Madness

Madness lies at either end of the spectrum of popularity, where one is so hated, so ignored, or else so well loved, that nothing you think, say or do can make your life worse or better. Madness is freedom from consequences.

LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS

Title: LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS
Created by: Tim Miller (Deadpool)
Network: Netflix

LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS is Netflix's newest adult-oriented animated anthology series, a kind of modern-day Animatrix or Halo Legends compilations, for those old enough to remember, or else Heavy Metal, for those even older.

Like all anthology series, LOVE DEATH + ROBOTS has its ups and downs, but overall most of the episodes are at least solid if not spectacular. At around 15 minutes a pop I found the length of episodes just right for visual snacking. 

Each episode has different writers, directors and animation studios, so thematically and tonally the series is all over the map. There's a hefty dose of military SF if that's your bag. I really like when they tried to be innovative either artistically or with the story, though sometimes it felt like nudity was shoehorned in for the sake of appearing more 'adult'. This is really apparent if you watch the series in order--I feel they front-loaded all the T&A (and PP) into the first few episodes, as the rest are actually a lot more mainstream in their appeal.

5-second episode reviews:

1. Sonnie's Edge: Cyberpunky. Human-controlled monsters fight in gladiatorial battles. Hoo boy, lots of weird rape imagery and Polar Express grade nudity in this one, which could put you off the series--but like I said, it's not really representative of the series as a whole. Felt a bit like when comic books try too hard, to be honest. Neato twist at the end.

2. Three Robots: Humorous post-apoc. A little cornball ("tell us what the humans were like") but the back and forth between the three robots of the title is pretty funny. Silly ending.

3. The Witness: Genre =??? Kinda cyberpunk I guess. Whoooooaaaah. This one is a trip and a half. More gratuitous nudity, but that ain't even the point. Very artsy, I really liked the way they played against it being CG, with "shaky" camera work, the "actors'" breath fogging the camera lens in closeups, visible sound effects, etc. etc. Easily the most visually innovative of the episodes.

4. Suits: MECHA! Yay! MECHA! A team of heavily-armed AgroMechs fight off an alien assault on their farms. In contrast to the first three eps, this one plays its story very, very, almost predictably straight. Like, almost cliche straight, which I think was the objective. You know exactly what's going to happen with these characters, and there's a kind of cozy comfortability with the way the story is handled.

5. Sucker of Souls: Horror. A team of mercenaries protect an archaeologist from the evil he has unleashed. Art style reminded me of the old Star Wars: Clone Wars animated shorts. Very simple premise and plot, but the banter among the characters elevates the experience and makes this a retro gem. Would shoot in the dick with a shotgun/10

6. When the Yogurt: Humor. Yogurt becomes intelligent. Eh, didn't think it was that funny to be honest. Just kind of goofy.

7. Beyond the Aquila Rift: Space Opera. This one was also very cool, with fantastic art direction/CG. Has a real Mass Effect/Alien/Serenity vibe to it, with space truckers stuck when something goes wrong with their ship. I thought the story (by Alastair Reynolds) was something we've seen before in SF (Star Trek sprang to mind), but the visuals make up for it. Zero Gravity banger/10

8. Good Hunting: Steampunk/Retro-future. The son of a spirit-hunter befriends a fox spirit in steampunk Hong Kong. Could have been a lot more fun but I felt the main story was a bit dull. Would not turn into a robotic sex doll/10

9. The Dump: Humor. Aside from "Three Robots", I thought the episodes that tried to be humorous were the weakest in the series. A lot of the jokes just don't land for me.

10. Shape-Shifters: Military SF. Werewolves in Afghanistan is an interesting idea. Pretty animation, but a bloody chewed-up mess thematically. Not really sure what it was trying to say.

11. Helping Hand: Hard SF. Kind of like a gross-out version of the movie Gravity. No, really. There's a sequence that can be a little stomach-churning even in CG. Still, once you get to this point in the series, something that moves slower, takes its time, builds the tension comes as a welcome relief.

12. Fish Night: Magic realism. A pair of traveling salesmen get stuck in the middle of the badlands and have to spend the night in their car. Loved the Through A Scanner Darkly style rotoscoping animation. Very pretty to look at. A bit "ah huh?" in terms of what actually happens, but it's more about the visuals than the story.

13. Lucky 13: Military SF. Again, great visuals save what is otherwise a fairly predictable story about a pilot and her notoriously "unlucky" gunship/dropship.

14. Zima Blue: Artsy. A far-future robot artist reveals the source of his inspiration. Color used to great effect.

15. Blindspot: Action. Vaguely Mad Max style road-warrior battle between a team of cyborgs trying to steal a microchip from a heavily defended transport truck. Okay I guess.

16. Ice Age: Humor. Couple discovers tiny, advanced civilization in their refrigerator ice box. Humor comes from their nonchalant attitude towards what's happening in their fridge. Charming, but not all that funny. But nice.

17. Alternate Histories: Humor. One of the better humor episodes, investigating possible histories based around increasingly improbably and unlikely scenarios of Hitler's death (e.g. killed by secret Russian gelatin gun, dies after marathon orgy with Viennese prostitutes etc.). The bizarro setups are pretty funny, but man o man, I can tell the two-second clip of Hitler's sex orgy is all anyone is going to remember about this one.

18. Secret War: Horror/Military SF. WW2 Russian soldiers on a mission to hunt down a pack of ghouls. Isn't Overlord based on much the same premise? Anyway, great CG work again, riveting and visceral battles set to stirring music. Very fun!

Cities Are Snares

Cities are snares for potential. It’s a wonder they don’t collapse under the weight of all that wasted energy, or snarl themselves into immobility.

Picture all those missed encounters, lost opportunities, wasted moments, bound around and tangled between the people like thick and heavy black strands, sticky spider webbing that grows denser and denser with each glance the wrong way, each misplaced word, each hesitation and retreat. 

That person, there, that best friend or partner who might have been, will walk on, never knowing you exist. Their vision slowly occluded by the mass of habit and anomie, until there is only tomorrow, which will be much like today.

And I.

I peer down at my phone, earphones in my ears. Happy little insect, tangled in the web.

Time Makes Everything Its Opposite

An archeologist, time’s tourist, stood in the excavation pit. A reverse grave, where people went to retrieve some living fragment of the dead; an inside-out box, where everything of value lay beyond the four walls. 

Potsherds and stone flakes rustled in their hand. Once a slave’s garbage, now incalculably valuable.

Smart Glasses

He put on the Smart Glasses, opened his eyes and for the first time, saw.

Images that skipped invisibly past unseeing eyes and pressed themselves directly on the optic nerve. Accurate in a way no lazy human eye could ever be, no guesswork or filling in what it expected to see, but the ocean of life in all its grainy, gritty glory.

He drowned himself in the depths of city streets, surfed the crashing waves on crowded commuter subways, watched waves lap at his feet along the beach, carrying their tides of plastic and paper.

A hand reached up, and took the glasses off.

Female Monarch Movie

Title: Bohemian Rhapsody

Director: Um … haha … yeah well

Screenplay: Anthony McCarten

Yes, it’s Female Monarch, the movie slash biopic slash Live Aid performance reenactment, starring Rami Malek and Rami Malek’s prosthetic teeth. It’s a karaoke music video montage, Queen’s Greatest Hits loosely strung together with a couple of talky bits sandwiched between the singles.

The feeling it evokes is not-quite-nostalgia, as I don’t really remember Live Aid all that well, nor was I especially interested in Queen, but it’s more nostalgia for nostalgia, a feeling I’ve missed out by not being there, in the moment. It also evokes a feeling of why-the-hell-did-I-just-watch-this, given the depth is about as deep as the melody for “We Will Rock You” and the only thing that really stuck out were Freddie’s incisors. 

It’s a fairly by-the-numbers rock bio, charting a familiar course of rise to fame, descent into debauchery, last-minute eucatastrophe standing-in-the-pouring-rain moment, redemption in front of a live global audience of nearly two billion. There isn’t much insight, and since most of the members of Queen save front man Freddie Mercury are still with us and probably need placating if the movie was to secure song rights, it definitely plays softball with the challenges the group faced. It’s just thing happens, song, a different thing happens, song, Freddie comes out as gay, song happens, another song happens, Live Aid happens, roll credits.

The movie plays fast and loose with historical accuracy in the name of creating this cookie-cutter drama, inventing a break-up that never happened and moving Freddie’s AIDS diagnosis several years forward so that his “I’ve got to go and leave you all behind” lines from the song “Bohemian Rhapsody” at Live Aid carry greater weight. 

I’m not joking about the Live Aid thing. The last 15 minutes of the movie is essentially a shot-for-shot reenactment of Queen’s 1985 Wembley performance. Which is available on YouTube for the princely sum of zero dollars, so frankly, why not just watch that?

It’s also a very narrowly-focused movie, with Queen apparently existing in a musical vacuum broken only in the last act by name-dropping everyone else who was at Live Aid (= everyone, basically). There is, for example, no mention of their collaboration with David Bowie on “Under Pressure”, whose first two bars give all 90s guys like me the shakes whenever we hear them on the radio—we know it could go one of two ways. You’re either in for a treat, or on a one-way elevator ride to audio hell. 

So, distressing lack of Bowie. I ask for your thoughts and prayers during this difficult and Bowie-less time. 

I believe that at times like these, it is traditional to leave a scathing Rotten Tomatoes review and then create a series of increasingly incoherent rants on YouTube, but I figured I’d put my thoughts out in the most impactful way possible. Cough.

Bridging the Genres: Walking on Glass / The Bridge

Titles: Walking on Glass & The Bridge
Author: Iain Banks-without-the-M
Publisher: Macmillan

I’m a ginormously huge, rabidly proselytizing advocate of the science fiction works of Iain M. Banks with an M (e.g. Use of Weapons, Excession, Look to Windward, etc.), but I’ve always held back from his mainstream fiction as, at first glance, it seemed very Scotto- or at least Brito-centric and thus less relatable.

As with most of the thoughts floating around this shaggy old head of mine, this one also turned out to be completely wrong.

While both Walking on Glass (1985) and The Bridge (1986)—Banks’s second and third mainstream fiction novels after Wasp Factory—are at least partially set in 1980s London and Scotland, respectively, they’re both far more concerned with the interior life of their protagonists than the superficial details of life in the UK.

The two novels share a lot of similarities both structurally and thematically.

Structurally, they both weave together three separate narratives which at first glance appear separate, but whose connections gradually become apparent as the story progresses. 

Walking on Glass is the more opaque of the two, the connections among its strands more tangled and harder to unravel. There’s Graham Park, a shy art student smitten with an elusive and mysterious woman named Sara ffitch (two F’s, lowercase); Steven Grout, a possibly delusional man convinced he is actually a noble warrior exiled from another time or place imprisoned on Earth; and in the most SFnal thread, a man named Quiss, a warrior who has been exiled to a crumbling castle made of books and illuminated by glowing fish, where the only way to escape is to win nonsensical games such as one-dimensional chess and blank dominos and answer a nonsense riddle: What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?

The “point” (or maybe the “question” to put it better) is to what extent the people in the three stories are delusional or engaging with reality. Grout at first glance appears to be a lunatic, but the Quiss story suggests there are indeed warriors in another time/place, thus creating an element of doubt. The waters are further muddied when Grout discovers a discarded matchbook with the riddle “What happens when an unstoppable force meets and immovable object?” raising the possibility that it’s actually Quiss’s story which is delusional. If you extend that line of thought to the one that seems the most mundane—Graham’s hopeless pining for an unavailable woman—then we start to see how much of life is built on seeing what we want to see, believing what we want to believe. In a way, Graham’s behavior is as crazy and nonsensical as Grout’s or Quiss’s. 

The Bridge also follows three plot lines, this time involving Alex, a successful engineer who crashes his car near the Firth of Forth bridge in Scotland and slips into a coma, John Orr, his alter ego inside the coma, and the Barbarian, a violent Conan figure who exists within John Orr’s dreams—a dream within a coma. 

As Alex lies in a coma John awakes on The Bridge of the title, a kind of enormous version of the Firth of Forth bridge inhabited—like the London Bridge of long ago—by thousands of people in a kind of Terry Gilliam/Brazil-esque society of secretive agencies and societal rules. A psychiatrist tries to help John by analyzing his dreams, but John resists—for reasons that become clear as we learn more about Alex’s history—and invents dreams instead. One of his real dreams is of the Barbarian, a kind of uber-Conan killer assisted by a wisecracking familiar and a flying dagger called a “knife missile” (a term instantly recognizable to anyone who has read Banks’s Culture stories). 

Here, I think the idea is that all three—Alex, John and the Barbarian—are leading lives governed by what are, when you get right down to it, nonsensical rules and standards. The Barbarian inhabits the world of Fantasy and myth, with spells and curses made or broken acausally, while John’s Kafkaesque world is similarly arbitrary, with people marshalled and ordered about for reasons they cannot understand or articulate. As with Walking on Glass, this realization leads us to look at the mundane story line, in this case Alex, his professional frustrations and his tangled love affairs, and see how our world, too, is governed by pointless and meaningless rules.

Both novels overflow with Banks’s cheery wit and exuberant imagination, especially in their most fantastical modes—Quiss’s castle and the Barbarian’s adventures. 

Walking on Glass definitely feels the less polished of the two, with the twist/reveal in Graham’s story managing to be at once both entirely predictable and then from out of nowhere, over the space of a few paragraphs, just weirdly and unnecessarily convoluted and grotesque. There’s about three twists in a row and they’re all just dumped on you with no warning in one scene, which honestly just feels kind of cheap and detracts from the essential groundedness of Graham’s story line. 

In addition, the connections among the three story lines aren’t really clarified, but left fuzzy and open to interpretation, which could be frustrating for many readers. 

The Bridge, by contrast, is much more silky and smooth, and the humor more pervasive and deft, though my reaction to the ending was that Banks went too far in the other direction after Walking on Glass—instead of leaving things undefined, here he really just lays out the theme and message in 60-point Impact font, THIS IS WHAT IT MEANS. As a counter-reaction to people scratching their heads over Walking on Glass? Who knows. 

Appropriately though, both books taught me the folly of artificially limiting what you read to one genre, and to avoid being bound by senseless and meaningless categories.

1979

He was born in an in-between place, a valley with old and rounded hills behind, sharp and eager mountains before, a kind of negative space of not-geography. It was the kind of place life largely passed by, with wars that broke behind the weathered hills and storms that raged beyond the peaks. 

In the sheltered valley there was idyll and ease. Days, months and years slipped by his defenses, unchallenged. And crept up on him as he stood by the window, watching the distant lightning.