Is This Something?
Added: Is The Terminal List Something?

Did you see It Follows?

So this is It Smiles.

Oh, to clarify: It's not called It Smiles; it's just "Smile." I was making a joke because it's similar to It Follows. It Follows made the simple, mundane act of walking horrific; this makes the simple, everyday act of smiling horrific.

Here's something scary I found: A scene from a Japanese movie called Kairo (also called Pulse), which came out early in the era of the Internet, when it was generally accepted that The Internet Can Do Anything.

I think the film's premise was that there was some kind of secret room on the internet. Maybe a connection to the underworld where evil ghosts live. A guy found it and was then found dead under suspicious, maybe supernatural, circumstances.

His friend drives to the guy's crime scene tape sealed apartment and goes inside.

I have it cued to 3:01, when he gets to the apartment. Worth the three minutes.

This might be fun:

I've been watching The Terminal List on Amazon, which is good.

The critics hate it, because they hate Chris Pratt because he believes in Jesus and that is a crime, and because the show has families in it and I think in one scene they say grace. And also it has the military and guns, so it's "anti-woke."

To complain: It's doing that thing that all Premium Quality Cable TV Shows do, which is to suggest it has Dramatic Weight by making people talk slowly and having scenes go on for longer than they need to. The show's got some unneeded flab.

But on the plus side: In every episode so far (I've watched six of eight episodes), there is at least one big moment that justifies your having spent 50 minutes watching it.

It's an action vengeance story with an interesting character twist: the main character, while a good and decent man, may have some serious mental issues, so his judgment is not very good. In the usual action vengeance fantasy, you're completely on-board with the hero's plan to just kill the bad guys.

In this one, you're not always sure he's mentally together enough to have correctly deduced who the bad guys are and you're sometimes very opposed to the extreme means he uses to exact vengeance. Like detonating a bomb on a crowded street.

Instead of always rooting for him, I'm frequently thinking, "Please don't do this." I don't want him to be just a crazy killer.

The tension there, between wanting him to succeed and wanting him to come out of this okay, but also being... worried by his behavior and shaky grasp of reality, is exciting. It keeps you interested.

This is overstating it for effect, but it's almost as if, "What if Joker was the good guy?" Or at least he's got some Travis Bickle DNA in him to go along with his John Rambo DNA. (Or, I guess: He's like Rambo for the first movie, except not just reacting, but acting proactively.)

posted by Ace at 04:09 PM

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