The curse of the zombie franchise

Appropriate topic for a Halloween-ish post, n'est-ce pas? (Pronounced "nez pah," but why you'd expect rational spelling from the country whose tanks have three "reverse" gears, to butcher an old joke, is entirely beyond me.)

Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen, The Terminator is getting another reheating.

What's The Terminator, you ask? Well, back in the early 1980s, a man named James Cameron had a nightmare about a metal skeleton walking out of a fire. This was turned into The Sleeper Hit Of 1984. In a sane world, that was the end of the story.

We were also spared this.

This world, as you should know by now, is not sane.

A question I would like to answer at some point

Did the later Harry Potter films benefit from having one director do the last four films? And if so, should that model be re-applied to the James Bond franchise in spite of the eventual disasters that produced back in the Cubby Broccoli days?

By "disasters" I mean that both Guy Hamilton (4 Bonds) and John Glen (5 Bonds) have steaming piles of crap on their hands.

Moonraker, the novel

is the third James Bond novel. It's the first one where Bond confronts a full-on supervillain. The previous two baddies were a tad small-time: a moneyman and a druglord. The villain of Moonraker wants to nuke London, and Bond has a (minor) freak-out when he realizes it.

Given that Daniel Craig's Bond hasn't run into full-on supervillainy yet, I kinda hope that he has a similar scene when he finally does.

And now, a word about the sexualization of female videogame characters

Videogame characters are not real.
I knew that when I was 5.

Five Years Ago, I was an idiot

Five years ago, I had some different opinions than I do now. Mostly these pertain to films, since my musical and political tastes were set.

I've revisited some of the films I know I had opinions on five years ago.

It must be nice on your weird non-Earth planet

or: another GamerGate post.

First off, a hat tip to my liberal friends who keep (inadvertently) pointing me to these things. Today we're discussing another article (ostensibly) about GamerGate, this one on The Daily Beast, called Of Gamers, Gates, and Disco Demolition: The Roots of Reactionary Rage.

First of all, this article has almost nothing to do with GamerGate. It does, incidentally, cite another article that has almost nothing to do with GamerGate that I dissected previously. It is, to the extent that it's about anything other than liberal chest-puffing (more on that in a mo), about denigrating reactionaries.

Let's first take a step back here and talk about what's going on.

I hit 100 in two-handed, my primary stat in Skyrim. Time to start a new character?

Haha, of course not! Time to enchant a ring of +40% archery/+40% one-handed and start leveling up those skills!

GamerGate, quickly

Unless you live under a rock, you're probably aware of GamerGate. If you're confused, here's a really simple version:

• The videogame journalism industry is by and large in bed with each other, and also in bed (sometimes literally) with the games production industry. People who support the GamerGate movement have a problem with this.
• According to people who oppose the GamerGate movement, GamerGaters are a bunch of sexists and racists (because a few of the targets of their ire happen to belong to "protected" classes, i.e., are not straight white males). 

That's it. That's the entire hashtag distilled into two points. 

Happy Birthday to Sir Roger Moore

I really, really wanted to find a standalone clip of That Scene from The Spy Who Loved Me. You know the one:

When someone's behind you on skis at 40 miles per hour trying to put a bullet in your back, you don't always have time to remember a face. In our business, Anya, people get killed. We both know that. So did he. It was either him or me. The answer to the question is yes. I did kill him.

Because it's one of the best in the entire franchise. But I couldn't find the clip, so you'll just have to remember it. From memory. I'm sure it's seared in there.

It's a spiritual antithesis, not a "f*ck you"

I think The Dark Knight and Captain America: The Winter Soldier are two of the best superhero films, like, ever. I like 'em both just about equally. One thing I really like about Winter Soldier is how it kicked off this huge debate (not that they ever engaged each other) on right-wing websites about what the film's politics actually were.

See here. I dunno; I don't think Winter Soldier was a big "f*ck you" to The Dark Knight. If you'll recall, in The Dark Knight, Lucius Fox was concerned about the misuse of Bruce Wayne's surveillance system (Bruce Wayne, you'll note, is a private citizen). Bruce told him that this concern was why he only trusted Fox to run it, and he told him to destroy the system when the mission was done.  All The Winter Soldier did was take that idea and run with it. What happens when the system falls into the wrong hands?

Because, and I don't mean to put on my political hack hat here, but, that will eventually happen. I do not care whether you're a Democrat or a Republican (for purposes of this post; I shall change my tune tomorrow, and that's how the internet works); one day you're going to wake up, and Your Guys won't be in charge anymore. The kids will have the keys to the liquor cabinet. Even if you're apolitical; Lyndon Johnson/Barack Obama and Richard Nixon/George W Bush are from different parties, but they're both/all terrible.

And, continuing to not put on my political hack hat here, when was the last time the government every destroyed anything useful? (Let me rephrase that: when was the last time the government intentionally destroyed anything useful?)

(Also, I don't think the MCU has ever made this clear: is SHIELD a US group or a global one? Its overseers teleconference, rather than always meet in person in D.C.)

Anyway. The whole relationship between the two films is, a bit, like the one between Casablanca and The Third Man (both of which are super, by the way, and if you haven't seen them, why not?). They have similar concepts; one is just more idealistic, and one is more cynical.

A problem with the whole "space is an ocean" concept

I started tweeting about how a whole lotta proletariat gotta die for the "perfect future" in Star Trek, given that well-known trope about how anyone with a red shirt is going to die, and there's no money in the future. So they're a bunch of suckers. Seriously, though, in five series and twelve films, exactly... um... four or five main characters have stayed dead:

• Spock in The Wrath of Khan didn't stay dead
• Tasha Yar in TNG (main character? she was in the titles)
• Kirk in Star Trek Generations
• Jadzia Dax in DS9 (kinda had an Nth Doctor thing, though)
• Everyone at one point or another in Voyager (nobody stayed dead)
• Data in Star Trek Nemesis
• Trip Tucker in Enterprise
• Kirk in Star Trek Into Darkness didn't stay dead

So, yeah, obviously this is because shows want their main cast to stick around, and Tasha and Jadzia died because their actresses wanted out, and Real!Kirk and Trip died because their series were over, and Data died but not before creating a backup copy that you know would have been him had the TNG film zombie shuffled onward.

And no, I didn't count Benjamin Motherf*ckin' Sisko because whatever the hell happened to him at the end of DS9, he didn't actually die.  

So I started thinking - okay, you could try to subvert this. I mean, unless you wanted Gene's Utopian Future to be one where the underclass take all the risks. (Awkward.) You could do a Hornblower-type thingy where your main character (or ensemble cast, because those are a thing) start out low in the ranks, and their friends get killed as redshirts are wont to do - but so do the lieutenants and the captain, on occasion.  Ensign Spaceman's ship gets exploderated and he's set adrift...

Ah, but you see, if your ship sinks in one of Earth's oceans and you have enough food, a) you're probably going to wash up somewhere eventually, and that place is likely to be b) habitable and c) inhabited.

Space, says the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is big. Really, really big.

Of the nine planets in the Solar System (suck it, The Scientist Neil Tyson!) only one is capable of supporting life. Not only that, but it's not that easy to get to. I'm going to assume Apollo 13 is scientifically accurate here and say that if the Earth were a basketball, you would need to hit a window no thicker than a piece of paper in order to safely enter the atmosphere.

OK? So, if you manage to survive your ship getting exploderated around you, and if your escape pod isn't mangled by debris, and if you manage to float your way to an inhabited planet, you would still need to hit that teensy window. And good luck getting the attention of a passing ship to get off your new planet...

Geoffrey Holder (Baron Samedi in Live and Let Die) RIP

Skyrim Modding Fun Time

As a result of one or more mods I've installed in Skyrim, my footsteps are muted, but only when I'm in third-person view and am not holding a weapon. It's very weird.

Also, female city guards apparently no longer spawn.

Still, bewbs. I mean, um, better graphics and more immersive armors.

By the way, why do people complain that "certain" armor mods are unrealistic? Have you seen the Steel Plate Armor on female characters? Or, for that matter, the vanilla female muscles? (Well, no, you haven't seen the latter because they're nonexistent.)

Come on, guys

So. Here's why Jennifer Lawrence took nude selfies:

I was in a loving, healthy, great relationship for four years. It was long distance, and either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he’s going to look at you.

Wow, guys. Could we, as a gender, be less pervy?

...or does J-Law need to find herself a better class of boyfriend?

I noticed something about Bond Film quality versus Trope-iness

Which is to say, I think there are some great Bond Films that don't really feel weighed down by The Formula (From Russia With Love, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Casino Royale), and I feel that there are some other Bond Films that are great because they executed The Formula so very well (Goldfinger, Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me).  There are some films that are just awful, yes, but there are others that wound up falling flat on their faces because they tried to be "tropey" and "not tropey" at the same time (The World is Not Enough, Skyfall).