Well audience, it finally happened. In all of its kinky glory, so emerges the black butterfly from the fetid cocoon. Fifty Shades Free is out, and I can comfortably tell you that it is the hardest film of the three to write about.
 
Freed commits a cardinal sin in bad moviemaking: It’s profoundly boring. This movie reeks of the “Make three of them” mentality that media has adopted over the last fifteen years. There’s barely enough plot in this series to fill a thimble but bless her heart, EL James has painted an entire trilogy with it. Here we go:

The film opens with Christian and Ana’s wedding, which unlike the Twilight wedding is blissfully short but tragically contains no poorly dressed guests. They decide to honeymoon somewhere nonspecifically tropical, which brings up the first two problems in the film.
 
Problem the first: As they drive away from the wedding, Christian and Ana approach an airfield with a private jet. Ana exclaims, “You own this?!” to which Christian replies, lovingly, “No, we own it.” You guys, they didn’t discuss finances before they got married. Ana has no idea how much she’s now worth. Intriguingly, this also means that Christian never gave her a prenup before this, so when their marriage inevitably implodes Ana will be able to walk away to the tune of several billion dollars from Grey…LLC? Enterprises? I feel like the name of the company changed between films.
 
Problem the second: Remember Jack Hyde? Ana’s crazy, rapist boss from the last film? That’s okay, nobody else does either. But he’s back, and now inexplicably he’s a domestic terrorist. Hold on, be careful before you get too interested because this goes fucking nowhere. Jack Hyde sneaks into the Grey building disguised as a janitor and hacks into Christian’s server room before blowing it up with a bomb that’s somehow made out of an old steel flask. That’s not even a joke – I can’t get the screenshot, but if you ever have the misfortune of watching this movie, take a look, it’s a flask.

These questions carry me through the entirety of the film. Every time we have to sit through Christian and Ana fucking I’m wondering what Jack’s doing. Is he mining Bitcoin? Is he throwing some rouge on his lips and entertaining sailors down by the pier? Where does he get this money? What’s he up to now? Is he thinking about me, too?
 
Ana and Christian come home from their honeymoon because of the attack. Jack, I guess, stole some personal information on Christian, which he could have done without blowing up a server room and nobody would have suspected a goddamn thing, but hey, then we wouldn’t have a movie, Jack would win, and I would be happy.
 
Ana is introduced to her new private security team – a man named Sawyer, who’s cool, and…a woman. She has a name, but this series tends to spit out people who don’t accomplish anything, so we’ll just call her Woman #4.
 
Surprise! Christian bought a house without telling Ana, which is becoming increasingly distressing as they continue to, y’know, be married. It’s the house from the boat scene in the last movie. Don’t remember the boat scene from the last movie? There was a house in it! It’s…fine. Imagine asking a billionaire what a rustic cabin looks like and you’ve got the gist of it. Christian hires an architect to tear the whole goddamn thing down and put up a smart house, which is a great idea when your wife was making doe-eyes at it earlier because you know she was stoked about the value of the land and nothing else. The architect is pretty and hits on Christian, so Ana puts on her most intimidating face and tells her to knock it off, proving that she’s just as weird and jealous as Christian, I guess? I think this was supposed to establish that she could also put her big domly dom pants on sometimes, but Dakota Johnson delivered the whole speech at a low, mewling whisper like every line in this series, so it was about as intimidating as boxing someone with no arms. Architect lady acquiesces.

Sometime around now, Christian and Ana get into a discussion about whether or not they want children. Christian says he does, but at some point down the road because, and I’m quoting here, he’s not ready to share Ana with anybody else yet. With a child. His child. This man has a problem.
 
Jack Hyde, we’re told, continues to do some crazy Mission Impossible bullshit behind the scenes, which is ridiculous because that sounds like a much more interesting movie.
 
Christian goes away on business, because EL James can’t think of any other way to separate this couple. He insists that because Ana is being hunted by a psychopath that perhaps she should teleconference into work for the next couple days, but Ana is far too strong-willed to be held down by the oppressive wishes of her safety conscious husband. Which, look, I get it. Christian is an asshole. He tries to police every single aspect of Ana’s life, but like, in this one specific instance, maybe you ought to stay home and stop yourself from being murdered. Eagle-eyed readers may be able to figure out where this is going.
 
Ana ignores the wishes of her husband and goes out for a night of drinking with…a person. It could be anyone, really. You don’t care. Nobody cares. Existence is meaningless. They have a nice time.
 
As Ana returns home, she’s accosted in her living room by Jack Hyde, who pulls a knife on her before being subdued by Sawyer and Woman #4 and arrested. I start to wish the movie was about Sawyer instead, because he seems like a nice guy.
 
AND BY THE WAY, there’s a subplot about Ana’s secretary trying to seduce Sawyer, and they make eyes at each other for like half the movie and it goes fucking nowhere. In the movie where everyone is supposed to be fucking, Sawyer can’t get any. It’s a goddamn tragedy is what it is.
 
Christian comes home, sad that Ana exposed herself to domestic terrorism. Ana (correctly) points out that Jack attacked at the house, so staying home would have been no safer. She doesn’t want to feel like she lives in a prison, which is weird because she married Christian Grey. Christian gives in, and he, Ana, and their friends go on a trip to Aspen, Colorado. This takes about 20 minutes of the film and stone nothing happens. Christian’s brother gets engaged. Remember Christian had a brother? Me neither.
 
Jack gets out on $500 000 bail, once again raising the question of where the flying fuck Jack gets all this money. Jack claims that he had come to the house to talk things over with Ana, or something, which works despite three witnesses who can testify that he had a knife, and the knife being at the crime scene. In the most shocking of twists, Jack somehow kidnaps Christian’s sister Mia. He demands some money or he’ll kill her, so Ana grabs a gun and goes to the bank, asking for five million dollars. Not like, with the gun. The regular way. The gun is for Jack.
 
I feel the need to mention at this point that Christian Grey is a multi-billionaire. Billion. With a B. Asking for five million dollars is trivial. This is like me kidnapping your sister and demanding a ham sandwich.
 
Christian hears word that his wife is absconding with a paltry sum of his money and starts tracking her phone. Everyone follows her to where Jack and Mia are. Jack kicks Ana twice and she shoots him in the leg with the gun before blacking out. Christian and all the police show up and get Jack. Everyone is fine, including the baby, which they have. Roll credits.
 
There’s some more to it than that – Jack and Christian turn out to be from the same foster family, one of Ana’s coworkers is evil, and some other stuff, but you don’t care. Don’t lie to me, internet, I know you don’t. This movie makes no sense.  I want to hope that the book makes more sense than this but I know it doesn’t.
 
The important takeaway here is that we’re done. Really, truly finished with Twilight, with Fifty Shades, the whole shebang. It’s over. We did it. We slogged through perhaps the worst seven movies ever made, and all for the sake of comedy. You know what? I’m gonna jinx it. I’m going to do it on purpose. I want to see what comes next; I want to know. So here goes:
 
There’s no way it could possibly get any worse.

So anybody who saw Sunday’s Battleground pay-per-view will be able to tell you that it was bad. It’s made all the worse by the fact that last year’s equivalent was probably the best “B-show” of the year (Meaning it wasn’t WrestleMania, SummerSlam, Survivor Series, or the Royal Rumble). WhatCulture already wrote a lovely article about the obvious stuff so I’m going to stay away from, “Oh, the Punjabi Prison is impossible to see into, and there’s strange racial implications,” and whatever. Other people have said it already and said it better. Instead, I want to talk about Battleground as a signpost of something very simple:The company continues to stay the course.

What I mean is that their whole mindset continues to reek of short-term planning. And before anybody gets all up my ass about how hard it is to change course in the middle of a development cycle, I know. I know. The WWE is probably in the process of putting out fires that began sometime around January, if that. But this issue has been going on for years now: We see the company banking on old formulas in the hope that they’ll pull in the numbers that they did when they were fresh. The options for anything new or exciting are consistently squandered.Think about this for a second: Randy Orton lost a Punjabi Prison match for the world title after getting choked out by The Great Khali. Is that headline from yesterday, or 2007? Meanwhile, Sami Zayn won a nothing match against a returning wrestler, we got the same women’s match that we’ve seen for six months, and America beat a country that was standing in for Russia. In a match about flags.
The surprise of the evening was Khali’s return, and it’ll be all that’s talked about in the wrestling world for at least another week, which is obviously what the company is going for. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Big returns have generated buzz literally since we invented wrestling. But part of the reason that this is so newsworthy is because nothing else was newsworthy. The rest of the show was a big steaming pile of nothing.
At last year’s Battleground Sami Zayn had one of the defining matches of his WWE career. He’d been building this feud with Kevin Owens for like six months, and he kept losing, and they were costing each other matches and it was great. And then at Battleground Sami kicked Kevin’s fucking head off twice. It was a beautiful moment. This year he beat Mike Kanellis, who I guess is in love. And apparently that’s terrible.

Who gives a shit?! There’s nothing to care about! There’s been nothing to care about since WrestleMania! We’re in this weird limbo of nothing: Nothing of value is happening week-to-week, and Battleground proves that nothing of value is happening during the pay-per-views either. So why am I watching? It’s not even shocking! The last time I wrote about wrestling it was because things had gotten weird, and you know what? Weird puts butts in seats. If things are completely bonkers I might not enjoy it but I’m at least compelled to watch. Battleground was more like a slow, arduous march towards the inevitable. It wasn’t good, but more importantly it wasn’t interesting.
The WWE has had enough opportunities to make something interesting happen and yet instead of admitting that what they’re doing isn’t working they’ve decided to stay the course. They’ve stayed the course to the tune of a 20% ratings drop from this time last year, including a 40%-or-more drop with teenage boys, who represent a significant demographic.
But nothing is changing. Why would I watch if they’re committed to a death march?

Also known as “Why fucking awful Fantastic Four movies keep coming out for some reason.”Recently Spider-Man: Homecoming actor Tom Holland revealed in an interview that according to Marvel big-wig Kevin Feige Peter Parker appeared in 2010’s Iron Man 2 in a brief cameo. Some people are chuckling to themselves about it but some people are flipping their lids thinking that Marvel’s had this whole Spider-Man thing on the back burner for seven years and they’ve just been waiting to let the hype train loose from the station until now.
As a Marvel fanboy I’d love to be able to tell everyone that Kevin Feige is some kind of secret genius, but as many people already know, given Marvel’s current cinematic landscape, it was impossible for this to have been the plan all along. To explain why, we have to step back about twenty-five years.

Basically, it’s been Marvel’s plan to make movies for a while. However, it hasn’t been Marvel’s plan to make movies in-house until quite recently. The first film in the so-called “Marvel Cinematic Universe” was 2008’s Iron Man and they’ve been making money hand-over-fist ever since. Everyone knows that the big superhero boom started around 2000 though, with the first Marvel hit technically being 1998’s Blade. So what happened here? If Iron Man was the first Marvel Studios film, who was making these other superhero movies?Well, frankly, a lot of people. Blade was done by New Line Cinema, Ang Lee’s Hulk was Universal, X-Men, Daredevil, and Fantastic Four were 20th Century Fox, and importantly, the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films were done by Columbia Pictures, which is a division of Sony. Studios also owned Namor the Sub-Mariner, Black Panther, and a bunch of others who never ended up getting stand-alone movies.
These rights were sold off to various movie studios in the 90s back when Marvel didn’t even dream of making its own films. The problem with having sold off these rights is that Marvel Studios circa 2005 was actually not allowed to make films using their own characters. The rules of these sales, as I understand it, state that if a certain amount of time goes by without a product containing these characters being made, the rights automatically default back to Marvel. That’s why Fant4stic (Pronounced fant-four-stic) got made recently and why the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man films got made as well.

Which brings us back to our original problem: The kid in Iron Man 2 not being Peter Parker. Iron Man 2 was released in 2010 amid early production for 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man, which was back when Sony and Marvel were, to put it overdramatically, not talking to each other. Marvel was in a bit of a scramble to re-acquire the rights to their own characters, but certain studios, Sony included, were dragging their feet on the issue.

Personally, my theory is that when Marvel started killing it at the box office, those who owned the rights to Marvel properties went into panic mode and started developing anything using the characters that they had available. This explains why we ended up with the 2011 reboot X-Men: First Class and probably why we got 2012’s Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. Remember that one? Yeah, me neither.
So for Feige and the rest of Marvel’s film division to have planned a Spider-Man cameo in 2010 would have just been poor business strategy. What if they never got the rights to Spider-Man back? Then they would have promised Peter Parker and been unable to deliver. With 2012’s The Avengers still right around the corner promising huge payoffs to four years of waiting, Marvel was treading on some very untested and potentially unstable ground. It would have been foolhardy to try to promise something that they knew they couldn’t deliver.
So what appears to have happened is some kind of retroactive cameo. It was just a kid, but now they’re embracing the idea that this kid is Peter Parker. Holland himself even confirms this in the cited interview, saying “[Feige] didn’t confirm [the kid was Peter Parker], I took it upon myself just because I thought it would be a good story.” And you know what? That’s totally fine! I have absolutely no problem with them retroactively making that kid Peter Parker. In fact, I think it might be cool if there was a throwaway line in the next MCU Spider-Man film confirming it. “You saved me at the Stark Expo, it made me want to be a hero.” Or something. I fully support going backwards and adding depth to the character by retconning certain innocuous events into important parts of Parker’s origin story.
I just want to make sure that everyone knows it’s a retcon.

(This article contains in-depth spoilers for Wonder Woman. You’ve been fairly warned.)
First of all, to address the title, take any joke in the film and imagine that it was plucked verbatim from a Zooey Deschanel movie. You’ll be surprised how many of them line up.
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Wonder Woman was pretty great. It’s by a significant margin the best live action DC film so far. Of course, the bar is pretty low on those. I want you to bear that in mind while you read this, because I’m going to be critical of it. That’s just what I do, it’s easier for me to criticize. So, yes, you should probably go see Wonder Woman if you have a chance. It’s a good time.
So, I’ve always been a Marvel guy. I’m not sure specifically what it was about Marvel, but when I was a kid I was always way more intrigued by their aesthetic than I was DC’s. Spider-Man and Wolverine were my jam, and as I got older I started to appreciate guys like Iron Man and Daredevil. DC, I dunno. Batman is cool, sure, but that’s one shiny light in a sea of I-don’t-care

I begin with this because I want to make it clear that one of the issues that I have with Wonder Woman is not entirely Wonder Woman’s fault. Problem number one is an issue with the DC aesthetic, so it’s not Wonder Woman’s fault that they’re portraying the character faithfully. Problem number two is a logistic one, which personally I like a lot more.

Batman notwithstanding, DC has always had a problem with their flagship heroes being, frankly, too morally righteous; too unflappable. They cannot be flapped. Superman, for example, is not an interesting character because watching him is like watching a toddler fight a brick wall: He is physically impervious and in the main continuity his ethics get tested so infrequently that doing so is a laughable waste of time. A toddler cannot physically harm a brick wall. Nothing a toddler can say will make a brick wall cry. You know the brick wall is going to win, so why bother watching in the first place?
(As an aside, Superman grew up in rural Kansas in the 30s, where they practically invented racism. Where’s my alternate-universe hyper-racist Superman? I’m not saying it would be a good character, but at least it would give us more twists and turns than vanilla Clark.)

One of the other things that the film flip-flops on in terms of lessons is the idea of whether or not humans are inherently good. Wonder Woman believes that they are, and that war is a product of the corrupting influence of Greek god Ares, but boyfriend Steve claims that some people are just dicks. Near the end of the film, Wonder Woman realizes that one of the Germans (this is WWI, in case you didn’t know) is actually Ares in disguise, so she does the sensible thing and runs him through the chest with a sword. She’s then devastated to realize that the war continues around her.
Great! So the lesson is that humans are in full control of their destinies. Sure, we sometimes go to war and murder the shit out of each other, but at least we’re not being controlled by a vindictive God. Except no, it turns out that Ares is actually in disguise as a British general after all. Wonder Woman kills him, too, and then the Germans all kind of drop their guns and surrender.
Okay, that’s also fine, I suppose. War is caused by the corrupting influence of Ares, but he’s dead now, so we can all get along. Sweet! Thank God that there was never any other major global conflicts after World War I.
Seriously though, what’s the lesson here? We know that war didn’t just stop at the start of the 1920s. What’s more, we know that there’s an enormous number of significant sociocultural factors that led to World War II. Well Scott, Ares clearly didn’t die, I hear you already saying. Okay, sure, that’s a possibility. But was Ares at the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, ensuring that the terms were grossly skewed against the Germans? Did Ares tank the German economy? Is that something he can just do? That sounds wrong to me.
Wonder Woman decides that she needs to protect humanity out of love for them, and presumably for her dead boyfriend. But if humans need protecting from each other regardless then why did you kill Ares? And if killing Ares was necessary then why do we need protecting now? Does Ares govern small conflicts? Fist fights? Where’s the line? What did defeating him solve? What is the nature of humanity, Wonder Woman? Your moral subtext doesn’t make sense.
I’ll leave it at that for now, because frankly I don’t think the movie really deserves to be shit on any more than that. It’s honestly a pretty fun ride—my official score is that I’m glad I saw it, but I probably wouldn’t pay money to see it again. It’s the best live-action film that the DC cinematic universe has produced so far, but as superhero movies go it’s kind of middling. Check it out for yourselves, I would love to hear what other people think about it.

Full disclosure, in this article I’m going to be talking about something that is, in strictly technical definitions, pornography. The article is not about the sexual aspects, nor does it feature any sexual images. You’ve been warned in advance.You know what I love? Taking something old and tired and making it new and interesting again. I love, for example, that Cabin in the Woods was able to take the played-out formula for an 80’s-style slasher movie and turn the whole thing on its head until it made that style fresh again. I think that sort of thing is brilliant.
Specifically in this case I want to talk about a visual novel called Grisaia no Kajitsu (“The Fruit of Grisaia”). First, to get it out of the way, yes, I read a lot of visual novels, and no, this doesn’t have anything to do with my weird obsession with terrible erotica. This is entirely about enjoying a good story.
Grisaia no Kajitsu stars Yuji Kazami, a high school-aged boy who’s spent the better part of his life either training to be or actually being a child soldier/special operative. Like all proper anime protagonists he’s got a dark and troubled past – his sister, a God-level genius, disappeared years ago and is presumed dead. Because he lived in the shadow of his older sister, he was neglected by his parents and became an introverted, emotionally stunted child. One thing leads to another and he ends up becoming this amazing secret agent.

Anyway, when Yuji gets to his mid-teens, he decides that, for a change, he wants to get his fair shot at a normal life. His superiors are okay with this so long as he remains on standby in case a major crisis breaks out. Problem is, as someone who hasn’t experienced a normal social upbringing, his superiors are worried about sending him to a normal school for fear of, say, PTSD symptoms and difficulties adjusting. Instead, they send him to a school for, effectively, socially broken people, of which there are already five, all of whom are girls. Throughout the game you make choices and based on those choices you end up dating one of these women. Wacky hijinks ensue.

This is where Grisaia gets super interesting. To explain why, let me go into the entire backstory for one of the girls.
So, should you choose to pursue Amane, she quite abruptly amps up all of her cliche tropes. Despite being a virgin, she throws herself at you, sexually speaking, and suddenly she’s caring for your every whim. She claims that she just enjoys being able to be affectionate with her partner, but as the game progresses it becomes increasingly clear that making you happy is becoming an unhealthy obsession for her. You discover that she’s keeping a diary where she frequently writes down new and interesting ways that she can think of to giver herself over to Yuji more fully. She wonders if she can find ways to offer up her ears and nose as sexual orifices, she’s obsessively figuring out how to cook every single thing, it’s nuts.

So finally you corner her and ask her what the hell is going on and you get the whole story. So, remember when I said Yuji had a sister? Before Amane came to this school she was in the same class as Yuji’s sister. On the way back from a camping trip, their school bus took a turn too hard and tumbled off a cliff into a forest. A bunch of kids and teachers survived, including Amane and Yuji’s sister Kazuki. At the bottom of a canyon surrounded by trees there was no cell service, and the road they were taking was remote, so the odds of someone coming across the wreckage soon were slim. Nobody knows how wide the forest is or even if there’s anything on the other side.

They try everything to get help but they’re unsuccessful. Amane, hysterical and terrified, clings to Yuji’s genius sister, who calmly tries to guide her through the situation. They’re stuck for two weeks with limited food and water until people start succumbing to their injuries and dying of sepsis. Everyone who’s thankfully not injured starts to waste away and starve. However, there’s a couple people who strangely seem to be doing pretty okay. Amane wanders through the woods one night until she discovers a group of them eating one of the sepsis-ridden bodies of their classmates. They, mad from brain diseases (they ate sepsis) and not wanting to get caught, try to kill Amane. Amane runs to get Kazuki, and Kazuki starts leading her through the woods, but the cannibals are better fed and start gaining on them. Kazuki tells Amane to keep going, she’s going to distract them, then turns around and is never seen again. Amane keeps going, ends up in a field of cabbages, where she sobs uncontrollably and eats until she throws up. Later, she’s rescued.
Right before Kazuki turns around to leave, she says, “Oh hey, by the way, since we live so close to each other, if you ever happen upon my brother, would you mind taking care of him for me? He’s kind of fragile. Well, see ya later!”
Wracked with guilt, Amane decides that the only way she can repay Kazuki for saving her life is by throwing herself, body and soul, at Yuji. This manifests itself as the doting and sexually promiscuous “older sister” anime stereotype. You see, all of these women are anime cliches, but they also live at a school for the extremely mentally disturbed.
It’s great! It’s fucking unbelievable. They’re all like that, and all of the explanations are extremely creative and heartbreaking. It also makes replaying the game extra difficult, because you start reading innocuous comments with new context and every single thing they say just knifes you right in the feelings. You learn why the maid takes everything literally, you learn why the tsundere has such a loud personality, and all the reasoning has so much depth to it. Sure, some of the explanations are a little silly out of context (I’m not a huge fan of the tsundere’s storyline) but in the moment when you’re emotionally invested in these characters it’s a thing of absolute beauty that I encourage everyone to check out. It’s on Steam. It’s like 60 hours long. The soundtrack is fucking gorgeous. Do yourself a favor.
So yeah! Take the old, make it new. And check out Grisaia no Kajitsu so that I have someone to feel feelings with.

Okay, I promise that this isn’t supposed to be a series or anything, but I’m going to be touching on subjectivity again here. Less so this time though, so feel free to sit back, relax, and turn your brain off for this one. If you’d like to check out my other articles on the subject click here and here. I just got back from seeing Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 2. I’m not going to spoil it for anybody; no review, no nothing. If you want to form an opinion on it, go and see it for yourself, or else tune in to the Hit Continue podcast next week when I’m sure we’ll talk about it. Yes folks, there’s no spoilers in this one, with one small exception—I’m going to talk about a small detail of the ending in very broad terms.

I have a story that I tell occasionally at parties and to new girlfriends when I want to seem funny and sensitive. It’s true, and technically it’s embarrassing but I laugh about it so it’s not typically that bad to tell: I cry at movies a lot. Like, a lot a lot. More importantly, I cry during movies where you’re probably not supposed to cry. The story goes that my most ugly and embarrassing movie cry was during 2011’s reboot of The Muppets. At the very end, when they’re leaving the theater and they open the door and there’s like ten thousand people there cheering for them I burst into fat ugly tears. Every. Single. Time.
The first time I saw the film I was living in the dormitories at university and I was roommates with a very manly-man hockey defenseman and I choked up so loudly that he knocked on my door to ask me what that weird noise was. I can only assume that he thought I’d somehow smuggled an eight-year-old girl into my room.
The ending of Guardians made me cry in similar fashion.
I’m grateful that it was dark, because I saw it with fellow Low Fiver Greg, his cousin and his cousin’s wife. What’s more, I’m thankful that I didn’t make any noises because when I get into a real good cry I sound like the tauntaun from Empire Strikes Back getting cut open for warmth.
The reason I’m writing about this though is that as we were leaving and I was kind of chuckling to myself about how lame it was that I could add this to the long list of stupid things that make me cry, I had a bit of a revelation. Namely, I was finally able to put my finger on what trope it is that makes me burst into tears.
Specifically, it can be summed up with the phrase, “We still love you.”
The trope plays out something like this: Characters B through Z walk out on character A, leaving him/her alone and abandoned. Either character A dies and it unites B through Z together in a “he/she wasn’t so bad after all” sort of way, or in their ultimate moment of need, all the other characters come back and stand by A’s side to help them through their crisis.
You might at this point be saying to yourself, “Yeah, that happens in like, every movie. You’re just describing the transition from act 2 to act 3 in every script ever written.” And now you understand why so many movies make me cry.

So having the metaphorical rug pulled out from under that fear is the fastest way to reduce me to a blubbering mess of a human being. In that sort of eleventh hour moment of despair a grandiose gesture of unadulterated and genuine affection hits me so strongly in the feels that there’s literally nothing I can do. And I’ve tried, audience, I’ve tried hard. Even during Guardians I had my internal monologue going like, “Really? Right now, in front of you friend? C’mon man, hold it together, you’re better than this.” And from the back of my brain a tiny voice cried out, “No you aren’t!” and the goddamn waterworks started.
I think everybody has a trigger like that though. It’s not necessarily a thing that makes you cry at movies, but maybe it’s the thing that makes you go quiet in a conversation, or the thing that keeps you up at night when you’re alone. Maybe it’s the thing that like, once a month you get one of those serious nightmares that sticks with you all day after it’s over. It’s not really something to be ashamed about, it’s what makes us human. Like any other red-blooded American you have an obligation to tamp those feelings down into a tiny bottle in the pit of your soul and let them fester for two decades as a mental illness until you have a stress-induced heart attack.
But seriously though, these manifestations happen to everyone. I got quite lucky because the worst expression of my fear is that I cry at movies sometimes. What’s more, I’ve got the tools at my disposal to laugh at myself when it happens. It’s funny! Seeing Kermit the Frog be loved by New York turns me into a little bitch, and I’m sorry, but if you don’t think that’s at least a little hilarious then you’re probably an unfeeling robot. And if you’re an unfeeling robot then you don’t cry at movies anyway.
What movies have made you cry? Are you a sucker for the dog dying? I know I am.

First of all, hello to all the new people who discovered us at the Calgary Comic Expo! Or, if you’re a regular reader and would like to visit us this weekend, we’re in booth 4540 in the Big Four building. We hope to see you stop by! Okay, article time. So, I just got home from seeing The Fate of the Furious. This isn’t a review of that – if you liked the last seven of them you’ll like the eighth one, that’s all there is to that. What I want to talk about instead is one of the positives of the writing of the, uh, “and Furious” franchise. To a lot of people those are pretty few and far between, so I think it’s only fair to point out when they do something really really correct.

As far as I know there isn’t really a concrete term for what I’m describing, so for the purposes of this article we’re going to talk about this in terms of thematic resonance, or how strongly you relate to the subtext presented in a work. This ties very strongly into my previous article, “On Subjectivity.” (Funnily enough, after writing that article, Greg said it was one of the best articles I’d ever written, while I think that some of my earlier stuff is a little better.) The short definition is this: You’re gonna like stuff that hits you in the feelings more than stuff that doesn’t. This is not surprising. If that’s surprising to you, it’s possible that you’ve never actually seen a movie before. But it does explain a lot of stuff. I have an excellent case study for exactly this topic:
From the opposite side of the equation this is called “knowing your audience.” Knowing your audience doesn’t guarantee a good movie, but it does typically guarantee a profitable movie. The Fast and the Furious movies know their audience perhaps better than everyone except one filmmaker on the planet: Michael Bay.
There are a lot of people, myself included, who shit on Michael Bay pretty relentlessly. For one thing, he wrecked the Transformers franchise for me, and while they were better than that, he also fucked with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which gives him two strikes in my nerd culture book.
Yet the Transformers films have grossed almost $3.8 billion over the course of their lifetime. Despite having an 18% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the oft-forgotten Age of Extinction grossed over a billion dollars on its own. Handily. Why? Because Michael Bay knows his audience.
The man is your go-to summer blockbuster guy. Michael Bay isn’t winning any Oscars because he’s not going for Oscars – he’s going for the kind of popcorn flicks that get butts in seats when kids are off school in July. It doesn’t matter how poorly his films are received for being trite and explosion-y because his target audience is looking for a trite movie that’s full of explosions.
It’s easy to dismiss Michael Bay as someone who doesn’t know how to make movies. It’s an extremely tempting notion because it lets us disregard him without having to think too hard. But the man knows what he’s doing, both as a marketer and as a student of the craft of film. His shots are well crafted, and on the occasional time that he’s delved into something slightly deeper than a rain puddle (The Rock, for instance) he’s shown he has a strong understanding of visual storytelling. That means that he’s making lowest-common-denominator action films on purpose. Why? Say it with me now. Because the man knows his audience.
Fate of the Furious does something similar, both in terms of plot and in terms of what I was alluding to earlier—theme. The series plays on extremely universal and wide-reaching thematic beats: Fraternity, loyalty, self-determination, etc. These things synergize very naturally with the hyper-machismo aesthetic of the films to make them extremely appealing to a large male audience.

Much like my subjectivity article, I’m not immune to this. I fucking love the Fast and the Furious series. It’s ridiculous, but it’s the fun kind of ridiculous that tickles my inner five-year-old that just wants to see explosions and attractive people and shiny stuff moving really fast. On the other hand, I don’t love this series even a fraction as much as Greg does. Greg really loves the movies because, and I’m quoting here, they’re “ABOUT FAMILY!” And this is the thing I’m talking about; family is super important to Greg, and so laying that theme on thickly (and it’s thick in this latest installment) gives the film, to him, a sense of substance that might not necessarily extend to all members of the audience. It’s part of the reason that I love The New Guy, it’s a movie about coming into your own from a position of social ostracism, which really resonated with me when, y’know, I was an enormously antisocial outcast, and fantasies of dramatic change were really valuable to me at the time.

I want to tie this back into subjectivity, because I feel like in my last article on the subject I failed to talk about every facet of it that I wanted to. Subjectivity isn’t something that just comes, poof, out of thin air. We’ve all got this unconscious list of boxes that need to be ticked in order for us to like something, and all of that stems from our personal experiences and values. Greg values the Fate of the Furious aesthetic because his family life has always been one that valued loyalty to the brotherhood very strongly. It’s the same reason why Final Fantasy XV resonated so strongly with him. As someone who didn’t have that experience growing up, I’m more willing to be critical to things that lean hard on those themes. Subjectivity doesn’t just get pulled out of your ass, it’s a combination of the experiences you’ve had and the choices you’ve made that lead you to be the person that you are now.
Sometimes those choices lead you to like The Fate of the Furious. It’s all good.

Well, it happened last Monday and Tuesday, and oh man, shit was a little bonkers. Perhaps most notably, several ongoing feuds were broken up even though there are matches booked for them in the coming weeks. For example, on the SmackDown after WrestleMania, Bray Wyatt announced that he would be cashing in his rematch clause against Randy Orton in a House of Horrors match, which doesn’t exist yet. That’s not a thing that’s real. He just teased it. Then Bray got traded to Raw. He announced his re-emergence by cutting a promo against Finn Balor. In the promo, he announced that his match with Randy is still happening! And, to be fair, it’s not like anybody was expecting Bray Wyatt to win this rematch, but now that they’re on separate shows (and Raw’s equivalent Universal Title isn’t being offered to a SmackDown guy) that makes this whole thing sort of inevitable.

Dean Ambrose was also traded to Raw, prematurely ending his feud with Baron Corbin. Dean brought the Intercontinental Championship with him, which of course necessitates that Kevin Owens and his US Title go to SmackDown. Kevin Owens is still involved in the hottest feud of the year with Chris Jericho. Or, at least, he was. What makes this all even more ridiculous is that Chris and Kevin have a match at Payback, and in order to make sense of that, the stipulation for Kevin coming to SmackDown is that he’s only there conditionally in case Chris Jericho wins their match. If Kevin loses, he goes back to Raw, and Chris comes to SmackDown.
And this isn’t even the weirdest thing that happened since WrestleMania.
No, the weirdest thing that happened, ladies and gentlemen, came this week on SmackDown. See, in spite of the fact that technically speaking Randy Orton is still in a feud with Bray Wyatt, they decided that SmackDown needed a number one contender for the WWE Championship. From a managerial standpoint this makes perfect sense – with Bray on Raw Randy now has nothing to do on television, but from a storyline perspective, what?! We have a number one contender, and his name is Bray Wyatt. Bray is the number one contender until he either wins or loses at Payback. Why are we looking at Backlash already? That’s still not the weirdest thing that happened.
So this number one contenders match begins and it’s Sami Zayn, Erick Rowan, Luke Harper, Dolph Ziggler, Jinder Mahal, and Mojo Rawley. This is setting up to be a profoundly average match, as many of the people in it are midcarders without feuds going on. And in truth the match was…fine. It wasn’t amazing, it wasn’t bad, it was perfectly acceptable. The weird thing though, at the end, is that Sami Zayn is setting up for the Helluva Kick (That’s Helloooova Kick and not hell-of-a kick, which is still dumb) when he’s interrupted by Harv and Gurv Sihra, also known as The Bollywood Boyz from the Cruiserweight Classic, now billed as the Singh Brothers.

Now let’s suppose that that didn’t happen. Let’s say that after the events of the third book it became clear that Samwell Tarly was the main character. Samwell is the overweight and slightly whiny friend of Jon Snow. There’s basically no discernable reason for him being the main character – we’ve had no other interactions with the Tarlys, his backstory thus far has been pretty clear cut and without major or interesting conflict, and he hasn’t really done anything exceptionally meaningful since his introduction except being an empathetic springboard for Jon Snow. It would be weird if Samwell was suddenly the main character. Jinder Mahal has been, up until this point, the Samwell Tarly of professional wrestling.

And that’s not to say that Jinder could never feud for the title. A perfect example of this is Dolph Ziggler. Last summer Dolph had a shot against Dean Ambrose for the WWE championship at SummerSlam. It didn’t work out for him, but in the weeks leading up to that opportunity the WWE were careful in making sure that Dolph’s wins were grandiose and the margins for his losses were pretty razor thin. Even though his feud with Dean isn’t all that fondly remembered, it also gave him enough credibility that after that he feuded with The Miz over the Intercontinental Championship, and that was without a doubt the feud of the year. But those builds were months in the making. The Miz/Ziggler feud didn’t really kick off until October, but Dolph started feuding with Dean in July.
If Jinder had maybe been the second-to-last man in this number one contender match, and then started racking up wins, he could be a totally viable main eventer in time for SummerSlam no problem. Probably even earlier than that, if they were desperate. But where we’re at right now he’s had two wins on television (not counting this last one) and that’s weird. That’s a double-a baseball team beating the Mariners. It’s not impossible, but it’s so grossly improbable that it’s weak writing.
Things are completely sideways, my friends. And I mean that in perhaps the worst way possible.

So, a couple weeks ago Billy posted an article about why everyone calls Adam “Beast” in Beauty and the Beast. It got a couple people thinking, myself included, but in the end we all kind of just giggled to ourselves and moved on with life.BUT THEN.
After browsing the internet for a while the answer was brought to my attention. I’d like all of our viewers to consider the following scenario:

You work for Prince Adam. You’ve been his loyal and faithful servant your entire life, and all you want out of your existence is for him to succeed. However, Prince Adam has grown into a bit of a shit. He’s inconsiderate, he’s selfish, and he throws these lavish, crazy parties that you no doubt have to clean up the following morning. Lame.
One day, Prince Adam is throwing one of these aforementioned parties when all of a sudden a poor old woman comes stumbling in out of the rain. She’s tired, she’s wet, she’s miserable. All she asks for is a place where she can dry off and spend the night, maybe if you’re feeling extra generous she could have a slice of bread from the kitchen. Your heart breaks, because you live in a world with such plenty and she a world with so little. You instinctively turn towards the kitchen to get her a hot bowl of soup.
Prince Adam tells her to go fuck herself.
Your head hangs in shame, because this isn’t the first time he’s been a dick to the poor. His wealth and status have gone to his head and there’s nothing you can do to overturn his decision because you, too, are one of the despondent which he hates.

YOU BET YOUR FUCKING ASS I’M GOING TO CALL HIM BEAST.
It’s Renaissance France, they don’t have the word ‘douchebag’ yet. But you’d better believe that if I got turned into a chandelier because my boss was a tool that I would wake him up every morning at 4 o’clock and get his name wrong. “RISE AND SHINE BEAST. THEY NEED YOU IN CHOREOGRAPHY. WE’RE DOING ANOTHER FUCKING SONG AT 8.”
I would burn all his food. I would make his bath water cold. I’d make him dress tacky. Dick.
By the time Belle ends up in the castle the Prince has been moping with his petty serving staff for like twenty years. He doesn’t trust people, he thinks they’ll shun him. That’s not from the Witch! The Witch never shunned him. She was shunned, but Adam wasn’t. The shunning comes from the fine china that calls him la merde every time Adam wants some damn Kool Aid. It’s not Belle’s fault that she calls him Beast, it’s the only name she knows because it’s the only name anybody in the house uses.
This is a teachable moment, really. I’m not gonna name any names, but I think the moral of Beauty and the Beast might be that you should respect the people that keep your fucking website running. Or something. I might be paraphrasing.

Okay, let’s do that thing where I’m funny.
So, on the way back from the film something occurred to me—Laura, according to her file, is 132 months old. That’s exactly eleven, if you’re like me and you don’t feel like doing math (Happy birthday, Laura!). What’s more, the girl looks like she’s somewhere in the middle of four feet tall. If anybody tries to tell me that cinematic Wolverine is the 5’3 he’s listed in the comics I will fight you.
Sure hope Laura likes being short.

X-23 is, effectively, tiny female Wolverine. That’s how she’s always been and the film didn’t differentiate from that at all. That means that our heroine here has adamantium-covered bones. What’s more, based on the flashback stuff that they show throughout the film, she’s had the metal in her body for a year, maybe a year and a half minimum. Do you suppose that you were done fully growing at 9? I know girls tend to hit puberty faster than boys, but I was probably 4’10 at 9 years old and I’m 6’1 now. I bet bones trying to grow and not being able to really hurts.On top of that, is her brain okay? Like, I’m not a doctor, but I get the feeling that the brain would keep growing in spite of the fact that her skull can’t. Is her brain just going to swell up and press against the inside of her skull? Because that’s super bad for you. Are all her baby teeth out? Will her adult teeth grow in? I don’t know. What if she has wisdom teeth? What happens when those try to come in and run up against solid metal?

I’ll tell you what happens: She’ll be in a ton of pain until she dies before she’s 55.
See, here’s the other thing wrong with encasing an eleven-year-old girl in unbreakable metal. Yes, there are only two things wrong with that. So, Logan was just shy of about two hundred years old when he died, which speaks volumes for how well Laura’s gonna do. EXCEPT. Logan dies in this film because the adamantium in his body is poisoning him so badly that it’s negating his healing factor. The adamantium in his body. Which Laura now also has.
After a quick bit of Google-fu I found this timeline of events for Logan’s life: He lives as-is until the Vietnam War where he meets William Stryker and joins Team X, which he spends “a few years” in with Sabretooth until Logan bails and spends six years in Canada as a lumberjack. Almost immediately after that he fights Sabretooth, loses, and then agrees to join the Weapon X program (the thing that gave him adamantium bones). This eventually takes us out of X-Men Origins: Wolverine and into the first X-Men film.
Let’s give Logan the benefit of the doubt: Let’s say he was only in Vietnam for ten minutes at the very start of the war. That would mean that he joined Team X in 1955 and spent “a few years” there. So now we’re at like, 1960, at which point he spends six years—’66—as a Canadian lumberjack. So, in ’66 he joins the Weapon X program and gets his adamantium. Logan takes place in 2029, 63 years later, at which point the poison in his body is so overwhelming that it kills him. Considering that Laura got her adamantium at 9 or 10, she’ll be right around 72 when it gets her.
In actuality, the aesthetic of X-Men Origins is such that Logan was probably fighting until the end of the Vietnam War, which would mean that after spending a total of eleven years fucking around we’re at ’86 instead of ’66, bringing Laura’s life down to a respectable 52 years old. That’s not great even if you’re not immortal.
So even if we don’t count the fact that she watched her father get killed by an errant tree stump our new tiny Wolverine has some problems in her future. I’ll be curious to see if they maybe continue with her as a character, I think it would be neat to explore the issues that she faces as a creature having been specially bred to be a weapon. Somehow I get the feeling that none of these nitpicky issues will be addressed. In the next film she’ll be taller. And that’s fine, I’m just being shitty.
Honestly, it’s hard to poke holes in a movie like Logan; at least, it’s hard to poke meaningful ones. Basically all I’ve got is “Hurr durr, superheroes are goofy.” If you’re at all invested in the genre then you know that already and don’t care, and if you’re not invested in the superhero genre you’re never going to read this so who gives a shit? Either way, given that Logan has already made upwards of $500 million domestic you probably don’t need to hear this, but if you haven’t seen the film yet you really owe it to yourself to go.