At First It Seems Delirious, But When Explained, It's Nothing Serious

[This poster struck me as outrageously sexist for a company with such progressive values.  So you can’t have a strong female lead without defining her through her male associates?  Is this supposed to imply that she’s her husband’s property or something?  Shame on you, Disney.  I suppose you also think women should pay for birth control with their own money, don’t you?  Kindly STFU and go back to the stone age where you belong.  The times we’re living in...]

The reason for all of Into the Woods’ most egregious and heinous and non-triumphant errors is encapsulated in the soundtrack’s liner notes, so penned by director and apparent airhead Rob Marshall.

“On the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I was watching President Obama address the families of the victims.  In an effort to console them, he said with great compassion, “You are not alone… No one is alone.”  That moment stayed with me.  And soon after, I began to think that this beautiful message (unknowingly quoting one of Stephen Sondheim’s most poignant songs) might signal that it was indeed the right time to bring Into the Woods to the screen… The musical explores the consequences of wishes, the complexity of the parent/child relationship, greed, ambition, loss, and perhaps most importantly, unconditional love and the power of the human spirit.  In many ways, Into the Woods is a fairy tale for the 21st century… the comforting knowledge that we are not alone in this world gives us all that glimmer of hope.”

In another illuminating interview, Marshall confessed,

“The musical’s central message [to me is] about how you get through loss and move forward.  You do it as a community, rebuild and get through life.  I turned to John DeLuca, my partner, and I said, ‘It’s the right time for Into the Woods.’  Children today live in a much more fragile, unstable world than when I grew up.  The Giant in our piece is terrorism, school shootings, and even climate change.”

In essence, Rob Marshall is a walking exhibit in why we still need a reading comprehension section on the SAT, his interpretation of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s dark fairy tale musical being so off-base and diluted through a dreamy left-wing filter that its realization on screen bears almost no resemblance to the source material.  Neither the book nor the lyrics nor the underlying expression of the music have anything to do with recovering from loss, the indomitability of the human will, or unconditional love, much less climate change, Newtown, or Obama’s “compassionate” comfort speech.  Far from leaving the viewer with feelings of hope or spiritedness, Into the Woods takes its audience’s preconceived expectations of a lighthearted fairy tale and unceremoniously smashes them in the 2nd act.  Rather than placating us with a familiar but bland and unsatisfying Happily Ever After, Lapine weaves a grim and weighty fable about the difference between perception and reality that leaves us questioning whether Happily Ever After is even possible in the real world.  His and Sondheim’s work is essentially pessimistic upon its denouement; Marshall’s and Disney’s work, alas, is essentially optimistic, and thus deprives the story of the very element that made it so original and mesmerizing in the first place.

If there’s any remnant of the Broadway production’s themes that’s preserved in the movie, it’s that you should be careful what you wish for because you may not desire it after all and most wishes have unforeseen consequences.  Every character in the plot in pining for something or another – be it a prince, a ball, a child, or youthful beauty – that they realize upon attainment is hardly as priceless or fulfilling as they’d initially and idealistically thought.  Cinderella wishes to go to the festival, and wishes, and wishes, to an obsessive degree, but is struck by how shallow and materialistic her wishes were upon fleeing from the palace and realizing just how little of substance she has to say about the legendary Prince of so many women’s affections.  “He’s a very nice prince,” she weakly tells the Baker’s Wife.  “And it’s a very nice ball… and the prince, well, he’s tall.”  “Did you dance?” the wife asks the scullery maid, to which she bluntly answers, “We did nothing but dance.”  Raised to be “charming, not sincere”, Cinderella’s prince turns out to be a serial philanderer, making love to another woman of royalty and the Baker’s Wife as soon as his chosen wife begins to bore him.  Ella’s tireless pursuit of a lifestyle she erroneously assumes will bring her happiness tragically leads her to ruin, disgrace, and anything but a typical Happily Ever After Disney resolution.  So too does Jack’s love of plundering riches result in the death of his mother, Rapunzel’s defiance and worldliness compel her own demise, and so on and so forth.  Such is the harsh reality of the human condition: life isn’t a fairy tale, happy endings are an illusion, and elders should be careful what they say because “children will listen”.

All that’s reduced to “Be careful what you wish for” (blatantly emblazoned on the main poster) and “It takes a village – #NoOneIsAlone” in Marshall’s and Obama’s dumbed-down, post-9/11 retelling of the story, which basically plays out like a poor man’s Coraline that substitutes the eerie and the macabre for whatever fairy tale trope was rehashed on the latest “Once Upon A Time”, itself a poor man’s fantasy mashup show. There’s nothing remotely profound within the movie’s narrative and whatever embers of brilliance it starts to carry over from the play are promptly stamped out by Disney’s need to make an ultimately feel-good picture for the holidays, sufficiently palatable to children but also tolerable to their parents.  Anybody who’s looked at early audience reviews can confirm this clearly didn’t work out the way Disney wanted, with the reactions split largely between those who appreciated the movie’s supposed dark and edgy undertones and those who begrudgingly thought the PG-rating didn’t reflect the (not very well depicted) sexual predator symbolism of Johnny Depp’s character, the steamy and “adulterous” kissing encounter in the woods (which, unlike in the musical, is only a kissing encounter), or such extreme (off-screen) violence as eye-gougings, toe amputations, people dying in general, and other things kids shouldn’t know about at all.  These are basically all the same people who complained about Man of Steel being too heavy and dark for a comic book movie, countered by the obligatory but equally imperceptive people who think themselves really mature and conscious for having the constitution to handle the “uncensored” and morbid material of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales.  Once again I’m going to be the dissenting vote: Into the Woods isn’t heavy, morbid, dark, or deep in any genuine way, not even relative to Disney’s other fairy tale adaptations, which offer much of the same conflict, peril, violence, and scary images.  Into the Woods is just kind of stupid.

A nice picture to get you through the second half of a ridiculously long critique.

Having established that the movie rather sucks as a story and a faithful adaptation, I suppose I could close the review right there, but movies don’t necessarily need a good story to be entertaining or well produced. Unfortunately, Marshall’s direction ensures it’s neither of those things, repeatedly employing boring and static camerawork, ungainly special effects, and aimless choreography.  There are some rare flashes of creative inspiration throughout the film, mainly the scenes of Depp’s Mr. Wolf howling at the sky, his face shrouded in silhouette and appearing creepily nonhuman, Cinderella freezing time on the palace steps to sing about her conflicting emotions, and the witch’s random but spectacular dissipation into some kind of tar pit.  But even this last shot is disrupted by bad placement of musical cues in the editing room; the image alone of the witch vanishing into oblivion is enough to convey the gravity of what the ensemble has lost, but the editor thinks we’re too stupid to process the visual and punctuates the camera movement with one final, completely gratuitous musical note.  Actually, Into the Woods has far too much music playing throughout it, particularly when the characters aren’t singing their feelings and the dialogue is supposed to take prominence.  Sondheim’s score already made extensive use of themes and instrumental textures to accompany the entrance of major characters, but for all his experience with musicals (Chicago, Nine, and an Annie remake for TV) Marshall still takes this technique overboard for a film, breaking out the fanfare almost whenever the Prince or his steward rides onto the scene and coating exchanges between the Baker and his Wife with generic background music.

The production design is decent enough.  Much of the film was shot on location and the fog-drenched woods certainly look real, if not really magical.  Still, the filmmakers deserve credit for not deferring to a cheap studio soundstage and poorly executed green screen, a la Mirror Mirror or every damned episode in the Neverland season of Once Upon A Time.  The effects works on the giants, however, almost made me long for the cheesy scaling effects used on Heidi Klum in Ella Enchanted, which was at least quirky in its low-budget way.  Speaking of Ella, the same girl who played one of the evil stepsisters in that picture is also playing an evil stepsister in this one, which I found distracting but not damning if only because her character as well as everyone else’s is so thinly drawn.

The cast is pretty much perfect in terms of acting and vocal ability, but the script doesn’t give them much of anything that’s particularly interesting to portray.  One of the upsides of directing a mainstream big-screen production on a $50M budget is having the resources to show action which wasn’t formerly feasible in a stage show that’s already too long for the majority of this generation’s consumers.  But rather than delving more deeply into the individual characters’ exploits or motivations, Into the Woods carves so much out of the original play that many lyrics and actions seem incomprehensible.  E.g., Red sings that Wolf “showed [her] things, many beautiful things, that [she] hadn’t thought to explore,” and that “he made [her] feel excited – well, excited and scared,” but the only interaction we observe between the two is a brief flower-picking episode in the woods.  Granted you can only take this obviously twisted relationship so far without demolishing the PG boundaries, but one would think a studio and an artist dedicated to crafting high art would put the logic of the characters’ development before concerns of age appropriateness.  In the extremely professional rendition of Woods I was privileged to see before Marshall took a swing at it, Red sensually approaches another wolf while singing of her lost innocence before slitting the beast’s throat in his trance.  This staging represents the character’s evolution both visually and lyrically, showing us Red’s newfound strength instead of asking us to take it on blind faith.  Marshall simply motions Red to prance around the Baker and assumes we’ll trust she’s speaking sincerely.  So too does the spontaneous disloyalty of Cinderella’s Prince feel unnatural in the film, as we’re given no evidence leading up to the scene with the Wife that such behavior is consistent with his personality, whereas this moral foible is shown more extensively in the play.  Nor do we get to see his meetings with Ella inside the festival, something omitted in the musical that would probably have provided crucial context for a film so barren of reasons for its key events.  Instead we’re treated to an overabundance of scenes concerning Rapunzel, who’s all but forgotten in the final act and comes across as a tool for fleshing out the Witch.

Into the Woods wants to be an uplifting epic of hope and redemption but it’s hard to summon much joy seeing so many competent performers so utterly wasted.  Anna Kendrick makes a lovely Cinderella, vocally and otherwise – as my crazy, unrealistic 19-year-old friends will unanimously testify –, but an incredibly dull one all the same, while Chris Pine as her prince proves he’s as good at singing as he is at sitting in a chair and barking orders to crewmates, which is about as captivating as the role he plays here. Emily Blunt is good as the Wife, though it’s the kind of the performance that’ll leave you thinking, “Who is that lady?  Oh, the commander from Edge of Tomorrow!  She was so awesome in that movie!”  The same is true of Meryl Streep and Johnny Depp, who gets maybe twice as much screen time as he did in the trailers.  At least he can sing, and the music is truly the only reason you should even consider watching this, though I wouldn’t recommend letting the movie sour your opinion of the album.  Then again, maybe you’re one of those suckers who think that Frozen’s soundtrack is the pinnacle of modern musical composition, in which case you’d probably find Sondheim’s polyphonic rhythms and fast-paced lyrics confusing and non-catchy.  Just let it go.

If you wanted to see a revisionist, whitewashed version of Into the Woods with liberal doses of Hope and Change sprinkled atop the final chapter, or if you didn’t even care about the Broadway show to begin with, then Into the Woods will probably offer enough attractive stars in glittery costumes to amuse you for a tedious two hours.  If you care at all about thought-provoking storytelling or strong character development, then Into the Woods is just another addition to the wastebin of Disneyfied faerie stories, which is an immensely more depressing plot twist than any of the characters’ fates.  Would that somebody had fed this to the same giant who nearly devoured the narrator in the Broadway play, the narrator who actually served a purpose in the framework and didn’t exist solely to read the action that’s already happening on stage.

I wish.


Verdict:

Funny story: I thought I was being really horrorshow clever twisting this Cinderella quote around on the filmmakers.  Somehow I didn’t see how clever I was being until the picture was done.   I am good.

Trailer reviews (with bonus reviews from Edge of Tomorrow and Interstellar, which I’ll probably hold off reviewing until closer to the video release date)
The Gambler – I’m still recovering from what Mark Wahlberg and his writers did to the Transformers franchise, but this looks boring regardless.

Fast Seven – Cars falling out of planes, buses falling off of cliffs, girls falling out of clothes – yeah, it’s another Fast and Furious movie.  The opening looks pretty cool, though.

Chappie – So this is really just a rehash of that other Hugh Jackman Rock Em Sock Em robots movie by way of Elysium’s art direction with a weird South-African rapper duo thrown into the mix.  Been there, seen that.

The Avengers: Age of Ultron – I honestly wasn’t too excited for another Avengers movie until this came out, but what action movie fan doesn’t want to see giant Iron Man take on the Hulk?

The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies – Enough is enough.  I have had it with these money-grubbing franchise flicks on this mind-throttling Hollywood train.  From this point forward I refuse to indirectly validate these tripartite or dipartite features with my words.

Mockingjay Part 1 – Ditto.  But seriously, did the Capitol firebomb the movie’s marketing campaign or something?
Sex Tape – A married couple determines to spice up their sex life by recording a video of themselves getting intimate, which presumably would give them the opportunity afterwards to pleasure themselves by watching themselves doing it instead of just cutting to chase Jase and actually doing it.  Upon completion of said video, couple immediately regrets having made it and resolves to delete it later, which kind of defeats the purpose of making the tape in the first place, but an automatic backup procedure spoils their plans and releases the sordid video to the web, prompting our aspiring filmmakers to embark on a heartwarming and hilarious retrieval mission replete with Siri and cloud jokes.  On the plus side, Jason Segel absolutely nails the creepy-guy persona with that “helloooo”, a noise that’ll certainly haunt you throughout the comedy, your ride home, and your very dreams should you throw your money away on this pathetic tape.
Get On Up – Watch the casts of The Help and the secular, liberal Jackie Robinson movie sing your grandparents’ favorite music, dance, jive, drop double-negatives, and generally leave their stupid whitey record producers in the dust.

The Expendables 3 – The epic conclusion brought to you by writer Sylvester Stallone and a bunch of old-timers reminiscing about their youth.

Tomorrowland – The main actress is kind of lame from what this shows, but otherwise a very well constructed teaser trailer, plopping us in the middle of what could be the final shot of Portal 2 while interweaving shots of the mundane with something very fantastical and strange.  Not counting Marvel productions, this is probably the most intriguing trailer Disney’s thrown together since the Tron: Legacy reveal.

Nicholas Sparks movie with Jennifer Lawrence lookalike, the name of which escapes me – What is this editor trying to sell me?  The reverby, ethereal music by BANKS cues me in that this some kind of sizzling drama, ripe with jealousy and scandal, but then I’m told it’s “from the producer of Fault In Our Stars” and I can’t respect any of it, even with the love stories criss-crossed by Fate and the oh so sappy Hozier song.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 – Paul Blart is back and the stakes are higher than ever before with a larger hotel/mall to defend, more bad guys, and everything else you would instinctively expect from a pointless sequel to Paul Blart: Mall Cop.  And no, the final gag of the commercial is not a total copy of the final gag from the first Paul Blart commercial.  You see, in Paul Blart Mall Cop 1, Kevin James slides short of the planter due to his weight and has to push himself forwards to hide behind it, but in Paul Blart Mall Cop 2, he overcompensates by neglecting the slippery floor and shoots out ahead of the planter, pushing himself backwards to rectify his error. The editor only wanted you to think they recycled the same joke.

Jupiter Ascending – New, delayed film from the Wachowski Brothers looks like a spectacularly generic and eye-boggling space opera about a chosen one from earth having to bail some alien civilization out of a tight spot.  Begs to be taken seriously, but with Channing Tatum at the helm it’s just so hard.

Black or White – This is the movie about the selfish, crazy old white man who wants to steal the little black girl away from her rightful black daddy, a drug addict, because he’s scared of those people.  “Do you dislike black people?” the impartial judge asks him, to which he replies, “Not all of them.”  RACIST!!!  The moral profundity we’re supposed to glean, too important to leave in the film, is helpfully pound signed for our consideration.  LoveHasNoColor.

Martin Luther King Jr. movie with Oprah and rap music #marchon – We get it, already.  America is racist.  Gaw.  How many movies do you need to pound this message into our skulls?

Proceeds likely going to the #NojusticeNopeace “peace” fund.  Sure to give a very well-rounded, provocative, human portrayal of Mr. King’s life and legacy.

Hop Aboard the Washington Pineapple Express

“I think it says something interesting about North Korea, that they decided to have the state mount an all-out assault on a movie studio because of a satirical movie, starring Seth Rogan and James Flacco. I love Seth. And I love James. But the notion that that was a threat to them I think gives you a sense of the kind of regime we're talking about here.” ~ U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama

And We'll Never B. Royales

We never run out of blood.

When entreated about a month ago to head out and subsidize the newest half-installment in the Westernized teenybopper franchise fiasco that’s called The Hunger Games, I politely abstained, inwardly fuming at those who would thoughtlessly lend their support to a product of blatant plagiarism and commercialism.  Being a bit of a film snob, I elected instead to watch the work that everyone knows inspired Suzanne Collin’s cheap PG-13 ripoff, the work that shocked audiences all around the Japanese isles, and the work that brought the explosion of international child killing competitions to the forefront of our post-9/11 consciences.  Uncut and uncensored, Battle Royale is in every sense the artistic superior of The Hunger Games, pulling no punches with its extreme violence, emotional intensity, raw primitivism, and potent social commentary on… well, we’ll get to that.

If you’ve seen or read the American copycat, then you already know the basic setup of Battle Royale.  The two dystopian worlds are practically identical: both involve corrupt governments randomly selecting teenagers to murder each other in an annual competition, except that the teens in The Hunger Games are tributes and strangers and celebrities from districts subjugated to a centralized Capitol whereas the teens in Battle Royale are just anonymous kids from the same class who all happen to know each other really well, except that the Hunger Games government uses the games to sow fear and discourage rebellion whereas the Battle Royale government uses the games to teach kids a lesson about staying in school… or something, except that the Hunger Games games are nationally televised and virtually inescapable whereas the Battle Royale games have somehow gone entirely unnoticed by all the kids competing in them – which honestly begs the question of how the government expects the games to alter any of the students’ behavior, especially when they’re trying to reprimand/slaughter the kids who’ve dropped out of school and wouldn’t be eligible for the battle anyway –, except that the Hunger Games games are set in a controlled and dynamically evolving environment whereas the Battle Royale games are so poorly overseen that three guys are able to hack the gamemakers’ computer and rig a truck as a bomb in a matter of two days, and except for many other things, none of which are minor enough to change the fundamental, indisputable reality that The Hunger Games is an American bastardization of the foreign-language bloodbath.

And it is a bloodbath.  Make no mistake that Battle Royale is not a movie for the faint of the heart and doesn’t shy from the kinds of images that Hunger Games weakly refrained from showing.  Director Kinji Fukasaku turns up the CGI blood spurt level a couple thousand notches but never uses violence gratuitously or glamorizes it, a la Collins’ work.  Fukasaku’s strength as a director is his dedication to portraying human violence as realistically as possible, and it’s in this area where he triumphs over the Hunger Games creators, using only as many unlimited CGI blood spurts as are absolutely necessary to convey the devastation of the unlimited ammo holstered by the film’s token bad guy.  A lot of less open-minded critics have ripped the film for its frantic and confusing editing: how, they ask, does the badass redhead transfer kid manage to get a hold of the machine gun when it looks like the other guy is holding it, and are we really supposed to think that he can dispatch five other teens by spinning in a circle and firing while crouched like he’s some kind of action hero?  From where does the bad girl obtain her sickle when a series of shots show her chasing down the good girl unarmed; does it magically appear in the nether region between the frames?  How does the crazy math nerd get his own axe buried deep in his skull through the mere act of rolling down a hill?

I admit these questions bothered even me at first, but then I realized that the discontinuity and occasional incomprehensibility of the fighting was an intelligent production design by the editor and cinematographer, who deliberately sacrificed coherent and slick action to emulate the chaos of real-world violence, where people very rarely have time to stop and hold the camera steady or survey the battlefield well enough to answer the prior questions.  The original Hunger Games definitely had the right idea here, jerking the camera so incessantly and realistically that motion sickness was reaching all across the aisles, but the violence was so toned down to mollify fragile teenage girls that this became irrelevant.  The fight scenes in Hunger Games at least made a sliver of rational sense, but Fukasaku, in his wisdom, shows us that real violence never makes sense.  Violence solves nothing, people.  Welcome to 2014.

All that said, the actual idea of Battle Royale’s murder games is surprisingly a lot more disturbing than their implementation, this being one of the more palatable R-rated movies I’ve ever seen.  Of the 40 teens slaughtered throughout the battle (in a happy twist, a couple make it out alive, providing even more evidence that The Hunger Games is a knockoff), two of them are killed by the teacher before they’re even out of the gate, a few commit suicide by jumping off a cliff, and others get nonspecifically murdered off-screen (a couple in the buff and presumably after sex, which we don’t see at all in a movie full of otherwise animalistic and overtly sexualized teenagers).  An especially unlucky number get riddled with machine gun bullets and end up dying very, very slowly, usually at the rate that they can get up and walk around, gasp some dramatic final words, or even answer one last business call.  As prevalent as the brutality in Battle Royale is, the shock of the premise is always blunted by the ever-present hope that a character, particularly an important one, can still take one more bullet or stab wound before falling down for good. This makes it far less intense, if no less compelling, than an abundance of other gorefests including Apocalypto, The Raid: Redemption, any Quentin Tarantino movie, District 9, or The Cabin in the Woods. Don’t mistake me as saying that this film is in any way suitable for children or men without chests.  In fact, due to the dark, quasi-sadistic themes, intentionally incoherent storytelling, pointless title cards, and distressing foreign dialogue, I’m not sure I can safely recommend this movie to anybody.

Much uproar has been raised over the English-language subtitle track of Battle Royale, but reasonable viewers will understand that this mishap is in no way the fault of the screenwriter.  While it’s regrettable that so many hiccups should mar the translation of a foreign work, audiences should acknowledge that such annoyances are unavoidable and try to look past them for the gold that is the overall story.  If you want to watch a Good Parts version of Battle Royale, my staff has compiled a list of lines which may detract from your viewing experience and we’d freely encourage you to pass over.

Teacher: “Life is a game, so fight for survival and find out if you’re worth it.”

Teacher: “It’s tough when friends die on you, but hang in there.”

The main protagonist: “This is crazy!  How can you all kill each other so easily?!”

Slut girl: “B*!&%, murderer!”

Bad girl: “Why not kill?  Everyone has their issues.”

Dying girl: “God, can I say one more thing?  You look really cool, Hiroki.”

Hiroki, who has never noticed her noticing his coolness until now: “You too.  You’re the coolest girl in the world.”

Possum guy, after being pelted by unlimited ammo guy: (read jubilantly at the top of your lungs so that the bad guy can hear you and return to finish his job) “I made it!  What a sweet bulletproof vest!”

Rebel: “We’ll destroy this stupid system, and then we’ll all escape together.”

Disregarding these oversights and a couple plot holes, such as why the teacher would enter the warzone with an umbrella to scare away the bad girl and save the main female protagonist or why the teacher would call off his soldiers from checking the final bodies, thereby enabling them to infiltrate his compound and fatally shoot him, Battle Royale is a brilliantly written and thoughtfully composed movie.  Most teen killing competition movie enthusiasts were disappointed when neither of the Hunger Games films opened right at the beginning of the games but instead killed well above an hour in the Capitol and District 12 providing nonessential backstory and character development that nobody asked for.  Battle Royale averts this dilemma by throwing us almost immediately into the fray, giving us little time to know the characters who are about to get slaughtered or trip our brains up on any kind of sociopolitical commentary.  From almost the very first frames, Battle Royale is all action and doesn’t worry about making us sympathize with the victims of a great governmental injustice, trusting the emotional story to do that work on its own.  Rather than boring us up front with the characters’ diverse life stories, personalities, and beliefs, Fukasaku uses flashback sequences to establish his gladiators’ complex psyches: we have the transfer victor from a previous game who wants to get back at the evil gamemakers for killing his girlfriend (who appears to have tried to kill him, though the hectic editing makes this plot point unclear), the traumatized, fatherless girl who channels her seclusion and pain over childhood sexual abuse into violence against others, and various other figures we’ve never seen before.

The ending of the movie remains controversial even to this day, a shocking turn that will leave even film-savvy experts like me thinking, “WTF?!” which is completely fine, as Battle Royale is basically the biggest WTF-movie of all time, even more so than Sharknado, After Earth, The Happening, Avatar with airbenders, Buckaroo Banzai, that Seth Macfarlane faux western thingie, the Jonah Hill babysitter travesty, Shaun of the Dead, and other made-for-zombie pictures.  If you enjoyed the WTF moments in any of those films, then you’ll probably enjoy all such WTF moments in Battle Royale.  If you didn’t appreciate the artistic genius of any of those films, then you probably won’t like Battle Royale.

The Author's Musings vol. 1 – tyranny, TV, and Winterholiday songs

Well, it’s that time of the year again.  No, not the start of the long anticipated Winterholiday season, but the time when students the nation over are systematically broken and squashed beneath the baggage of their own imprudently accumulated homework.  This week also marks something like the three-month anniversary of the Author’s regrettable and short-lived stint on that leviathan of internet timewasters we aptly refer to as Facebook, since pictures of faces are pretty much the only media people bother to share there.  In recognition of these historic events and until the day on which the Author can adequately compress all of Facebook’s failings into a single post, we’ve decided to introduce a new feature of this website designed specifically for on-the-go enlightenment in tightly condensed, intermittently nonsensical, Mark Zuckerberg-approved packages.  In the meantime, you’ll have to wait a bit longer for the Author’s verdict on Interstellar, the Michael Brown riots, anonymous “debate”, and an abundance of other American horror movies.

* 25 years since its conception, The Simpsons remains a diamond in a rough of lackluster television propagamming largely in that its writers have the good sense to lambaste both sides of our politically polarized, eternally stagnant nation.  Contrast this residual masterwork with any gushingly homosexual sitcom or crime drama whining about radical tea party terrorists.  I hate network television, pound sign so much.

* A five-line conversation with real people.

The Author: Why do people like this show [NBC’s “Phony Scandal”] so much?
Phony Scandal fangirl 1: You know, this is the first network TV show in history to feature a black female protagonist and it has a black writer [so you can just shut your mouth]!

Phony Scandal fangirl 2: The writing is soooo good.

The Author: Is that why people like it?
Phony Scandal fangirl 1: That’s why I like it.

* There is nothing more discordant or depressing in music than a country singer with a ring in her nose.  Pound sign just like animals.

* Screw the critical elite, the consensus of the mind-controlled mob.  Obamacare doesn’t work, the most beautiful woman isn’t a celebrity, and everyone knows the best song/movie/book of all time isn’t on anybody’s top 10 list.  Unless it’s mine.

* I love it when performers on these singing/karaoke shows “play” an instrument for the first 20 seconds of their gig and then put it away for the rest of the song.  Pound sign bsing us.  Pound sign charming, not sincere.

* Johnny Depp is looking to revive his tarnished career by portraying a wolf in a new Disney fantasy musical,  Not a real wolf or a CGI wolf or any kind of wolf that we can actually take seriously, but a guy made up as wolf.  Oh well.  He can’t be worse than Olaf.

* Why do we moronically insist on using the catch-all phrase “studying” for labors which very often have nothing to do with studying and are solely a matter of menial labor?

* When you ask me, “What’s up?” do you really want to know what is up or are you merely greeting me with a false and formalistic pretense of interest in my affairs?  When I pass someone by in a hurry I never ask them, “What’s up?” because I don’t care what’s up and I never pursue a conversation out of dishonesty. Would you believe me if I said it took me a full month in a real-world setting to realize people don’t want to know what’s up when they ask what’s up?  Pound sign seriously, what’s up with that?

* Asinine anapests.

* King Obama answers Congress and the voters who determine Congress’ structure: “To those of you who criticize me for doing what I want all by myself without your permission, we wouldn’t have this problem if you only did what I wanted or gave me your permission.”

* In other news Stephen Hawking says that, “The development of artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race… It would take off on its own and redesign itself at an ever increasing rate.  Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”

Stephen Hawking is also overlooked for saying, “As in past deliberations, we have examined other human-made threats to civilization.  We have concluded the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons.”

And people think this joker is “smart”.

* You think it’s sad your computer takes three minutes to start up?  Mine takes five to shut down.  Pound sign perspective.  Pound sign Thanksgiving.

* Baby, It’s Cold Outside is one of the worst songs in human history.  Pound sign Frosty better watch out.  Pound sign Rudolph is running for the border.  Pound sign Satan is hiding out in his trash can.

* Speak of the devil: why is the live band at this university playing Santa Claus Is Coming To Town to an assembly of mostly grown teenagers and twenty-somethings?

* And Mary, Did You Know? is now officially the Christmas carol of all Christmas carols – dark, brooding, indescribably hip.

* We try to refrain from outside plugs at the Author’s Files, but this guy has officially usurped the Screen Junkies writers as my favorite movie critic, because that’s just what he is.  Your Movie Sucks is cynical, shrewd, irreverent, frequently profane, and doesn’t give any movie a free pass simply based on what other people say about it.  He can be a bit of a communist turd at times, but at least he exhibits a modicum of independent, rational judgment when it comes to film.  Well recommended for adults who like thinking about criticism, storytelling gimmicks, or the distinction between art and propaganda.

Really salty language throughout.

Politically Correct Aliens

On October 7th of the year of the illegal immigration surge, 20th Century Fox and Creative Assembly accordingly treated video gamers and sci-fi nerds to arguably the first proper Alien sequel in three decades. Alien: Isolation has been lauded for its suspenseful gameplay design and oppressively atmospheric tributes to Ridley Scott’s horror classic, with the Onion’s A.V. Club warmly declaring it a “stunningly realistic locker simulator”.  In celebration of this momentous occasion, we at The Author’s Files have decided in collaboration with Fox to release a never-before-seen early draft of the screenplay to James Cameron’s glorious sequel Aliens.  Cameron’s original take on the Aliens universe had a much different slant than the undiluted action thriller we all know and love and quote from memory, and we’re beyond assured that it will provoke much debate among fans of the franchise.

Aliens – The Lost Script – Redacted for overtly and offensively P.C. undertones

Starring Sigourney Weaver and Bill Paxton and Paul Reiser

Written by James Cameron

Produced by James Cameron

Nominated for the Oscars by James Cameron

Directed by James Cameron

Retrieved from the memory hole by film historian and archeologist Josephos Rex

[A screen of total blackness recedes as the center gradually pulls back and opens up to reveal a blurry shot of a grated ceiling.  The view shifts to the left and right in dizzy-person-cam as the dazed person tries to reorient himself with his surroundings.  The screen snaps to black momentarily and opens again, this time looking directly at the person’s feet, where lies the pale carcass of a monstrous hand-like creature.  The eyes close sharply, accompanied by the heavy gasping of the unknowing victim, and remain sealed for several seconds until he dares to look straight ahead and finds himself peering down the barrel of a jittery M1A1 pulse rifle.  Still dizzy-cam.  The rifle’s owner screams at him in a forceful but frenzied tone.]

Hudson: Whoa, man!  What the Ω#!$ happened to you?  Stay right there, no quick movements, you hear me!  You got yourself in some deep amp;%# now, man, don’t think I didn’t see!

Shadowed victim: P-p-please, don’t sh-shoot! I don’t wanna die!

Hudson: It’s too late for that now.  You’re (*#)ed, man, %**!ing ♫#*!ed.  It’s game over for you, game over!

Shadowed victim: B-but why?  What happened to me?

[The camera cuts to look over Hudson’s back and reveals the approach of a female person.]

Ripley: Put the gun down, asshole.  You don’t see the aliens busting each other up over a little infection.

Hudson: Well, why don’t you just put them in charge?

[An independent woman of leadership in the Sheryl Sandberg era, Ripley gives him an exasperated look that puts him in his place.  He reluctantly lowers his firearm and retreats to wallow in a corner, suffering from a phallic inferiority complex and embarrassed that he should have been ordered about by the woman.]

Ripley: Sorry about that, Burke.  Don’t mind him.  He’s just a jumpy bastard.

Burke: Where’d he get his background check?

Ripley: I’m sorry.  What was that?

Burke: … Never mind.

Ripley: So, how do you feel?

Burke: I was kind of groggy a minute ago, but now I’ve never felt better.

Ripley: Ah, a typical symptom.  This is most unfortunate.

Burke: What are you talking about?

Ripley: You are currently suffering from Xenoral-Impregnation, a fatal and untreatable condition contracted solely from contact with a young form of the xenomorph parasite.

Burke: What kind of contact?

Ripley: Intimate.

Burke: How dare you?  I haven’t come near one of those, those freaks!

Ripley: You were obsessed with exploiting those buggers long before we set down on this godforsaken world, and our team’s been paying the price of that immoral attraction ever since you led us into the belly of the beast.  All the evidence seems to indicate that you’ve made contact with one of them.

Burke: That’s a bunch of stuff and you know it, Ripley.  I’ve read about Xenoral-Impregnation before and know for certain that it’s not limited to cases of inter-species relations.  That’s a lie perpetuated by xenophobic bigots dead set on blocking research and suppressing awareness that might help those afflicted with the virus.  The most credible studies actually estimate that only 50% of those impregnated have reached that state through unprotected alien copulation.

Ripley: And the same studies will show that 100% of those who engage in voluntary oral copulation with an alien will contract the virus.  You ♦♣♥♠ed around with a facehugger and now you’re paying the consequences of your stupidity.  What the hell did you think was going to happen?

Burke: Why are you being so judgmental towards me?  Hold on.  You must doing it because you’re hiding something yourself.  How do we know you’re not infected?  Huh?

[Ripley groans at the illogic of the conversation, while Burke, feeling he’s struck a nerve, points accusingly and starts talking louder because he wants to sound smart]

Burke: Oh my God, that’s it!  This is your way of coping with your private guilt!  You’ve got one of those creatures growing inside you too and you can only make yourself feel better by taking out your self-hatred on me!  That makes perfect sense.

[In her face, now, hissing with disdain]

Burke: How much mouth you’ve been getting, Ripley?  Huh?  What are you hiding?

[Hicks finally steps out from the background in a presumptuous and misguided motion to defend her from her assailant]

Hicks: Now you’ve crossed the line, dude.  Get away from her –

[Ripley throws up her hand and stops him mid-one-liner]

Ripley: Thanks, but I’m perfectly capable of handling my own problems, Hicks.  It’s 2179.  I don’t need a male to watch my back for me.  Have you ever given birth to a child?

[Hicks stutters and babbles incoherently, grasping for a response. Having sufficiently proven her point, Ripley dramatically pushes Burke against the wall in shaky, action cam.]

Ripley: “Get away from me, you sonuvabitch!”

[Paralyzed by the self-reliant woman’s force, he slumps to the floor in a heap, shuddering with fear.  Hudson inches forward with hands clenched in a submissive, prayerful gesture.]

Hudson: Now, guys, don’t you think we’re taking this a little too far!  I mean, #♪!*ing A!  We should be working together on this $^&!

[Burke weakly rises to his feet and talks with his hands in a corporate manner.]

Burke: He has a point, actually. Look, I know this an emotional moment for all of us.  I know that.  But, come on, let’s not go making snap judgments.  This is clearly a very important issue we’re dealing with here, and I don’t think you or I or anybody has the right to arbitrarily abandon anybody who’s suffering from it.

Hicks: Damn right.   The time for judging is over; now all we can do is try to help Burke with his condition. We need to respond decisively and compassionately to discover a cure for Xenoral Impregnation.

Hudson: Has anyone seen that movie Prometheus?

[Everyone stares at him in uncomprehending befuddlement.  After a time he swallows and recedes into his corner of shame.]

Burke: What we need to do is start a media awareness campaign.  Awaken everybody in the Colonial Marines to the unique prejudices and health defects that Xeno-victims encounter every day, because, as we know, there is no greater weapon of mass destruction than misunderstanding and hate.  If we’re ever going to achieve notable advances in the war against Impregnation, we’re going to have to change the narrative surrounding this life-ruining virus.  First we’ll have to correct the misconception that Impregnation is a natural punishment for deviant relationships, when many people contract the disease from other causes or because xenophobic extremists deny them the education and resources to safely mingle with the other species.  It’s not their fault if they aren’t aware of the risks or how to counter them!

Ripley: There is no way to counter them. You think the xenos are some kind of pet that you can temper to your pleasure –

Hudson: Yeah, yeah, that’s a great idea, man.  And we should make some badge too, yeah, a red badge to show we care about ending Xenorphal-Indignation!

Hicks: I’m on board if everyone else is.  Are you with us, Ripley?

Ripley: … It won’t make any difference.

Burke: You’ll never know unless you try. Will you try, Ripley?  For my sake.  For the sake of all humanity.

[Ripley regretfully puts her right hand into the center of the four-person huddle, recognizing its futility but going along because it’s eminently harder to resist a crowd of idealistic human swine than it is to challenge a race of murderous space alien parasites.  The camera hangs above their brotherly formation to emphasize the strength of the pact they’ll undertake. Burke suddenly coughs heavily and spits blood onto the tangle of hands.  Cut to angled close shot of his chest frothing with blood and finally exploding to reveal a sickly eyeless worm with serrated teeth.  Ripley screams as it scurries up Burke’s arm, crosses to her own, and lunges at the camera in a 3D effect.  Cut to black.]

THE END