That’s entertainment!

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Fists of guilt?

Let me be clear. Taxi Driver and Raging Bull are great cinema, and they deserve all the accolades they get. But they’re the kind of movies I appreciate rather than enjoy. Watching Raging Bull yesterday, for the second or third time, I was struck less by the virtuoso cinematography and editing, by Martin Scorsese’s effective use of music (yet again), or by the performances, than by the sheer masochism in the movie. LaMotta’s masochism, where especially the later fights are extended bouts of self-punishment for his dimly understood sins. De Niro’s masochism, putting on 60 pounds for the role. But there’s also an element of masochism in sitting through this masterpiece. Paul Schrader (probably more so than Scorsese) writes the most effective guilt trips, but it’s difficult not to flinch and despair a little more at mankind (it’s really the men who come off looking worst in the guilt stakes) when LaMotta punches the walls of his prison cell or when he does his “I coulda been a contender” speech, or when Travis Bickle puts a finger dripping with blood to his temple and mimes blowing his head off.

 On a less masochist note: last night’s episode of House, M.D. (“Que Sera, Sera”) featured a remarkably controlled performance by both Pruitt Taylor Vince and his fat suit, transforming him into a 600-lb patient. While the episode was far from perfect, kudos ought to go to the House team for an astute handling of what could have been eminently tasteless TV.

Demurely Wilde

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There used to be a time, in the late ’80s and early ’90s when I thought that Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry could only be booked as an ensemble. These days, both of them seem to have done well enough on their own. Laurie appears to have become more of a star, mainly thanks to his wonderful Gregory House, M.D. (Admittedly, the series wouldn’t work without him.) Fry, on the other hand, is less visible but does more different things, a small part in a movie here, writing novels there, and voicing interplanetary repositories of knowledge in between, all of which seem to fit him quite neatly.

We watched Wilde yesterday, a film for which I had fairly high expectations. Unfortunately, for me the high point of the film was seeing a teensy, pixie-ish Orlando “Not an elf yet” Bloom playing a rent boy, wearing a bowler hat twice his size. No, that’s not quite true. (Well, the bit about the bowler hat is.) Wilde isn’t a bad film: the acting’s quite good, as is to be expected with such a distinguished cast, and it’s handsomely made. But it’s basically a run-of-the-mill, all too earnest (the pun is accidental) period drama, the only difference being that the tasteful sex scenes are between men. There’s a German word that can’t really be translated – betulich – that fits the film, in my opinion. It roughly means “staid”, “respectable”, “well-meaning”. Is this what a Wilde biopic, or indeed any film, should be?

The problem mainly lies with the script. The characters are clear-cut from the beginning and remain static throughout. Oscar is sweet, witty, but too much of a doe-eyed romantic when it comes to beautiful young men. Bosie is a shallow, callous narcissist. Oscar’s wife Constance is hard done by, but loyal. The closest the film comes to character development is when one of the protagonists grows a moustache.

And while I didn’t watch the film for hot, sweaty man-on-man action, is it too much to ask that the homoerotic scenes are actually erotic? The sex scenes are entirely too coy. (There is one ironic camera pan from a Wilde coupling to the window drapes swaying in the wind, although that was perhaps the only glint of visual wit in the film.) As a result of the movie’s consistent respectability, there’s no sense of outrage at the late Victorian homophobia and hypocrisy, just a passive acceptance of Oscar’s inevitable fate, reinforced by the film’s score working hard to make it clear that we’re watching something tragic.

Oscar Wilde, looking stylishly bored

Finally, the film succeeded most in making me think that Oscar Wilde, for all his sparkling wit, may have been a sad bore. A nice guy, surely, and very sweet, but in the end faintly pathetic and faintly boring. Like one of his aphorisms on yet another souvenir mug sold cheaply.

Did that soldier just shoot the fourth wall?

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Yesterday evening I finished Metal Gear Solid 2. The ending was decidedly underwhelming, for all its action and its cascade of relevations, one topping the other. It was also facile and preachy, and it hadn’t earned the right to be preachy. I wasn’t as annoyed at it as many people seem to have been, though, based on reviews and posts on the internet.

Penny Arcade’s take on the MGS2 ending

What seemed to annoy them most, however, was the metafictional self-awareness that crept into the last 2-3 hours of the game. Your superiors, who keep contacting you via radio throughout, start to make increasingly explicit references to everything that’s gong on being a game, even telling you at one point to switch off the console. While this isn’t postmodern fiction on a par with Pynchon or Auster, it’s still a refreshingly clever take on most videogame narratives, where you, the player, are as much of a puppet as your in-game avatar, following orders that the game’s narrative imposes on you, with little or no choice. The self-referentiality is also represented quite wittily, with everything that’s overtly game-like – the ‘continue’ and ‘save game’ screens, for instance – playing into it.

Why is it, though, that people – gamers as much as readers or movie and TV audiences – hate self-awareness so much? Read IMDB comments (admittedly, hardly the most critically-minded crowd) and you’ll see that self-aware fictions tend to get extremely strong reactions. Audiences, by and large, don’t want to be told that what they’re watching or playing is a film, a game. They prefer to submit to the illusion that ‘this is real’. In fact, they resent narratives that don’t allow them the comfort of that illusion. Because if something that we want to believe to be real is actually a fiction, it raises questions that may be a tad uncomfortable. Or perhaps I’m just a snobbish post-structuralist… But I think that at its best, you can see the puppeteer’s strings and appreciate his illusion-making, yet still feel for the puppets as if they were real.

And now, so’s you don’t get bored: a movie!

On a different note: What do you do if you get a book as a present, and you want to honour the present – but you hate the book? After Miéville, I moved on to Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors, and I keep wondering whether I really want to be reading this. It’s one of those “you have to laugh to keep yourself from crying” type of memoirs, where the things that are (supposedly) tragic are drawn in an exaggerated, cartoony fashion. According to the blurb on the back, it’s “hilarious… Adrian Mole scripted by Hieronymus Bosch”. The problem is, I don’t buy any of it. I’m not saying that Burroughs concocted the whole thing from scratch, but its over-the-top, camp tone and narrative feel fake to me. Augusten, a ceaseless self-dramatiser, is one of the most annoying narrators I’ve read in a long time. Is he a poor sod? Yes. Do I want to listen to him being a poor sod? No. And for all of its outrageousness, its lurid sexuality and forthright storytelling, there’s something disappointingly conventional and even prudish to the novel. Which may be true to the young protagonist, but that doesn’t make him or the book any more interesting.

So why am I still reading it?

Surreal Snakes and heroic metafiction

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– What’s going to happen to us?
– There, there. We always end up in a universe where we exist. Remember Copenhagen?

Remember the self-aware, postmodern hospital soap opera that Nate watches in the first episode of season 3 of Six Feet Under? Well, if that network – COMA TV? – had a 24-type series, chances are it’d be pretty much like Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, the PS2 game I’m currently playing.

 Quite honestly, I’m not certain whether MGS2 is a badly scripted, badly acted mess of a soap opera as done by Tony Scott, or whether it’s a clever parody of existentialist hi-tech conspiracy thrillers (ah, that old chestnut!). Whichever it is, the game is a weirdly compelling guilty pleasure. But yes, the writing makes Final Fantasy X seem a masterpiece of subtlety.

In part, the game is obviously tongue-in-cheek; the absurd conversations with Otacon when you save the game, or scenes like the one where you have to sneak across a walkway underneath a guard answering the call of nature make that clear. But what about the bathos of Otacon’s relevations concerning his quasi-incestuous relationship with his stepmother? And what about Peter Stillman (Paul Auster fans note the name!), the anti-demolitions expert who faked having a fake leg for years in order to gain sympathy? While the latter reads like bizarre black comedy, the game plays it absolutely straight-faced.

I can’t say I ‘get’ MGS2, nor can I gauge its tone most of the time, but I definitely want to know how it ends – even if people have it that it’s the sort of ending that makes you want to throw your Playstation out the window. But, dagnabit, did they have to make the cutscenes that long? I feel like I should take a day or two off in anticipation of an ending cinematic that’s bound to be (or at least feel) as long as Peter Jackson’s King Kong.

Super Coen Bros.

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The Coen Brothers’ Fargo is special to me, for two reasons: For one thing, it was the first time I went out to the cinema with the woman who ended up sharing my life and my DVDs. (Yes, the ideal date movie contains scenes of people being put through wood chippers. No wonder we only got together nine years later…) The second reason is somewhat less romantic, or weird and worrying, depending on what your ideal date movie is: Fargo was my first Coen Brothers movie. Afterwards, I worked my way through Blood Simple (perhaps the Coens’ darkest film, in more than one way), The Big Lebowski (which I thought somewhat amusing at first but have come to love), Barton Fink (the greatest David Lynch movie that Lynch never made, and proof that the face of evil is Dan Tanner’s face) and so on.

Evil John Goodman (flanked by John Turturro)

I’ve never seen Raising Arizona, and after Intolerable Cruelty I decided to give The Ladykillers a miss. Intolerable Cruelty had roughly two good scenes, namely one of the funniest, most unexpected deaths in recent movie history (an honour it shares with another George Clooney film, Out of Sight), and Clooney’s speech on the power of love at the divorce attorneys’ convention, followed by the obligatory ‘slow clap’ (which I read as ‘snow clap’ when Roger Ebert first mentioned it, and it made perfect sense to me). The last Coen Brothers film I liked was The Man Who Wasn’t There.

So what was wrong with Intolerable Cruelty? I think it’s mainly this: the Coens populate their cinematic landscape with characters that are essentially postmodern cartoons. There’s no such thing as a naturalistic Coen character. Even the more sedate protagonists – Marge Gunderson, Doris and Ed Crane – are caricatures. Their character features are exaggerated for comic effect. However, and this is what distinguishes a good Coen film from a bad one, at least in my opinion, these protagonists are deeply human caricatures. Jerry Lundegard (perhaps my favourite performance in a Coen movie, and my favourite performance by William H. Macy) is both as much of a cartoon as Wyle E. Coyote and hilariously, tragically human. He is observed with a subtlety that requires repeat viewings to fully appreciate. Consider the scene where he comes home to find that his wife has been kidnapped (as planned by him), and he practices what to say to his father-in-law, trying to get the words and intonation just right, and then is flummoxed when he dials Wade’s number and is immediately put on hold. Or his growing frustration when Marge Gunderson interviews him a second time.

Even in one of their most cartoonish films, The Big Lebowski, there’s something deeply human about the characters, so that when Donnie dies of a heart attack, it’s funny, but it’s also moving. You accept the Dude and Walter as cartoons, yet at the same time they’re real. And that’s how I tell a good Coen Brothers movie from a bad one – when they manage to maintain that tension. But enough of this Monday morning pretentiousness; I want to leave you with what may be my favourite scene from The Big Lebowski.

 

P.S.: I hope you noticed how neatly I segued from my last blog entry, which I called a mere filler, to today’s topic. That’s planning for you – almost like Lost. They’re not making things up as they go along either! (Nor do they kill of characters if the actor has a run-in with the police for one reason or another. It’s all planned!)

But is it what you would call ‘series acting’?

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I like good acting. Not Oscar-winning acting, which I often think is mainly a case of “who’s best at manipulating the audience?”. That sort of acting tends to feel acutely self-aware, to the extent that I sit there, watching it, being painfully aware of the acting. (And I usually groan when someone says that this or that actor isn’t actually very good because he’s only got two facial expressions. Being able to produce a number of different grimaces doesn’t make for good acting. Watch Ulrich Mühe in The Lives of Others for a beautiful example of acting, based pretty much on the most subtle variations of one facial expression.) 

Ulrich Mühe

Strangely enough, TV series don’t necessarily need good acting to work. Of course, atrocious acting is as painful to watch in series as it is in movies, but limited actors can still work extremely well on television. The good thing about series in this respect is that after a season or so, deeply mediocre actors become the characters. Look at Jonathan Frakes who played Will Riker in Star Trek: The Next Generation. Definitely not a good actor by any standards, and most people would hesitate even to call him mediocre; but by season 3, he was Will Riker. Any wobbles in the performance could be attributed to the character – “Ah, it’s Riker being full of himself! It’s Riker being nervous at meeting the Axitraxian ambassador! It’s Riker having had too much cheese before going to bed!” And somehow, by season 5 or 6 good old Jonathan felt comfortable enough in the part to stretch himself and surprise me with an actual good performance (!) in an episode called “Frames of Mind”.

Watching those HBO series I keep harping on about – The Sopranos, Deadwood, Six Feet Under – I am constantly amazed at the high quality of acting. Thinking back to the series I watched, and loved, as a kid and as an adolescent, though… Most of them had fairly mediocre actors, for instance David Duchovny (although he does make for a great transvestite!). Yet somehow I never felt I was watching Duchovny being mediocre. I very quickly forgot about Duchovny and was simply watching Fox Mulder.

David “Nobody’s perfect” Duchovny

For me, Lost has that very same quality. Some of the acting in Lost is good – Terry O’Quinn comes to mind, for instance. But if you look at it critically, most of it is hackneyed character work. If the series is still remembered in ten, twenty years, it won’t be for the acting. And yet… Half an hour into the pilot, and I bought the characters. I don’t know whether that is a quality of the writing, or the directing, or simply a case of the actors being close enough to the characters not to have to act too much. Perhaps it’s also just chemistry between the cast members. I don’t know. But I know that it’s the characters I keep coming back for – even if Jack is a whiny bitch, Charlie is even more annoying than he was as a hobbit (Pippin at least had the benefit of a Scottish accent – here we’ve got Desmond for that), and Nikki and Paolo deserve a horrible death (preferably something out of E.A. Poe). (Note: We haven’t seen any episodes past “Every Man For Himself” in season 3.)

Two final comments for today: 1) Why is it that the Deadwood women keep ending up on the island? I’m waiting for Alma and Jewel to turn up… 2) Was it very noticeable this was a bit of a filler blog entry? If so, I apologise – and promise that tomorrow’s episode will be better. (In that respect, perhaps my blog is a bit like Lost: a long mid-season slump, but the “huh?!”-inducing revelations at the end of the season will keep all of you coming back. Mwhaha.)

By my troth, thou art a hooplehead

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If anyone bemoans the state of TV in my presence, I tend to point them in the direction of HBO. At least if they’re not against watching series that may be very sexual or violent, or that may “contain language” (as opposed to all the Marcel Marceau-inspired television programming, of course). I’ll tell them to check out Six Feet Under, naturally, and The Sopranos. I myself haven’t checked out The Wire yet, but it’s definitely at the top of my list. From what I’ve seen so far, HBO series have a fairly consistently high level of quality, in terms of acting, writing, directing, cinematography.

I was rather surprised to find just how much I liked Deadwood. As a genre, the western doesn’t interest me that much. It took me two or three episodes to acclimatise to the language – not just to the incessant swearing, but to the elaborate quality of the dialogues. But then I was hooked.

One of the reasons is definitely the language. I know that the word “Shakespearean” is overused in criticism especially of TV and cinema, usually to give the younger, technological media a veneer of respectability that isn’t really needed anymore. But series creator David Milch’s writing does strike me as similar in quite a few respects to Shakespeare’s plays. Milch deftly mixes ‘high’ and ‘low’ language; he uses an impressive range of registers, styles and imagery to convey the characters. The difference is simply that with Shakespeare most people need to read the footnotes to see how filthy the language is at times. (I could imagine that it’s either frustrating as hell for the actors to speak the dialogues or greatly enjoyable. Or both.) The characters. Now, in a list of the best fictional characters on television, you couldn’t leave out an Al Swearengen. As a matter of fact, I’d say that you couldn’t leave him out of a list of the best fictional characters, period. (I imagine he might be joined there by Tony Soprano and his mother Livia. Now, I’d love to eavesdrop on a barroom conversation between Tony and Al.) I wouldn’t even consider it hyperbole to compare Al Swearengen to one of Shakespeare’s greatest creations, Falstaff. He’s just as rich, complex and ambivalent – and arguably as attractive – as the fat, vainglorious, cowardly and ultimately tragic knight of Shakespeare’s Henry IV. (Having said that, I would love to see Ian McShane in a Shakespearean role. Richard of Gloucester, for instance.) 

Ellsworth

While everyone loves Al, I must say that some of the more minor characters are my favourites. The first of these is Ellsworth. It’s difficult to write a fundamentally decent character and not make him boring, but they more than succeeded. And how can you not love a character who says the following, keeping a completely straight face?

Joanie Stubbs:   Will you keep a girl company?
Ellsworth:   I will, but I’m expensive.

Or indeed this?

 

Ellsworth:   Well, Ma’am, I’ve got myself a working gold claim.

Joanie Stubbs:   Well, sir, is that a damn fact?

Ellsworth:   A hell of a working gold claim, and if we knew each other better I’d throw “fucking” in there somewhere.

Joanie Stubbs:   If you did I’d try to catch it.

Ellsworth:   A working fucking gold claim, Joanie, and thank you for allowing me my full range of expression.

My second favourite character must be Dan Dority. He’s not the brightest, and he doesn’t exactly have great impulse control. But there’s something funny and sweet to his devotion to Al. His genuine distress when he thinks that Al prefers pretty boy Silas Adams to him, or when Al almost dies of a gleet. Again, like Shakespeare at his best, Milch mixes pathos and comedy perfectly in his best characters.

Dan Dority and Al Swearengen

 

It is to Dan and to Ellsworth, to Al, Sol, Seth, Trixie, Joanie, Charlie, Alma, Jane – and yes, even to E.B. – that I raise my glass of bourbon and say: “To your health, cocksuckers and hoopleheads! See you soon!”

 

P.S.: If you’re looking for a (Swiss-)German blog to read, especially if you’ve got a thing for outlandish international cuisine (and flame-baked Smurfs), check out Magenta’s Lucky Page. Highly recommended!

Loose baggy monsters. And they suck out your brain, too.

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I used to love reading fantasy and science fiction literature. Or rather, I used to love the idea of sci-fi and fantasy. My parents never got that I enjoyed stories that were out of this world, so to speak. (One of my defining childhood moments: My uncle sends us Star Wars: A New Hope on Betamax tape, taped from Channel 4. We watch it, and I love it. My parents think it’s a waste of time and tape over it the next day. It’s a miracle I didn’t go Michael Myers on them. And by that I mean Halloween Michael Myers, not the “Groovy, baby!” kind.) I loved The Lord of the Rings, Madeleine L’Engle’s Wrinkle in Time and Diana Wynne Jones’ Chrestomanci books.

Randalf the First 

And then I read too much fantasy. I watched too much sci-fi. And so much of it is poorly written, derivative dribble, disposable junk. I was fed up with bearded, grumpy wizards trying very hard not to be Gandalf, I was sick and tired of chosen ones and ancient prophecies and evils sweeping the land. I had enough of names that looked like the deformed offspring of multiple apostrophes and the bottom of the bag of letters at the end of a game of Scrabble.

Randalf the Second

It was Joss Whedon’s Firefly that reinstated my belief in good science-fiction. Neil Gaiman largely did the same for fantasy, but I didn’t like his last couple of books that much – apart from which he tends to write metafiction rather than straight fantasy (whatever that may be). There’s always a self-aware, postmodern twinkle in his authorial eye, it seems.

Yesterday I finished China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station. Arguably it’s fantasy, although it’s set in a universe that is closer to our world than to Middle-Earth or the books of Terry Brooks or Robert Jordan. There are no elves, dwarves or dragons (nor thinly veiled copies of them). Magic is a technology, essentially. And New Crobuzon, the monstrous city in which the story takes place, is reminiscent of Victorian London much more than of the pastoral fantasies or the hackneyed medieval towns of your common garden variety of fantasy.

What sets Perdido Street Station apart from those other fantasies is that it feels real. Not epic. Not mythological. Real. It’s fantastic enough to serve as escapist fare, but it’s not the sanitised, Disneyfied kingdom of Far, Far Away. What also sets it apart, and this may surprise some of those who have read it, is the economy of Miéville’s writing. Yes, the book is long – it’s over 800 pages long, in fact – but in the end I felt that no character, no scene, no piece of description didn’t serve a function. So often, bad or mediocre fantasy novels are filled with pages and pages of clumsily handled world creation, which feels like the author trying to show off his or her imagination, more often than not:

“Hey, look at this sentient bird-fish-dinosaur creature I’ve just come up with! And the deities it worships! And the weird, elaborate rituals in which the sentient bird-fish-dinosaur sacrifices his firstborn! And now we’ll never hear anything about them again. Because I’m so inventive, I don’t even have to use my bird-fish-dinosaur for anything else than showing off my imagination!”

Not so in Perdido Street Station. The book is wildly inventive, but everything is there for a reason. Yet the novel feels organic rather than constructed. And I never felt the sort of laziness you get in generic fantasy, namely that the author is simply ticking off all the things the readership wants: Old mentor figure: check. Orphaned hero-to-be: check. Evil lord, comes with his own minions: check. Instead, we have a novel that doesn’t have a clear-cut antagonist. The protagonists aren’t heroes, even if they end up being heroic, more as a way of staying alive than anything else. Some of the novel is genuinely unsettling. And it’s a deeply, densely political world – not the way George Lucas tried to bring in politics in his Star Wars prequels, but infinitely more believably and fascinatingly.

Perdido Street Station 

I don’t want to go on at great length (already having done so, of course), but my suggestion is this: if you used to love fantasy but then grew tired of it, or if you believe that you “outgrew” the genre – give Miéville a try. Check out Perdido Street Street Station. And if you don’t like it, write me… so I can tell you how and why you’re just, like, so wrong.

Dungeons and dragons (no bears) – oh my!

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I used to love fantasy role-playing games. I’d devour all the Bard’s Tales, Ultimas and Baldur’s Gates I could get my Hands of Great Fingeritude +2 on. Some of my fondest geeky childhood memories are of drawing maps of enormous dungeons (back before the days of wimpy auto-mapping features) and adorning them with clumsy doodles of ringwraiths, dragons and beholders. I got a kick out of reading the rulesets for Dungeons & Dragons and imagining my own (predictably generic) fantasy world, although I never got a successful campaign off the ground – mainly because one of the players was quite mad and better at chewing up PET bottles, skulking off to a corner and rambling incoherently than at role-playing his dwarven fighter. (And no, I don’t think that sort of behaviour qualifies as valid role-playing for a dwarf.)

I still have a weak spot for the Ultima games, mainly because they got two things right: the world and the characters. If I had unlimited time, didn’t have to work and wasn’t worried about my girlfriend thinking I’m even more of a geek than I am, I would try to recreate the series’ Britannia as a huge mod for The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. And then I’d get a kick out of walking from one end of the continent to the other, stopping every now and then to see the sunset over Brittany Bay or to watch a thunderstorm from some mountain peak. Sad, isn’t it?

  Britannia 

Anyway, to get back to the issue at hand: I bought Neverwinter Nights 2 last year, an RPG based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset. I’d heard good things about its story and writing. Somehow I never made it past the tutorial when I got started on it last year, but now I’ve started playing it again. And while it’s okay and competently executed, I realise I’m tired of what the 1UP review calls a “wonky fantasy geekfest”. I’m tired of the D&D ruleset. I’m tired of grumpy dwarfs, aloof elves, of slaughtering cheap orc knock-offs (doesn’t matter if they’re called “bladelings”). Yes, the writing is quite good, but not enough so to make the game much less generic. The characters seem fun – but not enough so to make me care much about the world or about what’s going on. Big evil threatening the Forgotten Realms, and only you can save the world? Please. Give me Planescape Torment instead any day, with its hyper-intelligent hive-mind rats, its puritanical succubus, floating skulls, and the best amnesia story this side of Memento. And its enchanted panty-sniffing armoires. Let’s not forget about the panty-sniffing armoires.

Planescape Torment

Anyway, enough of a rant about generic fantasy RPGs. More later, perhaps. And for those of you who tune in for the movie and TV musings, don’t worry – they’ll be back before long. It’s just that watching anything is more fun if my special someone is sitting beside me. And yes, that’s the kind of soppy, sentimental bastard that I am. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Morse code

Matt4 Comments

Ah, to live in the early 21st century… To be able to sit in a little café, drinking fresh, good coffee, listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations while reading China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station. And then to come to the office, start up the computer, and blog about it, to validate the experience.

(NB: If this was an e-mail or a message board post, I would have put a winking emoticon at the end of the paragraph, to indicate the subtle postmodern irony – there I go again, being less than perfectly serious! – but I try to do entirely without smileys in this blog. After all, Jane Austen, Randy Newman and Alanis Morissette managed entirely without…)

However, this blog entry is not about irony, or cafe latte or the Goldberg Variations (which I am proud to say I can listen to almost without thinking of Hannibal Lecter). It’s more of a dire warning.

For I have seen the face of evil. And it looks like this.

Looks innocuous enough, you think? Look again.

You may be wondering what it is that makes me think David Morse is evil. The reason is quite simple: he’s the one responsible for dooming the human race. He’s the one who released the virus that killed most of humanity, forcing us to live underground. He is evil.

And this may be where you go, “Huh?” And, if you know where I am currently located, you may even be calling the doctors to come and take me away. If you know Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, you might understand what I’m going on about, but it might still not make that much more sense to you.

Yes, I can distinguish between fiction and reality. Yes, I know that David Morse is an actor, hired to play characters, such as the apocalypse nut in 12 Monkeys. And yet. Every time he pops up on screen, I tense up. I take an immediate and intense dislike to him. Sometimes I’m proven right (Dancer in the Dark). Sometimes I’m proven wrong (The Green Mile). Sometimes the film and the scenes he’s in are so atrocious that it’s hard not to feel sorry for Morse (Contact, anyone? Daddy issues on tacky intergalactic beaches?). But I don’t trust the guy, and therefore I cheered on the inside at the thought of Greg House, M.D. and PhD in Misanthropy deciding to thwart the Morseman’s evil plans. Who will come out on top in the upcoming fight between House and his newly found nemesis? Only time will tell. Until then, it’s drawn thermometers at dawn.