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Category: Essays

The Locksmith

Posted on by Alex Daily

This anecdote originally appeared as my Letterboxd review of Wes Anderson’s The Rat Catcher.

My neighbour had locked himself out, no phone, no keys, so he knocked on my door to ask to use my phone to call his friend who, one, had his spare key, and two, was apparently in the Phantom Zone, seen recently by half the city and yet totally unreachable.

So we called a locksmith, just the top result in the search engine of your choice, who was here as fast as he could have been, and instantly jimmied his way in with some WD-40, a sheet of plastic, a rope, and my door as a cheat sheet.

Which we both found incredibly impressive — I applauded without prompting, which I never do — and also, our human doors might as well not be there for this man, nay, ghost.

Anyway, the rat catcher here looks like an English version of the locksmith, which is why I’m sharing that story here in this review in lieu of struggling to find something to say about this one. It’s good, it’s like the other Wes Anderson Roald Dahl shorts.

The locksmith was a lot nicer than this rat catcher, though. There was a fistbump.

So You Want To Watch The “Ring” Movies (Part One, 1995-2000)

Posted on by Alex Daily

I watch a lot of movies. On average, about 400 a year. That makes it very easy to just say, okay, I’ll watch all 20 movies in this franchise. I am, of course, aware of two things. One, most people are simply not like this. And two, I have a tactical advantage over those people which they can benefit from.

Whether you go in chronological or release order — maybe you do Machete Order, you do you — everyone knows about the various ways in which to watch Star Wars. We all understand that if you really wanna keep up with the MCU you should probably just watch it all, but if you just wanna watch what you need for the next movie, you’re probably good with three movies and three Disney+ shows, all of which have their own prerequisites and– Okay, yeah, cripes, that’s a mess. But most movie franchises are not that complicated.

Which brings me to the Ring movies. At 26 movies — including Ju-On, which I don’t even get into here yet, and the various international versions, but not even counting the short films or the weird Chinese crossovers, unofficial sequels, Bunshinsaba… — I can imagine “most people” who might want to watch these will want to know what chaff to cut.

This is part one, covering the six Ring films released in the 1995-2000 period. Ju-On also starts in 2000, but I think this is a clean enough block to write up on its own. Part two, when I get there.

Here are the six films I’ll be covering below the fold:

  • The 1995 Ring TV movie, also known by its home video title Ring: Kanzenban (or, Ring: The Complete Edition.)
  • The 1998 Ring film, its original sequel Spiral (or, Rasen,) its replacement sequel Ring 2, and the prequel film Ring 0: Birthday.
  • The 1999 South Korean film The Ring Virus.

Continue reading “So You Want To Watch The “Ring” Movies (Part One, 1995-2000)”

“Rogers: The Musical”: I have some questions

Posted on by Alex Daily

I was recently reminded that the Disney park in California actually put on a 45-minute version of the Rogers: The Musical scenes from Hawkeye, so I watched first the first performance, and then the last performance of it. Turns out that if it happens in a Disney park you can probably find a high-quality recording of it on YouTube.

I like Rogers: The Musical as the goofy thing it is, which is a supposedly in-universe Hamilton-ising of Steve Rogers’ story. It starts off fairly faithful to the movies, and then as it goes on gets, as seen in Hawkeye, increasingly inaccurately silly. (It’s pretty clear the whole thing is engineered around the song we saw in Hawkeye.) And then it starts raising questions it doesn’t have answers to. Because where Alexander Hamilton is long dead, just another dead guy in history, Steve Rogers and his coworkers are… not.

A short note on chronology

Both versions I’ve watched present what you’re about to see, in the grand tradition of place-based theme park chronology, as the world premiere of Rogers: The Musical, which means, in theory, you’re watching the exact 19 December 2024 premiere performance Clint attends in Hawkeye.1Hawkeye 1×01: “Never Meet Your Heroes” (2021)

Let’s just get into it: What exactly is this based on?

Steven Grant Rogers was enough of a public figure and then, with the SSR, surrounded by enough historically notable people, that the WW2 section of the story is easy enough to source from what we can easily imagine are several history books and biographies that broadly speaking agree with each other. This is what he was like as a youth, how he came to join Abraham Erskine’s Project Rebirth, how he saved the Howling Commandoes. Rogers was a living legend before he went into the ice, and it’s easy to imagine something akin to the Chernow Hamilton coming out between 2011, when Fury pulls him back out,2Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) and 2016, when Rogers, together with his co-conspirators Wanda Maximoff, Natasha Romanoff, and Sam Wilson go into hiding after falling out of favour with the United States government.3Captain America: Civil War (2016)

It’s the rest of the story that’s harder to justify a source for. Sure, the SHIELD leak and its presumably extremely public dissemination through journalism and government hearings4Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) covers the Battle of New York,5The Avengers (2012) and a lot of other stuff that’s skipped over in the Save the City montage, which is presumably how the musical knows about Steve’s list, though I think that’s weirdly personally specific, and about Fury being there when he woke up. Fury is a known figure in the world by 2024, but his notorious shadowyness will be why they don’t have much to work with for his actual personality and go for “sassy” instead. There’s probably another book out there in the world that you can get this from.

But then it gets really messy. Obviously Ant-Man was not at the Battle of New York. But Fury also rambles off, in 2011, years before most of these people join or even get their powers, but okay, whatever, a whole Avengers roster. Let’s go through them one by one.

  • “A Panther in Wakanda.” Sure, T’Challa’s association with the Avengers is presumably just a known fact.
  • “A Sokovian named Wanda.” As far as the public is concerned, the way she dealt with Crossbones’ attack in Lagos is the reason for the Sokovia Accords6Captain America: Civil War (2016) and after that she breaks out of the Raft and becomes an international fugitive. Footage probably exists of her fighting alongside the Avengers at Novi Grad and at the Battle of Earth. I’ll accept it, but it’s a little weird.
  • “A Star who is a planet’s son.” There’s genuinely no way Peter Quill is a known entity on Earth or that anyone knows he’s Ego’s son. The same is true for the rest of the Guardians — at most I’m willing to accept people know about “the tree and the raccoon who were there at the Battle of Earth.”
  • I can’t quite make out the line, “An AI who ran his own” something, but Vision. About as believable as Wanda, sure.
  • Spider-Man. Sure, the world’s knowledge of Peter Parker was erased ~10 days before this,7Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) but we know about Spider-Man.
  • “A lawyer who can’t really see.” Matt’s identity is not public knowledge as far as I know.
  • “A raccoon and a talking tree.” Like I said.
  • War Machine. Doctor Strange. Sure, these are probably public enough figures.

This all works just fine in our universe, but not really in theirs. To the Alex Daily of Earth-199999, these would be ridiculous allegations or revelations. People who know Matt make jokes, right, but there’s not that many blind lawyers associated with the Avengers8Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021), and people make jokes about Matt, sure, but we just don’t know some of this stuff. I can’t possibly justify a source for biographical details about Star-Lord.

The Save the City montage then rambles through a bunch of the big fights. These are all public knowledge. But is Steve’s use of the Time Stone to go back first to Peggy and then to make sure he does that a thing the public knows about? Nobody’s even really there to witness this conversation. Jim Barnes and Sam Wilson are aware of the broad facts of it, but why would they ever go on the record about this anywhere? As far as the Alex Daily of Earth-199999 would be concerned, Captain America simply hasn’t been seen since shortly after the Battle of Earth. Not that weird, he’s still legally an international fugitive.

Some of these details are on the level of, everyone involved must’ve been keeping detailed journals, but when would those even have been released? It’s December of 2024, it hasn’t even been that long since the Battle of Earth.

Conclusion

The idea of a Hamilton-analogous Rogers: The Musical is fun. These are public figures in this fictional world, they’d have certain cultural positions. But Steve Rogers was an international fugitive like ten months before this moment. If that position has changed, we don’t know about it. It’s weird to make a pretty hagiographic musical about this dude at this moment in time, right? It’s weird.

So here’s the only reasonable conclusion I can come to. From statues of mass murderer Confederates to a recent President currently out on bail, America has always had an element of, let’s call it, a willingness or even a desire to admire or worship the worst of itself. On Earth-19999, in December of 2024, based on Rogers: The Musical‘s relationship to the reality of Earth-199999, I posit to you that Steve Rogers might be who that admiration is currently predominantly aimed at. There might be Rogers Republicans, a CapAnon movement. HYDRA-emblazoned “SHIELD Lives Matter” stickers on pick-up trucks.

Which means the reason Clint is the only Avenger attending opening night is he’s the Republican Avenger. Oof, yikes. Couldn’t be me, Clint. Fix your heart, man.

  • 1
    Hawkeye 1×01: “Never Meet Your Heroes” (2021)
  • 2
    Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
  • 3
    Captain America: Civil War (2016)
  • 4
    Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)
  • 5
    The Avengers (2012)
  • 6
    Captain America: Civil War (2016)
  • 7
    Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)
  • 8
    Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

Review: “Dogman” (2023)

Posted on by Alex Daily

Cross-posted from Letterboxd and Mastodon.

See, this is why you go to Sneak Preview. Most of the time it’s Bank of Dave or The Courier, but then every now and then it’s something you didn’t know existed and that hits you just right.

Sneak Preview was 2023’s Dogman.

After a brief worry that the picture would be Super Transphobic — you never know with these things, you gotta be careful — it instead turns into a glorious portrait of a beautiful, complex character, the titular Dogman, played by Caleb Landry Jones.

He’s called that, you see, because he has A Lot Of Dogs. And over those dogs he has an amount of easy control that borders on a psychic power. And that gets… a little silly sometimes? But even at its silliest — his beautiful drag performances are just voiced by real tape of the singers he’s dressed at — it manages to land as something very sincere, very beautiful.

If I have any issues with this one, it’s, well, the character uses a wheelchair, and Hollywood is often a little weird about how it depicts that. It might be a little weird here, depending on where your sensibilities lie in that regard.

The same is true for the ways in which this is queer — it might just land differently on you than it did on me, and that’s fine.

It’s also, in the end, unfortunately, forced to conform to the shape of a modern crime film — and as much as I think the climactic Dark “Home Alone”-esque violence is a hoot of a sequence, I think something lower scale might have suited the rest of the film better.

I think when this actually comes out you’re gonna see a VERY wide range of opinions. A lot of them are gonna be bad opinions. Mine might be one of those!

But by Dog, I thought that was terrific. Beautiful. Gorgeous. A masterpiece I’ll think about for a long time.

Dogman did nothing wrong. Long live Dogman. Dogman — forever.

Weird Soda Review: Coke Zero “3000”

Posted on by Alex Daily

An energy drink-shaped can of Coca-Cola Zero Sugar Creations: 3000 Limited Edition.So I’ve had this one in the fridge since Sunday, but then on Monday I burned my tongue on hot soup, so it took me a few days of not wanting to waste it on my slightly numb mouth zone to get around to: Coca-Cola Zero Sugar Creations: 3000 Limited Edition, which claims to be a “future-inspired flavour co-created with AI.”

Now, I don’t know exactly what that means, but my guess is an ad exec somewhere got paid way too much to get a soda engineer to type some things into ChatGPT, or some other awful plagiarism generator. Whose artisanal soda recipe was this ripped off from? There may be no way to know.

Let’s get to it.

Expectations

I was pretty sure I’d seen this one go around when it was on shelves in America, but Googling it as I write this, it turns out this one is totally new, so I guess my vague recollection to expect a raspberry element in there somewhere, or maybe a blue flavour, that’s off the table. Neither the ingredients list nor the first sniff give any additional information — it’s just the same hollow smell as all zero sugar cola. The colour is the same as any Coca-Cola.

Now, a second sniff after a pour makes me feel like I might be onto something about the blue and raspberry flavours. Time to sip.

Taste

I’m very used to being betrayed by awful mystery Fantas, but I was really hoping this wouldn’t immediately send me there. And yet my first sip’s impression is… cotton candy? The vibe is definitely candular. Candesque. Of the Cand. But it’s not a specific cand. It’s just sweet. A little sour? Raspberry flavour candy as a touchstone is not a million miles off, actually. But it doesn’t taste like raspberry, not really. It’s like. You know raspberry. You recognise raspberry in the movie based on raspberry. And this is the third sequel to that movie, but now it’s all original material, and it’s not really anything like you were picturing based on raspberry? It’s like that.

Yeah, no, finishing the can, I have no idea what this tastes like. No. Wait.

Conclusion

Vaporwave. That’s it. Fuck me, it doesn’t taste like the year 3000 or like AI but like Vaporwave. It tastes: Like Vaporwave. And much like Vaporwave, it is indeed tolerable for a few sips, but quickly becomes tiresome from being so sugary and so overly produced.

I’m gonna go drink some water.

Review: Haruki Murakami’s “1Q84” (2011)

Posted on by Alex Daily

Original Japanese cover of the first volume.I was, chronologically speaking, about to graduate. Unfortunately, the work that led to that moment meant I’d caught up on podcasts. Nothing left to listen to1This is… relative, but the practical effect is as described.. That not having happened in some time, I panicked, decided I should listen to more of the kinds of books adults listened to, read, or at least pretended to listen to or read, and put a bunch (four) of Murakami novels and short story collections on my phone. 18 May, 2022, according to Overcast’s timestamp. I liked Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, I liked, mostly, the short stories I’d managed to find. Killing Commendatore seemed too imposing, which just left 1Q84.

Unfortunately, “catching up on podcasts” doesn’t stop podcasts coming and coming, or Big Finish dropping box set after box set, and soon enough, both 1Q84 and Killing Commendatore were but ideas at the bottom of a pile. Piles upon piles upon piles. So, this summer, more than a year later, having both graduated and finished the first half of a follow-up degree, I finally put it on. A choice, curiosity finally getting the better of me, not just because I’d run out of podcasts.

So. 1Q84. Tengo is a cram school math tutor with aspirations towards published authorship who is asked to shepherd a young writer’s amateurish manuscript to winning a new writers’ prize, only to discover the magical realist work of fiction is actually a true story meant specifically to disarm the real forces behind a dangerous cult. Aomame is a personal trainer slash personal assassin whose line of work eventually puts her in the position of having to take out the leader of a dangerous cult. They had a brief interaction once, as children, and long to reunite. 1Q84 is the story, told in alternating point-of-view chapters, of how they find themselves finally drawn back together in another world entirely.

Where Murakami thrives in his portrayal of this shared journey is in his descriptions of process, ritual, work. Whether that’s Tengo’s writing or Aomame’s killing, the ritual of reading to a comatose parent or of the departure from one world to get to another, or repetitive, boring time spent in isolation, it’s his descriptions of these two people going about their well-rehearsed business where the book really comes alive. Murakami really sells Tengo’s writing as an act of magic, Aomame’s killing as a cosmic duty. The travel to another world an accident, a spell tripped into, but a ritual nonetheless.

But it feels like the book reviews itself in its reviews of Fuka-Era’s novel Air Chrysalis. The magic2The magical kind, not the process, ritual, work stuff I describe above, which, in fact, gets pretty thoroughly explained., reviewers say, is left unexplained, the ending is too ambiguous. But that Murakami himself is clearly aware of the easy criticisms you could lob at 1Q84 — and a lot of his work in general — doesn’t mean they’re not true. If you don’t want people to say your ending is too ambiguous, you write a different ending, one where all the other plot strands don’t slowly fall away until even the A-plot falls away into another world.

So, yes, the ending is ambiguous. It would almost have to be. The magic, of Little People and Air Chrysalii, is vague. Would the book be better if Murakami explained what the Little People eat for breakfast? I haven’t even mentioned the absolutely impressively miserable sex scenes, which I’m pretty sure aren’t actually meant to be gross, they’re just written from a purely Male Writer’s Perspective, there’s truly no attempt made to see it from any other angle. But does any of that matter that much when the journey is so riveting? Does any of it matter when the prose — translated by go-to Murakami translators Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel — really, genuinely manages to engross in way that makes me go, oh, yeah, the absolutely wild thing that’s happening right now makes total sense? It really doesn’t.

Of course, the quality of the audiobook specifically also goes a long way to why I feel that way — narrated by Allison Hiroto in the Aomame chapters, Marc Vietor in the Tengo chapters, and then in the third volume by Mark Boyett in the Ushikawa chapters, each character’s respective reader so fully embodies both the story and the character that when Aomame and Tengo are finally reunited in the final chapters and their readers voice their dialogue in the other’s chapters, it moved me in a way prose never could have. They’ve not just reunited, they’re talking to each other.

Terrific.

  • 1
    This is… relative, but the practical effect is as described.
  • 2
    The magical kind, not the process, ritual, work stuff I describe above, which, in fact, gets pretty thoroughly explained.

Analysis: “Wreck-It Ralph” (2012)

Posted on by Alex Daily

Also posted as a review on Letterboxd, derived from a thread on Mastodon.

Never got around to the sequel, thought I’d go for a refresher on this one first.

Their respective games’ fellow characters are bigoted towards Ralph and Vanellope in essentially the same ways — total social exclusion through rigid enforcement of arbitrary rules designed to exclude them — but for different reasons.

Where Ralph’s exclusion is because he’s “the bad guy” who wants to be let into “good guy” spaces, approaching almost a faux “trans predator” thing, this idea that no matter what, in the ideas of Gene and the others he’s always gonna be pretending,

Vanellope is excluded because she has a disability, her “glitch,” when confronted she calls it “pixlexia,” the other racers’ mockery resembles common mockery of physical and learning disabilities, her peers make no effort to try to understand.

Felix, in this read, is the well-meaning cis liberal, the guy who on paper is totally fine with Ralph, but can’t bring himself to prioritise Ralph’s well-being over his own status because doing so would endanger his “hero privilege,” a limitation he only overcomes by figuring out a way to make himself the lead character of part of the story.

Unfortunately in the end Ralph and Vanellope’s conflicts are overcome not because Gene and the other penthousers learn to accept and love Ralph for who he is instead of who he was written to be, but because he “earns his medal” by saving the day, literally just trans exceptionalism, and not because reasonable accommodations are made to help Vanellope thrive but because her glitch is essentially brought under control, her disability “medicated,” the thing that made her unique transformed into something nobody finds too uncomfortable.

I realise 2012 is a different country, but there is simply no goddamn way anybody like me — trans, autistic — was involved in the production of this fucking movie.

We will never be able to look to Disney and truly see ourselves, it’s just never gonna happen.

Anyway, fun video game movie. Cute aesthetic, the fictional games fit right in with the real-world ones. Kinda proves these things can work as a movie in a way nobody has quite managed to do since. I say, actively not looking at the Mario movie.

On second chances

Posted on by Alex Daily

This is a necropost. A version of the following was originally posted as a Reddit comment on 7 August, 2023.

For context: This was in reply to speculation that an upcoming Big Finish announcement might involve the return of actor John Barrowman to the company’s Torchwood range after he was dropped, and a big anniversary story went unreleased, by the company in light of a pattern of repeated, open, and enthusiastic sexual misconduct. Wikipedia at this time calls them “allegations,” but Barrowman and his co-stars were openly talking about this behaviour in public on stage at conventions. It wasn’t a secret then, and it’s not a secret now.

If you’re a Doctor Who fan in the places where I’m a Doctor Who fan, you may have seen calls from other fans to bring him back in some way despite all this, because some people prioritise their fondness for a character over the safety and wellbeing of the cast and crew around the actor portraying that character.

This was my response to one such call, asking for Barrowman to be given a second chance.

I’m preserving it here mostly because I’ve got a feeling this will keep coming up, and I’ll want to be able to pull it back out to repost or reference.

John Barrowman has had his second chance. He behaved the way he did throughout the 00s until he was forced to apologise for it in 2008, both behind the scenes for how he was on set and publicly for doing it on Radio 1, and then… openly kept doing it, consistently, at least as late as his time on Arrow, where he was walking around his co-stars’ trailers naked and sending them pictures of, again, him naked, that he made a crew member take.

He claims in his 2021 apology that his behaviour has changed since 2008, but that’s clearly a lie, then, isn’t it. Perhaps it didn’t include crew members who might not have felt comfortable speaking up or saying no back in 2008 and that’s what’s changed? There’s “another chance,” and then there’s, why would you ever employ this walking liability again?

So, when I say, “RTD knows better,” what I mean is, RTD is a PR-savvy showrunner whose previous run on Doctor Who was mired in controversy that he has somehow managed to escape significant public scrutiny over. Even in the best possible scenario, after a thorough redemption tour for Barrowman — which could happen, but won’t start at Doctor Who — bringing him back, even just at Big Finish, would at the very least attach controversy to the show’s brand that, surely, RTD is sensibly trying to avoid. Why do that to yourself? Why do that to the show?

19 December 2023: Here’s a paragraph I think I might add in the future.

In general, I’m against the idea of permanent banishment as punishment for behaviour in different times, right, but there does come a point where I’m fine saying, actually, yeah, this person probably shouldn’t work in this industry ever again, and John Barrowman is on the wrong side of that line. Every opportunity given to him should instead be given to an up-and-coming queer person who’s not gonna commit sexual violence the second they get a chance.

Review: “The Blue Whale” (2020)

Posted on by Alex Daily

This is a necropost. This review of 2020 Egyptian internet challenge movie The Blue Whale was originally posted on Letterboxd. You should not watch 2020’s The Blue Whale.

The first sixty of these 77 minutes are trash. At best it’s disposable, and at worst it’s openly vile and toxic about mental health issues and what might drive a person to suicide. In the middle of those two extremes it’s also just very, very dumb about the internet. And not in the fun way a dumb slasher about a cursed phone or whatever can be, it’s more like how your parents or your dumbest uncle can be dumb about the internet.

And then, in the back 17, it drops the most truly unhinged, deranged twist I’ve ever seen. It’s not even a plot twist, because it comes completely out of nowhere, is never examined, and would have no time to go anywhere if it was going to, it’s more of a costume twist —

(And I’m not putting a spoiler warning on this because if I do nobody will read it, but look away and go watch it, even though it’s bad and you shouldn’t, if you don’t want to be spoiled for what is undeniably an absolutely damaged twist — )

But here I can do a read more.

Continue reading “Review: “The Blue Whale” (2020)”

What “Rashomon” is about

Posted on by Alex Daily

Lightly edited from Letterboxd.

My understanding of 1950’s Rashomon had always been that it’s about four witnesses of the same event sharing their contradictory good-faith accounts of it to a court. “That’s not how I remember it,” as one Homer J Simpson once famously put it. A tale of how human memory is subjective, and can not be objective.

But that’s not what 1950’s Rashomon is about at all: It’s about four witnesses of the same event choosing, one way or another, to actively lie about what they saw.

Tajōmaru the bandit lies to big himself up, regardless of whether he did it or not. He wants to be Tajōmaru the bandit, who killed a samurai in honourable combat. But it’s only in his own testimony that he’s ever presented as a person who’s even remotely capable of that.

The samurai’s wife lies because the most plausible account (the woodcutter’s) is, frankly, fucking pathetic. She comes off very poorly in it, and her husband dies a pathetic, pitiful death. A samurai’s honour is a thing that matters, dangit, is the thinking here — perhaps she feels she herself is to blame for what, and this is her way of reconciling those facts. (If the woodcutter’s account isn’t true, she may still simply be finding her own way to deal with the event.)

The medium lies because she’s a medium. It’s what they do. (Alternatively, the spirit of the samurai lies to preserve his own honour and let off his wife.)

Finally, even the woodcutter employs some creative editing to not get in trouble for stealing the valuable dagger — but his account, in which the wife spurs the samurai and the bandit on to fight each other and the samurai dies a pathetic, pitiful death, is by far the most plausible, and his motive to lie is only for not testifying. He has six kids to get back to — seven, now — and in the grand picture of things, that matters more than who stole the dagger.

Though there is some overlap, the accounts contradict so significantly that they can’t be reconciled. They simply can not be good-faith flawed accounts of the same event — the priest at the end isn’t losing his faith over the events described, but because each account is designed primarily to benefit the person recounting it, because this is a movie about what could make people who should objectively know the truth choose to lie about it.

Or at least, that’s how I’ll remember it.

Terrific picture. I regret to inform you all I’m going to be correcting people about it for the rest of my life.

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