Recently, I completed the first draft of a slasher novella I’ve titled CUTTHROAT that I began in early September.
The premise is stupifyingly simple, though, like many of my works, it’s riddled with satiric malice and dark humor:
A group of job applicants arrive at a sleek highrise for a coveted position, but find themselves trapped and fighting for their lives against a psychopathic assessor known as Cutthroat, who wields a briefcase full of nasty weapons and is out to kill all of them.
This first draft clocked in at around 31,000 words, and it proved to be both exhausting and grossly liberating at the same time. This was one of those “cutting loose” sort of writing experiments, where I didn’t feel bound by the ordinary constraints of storytelling. Though there are two character arcs, a strong mid-point shift, a late reveal, and a twisty plot with some inventive kills. Thematically, it’s centered around the tortuous difficulties attendant with job hunting, with the whole ugly process personified in the form of a psychopathic killer known as Cutthroat, who poses as a job recruiter performing interviews, only to hack his unawares applicants apart. I really tried to go for the economic malaise zeitgeist’s jugular here that mainly desperate jobseeking Millennials and Gen-Zers are suffering through or at least might relate to. Armed with briefcases filled with all kinds of nasty weapons, Cutthroat sadisticallly plays his own twisted “assessment” games with the group of twenty-somethings, and it’s up to the protagonist to figure out a way to stop him, or at least escape with his life.
Writing a slasher is brutish work, to say the least. I’ve written my share of horrors, such as The Devil’s Throne, released a few years ago, but a slasher is another beast altogether. Slashers, obviously, are less known for their elegant exploration of human themes through a lens of supernatural or psychological chills like traditional horrors, and more about delivering a certain graphic and visceral effect on the reader/viewer.
Cutthroat is sort of “Terrifier in a business suit,” as I’ve come to refer to it as a means to sum up its ethos in a pithy “elevator pitch” manner. The slasher franchise set around Art the Clown is a real phenomenon for its cult following. Walk by any Hot Topic store in a mall and you’re bound to see Art T-shirts and other merch. He’s as big as Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees were in their day. I’ve only seen the second film and the first half of the first one. That’s literally all I could stomach. From a writer’s perspective, I found them shockingly bereft of any “story,” even for a slasher series. The Terrifier films are more a bunch of gory vignettes strung together. A bloody highlight reel of makeup and special effects. Even Friday the 13th, with all its clumsy and meandering “plots” had a semblance of mythology what with Jason and his mommy issues. Not so for Terrifier, which seems content to just freak out audiences with new methods of bodily mutilation. Hellraiser seems tame by comparison, which seems not possible.
Honestly, I found writing my first slasher disappointingly mundane. How many ways can you really butcher human beings on paper? I found myself straining to somehow “make it more interesting.” I did this by interjecting a backstory for the villain in order to make him believable, and by adding humor wherever possible. At one point I gave up for a few days, put off by the whole thing. Only to return days later determined to finish the task.
Now that it’s done, like often happens when I’ve finished a writing project, I find myself wracked with a post-partum malaise. Though there is always the long and tedious editing process.
I remember reading about how John Carpenter, while struggling to write Halloween II (1981) hit some bad writer’s block. I wondered how in the hell could that happen. We’re talking Michael Myers here. Pehaps the most simplistic masked killer there ever was. Just set him loose in a school so he can stalk another group of dumb horny teenagers. How hard could it be, right? But after writing my first slasher, I can see where he was likely coming from, and how unfulfilled he probably felt trying his hand at the sequel. It’s no wonder he wound up throwing in the bogus development about Laurie Strode being Michael’s sister as a way to liven things up and add motivation. Something he later regretted adding to Michael’s “mythology” due to its inherent silliness. The whole point of Michael Myers is that he doesn’t need a “motivation.” That’s what makes him scary. But I can see how sheer boredom probably drove Carpenter to want to throw in anything, no matter how nonsensical, to make the writing process more palatable for him. At least The Thing had the intricate puzzlebox mysteries of “Who’s the Thing and who’s not?” “Who can you trust?” With Halloween, it’s more just about coming up with new ways Michael can kill people.
On the surface, writing a slasher is “stupidly easy,” sure. Kind of. We’re not writing a dense Cormac McCarthian Western here, even if Anton Chigurh is like a Mexican Michael Myers with a shotgun. But it takes a piece of your soul. There are also the tricky mechanics of coming up with a bigger than life villain. Something iconic. A Nightmare on Elm Street, to me, is the gold standard when it comes to slashers. It’s probably the most intelligent of them. Certainly it’s the best high-concept horror idea. A killer that stalks you in your dreams. The kind of idea that makes you go, “Why didn’t I think of that?”
Overall, I enjoyed attempting the slasher genre, though it’s not one I’d quickly want to return to. Technically, it’s not actually my first stab at it. I handwrote a short story about a group of masked killers stalking a school way back when I was a teenager in high school. It was a story obviously ripped off of Halloween as I’d just seen that film on cable, though I added a “clever” twist by not having one, or two, but three killers. Genius, obviously. With this latest attempt decades later, I like to think I’ve grown and matured. I feel I made Cutthroat suitably gory and satisfied the demands of the genre with all the requisite tropes, while putting my own touch on things and bringing something new. If anything, it was a fun writing exercise that felt perfectly appropriate with Halloween right around the corner. 🙂
For some reason, this movie popped into my head recently, and I just had to rewatch it. I don’t know why. I seem to recall seeing it in theaters while on a beach vacation in Ocean City, Maryland back in the summer of 1998. Though the film actually stayed in theaters for over a year.
Films did that back then. Now they dip in and out in like two weeks before hitting streaming oblivion.
It’s weird watching something from the ’90s, as it is basically a period piece anymore. This film is nearly thirty-freaking years old! It is as ancient to modern audiences today as something from the mid-’60s would have been during its premier.
There’s Something About Mary is a screwball romantic comedy about a guy named Ted trying to reconnect with his old high school crush–the titual Mary. Mary Jensen, that is. Following a catalysmically awful prom date that goes sideways in the film’s second most memorable sequence when Ted gets his dick and balls stuck in his zipper after arriving at Mary’s house. Poor Ted spends the next 13 years still pining (borderline obsessing) over Mary, until he gins up a scheme to sick a private detective on her to hunt down her whereabouts. Finding her in South Florida, Ted takes off to reconnect with his old flame, encounting a series of mad-cap adventures along the way. But competing with him for Mary’s heart is the greasy private detective, an old college boyfriend, a slippery pizza delivery guy, and even a famous football QB star. Will Ted, the ultimate nice guy, win Mary’s heart in the end?
Of course, the film is BEST remembered for its “Is that hair gel?” scene when Ted and Mary are preparing to go on a date. Believe me, that line was the height of bawdy comedy in my high school during that year. Between that and the many Monica Lewinsky jokes flying around (and there were many), my junior year was beset with semen-based hilarity.
In fact, I’d say there has likely never been a time ever in human history when male ejaculation centered so prominently in the cultural psyche as it did in the year 1998.That’s all thanks to Monica and Mary.
There’s Something About Mary is beset with a hideous amount of ’90s anachronisms, both technologically and cultural. Things that just wouldn’t work in today’s self-aware uber ironic entertainment landscape. The ’90s was all about being okay with looking stupid. It was the decade of Dumb and Dumber, Jim Carrey, and wacky attitude-y cartoons like Animaniacs. Weird toys like Gak. Very stupid and cringey TV shows. And lots of bright neon colors.
People nostalgia-gazming hard on the decade often forget how damn silly the ’90s really was. And that’s probably the best way to describe Mary. Silly with a capital ‘S.’
The entire conceit of the film falls apart in the age of Facebook and Google. Now it’s not only easy to look someone up from high school, you likely can’t even get rid of them anyway if they follow you on Insta or Facebook.
Then there’s the whole stalking angle. What Ted does is technically kind of creepy. While he does sorta pay for it when he’s forced to confess at the film’s “All is Lost” beat, and is consequentially kicked to the curb, true love conquers all of course in the end.
There’s the idea of a bunch of men fixating on Mary as a sex object in a predatory way that would be seen as “problematic” now. The film gets away with it mostly due to its unflinching cartooniness. The Farrelly brothers were at their peak. The story has heart, though its punctured by a lot of slapstick nonsense.
There’s Something About Mary really is one of those films that wouldn’t be made today. It’s an odd time capsule of a film. A relic from a very niche era of cornball humor that couldn’t be replicated. A perfect representation of what the ’90s was all about.
It does have some classical elements, too. The recurring motif of the singers reminded me of the singing muses often seen in Shakespeare plays or Greek epics. The crude sexual humor harkens back to the stylings of the ancient Greek play Lysistrata. There are some borrowed elements also. The police interrogation misunderstanding feels lifted from 1992s My Cousin Vinny, for instance. But overall it’s a funny original story with a handful of memorable scenes beyond the hair gel one. The fish hook gag, as an example.
Ben Stiller stars in one of his early big roles. At the start of his early 2000s tsunami of comedy hits like Meet the Parents and Zoolander. Cameron Diaz plays the lovely and lanky Mary. And there is the adaptable Matt Dillon as the greasy private eye with the porn stache.
Need some ’90s flavor in your life? Who doesn’t, right? Check out There’s Something About Mary.
I’m a recovering “beat-em-up” fan. Back in the day as a teen I used to love those terrible Steven Seagal films like Above the Law and Marked For Death. Or Jean-Claude Van Damme stuff like Bloodsport and Death Warrant. They were constantly on rotation on USA and TBS and other freemium cable channels in the late ’90s. Films that were passably entertaining for immature adolescent minds, but in retrospect are ridiculously cheesy and absurd. But hey, if you haven’t seen Seagal break a Jamaican dude’s arm in half or Van Damme roundhouse kick a guy into a furnace, you haven’t lived.
Nowadays, Jason Statham is your go-to macho man face puncher and bad guy beater downer. Strangely, actors even higher up the talent totem pole have had a go at their own fistacuffs franchises. Bob Odenkirk is Nobody. A-lister Denzel Washingtonis The Equalizer. And of course Internet Jesus Keanu Reeves is John Wick.
Everyone wants to kick ass these days! Who can blame them? Have you seen the prices of things lately? Going to the grocery store anymore is like going to a Fuck Me in the Ass Parade.
The latest is A Working Man, where Statham plays a former blacks ops soldier turned construction guy who has to return to his face-stomping roots when his boss’s daughter gets kidnapped or something. I’ve not seen it, nor will I ever. Just like I didn’t see Statham’s last flick The Beekeeper, which had pretty much the same plot. The latest edition of Statham Beats Up Some Guys interests me about as much as hanging around a bunch of backwards hat-wearing dude bros talking about their fantasy football picks.
(No man should have a hobby with the word “fantasy” in it. Like, are there sparkles involved? Pink glitter? GTFO of here with that.)
Anyway…
What is pretty cool (and surprising), is that A Working Man is based on a book. Which is part of a book series, actually. By a real author. Not some A.I. trained on Seagal and Van Damme flicks. Chuck Dixon is a prolific author known mostly for his work in the comic book industry. He co-created Bane, aka the villain who broke Batman’s back. So, this guy is well-experienced in creating characters that know how to kick the crap out of people.
Dixon’s series is called Levon Cade, and features the vigilante going on various quests involving revenge and likely crushing a few throats. There are twelve books in total. The first, titled simply Levon’s Trade, premiered in December, 2021. The others came in rapid succession, sometimes as little as three weeks apart, over the course of 2022. The eleventh published in August, after which Dixon took a sabbatical before dropping the twelfth and final (?) in February, 2024. Not bad. Guy banged it all out in roughly a calendar year.
Look, these are not labyrinthine literary feasts like A Game of Thrones. These stories are Fisher-Price simple and Neanderthal stupid. No shit. But when you get down to it, there are really only two genres — “Man with Gun” and “Girl Bangs Guy.” That’s about it. James Bond, for all his British sophistication, is just another “Man with Gun” story. Titanic is the ultimate “Girl Bangs Guy.” The classics usually combine the two in interesting ways. Double Indemnity, for instance. There are some exceptions, often seen in experimental or prestige award stuff, but nobody cares. People only pay attention when someone’s fucking or getting murdered. Can you name the book that won the Nobel Prize for Literature four years ago? No? Have you ever heard of Fifty Shades of Grey? My point exactly.
I am not a fan of simple vigilante series, in either book or movie versions. I read Killing Floor once, the first Jack Reacher book, a long time ago, and the experience was akin to tattoo gunning my eyeballs. I am a fan of writers, however. Especially ones who put in the effort to carve out their own success, in whatever genre they choose. A Working Man has likely done well enough at the box office to merit a sequel. Who knows. It could even be a franchise like John Wick. I have no idea. I’ll never see the films anyway. I outgrew the need for them a long time ago. But I do appreciate them and the writers who make them.
I’m actually disappointed in myself. I used to really be into stuff like this when I was younger. You slap the words “obscene graphic violence” on a flick and I was there like a six-year-old kid jumping into a dark van with “FREE CANDY” written on the side.
I remember watching Peter Jackson’s ridiculously gory Dead Alive years ago and laughing my ass off. I used to watch Hellraiser on repeat. When I was a little kid I begged my mom to rent a scary movie one night. She picked Jagged Edge, which bored me. I used to run to the horror section of the video store so I could scope out any carnage shown on the backs of the video covers. The Nightmare on Elm Street series always had some gems.
Lately, I’ve been hearing about the Terrifier films. A series I know nothing about other than it involves some kind of creepy blood-covered clown named Art the Clown. I kept hearing about how people were throwing up and passing out at premiers. The other day I passed a Hot Topic in a mall and I saw Art the Clownt-shirts. Now, as much as one can glean cultural impact from a store that serves the junior goth demographic, it’s clear this Art guy has some cachet with the youngins. I’ve got to keep up with the times, thought I. I’ve got to investigate this scary new phenomenon. I know all about Pennywise the Clown. But Pennywise is yesterday’s news, and I can’t fall behind on my killer clown mythology.
To my (at the time) delight, I saw that Terrifier 2 was offered on Amazon Prime. Oh, nice, here’s my chance to check this newfangled thing out. I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes to gauge concensus, and to my surprise I saw it not only had a fresh rating, it was actually in the 80s.
What??? A critically praised ultra gory film? Now I definitely have to see this.
I clicked on the tab. Within minutes I was greeted with a silhouette of Art the Clown walking down an alley. Okay, that’s creepy but not too bad. Then it cut immediately to a medical office, and a one-eyed Art is stalking some doctor in an office who’s been stabbed in the stomach. The doctor tries to make a phone call, only for Art to come along and start beating him to death with a hammer. Then Art rips out the doctor’s eyeball and inserts it into his own eye socket to replace his missing eye.
And that was it. I was done. I clicked away, and actually turned to The Silence of the Lambs as a form of therapy. Yes, the flick about the cross-dressing murdering sadist and psychopathic cannibal was “easy watching” compared to the bloody eyeball-snatching clown.
Who the hell watches this ultra violent gory shit? Friday the 13th, Nightmare, and the Halloween series, all of which I grew up on, are tame and nothing anymore. Terrifier is like cinematic equivalent of a heroin junkie injecting the syringe in their last good vein trying to chase that dragon high of scares.
Man, there is some imagery I just don’t care or need to put into my brain anymore. Now there’s a third Terrifier coming out this weekend. Yeah, no thanks. Fuck off, Art the Clown.
I’m not a Tarantino stan by any means, though like many, I admire his work and his unique voice. I was too young to see his early stuff like Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Only years later did I appreciate True Romance and Jackie Brown.
The two-time Oscar winner and pastiche-r of genres is kind of the patron saint artist for college students. Or cult leader, if you prefer. I would hear about him all the damn time and how great his movies are when I was in school. I think that’s why I put off watching them for so long. They were so constantly hyped up like “You gotta see it, bro!” that it had the opposite effect on me. I actually fell asleep the first time I was made to watch Pulp Fiction. I’m still kinda neutral about that one. I see the appeal, but it just never captured me, as most films featuring race as a prominent theme generally don’t. I have a younger cousin who loves it and calls it his favorite film.
Tarantino dominated the 1990s. His turn-of-the-millenium output has seen equal critical and commercial success, though maybe not in the same generational-zeitgeisty way as his early stuff. Even now, I passively follow his work, which for me remains hit or miss. I only recently saw Inglorious Basterds. Miss. Never saw Death Proof. Saw Django Unchained once. Eh, it was okay. Hated The Hateful Eight. Enjoyed Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, though it felt underdeveloped and indulgent.
I do, however, fucking love Kill Bill Vol. I and II.
Credit: Miramax
Kill Bill holds a special place in my heart. Not just because I really like the story, but because of the memorable venue where I originally saw it. I was 21 and going to a private college in north Chicago in 2003. Loyola University sits wedged alongside Lake Shore Drive and Lake Michigan, and like many city schools, criss-crosses different neighborhoods of varying class levels. You’ve got your gentrified hipster streets, your more “ghetto” areas, your working class avenues, and your young professional couple cheapo condo building spots. Of course you have all the retail staples. Chinese food. Delis. Convenience stores. And bars. Lots of bars.
And you have the “ghettoplex.”
Chapter Two: The “Ghettoplex”
The “ghettoplex.” This was a tiny run-down old fashioned style theater on North Sheridan Road. Opened in 1913, it’s name was originally The Regent. In 1990 new ownership renamed it Village North Theater. Then it became the New 400 in 2009. Like many theaters, Covid punched it hard in the face. But it eventually reopened. Only to suddenly (and finally?) close in 2023.
I never knew the theater by any of its real names. It was just the ghettoplex around campus. The ghettoplex had only a few auditoriums. It attracted an eclective mix of people from all walks of life. Mainly broke college students. But also hipsters. Whites, Blacks, Hispanics. Uptight professionals. Homeless. Thugs. Everyone. Every screening was a melting pot and often chaotic, with people shouting at the screen, getting up and down, arguing, throwing food, amongst other activities. Even though I typically hate interruptions during movies, the ghettoplex was the one venue in which it seemed not just appropriate, but even welcome.
In other words, it was the perfect place to watch the vibrantly raucous Kill Bill: Vol I.
I was instantly attracted to Kill Bill from the trailer and all the advertising, as it looked unlike anything I’d ever seen. Which is ironic, considering it’s a blend of several classic film genres; namely spaghetti Westerns and ‘70’s Bruce Lee-style Martial arts flicks, combined with noirish crime and pulpy gangster revenge stories. Some people credit No Country for Old Men (2007) with starting the neo-Western trend that still continues today with The Last Stop In Yuma County (2023). But I think Vol. II of Kill Bill has an argument for being a bigger influence.
That Tarantino was splitting his new film into two parts felt audacious also. The Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions did that the same year. But they were both highly anticipated sequels to the beloved 1999 hit. It felt strange for even a respected artist like Tarantino to do the same with an original story that didn’t already have millions of built-in fans. Especially after a six-year hiatus from film making. His last film Jackie Brown (1997) didn’t exactly light the world on fire. There were even whisperings that Tarantino was just a ’90s man. That he wouldn’t make the jump to the new century with us coming-of-age Millennials.
I didn’t really care about Tarantino’s earlier works. I hadn’t even seen them at the time. All I knew was Kill Bill looked pretty badass. So, off to the ghettoplex I went the weekend of October 10, 2003.
Chapter Three: Ratatino, The Giant Rat
Movie theaters today are trying so hard to create immersive viewing experiences. There’s 3D, IMAX, 4DX, those D-Box seats that vibrate, stadium seating, and the latest and greatest in The Sphere in Las Vegas, NV, which has a near 360-degree wrap-around screen that’s so transportive it will give you anxiety. I highly recommend going. It’s mindblowing.
However, no theaters have considered the visceral experience that our good friends of the Rodentia order can freely provide during a film screening.
Kill Bill provoked hoots, hollers, “oh shits,” “fuck nawws,” and more from the get-go. The opening scene where The Bride surprises suburban homemaker Vernita Green (aka Copperhead) was a riot. “I should have been motherfucking Black Mamba,” brought laughs. The Kaboom cereal attack and its subsequent knife to the heart caused gasps. It was the kind of rare opening where you just knew you were in for a classic good time.
For me, the strongest reaction came at about the mid-point. It was right after when The Bride visits Hattori Hanzo to have a custom-made Samurai sword made and she’s off to Tokyo to deal with O-Ren when a giant rat ran across the bottom of the screen.
Now, for years I had often heard the legend of New York City’s giant sewer rats. As a new citizen of Chicago, it had not even occured to me that such massive cat-sized rodents could also live in the Midwest.
This rat was fucking huge. I’m not sure if it was in front of the screen or behind. It was a giant black shadow that scurried underneath Uma Thurman while she was determinedly seated on the airplane as The Green Hornet theme played. It ran across, its tail flopping behind it as thick as a coaxial cable, until reaching the other side and disappearing. The memory is burned into my brain. I’m not sure if anyone else even noticed it, as nobody reacted. I asked my friends that I’d gone with later about it, and they swear they never saw a rat. But given that the theater was called the “ghettoplex,” perhaps such gargantuan infestation was simply expected. Maybe this particular R.O.U.S. frequented the establishment and was well-known. I don’t know. But it freaked me out in kind of a good way.
What made it even better was that not long before, The Bride tells Hanzo about how she has a giant rat to kill (meaning Bill, of course). Did “Ratatino” (the name I gave him) hear Uma mention his species namesake, and take that as a cue to come out of hiding? Who knows. But I’m glad he did. God bless you Ratatino, wherever you are.
Chapter Four: Kill Bill and I
Have I mentioned how much I fucking love this movie? Good, I’ll jump into the many reasons why.
1. Uma
Credit: Miramax
Okay, ngl, Uma Thurman became my movie crush for years after Kill Bill, displacing Katie Holmes’ solid four-year run, and knocking out an insurgent Jessica Alba. But aside from my own star-struck amore, Thurman really was perfectly cast for the role of The Bride/Beatrix Kiddo. I only found this out recently, but it was actually she and Quentin who conceived of the idea for Kill Bill while on the set of Pulp Fiction. This is why the credits for the story are “Q&U.” Tarantino refers to Thurman as his “muse.” It’s easy to see why. Uma’s tall, near-Amazonian figure ignites the screen, hacking and slashing away like a blonde supermodel Grim Reaper. The movie thrives on juxtapostion and irony — West meets East, red blood on snow, spaghetti Western meets Kung-fu flick — a killer ex-bride (and mom) on a bloody rampage is striking. Her big blue eyes are as close to “anime eyes” as one can physically get without CGI enhancement. The whole effect is instantly iconic.
Very often, whenever talk of “badass action heroines” comes up, the go-to examples are always Ellen Ripley or Sarah Connor. Sadly, The Bride seems to be constantly left out, and deserves to be placed atop that stage. Uma’s performance is also enhanced mightily by the character’s maternal qualities, which mirrored her own. She’d already had two children by filming, and her daughter Maya Hawke was almost the same age as her movie-daughter B.B.
Uma also deftly handles the film’s more darkly comedic elements. Tarantino flicks are known for their outlandish violence, but it’s their nuance, complexity, and subtext that make them endearing and memorable. During The Bride’s interactions with O-Ren, her attitude shifts across a range of channels — vicious determination, inside humor, cruel taunts, sharp retorts, respect, and even tenderness. There’s a sense the two women were once best friends before the falling out. A hard subtlety to pull off, which Uma does in spades. Her whole performance is solid throughout.
2. Soundtrack
It may be cliché to describe a film as a “symphony,” but in the case of Kill Bill, it’s apt, and largely because of its pitch perfect soundtrack. As we first saw in Reservoir Dogs with the “Stuck in the Middle With You” scene, Tarantino likes to pick ironic music during violent scenes. But many of the musical cues are also just traditionally fitting. And “original.” Not in the sense that all the music was written specifically for the film. In the sense that much of the music was comprised of lesser known hits that Tarantino dusted off and reused in surprising and dove-tailing ways.
Some of my favorites are “The Flower of Carnage,” which plays directly after The Bride gives O-Ren the worst haircut ever. The song bears significance, as it’s sung by Meiko Kaji, an icon of Japanese cinema, who famously played Lady Snowblood (1973), an inspiration for Kill Bill. “Crane/White Lightning” by RZA is another one I enjoy. “The Demise of Barbara and the Return of Joe” perfectly encapsulates the end of the climactic battle between Beatrix and Bill. “Battle Without Honor or Humanity” was a major hit from the soundtrack.
3. The Mythology
One of the ways a great film pulls you into the embrace is with its often implied but sometimes depicted mythology. Star Wars is the best example of this, of course. Who the hell is this Darth Vader guy? Why has this Ben guy been hiding out in the desert? What’s a Clone War? While its prequels and sequels filled in the details with mixed results, what makes the original special is all the mysterious backstory.
Kill Bill does a similar thing. Giving us just enough backstory through flashbacks to keep the main story going, but also digging into the classified files, so to speak, of many of its characters. There’s a whole animated sequence that shows O-Ren Ishii’s tragic childhood that lead her to taking over the Yakuza gang in Tokyo. Even O-Ren’s bodyguard Gogo Yubari gets a mini biopic.
My favorite is the chapter “The Cruel Tutelage of Pai Mei,” which shows us quite explicitly how The Bride became trained to what is practically a supernatural-level of martial arts expertise. Then there’s the sequence with Hattori Hanzo. If there’s one criticism I have, it’s that I wished we could have seen a little of Hanzo actually making the sword. But perhaps it’s better that it remains a mystery how a seemingly simple bar owner in Okinawa is able to craft a weapon that can “cut God.”
4. The Venn Diagram “Super Movie”
To go along with Number 3, Kill Bill is also a good example of what differentiates a great story from a pretty average one. It combines a number of narratives that could on their own be a movie, into a “super” movie— like a Venn diagram — with the main one in the middle. You could do a whole film just on Bill founding the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, Pai Mei, O-Ren, even Gogo Yubari.
To say nothing of the some of the “loose ends.” What in the hell happened to Sofie Fatale? Actually, I don’t want to know. Did Elle Driver make it out of the desert after losing her eye? My vote is the Black Mamba snake eventually got her. Will Vernita Green’s daughter Nikki grow up seeking revenge on The Bride? More on that in Chapter Five. Here’s where editorial and artistic restraint are needed. Sometimes it’s better to leave people wondering. It’s not always best to fill in all the details, as some of the excessive and creatively bankrupt Star Wars spin-offs have shown.
5. The Subversive Humor
Credit: Miramax
The Pussy Wagon. Kaboom cereal. Much of the Bride and Elle’s fight. Budd’s shitty station in life as a bouncer at the titty bar. Beatrix Kiddo’s name reveal in the kid’s classroom. Boss Tanaka provoking O-Ren’s sensitivity about her mixed Japanese and Chinese heritage (a scene I always appreciated as a mixed-race person myself). I could go on and on.
Striking the right balance in tone for a movie about a woman going around cutting people’s heads off is tough. But necessary. Like much of Tarantino’s work, Kill Bill is very self-aware and post-modern. The bloody graphic kills in the Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves are cartoonishly but purposely over the top.
6. The Cliffhanger
The end of Kill Bill Vol I., where Bill reveals to the butchered Sofie that The Bride’s daughter is still alive elicited a few gasps from the rowdy audience at the “ghettoplex,” as I recall. It’s one of the first real film cliffhangers I remember that left me really wanting to know what happened next. As I was never a fan of the Star Wars sequels, the ending of The Empire Strikes Back never rustled my jimmies. The end of Matrix Reloaded was tepid and actually kind of confusing. The only other film ending that left me really wanting more was, oddly enough, The Blob. A film with a sequel tease that’s still not been paid off some thirty years later.
Making it all the better was that Kill Bill Vol. II premiered on April 16th, my birthday, the following year (2004). What a perfect birthday present.
I’d be remiss not to mention the Herculean (or perhaps She-Hulkian) physical contributions made by the peerless and legendary stuntwoman Zoë Bell. Bell sustained serious injuries filming the scene where The Bride gets blown away by Budd’s shotgun blast. In addition to being a “crash and smash” double for Uma, Bell also doubled for her in the fight scenes, becoming trained on swordplay and combat moves herself. Stunt work is often underappreciated, but the work done in Kill Bill went above and beyond. Both Bell and Uma got put through the ringer for our entertainment.
There’s also this dark episode from the making of the movie that honestly hampers my enjoyment of the film. Tarantino pressured Thurman to perform a dangerous driving stunt that wound up leaving her hospitalized with neck and knee injuries that she still suffers from to this day. The accident led to a falling out between her and Tarantino for 15 years. Uma doesn’t blame him so much as she blames the film’s executive producer Harvey Weinstein — yeah, this fucker again — for trying to sweep the whole thing under the rug. Check out this link here detailing Thurman’s account of the ordeal, which also contains a frightening video of the car crash. It’s very sad and sickening for any actress to be forced into a stunt for which she is not trained or prepared. But to do it to the star of your movie who inspired the story itself, is grossly irresponsible and monstrous. This is on top of Thurman having had an encounter with the disgraced former Hollywood producer in which Weinstein allegedly assaulted her in hotel in the ’90s. You can read about that here.
Uma Thurman describes her experience after the crash as “dehumanization to the point of death.” It’s a stark and scary reminder that for all its glitz and glamour, Hollywood is at its core, a brutal business that has allowed some real abusive assholes to gain power. There is a human cost that sometimes takes place behind the camera that often goes unnoticed. The unseemly developments I’ve mentioned don’t ruin Kill Bill. They do, however, give me a recontextualized appreciation for all the literal blood, sweat, and tears that went into making it.
8. Poetic Fights And Fates
Perhaps Kill Bill’s most creative component are all the diverse and fitting ways in which members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad get their comeuppance for their role in Bill’s attack on The Bride. Vernita Green’s death is quick and brutal, hinting at the fact that likely the two women were never exactly close. As I mentioned earlier, O-Ren’s drawn-out “graceful” demise indicates that she and Beatrix were probably besties at one point.
As her former brother-in-law, it seemed The Bride was satisfied with giving Budd a quick and painless death by surprising him at his shitty trailer. But a Black Mamba still wound up getting him anyway due to the vicious one-eyed Elle Driver. Driver and Beatrix were clearly hated rivals of one another, both professionally, but also romantically over Bill. Elle tells Bill, “You need me baby, I’m there,” over the phone before her surprise confrontation with The Bride. Their duel is a messy cat fight, ending after Beatrix yoinks Elle’s eye. This after Elle sneeringly and proudly confesses to poisoning Pai Mei, who plucked out her eye for impudence during her training.
Then there’s Bill’s death, which is both cathartically satisfying, but also bittersweet and tragic. At its core, Kill Bill is about a serious marital spat, and all the fallout that ensues. Both sides can be blamed. I always got the sense that if Beatrix had explained her side to Bill about not wanting her daughter to grow up in the life rather than just running off, he’d have likely understood and made proper arrangements. A workable compromise probably would have been reached. But this is not a story about rational, level-headed people. This is a story about brutal killers who think impulsively. We’ll never know what could have been.
9. Even Side Characters Are Memorable
This kind of goes along with mythology in Number 3. One of Tarantino’s gifts is in creating very lived-in minor characters that look like they were breathing and eating long before being summoned for their short appearance. Take Esteban, for example, the Mexican pimp and father figure to Bill. There’s a whole history to this guy and and how he raised Bill, but he’s gone after all of five minutes of screen time.
And let’s not forget Buck. Who’s here to do what? Fuck. A rather simplistic and base behavioral drive. But an unforgettable one, for sure.
10. The Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique
It’s fucking awesome. ‘Nuff said.
Chapter Five: The Blood-Splattered Sequel Rumors And Conclusion
Credit: Miramax
This past October 10th, 2004, it’ll have been 21 years since the premier of Kill Bill Vol. I. It’s hard to believe that much time has passed. For me it’s a literal whole other lifetime ago.
Not long after the conclusion of Vol. II, rumors began to swirl about a possible third installment. All kinds of theories abounded regarding possible plots. The most popular being a grown-up Nikki Green seeking out Beatrix to get revenge for killing her mother, with an assassin-trained adult B.B. being in the mix.
As much as the fan in me would love to see a third Kill Bill, I’m not sure it should happen. I’m very much a “completionist.” When a story is done, let it be done. I feel that way, as do many others, about the first two Alien and Terminator films. I feel that way toward Kill Bill. It ends as perfectly as it could. Why ruin that with a sequel? The whole point of the two-part film is The Bride rescuing her daugher from her savage life for a peaceful one. Which she does. But perhaps Bill is right in his “Superman talk.” Maybe Beatrix Kiddo is a killer at heart. Maybe it’s just a matter of time before that deadly assassin life will pull her back in. We’ll just have to wait and see. But I’d much rather think of Beatrix and B.B. living happily ever after.
I’ve been on a horror kick lately. I finally watched Barbarian. A film I wanted to see two years when it premiered, only to completely forget about until it resurfaced on Prime recently.
Barbarian is the latest in the “socially conscious” horror trend, which started with Get Out in 2018. Even our horror film franchises have to be woke nowadays. I recall a much simpler time. A time when all you needed was a mask, preferably a white one, and some maniac with a knife. A little cat and mouse. Some butchered coeds. And there you go, you had your movie.
Of course, the slasher tropes started by Halloween and Friday the 13th were tired and formularic even by the late 1980s. This is why Scream was such a refreshing hit back in 1996. It playfully toyed with the genre conventions in a fun, meta way, with characters using them as a “rulebook” to help ensure their own survival.
Don’t go off alone.
Never say you’ll be “right back.”
Never, ever have sex.
Scream was the shit back in the day. It not only kickstarted the teen slasher craze all over again, it helped director Wes Craven get back in the game. It was a mega jackpot win for screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who wrote the script on spec. It’s unlikely his record for most commercially successful spec script not written by a writer/director will ever be broken. The Scream franchise has scored nearly $1 billion at the box office alone. Imagine that. Being some rank nobody 31-year-old screenwriter and you have a pdf file on your rickety old PC computer that’s worth billions. It’s the stuff dreams are made of. And he wrote it in a weekend.
Two sequels quickly followed the original hit. Then the franchise went dormant for awhile. This is back before reboots and requels and prequels became a big thing in horror. In 2011 Wes Craven directed Scream 4. That was followed by another movie lull, though the TV series Scream ran from 2015–2019. Until finally Scream (the fifth film) and ScreamVI came out back to back in 2022 and ’23, with plans for a seventh on the way.
It isn’t just Scream’s almost 30-year longevity that’s amazing, but the relative high quality the franchise has maintained. Most horror series fall apart after the original. Some keep chugging along despite being objectively goddawful, i.e. Halloween, Saw, Hellraiser, etc. With the exception of Scream 3, every installment in the franchise is fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Even Final Destination, with its clever teen-killing conceit, sits mainly in the sub-50s on RT.
So, what’s Scream’s secret? Why has it qualitatively lasted for so long while so many others have pathetically limped from one refresh to another?
Scream has some built-in requisite elements that act as quality control. Every Scream film has its gimmicks — mainly a twisty whodunnit plot with multiple meta references. A balanced measure of comedy, thrills, and melodrama. A tone that strays just outside the lines of realism into cartoonism. This precarious tight rope act isn’t easy. The latest two films are meta inside of meta; referencing the in-movie Stab series, which itself is a self-aware horror film that replicates scenes from the first Scream. The whole self-referential effect becomes like an MC Escher staircase, but with blood and knives.
‘Scream’ (1996): Dimension films.
Scream has also served as a recurring mirror of the current state of horror, if not the cultural subtext influencing the genre. In 1996, it was quite innovative to introduce a beloved B-list sweetheart like Drew Barrymore, only to brutally kill her off in the opening. By 2011, the franchise had to adjust that formula with multiple twists, with mixed results. The latest two films have followed Hollywood’s latest diversity push, replacing the mainly White teen cast in the previous four with two leads of Hispanic origin — Jenny Ortega and Melissa Barrera — and assorted minority back-ups, with hardly a White male in sight (save for villainous roles, of course). All while letting OG Scream-ers like Neve Campbell, David Arquette, and Courtney Cox reenter on occasion.
It all makes for a nice adaptive organism of a franchise that can constantly reinvent itself to fit the times. I wonder what sort of State of the Horror Union address a Scream re-re-re-boot might make come the 2030s or even 2040s. The latest sequel already transplanted us to the Big Apple, à la Jason Takes Manhattan. Ghostface in Space is just a matter of time.
These days, it’s not enough to just throw another set of endangered teens out there and watch them get butchered in obscene ways. Scream films are a thinking man’s slasher flicks, dare I say. At the least they offer something a cut above your typical violent bloodletting. I find myself strangely looking forward to the next one.
Last night I finally had the chance to catch Barbarian, the 2022 horror film written and directed by Zach Cregger. Like most films with memorable twists that I’m not able to see the very second it premiers, I had this one spoiled massively for me due to rampant YouTube reviews with certain images in the thumbnails.
Can we talk for a second about the humanitarian crisis this clickbait spoiler-craze really is? Barbarian is the just the latest in a string of highly anticipated films and shows that had plot reveals ruined for me. Don’t Look Now was, too. I’ve also had every major plot twist of Invincible (my new favorite show) shoved in my face thanks to YouTube shorts and “critical analysis” vids. It’s frustrating, but I suppose that’s the way things are now.
That said, SPOILERS incoming.
Barbarian starts off appearing to be your standard Hitchcock-style roommate stalker thriller, like The Resident or Single White Female. A young woman named Tess (Georgina Campbell) shows up late at night during a thunderstorm to her AirBnB in a decrepit part of Detroit, only to find someone else staying there. A young man named Keith, who looks nice enough. But can she really trust this guy? Somehow their reservations were booked simultaneously, leading to the awkward situation of two strangers having to share a house for the evening.
After Tess is unable to find a hotel due to a medical conference, she’s forced to spend the night. But soon she discovers this AirBnB has dark, macabre secrets, including a creepy basement room with a dirty mattress and a subterranean labyrinthine that seems straight out of a Kane Pixels “backrooms” video. But that’s only the beginning of the terror. A hideous humanoid monster also lives down there, too. And she feels the need, the need to feed.
Then suddenly we cut to Southern California, where working actor AJ (Justin Long) is cruising along in his convertible when he receives word from his agent/producer that he’s been accused of rape by a former co-star. With his life in shambles, he’s forced to liquidate some assets to pay for legal defense. So he flies off to Michigan to visit his, you guessed it, AirBnB rental property, where Tess and Keith just disappeared. It isn’t long before he too is captured by the monster, who has a bizarre need to “mother” her captives by forcibly breastfeeding them.
Suddenly, we’re launched into a flashback to the early 1980s, when the neighborhood was in good shape. We’re introduced to Frank, a middle-aged single man who kidnaps young women and holds them prisoner in his house of horrors. The “mother” creature there now is the hideous offspring of numerous inbreeding generations over four decades. Essentially, the ultimate thematic representation of male sexual assault coming home to roost.
—
Barbarian is mostly a smartly-written B-movie flick with a tight opening act. But I’m not sure the transition from its tense-filled beginning into a sequence straight out of The Hills Have Eyes, entirely works. It feels like two seperate stories were mashed together in the service of creating a Get Out-style socially conscious horror film. It’s tonal shift and plot twist is basically Psycho. Even Keith, played by Bill Skarsgård, reminded me of Norman Bates. The underlying theme regarding male violence, sexual harassment, and rape, is a relevant and timely one.
The movie is a cut-above the “hilbilly horror” schlock of the early 2000s, such as Wrong Turn or Jeepers Creepers. I enjoyed it, overall. But the film was far more engaging during its subtext-soaked first act, when even something like a simple bottle of wine appears menacing. When it becomes a freaky monster mash, it loses its thematic impact. Sexual predators rarely appear like the monsters they are. They’re often smooth talkers, manipulating their victims emotionally, only implying the threat of violence, until finally trapping them. Sexual assault is a grotesque physical crime, but much of it is psychological, too. Such ghastly human behavior is better explored realistically to relay its horror. AJ has a conversation with his best friend at a club, where he confesses how he had to “convince” the young actress to have sex with him, which is far creepier and more true to life. As is his later drunken phone call to his victim. AJ is a classic “mild-mannered” wolf in sheep’s clothing abuser. Clark Kent, except he rapes instead of changes into a hero in a phone booth. That sort of everyday psychopath is far more intriguing to observe than just another mutated creature.
There are many illogical plot turns and character choices that no sane person would ever make. While it’s believable that a single woman might stay at an AirBnB with a strange man by herself due to a reservation mix-up, you’re telling me she never even checked out the surrounding neighborhood? Google Maps is your friend. I also highly doubt anyone, male or female, would keep heading down into a creepy labyrinthe, even if their new guy friend was supposedly in trouble. The irritated police showing up, only to dismiss Tess as just another slumming crackhead, was far too convenient. Most police have very good sixth senses. Tess comes across as clearly educated and articulate, i.e. someone you take seriously. And wouldn’t there have been a history of young women disappearing in the general neighborhood that would trigger some suspicion from the cops? Frank’s abductions numbered in the dozens. There was no logical need for AJ to even visit his rental property, as liquidating it could all be done via email and pdf file signatures. He only went there because the plot needed him to. And how did a malnourished inbred freak develop super strength and become a giant? Most victims held prisoner in similar cases have usually turned up bony and uncoordinated due to isolation and vitamin deficiencies.
Then there’s that ending, which was almost laughable.
These questionable elements aside, and its jarring narative shifts, Barbarian is a decent film worth checking out.
The title of this piece is in reference in part to some recent comments made by Adam Goldberg, who played a bit part on the show Friends back in the day. In an interview with Independent, when asked about modern criticism toward the show due its lack of diversity, he said:
And in terms of diversity, looking back, it seems insane. I’ve heard Black people speak about this and it’s like, you never expected to see yourself, so when you didn’t, it was not a surprise, and you ended up identifying to characters, irrespective of their race.
The ’90s was a weird time in TV history when it came to racial integration. Back then, TV shows were largely segregated, with little integration unless an episode was racially-themed. You had White shows like Full House and Married with Children. Then you had Black shows like Family Matters and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. There were no mainstream Latin or Asian shows to my knoweldge. Certainly no Native American ones. It was vanilla and chocolate, with hardly any mixing.
Friends was not unsual in its milk-colored casting choices. I never watched the show, nor did I ever care for it or find it funny. What little I’ve seen of it I find cringe and annoying. I’m a Seinfeld guy. But I do recall that Friends had a wide and ironically diverse audience despite its “insane” lack thereof.
In 2004 in college I was friends with a young African woman who loved the show and raved all week about seeing the anticipated series finale. In one of the lounges, people gathered around watching the last episode. To be clear, it most likely had a largely White audience, but the show’s humor (or what passed for it) seemed to catch on with all kinds.
Goldberg’s comments are rather innocuous. The show’s co-creator, Marta Kauffman, however, was more passionate in her response. Saying to the Los Angeles Times:
“I’ve learned a lot in the last 20 years,” Kauffman said in a Zoom interview. “Admitting and accepting guilt is not easy. It’s painful looking at yourself in the mirror. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know better 25 years ago.”
She adds:
The series’ failure to be more inclusive, Kauffman says, was a symptom of her internalization of the systemic racism that plagues our society, which she came to see more clearly in the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the worldwide protest movement that erupted around it.
Kauffman felt so bad about her supposed “failures” that she donated $4 million to her alma mater, Brandeis University, to establish a professorship in the school’s African and African American Studies Department. A nice gesture on her part, I suppose. Perhaps the largest sum anyone’s ever paid to soothe their conscience for the crime of creating an insufficiently diverse hit TV show.
Though I would call it pathological. How sad and tragic that someone’s greatest accomplishment in life should be sullied by such pointless feelings of guilt over an imaginary transgression. This is the kind of remorse appropriate if you killed someone drunk driving. But casting six White people with good chemistry in a dumb sitcom? Please. It all seems performative and just a cynical attempt to pay off an angry mob.
It’s not the job of a TV show or movie to perfectly represent some fictious ideal image of a multicultual society. Or to live up to some hypothetical future standard. Sitcoms are notoriously tricky to cast for and rarely succeed. Many are canceled right out of the gate. The best ones all have a rare casting synergy, and for the most part have been homogenous. Comedy in general is largely a birds of a feather affair, save for some exceptional pairings like Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. Or Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
Even when a show injects some ethnic mixing, it often comes off as unconvincing, forced, or awkward. I always felt that the Indian character Raj in The Big Bang Theory was marginized and especially virginal compared to the better developed White characters. In the first season he hardly even speaks. But I suppose he represents “diversity,” or at least serves as an avatar of it.
“I feel like it was a show created by two people who went to Brandeis and wrote about their lives after college,” Kudrow said.
“And for shows especially, when it’s going to be a comedy that’s character-driven, you write what you know. They have no business writing stories about the experiences of being a person of color,” she added.
I think Kudrow’s comments make a very good point, and illustrate how we should not assume that a lack of diversity is due to malice or internalized racism, but an inability to be as authentic as the art requires. If you had primarily White friends in college and directly after, and then you proceed to make a hit show based on that life of yours, and that show goes on to get made with an all-White cast and becomes a cultural touchstone (however undeserving or absurd that is), then I say good for you. You have nothing to feel bad about.
I mean, at the end of the day, are we really going to take some overrated crap show like Friends and call that a mirror or summation of ’90s culture? No show could possibly encapsulate the ’90s. I lived in and remember that entire decade. Does that show reflect our society or just one woman’s experiences as a young person living in New York City with her stupid friends? Are people so desperate to see themselves in things that they’ll attack a show that’s been off the air for two decades over its lack of diverse casting? Especially now in the social media age we live in, where anyone can put themselves out there on a dozen platforms and find an audience no matter what race or ethnicity they are?
Attack Friends all you want for being unfunny and cringe as hell. But don’t waste your time bashing it for its lack of diversity. That’s actually insane.
Probably the most sarcastic article you’ll read all year.
Source: Midjourney
When your franchise’s latest installment sounds like a brand of female sex toy, you might have a problem.
“Girlfriend, my Acolyte just came in the mail. My weekend is all set.”
How do you keep up with the torrent of Star Wars content these days? I barely remember my own birthday anymore while there are whole YouTube channels and publications devoted to following this garbarge.
I’ll tell you one thing. None of this new stuff feels epic. It all puts off weird local hipster playhouse energy. As if the same cornballs behind Lesbian Interpretative Dance: The Musical, or My Vagina and Me, A Monologue, were suddenly put in charge of a billion dollar brand and told let ‘er rip.
The original Star Wars and even Empire Strikes Back felt on par with stuff like Lawrence of Arabia or Dune or Lord of the Rings. The new shit feels small and unimaginative, and so slick-looking it looks like it was shot inside an empty bag of potato chips. Really, go compare the recent Dune trailer, or Avatar: The Way of Water, to any new Disney+ Star Wars stuff. No contest.
I don’t give a shit about Star Wars. I never really did. I count myself lucky I never saw it as a young kid. There was a brief time when I was 15 or 16, after I’d seen the original ’77 release that I sort of got into it. I admired the storytelling and the special effects. But it was nothing really special to me. For me, the “saga” was contained to one very good film, end of story. I never cared for Empire because it was like a weird Muppet movie, and the “romance” between Leia and Han felt immature and highschoolish. The first half of Return of the Jedi was decent, then it became a wacky cartoon with teddy bears.
I will admit I was one of those suckers in 1999 who got swept up by the hype for Phantom Menace. Then I saw it, hated it, and realized the whole franchise was purely a cynical toy-marketing machine for baby-men. I skipped Clones, but did check out Sith out of morbid curiosity and because I was reassured it was “good.” It was not. It sucked, too.
I can trace back to the exact moment I lost all interest in Star Wars, and in fact, began to actively hate it. I was in some sports good store years ago, mid-2000s maybe, when I spotted a Jar Jar Binks fishing pole.
Even I knew Jar Jar Binks was the most hated character in Star Wars lore. And they’d made a line of fishing poles with his face on it? I couldn’t get over thinking about how at one point some lawyer had to have handed Lucas a form to sign to authorize the manufacture of a Jar Jar Binks fishing pole. And Lucas sat thinking yes, this is a great idea and a necessary thing for my legacy and franchise income stream. I saw that fishing pole as a symbol of the ultimate abandonment of art and storytelling and the selling of one’s soul in exchange for a few more pennies. From that point on, I began to despise anything and everything associated with this shitshow called Star Wars. It offended me on a deep level.
Then came the asinine sequels from Disney/Abrams and Rian Johnson. The Force Awakens, an obvious clone of A New Hope, only with an even bigger death star this time. It took me four nights to hate-watch Last Jedi, and believe me, it was paaaainful. That was the last I saw of the franchise. I recalled hearing about various Disney+ shows, but in the same sense as one hears in the news about a new virus discovered in the rainforest. Just something to be ignored while you hope you don’t get infected.
Having said all that, you might think I’d be the last guy in the world you’d want trying to save this sorry ass franchise. You’d be right, of course. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have some ideas.
1.) Make ‘Star Wars’ Bigger and Blacker
Source: Midjourney
There are apparently armies of Youtubing dorks crying about how Star Wars is “woke” now, which is why it sucks so hard. I’m not entirely sure what “woke” means anymore, other than it seems to often boil down to the intolerable presence of too many Black people and/or gay people and/or gay Black people in a show or movie. The YouTubing dorks are very quick to point out how that’s not the case, insisting that wokeness is purely about left wing messaging and poor storytelling or something, NOT race. Except it’s rare that I see the charge of “wokeness” levied against any show where Blacks/Gays-A-Plenty isn’t the demographic distinction. Meanwhile, the show creators bray on about diversity and inclusion and other virtue signal corporate buzzwords.
Hey, if you don’t like Blacks or gays or whoever in certain roles or movies or shows, just say so. It’s perfectly fine to prefer whoever you want. It’s like dating. No one’s obligated to like everyone. Freedom of association extends to whatever garbage you care to scroll through on the tube. It’s kind of painful and cringe watching people contort and twist themselves in knots trying to justify or lambaste particular people or groups, using meaningless words like “woke” or “diversity” or “inclusion.” The supporters of diversity acting all open-minded, as if they don’t have an online cancel mob gun to their head. The opposers trying hard to toe the line between reasonable criticism and outright prejudice. It’s all make believe anyway. Just be up front about it.
Now personally, I say fuck both sides. Why make some watered down half-ass “woke” compromise? I say commit all the way. Make the next Star Wars show or movie with ONLY Black people. And not just Black people, but Black women. You set the story on a planet populated entirely by a race of aliens who happen to look like Black women. Strong Black women, to be exact. Then you introduce a villain. A White guy. That’ll be the only White character in the entire show. What’s his motivation? Who cares. What’s his name even? Who gives a shit. He’s White, he’s evil, ‘nuff said. Then, after, say, half an episode of setting up the characters and showing how strong, Black, and female they are, the villain shows up. Then you spend the next seven episodes just having the strong Black women beating the shit out of the evil White guy until he dies or goes away. You know the famous hallway fights from the Daredevil series on Netflix? Just like that, only for seven episodes. That’s it, that’s the show. Anything less than that is racist and insufficiently woke, as far as I’m concerned.
Yes, I know I’m being ridiculous here. But I’m trying to illustrate a point by making an argument by absurdity.
A good example of the type of “post-racial-don’t-give-a-shit-about-offending-anybody” sort of vibe I’m going for is what you generally see in a Tarantino film. Like, say, Django Unchained. That movie pulls no punches. Django starts off as a downtrodden slave rescued by a White guy. But he ends the film blowing up a plantation and avenging the death of the White guy who saved him, and freeing his wife. All while looking badass doing it. That movie made over $400 million dollars and earned Tarantino his second Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
Another good example is Avatar. That is an anti-colonialist, anti-imperalist, very pro-environmentalist-to-the-point-of-worshipping-nature-itself themed film. It’s very “woke,” technically speaking. One might even say anti-Western and anti-American. It’s made almost $3 billion. Conservatives and liberals all went to go see it and both came away loving it.
Point is, nobody really hates “woke” shit. What they really hate is weak, pandering shit that tries to do this halfway in, halfway out deal to please everyone. If your goal is to make a racially conscious Star Wars film, then fucking commit to that hard. Don’t just sprinkle in a bunch of minority actors as tokens of some half-baked rainbow messaging scheme, and then go around pattting yourself on the back. Don’t try to make the movie equivalent of that stupid We are the World singalong from the ’80s, or more recently, that ultra cringe Imagine singalong all those actors did during the Covid lockdown.
Moviegoers are thinking, conscious beings. They respect movies that STAND for things, even if they may disagree with the messaging. Even if the world is alien and strange and runs counter to their own natural experiences. Think about it. Imagine if these movies were like people. Does anyone like the guy with no identity who goes around desperately trying to get everyone to like him? No, everybody hates that guy because he’s a fraud. Don’t be that guy. Be yourself.
2.) ‘Star Wars’ is in Desperate Need of Butt Sex
Source: Midjourney
In an interview, Leslye Headland, the lesbian showrunner for The Acolyte crowed (kind of jokingly, to be fair) about the show being the “gayest Star Wars ever.” I’d link the original interview but I couldn’t find it due to there being a million YouTube videos of crybabies talking about it that I had to wade through.
Headland is now sort of passively walking back her statement, saying:
I don’t believe I’ve created queer, with a capital Q, content.
The Acolyte apparently has lesbian space witches who are able to summon the force somehow, or whatever. Again, I pick up most info about Star Wars these days through osmosis, as one hears about the latest sordid engagements of the pass-around slut in high school. I’m not watching any of this shit myself, as I have a life and things to do.
I will say, however, that I’m going to call Headland’s bluff here. She says it’s the “gayest” Star Wars ever? Well, I went back to watch the trailer, and I don’t see anything gay in it whatsover. No kissing between a same sex couple. No hand holding. Certainly no butt sex, either.
Again, what’s with all this half-ass compromise? You don’t run a race to come in second, to paraphrase the Apostle Paul. And I’m pretty sure Paul would also say that you don’t set out to make “queer content” unless you’re planning on earning that capital letter “Q.” So here’s my solution: Full-on close-up anal intercourse and lesbian grinding (I believe it’s called “scissoring”). That’s it, that’s the show. Just close-up shots of penis in ass and vaginas rubbing against other vaginas. Maybe you have a small part of the background just off to the side of a butt cheek or waist. That could be part of a compelling mystery every week. What planet are we on? Tatooine? Naboo? Vulcan? More importantly, who’s banging who? Then maybe at the end of each episode the camera finally pulls back and reveals who’s been fucking the whole time. Obi-Wan and Darth Maul? Or maybe it’s Yoda being a surprise power bottom to a vigorously thrusting Boba Fett. Maybe Leia had a lesbian phase in space college, and spent nights getting it on with Ahsoka. The possibilites are endless. Think of the viral memes when fans discover Lando liked to take a deep dicking from Greedo. Now we’ll know for sure who shot first.
A budget for a show like this I could see easily being $600 million or so for eight episodes. That’s money well spent. You might say it’s risky to show explicit raw gay sex in a franchise meant for the whole family, but you want to get people talking don’t you? I guarantee you that’ll happen when millions click on Disney+ and see Vice-Admiral Hodo butt fucking Jabba the Hut.
The underlying point here, is don’t misrepresent your show. Don’t do it to score some virtue signal points. Don’t do it because you’re just trying to impress your stupid woke friends in the office. Don’t do it, period. Not every piece of entertainment needs to be some activist content. You don’t get to go around saying how gay-friendly you are because you stuck some random same-sex couple in the blurry background kissing each other, or because your showrunner happens to be gay. What the fuck does that have to do with anything? What does you liking the same sex have to do with the character on screen swinging around a glowing plasma sword? If the answer is, “Well, nothing, I guess,” then kindly shut the fuck up. You don’t need to fill the air with a bunch of superfluous details about your sexual preferences. No one is looking at you like you’re some civil rights hero. You’re not being interned in a prison camp. You’re not self-immolating in front of the UN. You’re making a stage play about space wizards. For Christ’s sake, get over yourself.
3.) Dig Deep into Rey’s Sex Life
Source: Midjourney
Rey Skywalker? More like Rey Sexworker.
I never saw the final installment in the last trilogy of films. I don’t even remember what it was called. The Force Wakes Up Again? Palpatine Has Somehow Returned? Oh, yes. The Rise of Skywalker. That’s it. Ugh. What a boring, predictable title.
I remember even less about the plot, except for a lot of people on the internet complaining about the mixedupedness of the romance. First Rey was with Kylo, obviously turned on by that sweaty shirtless moment with him in Last Jedi. Then they’re fighting for some reason. Then they’re back together again.
All the while Finn is trying or not trying to get Rey’s attention because he may or may not have a crush on her. And what ever happened with the thing between him and that Asian chick Rose? Or maybe Finn and Poe were supposed to be banging all along. Talk about a missed opportunity for a hot gay romance.
You see how frustratingly annoying and wishy-washy all that is? What a load of weak sauce bullshit. This is like the worst high school romance YA book ever written.
All of these people are grown adults fighting a fucking war. You think there aren’t times they don’t get lonely and desperate? You think they wouldn’t want some action on the side? Let’s be frank here. Rey’s hot. She’s young. She’s nubile. She’s got a cute British accent. The girl’s got it going on. You think she wouldn’t have a boyfriend or at least some admirers orbiting around her on Jakku? You think when Rey was a slave she never had to give her master Unkar Plutt a blowjob in exchange for a slightly less severe beating that day? Because I guarantee you she did. You don’t even want to know what happened between Leia and Jabba the Hutt when the camera wasn’t looking. You think Ms. Organa choked the like out of the fat slug just because he licked her once? Nah, look at her face when she kills him. That’s the look of a woman who got fucked in the ass raw, no lube. Sorry to break it to you.
What is with these big Disney spectacle films where every character must be utterly chaste and sexless and romanceless? Why must every character be as untouched and pure as an unboxed collectible Star Wars toy? Why must every potential romantic interaction be juvenilized and made a big joke? Star Wars and Marvel films are meant to be modern day versions of Greek myths. Remember how the Greeks and Trojans fought an entire war because some dude wanted to bang an uber hottie named Helen? Remember how those hot naked Sirens lured men off Odysseus’ ship with songs of sex and pleasure?
Some of the biggest films ever have had major romances at their cores. Titanic being a great example. It has a steamy sex scene and it still beat Star Wars in the all-time box office gross back in 1998! But even in other more family-friendly “four-quadrant” films passions have run high. Superman gives up his powers to bang Lois Lane in Superman II. In The Lion King Simba and Nala actually get it on. In an animated kid’s film, no less. The Justice League cartoon from the early 2000s had a number of romance subplots. Yet somehow a science fiction/fantasy war epic featuring battle-hardened adult warriors with magical powers can’t handle personal relationships beyond what you’d see at an awkward middle-school dance party. That’s just plain pathetic and weird.
I’m not saying you’ve got to have romance injected in every relationship. But these Star Wars characters feel like they were written by robots. They’re so sanitized. They lack warmth and humanity because the characters themselves are denied an entire component of human nature. You can call it the Game of Thrones-ification of Star Wars if you want. I call it writing as if actual adults are in your story and not pacifier-sucking toddlers in grown-up clothes.
4.) Make the New ‘Star Wars’ Movie a Bait and Switch Infomercial
Source: Midjourney
This is honestly such a cynically crass but also brilliant idea I can’t believe Disney hasn’t done it yet. It’s distilling decades of relentless Star Wars marketing into its purest form, while deceiving fans into thinking they’re getting a worthwhile adventure. So, what Disney has done the last ten years, basically.
First, you create the most exciting and epic trailer of all time for the next Star Wars movie. When I saw epic, I mean fucking EPIC. You hire A-listers. You steal all those CGI computers they’re using for Avatar and use them for the most mind-bending special effects ever made. You hire John Williams and Hans Zimmer to co-write the most unbelievable new score ever written. You spend $1 billion, if necessary.
Second, you hype the absolute shit out of this trailer. You buy every ad space possible. You send every actor onto every show to do nothing but talk about it. You stage viral moments. You show people fainting and having to be rushed to the hospital after watching it. You kidnap Mr. Beast and make him do a whole video just about the new Star Wars trailer. You buy TikTok if you have to and only allow Star Wars-themed videos in order to totally capture Gen Z. Then, when you’ve got every person on the planet foaming at the mouth, you’re ready for the final step.
Step three, you premier the “movie,” only for it to just be a ten-hour long infomercial with some old lady in a blue sweater pitching Star Wars merch with a 1–800 number for people to call in and order. Star Wars Episode X: QVC. That’s it, that’s the movie. You could sell replica light sabers, original movie props, costumes, autographed portraits, and hey, maybe even Jar Jar Binks fishing poles, too.
If you’re going to commercialize your show up the ying-yang, then you might as well commit 100% to the bit. Just go all out. Stop pretending like you care more about crafting a good story than shoving the next pile of toys and dolls down our throats. There’d be more dignity in it. I’d have way more respect for Disney if during the next opening Star Wars crawl it just said, “Buy our shit or get out, suckers.” Rather than a bunch of silly exposition about the Empire still being a threat somehow.
Besides, you know at least every senior citizen in the country would sit for the whole ten hours of the infomercial “movie.” Oldsters go gaga for that QVC shit. You’d probably make a decent profit in the end.
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Anyway, I hope these suggestions have helped, or at least shined a light on some of the B.S. plaguing what is stupidly but evidently the most popular epic saga in American cinema history. I’ll never understand why that is. But I get it. Sort of.
If none of this has helped, then oh well. I don’t give a shit either way. Fuck Star Wars.
It’s good to be Robert Downey Jr. these days. With a career and reputation left for dead by the mid-2000s, a role in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang helped reanimate the troubled ’80s star’s corpse back to life.
Famously, it was landing the role of Tony Stark/Iron Man for the newborn Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2008 that would send him back to A-list status. It’s hard to believe it, but Iron Man was considered a signficant risk to produce at one point. Nobody had heard of the character outside of comic book fans. Then there was the star himself, Downey Jr. who was an even bigger gamble with his prior arrests, DUIs and rehab visits. Dude was a hot mess.
Iron Man was a massive hit. The MCU completely (for better or worse) took over Hollywood for the next ten years. The mega franchise culminated in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame, which saw Downey Jr. finally retire Tony Stark in dramatic, sacrificial fashion.
Ever since then the MCU has been…well, shitty. It’s been bomb after bomb, basically.
Earlier this year Downey Jr. won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role as conniving politician Lewis Strauss in Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. You may have heard of it. It won Best Picture and made nearly a billion dollars.
Yes, $100 million. As in one tenth of a billion dollars. That’s an obscenely silly amount of money to pay someone just for playing dress up for a few months. However, a little perspective is in order. Some justification, even. I contend Feige might have gotten Downey Jr. CHEAP for the role.
You have to remember, an A-list star is an investment in the film’s success. This goes especially so in Downey Jr.’s case. No Downey Jr, Iron Man maybe isn’t a hit. No Iron Man hit, no MCU. No MCU, no billions of dollars.
Like Jules Winnfield said, “Personality goes a long way.”
The last Avengers film, Endgame, made nearly $3 billion. Infinity War made over $2 billion. Even if the next two Avengers films make “only” $4 billion combined, that means Downey, Jr. cost a mere 2.5% of the total revenue, not including merchandise sales and other downstream effects of two hit movies, like traffic to the upcoming Marvel Infinity Kingdom at Disneyworld.
There’s also precedent for paying top talent a huge sum to help lend respectability (and most importantly, ticket sales) to a spandex flick. It all started when Richard Donner approached Marlon Brando to appear in Superman: The Movie as Supes’ dad, Jor-El. Brando agreed, but only for the princely sum of $3.7 million plus a cut of the profits. An utterly outrageous sum back then for what amounted to less than two weeks of work. But Donner needed a big star in addition to the great Gene Hackman already signed on as Lex Luthor, as newcomer Christopher Reeve wasn’t a big name at the time.
‘Superman: The Movie.’ Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures
Brando got his big payday. Superman grossed $300 million at the box office, making The Godfather’s upfront cut a mere 1% of the revenue. That’s not counting video sales, merch, broadcast rights, and other income sources over the last 45 years since the film’s release. If Superman has made $1 billion thus far, then Brando’s “outrageous” sum only cost about one third of one percent of the total revenue. I’d say Warner Bros. got their money’s worth out of him.
Of course, movies with big actors bomb all the time. It’s risky fronting enough cash to fill a Brink’s truck, even to charismatic, proven stars like Downey Jr. Time will tell whether this massive paycheck will prove a good investment or not. Either way, even $100 million will look small in four decades time, just like Brando’s $3.7 million does relatively-speaking today.
Dean Brooks 