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Monday, 5 August 2019

The Bruce Lee Fight in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ Almost Ended Very Differently

once upon a time in hollywood bruce lee

As soon as Once Upon a Time in Hollywood hit theaters, it predictably became a lightning rod for controversy — a time-honored tradition for nearly every film directed by Quentin Tarantino. Some controversies were less valid than others, but one that hit particularly hard was a flashback sequence to a fight between Brad Pitt‘s aging stuntman Cliff Booth and martial arts icon Bruce Lee (Mike Moh).

The scene was criticized by members of the Asian-American community and by Lee’s daughter herself, who condemned the film for treating Lee “in the way that white Hollywood did when he was alive.” But it turns out that the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Bruce Lee scene had an alternate ending that would have been even more controversial.

Spoilers for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood below.

In a flashback sequence in which Cliff ponders why he has become a pariah in the stunt world, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood shows Lee boasting about his martial arts skills to a captive audience on the set of Green Hornet. Among that audience is Cliff, who scoffs at Lee’s claims and pokes fun at him. Incensed, Lee challenges Cliff to a fight, with Lee winning the first round before Cliff bests him in the second, damaging a car door in the process. The fight is broken up before a clear “winner” is declared, but according to stunt coordinator Robert Alonzo, the scene originally didn’t end there. Speaking with the Huffington Post, Alonzo revealed that the original scene ended with Cliff emerging as the clear winner. The Huffington Post writes:

Round 3 of the fight would have been a much longer battle in which both men kept going at each other, with Cliff eventually making what Alonzo called a “cheap-shot move” that put Bruce on his butt. But the point wasn’t to turn Bruce into the underdog, Alonzo told Tarantino. Rather, it was simply to “explain to the audience the level at which Cliff was [operating].” So Tarantino agreed to have the Green Hornet stunt coordinators break up the brawl before the third round, meaning no proper victor could be declared.

Seeing Bruce Lee reduced to being the butt of a joke in the film was difficult enough, but watching an extended version of that scene in order to show off Cliff Booth’s abilities would have been so much worse. The scene has been interpreted multiple ways since the film’s release: It was a misremembered tall tale that highlighted Cliff’s nature as an unreliable narrator; it was Tarantino’s way of “humanizing” a martial arts idol; it was the metaphorical face-off between old and new Hollywood.

But from what we’ve learned of the original scene, it seems like Tarantino’s intent was solely to take down a Hollywood icon while elevating his own fictional character so as to make the film’s violent third act more believable. And while I’m all for taking Hollywood icons down a peg, it plays differently when it’s Bruce Lee, a rare rising Chinese star at a time when Asian roles were still mostly exoticized or demonized — when they weren’t cartoonish caricatures. Lee himself was faced with years of discrimination, and didn’t achieve his current level of worldwide fame until after his death. In this brief scene in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — notably the only speaking scene by a person of color in the film — Moh performs an admirable impression of Lee, but one that reads like a caricature because of the way that Cliff pokes fun at his exaggerated expressions and imitates his signature noises. It’s a scene that has rightfully earned criticism from the Asian-American community, who have only recently begun to see themselves properly represented onscreen — even if examples of yellowface were still abundant only three years ago. The original scene would have been criticized tenfold, something that Alonzon, who himself is Asian-American, was sensitive to, he told the Huffington Post:

“I know that Brad had expressed his concerns, and we all had concerns about Bruce losing. Especially for me, as someone who has looked up to Bruce Lee as an icon, not only in the martial-arts realm, but in the way he approached philosophy and life, to see your idol be beaten is very disheartening. It really pulled at certain emotional strings that can incite a little anger and frustration as to how he’s portrayed. … There’s a certain mythology and mysticism about who Bruce Lee is, which is understandable. Being an Asian American myself, I definitely related to how Bruce was a symbol of how Asians should be portrayed in movies, instead of the old Breakfast at Tiffany’s model that was really prevalent back in the day. … I had a difficult time choreographing a fight where he lost. Everyone involved was like, ‘How is this going to go over?’ Brad was very much against it. He was like, ‘It’s Bruce Lee, man!’”

Tarantino’s original version of the scene makes me wonder: Why Bruce Lee? Was it because he was the most significant martial arts star of the day? Was it because Tarantino famously idolizes him? Or was it just because he was super freaking strong? If Tarantino simply wanted a famous strongman celebrity for Cliff to take down to prove his absurd manliness, why not another action star? As the scene it, it feels like an uncomfortable jab at a human being who never got to see himself become an icon, or a joke.

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The Bruce Lee Fight in ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ Almost Ended Very Differently

once upon a time in hollywood bruce lee

Spoilers for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood below.

Round 3 of the fight would have been a much longer battle in which both men kept going at each other, with Cliff eventually making what Alonzo called a “cheap-shot move” that put Bruce on his butt. But the point wasn’t to turn Bruce into the underdog, Alonzo told Tarantino. Rather, it was simply to “explain to the audience the level at which Cliff was [operating].” So Tarantino agreed to have the Green Hornet stunt coordinators break up the brawl before the third round, meaning no proper victor could be declared.

“I know that Brad had expressed his concerns, and we all had concerns about Bruce losing. Especially for me, as someone who has looked up to Bruce Lee as an icon, not only in the martial-arts realm, but in the way he approached philosophy and life, to see your idol be beaten is very disheartening. It really pulled at certain emotional strings that can incite a little anger and frustration as to how he’s portrayed. … There’s a certain mythology and mysticism about who Bruce Lee is, which is understandable. Being an Asian American myself, I definitely related to how Bruce was a symbol of how Asians should be portrayed in movies, instead of the old Breakfast at Tiffany’s model that was really prevalent back in the day. … I had a difficult time choreographing a fight where he lost. Everyone involved was like, ‘How is this going to go over?’ Brad was very much against it. He was like, ‘It’s Bruce Lee, man!’”

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Sunday, 4 August 2019

Promoting based on potential: How The Atlantic is putting a lot more women in charge

It’s not a shocker that a lot has changed at The Atlantic since it was founded all the way back in 1857. Perhaps more surprising, though, is how much has changed there in just the last two and a half years.

In 2016, women made up just 17 percent of editorial leadership at The Atlantic. Today, women account for 63 percent of newsroom leaders (see the masthead here; though this story focuses on the editorial side, there are a lot of women on the business side too). In 2018, 75 percent of new newsroom hires were women.

This isn’t an accident. The Atlantic — like other news organizations that have sought to diversify their staffs, though there’s still a ton of work to be done — has been intentional about hiring more women and people of color under the leadership of Jeffrey Goldberg , who was appointed editor-in-chief in 2016. Adrienne LaFrance , who joined The Atlantic as a tech editor in 2014, has risen through the ranks to become the publication’s executive editor , the first time in The Atlantic’s 162-year history that a woman has held that role.

(Adrienne is also a former Nieman Lab staffer, like her Atlantic colleagues Shan Wang and Megan Garber.)

And it’s worth noting that it was in 2017 that a majority stake in The Atlantic was purchased by the Emerson Collective, which has fueled a hiring spree and is, of course, run by a woman, Laurene Powell Jobs.

I spoke with Goldberg and LaFrance about how they are thinking about the hiring and promotion of women at The Atlantic. Here’s some of their advice.

Prioritize it.

Adrienne LaFrance: It’s very easy to say that you care about diversity or having women or people of color in leadership. It’s a different thing to actually make it happen. With every single hire you make, you’re making a choice. Our goal is to hire the very best journalists for whatever role it may be and not limit ourselves to just half the population.

Jeffrey Goldberg: [Women in editorial leadership] is a top-tier priority for me. It’s in the basket of the top 2 or 3 things I have to get done. We have some opportunities for expansion — like the [post-Emerson

[Women in editorial leadership] is a top-tier priority for me. It’s in the basket of the top 2 or 3 things I have to get done. We have some opportunities for expansion — like the [post-Emerson uptick in hiring ] — that give me the room to maneuver.

When you’re being sexist, recognize it.

Goldberg: I am lucky in that I have my own personal gender advisor. My wife [

I am lucky in that I have my own personal gender advisor. My wife [ Pamela Reeves ] advises Melinda Gates on gender issues. She introduced me to the concept — which you don’t have to be married to a gender specialist to understand — that women are judged on experience and men are judged on potential.

When I really thought about that early on as editor, it helped me to look at the world in a different way. I began to look, inside and outside the organization, at who did not fit traditional models of what editorial leadership might look like. I studied their potential, their innate leadership abilities, their competence and ambition — and I thought, I’m surrounded by amazing talent, and it’s under-utilized talent. Adrienne is a perfect case in point, but we’ve done this now probably a dozen times or more.

It’s cognitive. It serves the function of leveling the playing field, but the problems are cognitive and cultural. It’s understanding women and their potential roles inside organizations different than previously.

LaFrance: When I started here at The Atlantic in 2014, when I became the tech editor, there were no women who were more senior than me [in any section or in the print magazine]. When I became editor of the website, there had never been a woman in charge of the website before. Across the newsroom, we’re putting women in positions that they’ve just never held before. The only way to put women in leadership is to do it for the first time.

Embrace discomfort and remember: It will make your organization better.

Goldberg: My number-one goal is to find the best leadership talent to run The Atlantic. It’s in The Atlantic’s best interest, it’s in my best interest. By opening up the possibilities of younger people, women, and people of color, by imagining their rise in a deliberate way, I’ve just widened the pool of potential leadership. So it serves The Atlantic.

My number-one goal is to find the best leadership talent to run The Atlantic. It’s in The Atlantic’s best interest, it’s in my best interest. By opening up the possibilities of younger people, women, and people of color, by imagining their rise in a deliberate way, I’ve just widened the pool of potential leadership. So it serves The Atlantic.

There’s no quota system here, but there’s a lot of latent leadership talent inside The Atlantic and there’s a lot of latent talent in quality print journalism, generally.

LaFrance: We obviously want extraordinary journalists in every position. In some cases, maybe, the hiring managers are male and can see themselves in the [male] candidates, but it’s about making sure that you’re looking outside of your own experience and your own career trajectory to think about what various paths and skillsets people could bring to the role. It’s just always making sure that in your pool of finalists you have diversity, you have really strong finalists who are different from one another.

We obviously want extraordinary journalists in every position. In some cases, maybe, the hiring managers are male and can see themselves in the [male] candidates, but it’s about making sure that you’re looking outside of your own experience and your own career trajectory to think about what various paths and skillsets people could bring to the role. It’s just always making sure that in your pool of finalists you have diversity, you have really strong finalists who are different from one another.

At times, that means you have to keep going back again and again, and hiring takes longer than you may want.

This is just adopting a mindset that the work is never done. It’s not like you hire women or put women in charge and then say, We did it! It’s a continual state, working toward diversity.

Goldberg: Writ large, our goal is quality right now. We’re leading up to a subscriber model [to launch this fall]. We have to make more, better journalism all the time. I think we’re doing better than we ever have and I don’t know how to link that to the gender issues, but I think diversity sharpens the mind.

Writ large, our goal is quality right now. We’re leading up to a subscriber model [to launch this fall]. We have to make more, better journalism all the time. I think we’re doing better than we ever have and I don’t know how to link that to the gender issues, but I think diversity sharpens the mind.

We’re about 160 people at this operation now, not including freelancers. I think having a very diverse editorial organization — diverse in gender, race, age, ideology — when you put all these people in the same room in the same organization, especially inside a country that’s so fractured and polarized, I think you’re going to create moments of tension and discomfort. I think you’re also going to create much sharper journalism.

Twenty, 30, 40 years ago, The Atlantic was basically a bunch of white guys and some women in helping positions. I’m sure for them it was very comfortable, but they were just not being challenged in a daily way. Their assumptions weren’t being challenged, their story selection wasn’t being challenged, the choice about who gets to write stories wasn’t being challenged. And now we live in a situation inside this organization where, I hope, every assumption is overturned, and every decision is discussed and dissected through various prisms, including race, gender, ideology, and age.

And I think everything gets better [with more women], by the way. I used to cover the Middle East and I think the thing that hamstrings Middle Eastern countries more than almost anything else is that they tend not to tap into half their population’s potential and intelligence. When half the people are women and they’re just not being used for the betterment of society, you’re not going to be a dynamic country. It’s the same principle applied to any field, any place.

Acknowledge where you have fallen behind.

LaFrance: Our most core, loyal readers are disproportionately male. If you look at our overall audience, it’s more evenly split, but if you look at just the most active, loyal readers, they’re more male. We are actively thinking about how to bring in more women as readers and subscribers. I think you do that just through elevating quality, generally. We want to bring the smartest, best journalists across all the topics we cover and we believe that if we do that, that will reach women as well as men.

Goldberg: We continue to have a problem with the print magazine cover stories — with the gender and race issues when it comes to cover story writing. [Of the 15 print issues The Atlantic has published since January 2018, 11 had cover stories written by men. —Ed.]

We continue to have a problem with the print magazine cover stories — with the gender and race issues when it comes to cover story writing. [Of the 15 print issues The Atlantic has published since January 2018, 11 had cover stories written by men. —Ed.]

It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males. What I have to do — and I haven’t done this enough yet — is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going!

That’s one way to approach it, but the other way to approach it is, huh, you’re really good at this and you have a lot of potential and you’re 33 and you’re burning with ambition, and that’s great, so let us put you on a deliberate pathway toward writing 10,000-word cover stories. It might not work. It often doesn’t. But we have to be very deliberate and efficient about creating the space for more women to develop that particular journalistic muscle.

The more women you have in leadership, the more women you have in leadership.

Goldberg: One of the things I’ve noticed is that the more women there are in leadership, the easier it is for women to be in leadership. There’s this theory of critical mass — if you’re an organization that’s, say, 10 men in leadership and 1 or 2 women, women have to do a lot more just to stay in that leadership group. They have to do a lot more advocacy for workplace issues that men might not be thinking about.

One of the things I’ve noticed is that the more women there are in leadership, the easier it is for women to be in leadership. There’s this theory of critical mass — if you’re an organization that’s, say, 10 men in leadership and 1 or 2 women, women have to do a lot more just to stay in that leadership group. They have to do a lot more advocacy for workplace issues that men might not be thinking about.

[One case in point is the story of how women at The New York Times fought successfully for better parental leave, a story told in this week’s episode of The Double Shift, a podcast by 2017 Nieman Fellow Katherine Goldstein. —Ed.]

It was important for me not to just raise up and promote a couple of key women. I want to create conditions in which women and people of color don’t feel like they have to represent all the time, they can just do their jobs.

Nobody comes here to be the advocate for gender parity, the advocate for the inclusion of people of color. They come here to do journalism. We have to not just promote a few stars, but distribute this widely so that burden-sharing becomes tolerable within an organization.

LaFrance: It’s stunning when I look around at the colleagues of mine who are indispensable to our institution’s success, and who wouldn’t have been here in an earlier era. I wouldn’t have been here in an earlier era. It’s pretty remarkable to me just to see how much can change if you resolve to do it, and then do it.

Graphic design students Mackenzie Robinson and Bethany Faulkner created a “copycat” Atlantic magazine for a school project. This art is from their cover.

The Best Way For Jeffrey Goldberg To Help Diverse Journalists Would Be To Quit His Job

Photo: Ben Gabble (Getty)

On Thursday, Nieman Lab published a friendly discussion with The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg and the magazine’s recently promoted executive editor Adrienne LaFrance, in which they addressed the great progress The Atlantic has made in adding women to its staff. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective) for what should have been a relatively puffy piece about the 162-year-old institution realizing that it’s actually good for news organizations to hire women and people of color, discussion about the discussion was entirely derailed by Goldberg’s explanation of why so many cover stories for The Atlantic are written by white men.

The evaluation and reevaluation of what Goldberg said has resulted in two camps: Those who think he’s a sexist old white guy who was perpetuating the worst tendencies of old white guys in media, and those who think his comments were disingenuously and perhaps willfully misread and that Goldberg was simply and unobjectionably pointing out that white men have historically gotten more opportunities than women and people of color to do ambitious journalistic work. Neither is quite right, and both are eliding what he actually said.

In the section of the article dedicated to addressing where The Atlantic has “fallen behind,” Goldberg said:

We continue to have a problem with the print magazine cover stories — with the gender and race issues when it comes to cover story writing. [Of the 15 print issues The Atlantic has published since January 2018, 11 had cover stories written by men. —Ed.] *
It’s really, really hard to write a 10,000-word cover story. There are not a lot of journalists in America who can do it. The journalists in America who do it are almost exclusively white males. What I have to do — and I haven’t done this enough yet — is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going!
That’s one way to approach it, but the other way to approach it is, huh, you’re really good at this and you have a lot of potential and you’re 33 and you’re burning with ambition, and that’s great, so let us put you on a deliberate pathway toward writing 10,000-word cover stories. It might not work. It often doesn’t. But we have to be very deliberate and efficient about creating the space for more women to develop that particular journalistic muscle.
*[An Ed. note to the Ed. note: Three cover stories in this time frame were written by women (the January/February 2018 issue, the November 2018 issue, and the December 2018 issue), and there was one cover that featured a package of stories which included one written by a woman (the October 2018 issue). Nearly all the cover stories were written by white people.]

This answer—specifically Goldberg’s apparent implication that white men are writing long Atlantic cover stories because it’s too hard for other non-white male journalists to do so—prompted a lot of pointed criticism from people who work in media. Many people, me included, felt that it was hilariously retrograde for the editor-in-chief of one of the country’s most storied publications to say that women and people of color can’t write cover stories because they’re “really, really hard” to write. Goldberg responded to the backlash on Twitter, first claiming that he was misquoted (throwing the Nieman reporter, who is a woman, under the bus in the process), then walking back his denial when it became clear that the reporter had taped the discussion, and finally clarifying that what he meant was simply to observe that white men are the ones who most often get the opportunity to write long cover stories. Then today, he tried to do further damage control in an interview with the New York Times.

Right on cue, reinforcements from the Reasonable Journalist Brigade charged in to explain what Goldberg actually meant. Witness an old white-guy staff writer at The Atlantic, who thinks his old white-guy boss is doing a great job:

A man who dismissed Goldberg’s critics as having poor reading comprehension:

Jonathan Chait and Will Saletan, of course:

And another powerful media man who seemed befuddled by the response to Goldberg’s quote:

This last tweet is key. If you read Goldberg’s quote as him saying that people who aren’t white men are generally incapable of writing 10,000 word cover stories—and, note, Goldberg did use the word “can” in his answer—that’s bad. If you read the quote as Goldberg saying non-white men aren’t usually given chances to write these stories at The Atlantic, that’s just him stating facts.

Whether you read what he’s saying as the former or, more generously, as the latter, what Goldberg said next is far more insidious than the obviously wrong assertion that women and people of color aren’t able to write 10,000 word cover stories. He said:

What I have to do — and I haven’t done this enough yet — is again about experience versus potential. You can look at people and be like, well, your experience is writing 1,200-word pieces for the web and you’re great at it, so good going!
That’s one way to approach it, but the other way to approach it is, huh, you’re really good at this and you have a lot of potential and you’re 33 and you’re burning with ambition, and that’s great, so let us put you on a deliberate pathway toward writing 10,000-word cover stories. It might not work. It often doesn’t. But we have to be very deliberate and efficient about creating the space for more women to develop that particular journalistic muscle.

When you consider that the 10,000-word cover stories under discussion here are the ones The Atlantic actually runs, it seems clear that to Goldberg, diversity isn’t about simply getting the many, many, many talented and qualified women and people of color in media to write cover stories for his magazine about subjects that interest them, but about training them to write the sorts of cover stories he happens to like—ones that at least gesture at being sharp and provocative and are aimed to spark discussion and that, ultimately, affirm his worldview. The whole point of having a diverse group of people with diverse thoughts and opinions and interests and areas of expertise, though, is that you don’t end up with a bunch of turgid, boring white-guy articles that gesture at being sharp and provocative and spark discussion in narrow and predictable ways. It’s one thing that Goldberg doesn’t even seem to recognize that there are lots of non-white male journalists out there right now who are not only capable of writing in-depth cover stories but are in fact doing so; the even more serious issue, though, is that this powerful magazine man seems to think the solution to the problem under discussion is to teach women and people of color to be like him (or how to do work that satisfies him) rather than to support them in being the best possible version of themselves, and adjust his views accordingly.

That “journalistic muscle” that he says he wants to help women and people of color develop is, after all, a very specific one, involving writing overly long thinkpieces about Society, often premised on the unprovable conceit that an abstract concept is dead or dying. In the last half-year the only cover story a woman has written for The Atlantic is “The Sex Recession,” a handwringy screed about how young women aren’t fucking enough. To Goldberg, the end-all be-all of journalistic success that women should be striving for appears to be having a cover story for The Atlantic called “The End Of Men” or “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” or “Marry Him!”

It takes a certain hubris to churn out a fatally boring, loosely researched 10,000-word take (incidentally, very few stories need to be 10,000 words long, but Goldberg wouldn’t be the first to confuse length and quality) meant to be slapped on the cover of a national magazine and “drive the conversation.” It also requires a certainty that criticism will attach to your ideas and not to you, personally. It’s a hubris, or confidence, white men in media seem to have aplenty, for what should be obvious reasons. Just take a look at staff writer David Frum’s recent cover story arguing that racist immigration policies are actually good; or the one by author and journalist Charles Duhigg about why “we’re” so angry; or the one by 60 Minutes correspondent John Dickerson about how being president is hard; or the sympathetic meditation on evangelicals and Trump written by George W. Bush’s former speechwriter Michael Gerson; or that disaster by transphobic lunatic Jesse Singal, who, by the way, also thinks Goldberg is doing great.

These fatally boring stories are usually written by well-known people with fancy platforms—people who are connected, and who use those connections, and who have reason to think that even if their provocations do spark backlash, it will be limited to discourse and debate, not very real threats to their personal well-being. The Atlantic has non-white guy writers on staff who could be writing better cover stories than John Dickerson or Michael Gerson or fucking Jesse Singal—and for that matter, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote the seminal magazine story of the decade for The Atlantic, though he’s since left—but, as Goldberg makes it sound anyhow, they’re just not there yet.

Getting there evidently means being willing to write grossly engorged and fairly basic takes about the death of some abstract concept or aspect of society that reveals something about “us.” This dynamic becomes clearer when you consider who the “us” here is referring to. For The Atlantic, it seems to broadly be wealthy white people; more specifically, especially when it comes to 10,000-word cover stories, it seems to be people like Jeffrey Goldberg. Diversity is about more than training people who check off certain boxes to write like an old white man; it’s about being open to those people’s ideas and their experiences and letting them report on what interests them in ways that interest them, rather than, say, writing vague and expansive polemics about how democracy is dying or what have you because that is what a serious story is supposed to be. Goldberg, though, to all evidence, wants grossly engorged opinion pieces about how some aspect of society is dying and what it reveals about or means to an “us” that can be best described as wealthy, white, connected older men—an exclusive group characterized by, among other things, not having to think too hard about what diversity actually means beyond it giving one the ability to brag about newsroom gender percentages to a reporter.

If Jeffrey Goldberg simply thought that the problem of having so many white men writing Atlantic cover stories was a question of opportunity, he could have said that he wants to fix that by hiring any number of talented and capable non-white men to write them. (More than that he could have done so in the two-and-a-half years he’s been running the magazine.) That’s not what he said. Instead, he delivered a patronizing, fogey-ish monologue about “1,200-word web pieces” and “potential” and “creating the space for more women to develop,” in service of training people to think and write in a way that he deems acceptable.

Sometimes people say exactly what they mean, and in doing so reveal problems and solutions they never intended to. The problem isn’t that not enough non-white male writers have proven themselves worthy of filling the pages of The Atlantic, but that Jeffrey Goldberg, in executing his specific vision for the magazine, has determined them not to be so. That’s a problem that comes with a simple solution.

Google's Smart Compose Is Shitty And Definitely Evil

Photo: Leon Neal (Getty)

Not satisfied with foisting predictive text and Smart Replies upon an unsuspecting public, Google rolled out a new Smart Compose feature for mobile Gmail two months ago that, like your significant other interrupting you, storms right ahead and puts words in your mouth. Like so:

Smart Compose is the result of Google AI doing a whole lot of machine learning (learning that is presumably overseen by subcontracted employees who are worked down to the nubs) so that Gmail can do an imitation of your voice that’s close enough to the real deal for you to go along with it. “‘See you later’? Sure, that sounds like me.” Tech media, as is their wont, went right ahead and salivated over the remarkably minimal potential upside of a feature people never asked for but will likely end up being too lazy to disable. Here’s CNET, in an article that featured a Google Assistant pop-up ad when I clicked on it:

Hate writing emails? Us too... Hopefully [Smart Compose] will eventually cut back on the amount of time you spend typing out mundane emails.

Here’s Engadget:

It risks leading to cookie cutter replies, but it could also save you time when writing perfunctory business emails or confirming a lunch date.

Here’s Workfront, featuring an inevitable cameo from Mark Cuban:

I find that it saves time to just hit Tab and complete a sentence. Since email is something that often gets in the way of the work I want to be doing most, it’s a welcome feature. Mark Cuban, business expert and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, agrees, saying “it adds at least 30 minutes to my day.”

And here’s The Verge:

The new ability arrived on Gmail today, moving us slightly closer to a future where we just use bots to replace our more mundane communications.

I am a supremely lazy man. I would always prefer that the ball be in someone else’s court. In fact, I’d prefer that no ball be in play at all. I don’t wanna send emails to anyone, and I’m not alone in that, given that social media and texting and apps like Slack have conspired to render email outdated, no matter what kind of flourishes Google adds to their product. In theory, Smart Compose was designed with someone like me in mind.

But I can write my own fucking emails. I do not need the email equivalent of the GPS lady ordering me around when I’m typing out “Happy Birthday!” to someone. I’m already doing the least I can do. I should probably not be angling to find ways to do even less than that. If Smart Compose can save me 30 minutes a day—the way it does for grandiosely self-important busyfolk like Mark Cuban—I would just waste that 30 minutes taking some other kind of AI-directed shortcut to nowhere.

There’s a pattern to those excerpts I plastered up above. They all imply that typing out a full email is busywork, which it can be. It’s “mundane,” “perfunctory,” and “gets in the way of the work I want to be doing most.” Those are all acceptable complaints about email. Smart Compose saves you time the same way reaching for an emoji does an adequate enough job of conveying your point to save you from shitting out a proper text message. But welcoming Smart Compose, whether enthusiastically or with a touch of seemingly obligatory caution, is basically an admission that it’s easier to just not be human.

Because being a human is a massive pain in the ass. You have to pay bills. You have to do work. You have to do chores. You have to floss your teeth. There’s allure in outsourcing as much of that tedium to a machine as you can, and modern industry is built on selling you myriad ways of doing so. Google Assistant has a whole “Make Google Do It” branding campaign—a good one—built upon that very notion. The pitch is that they’ll take care of all the bullshit, so that you have more time for all the good things in life. Your life will be distilled into its purest, most silken and livable form.

That’s a lie. I can’t believe Google lied, but it’s true. Google doesn’t want you to have more time for you. They want you to have more time for THEM. Like keeping their employees late at the office by plying them with free food and other goodies, tech companies hope that the more their services aid you, the more you’ll use them and rely upon them. [Bong hit] They WANT you to be machines. They want you to be as quantifiable and predictable as the algorithms they’ve designed to emulate you. Every new feature is designed to hasten that grim Singularity. Your data is not enough. Lord knows that Smart Compose represents an effective and invasive way of learning all about you and your tendencies, but that’s hardly the end of the con. They want you to give all of yourself away. And so this’ll hardly be the last time they design a feature or an app that’ll prove such a viable substitute for you that you can push a button, let the artificial you take care of it, and then just continue to sit there like a bag of crackers. By opting for the cookie cutter reply over and over, you become the cookie cutter. That’s the rabbit hole they’re beckoning you down.

There’s not gonna be a ton of active resistance to this. This isn’t some Skynet shit; the machines won’t have to wage war on mankind to get it to submit. I’m already an old man for bitching about all this. I know it. I’m not gonna dam this river on my own. I turned off Smart Compose but I still gleefully use Gmail and Slack and tons of other services whose mission is to have more of me be left to the cloud than not. I am aiding them in their efforts. But I’m still willing to hold out and do SOME things on my own, even if it’s rote nonsense like replying “I’ll see you next Wednesday!” to an acquaintance.

That roteness IS life. That is part of what goes into your identity. There is an intangible joy in such mundane rituals, aggravating as they may be. If you skip all those rituals, you skip the bulk of existence. There’s a fucking Adam Sandler movie with this lesson, it’s so obvious. Take enough autopilot shortcuts and soon there’ll be no you left. Mankind is engineering its own obsolescence and Smart Compose is a tiny but grating example of those efforts. Fuck that and fuck Google. I got enough people telling me what to do as is. Last thing I need is some goddamn email window doing likewise.

Why Your Children's Television Program Sucks: The Garfield Show

Illustration: Jim Cooke

A look at the awful children’s programming you’re forced to endure before you can finally kick the kids out of the TV room to watch sports for eight hours. Image by Jim Cooke.

The Show

The Garfield Show

The Theme Song

[alarm clock rings]

[sax solo opener]

BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA BA BA BA-BA

BA-BA BA BA BAAA BA-BA BA!

The Mythology

Created decades ago by cartoonist Jim Davis, who saw a commercial opportunity for a comic strip about cats because there were so many comic strips strictly about dogs, Garfield has become so popular and widely read that you almost certainly know the particulars and players in the Garfield Cinematic Universe, even if you’ve only encountered it via internet gags. There’s a cat. This cat is real fucking slovenly. He loves lasagna and hates Mondays. He’s more self-centered than the President but half as orange (ZING!). He’s the OG Grumpy Cat. His owner is a pathetic schlub named Jon Arbuckle who routinely dukes it out with David Seville for the title of Most Thoroughly Emasculated Owner Of Cartoon Animals. There’s a dog that slobbers a lot in the household as well. Somehow this adds up to hijinks.

I loved Garfield as a child. I owned every Garfield comic strip book, including the Treasuries, which were printed in color. I even owned the first Garfield book, back when he looked like a state senator from Kentucky. I laughed at all the jokes, even one-liners about Beau Brummel and Brigitte Bardot that I didn’t understand. I owned dozens of Garfield stuffed animals. I had one with a pull string where the Garfield would say things like, “Color me unimpressed” every time you pulled it. Just like a real Internet commenter! Back when AJ Daulerio ran this site, he randomly gchatted to me one day, “I bet you had a lot of Garfield toys when you were a kid” and I was like HOW DID YOU KNOW? There was a Garfield book called Garfield Takes The Cake and I once thought up a SONG for it in my head, skipping to the bus stop and being like ♫ Garfield, Garfield! Taaaaakes the caaaake! ♫ I was not the most popular kid at school.

I also watched the original Garfield & Friends Saturday morning cartoon, with the title character voiced by the late Lorenzo Music. Davis once said that Music never let anyone see his face, which sounds dark and mysterious until you do a Google image search for “Lorenzo Music” and see his face pop up multiple times.

That show ended back in 1994, and it was replaced over a decade later by The Garfield Show, an all-CGI animated showcase that seemed tailored specifically to people who were like, “I wish they could bring back the old Garfield show, only cheaper!” My fellow Garfheads, I am happy to report that they indeed did just that. I’m gonna celebrate by mailing Nermal to Abu Dhabi.

Episode Format

Pretty much every episode of The Garfield Show involves him doing something selfish and lazy (eating all the pizza in town, for instance), which then precipitates a chain reaction disaster (oh no, Vito’s pizza is-a now out-a the pizza because of that-a crazy cat!). This is followed by Garfield audibly moaning and then reluctantly un-fucking everything—“Fine, I’ll force Odie to build Vito a second pizza oven,” for example—so that he can at last go back to being fat and lazy.

That’s all foreseeable. It’s just the kind of shit you’d expect from a comic strip franchise that’s worked over the same jokes for decades now. But treating my man Garf, particularly in this iteration, as shopworn pablum for the masses fails to recognize just how deeply fucking WEIRD the broader Garfield universe is. It all feels so strange. It all is so strange. The characters all look like they got left on the cutting room floor of the Homer Cubed vignette from Treehouse of Horror. It’s a highly canny valley they occupy.

And in this universe, Garfield spends entire episodes doing things like harnessing the power to stop time, negotiating with lasagna-shaped space aliens, or capturing wild turkeys. You can tell that the writers on this show get bored even more easily than the title character does. “What if we had Garfield fuck a robot elephant?” The familiar Ugh It’s Monday jokes are merely the base of the show. Generous ladlefuls of LSD are then poured on top. Everyone’s tripping balls out here.

Characters

Garfield: Without voice-over help from Lorenzo Music or Bill Murray (who infamously voiced Garfield in the movie version because he claims he was under the mistaken impression that one of Coen brothers had written it), the showrunners picked veteran animated voice actor Frank Welker to play Garfield. You might remember Welker from The Simpsons, or from the new Scooby Doo. Like Music, Welker lends a laconic, oddly charming affect to Garfield’s monologues as he bashes alarm clocks to pieces and fills Jon’s bathtub with Hawaiian punch. I can’t believe I’m talking about this shit so seriously. BIG FAT HAIRY DEAL.

Jon: Just your average perpetually single cartoonist (real stretch in character development with that occupation there) who spends every episode bitching about how his cat has made him an indentured servant, but then turns around at the end of those same episodes and is like, “I love my fat male dominatrix cat!” Hard to believe he can’t find a woman to share his horrible life with. In a twist, it is JON who the pet! O HO HO BET YOU DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING! What a powerless dipshit.

(sees dirty dishes still in the sink)

Oh shit the missus will NOT be happy if she sees those. I better wash them and then wash them again just to make sure they’re right.

Odie: The dog. Drools all the time and is very happy and stupid. Just like every other dog, really. Odie is also blindly loyal to both Jon and to Garfield, and routinely gets enlisted in Garfield’s shenanigans, always to his eventual detriment. Hey Odie, go fight that saber-toothed tiger. Hey Odie, go whizz on that electric fence. Hey Odie, hold this pistol and tell the cops it was a heat-of-the-moment thing. Odie deserves better. Come live with me, Odie. I won’t trick you into tarring the roof when I accidentally burn the house down.

Nermal: Acknowledged by everyone (including himself) to be the cutest cat in the world. I’m not seeing it, personally. Even if Nermal really were the world’s cutest cat, it’s still a fucking cat, you know? It’s not like I’m beholding an $850,000 Bugatti. Garfield despises Nermal and routinely attempts to murder him. I like ol’ Garf’s go-getter style in that regard. Nermal’s an asshole. Also, he’s got a weird name. I read it as “Normal” for a good eight years at first.

Liz: Veterinarian whom Jon routinely harasses every time he drags Garfield to an appointment (you’re not gonna believe it, but Garfield hates going to the vet WHAAAAAAAAAA?). And yet she still agrees to go out on dates with Jon! She should blow the whistle on that pitiful, cat-afflicted mope. Instead, karma has inflicted a different fate upon Jon: in the Garfieldverse, Jon is stuck in an endless loop where he gets rejected by the same girl over and over and over again. Why, it’s just like my teenage years HEY-OOOOOOOOOOOO.

Doc: Jon’s brother. A farmer. Hates being called “Doc Boy,” so Jon always calls him “Doc Boy.” Some enterprising Redditor out there has definitely drawn Doc Boy jamming a pitchfork into Jon’s chest, which admittedly beats the other artwork you’ll find at that site. Hey Jon, did you ever consider that, by trolling your brother like a fucking dweeb, you’re modeling poor behavior for your cat, hmm? Of course you didn’t.

Pooky: Garfield’s bear. His Bobo, if you will. At this point I’m making Simpsons references just to keep you interested. Garfield loves his bear, which means that it winds up in mortal peril roughly every four episodes. Garfield inevitably ends up having to drop Odie into the middle of an Albanian gang dispute to rescue the thing from a band of opium smugglers and whatnot. The gag here is that Garfield treats everyone and everything like shit except for one inanimate object. Whatever.

[my kid shoots a Nerf gun at the TV]

YOU THINK THAT’S FUNNY, BOY? THAT TV IS WORTH MORE THAN YOU ARE!

Eddie Gourmand: Vile food critic who can make or break restaurants with a review, because it’s still apparently 1996 in this show. Anyway, Eddie is selfish and fat and arrogant, but not in the CUTE way that Garfield is all of those things. Honestly, this man is nightmare fuel. He’s distressing to see and hear. There’s lots of trippy nightmare fuel in this show!

Drusilla and Minerva: Two little girls who occasionally visit to torture Garfield and poor Odie by dressing them up and shrieking at them. Ever watch one of those old Tom & Jerry cartoons where Tom’s little girl owner pretends he’s a baby and punishes him by forcing him to take castor oil? That girl was a fucking abuser. Anyway, this show has two of her.

Vito: The pizza guy. No one let Sal Paolantonio see how this show depicts Italian-Garfieldians. Madone.

Best Episode

There’s one episode where Jon takes Garfield onto a TV show called “Pet Matchers” to see if the two of them are truly compatible, and the show reveals what’s obvious to everyone except Jon: that he sucks and so does his cat. The host then splits the two of them up, because we all know that TV hosts are legally allowed to determine pet custody. Then Garfield figures out that the host is a big fucking fraud and exposes him, which means that he and Jon can get back together again and continue to be utterly miserable forever. Yay?

Worst Episode

Those Drusilla and Minerva episodes are brutal. Trust me when I tell you that those two are as annoying as Garfield says they are. Really, any episode that features ancillary characters like Drusilla and Minerva or Doc Boy is going to be unbearable. The Garfield Show has a dozen Scrappy Doos waiting in the bullpen to derail virtually any plot. Really, the only good side character is Nermal, and then only because Garfield roasts his cutesy ass every five seconds. And what better way to raise children than to expose them to low-level insult comedy?

Pros

I’m biased here because I was little snot who used to love Garfield, but I’m fine watching this show with my kids when they queue it up on Netflix. God, that fucking sax solo is burned into my mind. It’s livin’ rent free in my noggin and bakin’ lasagna for the visitors. It’s in my head right now! GAHHHHHHHHHH!!!

I can be as cynical as Garfield when it comes to Garfield, but I’m also a sucker for easy nostalgia. One look at that pink nose and those bigass eyes and Garfield’s clown-sized feet and I’m right back in elementary school in Orono, Minnesota, where kids beat my ass in tetherball and made fun of me for wearing prescription lip balm. Also, girls would cover their mouths to snicker anytime I walked past them in the halls. Truly, those were glory days. At my folks house, there are STILL Garfield plush toys lying around somewhere. Crack one open and a family of scarab beetles attacks you.

Anyway, Garfield sometimes learns lessons on this show. They even have little PSA interludes, which your kids will invariably skip.

Cons

Why do you think I am the way I am? What do you think happens when you subject a child to a cartoon character who has shitty manners, cares only about himself, thinks perpetual cynicism is an endearing quality, never gets up, and constantly bitches about everything? Me. You get me. Turns out the Garfield was ME all along. Disgusting.

You could easily argue, as I am about to, that Garfield is what’s wrong with AMERICA. He thrives despite his own monstrosity. That’s here! That happens for shitty people here every five seconds! Again, look at me! I have a job. I don’t deserve a fucking job. I should be scavenging for food in the dumpster outside Vito’s. Instead, I get to broadcast my dumbest thoughts onto the Internet for money. America is a crime, and Garfield is why.

And yet, I let my kids watch this shit. I’m like, “Aw, they like Garfield the way I do!” instead of being like, “OH SWEET BABY JESUS ON A CORNCOB NO, THEY LIKE GARFIELD THE WAY I DO!” The cycle begins anew. Don’t let this happen to YOU. Turn your kids on to more responsible fare. This US Acres book is only nine bucks!

White Men Can't Jump Is A Lot Of Fun Masking What Appears To Be A Pretty Debilitating Gambling Addiction

If there’s a moral to be gleaned from White Men Can’t Jump, it’s that that if someone carrying many hundreds of dollars in cash—without a wallet in sight—challenges you to an expensive bet, it’s probably because they know something you don’t. I realize people relied on paper money more back in the ’90s, but no one winds up on the blacktop with a month’s worth of rent tucked into their socks without a plan to win.

This movie is mainly a vehicle for cool basketball choreography, increasingly absurd “your momma” jokes, and covetable denim looks/men in crop tops. Which is not in any way to its detriment, even if the plot that loosely ties all these scenes together is resolved in one of the most absurd deus ex machina financial windfalls in cinematic history. (And no, Gloria’s established interest in Jeopardy does not count as sufficient groundwork to justify her convenient appearance and prowess on the show.)

You Should Be Buying DVDs Instead Of Relying On Netflix

Photo: Spencer Platt (Getty Images)

When you’re a kid, it’s perfectly fine to partake in an array of bizarre or grotesque behaviors. Whether you’ve decided to chop your own hair off, get married to a stuffed animal, or just to scribble nonsense all over the walls, you are set—this is the only time in your life when adults might even mistake those behaviors for being cute, even if they come at the expense of damaging the home you’ll inhabit for the early part of your life.

My toddler quirks didn’t tend towards property damage, but there was a time when I slept with VHS tapes. Not like in my bed, but in the years before I knew how to spell my own name I’d set my precious videos where books are supposed to go on the bedside table. There’s a story about my parents swiping the Toy Story tape out of its box while I was asleep, and me waking up late by toddler standards to discover it missing, then walking downstairs and finding them watching the movie. Physical media is important to me, and I believe it should never die.

I don’t have most of those VHS tapes anymore because they gave way to DVDs and Blu-rays, which may in turn give way to 4K technology. But for the moment, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which I get rid of any of my discs or stop expanding my collection, even as physical media’s death rattle echoes louder. This is both because streaming culture sucks far worse than most of us would like to admit, and because DVDs are cooler than anyone remembers.

We’ve all found ourselves on either side of this sort of bleak interaction: “Have you seen Paddington 2?” “No, I’m waiting until it comes to Netflix.” “Sick.” (The first Paddington is currently streaming on Netflix, so get to it, you psycho.) Given that everything seems free or close to free, I can’t blame the impulse to wait everything out. With movies and TV shows coming and going from streaming services so often that there’s a cottage industry for “what’s new to/leaving Netflix” posts in the online content biz, your favorites are almost guaranteed to disappear at some point. And that’s not to mention Netflix’s piss-poor selection of films made before 1970—someday we’ll be as far removed from 1997 as we are from 1967, and Face/Off won’t be streaming.

My advice to you is this: just buy the movies you want to watch.

There’s really no good reason why DVD ownership isn’t in vogue in the same way that owning records is. (Maybe your dipshit college freshman roommate who insisted on calling them “films” and chronologically shelved his Criterion Collection ruined it for the rest of us?) On a practical level, DVDs are much easier to box up and move than vinyl, and you can even get one of those big leather-bound CD cases if the boxes are too much.

Streaming may seem more convenient, but that perspective vastly overlooks the benefits of DVDs: the boxes are fun as hell to open, and the gaudy menu screens can serve as a backdrop to some nervous, third-date post-movie makeout sessions. And there are bonus features! Commentary! I’m not saying anyone has time to explore every making-of featurette, but yes, I would like to hear a maybe-hammered Ben Affleck mercilessly roast his own movie, while watching said movie.

The best part might be that you don’t have to scroll through endless screens of middling content for something to watch if you already own, say, 50 of your favorites. You just walk over and put your selection into your DVD or Blu-ray player. (If you don’t have one of those, they now cost like $40.)

Streaming’s main appeal is convenience, but there’s nothing great about relying on Netflix to determine what movies you could and should watch on a given night. As streaming services shift further and further toward original content—Netflix intends to release somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 original creations this year—it’s a safe bet that they’ll feel less invested in the 30 Rocks and Godfathers of their catalogue.

There is something stable about physical media—not just because it can be held in your hands, but because your copy belongs to you. A streaming platform needs to churn and grow and add and add again, sometimes you just need to watch a movie that you like, and that’s much easier to do when it’s right there in your home. Just don’t let your rowdy kid smear peanut butter on the disc tray.

Deadpool Can Fuck Right Off

Photo: 20th Century Fox

The worst trend in modern moviegoing is not the proliferation or quality of superhero movies—there is just the right amount of those, and most of them are very good—but what happens to a theater when Stan Lee makes his way onscreen during one of these movies. I’d say around 2008, when the first Iron Man was released and the Marvel Cinematic Universe launched the first of what is now up to 19 installments, you would hear a few distinct chuckles as Lee showed up; it was a sort of audible nod, a nerd or two reveling in a payoff they’d come to expect. I know him, the sound told the crowd. By 2018, for the release of Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War, just about the whole theater was emitting deep, forced, guttural laughs when Lee wandered onscreen. Almost everyone has caught onto pop culture’s biggest inside joke by now, and they very much want to make you aware of this fact.

Lee has now appeared in almost every one of Marvel’s film adaptations (33!), starting in earnest at the turn of the millennium with X-Men and Spider-Man, the two movies that set all of this into motion; his cameos go even further back than that, to the made-for-TV The Trial of the Incredible Hulk in 1989. Stan Lee’s prolonged involvement has always suggested that Marvel adaptations were unafraid to press against the fourth wall in obvious ways. Deadpool proved Marvel would take a bulldozer to it, and then pelt jagged chunks of the rubble at viewers until they’re rendered unconscious.

Before we go any further, here is a list of some things that aren’t objectionable on their own: the word fuck, extreme vulgarity, nudity, graphic violence in movies, DMX song placements, ostentatiously meta shit, Rob Delaney, and fun dumb summer blockbusters. Deadpool, and we can probably presume also its sequel, which is out Friday, contains some combination of those elements in no moderation. This is fine, I suppose—the movie will make truckloads of money and please a lot of people over the weekend, and there’s no law requiring you or me or anyone else to see it or care about it. But also, fuuuuuuck Deadpool. Fuck it right to hell.

Deadpool sucks as badly as it does, which is extremely badly, for reasons that are both in and outside of its control. I’m told it’s faithful to the source material, which is something I don’t really care about when trying to enjoy any movie on its own terms. Ryan Reynolds, who’s always seemed like a relatively smug and self-satisfied guy, has finally brought his passion project to the screen. It was all sort of preordained, after Deadpool declared that he looked like Reynolds crossed with a Shar-Pei in an issue of the comic book. The struggle to bring Deadpool to theaters is well-documented and spanned nearly 16 years, and as such the goalposts were generously placed once the movie actually became a living breathing work. That it existed at all was, for people invested in it, a triumph in its own right.

That fundamental laziness—the smug certitude that simply Recognizably Being A Thing is enough—fits Deadpool’s style of comedy nicely. The Deadpool comedic approach is, in its way, the logical conclusion of all those Stan Lee cameos—a joke that isn’t really a joke so much as it is just Recognizably Being A Thing. That’s not the only obvious influence on the Deadpool style, of course—you’ve got a little bit of shitty Harambe meme vibes, some GEICO commercial moves, and to a lesser degree, a bite of the broader approach in Guardians of the Galaxy. All of the above offer a post-punchline approach to jokes, one that places far greater emphasis on the joke existing rather than its execution, delivery, or writing. They just kind of rapidly sputter out like nervous tics, and often at the expense of boring features like narrative coherence or rhythm. It doesn’t matter how Deadpool acknowledges Reynolds’ stint in the megaflop Green Lantern, the first movie’s relatively shoestring budget, that it only could afford D-list X-Men to aid his efforts, or how X-Men Origins: Wolverine mangled the character as long as all that is in there, and preferably sold with a cute enough wink to satisfy anyone who’s simply keeping up.

Everyone involved seems extremely proud of what they can get away with—look no further than Deadpool 2's original score, which giddily became the first film score to earn a Parental Advisory “badge of honor” on the back of song titles like “Holy Shit Balls” and “You Can’t Stop This Motherfucker.” For comic invention, the whole enterprise doesn’t amount to much more than a middle school chud who’s finally allowed to watch some R-movies and shouts the word “penis” at increasingly loud volumes in the cafeteria.

There is something appealing about a movie being able to own its studio and nearly everyone involved in making it, which Deadpool did pull off by way of its mildly amusing opening credits. It’s a minor achievement, since the studio will take no issue in fielding these barbs so long as the Deadpool franchise continues to rake in something like $800 million at the worldwide box office. I can also understand why Deadpool might have felt so refreshing in 2016, contrasted as it was with the gruff and tragically constipated DC heroes and the MCU’s general vibe of “enjoying a cold one with the boys while the entire universe hangs in the balance.” The stakes in the first Deadpool were admirably personal, even if director Tim Miller let the set pieces get away from him near the end.

Perhaps the best side effect of Deadpool, if there’s one to be had, is how it eased Marvel properties and thereby every other tentpole into embracing the R-rating. It’s not like this was revolutionary, really—The Matrix and 300 proved this to be possible in each of the last two decades—but it likely helped convince 20th Century Fox to take a chance on an R-rated Logan. Maybe someday Marvel will greenlight a more subversive gore-fest like Matthew Vaughn’s grimy, under-appreciated Kick Ass, which was slightly less impressed with itself than Deadpool.

Of course there were concerns that Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox might water down Deadpool for future installments, or force his integration into the Avengers universe, which is my true nightmare. But there’s nothing about the character, who is still as corny as a career theme park employee, that suggests he won’t be right at home in the Mouse House. He won’t have to dilute anything, which is probably for the best, since we’d just get an onslaught of jokes about why he can’t get the swears off. That’s the thrill of it all. The noticing.

Hereditary Will Completely Fuck Up Even The Most Seasoned Horror-Movie Watcher

My favorite genre of fiction, in books and stories and movies and probably even television shows, is horror. I love horror. I watch horror movies all the time. I stay up late after my wife goes to bed so that I can watch more horror movies, even though it means that I sleep terribly. My worry with Hereditary was that it’d be a punishment reel, a clumsy metaphor, or a vaguely-horror-ish but mostly grueling and tense tale of family trauma. That was not the case. It is horror. Whatever else it might also be, it is for sure a horror movie, and it’s the most terrifying horror movie I’ve ever watched.

I saw it Tuesday in an empty theater, and my brain is now a rattled mess. My hands were shaking on the walk to the car after it was over, and at several points during the last third of the movie I had to stop myself from sprinting out of the theater. I’ll try hard not to spoil anything, but know that this movie deploys every good horror trick in the book, with ruthless, relentless glee, all the way to the very end.

All stories come from somewhere, but a story told especially well obliterates all its origins and symbols behind the sheer thrill of exploring its plot points. If you’re telling a story around a campfire and your listeners have the bandwidth to wonder what is he really talking about right now, you are a bad storyteller. Horror movies can also be about Big Ideas, but most of the very good ones—The Shining, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Witch—are so good at telling their linear stories of things happening that you don’t necessarily need to trouble yourself with whatever Big Ideas might be there for the assembling. The Witch ripped my dick off—if someone came along later and told me actually The Witch is about the puritanical lineage of our ongoing oppression of pubescent female sexuality I’d be like huh, hey, remember when the old witch lady ate the fucking goat? She made a baby into chunky red butter and an evil goat killed a guy, and sorry that was a little distracting, you know?

I bring that up because Hereditary is so insanely frightening, so overwhelmingly terrifying, that there is no space left in my brain to even come up with a funny fake headline for a pretentious think piece about its symbolism. Some of what Hereditary is about is baggage and the destructive force of inherited trauma, but the plot is tight and propulsive enough, and the dread is so palpable, that it preempted and resisted and obliterated in realtime whatever feeble attempts I might’ve made to retreat to the calmer headspace of cohering its themes into some Important Observation About Families or Motherhood or Nature Versus Nurture or even Undiagnosed Psychological Disorders. The Babadook, by way of comparison, is a fine and frightening movie, but if you found its themes and emotional framework a little too front and center, you will have no such issues with Hereditary. It presents complex emotional circumstances, and there’s plenty of psychology to mine, but first and foremost it is very much about fucked-up, frightening things happening, like any good campfire yarn.

Hereditary does traffic in extreme horror, here and there, but those moments are mostly punctuation points amid exquisitely rendered sequences of almost unbearable terror. It’s helpful to think of it this way: horror is seeing; terror is not wanting to see. When Hereditary isn’t showing something horrifying, it’s slow-burning an atmosphere of escalating dread, using a bag of tricks so familiar to horror-film aficionados that it would be charming if it weren’t so cruelly effective. You’ll have no trouble spotting the influence of The Shining and Rosemary’s Baby. The way it trains the viewer via clever timing and framing to search every inch of the screen at all times will be familiar to anyone who enjoys the Insidious brand of mildly cheesy, meticulously constructed, undeniably formulaic supernatural horror.

But where Insidious and The Conjuring and their various sequels and offshoots are sort of thrill-a-minute popcorn flicks whose scares play out like darkly lit practical jokes, Hereditary is a genuinely upsetting story that, like The Witch, depicts explicit, unimaginable traumas that cannot be reversed. Toni Collette plays the emotional core of a family coming apart in spectacular fashion, under siege by forces well beyond their combined powers to even identify, let alone resist. The characters’ psychology is also a carefully manipulated variable, and the effect is a movie that keeps you guessing along the way just how much of what you’re seeing might be imagined. Those James Wan flicks keep their fundamental breeziness by more or less keeping the families intact, and utilizing those families’ simple virtues and some hope for a return to normalcy as a buoy amid all that dread. Hell, even The Shining and The Exorcist offer a kind of compromised relief at the end—at least there are innocents, and they can be spared. The family in Hereditary is fracturing and straining under old pressures and buried traumas before the real shit even hits the fan, and when things finally do go sideways the pivot is so nightmarishly explicit and brutal as to obliterate any hope that the situation is salvageable.

While that’s all awful enough all on its own, there’s also the ominous and increasingly undeniable suggestion of malevolent supernatural forces to sow distrust between the characters, and also between the story and the audience. In a weird way, the possibility that the events on screen were being manipulated and conjured by actual demonic forces wound up providing a kind of emotional anchor: I can’t save these people, but I can at least hope that all this hellish misery really is beyond their control. In a way it preserved for them the possibility of a kind of redemption, or salvation. That, ultimately, was less a theme of the movie than it was a lifeline for my sanity—it’s amazing how frayed my nerves were as the movie lingered on faces filled with terror and silhouettes lurking in darkened corners.

The story of this family’s grueling and violent dissolution, after every story of more mundane, reality-based family dissolution has already been told several times over, would be an exercise in thankless punishment without a compelling anchor in the supernatural to make it interesting. In Hereditary, the supernatural is deployed carefully but explicitly, among other things girding the movie against any frustration I might’ve otherwise felt towards the erratic, troubling developments of the family members’ individual story arcs. Yes, they often behave irrationally and destructively, but it is also evident that they might be up against something alien and profoundly indifferent to their suffering, and their various failings never come close to violating or disrupting those terms. Collette is brilliant and terrifying as a woman with a powerfully fucked-up psyche, and Gabriel Byrne is terrific as a grounded husband struggling to provide a stabilizing presence in an increasingly volatile household, but even without those nuanced performances the movie presents the possibility of actual fucking demons as a backdrop for every explosive exchange.

As I mentioned, classics like The Exorcist and The Shining allow the viewer to exhale some of the accumulated angst before the end of the movie. That’s very much not the case here. Hereditary ratchets up the horror all the way to its indescribably strange ending. When the credits rolled, the relief I felt wasn’t in how the movie ended, but rather that I had survived long enough to exit the theater, whereupon I immediately called my wife for emotional support. But it’s also true that the ending, which is perhaps the darkest and most insane sequence of the whole cursed movie, is also the story’s most exhilarating moment. It has that trait vaguely in common with some of its genre progenitors, but to name them would be to rub right up against spoiling Hereditary’s bananas ending. Suffice to say, the movie is skilled enough in its storytelling to keep the viewer always unsure of the reliability of whatever perspective is being depicted, and though that delicate touch isn’t necessarily abandoned in the ending sequence—what qualifies as a conclusion to the film’s bonkers narrative arc—it is so tangible and specific and specifically horrifying as to render any question of its meaning superfluous. All I know is what I saw, but I know what the hell I saw! It was almost more than my shredded brain could handle, just an explosion of madness and depravity and balls-out horror, as far beyond my capacity for sober comprehension as Cthulhu marching through my backyard. There isn’t enough bandwidth in the universe to make more of it than that.

Mission: Impossible — Fallout Might've Ruined All Other Action Movies

Screenshot: Paramount Pictures (YouTube)

Spoilers abound.

Late in Mission: Impossible – Fallout (which owns extremely hard), indefatigable secret agent Ethan Hunt, having twice climbed the rope dangling beneath an ascending helicopter, pulls himself carefully up onto one of its skids and perches there, just outside the open side door of the helicopter and out of the view of the bad guys inside.

It’s a crazily dangerous thing to do, of course; if you saw someone do this in real life, it would be one of the most dramatic things you’d ever witnessed and you would tell the story 10 times a year for the rest of your life. But it registered weirdly on-screen, when I saw the movie yesterday: Something was off.

And then it occurred to me. Plenty of movies have had their heroes hang onto the outside of helicopters before, and if you’ve watched any number of action-adventure-type movies in recent years, you’re probably familiar with how these usually look, how they go, even if (like me) you don’t have the technical vocabulary to describe it in film-school terms. There’s the wide, longer-distance shot of the whole helicopter, with the scenery blurring by in the background, the hero with his back fully or partially turned toward the viewer, standing on the skids or hanging out the door or dangling off the side; then there’s the closer-up shot of the hero in a moment between moves, where you can see his windblown face, panicked or intensely focused as the moment requires; then there’s maybe a cut to, like, the chopper pilot or bad guy, not yet aware that our hero is hanging off the side of the helicopter, mere feet away. Then a shot from a stationary camera on the ground or a nearby rooftop as the chopper zooms by overhead, to give you a sense of how fast it’s moving and how dangerous this is. Then back to the wide shot, then the closer-up one, and so on. With maybe a cut to a red LED countdown thrown in there from time to time.

So you’ve got all these different views, and every few seconds a cut between them. The fast pace fits an intense sequence in which every second counts, delivering the constituent storytelling parts in parallel: What the hero is doing, and at what insane breakneck speed, and how he’s feeling about it, and whether the bad guys are onto him yet. You’ve seen this before, right? Close your eyes, and you can probably picture this pretty much exactly as I am.

This quick, intercutting way of showing the action suits the story’s needs in more ways than one. For one thing, it does a good job of showing the amazing thing the character is doing, without calling attention to the fact that in half of the shots that character is being portrayed by a different actor than the guy who was exchanging hard-ass bon mots with the supervillain 90 seconds prior. I used to think of this as cheating, but that’s silly: All of fiction is cheating by this standard. None of what’s happening in the story is really happening, in the world where you’re sitting there reading or watching, and the job of the storyteller(s) is to make you forget that fact for a period of time. That’s fine. Within the world of the story, James Bond really is having a helicopter fight over the streets of Mexico City, and the filmmakers’ responsibility is not to let you be distracted by the unfortunate reality that he happens to have a whole different face during parts of that helicopter fight.

Over time, I think this has evolved into just sort of being How Action Movies Work—so that even a movie like John Wick, rightly praised for the clarity of its gun- and fist-fight and car-chase scenes and for its star, Keanu Reeves, having done much of the fighting and driving himself, still delivers its action mostly in quick-paced cuts. Even when action filmmakers don’t need to hide trickery, they still tend to show action this way. It’s just the grammar of action in movies.

So what’s jarring in this part of Fallout are the many long seconds—realistically, it’s probably not even 20 seconds, but it feels longer—during which, as Hunt boosts himself up onto the side of the ascending helicopter, your view never changes: You’re looking at him through a perfectly stationary camera apparently mounted along the side of the helicopter. There are no cuts to a wide shot of the whole helicopter, or cuts to a close-up of Hunt’s concentrating face, or shots of the helicopter whizzing by overhead. There’s just this extended, almost documentary-like view, looking back along the left side of the helicopter’s fuselage, where you can see Ethan Hunt, in his entirety, boost himself up from beneath the chopper and perch on the skid, with the mountainous ground receding quickly behind him. There’s something weirdly bald about this moment; I had an impulse to call it “un-cinematic” even without being totally sure what that even means, because it doesn’t look the way I’m used to this stuff looking.

Of course, what enables the makers of Fallout to do this is that, at all moments during Hunt’s climb up onto the skid of a flying helicopter, he is portrayed by Tom Cruise; they don’t have to cut away to some other shot to obscure the fact that he has suddenly become a whole other guy. So at first the moment registered, to me, as kind of graspingly thirsty, like the filmmakers had sacrificed good action moviemaking at the altar of letting their big star show off what a brave boy he is. It felt, for just the faintest blink of time, like Tom Cruise was getting in the way of Ethan Hunt.

But that feeling dissipated in half a moment, when I realized that I was actually holding my breath in terror, which I think was the desired effect no matter what name I stuck on the guy clinging to the side of the helicopter. That it’s weird and jarring to see the hero character of an action movie do some amazing death-defying shit all in one single unbroken shot ... that’s not the fault of Mission: Impossible – Fallout, man! That’s the fault of every other action movie whose star is not as insanely dedicated (or just flat-out insane) as Cruise, who will do all of this crazy shit for the sake of exactly that kind of clear, unbroken, undisguised action, where pretty much all the elements of the story can be on the screen at the same time instead of dispersed to different camera angles. If you have a movie star in your movie who will vault himself up the side of a flying helicopter in one take and you break that up in the editing booth to cut to a shot of some shitbrain villain checking his watch, you belong in fucking prison!

Fallout is filled with moments like this, where it employs Cruise’s mania for stuntwork to achieve levels of immediacy, intensity, and clarity that make you feel like you took a big sucking whiff of pure oxygen. All of the Mission: Impossible movies have had them, going all the way back to when Cruise sprinted away from tons of cascading water in the 1996 original’s restaurant scene (they’d tried using a stuntman for it, but it didn’t land as strongly without the hero’s face in the shot, and the final result remains fucking astonishing, even for these movies), but I think Fallout marks the point where this stuff has completed its shift from a ticket-selling gimmick—Come see what wild shit Tom Cruise got into!—into a distinct and, I think, phenomenally successful storytelling style.

This is a different thing from the showily long, unbroken (sometimes fake) single-take action scene you might know from, say, Children of Men—by the end of which you’re definitely paying more attention to the fact that it’s a single take than you are to whatever’s happening in the story. A(n apparently) single, unbroken, four-minute take, by the end, can’t help but call your attention to the fact that it is a(n apparently) single, unbroken, four-minute take, so that your attention is, at best, divided between what’s happening in the story and the clever means by which the director has accomplished showing you so much of it without cutting between shots. By contrast, there’s nothing particularly unusual or showy about the camera lingering on the star of a movie for a comparatively slight 15 or 20 uninterrupted seconds... except when, as in Fallout, that star is throwing himself out of the back of a fucking airplane 25,000 feet in the sky. What it accomplishes, in that case, is to draw your attention not to the filmmakers’ intricate and daring choreography, but with scary immediacy and a real sense of danger to what the character is doing. Instead of throwing you out of the story, it plunges you farther into it. After that one, vanishingly quick moment of dissonance, I spent the last, oh, 15 minutes of Fallout in a state of pretty much constant breathless terror, and it fucking ruled.

So what I am wondering now is how the hell I will go back to watching rubbery CGI mannequins do lasers at each other in whichever superhero movie comes out next. It’s gonna look really stupid and phony, I suspect.

A Non-Fanboy's Spoiler-Laden And Mostly Cranky Review Of Avengers: Endgame

GIF: YouTube

Avengers: Endgame is not a movie. Here is where some poor Ringer writer with Bill Simmons looming over their shoulder like Dennis Quaid in that The Intruder trailer would write “it is a Cultural Event” or “it is the End Of An Era” or “it is the high water mark of brand synergy in the IP marketplace” or some such. No. What Avengers: Endgame is is the awkward and over-serious series finale of a long-running television sitcom. It was not made to tell an interesting story of its own, or to expand meaningfully on the themes established in the earlier episodes, or even to reiterate those themes in thoughtful or fun or inventive new ways. To the extent that Avengers: Endgame even has an artistic purpose—to grant that it exists to do more than just soak up another couple billion dollars for Disney—its purpose is to get these actors onto the next phases of their respective careers, and in a way that is gratifying for people who especially give a shit about their Marvel characters.

If you are not someone who especially gives a shit about these Marvel characters, there’s a very good chance you will find this deeply annoying. If, for example, you are someone who has enjoyed the various Avengers movies well enough, for their cool action and quippy dialogue and generally unserious tone, but without investing a whole lot of emotional bandwidth in the question of whether Robert Downey Jr.’s stint as Iron Man is brought to a close with proper reverence, there’s a strong likelihood that you will spend the first two-thirds of Endgame surprisingly fidgety and bored, if not genuinely bewildered by how much this damn movie expects you to care about whether a crudely constructed immortal alien god who expresses anger by shooting lightning from his eyeballs finds emotional closure with a minor character from a movie you half-remember watching like eight years ago. Or the sloppy redemption arc of a guy whose entire moral decline is articulated in one deeply cheesy six-minute ninja fight sequence in Endgame’s endless first-third where-are-they-now phase.

The emphasis on Doing Right By These Tentpole Characters is so overwhelming that for long stretches of the movie it obliterates the conflict that has ostensibly motivated their actions in the plot. When Rocket and Thor find themselves off on a quest that is of absolute importance to the team’s long-shot hope of saving literally half of all living things in the universe, Thor’s angst over his career and lifestyle choices not only diverts his half of their effort, but is given the vast majority of screen time. We get plenty of Thor’s heavy-handed and cliché-laden reconciliation with a cameo performer, while Rocket literally scampers around desperately in a few throwaway cut scenes, actually fighting to save trillions of lives. The only way to interpret this, as a viewer who cares much more about the plot of the movie than about whether Thor will like Take The Mantle Of King Of New Asgard after the movie is over, is as proof that the plot is just a noisy excuse for the filmmakers to establish as much of what comes after it as possible.

That’s just one example. Here’s another: Tony Stark and Captain America go on a similar quest, with the same stakes—succeed or accept the absolute finality of Thanos’s Snap. It’s seemingly a risky gig, too, involving taking a potentially one-way trip to a secured facility to steal top secret shit guarded by armed badge-wearing types. At one point the duo’s attire and demeanor draw suspicion, and some of those armed badge-wearing types are mobilized. Cool! Surely this will raise the stakes—surely now we will get a sense of just how huge and daring and likely doomed this quest is for our long-suffering heroes! And we get the shot of Captain America coming one way through a narrow corridor while some of those armed types head toward him. Uh oh! How will our heroes escape this one?? I’ll tell you how: Captain America ducks into an unlocked office, whereupon those of us who are a little distracted by the quest to bring back to life actual trillions of beings are disappointed to learn that the whole potential conflict with the armed guards of a top secret facility was just a way for the story to force Captain America into that exact office at that exact moment, in order to confront some of his personal baggage. The MacGuffins he and Stark are after aren’t even there to move the plot; they’re there to give Captain America a boner.

And even the eventual undoing of the Snap itself—listen, motherfucker, if you thought they weren’t going to reverse the Snap, I’m afraid you’re just too stupid to watch movies, let alone read about them—is positioned by the story arc as ultimately about prolonging the resolution of the question of which of two central Avengers characters will survive the movie. This is a narrative trap of Marvel’s own making: under no circumstances were the Avengers not going to reverse the Snap; under no circumstances were they going to lose to Thanos. The only thing left to learn is under what specific circumstances they’d reverse the Snap and win. There’s a ghoulish God-view angle to this, though, because inevitably some part of what we are watching is not the development of a plot, but the sensitive extrication of actors and a studio from a project. As much as you may tell yourself that you’re watching to learn what will happen to these characters—or even just to enjoy the thrill of watching them do the only thing they can do, which is win—it’s impossible to ignore the knowledge that some number of these characters must have their stories closed, as a practical matter.

At one point in Endgame Thanos describes himself as “inevitable,” and it’s a little queasy, because as much as he is the author of his own genocidal designs, he is also an axe in the hands of the filmmakers, who simply have no choice but to kill some of these fuckers. By about the 120-minute mark of Endgame, if not far earlier, if not whole actual months ago, you have fully transitioned from wondering which Avengers will be killed by Thanos to wondering which will be killed by Disney. If you are not the sort of person who has invested disproportionate personal emotional significance in the fate of Gun Lady or Arrow Fella (for example) there’s a good chance this grim game of musical chairs will resolve itself in your brain into an uncomfortable and removed analysis of shit like genre conventions, if not brand fatigue and the dreaded IP. So when Gun Lady and Arrow Fella are faced with a terrible do-or-die choice, and the scene quickly evolves into an explicit test of which one can survive, you never quite escape the feeling that the cruelty that has forced them to this moment is less cosmic and more corporate, an artificial Sophie’s Choice being foisted upon the filmmakers, by the filmmakers, with the emotional weight sort of presumptuously passed along to you, the viewer.

The Avengers franchise is only the one-millionth story to run into the problem of how to produce an inevitable outcome in a way that feels compelling and urgent. What makes it a television sitcom, though, is the inevitable outcome they’re stuck producing is external to the plot, and is the retirement of a franchise that is ending for reasons that are arbitrary to the world of the story. There is no storytelling reason whatsoever that the MCU can’t conjure up the next big scary villain and throw these same superheroes in his or her path, in the same way that there’s no particular storytelling reason why the gang from Friends couldn’t continue snarkily hating each other at a coffee shop for another 100 episodes. The MCU movies are episodic, duh, because what makes comic book superheroes superheroes is their supernatural ability to return things to their prior condition in a certain number of pages. Their adventures on the page will quite literally never end, because there will always be someone to draw a new one, and anyway once you’ve gotten readers to accept things like reincarnation and the multiverse, you have permanently foreclosed on the possibility of retiring a character. Ending their adventures will always be a decision; in the movies, those decisions likelier than not have to do with this or that actor aging out of the damn role. Now that Spiderman has made the leap to the multiverse and animation, you can forget about worrying ever again how his stories will end.

So, like, Sauron was never gonna win in Lord of the Rings, but also Samwise Gamgee was never gonna be spun up into like the grim and gritty story of an essentially immortal vigilante Hobbit gardener in order to wring out another few years of summer blockbusters. Peter Jackson never had to devote any of his movies to convincing viewers that the individual arcs inside his movies were actually, really, sincerely coming to a close, and then do the demeaning servicey shit of making LOTR fanboys and fangirls accept that very arbitrary decision without too much moaning. There’s no rule or convention or standard of kindness that says the makers of Endgame couldn’t have made an even vaguely self-contained sci-fi action movie, ended it the way all the other movies ended—with things returning more or less to normal—and then just said “we are now done telling the stories of those characters.” Frankly, that would’ve ruled! Instead they buckled under the wholly self-imposed pressure to like Do Right By Undies Man And Mech Genius In This Hour Of Their Retirement, and the result is a movie where so much of the important and permanent stuff that happens has the impossible-seeming quality of feeling both arbitrary and also inevitable. There are no surprises. Only children and the least savvy viewers will not spot the either-or choices the filmmakers have dug their way into a mile away.

With the actual plot thus encumbered, Endgame devolves fairly early on into a greatest hits reel, and the weight given to some of the character resolutions in the final third is goofy to the point of being unbearable, the kind of shit that could only deserve all its heavy-handedness if you consider Chris Evans as Captain America to be an important part of your childhood. If you’re just a person who thought the Avengers movies were fun and had cool punching and unpretentious dialogue, you may find yourself wishing they’d ended it with all the main characters going to jail. The Avengers movies have never before given me the urge to shake adult human beings and angrily remind them that these are comic book characters, until Endgame. That’s a talking raccoon. That’s a green space alien. That guy shoots lightning. That guy shrinks. Settle down.