lose any mass. Just volume. The science behind the "Pym particle" is all kinds of ridiculous, but the initial explanation, which says that atomic distances are decreased, serves the movie just fine. But for comedy, we need to have Ant-Man riding Thomas the Tank Engine, or getting swatted out of the air with a wave of the hand. Oh, and for about half the action to work, Ant-Man needs to be able to ride on ants. That's not something a one-hundred-and-fifty pound ball-bearing can do. "Which is it?" I kept asking myself. "Tiny and heavy, or just tiny and cool?" The fix, obviously, is for the Pym particle to be able to variably effect the expression of mass by affected matter. Sometimes Ant-Man is heavy, sometimes he's not. But if they'd invoked THAT, then there are a host of other abilities he could have used, and should have used, starting with flying high above his target on the back of a flying ant before dropping fifty feet through the skull of the enemy goon, and then expanding to full size in a shower of gore. And, well, this isn't that kind of movie. Did I enjoy it? Absolutely. It doesn't come anywhere near being my favorite film of the year, entering my list at #8, but it did clear the Threshold of Awesome, and was a much more enjoyable movie than I expected it to be.

Minions crossed my Threshold of Disappointment, which is quite an accomplishment considering the fact that I really didn't expect much from it. I think the core problem was that I didn't care. Nothing seemed to be at stake. Sure, there were some funny moments, and the animation was brilliant, but ultimately the film failed to connect with me anywhere. Like Penguins of Madagascar, Minions attempts to take hilarious side characters and extend the hilarity to a feature film. Minions was hobbled by one of the key rules of the setting: the Minions themselves must never speak intelligibly. Remember WALL-E? Imagine the first act of that story with a narrator interpreting it all for us. That is exactly what happened for the opening scenes of Minions. I don't mind having a narrator set the tone, and Geoffrey Rush was great at that, but when the narrator must tell me what a character is thinking, feeling, and saying, something has gone terribly wrong. Minions enters my list at #16. If you've got kids who are begging to see this, my advice is to take the money you would have spent on that, and buy something cool for them with it. Then rent this when it comes out on DVD.

This Saturday I'll be at the Salt Lake Public Library at the invitation of Utah Sequential Artists and Illustrators. Alan Gardner, newshound-in-chief at The Daily Cartoonist, and a founding member of USAI*, did the poster above, and I love the caricature. Here are the details again, because copying and pasting text from an image is tedious: July 11, 201510:00 AM @ Salt Lake City Public LibraryConference Room A I'll have slides, I'll answer questions, and the whole thing will run for about 60 minutes. Seating is limited, and the event is open to the public. A few seats will be reserved for USAI members.

From Tuesday through Friday my family and I are participating in "Trek," which, in the local dialect of Mormon-speak, is interpreted to mean "hiking and camping with handcarts, hymns, and harmonicas." Just like our pioneer ancestors. I joked that this event was a cross between a Mormon Pioneer cosplay and an Oregon Trail LARP, but I've been told that this is not the case, and no, I'm not allowed to pretend to have died of dysentery so I can go home. If it sounds like I'm making light of it, that's because I make light of pretty much everything. Especially things of which I'm frightened. Camping in general has lost its appeal for me. Hiking? Sounds suspiciously like work. Doing them together, so that after a long hike you get a crap bed and food you carried and zero long soaks in a hot bath? Let's just say it's not Reese's Peanut Butter Cup math. I am not, however, a heartless, spineless fool who cannot see the benefit in these things. Sandra and I have been given the opportunity to walk the trail our ancestors walked one-point-six centuries ago, and we get to do so with all four of our children. The window of opportunity for this activity is pretty much this year, or never. Our kids are growing up and growing out. If we want to be miserable, all six of us, together in Wyoming, this is the time to do it. Am I making light again? Perhaps. We won't have "electronic devices" with us, which is Trek-speak for "no phones, no music-players, no movies, no laptops, no getting any work done Howard, and if you want to take pictures the camera must only be a camera, not a smart-something." If I want to tweet anything I'll have to write it by hand in my journal, and carefully count the characters on my fingers to make sure I don't use too many. I am issuing an electronics exemption for my Fitbit, which I will be wearing for the whole trip. I have it on good authority that the pioneers had 1) odometers, and 2) timepieces. Besides, this is the damaged one (the replacement from the manufacturer is still in the packaging) and the repair scars I've inflicted upon it exemplify the old saw about thrift:

I'm listening to the Terminator: Genisys soundtrack, by Lorne Balfe, as I write this. It is quite good.Per my remarks on Twitter, Terminator: Genisys is NOT the movie in which Starbuck says to Sarah Connor "this is my friend Neo. We're here to help with your robot problem." That impossibly wonderful crossing of the streams was my brother Randy's idea, and we both know that it's something we'll never have. Perhaps our grandchildren will get it on SpacePirateBay, or Googazon's hTube, but it will never be ours.Terminator: Genisys does manage to cross some streams, though, and to great effect. If you're familiar with the first two films, and perhaps a little confused by the third, the fourth, and the TV show, (the confusion results because you're trying to use the word "continuity" in conjunction with the words"time" and "travel,") you will find that Terminator: Genisys plays with all of the source material, and will reward those familiar with the franchise for paying attention.(As of this writing the original Terminator film, starring the inimitable Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor, is available on Netflix. Should you watch it first? Maybe!)I would have enjoyed the film much more had I not seen so many cool reveals in the trailers. They telegraph quite a bit of what's coming, but the studio did manage to hold a few things back, and the surprises were delightful. I want to talk about those things, and how effectively the story turned expectations upside down, but then you'll have less fun in the theater than I did, and that is almost the exact opposite of what I should be causing to happen with these reviews.Emilia Clarke, who plays Sarah Connor, initially struck me as looking far too young and tiny for the role. Funny thing: she's within a year of the same age Linda Hamilton was when she defined Sarah Connor for us in 1984's Terminator.Despite being four inches shorter than Hamilton, Clarke had me convinced by the end of the movie. It's probably because she's a fine actress, and has that amazing ability to project herself as larger than life. Not having watched enough Game of Thrones to see her as Daenerys, I can't speak for everything she does, but that particular piece resumé should speak much more loudly to you than anything I say.Terminator: Genisys did what few* sixth installments in a cinematic franchise do: it crosses my Threshold of Awesome, entering my 2015 list at #8.Regarding that, it seems that either my standards are slipping, or this is a good year for movies that I enjoy. Or maybe I've become a better judge of what I should see in the theater. My Threshold of Disappointment has only been tripped once (Furious 7), and the middle ground between disappointment and awesome is occupied by four titles: Inside Out, Insurgent, Strange Magic, and Seventh Son.The year is half over. I hope this does NOT mean that I've accrued a stack of movie karma that will require balancing in the coming months.(*Note: sixth installments that cross the Threshold of Awesome: The Avengers in 2012, and The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies in 2014. Sixth installments that don't?)