Who would win: leucism zebra or quagga?

The quagga was/is a type of zebra that gave up halfway going backwards. That is to say, only its front half has the zebra stripes, whereas its back half is a horse.

The quagga became extinct in the 1880s, but zebras have now been bred to look like it, so at least quasi-quaggas can be found on Earth today. But wait: a challenger appears!

Due to leucism, a pigmentary condition often confused with albinism, this zebra is like the quagga in reverse. It's like you have enough for a full horse and a full zebra, but spread across two animals. Maybe they're both pantomime horses whose operators mixed up their costumes. Other examples of leucism include this toucan:

"Kick A Ginger Day is NOT funny" - this toucan

And this peacock:

"Remember the name you all had for me when I was at internal affairs? What was it, Gordon?" - this peacock

I think the leucism zebra would win, because it has a more ostentatious mohawk. What do YOUM think? Let me know down in the comments.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Apocalypto!

The blue hippies from Avatar meet real Indigenous Peoples (1502, colourised).

Apocalypto peaks so hard in the cast-of-thousands city sequence that the third act, consisting of a few guys chasing one another around a forest, feels more like an extended cooldown than an escalating climax. I know we're supposed to care that our hero gets back in time to save his family from drowning, but the whole time I just wanted to get back to the city, because it's the one time on film this criminally underused aesthetic has been let loose in its Mesoamerican maximalist glory. A fun game to play is to pause at any point during the crowd scenes and see what the incidental extras are wearing, and make reaction images of them:

>mrw ____

Mayan cities tended to rise and fall somewhat cyclically due to location, resources and their eventual exhaustion. A city might form around a subterranean cenote, thrive for a time, and then collapse from overlogging and desiccation of the soil. So much for the cliché of pre-industrial peoples living in harmony with the natural world (though, to be fair, the Mayans only ruined one city-sized area at a time. Australia was covered in lush rainforest until the aboriginal inhabitants repeatedly burned the entire thing to the ground to smoke out game, meaning the worst ecological catastrophe of all time was caused by a people hippies are now obligated to worship).

Whoa, for real? Jamie, pull that up. You're blowing my mind right now.

NPCs deplore this kinograph for portraying the Mayan civilisation as cruel, but in truth it doesn't show nearly the worst of it (children were ritually drowned in the cenote, for starters), and it's not as though The Northman or Kurosawa's epics whitewash the history of their respective settings. Personally, I want to see more Mesoamerikino that's as uncucked about showing both the aesthetic splendour and the insanely violent practices of pre-conquest Mexico. The rise of the Aztecs from Chichimec nomads kicked out of every place they settled to vassals of the Tepanecs to a triumphant regional hegemon under the speakership of Itzcoatl would be the perfect subject matter for an epic to end all epics. For this reason alone, infantilising noble-savage cod historiography must die.

Greatest Movie of All time of the Week: After Hours!

Martin Scorsese is now mostly famous for telling zoomoids marvelshit isn't cinema, but to olds like me, he was mostly famous for making gangster flicks where people talk like people talk, you know? With the you-knows and the whatnots. And this sort of gradually overlapped with and morphed into biopics and theological navelgazing and other things of that lofty nature.

Yeah, this ain't one of those.

But, like those few strips where Garfield became an existential horror comic, in 1985 Scorsese suddenly decided, just once, to make a David Lynch film, which was an audacious move, because Blue Velvet didn't drop until the following year, and Lynch's formula (one part Hitchcock, one part Kafka, one part The Wizard of Oz) was yet to be articulated*. Nothing Scorsese did before or since was anything like After Hours, which is a shame because it's his best movie, but is also kind of great because it implies any mainstream filmmaker or entertainer in general might just take a sudden detour into bizarre territory for no reason at all.

Horrifying sculpture of Gregor Samsa-mode abjection, or YouTuber reacting to the new slop to drop on Disney Plus? As always, you decide.

Griffin Dunne plays Paul Hackett (who, we will learn, can't), a hapless everyman whose efforts to live out the plot of a romantic comedy with Rosanna Arquette (Buffalo 66) go awry due to a storm of what begins to seem like targeted bad luck. Events contrive to strand him in the Soho district of New York, unable to get home. Like Dorothy, this becomes his singular focus, but things get worse and worse for him as his neurosis leads to poor decisions and his poor decisions lead to crippling fear and guilt, none of which is warranted because he's clearly in a situation so absurd that no decision he could make could save him from it.

"Can't we just get over the rainbow?" - Dorothy Gale, Paul Hackett, and everyone living in currentyear+9.

To say much more would be to give away a lot of the twists and turns of the piece, so I'll pontificate on Kafka instead. Kafka's main theme was abjection, which he understood so well that he completely covered everything there is to say on it, at least from the inside. Despite this, every other person I pass in the street wears a Nirvana T-shirt, indicating that abjection as a topic has never been more popular. Social media is mostly people whining about (and demonstrating) their collection of mental illnesses. Characters in TV and movies are made unlikable and dysfunctional so people can "relate" to them. What none of these posers realise is that Kafka was laughing at them (and himself) because unlike Burt Cobain and his shit Pixies knock-off band that blew up over their only good song (read: riff), Kafka had a sense of humour.

The longer you look at this still, the funnier it becomes.

*Ingmar Bergman also made a Lynch film, 1968's Hour of the Wolf, long before even Eraserhead dropped, but since it's Bergman it has only the dark Kafka stuff, because Bergman is Shadow the Hedgehog.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Rumble Fish!

Do u think the fish motif or the fish-eye lens visual pun came first in the creative process?

You've been successfully bullied out of liking Donnie Darko but you still want an entry-level (not an insult) arthouse-for-teens-and-young-adults kino. Enter Rumble Fish, the most overlooked movie from Godfather and Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola, who spiraled into massive credit card debt over Apocalypse and failed to bail himself out with flop musical One From the Heart, which explains in part why his 80s tenure is obscure while other New Hollywood-era filmmakers like Scorsese continued to pump out the hits. If you're going to tank your long-term viability over a project, it might as well be Apocalypse Now, but after it, nothing in the Coppola oeuvre has made much of a splash, unless you count his nepotism baby's single worthwhile outing Lost in Translation (yeah, I like shoegaze. Blow me).

"♪Ciiiity giiiiirl/I love youooooouooo/Iii dooo..." - me in the shower

To be honest, most of that obscurity is no great loss. No one is going to his grave agonising that he never saw Peggy Sue Got Married. Rumble Fish is different. Picture Rebel Without a Cause filtered through German Expressionism with a bit of that Koyaanisqatsi time-lapse magic that was cutting-edge at the time, with the subtlest frisson of The Warriors or Streets of Fire stylization to its monochrome urban jungle setting. No adolescent will be bored by an art flick featuring setpieces like this subway beatdown:

Nor will any cinésnob fail to be moved by the film's casual diversions into dreamlike flights of fantasy:

Yes, that hack Spielb*rg ripped off this device for his rancid Oscarbait Schindler's List, but try to imagine how cool it must have looked back then.

Matt Dillon (Wild Things) plays Rusty James, a somewhat dense Brad in a teen street gang that calls street fights "rumbles". Mickey Rourke plays his older brother, The Motorcycle Kid, with a conspicuously Kurtzian burned-out poet-of-doom sort of vibe. Rusty James idolises The Motorcycle Kid as the badass anyone called The Motorcycle Kid would have to be to stay called The Motorcycle Kid for long, but TMK starts to drop hints he doesn't want Rusty James following in his footsteps. Perhaps to underscore the Apocalypse Now resonances, Dennis Hopper is cast as their alcoholic dad. Probably not to make you (me) rewatch Streets of Fire for the 14th time, Diane Lane is cast as Rusty James's gf. Because he's Coppola's nephew, Nicolas Cage is cast as some other douchebag in the gang. But besides the credited actors, the movie is populated by a cast of visual and audio characters who compel the viewer's attention: the looming clocks, the speeding clouds, the creeping shadows of the fire escape.

They speak of time passing with a low-key urgency unknown to any other film. Your life is fleeting, your youth moreso, so make it count, but set aside 90 minutes to watch Rumble Fish.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Wild Things!

Spot the subliminal alligator.

1998's Wild Things is the classic case of a movie you watch with the horniest of intentions but find yourself sticking around for the plot unironically. In fact, the details of the film's noir conceit are so much fun they're still elaborating on it through the end credits.

The working title for the script was literally Sex Crimes. Always a good way to pique a Hollywood producer's interest.

Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon) is the guidance counsellor at 25-y/o High School, Blue Bay, Florida, who, in a Rashomonesque off-screen event may or may not have raped preppy Stacy Kelly Van Ryan (the ubiquitous Denise Richards), prompting this hilarious outburst from her cougar Karen mother (Theresa Russell):

Least self-serving #metoo poster.

The plot thickens with the introduction of Kelly's trailer goth rival Suzy Toller (Neve Campbell, Scream), shyster lawyer Ken Bowden (Bill Murray, as himself), and cop duo Gloria Perez (Daphne Rubin-Vega) and Ray Duquette (Kevin Bacon), but I will leave it to you to unravel the elaborate knot of intrigue that surrounds this cast of ne'er-do-wells and rarely-do-wells, because Wild Things is the rare erotic thriller that retains your interest to the end.

Choose your fighter.

I will say this though: watch the extended (lol) version for more of the fantasy centrepiece scene, to say nothing of more intra-credits gems. The world of Wild Things is a wonderful, lurid, vibrant sort of heatstroke daydream, where porno logic, telenovela sensationalism and brooding, True Detectivey atmospherics mesh into a strange, beguiling mood. The near-total excision of eroticism from the movies in the decades since has not resulted in greater, more honest works of capital-A Art; in fact, the movies have become dumber and lamer. It's almost as though that reptile brain part of us can't be neatly lobotomised away without dulling our collective humanity; our very sovl.

Jimbo: The Thinking Barbarian - 20. One Way Ticket to Midnight (Part 3)!

Previously...

Theme: One Shot at Glory - Judas Priest

To be continued...

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: A Man For All Seasons!

Sir Thomas More is not only cinéma's great reactionary hero, but one of history's too. A Man For All Seasons recounts with bottomless wit and pathos the escalation of his persecution by heretical, philandering fatass Henry VIII and his cadres of Maoist goons from the pointed nudge to threats, imprisonment, struggle session and show trial, to the final execution of the recalcitrant saint. Sir Thomas (Paul Scofield, who honed the role to perfection in many prior stage performances) seeks only to live up to the minimum standard Solzhenitsyn espoused: not to take arms against his era's iteration of the perennial petulant libtard revolt against truth, beauty, hierarchy and God, merely to opt out of it; not to say that which he does not believe. Let the lie come into the world, let it even reign there for a time, but not through me.

Who would win: the most painstakingly prudent man of his time, or everyone else being petty and retarded?

Sir Thomas remains a dignified enigma, one of the few grown-up protagonists to grace the screen, but the drama lays bare the small souls of his regime-compliant nemeses. Cromwell (Leo McKern), Henry's chief hatchetman, appeals to the consensus of the credentialed classes like the classic reddit midwit and/or Woman On Twitter (but I repeat myself):

Like UGH, like seriously? Like don't you see that all the celebrities you hate, the journalists who sneer at you, The Science, every corporation, and a bunch of soyjaks with "PhD" in their bios all agree that men are women, Russia blew up its own pipeline, covid was deadly to all gatherings except George Floyd protests, and Israel is our greatest ally? Like, do you even care about peer pressure at all?

Of course it's not too long before this crude veneer of sophistication gives way to blunt threats of torture on the rack. But most of us are neither More nor Cromwell, saint nor psychopath. Between the Good and the Bad scurry the Ugly. Perhaps you recognise yourself in this guy...

Or this guy...

Or this little asshole...

This oleaginous pissant is every resentful commie social climber you've ever met in your life. The most well-observed depiction of the true, abject face of evil in the movies.

All these people have their litanies of rationalisations. Of course, they all have to live under the considerable shadow of Fat King Fuckpants and his temper tantrums. Few scenes in movies demonstrate the hapless lot of sycophants trapped in the orbit of power like the one where Henry (Robert Shaw) jumps off his boat to find himself splattered in mud, turns and gives an I-meant-to-do-that laugh, taken up by his toadies, who all pile into the mud after him. It must be what it's like pretending Biden is the president.

Couldn't be me!

You know, as much as people shit-talk the boomers (and they're right to), at least the boomers actually sold out: they had goofy principles to begin with, but when they abandoned them, they at least got paid. My generation (millennials) abandoned all our principles for literally nothing. We all grew up laughing at Pain Olympics and the "Offended" page of Encyclopedia Dramatica, then at some point we all started pretending to be pious libtards, but we didn't even get anything for it. Man buries the millennial with this riposte:

You did it for worthless social credit.

Watch A Man For All Seasons, and repent.