Tomorrow Never Dies

The last favourite of mine to be released, Tomorrow Never Dies is the underacknowledged masterpiece of the Architect's oeuvre. In this prescient movie, James Bond must defeat the most evil and loathsome enemy of his long and storied career: a news network.

IDK if these graphics look dated in the States. In the UK news still looks like this crap.

Elliott Carver, who is the most fun villain since Christopher Walken if not Jaws, plans to start a war between China and the United Kingdom, to crown a career spent fabricating news stories like CNN on vitamins (not steroids, let's not get carried away here).

The look of an absolute lunatic who takes great pride in his work.

While the geopolitical balance might be way off, everything else about this scenario is dead on for today. Carver's dorkish megalomania is far more interesting than the fairly humourless villains of License and GoldenEye. It's easy to imagine him today tweeting pseudo-messianic banalities of the "orange man bad #resist" variety, inventing 8-year-old sons to provide him with profound soundbites on why antivax is worse than murder (but murderers are Good, Actually) and conspiring with the Zuccs and Jaccs of the world to save us peasants from our own stupidity and bigotry.

"So then I said to him, 'you know who else didn't like The Last Jedi? Mussolini.' And then everybody clapped."

Is trying to start war with China such a stretch? Well now it is, but just China specifically. Consider that the real-life mass media basically started a still ongoing race war off the back of such fabrications as "hands up don't shoot". This James Bond movie nailed the problem with the 21st Century better than any thinkpiece. Besides which, it was just entertaining as hell.

The prog rock acid trip visuals in the opening credits are strangely on point while being totally irrelevant to the movie.

Michelle Yeoh is Wai Lin, the Bond Girl, who is a Chinese agent. Sadly he doesn't sass off to her about Tiananmen Square (Moore's Bond zinged Major Triple X about the Gulag) but they have a fun dynamic anyway and spend a chunk of the film riding a motorcycle while handcuffed, which calls to mind the logistics of The Chase's sex scene in a moving car. The Chase was good as hell.

Everything better on moving vehicles.

Nightcrawler is a great movie.

If you haven't watched Nightcrawler, but have watched anything else from the last several years, you should be banned from cinemas because you have shit taste. Nightcrawler is a great movie about how utterly morally bankrupt the media is. It stars Jake Gyllenhaaal as creepy fuck Lou, a petty thief whose skill set translates perfectly to the job of filming crime scenes and related human misery for profit. His character is like the Gawker of movie characters, except much more likeable and less evil.

Lou takes inspiration from online business courses and enlists Rick, a halfwit who needs the money, to help him navigate around LA looking for scenes of violence and destruction. As the film rolls on, he pushes the limits further and further by moving around bits of stuff, including bodies, to get better footage, and ultimately semi-staging the news so he can record it. As someone that's done TV shit, I know people like that are out there. Given how brazenly "journalists" sneer at the very concept of ethics, it's not even surprising that people like this prosper in this industry.

Since everyone in the media is a lying, evil, amoral, deceitful scumbag, you would think the character would not be very likeable, and apparently this was true for many people when the movie came out. A lot of people's reactions to this film were basically "it's bad because he is a bad man", by which rationale Citizen Kane, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, A Clockwork Orange, and basically everything worth watching sucks. I can't relate to those people, and I suspect they're not really human.

Anyway, Jake Gyllenhaaaaaaaaaaaaal and Rene Russo are both really good in it and you should see it if you like movies with dysfunctional protagonists like Taxi Driver, King of Comedy, Super, and Paul Blart Mall Cop.

12 rebel flags too hot for public viewing!!!

Everyone is stupid re Jeremy Clarkson.

As you know, I can't watch Top Gear anymore because the BBC threw all its toys out of its pram again. TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson has been "suspended" from the corporation for punching a guy and maybe saying naughty words again, unless he didn't. Every few weeks there's a story about Jeremy Clarkson going full retard, and every time it's about 20% true and 100% stupid. I've heard intelligent people seriously say that Jeremy Clarkson should be sacked, but one person who doesn't think so is the fucking producer he allegedly "punched", who retweeted the petition to reinstate him.

Oops.

The reason I'm busting out the "allegedly" is that all the stories about Jeremy Clarkson are systematically inflated and exaggerated because the news media want us all to think he's controversial, which he isn't. Only retards who read the Guardian and cycle (preferably at the same time) spaz out about Jeremy Clarkson. That's because the rest of us are grownups. Hey, remember when he said that people should be shot in front of their families? Except that it later turned out he was being sarcastic and making the opposite point.

Oops.

Jeremy Clarkson isn't controversial to real people, because we have real problems and things to worry about. Given that the petition to reinstate him is the fastest-growing ever in Change.org's history, it would seem that most people are more fed up with the BBC's histrionic bullshit than with Jeremy Clarkson, and for as long as we're paying the license fee, the BBC can shut the fuck up and do what we say. Maybe this wouldn't be such a pressing issue if the BBC had anything else worth watching.