Torontoist asked me to weigh in on the Margaret Wente plagiarism scandal, so I did, although they cut out many of my more imaginative swears.

So I’ve been busy the last week, not with work (well, I’m always busy with work-a-day work, but you know what I mean). I’ve been busy writing, because Harper Voyager announced this, and I’ve got a half-finished novel that’s at about the 60K word mark and if I bust ass I might be able to submit it by deadline and have it not be shitty.

I’m going to try and maintain the regular posting level for the next few weeks, but if things drop off, things drop off a bit. Sorry, guys. If it looks like I won’t make deadline I will ease off the throttle.

In email zzzThunk says

First off, let me start by saying I like Al’Rashad. I enjoy it every week. But here’s what I don’t get: I know you’re capable of writing more sizzling dialogue than what makes it onto those pages. (It’s not bad dialogue at all, but…) You’ve shown us all that before, so I know it has to be a conscious choice. But why make that choice, exactly?

Because I’m trying to write something approaching more naturalistic dialogue rather than go with my usual hyper-stylized joke-spew? This isn’t to say I don’t enjoy writing like that. It’s fun to write like that, obviously. But putting it in the mouths of my characters rings false to me most of the time, so I don’t go that route. It just doesn’t seem right to me that these fantasy-epic characters should be talking like extras from a Joss Whedon script, you know? To say nothing of the fact that nobody would get their equivalent of pop-culture references.

Of course, there are character/world reasons for it as well. The astute will have noticed that everybody in this fantasy world, thus far, appears to mostly be speaking the same language, which is a bit odd given that the two dominant cultures (in terms of narrative thus far) are pretty wildly different from one another, and there are in-story reasons for that – involving a Roman Empire analogue that left behind their language as the lingua franca a couple of centuries ago. But if you look at some of the speeches, it’s clear that those individual cultures are reasserting themselves and their interpretations of that common tongue are starting to become individual dialects, and given another couple hundred years of cultural isolation from one another there would be enough language drift that they would be barely recognizable as kin. (It would actually happen much faster than that, actually, and I’m cheating a bit by having a lingua franca last as long as it has, but this is a creative choice because language barriers are mostly not fun.)

On top of that some of the characters aren’t particularly good choices for lengthy, witty interludes. Kahal is a very formal person for a number of reasons (after all, someone romancing a lady several miles above him on the social ladder should watch his words carefully). Rayana is an actual princess and also someone who has to watch her words carefully thanks to numerous political enemies. I mostly use Fezay and Joro for snark purposes because they’re both lower-class and proud (as is Tanquir, who also loves to hear himself talk, so there’s that – and yes, Tanquir is not finished yet in this story, rest assured).

But at the same time, I don’t want the dialogue in Al’Rashad to be too formal, or even, say, Conan-formal (and I have told myself repeatedly that if any page sounds like a page out of Conan, it needs a rewrite, unless it is too awesome to rewrite). I’m trying to hit that middle ground in a triangle where Conan is at one point, Whedon at a second and, say, David Mamet or even John Cassavetes at a third.

Anyway, the point of this post is basically “yes, the dialogue is supposed to be like that,” so you’re welcome, and I guess I’ll open the floor to other questions about the comic if people want.

The other day, I sold all of my ‘Sin City’ trade paperbacks.

I didn’t do it as a grand gesture or anything; I was making one of my occasional trawls through my bookshelves, clearing out the stuff that I didn’t think I’d miss and selling it to Half Price Books. But it struck me as significant that when I looked at a series I’d once greatly enjoyed, all I could think of was how much of a gigantic douchebag Frank Miller was, and how badly his desperate “misogyny and machismo” act made him equally worthy of pity and contempt. (And also that he hadn’t done anything worth reading in years…it’s hard for me to pick up ‘The Dark Knight Returns’, knowing that it inevitably led to ‘The Dark Knight Strikes Back’.) And so I sold them.

Now, this isn’t a grand announcement of how I’m done waiting for Frank Miller’s work to be good again, the way I just did with Marvel and DC. It’s not intended to be a statement of moral superiority: “Why are you still following Frank Miller, don’t you know that you’re giving money to a man who kills puppies and hates freedom and loves ‘Toddlers and Tiaras’ and…” (Et cetera.) It’s just that it struck me that everyone has that breaking point, even if it’s different for each person and different things trigger it. Everyone has that point where they can no longer separate the art from the artist, and they just can’t keep following a person’s work because as talented as they are, that person is a thundering asshole. Dave Sim hit that point for me, Orson Scott Card did too, and as mentioned, Frank Miller finally reached that level as well.

(And let me stress, this is different from suddenly realizing that someone’s actually horrifically untalented and that everything you thought you liked from them was really just superficially entertaining in a glossy way that covered up its huge, fundamental flaws. That’s what we call a “Mark Millar” moment.)

But I was interested in finding out what makes it happen for other people. Is it politics? Is it a series of particularly personally offensive works? Is it just ugly personal practices, like finding out that someone ripped off their business partners to get all the proceeds from an AMC TV series? (Not that I really care about it…I wasn’t following Robert Kirkman even before that…but it strikes me as something that might turn some people away from his work as well.) Is it gradual, or sudden? I’d like this to be as open and friendly a discussion as possible, so try to avoid saying things like, “I can’t believe you haven’t given up on (Orson Scott Card, Frank Miller, Dave Sim) yet, don’t you realize how terrible he is?” Or, for that matter, “How dare you slag off on (Orson Scott Card, Frank Miller, Dave Sim), don’t you realize he’s really a wonderful person who’s absolutely right about women being black voids of emotion that swallow men’s divine light of reason?” Let’s try to keep it to what makes that moment happen, and how you handle it when it does.

Earlier this week, I posted my thoughts for where to go with another Batman movie, now that Christopher Nolan seems to have wrapped up his “Dark Knight” trilogy. Little did I know that Newsarama and io9 were both planning to rip me off, albeit with more actual speculation about where to go next and fewer brainwashed killer orphans. But that’s okay. I can play that game too. And after the cut, I’ll talk about what I seriously think the next Batman movie should be like. (Hint: brainwashed killer orphans…from space!
continue reading "Let’s Try This Again: The Next Batman Movie"

Someone a while back, I forget who (hold up your hand in the audience if you read this, I guess) asked me how I would book the WWE given the chance. Now, the traditional internet-smark thing to say here is “well I would bury John Cena and make the fans care about Tyson Kidd and then I would book Dean Ambrose to win every title on his first night and also every wrestler I like would be a cool heel again.” I would do none of this. Well, I would try to make fans care about Tyson Kidd, because he is really great. But not the rest of it.

I also know that, after last night’s truly dreadful RAW, the obvious thing to do is decry it as being horrible wrestling and say “I would do the opposite of that.” But, unfortunately (from my perspective, anyway), the fans in attendance clearly had a great time last night. John Cena’s fan support has not been this strong in years (when was the last time you heard a really strong “Cena Sucks” chant?). There are lots of people out there who want to see Santino Marella in silly slapstick sketches and want to see Michael Cole get beaten up. (I am not convinced that anybody wants to see Hornswoggle the midget, though. Sometimes that sort of thing is just the result of Vince McMahon thinking midgets are inherently funny.) Saying that these people are wrong to want to watch these things is, frankly, not good business. So you don’t just cut them off.

But at the same time you want to also make them care about the wrestling, which is what drives the program and the narratives. So you need a vehicle to do that. I would do it this way:

Recently the WWE has been running a “who will be the next General Manager” angle, bringing back all of the old former general managers. (For those not following: the General Manager is a sort of authority figure for the show who, story-wise, is the one who makes matches happen.) Now, all of the options are basically dreadful because the General Manager concept is so played out in wrestling generally at this point that it makes Jersey Shore seem underexposed in comparison: we’re on our seventh or eighth iteration of an imitation of Vince McMahon’s heel act by now and Vince McMahon knew well enough to get off the air before he got so stale himself that the fans would no longer cheer when he intermittently showed up. Every General Manager is the same: make matches, abuse authority against the people they don’t like (face GMs abuse heels, heel GMs abuse faces), generally be a waste of space otherwise. Nobody actually cheers Teddy Long, after all. He’s just sort of there.

So I would kill it. Not get rid of the GM position outright, but when Vince or HHH or whoever assembles the candidates, I would have a new character come out as well. Maybe he grabs a microphone and interrupts Vince as Vince is about to decide between Vickie Guerrero and Mick Foley or something. (“How did you get a microphone?” “Vince, your sound techs will give pretty much anybody a microphone.”) This new guy who we have never seen before would come down to the ring and make his pitch: he’s a guy WWE corporate recruited for an interview, but Vince has been blowing him off for weeks, et cetera. (Ideally we would get some vignettes of Vince blowing off the guy first so that the internet could go “wait, who is this guy?” But that is not necessary.)

And the new guy basically makes his case. Every GM Vince has hired has been a failure because he keeps hiring from within the business, and outside of the WWE you wouldn’t hire Teddy Long to manage a McDonald’s, much less a major sporting organization. But New Guy has sports management experience, and alternative dispute resolution experience, and most of all he doesn’t have any grudges towards any of the wrestlers. His strongest point is that, if Vince fires him, he’ll just shrug and go work somewhere else for half a million dollars. And that’s why he’s the guy Vince should hire. So he gets a tryout show, nails it, becomes the new GM, and thereafter his onscreen role is extremely limited: no speeches, maybe one appearance per RAW to set up matches or address a wrestler’s complaint in a completely neutral tone.

The New GM makes the following rule changes:

1.) From now on, one title – let’s say the US title – must be defended at every TV show and PPV. This is an old tradition going back to the early days of WCW and their TV title, and it’s a good one. Plus if it’s the US title we can get some amusement out of Santino in the ring before he finally drops it. To make it “fairer to the champion” who has to constantly defend the title, all of these title matches have a ten-minute time limit. Presto: the US title matters again. (You can even merge it with the Intercontinental title if you like – after all, WWE’s roster isn’t much larger than when they only had two singles titles. Right now they have four, which is the equal of WCW at its peak, and that organization had a roster of nearly 100 wrestlers at that point!)

2.) Second change: blatantly steal the Bound For Glory Title Series idea that TNA is currently doing, because fuck it, it’s a good idea and it turns non-title matches into important marquee matches, and the first rule of wrestling booking, I think, is that Every Match Should Matter As Much As Possible. You can have wrestlers competing for the opportunity to have a title series match, even – this would be a great way to put newbie wrestlers into matches that would have some appreciable stakes for the fans to root about, even if the next week they just get trounced by Established Superstar in said title series match. And the point of the title series is to get the other title shot at WrestleMania – you know, the one that the Royal Rumble winner doesn’t get.

3.) Final change: if you want a title shot, you have to win a lot of matches. No more heels or faces coming up and demanding a title shot just because – New GM will say “well, tough, you lost your last X matches except for this one, and that was only a DQ anyway. I’ll give the title match to Mister Winning A Lot Lately.”

That’s basically it. I don’t see the point of altering the booking much more than that; maybe make the comedy bits a bit less obviously dumb, make Cena’s character a bit less of a dick and more of a Superman-style face, and write angles more for the long term, but those are relatively minor things, much like bringing back King of the Ring (which I would also totally do). The important thing is to kill the authority figure angle as dead as possible, and to make individual matches on what is soon to be a 3-hour show matter in and of themselves so that viewer interest is retained.

(Needless to say, this post might have some triggers in it for those who are concerned about such things, and I apologize to anybody for that. But I think this merits comment.)

Game designer James Desborough recently wrote an article entitled “In Defence of Rape,” the gist of which is that using rape as a story device is, well, I suppose I’ll just quote him directly:

Rape or attempted rape is a fucking awesome plot element.

Now, granted, Desborough has a lot of experience with rape as a story element, given that he has designed a tentacle-rape card game and several sex-themed third-party D&D sourcebooks, one of which contained a spell which would let you sexually assault a dryad, merfolk, centaur or pureblood yuan-ti. However, I think it is fair to say that despite his experience in this area – which certainly trumps mine, to say the least – he is still wildly wrong.

A few points which particularly shout out at me:

Is it lazy writing?

Rape is certainly some shit that can happen.

Here’s my issue with this statement: it is lazy thinking in order to justify lazy writing. Let us quickly catalogue the levels of laziness here:

1.) Assuming that a lack of originality re: plot devices equates to lazy writing. Which it doesn’t. I mean, I can go to something like, say, Sam Raimi’s Darkman as an example of how a dedicated creative individual or team can take the dross of half a dozen previous stories’ leavings and turn it into gold.1 Laziness and originality are not linked.
2.) Assuming that murder is objectively worse than rape as a given, which is arguable to say the least. Sexual assault is ultimately about the removal of agency from the victim, in the same way that murder is; to say that sexual assault is “better” than murder because the victim survives tends to ignore the beliefs of the victims in question.
3.) Taking some bullshit aphorisms from Shakespeare and Tolstoy and treating them as actual literary theory rather than a couple of great writers trying to sound clever.
4.) Expanding on said bullshit aphorisms and trying to trump them by reducing story to a sequence of events, which – no, that’s simply not true.
5.) Finally, using one’s own self-derived bullshit aphorism to justify using rape as a story element, which, in terms of logical reasoning, boils down to “It’s cool because I said so.”

Rape can place a character in jeopardy where the readers’ care about what happens, without necessarily taking the character out of the story. It’s a threat with implications, but not as final as death.

This is not a specific justification for rape. It’s a generic justification for all sorts of conflict, with the word “conflict” whited out and “rape” scribbled in on top of it. Just about anything can place a character in jeopardy. It doesn’t especially matter that rape has knock-on effects (as he goes on to describe in needless detail, in case it had not occurred to you that if someone is raped by their partner then the relationship – gasp! – might change somehow), because everything has knock-on effects. A butterfly flaps its wings, a man gets on the bus, an asteroid approaches the Earth – whatever.

Does the existence of rape stories, even as a cheap jab to get someone’s emotions involved, somehow trivialise or normalise rape?

How can I assert that with such confidence? Simply this. If rape were trivialised it would not have the power to move us, involve us and activate our emotions. If we had become inured to it, it would not work to establish a character’s evil credentials. If it had become normalised it wouldn’t serve its purpose in a narrative. It wouldn’t be a big deal. It wouldn’t upset the characters because it wouldn’t upset us.

Oh, lord.

When people say that using rape as a “cheap jab to get someone’s emotions involved” trivializes it, they’re not saying that having someone’s boring shitty character rape another boring shitty character in a boring shitty way2 makes them care less about rape. Their complaint is with the “cheap” part of that sentence. Sexual assault is – and I can’t believe I have to explain this – deeply traumatizing to its survivors, which is why I put that trigger warning up at the top of the damn post. Using it to generate some conflict in your boring shitty story trivializes it because you are making the statement in choosing to do so that what happened to them is unimportant, because your boring shitty story is unimportant.

And to say that sexual assault isn’t “normalized” when somebody does this is reductionist. The point is that if you treat sexual assault as a normal thing to happen to a character, then it will eventually be a normal thing that will happen to a character when it should be an exceptional and rare thing, just like murder (as opposed to killing badguys in an action story, which is not the same thing) should be exceptional and rare.3 But sexual assault in fiction is pointedly not exceptional and rare. John Perich just wrote an excellent post about that earlier today, pointing out how Bad/Dramatic Things That Happen to Women Characters almost inevitably fall into three categories: pregnancy, rape and kidnapping.4 Those who complain about the normalization of rape in fiction are working off established history. It’s not opinion.

And now that we’ve discussed all of that, let’s bring out the 500-pound gorilla in the room that Desborough doesn’t address, which is that the use of sexual assault to a relatively meaningless end can offend and even harm the viewer in a way that most other sources of conflict can’t. Therefore, any writer who takes into account the potential reactions of his audience – which is to say any writer worth a damn – should strongly consider not just whether depicting a rape will create reaction but if that reaction merits the inclusion in the first place. If you don’t address that issue, then what’s the point of talking about rape in fiction in the first place?

1. Nobody better fucking slam Darkman or I will cut them. [↩]
2. Of course, perhaps Mr. Desborough’s depictions of sexual assault are thrilling drama! Could be. I’m not going to bother checking that out, though. [↩]
3. And the fact that murder is not exceptional and rare in fiction, despite the fact that Desborough claims it is objectively worse than rape, kind of makes the point. Murder has been normalized in fiction. [↩]
4. It’s a bit reductionist, of course, because anybody can play the “well look at Buffy game” wherein they cite examples from their favorite teevee show where a female character did not have only those things happen to her – although of course Buffy was at various points both sexually assaulted and kidnapped. But as a general rule it’s not that inaccurate to say that Perich’s “Three Fates” hold up reasonably well. [↩]

I’ve been thinking about the traditional heel/face (bad guy/good guy) dichotomy in pro wrestling for some time now. It’s interesting because it tends to be rare that a truly popular face, one the crowds will cheer like mad, starts out a face and then remains a face until they are a megastar. There are a few who did it that way (Ricky Steamboat and Rey Mysterio being the most notable). But more common is for a wrestler who is not over with the crowds to spend some time as a heel and build up a following in that manner.

There are reasons, of course. The hardcore fans love a good heel because then they can cheer for the guy all the little kids boo. (This has never been more true than when the company is headed up by a truly over face in their prime, a la Hulk Hogan or John Cena.) Heels get to be snarky and clever and sarcastic. Heels drive storylines – faces, like superheroes in comic books, are reactive elements in the story rather than proactive. Heels get to cheat, and cheating is the easiest and most satisfying way to get a crowd reaction. And if you’re a good wrestler at all – if you understand the skill of making moves look realistic, both on the giving and receiving end, and if you understand how to pace and build a match – in many ways you get more opportunities to build your craft as a heel. Thus, a very common progression for most wrestlers is to vary between the two – spend time as a heel, then time as a face, and revert back and so forth.

But the real reason most wrestlers who build a following start doing it when they’re heels because faces are the people the fans want to cheer, and it’s not easy at all to tell a crowd to cheer somebody. The Rock, Randy Orton, and John Cena (just to name a few) all started out as basically vanilla faces that the WWF/WWE tried to get the fans to cheer, and all failed miserably to draw a reaction until they were converted into heels.

But the WWE’s current problem in this regard started with Steve Austin back in 1996 or 1997, because Steve Austin was over as a heel and then was converted into a face – except he wasn’t. He was a heel who happened to get cheers and who continued to act like a heel: he would cheerfully cheat and swear and be a bad person generally and this was all sort of awesome. But then the Rock started doing the same thing, because he was mega-over as a heel and it just sort of stuck.

And on some level this is understandable, because if you get over as a heel doing a specific thing, you’re not going to want to mess with that just because you’ve become so popular that now you have to be a face by default. But now it often seems like the WWE’s top faces are just heels who happen to get cheers rather than boos. CM Punk, for example, is still basically a dickhead. Randy Orton just beats people up for the hell of it. And John Cena, who is supposed to be the WWE equivalent of Superman, now seems to spend more time beating up and humilating non-wrestlers in a distinctly creepy way than beating up baddie wrestlers.

It’s a problem, because wrestlers have to come up with new ways to get boos and if it is suddenly cool for the good guys to beat up and humiliate or emasculate helpless people, then they need to up their ante. (Daniel Bryan was on the verge of turning face by default but seems to have pulled back from that by maxing out his dickishness to an amazing degree.) But this leads me to wonder: is there something faces can do to proactively get cheers?

The only thing I can think of is the rescue. Fans always mark out for one face coming to rescue another, probably because it hits that six-year-old inside of us (or, in the case of Cena kids – and admit it, even if you don’t like Cena, Cena kids are awesome – outside of us) who wants Batman to show up whenever Luthor is menacing Superman with Kryptonite and beat Luthor up Bat-style. But is there anything else? I am genuinely stumped here.

The first thought: It’s tricky. Obviously, Marvel has provided a blueprint on how to create a blockbuster film that acts both as a standalone film and as a sequel to numerous other standalone films featuring the origins of the cast of your current movie (so that you don’t have to spend the first ten hours of your two-hour movie just explaining who everyone is.) They’ve shown not just that it can be done, but that you can structure the contracts to retain (almost all of) your cast and have a strong studio involvement to keep things consistent from film to film while still attracting A-list directors with unique personal styles (like Branagh, Joe Johnston and Joss Whedon.) But Marvel had a big advantage that DC doesn’t: They hadn’t made a whole bunch of movies already before coming up with the idea.

DC, on the other hand, has a high-profile Batman trilogy that isn’t even wrapped up yet, one which establishes an internally consistent mythos for the character that doesn’t involve any other superheroes. It’d be difficult to imagine Nolan and Bale’s Batman standing on the same screen with Green Lantern and Superman, even if it seemed likely that Bale would return to the role (which it doesn’t.) They have a Superman franchise whose most recent movie has been more or less entirely disavowed by the studio despite positive reviews and box-office success. And they have a Green Lantern movie that woefully underperformed both financially and critically. The Superman reboot that could serve as the beginning of a hypothetical Justice League launch is coming this year, but it’s anyone’s guess whether Warner Brothers had gotten its act together sufficiently by the time Man of Steel went into production to be able to think of their comics properties in these terms. (I have insisted, and will continue to insist, that the reason Marvel’s films have done so well while DC’s have done so poorly is because Marvel is in a position to be able to dictate terms to the studio, while DC is ultimately just “the hired help” at Warner Brothers.)

So the first thought ultimately leads to the second: There’s gonna be a lot of rebooting going on. Two of your three core members (Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman) need a new movie to establish themselves as part of the DC Movie Universe, and one of your second-tier members has a stinker that needs to be swept under the rug (a la Ang Lee’s Hulk.) How do you handle this?

You start by ignoring it. You’ve got an Aquaman movie, a Wonder Woman movie, a Green Arrow movie and a Flash movie to make. By the time you get through those four films, there’s a pretty good chance that you can go back and do a soft reboot of Green Lantern that isn’t so obviously an admission that the previous film tanked. Then, with five films under your belt, you can go in and do your Justice League film.

“Wait, what, five?” I hear you say? “What about Batman? What about Superman? What about the Martian Manhunter?” But honestly, I don’t think you need a movie to establish Batman and Superman before putting them in a JLA film. Batman and Superman are, at this point, such iconic characters with such iconic origins that babies practically come out of the womb knowing that Bruce Wayne’s parents were killed and he was inspired by a bat to fight evil. The last thing we need, pardon my mild frustration, is yet another goddamn retelling of the origin of Batman and Superman. (You can see how excited I am for the Man of Steel movie, aren’t you?) Just mention them from time to time in the other films, establish that they exist, and then throw them in the final flick.

As to the Martian Manhunter, he’d be filling the Nick Fury role on the DC end. He’d appear in all of the different movies, talking to the different heroes about how he’s getting them together to face a larger threat, one that he knows about as a telepathic space alien. (Maybe even one that killed off the Martian race…) This would link the various heroes together, whet interest for later films, and give audiences time to get used to the Martian Manhunter, who is definitely something of a legacy from a very different age of science fiction and comics.

So who would the villain be? Actually, surprisingly enough, I’d pick Libra. Go back to his original roots, where he was a supervillain attempting to steal the powers of the entire Justice League, and give a tip of the hat to his recent role in ‘Final Crisis’ by a) having him do so in order to better prepare Earth for the coming of Darkseid, and b) having him recruit a passel of henchmen to help him out. Then, in the Justice League movie, you pull a big surprise at the end…in the third act, after he steals the powers of Superman and the Flash and Green Lantern and seems pretty much unstoppable, you find out that the Martian Manhunter’s been recruiting a lot more than just the heroes who have movies. The final battle would have cameos by dozens of superheroes, from Zatanna to Black Canary to the Elongated Man to Steel to everyone who you haven’t gotten the rights to, all dogpiling on Libra and his Secret Society. In the end, Libra overloads himself absorbing everyone’s powers and blows up (a la his original appearance…) but the greater threat is still out there.

But all that, of course, assumes that Warner Brothers is interested in replicating Marvel’s success, something which has never been particularly clear from their actions. Certainly, it’s hard to believe that the people who made ‘Batman and Robin’ are interested either in making money or in bringing joy to the lives of others.

As per yesterday:

Andrew Miller: What’s the best horror movie that most people haven’t heard of?

I’ll go with Demons 2, Dario Argento’s sequel to his somewhat more famous but less scary Demons. For those not in the know: the Demons films are essentially “fast zombie” films twenty years before fast zombie films became a thing – the titular demons attack and either kill their victims or turn them into more demons in a very zombie-like way, and the movies are gory and violent. The first one is okay, but the second one takes place entirely inside an apartment building where the demon attack begins when a girl watches a TV show with a demon in it and then the demon on the TV sees her and comes out of the TV – which is ridiculous, of course, but it sells the horror quite effectively and the movie as a whole is a pretty good take on the “locked in the building with zombies” genre. Except, as I said, twenty years before that was really a thing. The original Demons isn’t bad either, but I like the second one better.

What’s the best horror movie that has an undeservedly poor reputation?

Probably The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation. Yes, the one with Renee Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey. I’m not going to say it’s good exactly, but it got pilloried for being total shit because it’s not like the earlier films in the series – this one is just sort of insane in a weirdly entertaining way and I think it deserves to be resurrected as a bold failure if nothing else.

Goattoucher: Why, God? WHYYYYY?!?

Bud Dry.

Darren K: Do you like travelling? Have you done much of it? Left the continent? Been to Winnipeg?

Yes, no, yes (Australia, Bolivia, and South Africa when I was little), and yes (it’s quite pretty along the river, but other than that – sorry, too small for me).

Bret: Pete Ross (The Superman supporting character): Why doesn’t he work?

Pete Ross doesn’t work because there is nothing special about him; he learns that Clark Kent is Superboy completely by accident and that is basically all there ever has been to the character, and it’s simply not enough because A) Lois either already knows or will eventually figure out that Clark is Superman, B) there’s a strong argument that Perry White and Jimmy Olsen know (or have at least guessed) and are just playing along because Clark is their friend and they’re covering his ass, as friends do, and C) Batman knows, and if you’re gonna write a Superman story, are you going to team him up with Batman or Pete Ross? The answer to that question is never going to be Pete Ross.

mason stormchild: Do you think reddit is basically becoming 4chan with a veneer of respectability?

“Becoming”?

Brendan: What do you think the best policy is for coming up with fantasy names/words without making them sound too silly?

Take a name from the culture you want the character to reflect/imitate (since nobody is really imaginative enough to truly come up with their own completely original culture, when you get down to it). Change 1-3 consonants depending on how many syllables the name has (if it’s two syllables or less, only one), keep the vowel sounds intact, and you’re done.

Kai: Marvel Studios, riding high on their successful series of movies all leading up to the Avengers (which is going to be a hit whether it’s actually awesome or manages to totally suck, let’s be honest here), is looking for their next big Marvel-verse thing and comes to your door with a dump truck full of cash and a request for you to take the helm of their newest project, a Doctor Strange movie. So how do you do it? Who do you cast? What’s your script breakdown look like? Bear in mind that you have to try and keep things roughly within the style and tone of the Marvel movies we’ve seen so far, but beyond that you can tackle it however you like.

Dr. Strange is, I think, one of the great unexploited origin stories in comics and a film version of it would be the wisest course for an initial Dr. Strange film: a bad (but not irredeemable) person becomes a good one when his quest to make himself whole becomes a quest of an entirely different sort. The overall tone would be more contemplative than your average Marvel film (although still with comic moments) and lean more in the direction of Guillermo del Toro visuals than Joss Whedon-style wit because you really have to sell the otherworldliness of Dr. Strange in order to make him stand out from the superheroic crowd, but you’d still have the vicious and awesome magical battle with Dormammu as your closing piece. I would probably borrow a few story elements from JMS’s Strange miniseries since it had some excellent ideas in it.

And: Benedict Cumberbatch as Strange, Daniel Dae-Kim as Wong, James Hong as the Ancient One, August Diehl (from The Counterfeiters) as Baron Mordo and Rosario Dawson as Clea.

Back in 2005 or so, when I actually cared enough about DC to pay attention to them, it occurred to me that there was an interesting vacancy created by the departure of Wally West as the Flash and the arrival of Bart Allen. Specifically, it meant that the identity of Impulse was just floating around loose, looking for a legacy hero to step into the role. So I came up with some ideas that I thought would make for a good ‘Impulse’ series, one I hoped to someday submit, should I get the time, energy and confidence to do so. Obviously, that was back in 2005, and at this point there’ve been so many cast changes in the Flash family’s story, including one complete reboot, that the idea is pretty much moot. Nonetheless, I still have some fondness for the idea, so I thought I’d share it here: My plans for the all-new, all-different Impulse!

In this case, “all-different” definitely describes the character. Her name is Hannah Hunter (I’m sticking with “is” here, because “would have been” is such an awkward bit of sentence construction), and she’s a teenage high school student; both her parents are devoted to their careers, leaving her as pretty much a latchkey kid. There are pretty much two ways you can go when your parents barely pay any attention to you, and Hannah went the second direction; she’s hyper-responsible, almost an adult in miniature. She cooks her own meals, does her own laundry, and basically has a house to herself with parents she only occasionally sees. (The fact that she doesn’t use this house for wild, frequent parties tells you what the other direction was, the one she didn’t go.)

As can happen with children like this, she gets along much better with adults than other teenagers her own age; it doesn’t help that she’s somewhat bookish and has never had much luck trying out for sports teams. She almost made it onto the varsity softball team due to her pitching skills, but they had no designated hitter rule and she was too slow on the base paths. She tried out for the basketball team, but despite being a great shooter, she’s too slow on the fast-break. In short, she’s not unathletic, she just has lousy foot-speed. She idolizes the Flashes because they can do the one thing she desperately wants to: Run.

As a result of the above, she spends the after-school hours at the Flash Museum, doing her homework and chatting with the staff (who, as with many adults, admire precocious and mature teenagers.) She knows every exhibit inside and out (at one point in the development of the idea, she idolized Barry best of all because he was also a police scientist. When they reconcealed his identity, she idolized him as a person without even knowing he’s the Flash because she wants to get into forensics someday and admires his work. Yes, she is a teenager geeky enough and focused enough to know about prominent forensics experts. Unfortunately, she doesn’t know who Justin Bieber is.)

She gets her powers when the Flash Museum gets attacked by Rogues’ Gallery members who want to make a statement about their feelings towards their arch-nemesis…the Flash shows up to foil them, there’s a fight, innocent bystanders get endangered, and Hannah winds up taking an inadvertent spin on the Flash’s Time Treadmill. She winds up back in the 30s, with all the powers of the Silver Age Flash…

…except one. She can’t think at superhuman speeds. Without the ability to process information and perceive time the way the Flashes do, her super-speed is utterly useless to her; the second she tries to run, she’s impacting into a solid object before she knows it’s even there. (Luckily, she has Wally’s super-fast healing. Even so, she spends time in the hospital in the 30s, as well.) As a result, she’s forced to use her speed-powers creatively, adding and subtracting speed from objects around her instead of using it just to speed herself up. (That’s why she calls herself Impulse–because momentum is mass times velocity and impulse is the physics term for an object’s change in momentum. Have I mentioned geeky?)

Her first story arc, where she learns to use her powers, involves her “bouncing” through time on her way back to the Flash Museum in the present. She meets the Golden Age Flash, the Legion of Super-Heroes, and comes back to the present day with a reasonable amount of skill at fighting and so forth (so as to gloss over some of the learning curve of being a superhero. Karate Kid teaches her judo, because using someone’s own leverage against them is a good fighting style for a scrawny teenager, and because throws and flips become extra-nasty when you can pump an extra 500 miles per hour of velocity into someone on their way out.) She helps the Flash defeat the Rogues’ Gallery, and becomes a crime-fighter in Central City when not attending classes.

I thought it had some potential; since she doesn’t have “run really fast” to fall back on, the character has to use her super-powers creatively to defeat bad guys. The high school setting is always fun for a comic book hero, and let’s face it, comics fans dig geeky teenage girls with weird senses of humor. But of course, at this point I’m not even sure whether there ever was an Impulse, let alone whether another one would be welcomed by comics fans. But I’m sure the current direction of DC makes perfect sense to someone.

So I did indeed watch WrestleMania, which mostly sucked. Some people are touting Undertaker/HHH and Cena/Rock as being good matches, but I thought both were lousy – the first was a couple of old limping guys trying to make Jim Ross’ dramatic announcing meaningful, and the second was just sloppy wrestling. Jericho/CM Punk was not bad, but also not a show-saving match (it had a slow start and a stupid bit about Jericho trying for the intentional DQ). Honestly, in retrospect the highlight of the show may end up being Daniel Bryan losing to Sheamus in 18 seconds, not because that was a good thing (it wasn’t), but because the fans reacted so extremely negatively to not getting to see Daniel Bryan actually wrestle that the WWE may be forced to recognize that he is actually very over (as opposed to acting embarrassed that they have hired and pushed him).

But WrestleMania mostly blew for two reasons.

1.) The WWE is either unable or unwilling to work at grooming new stars. WrestleMania’s two most important matches were A) between two guys who are inches away from retirement and B) featured someone who hasn’t wrestled regularly since 2003. Their big returns on the following RAW were Matt “Albert/Lord Tensai” Bloom (last seen in the WWE in 2004) and Brock Lesnar (ditto). I loved 2000-2004 WWE as much as anybody (indeed, I think it was probably the company’s creative and performance peak), but this is a well that has diminishing returns to say the least.

It used to be more straightforward: you had your A-level stars, your B-level stars, your C-level stars and your jobbers. When you wanted to “promote” a B-level star to A-level, it was simple: they beat an A-level star fairly and presto, they were in the club. Back in 2001, Chris Benoit and Chris Jericho were both mired in the midcard until they beat HHH and Steve Austin in a hot match. (Beating heels when heel tactics backfire on the heels is “fair.” Don’t look at me, I didn’t make the rules of wrestling storytelling.) This method works. Kurt Angle beats the Rock, Eddie Guerrero beats Brock Lesnar – presto, instantly credible World champions.

But nowadays, there are problems with this approach. Firstly, there aren’t many A-level stars (right now it’s probably CM Punk, John Cena, Chris Jericho, the Undertaker, HHH and Brock Lesnar now that he’s back – and Daniel Bryan is probably on the cusp) and the company is extremely careful to protect them. Secondly, there aren’t really a whole lot of well-defined B-level stars any more (right now I’d say the only real candidates are Kane, Mark Henry, the Miz, and Dolph Ziggler).1 Everybody else just sort of floats around in this morass of boredom and nobody really cares about them – call it the Kofi Kingston Zone. They’re just sort of there. Maybe they have a gimmick, but nobody cares about the gimmick. Heath Slater is the One Man Rock Band, but who gives a damn about that when Heath Slater matters less to the stories than Barry Horowitz ever did?

2.) The WWE has gradually stopped writing long-term plotlines. Partly this is because the WWE’s writers got tired of having to change their stories on the fly when a wrestler got injured, but that doesn’t really change the fact that going into WrestleMania, there was not one match that had a storyline that effectively went back more than a month. Rock/Cena doesn’t count, because that wasn’t an ongoing year of buildup to that match: Cena was doing other things (like feuding with Vince and/or CM Punk) for most of the year, and then Rock shows up for this one tag match, and then Cena fights Kane for two months just because, and… okay, Rock time now!

Or another example: another match on the card was Kane versus Randy Orton. Why were these two fighting? “Because.” That is literally the only reason – three weeks before WrestleMania Kane decided he hated Randy Orton. This is stupid. Never mind that there was a golden opportunity for the WWE to conclude or at least develop a longer storyline by having Kane fight Zack Ryder – you know, the guy Kane repeatedly brutalized during that feud with Cena I just mentioned. Plus, if they let Ryder go over Kane (and they should, because Kane is 44 and doesn’t have much gas left in him), they would elevate Ryder.

Really, long-term wrestling plotlines aren’t hard to write. You’ve got your classics (“escalating match stakes until things get insane,” “baddie runs away/cheats for seventeen thousand matches until good guy finally beats him,” et cetera), you can switch guys in and out, it’s not that hard. But the WWE has lost the knack for it.

1. The Big Show is sort of a special case because he is a giant, and giants play by slightly different rules because they can be instantly credible A-level stars whenever the company decides to have everybody suddenly realize “wait, this guy is seven feet tall.” Unless they are terrible like the Great Khali is. [↩]

It’s become an overused and empty catchphrase with almost depressing speed; faced with sexist caricature after sexist caricature, feminist comics fans said that they wanted strong female characters as an alternative to women who serve no purpose other than to be the eye/arm-candy for male protagonists. And seemingly within days, every character was being described as a “strong female character”, from Ripley to Buffy to Catwoman to Lady Bullseye to X-23 to Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose. Because there are so many different kinds of strength and different ways to depict it, just about any character could be described as “strong” according to the writer’s personal lights, even while feminists continued to decry them as sexist caricatures. Which just led to a sort of hurt puzzlement among clueless male writers…after all, how could Lady Bullseye be considered “sexist”? She beats people up! Having read more than a few of these debates that always seem to trail off into anger on both sides, I thought I might present some of what I think are tangible, clearly-defined differences between actual strong female characters, and those just called “strong female characters”. Here are some of the characteristics of the “strong female”, as opposed to the actual strong female:

1) A “strong female character” is strictly limited in the scope of where she is allowed to be strong, usually to combat; she is strong, but she is not active. The best example I can think of for this particular trope is Cherry Darling, Robert Rodriguez’ supposedly strong character in ‘Planet Terror’. Certainly, she’s strong in one sense–she is able to kick lots of ass, mowing down dozens of zombies and Marines and zombified Marines in the film’s action climax. The ending of the film even shows her as the leader of the group of survivors. But when the film isn’t showing her shooting people and blowing people up and openly defying the laws of physics in various violent ways, it’s showing her…taking orders from El Wray, the male protagonist. He tells her to stop moping. He gives her both her wooden leg and her gun-leg. He practically drags her along through every scene of the movie. Even her final decision, to become the group’s charismatic leader and take them south to an easily defensible coastal region, comes from a scene where El Wray says, “Honey, time for you to become a charismatic leader by following my plan.” “Yessir.” She is never a decision maker, only an exceptional fighter. The two should not be conflated, and all too often are. (This is what John Scalzi referred to as “Spinny Killbot Syndrome”.)

2) A “strong female character” is strong in a way that does not threaten male gender roles. The implication that’s always given in these roles is that anytime women are anything other than helpless and simpering, they are automatically challenging sexist assertions and should be lauded for it. But the fact is, in practical terms, there is a strong societal belief that violence is perfectly acceptable for women under the right circumstances. Take Ripley, for instance. She is definitely seen as a feminist icon, and there’s certainly a lot of justification for that. But her most iconic scene is actually her least feminist; when she confronts the Queen Alien at the end of ‘Aliens’, it is with the intent of defending her surrogate daughter. It is automatically assumed, in fiction and in life, that a woman standing up for her family (her children, her husband) is going to use violence far more effectively and with less hesitation than a man would in the same situation, because her primal maternal instinct is aroused. The “Mama Grizzly” stereotype is every bit as sexist as the “Damsel in Distress”, even though one involves inflicting grievous bodily harm on people and the other involves helplessness in perilous situations. So are all the female characters who fight with determined efficiency while the battle is going on, only to faint when it ends because they’re so relieved, so are the femme fatales who vamp their way through combat. In ‘Aliens’, it’s Vasquez who is the truly challenging female character, determined to succeed better than men in their own field. (Unsurprisingly, people seem to prefer Ripley’s brand of “feminism”.)

3) A “strong female character” is either sexless or hypersexualized. The “virgin/whore” dichotomy is a classic complaint about the treatment of women in both fiction and life; female characters, it seems, are never to mention that they have body parts that produce orgasms or otherwise they’re supposed to be teases, sex kittens, vamps and sluts. Red Sonja is one example of the former; she’s a “strong female character” whose actual motto involves a vow of chastity to be enforced at swordpoint, while Catwoman gives us a view of the opposite extreme, a character who fights crime in a slinky catsuit and high heels. There’s very rarely a middle ground (and ironically, characters who inhabit it are all too frequently deemed “sexist”, because in the minds of many feminists, it’s better to fall on the “sexless” side of the divide than the “hypersexualized”. Slut shaming is all too common, even among people who know better. Of course, that isn’t to say that all sexual characters can be or should be defended by saying, “Oh, you’re just slut shaming!”. Sometimes hypersexualization is exactly what it appears to be, turning a female character into nothing more than an object of male lust. Are you listening, Scott Lobdell?)

4) A “strong female character” derives her strength from victimization. And speaking of Red Sonja, her origin story is par for the course for about two-thirds of female heroes…she was made helpless and victimized (“sexually” is often implied even if not outright stated), and she has made it her mission never to be helpless and victimized again. Lady Bullseye, Beatrix Kiddo…even X-23 has an element of pointless victimization grafted into her origin, as she apparently spent some time as a prostitute with an abusive pimp. When the female equivalent of Wolverine gets sexually abused, you know the trope is a little bit nuts. (By the way, it’s worth pointing out that the number of male heroes with the same element of victimization is exactly one: Batman. And he was a ten-year-old when it happened.)

And 5) a “strong female character” has an existence that revolves around the male protagonist. This is why I grew less and less enamored of River Song, even though I couldn’t articulate exactly why at the time. It’s because while she started as a mysterious archaeologist with a hidden past, she rapidly became “The Doctor’s assassin who became the Doctor’s lover who became the Doctor’s wife who became the Doctor’s murderer who became the Doctor’s Doctor’s Doctor’s…” While she’s active, competent in ways other than the merely physical, and has an active sex life but isn’t defined by it, she does come to be defined by her relationship to ther Doctor. Her story revolves around his, it does not cross it independently; this is all too common regarding “strong” women. (One of the biggest and most positive changes to Lois Lane was when she stopped trying to prove that Clark Kent was Superman so that she could marry him and started becoming an actual journalist.)

Now, appearing on this list does not immediately mean that a female character is sexist, or that their creators are sexist. Every character is on a journey that may involve them overcoming personal issues like those mentioned above (take River Tam, who moves from being passive to active over the course of a season of ‘Firefly’.) Some characters are meant to be flawed, but still admirable (River Song, for all that she has become obsessed with the Doctor, is nonetheless an active figure who refuses to blindly trust him or follow his orders.) If your character can check off a box on this list, it doesn’t mean you’ve made a huge mistake. (If they can check off all five, on the other hand…) But they are things worth discussing, and they are definitely things worth remembering when creating future female characters. Because an actual strong female character shouldn’t be that hard to create.

Doctor Doom is, without a doubt, one of the best villains in comic book history. Arguably, he’s the best; he has menace, style, wit, flair, power, and even when you defeat him, he’s still the ruler of an entire country and untouchable by the law. (Even better, when he loses control of Latveria, the writer gets to do a story where he crushes his enemies and regains power. Nothing keeps a villain menacing like a story where he wins.)

But like all comic book characters, he’s been handled by literally dozens of writers over the decades, and some of those writers have dealt with him better than others. Doom is actually the poster boy for the TV Tropes “Actually a Doombot” trope, where all of his more embarrassing stories are explained away as being the work of Doombots masquerading imperfectly as him. Some writers, on the other hand, have developed a reputation as handling the character so well that he almost becomes a second protagonist…but in a fandom that comments obsessively on the best writers and the best runs for heroes, the best writers of recurring villains often go overlooked. This essay attempts to rectify that by answering the question, “Who are the best Doom writers?”

5. Steve Englehart. Englehart’s main Doom credentials are his long run on ‘Super-Villain Team-Up’ and his slightly less-well remembered, but still interesting run on ‘Fantastic Four’ (he had the bad luck to be in between John Byrne and Walt Simonson, both of whom will be on this list.) His SVTU run showed Doom going toe-to-toe with Namor, the FF, and the Avengers, and coming out on top more often than not; in addition, Englehart’s Doom goes into battle directly, something that isn’t often seen even among the other writers on this list. When Englehart writes Doom, you remember that he built a suit of battle armor every bit as tough as Iron Man.

He also wrote the story where Doom was deposed by his own adoptive son, which was interesting and showed a side of Doom we hadn’t seen, but is also the reason he’s #5 on the list; Walt Simonson elegantly showed that a man smart enough to plan for his own death by brainwashing his adoptive son to replace him is smart enough to have countermeasures for that, too. A Doom that has problems with a ten-year-old kid is a Doom that gets bumped a few notches down on the list.

4. Walt Simonson. He’s #4 because he only wrote one Doom story in his brief-but-spectacular FF run, but it was a doozy. In the span of two short issues (okay, one double-sized issue and one short issue) Doom retakes Latveria from Kristoff, brainwashes Ms Marvel into fighting the Thing, imprisons the FF in perfectly-designed traps, and then battles Mister Fantastic in one of the most innovative issues ever written. (It’s a time-travel story, with a clock at the bottom showing the progression of “real time” and time-teleportation effects showing when Reed and Doom are traveling to each time they leap through time. So you can read it front-to-back to experience the story in real time, or jump around from page to page to experience it as Reed and Doom do.)

Simonson’s Doom is slightly different from all the others, almost an older and wiser Doom. (Some have speculated that this is Doom after returning from the “Doom 2099” series, a speculation supported by his altered armor.) He’s calmer, almost melancholy at times, but no less intimidating and powerful. Definitely worth reading, and it’ll make you wish Simonson wrote the character more often.

3. Jim Shooter. A surprising choice, as he never wrote an issue of ‘Fantastic Four’, but Doom’s appearances in the Shooter-written ‘Secret Wars’ and ‘Superman vs. Spider-Man’ are truly wonderful. Shooter writes a bombastic, almost-comic Doom who’s utterly megalomaniac, so convinced of his greatness that he literally tape-records his every utterance for posterity. (That’s right. You ever wonder who Doom is talking to when he delivers all those monologues? Motherfucker’s talking to history, bitches.)

And yet for all that his egotism is played for laughs, Shooter’s Doom is a character of terrifying intellect and deadly cunning, winning not just the Beyonder’s prize but the Beyonder’s power as he outwits an omnipotent god. In the end, the only thing that can defeat Shooter’s version of Doom is his own fatal imperfections. That’s a pretty deep take on a kid’s character.

2. Stan Lee. He created Doom, of course he’s getting a high spot on the list. Sure, there were some cheesy elements in the early Doom stories; in retrospect, it’s a little silly that he invented a time machine to force the Fantastic Four to steal Blackbeard’s treasure. But it was a sillier time, and it’s not like Lee and Jack Kirby (who deserves just as much credit as Lee) didn’t give us some of the iconic Doom moments, like the “Battle of the Baxter Building” (Doom vs the Thing in an absolutely unforgettable sequence.)

Also, they developed Doom’s unique aspects; his code of honor (there’s a wonderful scene where Doom has the FF trapped in his castle, but he lets them pass through the art gallery unscathed because it would be barbaric to risk damage to the paintings) and his downright mythic origin story. And, of course, Stan Lee’s dialoguing style is so distinct that even decades later, you can still tell when Doom is speaking without needing tails on the word balloons. Really, he’d almost be #1 worthy…

1. John Byrne. Except that Byrne didn’t just write half the classic, definitive Doom stories, he practically cared more about the character than he did about the FF. When Byrne wrote Doctor Doom, you could tell he was fully able to understand that in Doom’s world, he is the hero of the story and Reed Richards is the villain. It’s Reed who has to admit that Doom rules Latveria better than his successor, and that he is sincerely beloved by its people. It’s Sue who’s able to detect a Doombot by realizing that Victor would never be so uncouth as to strike a woman. And it’s Byrne who gave Doom his own issue without the FF even appearing, to show what the world is like from behind Doom’s metal mask. John Byrne “got” Victor von Doom, and after reading his comics, you will too.

Those are my top five. Anyone else got opinions? Feel free to put them in the comments!

Ghostbusters: No matter how big and wild and crazy and wonderful a job sounds, it’s probably just a job to the people who do it.

Night of the Living Dead: The biggest threat in any crisis isn’t whatever’s going wrong, it’s the stupid ways people react to it.

Up: What’s important in life isn’t whether you achieve what you set out to do, it’s whether the things you did were worth doing.

Memento: Revenge is an ultimately hollow and meaningless pursuit that makes you into a monster.

The Limey: It still beats not getting revenge.

Star Wars: Adventure reveals people’s hidden talents.

Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie: If you’re stuck in a bad situation, it helps if you can keep your sense of humor.

Labyrinth: If you make a mistake, you have a responsibility to make it right no matter how hard it is.

Logan’s Run: It’s easy not to care about a problem until it becomes your problem too.

Blade Runner: Anyone who tries to divide the world into “us” and “them” is probably trying to justify the terrible things they do to people.

The Little Mermaid: You have to let your kids grow up, even if it means they make some really dumb mistakes.

The Wicker Man: The protections of civilization do not extend beyond civilization’s boundaries, and you forget that at your own peril.

The Ring: Just because bad things happened to someone does not automatically make them worthy of your sympathy.

The Princess Bride: Love is worth everything you have to go through for it.

Raiders of the Lost Ark: Obsession can be a very dangerous thing. (Actually, this could be the ultimate message of just about every story ever.)

Aliens: Imperialism has consequences.

Spider-Man: Being a hero requires sacrificing your own personal happiness.

Donnie Darko: Being a hero requires sacrificing your own personal happiness.

Pulp Fiction: The path of wickedness might be glamorous, but it’s ultimately poisonous and destructive.

A Nightmare on Elm Street: Part of growing up is dealing with the crazy fucked-up world your parents left for you.

The Birds: Sometimes bad shit just happens and all you can do is deal with it.

The Wedding Banquet: Your parents are always going to be smarter than you are.

Doctor Strangelove: People in positions of authority are no less likely to be crazy and/or stupid than the rest of us; in fact, they’re probably moreso.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Greed and selfishness are ultimately the root cause of all of society’s problems, even the ones that seem minor and unconnected.

Transformers: As long as you cram enough giant fighting robots that turn into cars and planes into your movie, it doesn’t have to mean a goddamn thing.