Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Rain Man!

In this 1988 sci-fi classic, Tom Cruise becomes the first neurotypical to gradually learn not to actively torture the autistic people in your life with loud noises and disruptive bullshit.

Using a physical line of demarcation to show that they live in different worlds is level 1. Level 2 is that Cruise's world is empty, while Rain Man's is populated by ceaselessly turning wheels.

Justin Hoffman plays the titular savant rudely interrupted from his routine of TV slop and tapioca pudding by Cruise's embittered normal who, at first, connives to wring half the inheritance his estranged father bequeathed to Rain Man out of Rain Man's stuffed-shirt custodian. Cruise is one of those movie assholes we like much more than we might a boring nice guy, and it's only because we start to root as hard for Rain Man that we can forgive his softening ad tedium over the movie's course. Naturally perturbed by the disruption of his routines, Rain Man has a tough time on the road with Cruise, but gets his Chad on when it turns out he can rinse a Vegas casino by counting cards.

I hope they fired whoever didn't score this scene with "Sharp Dressed Man" by ZZ Top.

Rain Man even sort-of gets molested by Cruise's gf in an elevator in a scene reminiscent of Greatest Movie of All Time Pumpkin.

Sorry Tom Cruise, in the real world the barely functioning autist gets (molested by) the girl.

If you take the film's events too literally, it still works, but on a bad-taste comedy basis. But movies aren't about literal events but the stuff of feelings. Rain Man isn't an ethics course on how to treat irl min-maxers, but a feel-good road trip through a world that no longer exists and never did, and anyway, what does anyone alive today know about treating my people with decency and respect? You devise ever more labyrinthine systems of offence and taboo to trip us up when we can barely navigate the standards that existed yesterday - a fun game for normoid social climbers, a Kafkaesque gauntlet for us. You throw riots and revolutions because you're bored (because you're boring) when all we want is stability in which to do all the real thinking that gets done. The internet, our home, you occupy and police. Finally you redefine us as "neurodiverse", another stripe on your endlessly metastasizing rainbow vomit flag; a function of your ideology, not a people unto ourselves.  

#ActuallyAutistic posters if they had that tell-the-truth curse from Liar Liar.

So while it only lasted for one Oscarbait season in 1988, Rain Man remains the triumphant high water mark for tism on film and in the culture. Definitely...definitely watch Rain Man.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Missing in Action 2: The Beginning!

Missing in Action 1 was a solid action flick about I-Can-Has-Cheese-Burger-era internet meme Chuck Norris freeing POWs from Vietnam prison camps, sort of like Rambo: First Blood Part 2, if by "sort of", you mean "exactly". While this automatically makes it better than whatever drivel you consoom to keep up with your coworkers' inane water cooler conversation, it's still kind of redundant. Prequel The Beginning, however, mines the formula quite differently: Norris and his squad are captured by the commies under the command of Colonel Yin (Soon-Tek Oh, who is not an ad for a new digital appliance).

"Sir, please state your name."
"Soon."
"How soon?"
"No."
"What?"
"Huh?"
-this actor's screen test

Years after the war is over, Colonel Yin harbours demented dreams of breaking Norris's Colonel Braddock, having him confess to bogus war crime charges. Yin employs the carrot and the stick: as well as brutalising his captives, he has buck-broken Captain David Nester (Steven Williams) try to ply the others to give in with appeals to pragmatism, in a good cop-bad cop routine you'll recognise from your """"centrist"""" peers entreating you to join the current year. Come on, man, everyone else has folded. That was Not The Hill To Die On, and nor will be the next hill, nor the next.

"Hey, look, you guys, I'm on your side. I mean, I used to lmao my ass off at Encyclopedia Dramatica and Anal Cunt lyrics too, but the fact is we live in a world where saying Chinaman or retard is a thoughtcrime, and I for one am going to thrive in it, you problematic sexist biggots" - Nester

When POWs try to escape across a wooden bridge, the commies light it up with a flamethrower, which probably wasn't meant as a metaphor for the characteristic eptitude of pinko forward planning, but indubitably works as one.

"My work here is done" - Comrade Einstein over here

You might expect this movie to be comically cheesy, but the harsh conditions of camp life it portrays make it a lot more resonant and honest than your typical war flick. In the gnarliest scene, Yin and his goons attempt to torture and/or kill Braddock by placing an enraged and panicked rat in a sack over his head:

♪Despite all my rage...

You might think this is an absurd invention meant to demonise the brave anticolonialists but, as always, you'd be wrong because commies were torturing people with rats as early as the Russian revolution. By some accounts the practice continues in North Korea's gulags into the 21st Century. Even the stuff people make up about the relatively few rightist dictators doesn't approach this tier of casual psychopathy, but you've already decided not to learn this most central lesson of history, so keep wearing your epic cool guy Che T-shirt, I guess. Fortunately this is a Chuck Norris picture so after taking Yin's bullshit for most of the runtime Braddock finally grows bored and leads what's left of his men in a rampage that destroys the camp and puts paid to Yin in the most satisfying beatdown ever committed to film. If you were minded to give this overlooked kino credit for sly symbolism, you might say Yin met his Yang.

"Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits" - Confucius

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Mughal-E-Azam!

The title Mughal-E-Azam means "The Great Mughal", which is in reference to the emperor Akbar, known as Akbar the Great. Akbar means "The Great". "Mughal-E-Azam" therefore means "The Great The Great The Great". A movie would have to be pretty good to live up to such an overweening appellation. Fortunately, Mughal is the Indian Gone with the Wind, a grandiose epic spectacle which subsumes any silliness into itself like the Yellow River flooding over an impudent field.

This opening goes harder than the combined cinemas of most countries.

The real Akbar was almost as effective as he was ambitious, conquering vast areas for the already powerful dynasty he inherited. He took a Hindu wife and designed to bring Hindus and Muslims together under his syncretic vision of the Dīn-i Ilāhī. His son Jahangir did, as in the movie, lead an uprising against him, but it wasn't for love - like all real-life revolutionaries, he was just a prick who wanted power for himself. Jahangir's rebellion was put down but his stepmothers bailed him out in an act of shameless enabling upon which he squandered no reflection; his own son Khusrau would attempt to coup him in turn, to which Jahangir showed none of his father's forbearance - he had his own son blinded for his disobedience. Worse still, his other son, Khurram (later Shah Jahan), rebelled as well, and Jahangir made peace. And you thought your parents played favourites.

What a cunt.

Mughal, then, is somewhat of an inversion of George Fatfuck Martin's Cheetodustcore soap opera G*me of Thr*nes in that it glosses over a grimdark cutthroat historical reality with a romantic myth that compels sympathy for the upstart prince if you don't give any thought to the thousands of innocent men who die in the setpiece battle just so he could try to bang Anarkali (Madhubala), the Helen-of-Troy of the drama.

"um sweety my eyes are down here" - madhubala

So the film's morality might be a little unorthodox, but you're going to pretend to care now, after cheering for Gone Girl and the bugs from Star Ship Troopers? Film is an amoral medium and if you think otherwise, you've been programmed. Hitchcock made this point repeatedly, such as in Strangers on a Train, in which he has the villain drop a piece of evidence he plans to use to frame the hero down a drain, at which point you and every other viewer started rooting for the villain to retrieve it. Mughal even anticipates and rubbishes the moralistic critique in the following exchange:

Media literacy soyjaks rekt AGAIN.

More to the point, Mughal shames most Hollywood period epics with its lavish set and costume design, and the colourisation (which was undertaken in accordance with the director's original vision; belay your epic bacon Orson Welles quote on Ted Turner's crayons) only renders it more psychedelic still.

Among their many crimes, the Beatles must answer for making this uncool (in hell).

Greatest Album of All Time of the Week: Adam and Eve!

In accordance with our censorship policy, female nipples have been replaced with convicted murderer Stephen McDaniel, to avoid any offence.

Because you're irreparably basic, your favourite Pink Floyd album is The Wall or Dark Side of the Moon. Because I'm a handsome patrician, my favourite Pink Floyd album is Adam and Eve by Catherine Wheel, one of the best and most interesting bands of the 90s. Debut Ferment brought classic rock grandeur to the shoegaze sound, followup masterpiece Chrome was face-punching space rock, and failed attempt to sell out Happy Days at least had my personal theme song on it. But on their GOAT B-sides & rarities collection Like Cats and Dogs, you'll find their cover of "Wish You Were Here", which presaged their full-album pastiche of "Welcome to the Machine"-era Floyd.*

You might think pastiche is a limiting format, that the result couldn't very well transcend gimmickry, that it would be fated to live in the shadow of its inspiration. But you would be characteristically wrong because Adam and Eve is great and uses Floyd as a genre the way a hundred billion doom bands used Black Sabbath, while imposing the Wheel's own more inimitable quirks and sensibilities. Bob Ezrin and only-album-artist-you-can-name Storm Thorgerson reprise their schtick from the Floyd catalogue but charismatic frontman Rob Dickinson (who is Bruce of Iron Maiden's cousin) takes the Wheel and wrests the sound in his own distinctly un-Roger-Watersishly positive direction. Lyrics like "don't you think the sarcasm's a little hard to stomach?/the cynicism's boring" ("Here Comes the Fat Controller") are as bold and caustic a revolt against the practically mandatory nihilism of the 90s zeitgeist as everyone pretends grunge was against those evil hair bands. In fact the track cuts short abruptly with a one-two punch "clamping down" effect in stereo just as it seems it will exult forever, like The Machine of corporate radio saying "that's quite enough of that". We don't mind; we'll be listening again.

Adam and Eve is far too long and I wouldn't cut a track, a verse, or an indulgent soundscape because the meandering, dynamic ebb and flow is the point. "Broken Nose", "Satellite" and "Controller" are standout anthems, but the plaintive, wistful strains of "Ma Solituda" and "Thunderbird" are no less resonant for being stood out from. The album feels vaguely conceptual but good luck pinning down the concept. Sex, love, friendship, burnout, melancholy, childhood, fantasy and nostalgia alternate with the fluency of a lucid dream. "There's far too many ghosts", Dickinson intones, and maybe that's the key. First "Phantom of the American Mother" quotes lyrically, and then "Goodbye" musically, from "Shine On You Crazy Diamond", so the album is already haunted by the ghost of Syd Barrett. Further lyrics allude to Bruce Lee, Sir Michael Caine, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, and then there's the titular pair whose archetypal tragedy haunts every man, woman and child. The closing track laments an unnamed girl who left town years ago. But with remembrance of old lovers, childhood favourites and estranged friends comes the warm afterglow of the good times. Does "Thunderbird" refer to the creature of American Indian myth, or the Supermarionation show from 60s British TV? Either way, urged on by eager, tentative piano lines, it sounds like it evokes the delicate integrity of childhood play: "just speak it more discreetly/you're making it sound absurd".

IDK if I'll write more music reviews but if I don't, listen to Adam & Eve instead of trapcore or post-slop or blackened EDM or whatever you think makes you sound interesting.

*When I sat down to write this, I was under the impression that the album was called Welcome to the Machine. Berenstein Bears confirmed.