Review: A New Hope

A New Hope is one of those films I have very little to say about.

It's well made, a classic and it earns its place in the pantheon of must-watch films but if I go purely by my enjoyment of my time with it, I can sincerely say it wasn't as fun or interesting as I'd hoped it to be.

This isn't my first rodeo, I watched A New Hope back as a child and over the years it's been kept fresh in my memory through cultural osmosis but I'd lie if I said it was something I was aching to go back to.

Whereas I'm surprised at how much I ended up enjoying The Phantom Menace upon repeat viewing, A New Hope I was startlingly apathetic towards.

I think a part of it is how some beats just don't connect with me. My particular standout is Luke finding the corpses of his aunt and uncle, a clearly traumatic and life-changing moment... But it's never mentioned save for one moment after it happens. Luke losing the only parental figures he's ever known is treated like getting begrudged permission to leave home. The lightsaber duel between Ben and Vader felt more flaccid and limp than ever. Han Solo's once-charming mischief comes off as boarish and the casual sexism that goes unchallenged kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.

Other problems also crop up, but I'll get to those in a bit. If I had to describe my experience in microcosm it's that partway through I'd just.. Walked away. Seriously, I walked away to go to the bathroom and for 45 minutes just forgot to come back. Perhaps in '78 it was a breath of fresh air for genre films but with my current taste and having lived out two decades of watching sci-fi, it just doesn't feel as monumental as some make it out to be.

Still, I didn't hate the film. It was perfectly watchable. Not a revelatory film experience, actually, the mundanity of it all kind of seeped in and it just felt like I was watching a decent pilot episode for a TV show I had a passing interest in.

The flaws of A New Hope are mundane. They're... Barely worth talking about.

One thing the prequel trilogy does have is flaws worth talking about and I think both as a critic and an audience member I'd prefer a film that has a couple noteworthy flaws than a film that's decently good, perhaps even great but has just very little to leave behind when the credits roll.

Still, I welcome the rest of the films as a chance to re-examine this pop culture giant.

Perhaps I'll rediscover what it is that attracted me to these films in the first place.

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Review: The Phantom Menace

Episode 1 of Star Wars is kind of the holy grail of bad Star Wars movies. Between Jar Jar Binks and overly explained Mido-Chlorians, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone disagreeing that it's bad.

So uh, here's a lukewarm defense of it.

I'm not going to say it isn't flawed or that there aren't major problems. Anakin kind of fails upwards, and despite the majority of the plot hinging on Padme she ends up taking a back seat for most of the film. There are 55 separate wipe transitions, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are clearly the people who matter here but they have to constantly share screen time with unlikeable CGI monstrosities and well... You know. The accents.

There are reasons to dislike this film.

But I was surprised at how much I didn't end up hating it on rewatch. I ended up liking it a lot more than I thought. The stuff that holds up still does. Pod Racing is great, Obi and QG versus Darth Maul is great, in fact any time Obi and QG are on screen together it's a pretty fun ride.

Coming back to anything after a long hiatus is kind of a tough feat and no one really knows what the best way to go about it is. I think The Force Awakens had more success than The Phantom Menace in that regard but it's clear just how many kinks the original trilogy left to iron out, and while The Phantom Menace is definitely not the answer, I do think it was at least a great shot in the arm for the franchise.

It's a little hard to quantify where I'd put it now. It's not a great film but I also don't think it's an unsaveably bad one. A couple edits here and there could easily put The Phantom Menace as one of the best Star Wars films of all time, but personally, the less George Lucas touches Star Wars, the better at this point.

If you haven't seen it, I'd still recommend it, if you haven't seen it in a while, I think you'll be surprised at how much holds up but either way, don't expect it to blow your mind. It's the phantom fucking menace, so, you know.

Prepare for all that entails.

55 wipes, man. Someone needs to bat Lucas's hand from the keyboard.

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Review; Bring Me The Horizon's Count Your Blessings

Count Your Blessings is a mean spirited album which is more intent on trying to emulate the style of The Black Dahlia Murder while slutshaming on 60% of the tracks. There are musical ideas in here that I think are worth exploring, I think the unashamed guitar solos and pick squeals and breakdowns are fun to listen to but lyrically, for, all but three songs, Count Your Blessings really is more about trying to sound like the most annoying teenager on Myspace, with such prize winning lyrics as "Fuck yourself you stupid fucking whore".

That said, the few good tracks on here are very enjoyable. Pray For Plagues, A Lot Like Vegas and Tell Slater Not To Wash His Dick hold up as some of the most enjoyable of the genre and the two instrumental pieces really do improve the pacing of the album, whereas songs  like (I Used To Make Out With Medusa) drag and are just Bring Me The Horizon at their absolute worst. The Hot Topic version of Slipknot's Eyeless you'll either love or hate, and I'm personally fond of the stylistic quirks of Bring Me The Horizon put onto, to be frank, a much better songwriter's track.

It's just a genuine shame that for 70% of it, you're going to be wishing you were listening to Suicide Season instead.

While they've grown a lot in the years, this is an album which while formative, doesn't hold up as well as you'd think. There's better deathcore and there's better Bring Me The Horizon albums out there so playlist the two or three songs you actually end up liking and dump the rest.

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Review: Netflix's You

The first thing I thought at the end of the first episode of Netflix's You was, Oh no, I really like Joe.

And that's awful, but also the point.

Netflix's You is a psychological thriller that will make you forget that it isn't a 2009 Rom Com film right up until it has a big twist to hit you with. Everything is there, the meet-cute the quirky love interest, the whirlwind romance.

Except of course that Joe is human garbage and he deserves nothing less than to fail at every opportunity.

And that's kind of great. Joe is objectively the bad guy but you can't help but root for him. He deserves to fail, he deserves to get hurt, he deserves all the bad things that happen to him but you want him to succeed, you want him to get the girl and that is terrifying.

It's a unique type of horror, it's grounded in the likeability and charm that real-life stalkers often have. Joe seems like a charming, nice, safe guy on the surface. He reads, he's articulate, he's smart, and super cute. But he will also murder in your name.

Just when you think there's no territory for the show to explore, it often pulls out a surprisingly profound aspect of dating, things like falling out of love with a partner. This show about the worst relationship surprisingly has more insightful things to say about a healthy relationship than most shows about relatively healthy couples. It's meditative on the complexities of intertwining your life with another person, while also making you fear very deeply that the person you're with might be a stalker and murderer.

It's subversive, in a strange way. Sera Gamble and Greg Berlanti have done a wonderful job of bringing the central premise of the book to life, while using all the techniques that makes the medium of television so different.

It's not without its flaws though. The gimmick can lean a little too much on Joe's side and there's a fair bit of plot contrivance to tie together some of the story beats. And for as likeable as Joe is, Beck can kind of be the worst. The finale will either work for you or it won't and it does take eleven episodes for Beck to get a clue.

But despite some hiccups, Netflix's You is compelling, gripping, thrilling and terrifying.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go watch something with Penn Badgeley where I don't feel guilty about thirsting over him.

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Crunchyroll Needs To Adapt Or It Will Die

Crunchyroll is a streaming subscription service and content host which brings anime and manga to desperate and lonely weebs like myself, although my weeb power level hasn't quite gone up in a long time.

If you live anywhere other than Japan and you like anime, I'd wager a guess that your main anime source is Crunchyroll (or like, Netflix's paltry selection), or pirating. Not trying to out anyone, but the only other option is expensive imports or bootlegs and I doubt anyone is really doing that.

Now I like Crunchyroll. I like the idea that for an affordable price you can stream seasons of anime and get it at a decent quality with decent subs, and the upload schedule is fair. However, Crunchyroll might have the worst user experience out of all the streaming services I use and honestly, that doesn't bode well. The more I use it, the more feature bare it seems. And that's led me to one conclusion;

Crunchyroll needs to adapt, or it will die.

Any software solution has two parts, the back end and the front end. Back end is the hardcore mechanical stuff, such as the netcode and videoplayback and generally Crunchyroll does alright with that. Crunchyroll works, but it's the front end, the bells and whistles, the user interface that really lets the service down.

For starters, there are web 1.0 sites that are more visually appealing than this eyesore of trying to pass itself off as a design. Websites nowadays look a lot more like applications than interactive word documents and that's just the start of the problems with Crunchyroll.

Here's what Crunchyroll could use:

1. Animated Thumbnails

2. Trailers

3. Original Content

4. A Cleaner Interface

5. Curated suggestions of content on the home page

6. Animations, please, for the love of god, add animations to this website

7. Larger fonts

8. Skip Intro Button

9. Autoplay (At least moving to the next episode of the thing you're watching after 5 seconds)

10. A Continue Watching Tab

11. Dark Mode, Jesus please.

That's just all off the back of my head from different, better video streaming services. I couldn't believe this stuff was missing when it's clearly not that difficult to implement.

But this article is a dime a fucking dozen, everyone has gripes with Crunchyroll for different reasons and I'm not the first asshole to suggest it. Maybe use some of that massive marketing budget that hasn't built up the audience you've wanted.

What I wanna say is that I like anime, I want it to get to more people, I want more people to have access to a good service to use it.

It cannot be that hard to implement that. It just cannot.

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Making (Art) Is Hard Work

Hey, I'm Matt-Dave, and I have released exactly two videogames, written over 100 blog posts, wrote a novel, and recorded 4 demos with a band that broke up.

And those things were all bloody hard to do.

Any personal project is something that's very hard to get off the ground. You're usually solely responsible for it's completion and holding yourself to task is hard. Often, the reward is... Nothing. Perhaps a small audience, perhaps a couple pats on the back, but most of the time you're shouting into the void and hoping someone hears it.

It's hard to make a career and name for yourself off of passion projects, hell, this blog has been going for years now and I couldn't tell you if any actual humans read my blog or if it's just porn bots.

Why do we do the things we do, even if they're difficult, tedious, time consuming and sometimes not even that cathartic?

Well, I crave creative satisfaction. I consider myself something of an artist. I make music, I make games, I write, all that good stuff and I publish a lot of my work online. Sometimes it just doesn't get noticed.

That's okay though.

Making art for the sake of making art is where the true joy in life lies. I wish I could spend my life just doing that. Just writing, just penning blog posts, just making games, just making songs. It's some of the greatest pleasures I've had as a human being and I wish more people could experience those things.

But it takes its toll.

Sometimes you do wonder if it's all worth it, if screaming into the void means you're just yelling at yourself.

I don't know what to do about that.

I do know I'll continue. I'm trying my best to make something out of nothing here and I hope some day it will pay off. In some ways it already has, so we'll see if there's any further return on investment.

All I can say is, finish your passion projects. Don't let them linger.

We all have too many lingering regrets already.

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Evangelion; Shinji, DON'T Get In The Robot (Unless You Want To)

Alright you pathetic soon to be Fanta Orange offspring of Lilith, I watched Evangelion a while back and I have thoughts and opinions and you're going to hear them as sure as Shinji gets in the goddamn robot.

*deep inhale*

So like one method I like to use to understand and establish theme is abstraction, the other being personification. So like, if you had to explain the narrative without the trappings of the diegetic jargon to someone who knows nothing about the work, what would you say it's about, what happens in the story? If the work was a person, what is that person's view on things? So I'm going to use that framework to say Evangelion is actually about the military complex and the emotionally abusive nature of adults in power. Strap in, bitches, we're about to get into our robot moms, and it's gonna be a long ride.

Also spoiler alert but like, fuck it, none of us even understand Eva anyway so like, you only live once, might as well read on.

So Evangelion is about a 14 year old boy named Shinji who is estranged from his cold and distant father who emotionally blackmails him into piloting a monstrous weapon of mass destruction. This WMD operates on the principal that any damage it takes inflicts sympathetic pain onto the pilot and the better you are at piloting it, the more painful it is to use. There's a war going on between two factions with opposing loyalties and goals but ultimately they're actually cut from the same cloth. Shinji's first bout with the enemy leaves him with excruciating pain but he ultimately succeeds. But because he was untrained and underqualified, he causes some collateral damage, and this prompts one of his classmates to punch the shit out of his tiny baby boy face and he goes to live with a stranger who is his handler that plays at being his surrogate mother.
Shinji fights on and the trauma gets so bad that he attempts to run and escape the life. He doesn't get too far or even leaves for very long before the military brings him back to continue his government approved torture sessions.

Anyway he meets his fellow child soldiers and becomes something of a war hero through training and continued victories. One of the fellow child soldiers, Asuka, co-habitates with him and his handler. Asuka proceeds to badmouth and verbally abuse him at every opportunity and he takes it because while it's not validation of his inherent worth as a human being it is brutal honesty rather than obfuscation and the drip feedings of praise, which is the second closest thing Shinji feels to friendship.

As more of the enemy is defeated, and the war takes its toll on the children and cities, the WMDs get more and more out of control. One of Shinji's friends is then selected to pilot one of these WMDS and it goes so awfully that the other pilots are forced to face one of their own in armed combat. Shinji is forced into the fight and is ordered to murder his best friend to clean up the military;s mistake. He maintains that there's a better way and in response they take control of his WMD away from him and they all but murder one of only three friends he truly has.

Shinji quits for real and now that he's disposable the military allows this, so he lives as a citizen for a while. He lives out his days, convinced that being the pilot of a WMD is the only thing that gives him worth, but a disgraced member of the military tells him that it's not his ability to affect change for the better, but his willingness to do so that gives him worth. After his old comrades are defeated and wounded, he chooses to take up arms, but this time the trauma and anger causes him and his WMD to commit the unspeakable and he defiles and eats the body of his enemy.

Now so intwined, the border between him and his weapon have blurred. Shinji's friends try in vain for a long stretch of time to seperate him and the machine but their efforts are in vain. This goes on and the one thing that brings him back is the pleading of his surrogate mother.
Back in the frey, one of Shinji's comrades is murdered and replaced with an identical person, and no one notices or cares until far too late.

Finally, Shinji then meets Kaworu, the last child who will be drafted into this to use the WMDs. Kaworu displays a romantic interest in Shinji. They do a back and forth and Kaworu expresses interest only the sides of Shinji that are separate from him as a pilot. Kaworu then explicitly tells Shinji that he has inherent worth, and that his mere existence makes the world a better place. However, Kaworu has loyalties to the other side, and it is through this knowledge that Shinji finds out the enemy has only been variants of him, that they are all human, and that he has been fighting a war for survival on a world that was taken from other beings who were here first.

Kaworu begs Shinji to kill him so that Shinji and his kind may live on, but the inner turmoil of this wrecks Shinji inside. It lingers for an eternity on Shinji holding Kaworu's fate in his hands, and then finally, Shinji succumbs to Kaworu's wishes and kills the one person who told him that he has inherent worth.

Anyway, the next two episodes are various montages and frankly, it's psuedo-psychology mixed with baby's first philosophy class told over montage that gets stale and easy to tune out fast. It basically ends with Shinji learning that his self worth has to come from within and yadda yadda nothing we don't already know.

End of Evangelion is a mess that throws away the entire show's worth of character building so that there can be a dark joke at the expense of Shinji, or rather of Shinji as the audience surrogate. It kind of smacks of Serenity syndrome, and you can kind of tell that this was something made a while after the conclusion of the main story and the creators didn't really have the best handle on it the world anymore. The giveaway here is that when Shinji and Asuka fight the mass-produced Evangelions, they don't experience sympathetic pain but rather full blown injury transferrence. 

End Of Evangelion is stupid.

Still fun to watch despite being psuedo-psychology and esoteric bullshit.

Major Theme 01: Adults in power are emotionally manipulative!

This is pretty easy from the start, Shinji is convinced to pilot the Eva only after being shown that his dad plans to shove a barely conscious still bleeding classmate into the cockpit and Shinji's only courses of action are to allow this woman to die or get in the robot.
On top of that, Misato *constantly* attacks his masculinity and bravery, Shinji's father drip-feeds him praise and dies a sad and ignoble death admitting that he sees himself in his son and that he keeps his distance out of fear of hurting him, because rather than working on himself and his parenting, Gendo would rather try fuck the world.

Major Theme 02: The military is patriarchal!

Misato and Ritsuko at one point go to a military conference and in more ways than one we have a display of the sexism of military leaders. Ritsuko's is talked down upon and the very idea of using Eva units is brought into question. Birthed from Lilith and literally containing the soul of a woman, the Evas are seen as inferior and incompatible with the military and the way it runs.
Major props for Misato's fuck you guys, I'm gonna get in the damn robot myself moment.
Gendo, as the resident military complex also just... Abuses women. He trivializes their pain, he treats them as disposable... Risuko's mother died and he immortalized her in computer form as something reduced literally down to roles which serve him, as a mother, woman, and scientist. 

Major Theme 03: Your worth is inherent and not determined by what you are, or what you do

Self evident but the Kaworu stuff to me is the most powerful. Eva says something else here as well, and this is major theme four.

Major Theme 04: Our empathy, our sensitivity, those are our biggest strengths

Kaworu's reaffirmation that the best parts of Shinji are his sensitivity, and his large fragile heart. His final words even echo something really beautiful, "My life was made meaningful because of you." Our sensitivity, our empathy... It is our connection. And while we might have to guard our fragile hearts, what makes living meaningful is to continue to love and value each other. The pain should not drive is to isolation, only to find ways of coexisting without hurting one another.

I think that, is ultimately what Evangelion is about. I think the show speaks from the experience of a man who was very deeply depressed but I also think it isn't really about living with depression. I think it's about living past depression, living despite pain, and struggling to find a way to coexist without causing others pain.

And also, it's about knowing. Knowing that getting in the robot should ultimately be Shinji's choice, and that yelling at him to get in the robot is selfish and cruel. Man, was ultimately the most cruel angel.
And that, is my thesis.

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