Cherry 2000 to Blade Runner 2049: The Decline of Western Civilisation in Two Robot Waifu Kinos

This smudgy, low-res piece of shit was the only copy of the film I could find, but trust me, it's kino.

As you know, yesterday's scifi is today's reality. Cherry 2000 is a 1980s motion picture starring Melanie Griffith and some guy in a highly 80s neon and synth-obsessed dystopia in which romantic relations between the sexes have deteriorated to the point men are turning to sex robots while """"real"""" women are exacting contracts before sex and dating can commence. It's set in 2017, making this literally the most accurate prediction of the future in any B-movie, ever. Coincidentally or otherwise, 2017 was the year another neon robot waifu kino, Blade Runner 2049, was released. In my ongoing effort to replace academia with shitposting, I offer you a comprehensive breakdown of these eerily similar films and what they say about our IRL dystopia.

Don't you hate it when your wife short-circuits?

So the plot is kicked into motion when our bland everyman hero's robot waifu gives out during foreplay in the suds from an overloaded washing machine. She's the eponymous Cherry 2000, a high-end model powered by the latest technology: a mini-disk. Our protagonist, who I'd swear had a name but whatever, sees his relationship with her as real and meaningful, even though she basically repeats a few phrases monotonously with a smile on her face. Maybe the subtext is that he's as boring as her, so he can't really tell there's anything missing. To be fair though, this relationship appears to be better than the alternative.

What if I told you I was in Apocalypse Now? No really, I was.

Yes, that's Larry "Morpheus" Fishburne (again, eerily presaging his later role by wearing these reflective sunglasses. IRL Matrix confirmed) as a lawyer/pimp/chaperone who arranges dating contracts like in that one Chappelle Show sketch between men and women at a bar. Do you think Hollywood comes up with these ideas because they think the rest of the world are as degenerate as them?

Anyway, Protagonist resolves to get a new body to house his waifu's mini-disk. There's only one problem: the only waifu bodies left in that make and model are in storage in Las Vegas, deep in Zone 7 which has descended into the sort of neo-wild-west setting you'll recognise from 800 Mad Max ripoffs. The major difference is that the villainous gangs that run this wasteland are preppies instead of punks:

The feared warlord Lester (yes).

This idea is funny, and it's just one of a number of imaginative quirks that make Cherry 2000 kino. So to help guide him through this hazardous desert, Protagonist enlists the help of "E" (Melanie Griffith), a manic-pixie-dream-girl-haired qt who I guess is like a Stalker from the movie of the same name, but for preppy post-apocalyptic California instead of Bumfuck USSR. Not, however, before visiting this hotel, where they have a cat in a bottle on the front desk:

Yes.

So E leads Protagonist into the Zone where they're picked up by a large magnet on a crane and shot at with rocket launchers, presumably to avoid damaging the road surface, which makes this a more forward-planning-oriented gang than most.

>tfw no rocket launcher having post-apocalyptic mpdg qt gf

Naturally E and Protagonist Guy fall in love, but a romantic comedy contrivance has them fall out and press on to find the robot body and more hijinks ensue. Eventually they go to Vegas, just like in BR 2049.

Vegas is always a e s t h e t i c after the world ends.

Of course, this is two human beings going in search of one robot, whereas in BR 2049 it's two competing replicants (K and Luv) and a hologram (Joi) going in search of a lone, aging human man in hiding. Quite the demographic reversal in the 32 years between 2017 and 2049.

In both movies the male protagonist has a choice between an artificial relationship with a "real" woman (the prostitute in BR 2049 and the bar thots with the contracts in Cherry 2000) and a relatively real relationship with an artificial woman (Joi/Cherry). Of course in Cherry 2000 he ends up with E, but this only adds another layer of depression to the experience, because E, as a manic pixie dream girl, also represents something that doesn't actually exist. Real-life "random" women with unnatural coloured hair are far closer to the contract thots than to E in the movie.

What do you mean I'm not the girl of your dreams, cis-pig?? This is hash tag why we need SocJus!

What both movies recognise is that a Cherry or Joi is just going to be the go-to choice when the alternative is this Lego-eyebrowed Boris Karloff looking turbothot and others like xir. Cherry 2000 cheats by offering the possibility of a good woman as an alternative, but as Mark Sandman once said, a good woman is hard to find*.

However there is a a teeny tiny whitepill to be found in this morass of depression, in the form of best girl Luv.

<3

For while Joi (Jerk Off Instructions) and E (ecstasy) are both essentially fake stimulants, Luv (love) is real, and love hurts, and the relationship between K and Luv is the realest one even though it is largely antagonistic, because at base she wants Ryan Gosling's BAC (Big Autistic Cock), making her what weebs call "tsundere". Although a replicant, Luv has internal conflict and this makes her more human than the basic bar thots and the mascots such as Joi and E. Luv represents the SYNTHESIS between the loving waifu and real (complex) wahmen. This is what is meant by her catchphrase, "I'm the best one".

Now That's What I Call Kino (Vol. 344)

Despite the crieing of many, this is NOT at all an unattainable standard for wahmen to aspire to. You can even keep your straight bangs.

Do you like how I solved dystopia??? Leave a comment!

*Note that when your entire sex gets BTFO by Morphine you can never recover because Morphine is the best 90s-core band, at least tied with Hum. If anyone still clings to muh feminism in the face of the Morphine argument, they may be dismissed as irreparably basic and broken down for spare parts.

Superman always wears red overpants.

Living in the Berenstain Universe, where everything sucks, you may have noticed that contemporary "Superman" depictions have no red overpants. This is one of the many, many, many, many, many reasons I stopped reading comics, and since the depantsing continued into the motion picture maladaptation The Man of Steel, I have considered dropping movies too.

Note that no-pants Superman is technically Bizarro.

Back when comics were good, a run called Superman: Red Son was released which posited the question: what if Superman's rocket had landed in the Soviet Union instead of Kansas? Of course the Ferrous Gentleman was raised as a communist and grew up to become a totalitarian dictator. This Superman did not wear red overpants. His overpants, where he had any, were grey - symbolic of the grim, conformist Hellscape communism wrought.

Contemporary Superman is a communist. This is because he is being written in the Berenstain Universe. Superman's overpants represent his conscience - their colour suppressed in Red Son as under a stifling ideology, and totally absent in the degenerate and nihilistic culture of today. Red Son was a warning about misguided ideals which we have failed to heed.

In 2013, forehead can crushing champion Zack Snyder gave us a movie in which Superman, stripped of the overpants of truth, justice and the American way, fucking murders General Zod by snapping his neck. Batman in The Dark Knight Returns didn't even kill the Joker, who was way more evil than General Zod, a military professional whose only crime in The Man of Steel was to attempt a necessary coup to save his world from destruction.

Some argue that Zack Snyder did this because he is a simpleton who doesn't understand things like character, character arcs, or that slow motion isn't new, or that making everything look visually dark doesn't create dark atmosphere, or that Superman without his red overpants is horribly aesthetically unbalanced, or that the field of design is best left to professionals, or that chopping up the chronology of a movie for no reason doesn't make it better, or that JJ Abrams style lens flare was stupid in Star Trek and is stupid in Superman, or that you can't level a city and expect people to feel like there was a happy ending in your movie, or that Ben Affleck already had a role in Mallrats which was stylised in the opening credits as "Buttman", or that no one likes Zack Snyder.

The Superman cape has a yellow S-shield on the back of it as well. If it doesn't have that it's not Superman. It's another design thing. You can't just take stuff out of a design and add a bunch of lines on it. It doesn't work that way.

The Right Side of History

I met a traveller from Web 2.0,

Who said that many archived Twitter tweets

Stand unremembered. Where no one will go,

A long-abandoned profile lies, whose bleats,

And Tumblr memes, redolent of BO,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

And on the pinned tweet fourteen words appear:

"We are #SocJus; listen and believe:

Look on our works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that embarrassment, boundless and bare

The lone and level webs stretch far away.

Mad Max Ripoffs: World Gone Wild!!!

World Gone Wild opens with the one thing even The Road Warrior was fundamentally missing: hair metal. In this world (gone wild), oh, let's say...water is scarce. A few nice hippies live in a community with water known as Lost Wells, which is made of cars.

But trouble comes looking for them in the form of a bunch of choirboys riding a helicopter. Not through the sky though; they just drive it around like a car. Maybe the budget didn't stretch to flying the fucking thing. The leader of the baddies, played by Adam Ant, is named Derek.

The Lord Humungus. The Immortan Joe. Derek.

So Bruce Dern kills one of his choirboys by flicking a bowl off the ground into his neck. Impressed by his fuckery of physics, Adam Ant decides to leave, but with the ominous suggestion he'll be back. It's up to Bruce Dern to find a hero to save his town, and that hero is none other than Michael Paré, from Streets of Fire.

Paré shows he's got what it takes by beating an Old West-style gunslinger, so Bruce Dern and the female lead take him and a bunch of other hoodlums back to Model T Fort to prepare it against Adam Ant's purposelessly delayed return. Much time is killed with Adam Ant reading from The Wit and Wisdom of Charles Manson and everyone trying to rape Main Girl, who is practically approaching Hood Ornament Girl from Wheels of Fire levels of getting raped.

Finally all the good guys' bad guys spring their trap for Adam Ant and his choirboys and motorcyclists, and have a whale of a time killing them with snakes, golf clubs and purple spandex, like this fruity fuck:

This movie is particularly endearing because of the attention to detail evident in the locations and costumes. One woman has CDs for earrings, while another guy has like a hubcap for a hat or something. This sort of repurposing of crap is an overlooked part of the post-apocalypse aesthetic. The movie also develops its setting reasonably well, and has plenty of likeable misfit characters. I would recommend this movie, if you've already seen all the good ones.

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: none.

SHOULDER PADS: a couple.

CUSTOM CARS: nothing stands out, but the fort is made of cars, so that counts.

MUTANTS: none, but there are cannibals.

GOGGLES: Derek wears them.

TOTAL: 3/5 - somewhat post-apocalyptic.

Mad Max Ripoffs: Raiders of the Sun!!!

It is a consistent rule of post-apocalypse movies that whatever is in shortest supply is used most recklessly. Mad Max and The Road Warrior are all about the scarcity of gasoline, yet everyone spends all their time driving around and into one another. Raiders of the Sun continues in this tradition by having a shortage of gunpowder at the centre of its plot, yet everyone spends their time engaging in massive, unnecessary shootouts. There's no mention of a gasoline shortage, but we can assume there is one too, because in one scene a bunch of dudes dance around a family of dwarfs splashing tanks of it on them. This is the movie's chilling message: in a world without the internets, we would set fire to little people for our entertainment. The sequel will be about a dwarf shortage.

Even after the nuclear holocaust, dwarfs carry axes. That's racist.

The opening narration actually suggests the world was getting better, under the organisation of good guys "The Alpha League". Unfortunately they're now in a state of civil war against a rebel faction led by this guy:

"I do not want things to get better. I want to blow things up and be a bad guy :(" - actual dialogue.

You can tell he's the leader because he's the only one who put any effort into his outfit. In the post-apocalypse, it's clearly not tactical skill that grants leadership, but the size and extravagance of your shoulder pads. The only exception to this rule is the Lord Humungus, but that's because he was fucking huge.

In their quest to get more gunpowder to prevent the civil war from sort of awkwardly winding down, the main bad guy allies with another bad guy, whose name I also can't remember, who does nothing all day but half-assedly attempt to rape the women his minions bring him. He's the most laid-back rapist I've ever seen in a movie. When the Main Girl is brought before him she kicks him in the face and knocks out a tooth, and he just kind of chuckles and sends her away. He's like the rape equivalent of a Bond villain: in no hurry.

"Alas, poor molar. I knew it well" - not actual dialogue

The problem with this movie is that it's more like GI Joe than Mad Max. There are too many pitched battles and not enough chases. There is, however, a cool scene where Main Girl's husband joins Bond Rapist's gang to rescue her, and has to undergo an "initiation" that involves swinging from ropes in a duel to the death with another of Bond Rapist's henchmen. Now, I'm no mathematician, but it strikes me that if everyone who joins his gang has to kill one of his guys, his gang is never going to get any bigger. Fortunately, this is set after a nuclear war so no one questions stupid shit like that.

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: none.

SHOULDER PADS: only the main bad guy has them, but they're very large.

CUSTOM CARS: the spiky one from Wheels of Fire makes another appearance and is knocked off the cliff in the same way, probably because they reused the footage, and the dwarf family drive some kind of station wagon type effort with a bunch of crap piled on.

MUTANTS: none.

GOGGLES: Main Bad Guy has some that he perches on his military-style hat.

TOTAL: 3/5 - naht very post-apocalyptic.

Mad Max Ripoffs: Wheels of Fire!!!

Time for another Mad Max ripoff, my pretties. This one is fondly remembered by genre fans for the topless lady who becomes a living hood ornament for the bad guys. I can only dream of the day I'll be a big enough bastard to drive around with a topless woman strapped to the hood of my car, and frequently do. I'd give her some stock lines to learn so when we got stuck in traffic she could yell abuse at the other drivers based on their cars. I couldn't see anything, and would run over everyone all the time, but it would be worth it.

Villain solves this problem by standing, which must be fun over long distances. Image censored for boobs, as we wouldn't want to upset anybody.

To understand how she came to be strapped to the car, you'd have to go back to a different time. A time when her boyfriend is trying to win a car or something by fighting some weed. The weed subs in a big guy and the boyfriend starts getting his ass beat. Just when all seems lost, our indifference is blown by the arrival of Trace, Hood Ornament's brother and our nominal hero, who rescues boyfriend from a beatdown. They're then chased through the desert until they separate for no reason, and the bad guys capture our heroine.

I shall call the villain Standy, Who Stands On Cars.

In a bold artistic choice, she plays the whole kidnapping and sexual torture scenario with a sort of half-bored indignation, almost as if her trauma has induced a state of bad acting. We can forgive this though, as it's absolutely hilarious.

But do not be mildly perturbed, dear readers!!! For Trace slowly develops a plan to save her, or at least a general feeling that he might. But first, he picks up some other chick with a pet hawk, who falls into a cave and finds another teammate, who claims to be psychic because she can tell the cannibals who live there are planning to eat her. I think this girl is full of shit, because all her psychic insights suspiciously resemble the bleeding obvious.

She also claims to be able to translate this dwarf's thoughts into English, because in Wheels of Fire, dwarfs have their own language.

After a while, Trace, Hawky and Psychic run into a bunch of fucking hippies who are building a space rocket to get off post-apocalyptic Earth and start a new life. It would be awesome if the movie ended with their rocket climbing a few hundred feet and then collapsing, but it didn't happen. Trace, however, immediately forgets about looking for his sister and starts arguing about politics with some guy, and then with Hawky, whom he then sexes in public, then he leaves. I think Trace is autistic.

How many people were they planning to fit into that rocket? Fuck if Wheels of Fire knows!

I won't give away the ending, but it's not that the hippies go to space in their rocket ship. Wheels of Fire is somewhat of a classic, but suffers from the same problems that most of these ripoffs do: they have plenty of cars, explosions, sexy women and shoulder pads, but they're shot so indifferently you might as well be watching security footage. There's a small scene in this one where Trace sneaks up behind a rock before moving on, only it's filmed from in front of the rock, so what we're actually looking at is a rock covering most of the screen. They should have put the camera on the other side of the rock, with Trace. And that, my friends, is a free film school lesson for you.

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: none.

SHOULDER PADS: a couple of bad guys have them, but nothing special.

CUSTOM CARS: there's a nice one with spikes, Trace has a flamethrower and grill attached to his, and naturally the bad guys accessorise theirs with Playboy Girl.

MUTANTS: underground cannibals that resemble the Morlocks from the 1960 version of The Time Machine, and presumably the psychic, unless she's just bullshitting.

GOGGLES: one of the bad guys and one of the hippies has them.

TOTAL: 4/5 - very post-apocalyptic.

The British rail network is a joke.

Video: a train recently leaking. Britain confirmed for third world country.

The rail network in Britbongistan is the oldest in the world and runs like it hasn't been updated since. Delays of anything from half an hour to several hours are considered normal, carriages are generally overcrowded, and there's always some old hag reading the Daily Mail. It's getting so bad that this generation of Britbongs don't even know simple rules of Bongish etiquette, like never sit next to or opposite someone. When I were a lad (I were never a lad), up to two thirds of a carriage's inhabitants would stand to avoid the terrible awkwardness of sitting next to someone. Diagonal was acceptable, but still frowned on, as it should be.

I was at a station recently where we weren't sure which of two late trains would arrive first, and on which platform. When we asked a worker which way we should gamble, she said "stay at the top of the stairs, and whichever one gets in first, run for it".

Do you remember when people in the 20th Century thought the 21st would be like the Jetsons? But instead, it was like the Flintstones.

I think we should add up all the times trains are delayed, and for every twenty-four hours of delay-time, we should keel-haul Richard Branson behind one of his shit-ass trains for ten minutes. I think this would see a dramatic improvement, but the government has yet to reply to my letters :(

12 rebel flags too hot for public viewing!!!