Boy, howdy, did I enjoy this movie. No surprise. It’s at 93% on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s earned the biggest box office weekend EVAR.

But it has stuck with me in curious ways.

Spoilers abound, and if you haven’t seen The Avengers yet I advise you to GO SEE IT and NOT to read this. The little twists and gifts and traps and pointy bits add up to the great pleasure of the movie, and the reason I’d put this Blu-Ray in on any rainy Sunday, whereas Dark Knight might molder in cellophane forever.

WHAT I LOVED:

• The one-liners
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• The many-liners
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• Bruce Banner conspicuously going sans belt, shoelaces or top shirt button. (It’s not wise to constrain the doctor.)
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• The many conflicts and power-checks. I was like, dang, Joss Whedon really understands how to balance a superpowered ensemble. Where’d he pick that up? Oh, yeah. It’s all he does.
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• The strategic pairings. Did you want to see Tony Stark and Bruce Banner discuss the gifts and responsibilities of scientific discovery? Yes, yes, you did.
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• Black Widow and Loki settling in for a good Silence-of-the-Lambs you-tell-me-yours, I’ll-tell-you-mine head-game session — and B.W., unlike Clarice, winning.
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  So much better

• No fan service. Yes, Black Widow’s caboose is carefully lit, but so is Cap’s, and neither of them pose for the camera.
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  Okay, maybe a little posing

• A Pepper Potts that doesn’t make me want to stab myself in the face!
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• Black Widow being a character. The moment when she tries to calm a hulking-out Banner while shooing away arriving help is worth the cost of admission.
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• Hulk hulking. Can’t get enough of that Hulky stuff. There is no wrong Hulk here.
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  Also he looks like a brute instead of green Superman, which is nice.

• Tom Hiddleton as Loki. It’s not easy to be the baddie against five-six-seven-eight? a basketball team’s worth of goodies. But he does it all, the preening and the brooding and the funny bits, juuuust right.
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  Like Tom Felton and Brent Spiner had a spooky baby

WHAT I DUG:

• Joss’s tropes on tropes. The parting scene between Nick Fury and Agent Coulson parallels the same between Mal and Shepherd Book; you could even swap the dialogue. The gruesome death Loki imagines for Black Widow echoes the time Buffy killed Angelus, who turned back into Angel just in time for some last-minute awareness. Then there’s the magic device that makes people tetchy, and I’m pretty sure this was used in a Buffy, not to mention a Harry Potter and a Lord of the Rings.
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• There’s a moment where one lone civilian stands up against Loki. You can tell from his age, accent, and music cue that this character is a Holocaust survivor. I could have used a little more time with this moment: this man is the lone voice of courage without superpowers, and the lone demonstration of standing up (literally) for your principles even when you don’t have muscle or firepower to protect yourself from harm. It’s appropriate that Cap is the hero who arrives to defend this man, but I could have used just one minute more with the idea he represents.

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE:

- The Brave trailer. Didn’t really do it for me.

WHAT I DIDN’T UNDERSTAND

Okay, so I have a few nitpicks. That’s the fun part. If I weren’t still thinking about this movie, I wouldn’t have nitpicks. And these are like complaining that people on Tatooine cast only one shadow: THEY DON’T MATTER.

• What baddie is in charge? Is Loki working for the Master Shredder The Other (played by Alexis Denisof, hell yeah)? Sort of looks like it. If so, what does Loki get in the end — bragging rights? A way harsh prank on Thor? And why does The Other need Loki to pull this caper?
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• The outcome of the Black Widow/Loki Lecter-versation is the reveal that Loki wants The Hulk. But for what? He never tries to capture or harness Hulk’s powers. It never comes up again at all, as far as I can remember. Sure, The Hulk is useful for helping destroy the invisible jet flying aircraft carrier, but that doesn’t motivate why Loki sort of gave himself up in the first place.
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• Speaking of, The Hulk is set up as an indiscriminate murder force — unable to control his rage or, in the case of his first manifestation, distinguish between friend and foe as he attacks Black Widow. Yet thereafter he has no trouble strategizing, targeting the baddies and eventually rescuing goodies. What changed?
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• Even if faked, Agent Coulson’s blood-stained trading cards are biohazardous at best. There’s no assurance Captain America has a superpowered immune system.
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• When the portal is opened, everyone agrees the tesseract-employing portal opener can’t be shut off. Loki tells Thor this, and Thor doesn’t even try to bash it with a hammer. Thor tells Cap and the rest this, and all of them are like, “Welp, that sucks,” for the next 10 minutes. No attempt to out-science it or Gamma-muscle it or vibranium-thwack it. Then after a few waves of space orks come through, somebody suggests they really ought to look into shutting that portal down, for reals, and lo there is a way to do it.

  Maybe a little earlier SOMEBODY could have had a go at riding up Stark Tower to punch Stellan Skarsgard in the head. At least explained a little more WHY such a thing should not be attempted. Everything else had good rhythm and sense, so the delay in addressing the portal coupled with it being the eventual solution felt a little out of sorts.
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• As noted by Random_Tangent, it was peculiar for Cap to go motorcycling without a bare noggin. Maybe he’s not up to date on helmet laws?

Eight people who will never be left alone at a con

So can Joss Whedon make more movies now, or what? Wonder Woman, yes? Two Whedon films a year in perpetuity would be just dandy, thanks.

And finally some characters:

So it begins.

(Modeled on a rose woodcut by Dan Sorensen)

I have to work on my line weights. I’ve been avoiding using my precious superfine tips, but it is time. IT IS TIME.

Or I could just draw bigger.

Either or.

For those that are immediately inclined to provide the complete code snippet to solve the problem, where do we draw the line? What if the question being asked would need 10 lines of code? 20? 100? And if you are also interested in frequently helping people, would you be willing to provide 5 lines of complete code to 10 people a day, knowing that each person probably didn’t learn much? Furthermore, after having given this individual a quick answer, you have now rewarded their lazy behavior, and more than likely just encouraged them to repeat the bad habit again.

WriteMyCode.net

That is all.

This is the image they released for Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman in the upcoming Dark Knight Rises.

It annoys me.

It’s not that she is posing (she has settled into the classic contrapposto with spine twist that allows the butt and bosom to be viewed at the same time. Because this is a posture one would never enter into except for the benefit of the onlooker, one presumes at this moment Catwoman had nothing else on her to-do list, which is boring and sad.) Posing is annoying and impedes storytelling as sure as a salad bar impedes a buffet line.

It’s not that she has ears, although I’ve never met a headband that didn’t give me a headache nor a pair of sunglasses that would stay put on top of my head.

It’s not that she has long, loose hair, which is like wearing a great big handle on your head for enemies and straps to catch hold of. I understand certain hair flinging as a concession to aesthetics, but it must be minimized, e.g. movie Katniss may sport peripheral-blocking bangs, but even Avengers‘ Black Widow got a bob.

It’s not that she’s wearing six-inch heels, although these look like they’d be a bad choice for walking two blocks to a car, much less having a good burgle. (Note that she doesn’t have to wear these stupid high-highs when boarding her deathbike:)

It’s not that she has no trigger discipline:

It’s that the non-character character that all of these aspects represent is BAD STORYTELLING — not to mention anathema to the rest of the movie Chris Nolan seems to want to make.

Compare the still of Bane, all gritty and contrasty and stuff, looking like he wants to do things and feel ways about stuff. Love him or hate him or find him unintelligible, you got to admit he’s a character.

Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman got to wear stilettos and a vacuum-sealed suit because she inhabited a world of penguin pallbearers and Christopher Walken in eyeliner. Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman inhabits this world:

And treating her otherwise is just careless.

I’m concerned that the tendency to dress her up and pose her going is to introduce suck to Dark Knight Rises, and people are going to be like “Waaah, Anne Hathaway is bad and chicks ruin good action movies!!!1!” when really the deal is “Waah, bad storytelling is bad and ruins good action movies!!!1!”

That is all the Interweb brings to me today.

In the ad, the man stands opposite a Verizon Wireless store, expresses (in internal monologue) his desire for a new mobile device and eventually goes and gets himself one.

In the Father’s Day version, he rationalizes that his wife and daughter might not know he wants one for Father’s Day, so he should just go get it.

In the current iteration, he rationalizes that his wife won’t mind him being late if the reason is that he stopped to get this new mobile device.

While the link between the doll and the man’s child is more loose in the second spot, the job of the prop is the same: to identify him as a family man.

It’s not difficult to conjure a backstory that would explain this man buying a yellow-haired doll. However it remains a jarring choice for a 30-second TV spot starring an Asian-American dad.

All I can think is that the lighter-colored hair gives the doll more separation from the dark background in the wide shot, and competes less with the dad in the closer shot. But light brown would have worked fine, or even the same soft blue as dad’s shirt. It’s a toy after all.

It begs the question why the toy had to be a doll in the first place. If it were a stuffed puppy I wouldn’t even have a pit to hiss in, so to speak.

The point is this ad bothers the hell out of me and I thought it was gone last year and now it’s back.

(The actor in the spot is Randall Park and he does a good job. I probably wouldn’t even have looked up at the TV otherwise.)

Adleren gescharen nicht (eagles don’t flock) – Cited by Ross Perot

When I see three lootenants shooting the [breeze], it means 100 Marines are unsupervised. – Really old major at Camp Pendleton, 1969

How you doing in there today? – Major Eddie Williams, daily, one-on-one, to every prisoner in his Okinawa brig, Japan, 1989

Manage By Walking Around. Case in point, the all new and improved High Point University. Somebody is Managing by Walking Around.

Sergeants are the Army. – Ike

“Is there anything else I can do for you today?” Always useful after a confrontational phone call. – Dad Hoke

You can’t BS the troops. – Traditional Marine saying

My drill instructors didn’t have PowerPoint. – Dad Hoke

No, no — it’s all right. Mister big shot manifestation, come and go as you please. Don’t let me upset your schedule? Me and my bursitis. We got all the time in the world.

Oh, you got the fireplace going! Good, my circulation ain’t what it used to be. Little enthusiastic with the sparks, I see. Just pat that right out. Never wear synthetics on the job, I say.

Now you’re sending something down the chimney. Not the order I would have chosen, but all right.

A-a-and it’s a foot.

Come on. Let’s have the other.

At least this one’s got a shoe. Wingtip. J.C. Penney. Early 1960s. Fits the research.

Ah, and there’s the legs. Praise Jesus for pants.

Go on. Do your dance. You think a little half-embodied ambulation is gonna rattle my cage, you got disappointment coming.

Now don’t get all steamed. You’re gonna rock the plaster off the walls and only have yourself to blame. They’ll have a hard enough time paying the lien as it is.

Or didn’t you think about that?

And here comes the blood! Pass the smellin’ salts — haven’t seen that in nearly a week. Maybe that moves piss out of college kids, but when you’re right with God and the north side of eighty a little red on the walls fails to impress. I’m well to terms with the fragility of the human corpus. Do you know what a pessary is?

No?

So — Mister Wilcox, yes? Before you start chucking furniture you might ask yourself a few things.

Is this really what you want from your afterlife?

I know you’re angry. If I’d met a bad end at forty-three I’d be angry, too.

But so what! How long are you gonna keep beating that horse? Just think — you’d be well past my age now, and I’m a sight closer to eternal rest than you are.

Every other human on the planet, that’s who. If you think you’re too good for eternal rest, that’s just ego.

Not to mention you need to think about someone besides yourself. You’re still a part of this community. If you’re gonna keep clinging you need to start acting like it.

Don’t you think the Burnetts miss their cat?

Well, you knew it wasn’t your cat.

So here’s what we can do. Either you show me where your bones are, or I come back tomorrow night and ask again.

And the night after that.

And the night after that.

Doctor says I got years yet.

That’s more like.

Hold on! Don’t go so fast. Tsk. My poor feet. And the rug’s seen better days, that’s for sure.

Is there a light? I’m not an owl.

Fair enough. I’ve got my flashlight.

Thought we might run into a lock or two. You got the mojo to blow this off the hinges?

I understand. That’s not uncommon. Means you brought me to the right place, really. Most spirits lose gusto the closer they get to… you know.

Lord knows I know what that’s like.

Let me just get down here. Ay! My joints… I call it makin’ popcorn. Loud enough to wake the dead, eh?

God steady these hands. Eh.

Bah! Almost had it. Eh. Eh.

There we go! Come on. No time like the present.

Eh. Stairs. Eh. What a beast.

Still with me? Ay? Mr. Wilcox?

I was afraid of that. Here. Let me pour a little sand for you.

Just blow it where you mean me to go.

All right. Rats, don’t bother me and I won’t bother you. Ain’t you picked it clean already?

Welp, there’s the other shoe.

Don’t you feel better already, Mr. Wilcox?

Mr. Wilcox?

I never do get repeat business.