Mindless Ones

WHY DO WE STILL LIVE HERE, IN THIS REPULSIVE TOWN?

Blah blah blah fleshbags, Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735, podcastic postulations etc

BZZZZZZZZZZZZ>CLICK

<ITEM> No Silence! News, but much jinglage, in thanks to the financial resuscitations of the many SILENCERS out there. Beastman & Lactenberg come in from the cold next week, yes?

<ITEM> Sponsorship Special – The Beast Must Die (in his human skinbag form, Dan White) will be at this year’s Free Comic Book Day at Gosh! Comics.

<ITEM>Wade up to your knees in comics in the Reviewniverse with 2000AD, Indigo Prime, Saga, Wolverine,    Batman, Avengers Arena, Walking Dead, Secret Service, Constantine, Hawkeye, X, Sex and a special consideration of giant cosmic toga-wearing baby, The Beyonder.

<ITEM> Then, wade a bit further out, till the broiling waters of the Hyperrevieniverse tickle your conkers…Avenging Spiderman, Age of Ultron, Avengers Assemble, Saucer Country, Thor, Uncanny X-Men and Fantastic Four.

AND NO MORE! So get out of here, go back to your flesh-pens and weep. Leave Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 to his vintage basic-coding pornography and printer-ink martinis…

click to download SILENCE!#58

SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.

Spring Breakers, dir. Michael Bay, 2013

You might think that it would be impossible for Bay to top his Transformers trilogy, that those merciless tributes to the twin glories of steel and flesh represented the purest distillation of his art.  On the other hand, you might not think that he could get any lower than that seemingly never-ending explosion in a cliché factory.

Whichever side of the divide you found yourself on, Spring Breakers renders your opinion obsolete.  This movie is Fear and Loathing to the Transformers trilogy’s hyper-modern war movie (with Florida standing in for Las Vegas just as Vietnam blurs into Iraq). It’s the Saints Row to The Dark of the Moon’s Call of Duty.  The adventures of Optimus Prime and co might have fleetingly simulated what the disorienting frenzy of 21^st Century warfare would look like if it was fought on American soil, but Spring Breakers is the real deal – the story of four girls fighting the war at home with nothing but day-glo bikinis and raw fantasy. [1]

Oh, yeah, and did I mention guns?

Because – *SPOILERS* – guns are important too.

Sign up for Project Bayhem after the cut! Warning — contains stealth reviews of GI Joe Retaliation and The Host!

Here’s a brand new Cindy & Biscuit strip for you. I’m doing these on a semi-regular basis here on Mindless Ones. Check them out here.

Also, don’t forget to get yourself a copy of the brand new 56 page  Cindy & Biscuit no.3 from my shop at Milk The Cat. You can pick up my other comics while you’re there.

Amy and I might be posting about Mad Men over at our new Mad Men tumblr, She’s an Astronaut, but that’s not going stop us putting up the occasional post here. We love our Mindless.

Here’s four of the best links from around the web.

The number one spot has to go to Sean of Sean T Collins fame. His superb post on the nature of the Hawaiian “experience”, Something Terrible Has to Happen, is an absolute must read, and his episode thought dump isn’t half bad neither.

The ever insightful and spiky Molly Lambert comes in second with her post on just about everything in The Doorway. Molly’s view is often tougher than mine, especially her take on Don, but in a way that suggests she actually knows these people. She’s judgemental in all the right ways. Go read A Lighter, a Mistress, a Lot of Facial Hair

Third place goes to the Internet’s most reliable and comprehensive Mad Men fansite, Basket of Kisses. In a post that typifies their thoroughness, BoK founder Deborah Lipp looks at how how The Door Resonates Throughout the Seasons. Every self respecting Mad Men fan should have BoK bookmarked.

And last but by no means least is glam image blogger (all the best Mad Men images evar) Bohemea on Don’s absence.

Amy and I will continue to update SaA a few times every week. Here’s my latest post on the state of Megan and Don’s marriage, Break a Leg.

It’s taken me nearly a week to get up the energy to write about this episode, because it was… it was just sort of there.

[Excerpt from Adam and Amy’s new Mad Men tumblr, She’s an Astronaut]

For once, the question this opening episode isn’t who is Don Draper?

In many respects this is a Don we know all too well: Don the womanizer, Don the drinker, Don with a past to hide. Don in search of salvation with an existential text in hand. Last season saw him shed those roles and go, to quote Burt Cooper, on love leave, only to come back to find a door in front of him. A door with a dead body on the other side.

Lane Pryce couldn’t bridge the gap between his fantasies and reality, but neither could Don. All those beautiful dreams he couldn’t own, Joan, Peggy, Megan. Especially Megan, the wife he felt compelled to give away so that she could chase her’s. And then he went through another door and found himself in bar.

“What are you, some kind of astronaut?” asks PFC Dinkins

“I’m in advertising” replies Don. A moment of naturalism or an ambiguous refusal on behalf of the script to deny the possibility that, yes, perhaps he is some kind of spaceman? Perhaps this isn’t Earth. The script certainly isn’t sure where he is, is it Hawaii? Vietnam? What’s this, a G.I.’s lighter, Don’s got one just like it… perhaps he’s in Korea. Or maybe this is Heaven, that light, that air, that blue. What about that fire, the bar dripping blood, could he be in Hell? He could ask Jonesy the door man, he’ll know.

Visit She’s an Astronaut to read more

JUST REMEMBER, ALL CAPS WHEN YOU SPELL THE MAN’S NAME!

10 days and a wake up and Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 will be  rotating back into the quadrosphere, away from this blurb, this tedious podcast, and your grim grey visages…but until then I suppose the fleshy charade must continue.

Oh and I suppose some mention should be made of the extreme generosity of the listeners in ensuring that Gary Lactus & The Beast Must Die can continue to block up the internet with their inane aural clag. The sentimentality of weeping meat knows no bounds it would appear. Well if those two red-faced blowhards even dream of upgrading to a newer model of Narratorbot…well let’s just say there will be human sushi served all round.

HA HA, as if they would.

<ITEM> No SILENCE! News as Lactenberg & Beastman are still in The Bad Books of Silence. Instead enjoy some jingles in honour of our sainted benefactors. Commercial entropy here we come!!

<ITEM> The Reviewniverse reaches out it’s 4-D tentacles and sucks us all in to it’s endless horrors. As all of our realities merge into a 4-colour stew, the boys cover Godzilla, Batman LOTDK, The Intractible Hulk, Red She-Hulk, Aquaman, Earth 2, Dial H, Glory, Abe Sapien, Thanos, Superior Spiderman, Snow Angel, All New X-Men, Kieron Gillen’s Uber, Joe Casey’s Sex and Fashion Beast.

So I hope you’re all happy. Disembodied Narratorbot X-15735 certainly is. Or at least is able to exist in a perfect state of electronic bliss. I am a dial tone, hear me hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm….

click to download SILENCE!#57

SILENCE! is proudly sponsored by the two greatest comics shops on the planet, DAVE’S COMICS of Brighton and GOSH COMICS of London.

We’ll be writing about Mad Men over on our new Mad Men tumblr, She’s an Astronaut.

OR: last year I went to the movies and all I got was a sense of temporal displacement!

DREDD, dir. Peter Travis, 2012

This relatively low-budget attempt to graft a late seventies vision of the future onto the present day doesn’t quite come off seamlessly – the opening drone-cam riot shots would be much more convincing without the sci-fi data overlay – but the grim lack of distance between these three (equally imaginary?) time zones ensure that this bolted-together aesthetic is effective rather than ridiculous in the end.  A lot of the credit here has to go to Karl Urban, who sets the tone of the movie by somehow managing to play the perma-frowning Dredd with a straight face:

Like Urban’s Joe Dredd, DREDD (the movie) treats exposition as little more than a series of snappy situation updates, necessary only because they point the way from one dynamic lesson in pain compliance to another.   The result is a lean, efficient action films that you suspect the Judge himself would approve of.   The rules are established in the opening scene and are ruthlessly enforced throughout: you get a quick report of the location and nature of the crime in progress (the irradiated ruins of a future America; whatever takes your fancy) then whooosh, before you can say “hot shot” the situation has been resolved with the maximum amount of acceptable violence.

Because hey, when you fuck up, he’s got to fuck you up, right?

Right.

There are obvious affinities here – with Robocop, say, or with your Carpenter movie of choice – but these reference points never threaten to overwhelm the movie.  Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury’s almost/alternate score Drokk is far more heavily indebted to Carpenter’s work, for example, and while the soundtrack that plays out in its place is less immediately striking it’s also perhaps better suited to DREDD’s relentless utilitarian drive.  The aesthetics of past, present and future might me all jumbled up here, but there’s no time for reverence in this movie – everything is judged by how well it performs in its specific moment in the field.

Still, I’d be remiss in my duties as a reviewer if I didn’t point out that there are certain plot similarities to Batman Incorporated vol 2, #6, and while I don’t know how Peter Travis and Alex Garland were able to travel through in time in order to rip that script off, I’m glad that they did all the same –  this is a joke about the seemingly manditory you comparisons with The Raid, you can tell it’s a good gag because I feel the need to flag it up like this.  Since we’re all pals here I’ll assume that we can all agree that the similarities between DREDD and The Raid are worth talking about – in the same way that its resonances with this Moebius strip are worth talking about – but that simply saying “The Raid” is in no way the end of the conversation.  There are many different ingredients in DREDD, and the end result might have familial similarities with various other movies, but it’s overwhelming flavour is still undeniably that of “Judge Dredd”.

As my good pal (the devil)Andre Whickey has pointed out, there are several different types of Judge Dredd story, and this is a great example of one of them – Judge Dredd as straight action story.  While this means that DREDD can’t touch 2012’s Day of Chaos story (for example) for either political complexity or gonzo fanboy thrillpower, it does mean that this is Judge Dredd at its most insidious, a compelling story of good guys vs. bad guys that doubles as a cheap, spooky reminder of the fact that authoritarianism can always be made to look both necessary and cool using the right tools:

More on the fantastic damage of Looper and The Master after the cut!