Juno - I was overenthusiastic, clearly

Below is an old review I did of Juno, when I had a single blog and linking under the same account wasn't done, or I refused to branch out.

I don't think Juno's as good as what I said. So I'll say it then maybe parenthetically {-} correct myself as I go...

"I think Diablo Cody kept her stripper name, and it is a great nom-de-plume, mind you now I'm going to find out it IS her real name, she IS really that cool and this blog is NEVER going to make me famous. {She's not that cool, and her views on Disassociative Identity Disorder sucks, okay you got research done but the disorder was still fairly unknown and is still disputed by some doctors}.

By the by, Juno is a great movie {it's not, it's flawed and probably well outside deserving of any major awards} . Debutante Diablo's script does have that certain screenwriting 101 feel to it {remove "certain", replace with "definite"}, so the transitions are predictable, but the story isn't {Okay I didn't see most of it coming, but some people probably should}. Ellen Page {they weren't out at the time, so I had no prior knowledge of their desire to transition, and you could say neither did they - Elliot Page is a wonderful human being and is living their best life, I hope} does rock Juno quite hard, Jason Bateman, enough said, Jennifer Garner, to me, a little forced, and Michael Cera, Mr. Reprise but it all gels nicely {It's been argued this man can do nothing but be Michael Cera and sadly it's mostly true. His Marlon Brando impersonation on Twin Peaks will just forever confuse the fuck out of me}. Alison Janey still kicks a mighty amount of ass. (The only reason I remember her name now is Peter called his pet giraffe Alison Janey on Family Guy), JK Simmons, adorably gruff dad, is equally great but he has that "I've seen in him other shit I can't remember where" face. {Man's made a name for himself, as did Janey, so it's been nice to see them both finally win Oscars} I was so horribly disappointed Rainn Wilson was a mere cameo, I was waiting for him to contribute further and felt he was underused. {Could also be argued he couldn't be anyone but Rainn Wilson, and apparently he also has weird religious beliefs now}. And I was well chuffed to see another Degrassi alumni, Daniel Clark, aka bad boy Shawn, make an appearance, (again STUPIDLY underused), I hope this is a launching pad.  {Newsflash, it wasn't}.

Will the one-liner queen become a one-hit-wonder or can she do a repeat? Who knows? {She did a repeat, and I do like Young Adult, it's more interesting and better written than Juno, but United States of Tara is kind of a joke - people with DID don't usually have enough costumes to transform into their alters at will, plus you have to wonder if by the time they were done transforming, another alter hadn't decided to come in and change their mind. I can totally imagine them going out to buy clothes that suit one personality then wondering why their wardrobe is eclectic, this more felt like character acting in the dedication to the appearance of each alter. Some reason I thought Toni Collette wore a face mustache/beard combo but no, it was more superficial in terms of transformation}.

Am I a hipster now I use Juno-lingo? Am I a hipster because I'm emotionally deranged, horribly cynical, scathingly witty and wear long sleeve shirts under band t-shirts? I don't know. Has Juno reworked our general interweb speech? Possibly. {Newsflash 2, it really didn't, it was terribly twee, likened to terrible Dr. Seuss comparisons}

I love there wasn't a preachy feel to the movie. It tried to cover the pro-life/choice issue but definitely not with the same affect as Palindromes. I want to ask Cody if she is pro-choice, as the felt after Juno bolts from Women Now (who help Women, now) was darkly waving the pro-life banner. Or was Cody just trying to cover all bases with her cavalcade of one-off characters, (the clinic clerk, the cashier, the ultra-sound tech, the single protester)? The facts and opinions inter-woven in the dialogue gave it that Weeds kinda feel, educational and entertaining, but obvious in its intent. {And in this sense, it felt like it was being more educational than really dissecting the issues to make rounded characters we could sympathise with more - I think she wanted to look at accepting parents who were still a bit disappointed, someone who was pro-life who wasn't a dick, when you know it's rare for them to picket those clinics to work on their own.}

Was it too fucking clever? {For its own good, yes} It had the right amount of emotion, I felt the heartstrings tug at the appropriate moments, but did it blow the quirk-o-metre? {Yes, it wasn't necessary, the heart is there but I feel like this would irritate me now}. Benny and Joon still managed to rein in the quirk more effectively. Jason Bateman does embody the true essence of a generation lost in its own arrested development, one of the many strays left behind in the wake of the Cobain suicide. {On reflection, he's a douche but it's so hard to bat for Garner's desperate mother routine too. You run a risk of pining mother characters looking one dimensional, obsessed and myopic. Juno being into all the same shit he is makes her a kind of "old soul" in the way her having a fucking out of date hamburger phone makes her one.... Depicting kids being into Gen X shit at that time, it's not that endearing, you have to have a line about how they're aficionados of the same music, not just casual listeners, avid fans of the same movies etc}.

I do like the movie. {I really don't think I do now I've heard the legitimate criticisms} The music did grate {I had one song from it and and I don't listen to it anymore}. I'm not really sure what else to say. The dialogue was too cool for school. I've wanted to do scripts with the same kinda hep-cat beat poet vibe, but now, I'll be seen as a hack. Kudos to you, Cody, for getting a real job. Don't spend the fat pay cheques too quickly. {Quick Wikipedia scan confirms she's done very little but it was critically well received. What I saw of United States, I think that was when I started to get annoyed with her style, especially when she was using phrases like "bitchcakes" like, okay honey, you were a fan of Beth from News Radio, we get it. Bobcat Goldwaith made a point of calling her out for her dialogue in God Bless America, which I consider superior even if other people thought it was trash and problematic, I'm fond of it}.

Okay, so I didn't have much else to add since this wasn't a positive review so much it was, "I think I liked it??"

As an additional point, I looked at a clip of United States of Tara and this would've been Twitter cancelled before the end of the first season, it never would have survived until a third season cancellation. The alters are obvious excuses for the character to be completely irresponsible. I believe the Buck character does visit other women, and even if Tara''s shaming her son as this character for being too feminine, when she's Tara, she sees her daughter being pushed around by a guy with "pigtails" and has a go at her for being pushed around by him. Plus she makes slut shaming statements of her daughter getting a morning after pill. (I don't know if the joke was Tara was the one doing this as her teen persona but I don't think so). So, Tara's just a garbage person period, you're introduced to her having an ego on her already. What's to root for with this bitch? 

Brie Larson was in this and I think she may have been genuinely okay, I loved John Corbet in Northern Exposure but he's been used terribly since and his character in this show basically has to condone and endure Tara's decision to cease her medication because she doesn't want to be "stifled creatively etc" (bitch, we all have to suffer for stability with medication, your needs when you're off it shouldn't take precedence over your fucking family if you know full well you cannot function normally off medication) The husband has to put up with the alters making crass sexualised statements about his children, and be more or less molested by an alter and put boundaries on his sex life with them because that alter "just wants a baby". And the teen apparently abuses access to his credit cards. If you want to start saying DID sufferers go on massive spending sprees as their alters, that's bullshit, it happens more in a manic episode not a disassociative one. It's been highlighted sufferers of DID hurt themselves more than other and they easily have less criminal traits than sufferers of schizophrenia. (I read an article about a guy who murdered his wife's boyfriend while being a diagnosed schizophrenic and was told "there was no hope for them" back in the 70s, because yeah, every mental case was a total waste of space and families were advised to commit suffers and just forget about them, same with autistic kids).

And to top it all off, each alter is literally just a cliche - Susie Homemaker from the 50s, (so you can have a scene where she makes a perfect cake for a bake sale) 16 year old bad mouth Valley Girl (so you can have a scene of Tara being a reckless teen with her teen daughter who "loves this alter", yeah that's a totally healthy response, just encourage the mental patient), ex NamVet trucker asshole womaniser (so you can have scenes of Tara being sexist and flirting with women), five year old child, and hippy therapist. I understand this is a test of a marriage and someone's devotion and I hate people who bail on significant others over their mental health issues, same time, man has a fucking case here when it's about a conscious decision, stupidly agreed upon by a therapist, for a mentally ill woman to cease taking medication. Maybe if the alters had taken over gradually and less perceptively, and she was accidentally under medicated, it would make her a thousand times more sympathetic. But this is a conscious choice, and makes anyone with a mental illness look irresponsible for not taking their meds. It's insulting as fuck when you're on medication and in the middle of a relapse for your loved ones to just assume you've skipped your meds, like that's the only explanation. Please stop using this as a narrative hook. "Are you off your meds?" is a fucking insult.

Which brings me back to shitty depictions of therapists in movies. This is Silver Lining Playbook levels of irresponsible therapy shit that NEVER WOULD HAPPEN. And to make a joke of Tara finding a new therapist in a convenient alter persona, I'm sure a judge would grant a divorce and full custody to the dad upon being presented with this evidence in a custody trial. The mentally ill need proper support if they want to continue being a parent, and there's woeful assistance out there for women who have to come off meds to have kids, or were never afflicted with a mental illness until they even had a child. You don't depict mothers this way. I'd say they went with her having teenage kids because it would look horrifying to have her behave like this around an ignorant child who couldn't possibly fathom what was wrong with her.

No. This show sucks. It would not pass a single test you put it through now, it was created in a time it was totally convenient to throw mental illness under the bus for the purpose of entertainment. It had to take an episode of Modern Family, which I'm sure is equally offensive without this, of the family going as mental patients for Halloween for audiences to finally go, please stop. And I wasn't that offended initially by these depicitions, but Tara is offensive. Toni Collette is incredibly talented, it would take a lot of energy to do this, but shit, James McAvoy dare I say, did it more justice in Split, and that still didn't get a good response. In all honestly, I dislike so many of Collette's American woman depictions with her accent, she's not awful, but for a comparison, Rachel Griffiths does a better job in Six Feet Under. Australians are better with American accents because we're exposed to so much US content from birth, compared to the US, our movies and TV shows just don't get the love, kids don't know how to pronounce anything properly now.

You can say you did all the research you want, that you consulted all the right bodies for your accurate depiction, but guess who else said they did that? Sia. And look what happened to her. I've gotten used to looking for reactions from affected communities over these representations since it shouldn't take a person unfamiliar with their issues to know the depiction is wrong. And working with like one expert is not enough, you're using them a shield against criticism whilst saying, oh, well it's not about the illness, it's about how hard life is in general and how we all compartmentalise parts of ourselves anyway, so this is just taking that to a comedic extreme. Go fuck yourself. This may have started as a review of Juno but now it's just a rant against ableism.

Okay, so now this is just an I hate Diablo Cody post. She participated in the new live action PowerPuff Girls live action show and the script had some "choice" language (can't say if it's hers specifically) that fans disagreed with, so the pilot did what a pilot should do which is point out the flaws before the series goes ahead. Only, does anyone want it in the first place? I thought a bad pilot just meant you gave up and went back to the drawing board, not persist with the bad idea. But maybe she's out of touch with girls today when she was coming up as the voice of a generation. No, I think she's the voice of third wavers who can't get on board with sex positive language despite being an ex stripper.

She-Ra And the Power of Good Reboots

I'm sure the new(ish - it's kind of old really considering how long it's taken me to bother) She-Ra was the result of one imaginative person looking at the original unfinished series thinking, there's something here buried under this joke of a toy commercial, some kernel of awe-inspiring feminist punk rock/princess fantasy that'll appeal to kids now while satisfying fans and casual watchers, like me. 

Full disclosure - I really don't know/remember much of the show. I think I saw some episodes but I can't tell you much outside who She-Ra is in relation to He-Man and what her horse was called when it was a flying unicorn I wanted as a toy so fucking badly. I never wanted the dolls, I wanted their goddamn horses. I wanted Barbie's horse, Rainbow Bright's horse, and She-Ra's fucking unicorn Pegasus. Because Christ that's the epitome of every six-year-old horse lover's toy, especially one like me who couldn't sit on a real horse (pony) unaided without falling off. I feel like I could try riding a horse again, maybe just walking not sprinting, because I remember what I did wrong. But then I'd probably show up and go, no. They're good therapy though.

Anyway, getting a toy horse that looked like an actual horse was my goal, but I'd have loved a Swift Wind toy. I had a cardboard cut-out of Spirit I could put paper hook-on accessories on to make it Swift Wind. It just wasn't the same.

Anyway, the new She-Ra turned out to be rad. I've run out of stuff on Netflix etc to watch so I thought screw it (and I was inspired by some DeviantArt, finding out I have a thing for certain "reimagined" cartoon characters has been illuminating) I'll check this out. I really like the aesthetic even if it's borrowed a lot from Last Airbender, probably leaning more into the anime tropes at the same time. I'm in danger of getting sick of this amalgamated style the way I got sick to death of Pixar/Dreamworks style movies. Like, I'm fucking sorry, but you can tell they reuse assets for characters, that under Disney Pixar lost so much creative freedom as it was forced into multiple sequels they swore not to make. So, if this art style is really becoming the norm I'm not going to love it. I was underwhelmed with the cartoon style of Invincible until YMS pointed out it was in the style of Saturday morning cartoons, the deliberate lack of detail and sort of bad lip-sync gives it a certain charm in that regard, plus it ended up being a trauma ride not for kids, had interesting bad guys and flawed good guys and a decent enough hook with a frustrating love triangle, the kind you get from Saturday morning cartoons.

She-Ra, for some reason, has the best baddies, the kind you love to hate. Rather than stick with one dimensional Hordak as our main antagonist, we get a very nuanced, well-structured Catra, who was relegated to henchman in the original. We get a female based rivalry based on betrayal, Catra a better foil for She-Ra, with Hordak kinda hanging out in the background making more tension for Catra overall. Also, we've avoided the villain of the week and they've managed to develop a relatively engaging story with good twists and turns. And the gay kids finally get the ships and reasonable representation they deserve (to be fair, their only NB character's probably a little too camp/sexualised in the way you can oversexualise an androgynous character, but Double Trouble is still an entertaining far cry from the original as well, and they've gone to the trouble (boom-tish) of casting appropriately as well).

We have princesses but they've all been revamped into gutsy teens with various teen traits that don't make them uninteresting in any way, and they all have their awesome powers and realistic flaws. Entrapta has an obvious neuro- divergent slant, Frosta's now a spunky little 13 year old, Perfuma's more of a neurotic mess disguised as a hippy, I guess Scorpia's more sympathetic comparatively even if she's sappy and a little too clingy. Mermista's the Daria of the gang. Netossa and Spinarella were put in the background as lesbian wives (Bow also has gay dads, one of which looked a lot like a Dream Daddy character, also you get a short king out of King Micah, who's like half a foot shorter than Angella, they really wanted to cater to all the marginlised groups*). They've made a deliberate move to really keep with the higher ratio of female characters, Bow, Seahawk and Swift Wing are the bois of the crew, and they're not forced into relationships right away, Bow and Glimmer are good childhood friends, there's not a huge amount of underlying romantic stories between them. Also, Swifty is stuck as Swifty permanently, there's no reverting back to "horsie" mode, and instead of making him a pretentious asshole he's just campy, sarcastic, sassy-ass fun, meanwhile he still gives a shit about everyone and I'm sure he didn't in the original.

Shadow Weaver has a developed arc as a conflicted villain you're still unable to trust in terms of motivations. The Horde is still a problem but they seem more formidable, plus they're humanising the bad guys in terms of "who deserves to live or die in a war". You have moral quandaries over constant good versus evil fights, I'm into the story, there are stakes and tension you didn't get from a lot of older cartoons. What you do get is that hatred for the villain whenever it looks like they're winning, which was such a driving factor of those shows. When you weren't bugging your parents for the toys you were thinking about how evil the bad guys were. Well, these guys are genuine assholes with more than half a dimension. Admittedly, you're not always on She-Ra's side either. She's entertainingly flawed, she's not always winning, much like Buffy, she's the chosen one who is only truly strong alongside her friends. The reveal on her purpose is paced really well, the conflicts later on between the good guys aren't too contrived either.

I honestly have no idea what role the princesses served in the original series, either. I remember Glimmer but honestly she didn't look familiar until the episode they spoofed the original, which was fun. My biggest issue was random rock songs that take up two to three minutes of the episode. Use these sparingly, I beg you. (PS they did). I quit Bob's Burgers from there being a musical number every episode after they did their own "full musical" episode. Honestly, I don't find that shit funny. Simpsons was better at pulling that shit off sporadically, like the Monorail number or the Who Needs the Kwik-E-Mart, or See My Vest, or the Flaming Moe's song, or anything off the B-Sharps episode. I don't know what it's like now but they knew when to use a musical number. I don't really understand other cartoons doing this on a regular basis. Like if you have actors who can sing, that's swell and all, but do we need this interlude or were you struggling to fill the time?

So, I guess this show just has to quit it with the musical numbers and keep entertaining me, and I'll stick around until the end. I've kinda spoiled a particular arc because my dumb ass thought the still was someone's DeviantArt ship fantasy and was an actual scene in the show, but I'm looking forward to how we get there based on where we're at now. Some smarts have gone into this, as well as a good dose of charm.

Okay, that actually paid off really well. Semi-spoilers from here, and this is even after I spoiled shit for myself. I feel like this ending was the one She-Ra deserved from the very start, and I mean the VERY start. I doubt this was canon, that it was intended, I don't think they had a plan for the original show, most of those shows probably weren't ever designed for storytelling on this level since they were always cut short by the lack of toy sales (even Avatar suffered for this). But the new version was genuinely great, it was sincerely heartfelt and emotional without being hackneyed or schmaltzy. I was invested in the way I've not really been with other shows. What I assumed would happen didn't, expectations were subverted. There's a redemption for some and the final boss takedown is really special, it's not a drawn out battle, I like that about it. There's a lot of rainbows but it's nice, you feel good and not kinda overloaded with sappiness. 

Whoever planned this, (I'll say Noelle Stevenson carried this as its her creation) I take my hat off to you for actually giving She-Ra the ending she was worthy of 30 fucking years ago. I take it all back, she was done dirty and this makes up for everything. I wouldn't even bother with the original since it would be painful to watch with how little they did with She-Ra. You didn't marry her off or ship her with any particular male character. You didn't sacrifice her but made us think she would lose, for all her OPness, there was still a solid character there we were at least invested in and wanted to see succeed. Her "I'm the only one" shit wasn't played out to death like with Buffy, they saved that for the end. There were a lot of dark scenes I think (hope) people wouldn't be upset by, like I get the point of trigger warnings but I don't think there was inherent intention of causing harm, in some ways it refused to pull those punches other shows do.

And if you're a Korra fan, guess what, you got your damn kiss at last. So that's two for the price of one. I think this show is lacking the recognition it deserved for bothering to be diverse enough and turn shit on its head. You can say it was pandering but I'll give it so many passes for how well it did it, I don't think it was condescending in its approach. It played it subtly until there was a sign they could finally wave those flags. This actually would've made me cry in the way Wonder Woman never can or will. I mean, this deserves its Rotten Tomato rating. It deserves its fan base. And I did not feel that way about Wonder Woman in the slightest, or even the Harley Quinn sequel. (I'm not kidding, throw them both in the trash and watch the new Harley Quinn animation, it's really good). They both had an opportunity to do more with what they had, whereas She-Ra really feels like its heart was carried through to the end, left intact. I enjoyed this about as much as I did Avatar. I don't know if I'd ever watch it again, it'd be interesting since I've never felt a huge urge to go back to Avatar or Legend of Korra, I haven't been sucked into other animated shows. For all the anime out there that this borrowed from, it didn't suffer from pacing issues or just being compelled to continue an existing manga until the end of days, because the manga had no end. 

Anyway, faith restored for now. Something Netflix got right for once. This was a show for people who really thought those toy commercials were meant to inspire them, for the writers who believed in those stupid characters and wanted to be creative. And for those little girls (and boys - I discovered the other day drag star Courtney Act wanted a She-Ra doll so badly for Christmas, but hilariously, she got a Swift Wind, and I got the She-Ra doll. If we'd been friends, I'd have begged her to swap) who deserved a strong female character who was a princess who kicked ass and still had a heart, it was for you.

She's the hero we all deserved, then and now.

*Speaking of catering I have to say I think some of the cast were like meh they could be about character's alignments. Saying you "do think they are..." doesn't mean they are any more than Lando's pan. It's of no massive consequence now to drop those hints. I really do hope people have gotten what they wanted from this, that it's a normal thing in the show, that people don't feel pandered to.

Albums are dead. I don't do albums.

I have too much music on my hard drive. I've amassed so many tracks from various sources, failed to archive CDs because I was freeing up hard drive space and thought I'd never listen to them again, bought digital copies and own the CDs, again, never touched. I'm leaning more and more toward pure digital even being smart to the temporary nature of legal copies are, that I don't "own" this shit. I've gone to bandcamp which does let me own shit. I should probably use it more, but I'm a slave to my Apple account, which in fairness has delivered some surprises I thought impossible to find. I know what needs to be done to preserve this shit but I've gotten horribly lazy about it. I've even repurchased albums that were locked to limited devices on a previous account and some now miraculously saved my only copy of Miracle, one of the bonus tracks from American Doll Posse that isn't as easy to get now. So I used to value my music. I used to treasure my burnt CDs, I'm even going to find them to make playlists if I can, because I'm in a weird place and that often generates misguided nostalgia.

What I did dig out I wound up having to go through one by one since they weren't how I remembered. There wasn't a particular playlist I just carried around burnt CDs and used a walkman until I could afford an iPod. I had a list on our home computer when I was looking for songs, I think when I was unemployed my only happiness came from music and searching for songs, I made trips to the CD rental store and wound up selling original CDs once I'd burnt everything on blanks. Curating everything was therapeutic, my CDs got me through long trips around town or down to Fremantle. The walks I had to go on for Mutual Obs were unreasonable but I always took my dealings seriously, and making me walk miles to wherever my placement office was then assigning me to someone miles from there, I needed my walkman, as I needed my ipod as I need my phone and earphones, like I'll inconvenience myself to get them back. I think that was the last day I was in the office, if I'd not gone back for them I'd have been screwed.

But the tragedy of this is really the fact I'm so not pumped for Tori's new CD and I've just pre-ordered the physical copy out of habit. I've listened to Halsey's new album on an almost religious level, way more than I dedicated to the new Garbage CD, which I don't have a physical copy of. I really didn't bother with anything after Version 2.0, I have Not Your Kind of People and ended up downloading the one song I liked anyway, because I cannot justify the cost of an external CD drive to make use of it for an hour for four or five CDs I didn't think I'd ever listen to. I got a bonus track from Heather Nova's Oyster from this lack of foresight. Plus a lot of stuff's been remastered so you're sometimes better off getting a digital download. I at least made some kind of an effort to buy most of the tracks I got from Napster/Limewire. I mean it costs more than it sounds like but I felt like I "made up" for it once I finally did. The plan's since fallen in a hole realising I didn't listen to a lot of those tracks anymore anyway. I'll get through it all one day, maybe. Trawling for B-sides and rarities just isn't worth the hassle now.

Streaming - Pros and Cons

I've had a mostly hate partial love relationship with streaming services. I refused to get Netflix after being over people's houses to watch something only to sit staring at a bunch of thumbnails scrolling by for ages. (There's a study confirming our brains melt from too much choice). So, I actually cannot remember why I got a subscription. It had to have been for some show, seriously I don't remember. (Maybe Degrassi Next Class but I'm sure I saw it for free elsewhere) Anyway, I've got it. 

I have a Stan account for Twin Peaks the reunion, but I kept it for Better Call Saul (I did cancel for a while and borrow someone else's account but decided the Peaks was worth going back to it). I barely use it since I'm too cheap to allow more than one active sign in and I have the Return on DVD now anyway.

Then I got Prime. And I fucking dislike paying for a service that still forces me to rent some movies when I'd rather pay more to get full access. I'd also like to add, what the fuck determines what's for rent and what's free on Amazon? Like why are you asking money for Ghost Rider? I'm assuming it's a distribution issue, and what they've already got to rent for non-Prime video customers. I think there's some needless convoluted BS behind it. But free shipping (most of the time - one second I could get author copies with free shipping the next second I couldn't) I guess is worth the 7 bucks a month. It's interface isn't so great, you get more than one thumbnail for each show season. Which is stupid.

I skidded past SBS on Demand and cancelled my free subscription because I couldn't disable ads. I tolerated them barely for Letterkenny but haven't touched the new account since. They do have Nirvana the Band the Show, but again, ads.

Then there was Apple, which has easily the least amount of content, to the point they "trick" you by making four thumbnails for one fucking series. Overall it barely has 100 shows and movies available. I've seen one thing I wanted to see and I only have it because I replaced my phone and got a year's free. I might watch other shit on there. Again, I've barely looked at it.

Lately, I've wanted to watch certain things. But, as I suspected, they disappeared. Just as well I got the DVDs. I was beyond pissed certain A24 movies were pulled, the more it looks like studios want their shit back to stream themselves, the more shit vanishes from existing services. Services which operate at a loss and churn out exclusive content just to have content.

And God help me if I ever get sucked into Disney+.

Despite having free access for one of these, I don't get my money's worth out of it at all. Because I'm on YouTube rewatching the same channels where I have no ads and no monthly bill. I've given up on sourcing any movies outside of these services but when I'm not able to find one movie across FIVE platforms (or I do see it on Amazon but I still have to rent it), I get so resentful I go back to YouTube out of spite. I did bust out my DVDs the other day but I'm finally starting to see the fuss over HD/4K at least in terms of not having to fuck with the aspect ratio on my TV just to deal with something not shot in widescreen suddenly being in widescreen and making an otherwise svelte Matthew McConaughey look stupidly wide during True Detective. At least streaming for the most part delivers a certain quality. So I get pros from some of this but I'm not shocked by how many people have failed to see the obvious cons.

Friends wasn't funny, guys. It really wasn't.

I was a dumb kid. Friends came out when I was 14, I bought the soundtrack randomly because the theme song was a big hit commercially, I loved it (I even argued about how it was played to my music teacher learning to play it on trumpet - I think they thought if you taught people pop songs it'll motivate them more, so yeah, I could technically play Tequila as well) and it also had audio clips from the first season between the tracks, so I knew lines from the show before I ever saw the fucking show. And we all thought they were soooo fuckin hilarious.

It wasn't. It wasn't a great show, it was popular and different, it diverted from the usual nuclear family based sitcom, or the wacky couple sitcom. But the humour was horribly 90's. You'd cringe from it, it was so progressive having a lesbian couple on the show, only they were secondary characters and the crux of a joke regarding Ross, haha he's so pathetic his wife left him for another woman. It's a sexist show despite all the "feminist" jokes. It's racist and homophobic, because, sorry, all shows were. All shows from the 90's were. You could find that shit in Seventh Heaven. I digress.

I see clips from it now, with the laughter (which sounds canned), and I don't laugh. Someone showed a clip of Ross's mother joking about him tugging his testicles as a stress response to not getting enough attention. That's not funny, it's a stress response boys can have, it's damaging. Joey running around trying to find "that hot girl" is so disgustingly creepy in retrospect, he's a lech. Chandler isn't that funny, he's still technically the comedy guy but people made more fun of his schitch of pausing rewatching it made you realise it wasn't hilarious at all. Monica is easily the most annoying character, Ross being the other one, the pair of them insufferable. Phoebe's okay, but she could just be annoying. And Rachel was a nothing character who existed to be the love interest of Ross, she tries to exist as an ex-rich girl, and their relationship is an iconic joke, it's basically a meme. I thought them getting back together at the end was great, but I honestly wasn't watching the show regularly by then, I think it ended after I moved out. And when I rewatched that clip recently, I cringed more. It was bad. 

I don't think I could watch this, it'd annoy me. Monica and Chandler getting together was actually the funniest part of the show, Ross losing his shit was pathetic. Ross losing his shit over anything was pathetic. Somehow, them screaming a lot seemed to be the height of hilarity too. I have such a vivid memory of a Behind the Scenes episode they aired once that was shot during the Vegas episodes where Chandler and Monica got married, and Phoebe mentions Vegas weddings are only legal there, and Monica's like no, they're legal everywhere, and Phoebe has a moment where she's like, oooohhhh.... obviously realising she's made a mistake on a personal level and then she's like eh, and they move on. And it cut to a writer walking through the audience with the script calling out, "Okay, so you all got that right? You get the joke Phoebe got married in Vegas, right? You all got that?" Which is the point I went, okay the writers think I'm genuinely fucking stupid and they're so amazingly subtle they have to double check people got a joke, like any organic laughter they got wasn't proof. (I think this happened to Dan Harmon and he wound up using the same joke in Rick and Morty and I still got it, when the team giving him notes on the original script said they didn't get it, so OF COURSE your audience won't.) Four or five people on a committee decide now what you should and shouldn't, or will and won't, find funny.

I'm not saying if I watched a few eps that I wouldn't chuckle at some things, but I wouldn't laugh laugh. I would not LOL.

People who write these shows think they're smarter than you. They think they're so fucking funny, this was like the pinnacle of prime time comedies. Meanwhile, News Radio came out and that was, and still is, fucking funny. Yes, it's full of sexist, racist, homophobic jokes. It will make you cringe. But it was a better show. Comedy shows exploded in the 90's off the back off the success of the 20 something ensemble. You couldn't write this show now and have it be the same. All token minorities would have to be represented, as they should be,  but it would be with a huge amount of ignorance if handled by the same writers. Marta Kauffman went on to do Veronica's Closet, which I watched regularly but wouldn't be funny now, because it wasn't that funny then. Just seeing this clip recently, it hit me enough how unfunny Friends really was I had to write it down. Drew Gooden ran an experiment on how much time the laugh track took up on Friends in relation to the jokes themselves, it's egregious. The audience clips of laughter were edited to seem like people laughed harder at one joke than they did. The manipulative nature of a laugh track now is so grating shows have just progressed from that format and let the show be funny or not funny on its own.

If you took out the laugh tracks on Friends, it'd be more painful. Friends wasn't funny.

Case in point I'm watching a younger kid who was born after the pilot experiencing it for the first time and he didn't laugh much at all, not even at Chandler, Rachel's apparently more hilarious, so is Phoebe. They're all in Monica's apartment for the pilot so now he thinks they all lived in there, pilots tend to be pretty limited in scenery. Oh, and he knows nothing about Ross and Rachel. This is so fucking adorable. And he's still not finding it funny, even if he liked it it's proved my point it's not hilariously funny, the jokes weren't even that blue and still sounded sexual to them. The acting wasn't so over the top. The "Billy Don't Be a Hero" joke annoys me, so Ross hasn't had sex since he was six? Cool, funny. I get it's being hyperbolic, oh yeah that song's super old in 1994. Still, dumb. Plus this kid watched Friends once but I don't think he recorded any other episodes but this one. Evidence that show would be a hard fucking sell in this era.

Weirdly since I made this assertion more evidence has come to light. I tend to forget certain cringe things about shows but yeah, there was a whole episode where Ross tries to justify sleeping with a cousin (Denise Richards), and it transpired Monica was passed out at a party in college and Ross basically made out with her (???). That was the biggest problem with 90s shows, anything was hilarious that we'd now find excruciatingly uncomfortable, including incest. Seeing guys dressed as women and that's the joke, whether it's drag or an actual transgender character, it's just a joke. Lesbians, automatic joke, and they're punching bags as well as the man-hating variety. Monica in a fat suit because fat suits were just an easy joke, fat people were a joke. That one lech of a character who was actually way more rapey than people remembered (it wasn't just Joey, I'm finding this stuff on a stupid Buzzfeed list, but they neglected to mention this, and the responses are viewer written so I don't know how people literally get paid for compiling someone else's responses. It's particularly gross they recycle responses too.*). But at least their audience responses are finally seeing how fucking awful and gross Ross is as a character, I'd personally forgotten how shitty he and manipulative he was and you're supposed to be on his side. That's the shit thing about it. Least Always Sunny is aware of how garbage their characters are. Hell, AP Bio has a garbage main character who actually evolves over time, Ross progressively gets worse. Far as I see it now, he was a mouthpiece for the views of the writers, who had to have been that way inclined. He shouldn't have profited from his shitiness. I'm also amazed Joey didn't get more complaints so were people just, oh he's just a silly goofball perve with a heart of gold? 

Just put a millennial audience in front of a 90s show they'll rip it to shreds and while I used to shrug it off, I'm here for it now. Even if they wanted to bag on News Radio I'd let them go off. Especially when they realise who Joe Rogan was...

I chanced checking out a channel I've never watched because they broke down all the episodes through the lense of a Gen Z guy who'd never seen the show back in the day. (I also didn't realise how good looking John Favreau was back in the day). The best part is seeing the kids identify how toxic Ross is and how awful Ross and Rachel were overall. They're so incompatible but they hitched their wagon to them being the It couple when Monica and Chandler were the better couple you wanted to root for, (even with all the hiding shit, which I thought was okay, it probably is tedious to watch now, the way the Nanny played off the near-death kiss made the show watchable, and I'll be fair I liked the Nanny, I don't think binging with Fran Drescher's voice is good for your brain, however.) whereas Ross and Rachel, we're kind of forced to by way of the show insisting they're meant to be. All of Ross's other relationships are set to fail since all the women are "wrong", including the one who was hot but messy and the one who was nice but decided to shave her head. Monica standing in the way of Ross and Rachel is a good thing, and she'd be viewed as combative, suddenly Rachel loses interest because Ross is a perpetual divorcée despite dating one previously. Rachel is also more cringe than I remember. I'm glad this guy also hates that one Thanksgiving episode with the flashbacks and the fat suit. I don't know if it's the same one where Monica puts a turkey on her head to amuse Chandler, which I despised. I think so much of this would be cringe for me. This guy is jokingly a Ross apologist too, because he's good looking, but no amount of swagger and leather pants can fix Ross, even if he has an alter-ego called Russ. Can't buy it.

At least this guy sees the good character dynamics outside of the romantic relationships. It's been interesting finding out which actors were on the show, like Paget Brewster, who assumed she was too frumpy for the role. Jennifer Saunders plays Emily's mother, I think Ab Fab was still a big hit in the US because it was slapsticky enough. The girl who played Emily called the show out for being constrictive and insulting to Brits, agreed. Sherilyn Fenn plays another girlfriend of Chandler. Kristen Davis plays another of Joey's girlfriends. Bruce Willis played a part and I guess that's where the budget went that season, only for the show to make a Die Hard joke on top of a "not gay" joke between Ross and Joey. I like this guy isn't a Phoebe a fan and doesn't think Smelly Cat and the rest of the songs are funny, because they're not (there was a random unlicensed shirt that had a cartoon smelly cat on it a friend bought because that's how much Friends permeated pop culture before memes and the internet). Paul Rudd was the best on the show, he's always awesome. One good point to make is, a lot of kids are seeing this in binge mode, not weekly mode, like we did. I don't think the show needed as many seasons as it did, but we got them, and I know I stopped watching once I moved out. I wouldn't go back to even watch good episodes, I like random scenes and you can see some that pop on tiktok until those accounts get flagged. If I really wanted to watch it all by now, I could have. News Radio will remain the easiest sitcom for me to binge since it's awesome and enjoyable, and I missed most of it on TV when it was on anyway.

*This might as well turn into a rant about BuzzFeed and the fact they wanted to be considered a legitimate news source. There's a reason it failed completely over here.

Oh dear, Sia... Oh, Dear.

I have a funny relationship with Sia's music. I tripped over her the same way we all did: at the end of Six Feet Under, and that song became woefully overused. It's not even a bad song, it's amazing, but now you can only think of that Cyberbully movie and the suicide scene (I stupidly kinda felt that scene was still pretty emotional but it's not very good, it's the fucking song that moves you not what's on screen). And it was used perfectly in the initial sense. Once was enough.

So, in terms of her movie Music, once turned out to be far too much. I'm not going watch this given I've seen enough now that the initial reactions weren't overblown enough to put an end to this. I've defended Sia in terms of her Shia music video, I liked it, it was emotional and I refused to see it as pedophilic, I worry about people who see that where it's not intended. But this incident didn't really get her to think about how to respond with sensitivity, which is necessary. She lashed out more and got angry. She's had a misdiagnosis of Bipolar Disorder which damaged her life and led to some alcoholism. But I didn't know anything about her weird relationship with the dancer in all her videos, Maddie Ziegler. I supposed if we'd all found out six years ago they were working on a movie about autism, which, on inspection looks like it belongs back in 2015 when she wrote it, we wouldn't have thought much of it. Worse, we may have considered it brave and bold, like Rain Man. Maybe she just went, no too late to revise with actual up to date information, let's maybe leave it and actually skirt some of the danger zones, like working with the worst organisation that "advocates" for autism by literally spending resources to eliminate it from existence like it's of the devil. I think she just went too far down the road, spent too much money and couldn't get more to fix it. But I can't even argue that because it was after the release of the trailer she realised she backed all the wrong horses. Good intentions do nothing to save this, apparently.

Look, I fell for Jenny Mccarthy's BS at that start, and thought she was on to something with the vaccine bullshit because back then, we were all working with the least amount of info. Adults who were autistic had no clue they were on the spectrum. Parents were operating clueless to this, so they were ready to blame a vaccine. But once we tried to reverse the damage of one failed, misrepresented study, it was too late. People are going to die now, and indeed have died, due to the massive rise of anti-vaxxing bullshit. We have to worry about political parties decrying mandatory COVID vaccinations (which hasn't been introduced). We have to worry about parents feeding their kids actual bleach to "cure" their autism. We have to imprison well-intentioned parents who are practically starving their infants with bone broth to keep them healthy. (Some of the responses I have heard from these people, some are unequivocally evil and controlling, and some are just sadly misguided). 

And now we have to contend with this movie. Which needs to be so heavily derided and dismissed and discredited just to keep it from doing more harm than good. Cutting out scenes aren't going to keep it from being shallow and ableist. Yelling at people to save their judgements until the credits roll won't make it less of a dumpster fire. Sia herself seems to have really lost the plot. Her bellicose reactions to legitimate concerns on Twitter were horrifying. Now she's left Twitter entirely. There's no way you can stem the tide of criticism now. The intended audience voiced concern and, well, it turned out to be so much worse than people thought.

Tragically, she also managed to get Henry Rollins and Ben Schwatz on board, albeit in smaller roles, maybe where they weren't privy to the entire production, they may have signed on with similar good intentions. She also got Juliette Lewis (who was in What's Eating Gilbert Grape?* which isn't a bad movie but very much a product of its time) but then Lewis is also a known member of The Church of Scientology, (not sure if that's a current thing but it was so before), so I don't think she's the smartest person either. The nicest reviews seem to only focus purely on the music and the "nuanced" performance from Maddie, who I now feel awful for because she's far too young to understand what Sia was asking her to do: Go Full R-word.

I had an issue with Keira Knightly's performance in A Dangerous Method on my first watch, I felt her overwrought acting pushed her depiction of someone in the grip of neurosis into unbelievably offensive territories. On another watch I didn't find it as bad but I was cringing. What I saw of Maddie's performance made me cringe too. I always found Sia's love of colours, props, pipe-cleaners and paints so Play School, but I liked most of the songs off her last couple of albums. Until I just stopped listening. I was so into them then I just went, meh, over it. And it's not like it's awful music, it's good. People wanted her to write for them, she seemed the type to want to fade into the background and write and not perform, but then David Guetta outed her version of Titanium, after a leak featuring Mary J Blige and Katy Perry passing despite Sia writing it for her, and she sort of took off from there. In her words, she never wanted that. Which is something I can appreciate, it even inspired something I wrote because I found the idea of her being the opera singer behind the waif on stage kind of romantic. (I actually prefer She Wolf to be honest). But maybe Guetta's decision led us here by accident too. If she had less fame then, she'd have less infamy now.

Now, she's an official garbage person, and she probably has retired because there's no coming back from this. Its theatrical release was small, people probably won't stream it. It's a critical flop, she may have destroyed Maddie's career, however I wouldn't blame Maddie at all, she might grow up and distance herself from Sia, given she's already had a difficult childhood in the sphere of the toxic Dance Moms arena. And given Sia steered her away from another project, she might come to resent her surrogate stage mother too. There's no way you could blame her for any of this, and I feel terrible for her. Sia can fade out on this, Maddie probably can't afford to. So I hope she's supported by better adults going forward.

Anyway, I guess I'll still listen to like the one Sia song I still like. I'm kinda bummed it's another artist you have to grapple with when flicking through your music, but that's my privilege talking. I prefer to just enjoy the art and ignore the artist now, and yeah, I feel bad I recently paid for a couple of Manson tracks before he was #MeToo-ed, but I won't defend Sia anymore. She's slipped off into indefensible territory on this one simply by not showing sensitivity to rational disapproval. Perhaps she has an illness that prevents her from controlling her emotions. She had an outlet for that and we all got to benefit from it up until this point. She had the day job you're not supposed to quit yours for. And she fucked it up.

Colour me shocked (sarcasm) but Sia's since discovered she's autstic. She thought she had bipolar the pipeline is absolutely real, she's basically lived out my life with more drugs and booze. I really do like her music, I don't think she's a terrible person, she just reacted terribly to legitimate criticism. She's not like Kanye levels of fascist where no amount of acceptance into a community can fix. I totally believe this and I'd be willing to let it go, but I'm not watching her movie even if she's put warnings on it. If I found out she was back talking to Autism Speaks (like another misguided actor), then I'd be more willing to never listen to her music again. As I said, I go through a big love of her music then just burn out and get bored with it. It looks like others can't forgive her. I see why. It's more my concern that so many people are going to just use this the way they use other mental health "diagnoses" to get out of legitimate punishments and jail terms. The rest of my medication is also kicking in and I just realised how fucking tired I am and how much I do not want to touch this one. (I lied, I put my piece out there it's more a lament she could've handled shit way better).

*I got hella bored with no internet the other day and was doing exactly what I do with Netflix with an external hard  drive full of movies so I selected this before I went to bed just for noise. Honestly, I couldn't watch it. It's genuinely so much harder to commend Leo's performance in light of what happens in Music. It's tarnished Rain Man, I'm sure, and even movies like Nell, which were supposed masterpieces, Nell's still essentially a beautiful film if not overly dramatic. It's this notion you're mocking the handicapped at this point, that despite the sincerity it's now been transformed into parody. Even if a community heralded it back then, current trends and attitudes on representation have changed. If you do have a performer who is genuinely disabled, you have to avoid tokenising them.

Why don't you just...?

So, the new Hal Hartley Kickstarter project has been struck down by COVID, notably for health and safety requirements that cannot be met under union laws, which is understandable. Asking for another 100 thou would be against the rules, keeping the money means you have to do what you intended with it or apparently be taxed like a mofo. And if you think any project can just funnel the funds into a brand new project, I believe this is against the TOC for Kickstarter, otherwise you're running by Zack Braff rules, and we all know how that turned out. (There's a stupid Nicki Swift "why he got dumped" video that erroneously suggests he couldn't get funding for the project when he could, but not if he wanted to do it on his terms, which is one reason people got salty).

But one person's ignorant suggestion Hal bring the production to Australia weirdly made me want to inexcusably lash out at them with the litany of reasons that was a dumb idea. Apparently this person knew people and some friend suggested it as, yes, there are big productions happening over here, with big production companies. That people have heard of.  

I fail to believe that if you send a request to the appropriate government area that you would like to bring your 100% indie crowdfunded small production of less than half a million, that they would go, absolutely. Given we have strict provisions that you guarantee a percentage our workers are employed, that you can't just bring your people over and only use them, that would be a major hurdle. How about getting working visas for all your cast and crew, passports if they don't currently have them, insurance of all varieties, (which if it's travel insurance would be costly if you want COVID cover, or probably won't even have that)? All the costs of you bringing your people here would far exceed the cost of safety requirements in the US. 

I really love it when people hear about a thing happening and how easy it was and go, why don't you just... do that? Why don't they just go to Europe, or Canada for that matter, so you can get around the union laws. Or "have you considered" is another one. I always hear condescension and not a well-meaning suggestion. I guess because people have given me a ludicrous suggestion to a problem that sounded so simple to them when it's not for me. And it's happened a lot for me as a creator. I have good reasons not to do what people think is so simple. Because they don't know the problems associated with it. They don't want to read fine print.

There's no need for me to get this angry, but I felt like saying, hey is Hal a director for Marvel/Universal/Insert other Big Name Studio? Is his small company going to provide big bucks for our country like Marvel is for Thor: Love and Thunder? Is your main star Matt Damon and have they got a private location they can use for quarantine, thereby pissing off any other person who's been forced to go through standard hotel quarantine literally because he's bringing in money for us and they're not? No. You'll have to pay for quarantine for all your cast and crew, there's no getting around that. Unless this guy's thinking "sometime in the future", but I don't think so, because he's trying to skirt around reasonable hurdles. It's like emotional bargaining because you're not getting what you want. This suggestion is so woefully unhelpful. Here's just one line I could've quoted: The new Location Incentive will ‘effectively’ increase the Location Offset rate from 16.5 per cent to 30 per cent for ‘eligible large budget international productions that film in Australia from 1 July 2018’ and even then, it ‘can be slow to be granted, and the selective nature of the decision creates uncertainty, which presents a major challenge for productions wishing to use Australia’s locations and facilities.’ So by the time an approval for a grant came through, I'd imagine you'd be okay to film at your original location anyway.

It actually stinks we've made it look "easy" for people to make films here. Our country's always had an issue with elevating our locally made films above the US competition. Apparently three Aussie films finally made it to the top this year but the cynic in me immediately thought, "yeah, well cinema attendance is low and big movies are being streamed more now so maybe you could get more butts in seats for these than usual if people happen to want to go to the cinema".

I don't know. I shouldn't mouth off considering I'm not that well versed in how this shit works, myself. Which is why I didn't hammer out a response, because the last time I tried to make the same argument some twat said he "highly doubted it". I'm like, bitch, do you live here? And I just went oh well, maybe I'm wrong. Someone else is questioning the financial advice Hal received, again it felt more like bargaining with reality than being sensible. I'm sure he's smart enough he's looked at all the available opportunities and made this decision based on sound financial advice as they call it. I'm sure he looked over the union situation and I'm actually relieved he respected this enough and didn't try to circumvent the regulations like other directors have done. Do they realise  a director went to jail for ignoring location guidelines after one of his crew was killed on set by a train that "wasn't supposed to be running on this track". I don't know why I'm pissed it's just when people get like this I get offended that they can't accept reality. It's not even that big a deal, I'm just weirdly pissed about it. I suppose it's because I myself was told to shut up when making suggestions that sounded reasonable in my head, I don't want to attack them, but at the same time, you really aren't helping. It would be such a waste of time to pursue this avenue that'd be better spent focusing on something else.

Cut to late 2023: Though it fell short 50 grand, the new Kickstarter for the film crossed the line in time. I'm glad it's happening but kinda bummed a certain person isn't going to play the same part (I assume... She's not mentioned it at all). I also couldn't justify a pledge over 10 bucks for now. But barring any other BS, it's happening now. So, yeah, I guess waiting for funding to shoot here would've taken as long if not longer.