Daily Archives: June 18, 2023

Jun 18 2023
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TV

Black Mirror Review – Season 6, Episode 1 – Joan is Awful

It’s the Twilight Zone style show for the social media age and it’s finally back after a long hiatus.

BQB here with a review of episode 1 of the long awaited sixth season.

SPOILER ALERT: This isn’t so much of a review as it is a discussion so if you haven’t seen this yet, go watch it then come back and talk.

3.5 readers, if you’re reading this then chances are, you’re a nobody. Don’t feel bad. Most of us are and the good news is there’s a lot of safety in anonymity. Unlike the rich and famous, we can get away with a lot because no one cares about what we do.

But what if your favorite streaming service were to suddenly decide that your hum-drum life makes for good TV? Such is the case for Joan (Annie Murphy) a middle-manager at a tech company. Like all of us, she had dreams once, but now she just spends her days doing her corporate board’s dirty work, firing beloved employees for no cause just to increase profits. She feels dirty about it but finds no solace in her fiance, who she views as bland. Yet, she feels damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t, for she also has an ex wild man boyfriend who she enjoyed but ultimately understands that he’ll bring disaster back into her life.

And so, poor Joan feels trapped in the mundane when one day, she turns on Streamberry, a thinly veiled Netflix replacement, to discover a show about her life with the great Salma Hayek playing her with all of her dirty laundry hung out to dry. All of her indiscretions, infidelities and immoralities are laid bare for the world to see and oddly, in record time. The show churns out episodes so fast that it seems like no sooner does Joan do some inappropriate act that she thought no one saw that sure enough, that inappropriate act is streaming for the world to see.

After her lawyer investigates, Joan discovers that part of the terms and conditions of the long contract she signed when she signed up for the streaming service was to give the company all rights to make a show about her life. Through AI, the company is picking subscribers at random, following their lives via their cell phones and home cameras and creating computer generated shows about them. No writers or actors are needed. AI just takes scenes from subscribers’ real lives and provides dramatic flourishes, while actors have signed away their CGI rights for profit.

That’s right. Salma Hayek isn’t playing Joan. CGI Salma is and real Salma thought it would a quick buck to sign those rights away. In the hopes of grabbing Hayek’s attention and getting her to put the kibosh on the show, the real Joan starts doing horrendous, unspeakable, darkly comical things to the point where the real Salma doesn’t want her likeness associated with such depravity.

Shenanigans ensue as the real Joan and real Salma team up for a clandestine attack on Streamberry’s AI computer server and I’ll leave the rest to your imagination.

This is a rare light-hearted episode of black mirror. Usually, the show is quite dark and gut punching, as characters suffer irreparable damage and loss, forever doomed to experience terrible consequences. This one is actually quite funny.

“Absurd” I thought. CGI replacing real actors? That’ll never happen. Then I went to see The Flash last night and a CGI Henry Cavill did a brief cameo as did a CGI younger version of Nicolas Cage. CGI past versions of actors from DC superhero films from long ago also stopped by. So apparently, yes, Hollywood is looking for ways to make content with computers at a cheaper rate than what they have to pay real live humans.

And low and behold there’s a writer’s strike underway, with one of the chief complaints being that human writers are worried about being replaced by CGI writers. Could a CGI writer write better fart jokes than a human writer? Time will tell.

STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Credit to Netflix as with this episode, they basically admit that they invented the model of churning out unenriched crap at a rapid pace, content for the sake of content, just give viewers a neverending stream of new stuff to watch without worrying if its any good.

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Jun 18 2023
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Movies

Movie Review – The Flash (2023)

What a rush!

BQB here with a review of the Flash’s standalone movie.

3.5 readers, I’m going to separate this review into three parts: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Not to be confused with the Clint Eastwood film of the same name.

THE GOOD:

Overall, this is a good film. Worth your money and your time, enjoyable to see on the big screen.

The premise? Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) aka The Flash entered the criminal forensic profession as a young lad with the hope of proving his imprisoned father’s innocence and overturn his conviction for murdering his mother.

Alas, this plan is not going well. In fact, it’s going rather badly. So bad, in fact, that the Flash angry runs so fast that he discovers the ability to run through time. Ignoring everything he learned from Back to the Future, Flashy Boy tries to save his mother’s life but in so doing, enters an alternate world, similar to his own but in many ways different.

The Justice League as he knows it never formed, so instead, to foil an attack by General Zod (Michael Shannon), he teams up with Supergirl (Sasha Calle), Batman, but the elderly form of the 1989 film version (Michael Keaton) and a younger version of himself, obviously also played by Ezra Miller.

The film’s got a lot of heart, great special effects, and its good meditation on choosing to live in the present and make good decisions going forward, rather than dwell on past mistakes and tragedies. The scars from our past, painful as they may, made us who we are and one little change would throw everything off balance.

Fans of the 1989 Batman film will rejoice as their are many fun callbacks to that film, as well as to other old movies set in the DC universe.

THE BAD

While a fun movie, there are times when it feels like it’s not the best movie Warner Brothers could have made but rather, the best movie Warner Brothers is willing to pay for.

Gal Gadot, Ben Affleck and Jason Mamoa all reprise their Wonder Woman, Batman (the middle aged version from our timeline) and Aquaman roles from the Justice League film, but in brief cameos to help The Flash on his adventure. One wonders if WB would just drum up a great script and part with boku cash, they might be able to get the band back together for another go around.

But since they don’t want to, you get the Flash – and an alternate Justice League based in an alternate reality including Supergirl instead of Superman and 1989 Batman instead of Modern Batman, presumably because Calle and Keaton are cheaper than Henry Cavil and Ben Affleck.

THE UGLY

Ezra Miller has a lot of disturbing pervy allegations against him, so much so that it’s hard to believe this movie wouldn’t have been shelved if they’d been levied against a straight actor. The public will forgive WB for releasing the film this go around, though let’s face it, we’re all such lemmings we’d probably sit through anything released on a Friday night at our local cineplex. At any rate, WB spent big bucks making this movie and needed to get a profit by releasing it. However, in today’s “metoo” environment, I just can’t see WB allowing Miller to continue on as the Flash in a Flash sequel or any other DC movies.

A lot of squandered talent here because Miller really does play the role well. While we’ve seen many versions of Batman and Superman and we all have our favorites, I think Miller really captured the essence of the character as a spazzed out nerd, overworked and underappreciated, constantly dealing with the stress of superlife while suffering from anxiety and panic like the rest of us would in such a situation.

STATUS: Shelfworthy, though I get the impression that DC execs must have watched the last Spiderman movie where three film versions of Spidey teamed up and said “We need to do that!” There are times when the cameos of past DC film characters are a fun walk down memory lane and other times when you wonder why a studio gets to render CGI versions of long deceased actors into perpetuity.

Then again, there are a few CGI cameos from the likenesses of actors who are still alive and young enough to act but IDK why they’re digital except it cost less than it would to pay them to come to the set I suppose. I could be wrong but this might be the first film to capitalize on that.

SIDENOTE: 1989 Batman came out 34 years ago, but I remember being a little kid in the theater watching it with a sense of wonder like it was yesterday. Then I blinked and now I’m a middle aged geezer watching a film that’s partly an homage to it. Boy, this life went far too fast but I’d point out while movies today tend to be reboots, rehashes, and homages to older films, I wonder if 34 years from now, there will be many rehashes of films from today, when they rely so heavily on the nostalgia of past films now?

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